Another
in my (highly) irregular series on my top 50 albums
”I
should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been
happy and then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come
back and dig it up and remember.”
-
Sebastian from 'Brideshead Revisited'
”With
a childlike vision leaping into view...”
Journey
with me now back to 1968. And there's two big ideas in popular music.
Post 'Sergeant Pepper', music has started to grow
- becoming bigger, more grandiose, more important. The length of time
an album took to record, the sum total of equipment the band
possessed, such things were becoming vital forms of currency. Also,
reflecting the tumultuous events of its time, the growing social and
political upheavals, its becoming more politically charged. Why not
succumb to that music journo cliché where everything is supposedly
summed up by a song title? There was, to quote Thunderclap Newman,
'Something In the Air'. Okay, that wasn't actually
released until the following year. The point still stands. In 1968
even the Beatles, the very epitome of love-in hippies, had started
singing about revolution.
Though
Van Morrison had already released one solo album (which he later
claimed had come out against his wishes), he was then chiefly known
for the urgent R+B hits he'd clocked up with Them. A band who had
influenced much of the then-current wave of music. The Doors' Jim
Morrison, for example, had all but studied his namesake. So of
course, ever the contrarian, Van took all this as his cue to
completely ignore everything set out above and release a languid folk
album - flutes in place of electric guitars and harmoniums replacing
mellotrons. 'Sergeant Pepper' has taken a
record-breaking six months to record. 'Astral Weeks'
was laid down in three short sessions. And they didn't bother using
anything from the middle one.
Perhaps
only Bob Dylan rivalled the reckless perversity in bucking trends,
when in the previous December he'd released the country album
'John Wesley Harding'. But there's a crucial
distinction. As recounted previously, Dylan took refuge from the
antagonisms of his previous patented “me/you” songwriting by
escaping into a collectivised American folklore. It was an album
borne of his desire to not look or sound like Bob Dylan any more, or
even particularly answer to his own name. Whereas Morrison's
reminiscences of his Belfast youth were simultaneously highly
personal and absolutely universal.
While
notable exceptions apply, the new 'progressive' music was for the
main part simply standard rock fare with knobs on. With the
inevitable result that most of the knobs fell off as soon as they
were tried. 'Astral Weeks' was and remains beyond
all that.
Compare
it to visual art for a moment. If Faust were an artwork they'd be a
Dadaist collage, Wire a Bauhaus diagram. 'Astral Weeks'
would be a piece of folk or naïve art. And like much naïve art the
album has an apparent freshness and simplicity. Only once inside do
you realise how easily you can get lost in there.
Listen
closely to any track you choose and beneath the languid surface you
find something incredibly rich and sophisticated. What almost
invariably starts off as a simple little folk ditty soon spawns a
multiplicity of instruments. Instruments which don't just play along
with one another but take off in entirely unexpected directions,
while somehow retaining their harmoniousness when they should by any
odds collapse into chaos. (The overlay picture on the cover is
perhaps a perfect visual representation of the music.) Morrison has
described the album as “just folk music incorporating jazz” and
much of this effect seems to have been achieved merely by enlisting
jazz musicians to play folk. It results in a double-plus trade-off
where the folk stops the jazzing getting too noodly, while the jazz
makes the folk richer than just straightforward.
Yet
the surface is as important as the substance, the jazz needs the folk
as much as the other way around. Its vital that it all feels
so immediate, so organic and spontaneous. While you listen you can't
imagine it being composed, arranged or produced, you can't separate
it back out into its constituent parts of lyrics and instrumentation.
It feels like the music somehow just appeared the
way we hear it now, simply leapt into view, was cut from whole cloth.
Which
I long assumed to be a smart illusion. Like Dolly Parton claiming “it
costs a lot of money to look this cheap”, I was smart enough to
know it must have taken considerable time and effort to achieve that
spontaneous sound. As it happens, it seems they achieved it
through... well, spontaneity. Though he'd taken a year to write all
the songs (during an impasse where he lacked a record contract),
Morrison hadn't met many of the musicians before recording began. And
when they all showed up, he simply told them to play what they wanted
then vanished off into the singer booth. So casual were the
arrangements that to this day the flautist on many of the tracks is
unknown.
The
album I most associate with 'Astral Weeks' in its
effect, in the way it works on you is one it has absolutely nothing
in common with otherwise, stylistically or thematically – Patti
Smith's 'Horses'. Both induce a fugue state. Its
not a matter of what the singer is singing, the guitar is strumming
or the drummer is drumming. It's all of those things at once, ganging
up on your attention, overwhelming you until your senses can only
surrender and be swept along. Compare the hypnotic repetition of
simple phrases, “way up on, way up on” from 'Madame
George' to “go up, go up, go-up go-up” on
'Birdland'. But while 'Horses'
is vibrant and convulsive, seizing at your ears, 'Astral
Weeks' is beguiling. It lulls you into its world.
People
are wont to argue that good song lyrics are akin to poetry, and so
measure them by how well they stand on their own terms. Whereas
Morrison's impressionistic flow of lyrics could never be prised apart
from the music they go with. Which is why they go
with the music. Its like asking if the front wall of my house would
stay up if you took the other walls away. I've no interest in finding
out, I like my house the way it is.
Certainly,
the lyrics can be given to poetic flights. Things open, after all,
with the couplet “If I ventured in the slipstream/ Between the
viaducts of your dream”. But its the simpler phrases which linger
the longest. Take the classic line from 'Sweet Thing',
“I will drink the clear, clean water for to quench my thirst”. At
numerous points things slip into a childlike perspective, the
innocent anthropomorphism of windows rapping or music dancing.
And
Morrison is as happy with the mundane (“Kids outside collecting
bottle tops/ Gone for cigarettes and matches in the shops”). With
memories, the minutiae of the detail – the shape of the room, the
wallpaper, the time of day – are just a tag for the real substance,
a thread leading you to the way the whole thing felt.
This is what Waugh (via Sebastian) means in the quote up top, in his
comparison of memories to treasure maps.
Which
tends to the untranslatable. The surface details of my youth, which
would trigger such resonances for me, would seem without significance
for you. The tag would be unattached to the thread. But put together
with the vocal delivery and the music, they become like biting into
that Proustian cake. It's like a spell falling on you, like accessing
memories you never had.
The
result is an album fit to induce synaesthesia. Basslines
snake along long numbers, curving like country lanes. The
shimmer of strings on the title track calls up the sparkle of the
summer sea, the jaunty swoops of the flute like brightly coloured
bobbing sailboats, the harmonium on 'Cyprus Avenue'
evokes the golden glow of late afternoon.
”Another
Time, Another Place...”
'Rolling Stone' have commented of 'Astral Weeks':
“it was instantly recognized as one of the rare albums for which
the word timeless is not only appropriate but inescapable”. And indeed it's timeless
in both senses of the word. In the already-mentioned sense of not
being tied to its era, but instead following more universal themes.
But also in the sense of taking time as being ours to play with.
To
get to the heart of 'Astral Weeks', you need to
compare it to an earlier Dylan track - 'Bob Dylan's
Dream'. Dylan sings plaintively of the room he spent so
much youthful time in, knowing that he'll never be able to step back
inside it. Whereas 'Astral Weeks' is 'Bob
Dylan's Dream' inside out. Hartley called the past another
country. But that's no reason not to move there. Morrison contends
that you can go home again, and that music can be
the spell that takes you.
Here's
a bluffer's tip. When talking about 'Astral Weeks',
mention the German word heimat, which fuses together 'home', 'source'
and 'belonging'. Its the idea that we are formed by primary
relationships, with people and with places.'Astral
Weeks' portrays Belfast as heimat.
And
the fact that the title track is in many ways a gospel number,
mentioning “I got a home on high... way up in the heaven”, merely
compounds this. What heimat and heaven have in common is that they're
source places, they're where we were made the way we are. (Though the
phrase “to be born again” might not have had the same
associations when written. Stemming from the Bible, it would probably
still have been seen as a religious phrase. But it's association with
right-wing evangelism mostly dates from Chuck Colson's 1976 book of the same name.)
People
are wont to to tell you 'Astral Weeks' is Blakean.
Me, I find the notion fanciful. They're as wont to see it as Edenic,
and there I think they're on the money. 'Sweet Thing'
is, after all, about nothing other than two lovers in an idyllic
garden. There's the repeated references to being beyond thought.
Perhaps the epitome of the mood is the way Morrison sings the line
“to dig it all and not to wonder”. In the (in many ways splendid)
cover by the Waterboys, Mike Scott sings the line hopefully - as
though that's the life he wants to be living. Whereas Morrison sings
the line as if that's what he's doing right now. (And I say that as a huge Waterboys fan.)
Brian
Hogg makes a vital point - “the strength of 'Astral
Weeks' is not held in individual tracks, instead it comes
from its cumulative air of passion and mystery.” ('Strange
Things Are Happening' 4, 1988) Which is correct, but relies
on a different definition of 'cumulative' than 'beginning to end'.
Popular
music comes from popular culture, and frequently you have to think
yourself back into its era before you can fully appreciate it. Yet as
'Astral Weeks' breaks all those rules perhaps its
not surprising that the ideal way to hear the album didn't come about
until years after it was released – on rotation. It's a song cycle
which doesn't run through but loops endlessly, from the dying
ex-lover on 'Silm Slow Slider' to the refrain “to
be born again” on the title track. And you inevitably find you
can quite happily listen to it repeatedly. In the
words of the song, you'll always be “caught one more time, up on
Cyprus Avenue”.
And,
as if to prove that point, let's look at individual tracks by
starting off with the closing number...
”Ain't
nothing but a stranger in this world”
Some
albums come with their own get-out clause, making one track the
antidote to everything else, such as 'Malibu' from
Hole's 'Celebrity Skin'. 'Astral Weeks' conversely
is an album built as an an antidote to one track, which then gives
that track the last word by making it the album's closer. With its
mournful sax refrain, seemingly floating above and beyond the rest of
the number, 'Slim Slow Slider' is as hauntingly
empty as the rest of the album is rich and golden. Notably it's the
only track to name a place outside of Belfast – Ladbroke Grove in
London, the big city. (Though Morrison was resident in America when
the album was made. And perhaps he even needed that distance from it
all.)
Equally
notably, its the shortest track on the album. (Unless you count
'Like Young Lovers Do'. Which we don't.) Compared
to what has come before, its almost abrupt. “You're out of reach”
is the chilling counter to the eloquent flow of lines like “the
love that loves to love”. (And note how 'Madame
George' featured “throwing pennies”, whereas here its
“catching pebbles for some sandy beach”.) It's like grits in the
bottom of the glass.
And
yet of course its Morrison seeing his old flame in the street (“with
your brand new boy and your Cadillac”) that starts the song cycle,
that unleashes the flow of memories that make up the album. Which is
where the album starts...
The
shimmering flux of the title track is one of those songs which acts
like a spell upon you, kissing our eyes back into seeing, taking us
back to “another time, another place” like the visual conceit of
films going wibbly to signify flashback mode. Having quoted
'Brideshead Revisited' once already, this is how
an older, more weary-wise Charles reacts to suddenly re-hearing it's
name:
“On
the instant, it was as though someone had switched off the
wireless... for he had spoken a name that was so familiar to me, a
conjuror's name of such ancient power, that, at its mere sound, the
phantoms of those haunted late years began to take flight.”
Typically,
the line “nothing but a stranger in this world” doesn't really
register until you've heard the cycle through, and realise Morrison
is opposing the contemporary world of Ladbroke Grove with his
youthful memories of Belfast, that “this world” he's so outside
is our world.
After
all this metaphysical flying through time we find ourselves in a
child's bedroom. But not for long, because “Little Jimmy's
gone/ Way out of the backstreet/ Out of the window/ Through the
fallin' rain...”
That
unused session mentioned earlier was the only one which didn't take
place in the late afternoon. And the whole album has that unhurried
pace, as if the bustle of the day was all behind you. But only
'Beside You' is set in that twilight time. It's an
account of a child starting to explore the world around him,
discovering the streets that surround his home as a way of finding
out about himself. New instruments continue to strike up, like
further features of this new world appearing. Such vivid descriptions
of Little Jimmy's explorations (slipping from “he” to “you”
as the song goes on) may initially seem at a remove from the
title-supplying chorus, which is more a simple love song that a
protective parent may sing to a child. In one the child is tucked up
safely at night, in the other he's absent without official leave. But
it's through that juxtaposition that the song draws its meaning.
It's
the benevolent paradox of childhood, as summed up in the joining line
“you turn around and I'm beside you”. You can slip your parent's
hand and run off, secure in the knowledge that at some point your
parent will come along and find you. You know they have the same
limited physical existence as you, that pushing open the window and
sneaking out works when they're not there to see and stop you. But
still your young mind ascribes to them some vague sense of
omnipotence. They won't so much look for you as know.
I'm of the generation where religion was a fixed part of the school
curriculum. And, while children are of course credulous by nature,
its worth noting how easily it is to conceive the concept of God at
that age. A limitless, all-pervasive loving force – something like
your parents, only even more so.
From
thereon in it's possible to make out a fuzzy narrative, a life story
built around a love affair. As little Jimmy grows we first encounter
hopeless adolescent infatuation outside the school gates ('Cyprus
Avenue'), rising to a meeting of souls and bodies
('Ballerina'), then the inevitable break-up and
dissolution ('Slim Slow Slider'). There's no
shortage of lines which support this narrative, such as the girl
being specified as fourteen on 'Cyprus Avenue'
then as twenty-two on the later 'Ballerina'.)
Except
the more you try to pin things to it, the less they adhere. 'Sweet
Thing', for example, strikes up out of order, before the
girl down Cyprus Avenue has even been glimpsed. But there's worse...
This
narrative structure is mostly likely a detour I've built in my mind
to skirt the obvious. In it the singer of 'Cyprus
Avenue' is a schoolboy to go with the schoolgirl he's so
smitten by. Which he most probably isn't. “My tongue gets tied”
might suggest adolescent awkwardness, young mouths fumbling to
express strange new feelings. But what of the line “conquered in a
car seat”? Doesn't it suggests an ironic juxtaposition between the
active, adult role of being behind the wheel and the regression back
into a blushing boy? Besides, would one schoolchild strike another as
“so young and bold”? In which case what we actually have is a
song about an older guy parking up so he can gawp at a schoolgirl.
Lester Bangs was probably right all along to say Morrison had a
tendency to sing about paedophilia.
But,
were we to somehow set this no-small-matter aside, the lack of
coherence in itself doesn't matter much. While the album is playing,
while it's all happening, the music and lyrics seem in such a state
of harmony that surely it must all make sense.
It's just when you try to make sense of it, it all
seems to dissolve. It's like chasing the end of a rainbow, it so
clearly seemed to be somewhere until you went there. But then sense
was never the object. Morrison always insisted that he wrote the
songs in a stream-of-consciousness fashion, had not the slightest
clue what any of it might be about and has no interest in speculating
on the subject.
However
Lester Bangs, in his celebrated review, essentially stated that he has no
idea about any of it either but doesn't see why that should stop him.
Which is pretty much the approach I'm taking. When the love-story
narrative works, go with it. As soon as it doesn't, let your mind
focus on something else.
Take
the sequencing, for example. It works better experienced as a
geography than a narrative, the title track like crossing the crest
of a hill to see what's laid out beyond, next a downward swoop into
the serene valleys of 'Cyprus Avenue' and
'Madame George', then climbing the next peak with
'Ballerina'.
But,
were we to insist on forcing the pieces into a fixed narrative,
perhaps the worst aspect would be that it excludes the album's best
track and incorporates its worst. Thematically, 'Like Young
Lovers Do' is a companion love song to 'Ballerina'.
Yet it's urbane and polished while the rest of the album is free-form
and impressionistic. Compare the crooner scatting of the vocals as it
closes to the ululating glossolalia of 'Madame George's
“love that loves to love”. The track is such a sore thumb stuck
on an elegant hand that you can only assume it was intended as a
single. (Though no single was ever released.)
And
speaking of 'Madame George'...
”And
you know you've got to go...”
Ultimately,
we need to be less concerned with what slots into the narrative than
what fits the picture. The love story, like a love story in a movie,
is a framing device. A way to convey what's really going on in a form
most of us will recognise. So when the album's key and stand-out
track, 'Madame George,' ignores it completely...
well, so should we.
Mid-way
through another idyllic reflection comes the phrase “and you know
you gotta go”. Already the longest track on the album, just as it
seems to be over it strikes back up for an extended closing refrain,
built around the repeated phrase “say goodbye”. It hangs around
as if the song itself doesn't want to leave, drawing out the moment
as long as it can. If 'Madame George' is the key
song on the album, this coda is quite possibly the key moment of the
key song.
The
cartoonist Dylan Horrocks once described nostalgia as “remembering
the past without the passing of time... You're just remembering what
the place was like and the particular atmosphere and so on”.
('The Comics Journal' 243, May 2002) By a kind of
rose-tinted wallowing in the past, we evoke place over time. Tableaus
triumph over narratives. Birthdays become special days, made up of
cakes and presents, unconnected with our getting older. (I find
myself I can remember whole chunks of childhood birthdays, but never
what particular age I was.) Time has to be suspended for its time
which is the undoing of all of this.
I
think 'Astral Weeks', however tied up it is with
recalling your youth, is doing something else - something more than
what can easily become a old-chocolate-wrapper sense of nostalgia.
And this coda is where that becomes clearest.
Earlier
I compared the album to 'Bob Dylan's Dream', a
comparison most notable with 'Madame George'.
Significantly, both share the conceit of the past being represented
by a room. ('Madame George' is perhaps the only
interior-set song on the album.) And of course the past is
territorialised for us, tied to memories of spaces we no longer
inhabit. But more than that, enclosing the past makes it hermetic.
For Dylan its a space he can peer back into, but behind a door that's
forever locked. It's notable he
dreams of the room – a static space - “while ridin' on a train
going west” and comments of his time there “we never thought we
could ever get old”. Whereas Morrison starts the song
inside the room, then announces he has to leave.
And that leaving is the heart of it all. We have our memories and we
can indulge them, but embedded in them is the end-date, the knowledge
that the situation ends.
'Madame
George' is, in about every sense of the word, idyllic but
that doesn’t make it utopian. It's on an album which can radiate
with sunshine but is as likely to pour down “rain, hail, sleet and
snow”. It’s not the soundtrack to a cheery singsong past. It’s
an account of life being lived to its fullest, for both good and ill.
As Lester Bangs says its “transfixed between pure rapture and
anguish. Wondering if they may not be the same thing”.
(Disclaimer:
Ultimately, I’m not sure that I hear this album the same way as
Bangs. It often feels like he heard the album he needed to hear at
that time, rather than the one Morrison actually recorded. But that
quote at least seems to me to be almost perfect.)
And,
though at it's strongest on 'Madame George', this
duality of memory is to be found elsewhere on the album. Take
'Ballerina', where Morrison sings “when you came
up to me/ Child, you were heading for a fall”. And of course the
Fall isn't a twist ending or an interruption to the Edenic myth, it's
a core component of it. Some have suggested the woman's impending
death on 'Slim Slow Slider' is as a result of
drugs. But not only is that interpretation unsupported by the
anything in the lyrics, we're not dealing with something that needs
pinning to drugs, disease or any thing in particular. The line is “I
know you're dying baby, and I know you know it too.” Its the
knowledge of death which is significant, the
sour-apple taste of knowledge, the opposite of all the not-wondering
that went on earlier. Things have shifted from the innocence of the
garden to awareness – exile in the outside world.
But
for all that, the concept of a song cycle remains essential. When we
think back to, for example, Morrison proclaiming “I shall never,
never grow so old again”, we know full well that he does. He does
it on the very same album. Time will pass. But its not that we're
supposed to retrospectively fault this statement, to find it false or
naïve. Its a true expression of a true feeling. It means that within
the rapture of youth there can be no real sense of death, even if the
concept can exist in the abstract.
Ultimately,
its not just the songs but the conception of time which becomes
cyclic. Rather than progressing through stages of our lives like
baton-passers, the adult arising to replace the child, we grown in
some way more akin to tree rings. The youthful state is kept alive
inside of us, everything that happens being absorbed into our being.
And this is captured in the afore-mentioned fugue state conveyed by
the music, the sense of it happening all at once.
And
it worked. Being out of time created something timeless. One of the
(possibly apocryphal) stories about 'Astral Weeks'
is that it sold poorly on release, but then carried on steadily
selling the same number of copies with each successive year. It
is true that when it achieved gold record status,
it had taken thirty-three years to do it. It regularly appears on best-of album lists, including of
course this one. It's an album you could never tire of, or feel you'd
fully got to know. You'll always be caught one more time, down on
Cyprus Avenue.
Astral Weeks is one of those albums that I simply can't make sense of. (See also: pretty much everything by Dylan.) Almost every song on it annoys me enough that I stop it and move on to something else before reaching the end.
ReplyDeleteI'm not trying to open a dialogue here on whether the album is any good. I'm sure it is. Enough people who I respect (you included) love it. What I find fascinating here is my own inability to see it. It's like a colour-blindness. I deeply regret it.
I guess it does overlap with Dylan to some degree. Sometimes when something is hard to parse it's good idea to work towards it by increments. But unfortunately this case, despite my love of 'Astral Weeks' I really don't know Morrison's general output well enough to recommend anything else by him.
ReplyDeleteWhat frightens me about this is that I had a similar initial reaction to Jimi Hendrix, and even to some extent Joni Mitchell -- both of whom are right up there now in my all-time top musicians. So I am left with this general sense that maybe one day I'll have a similar epiphany with Dylan (or, I guess, Van Morrison), and that leaves me unable to just write them off and move on with my life.
ReplyDelete... and that's not even getting into the problem of the Rolling Stones :-)
It was many years ago when I was at school, and the Fall were one of the popular bands. I'd see their name written on other kids' school bags every day. And what got me wasn't that I didn't like them, but I couldn't see how anybody could like them. I didn't like the Exploited or Iron Maiden but thought I could see why their fans like them. How could anyone like the Fall? It seemed inexplicable.
ReplyDeleteIt bugged me so much I'd make a point of listening to them whenever John Peel played them. Which was frequent. And of course, as you'll have already guessed they became one of my most favourite bands.
I think the moral of the story is that I wasn't trying to change my reaction. Willing yourself to get something is like willing yourself to go to sleep, its only ever going to be counterproductive.
As it happens, I made an effort to listen to the Fall's Hex Endunction Hour last week, partly because everyone went about how great they were when I was at university and partly because Stewart Lee listed that album in his all-time top 10. I absolutely hated it, and gave half way through track 4.
ReplyDeleteSo ... if you weren't trying to give yourself a chance to change your reaction, what were you doing when you deliberately listened to a band that you didn't like?
But then you didn't even get to 'Winter', one of their finest tracks of all! (Inexplicably split into two on the original LP version, that Mark E Smith can be strangely perverse.) Should I ever get further along with this series of Top 50 albums, I will include a Fall album. 'Hex' is almost everyone's favourite, but I think I might slightly prefer one of the others…
ReplyDeleteI'd have been listening to Peel anyway so listening out to Fall tracks wasn't much extra effort. The Exploited seemed a classic bad punk band, sweary inchoate hate, the musical equivalent of lashing out, like Mel Smith's pisstake "Gob On You" except more parodic - terrible but explicable. The Fall were clearly doing something else but I had no idea what.