There aren’t many “open days” left till the end of the year
(and the end of this series), so for today’s open day I’ll go with one of the
greatest songs ever recorded. “Madame George” is Van at his best and it is found on one of the truly great LPs of the 1960s, Astral
Weeks. This is an album that seems to get better as the years pass, in part
because it seems somehow to be a distillation of its era, not in any political
way or even in the manner of a hit machine that became a common reference
point. I daresay the album, except to fans of Van, is still a bit obscure. But
there’s something in that: there’s an esoteric quality to the album that comes
from how “out of the way” its environs are—Belfast and Dublin, Ireland, specifically—and how
unusual the music on the album sounds. It’s famed by critics and it’s
influential, but is probably still not fully “embraced” by the general
public. And that’s how I’d have all my favorite masterpieces, thank you very
much.
Clocking in at over 9 minutes in length, “Madame George” is
one of the most striking of many Van tour de force performances, where he takes
a meandering tune and keeps it unfurling. In a sense, there’s no reason it has
to end when it does—on a long fadeout of a long goodbye—except that, well, yes,
it’s time to “get on the train, get on the train,” and “say goodbye, goodbye,
goodbye.” It’s that sense of parting that makes the song so monumental. It
feels as if the entire scene that the song describes is being parted from. It’s
always been easy for me to imagine it as Van’s farewell to Belfast, even if it’s
only a projected one at that point. There are so many wonderful little glimpses
of a world known—such as “throwing pennies at the bridges down below / And the rain,
hail, sleet, and snow,” one of the most beautiful couplets in this beautiful
song. Then there’s the “kids out in the street collecting bottle tops / Gone
for cigarettes and matches in the shop.” Remember collecting bottle caps to turn
in for change?
At the center of the song is Madame George, a transvestite,
one assumes (“in a corner, playing dominoes in drag”), who adds an air of the
exotic and of the demimondaine to the song. That and the “everything she gots”
that is dropped “down into the street below” the minute she says “Lord have
mercy, I think that it’s the cops.” We glimpse a kind of salon situation where folks
into drugs congregate, and “the one and only Madame George” holds court.
Our hero/narrator is present as a kind of witness, but is
also aligned in spirit with “the little boys come around, walking away from it
all, so cold.” There’s a distance here, as our narrator puts upon his
earlier self a bit of that spirit Dylan contained with his Mr. Jones: “With your
folded arms and history books you glance / Into the eyes of Madame George.” It’s
not that something is happening here and he don’t know what it is, it’s more
like he’s brought to this scene his own expectations, his own sense of self—no doubt
somewhat arrogant—and at the heart of the song is the pathos that comes from
the encounter with Madame George: “She jumps up, says, ‘Hey, love / You forgot
your glove.’” Trivial event, but the kind that Van’s master James Joyce would call an
epiphany.
And that’s what is circulating through the entire song, that
sense of a glimpse, a glance, a shared moment—things that shouldn’t count
unless they do. And Van keeps the feeling changing as the song begins
slow and laconic—and “that smell of sweet perfume comes drifting through / The
cool night air like Shalimar”—as though “nobody feels any pain,” letting the
details of Madame George—“the clicking, clacking” of her high-heeled shoes, her
perfume, her “soldier boy” (defined by that great line “He much older now with
hat on / Drinking wine”), her boys out to get cigarettes—slowly congeal into
the moment of trance: “wo wo wo, that’s when you fall.”
“You’re getting weaker and your knees begin to sag”—it could
be from drink, sure, but sounds like it’s from daring to look the one and only
Madame George directly in the eyes. The trance is broken by the rapping at the
window and the fright that it’s the cops. Then comes my favorite verse:
And you know you gotta
go
Ride that train from
Dublin up to Sandy Row
Throwing pennies at
the bridges down below
And the rain, hail,
sleet, and snow
The lines are charged with the full melancholy of
leave-taking, of looking ahead at the long journey, of having to go out into
the cold and away from the comforts here. But the epiphanic feel remains in
play, reaching its ecstatic moment with “And as you leave the room is filled
with music / Laughing, music dancing all around the room” and those little boys
walking away from it all. Free, and leaving on a high note, even as the long
farewell, supported by flute and strings, keeps that music dancing along with
us, to “dry your eye your eye your eye your eye” with thoughts of “the love that
loves to love the love that loves to love.”
What Van does, that no one does quite like him, is ride that
epiphany out to its furthest edge. Letting the moment of goodbye prolong for
over four minutes, he gives us—and his hero—ample time to muse upon this
moment, to feel the parting and the possible love, the sadness and necessity
all together at once, with the memory of the backstreet and the wind and the
rain surging into view, but, finally only the emphatic “get on the train”
becoming “this is the train.” The song itself ultimately conveys the speaker
away from the moment, the scene, the memory where he threatens to be stuck.
It’s a commanding performance, so full of what it evokes,
letting emotion guide us through the scene. I have images of rooms and of what
seems to me early dawn, but that’s all just conveyed by the sound itself, and
Van’s voice is able to chart this world with a feeling of detachment shaded
with sorrow. It isn’t really the speaker’s scene, but there is a fulsome
temptation there that haunts.
With a childlike vision leaping into view.
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