DB's Song of the Day (day 354): "MADAME GEORGE" (1968) Van Morrison

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.

DB's Song of the Day (day 243): "REMINDS ME OF YOU" (1999) Van Morrison

It’s Van the Man’s birthday. Van Morrison was born in Belfast on the 31st day of August in 1945. One of the greats of the generation of singers/songwriters whose careers got underway in the Sixties, Van’s still going strong and, like most of his contemporaries, he’s had some ups and downs. His major phase lasts from 1968’s Astral Weeks, one of the best albums ever, by anybody, up to 1974’s Veedon Fleece, a major statement. He hit a better-than-average stride with three albums after that: Wavelength (1978), Into the Music (1979), and Common One (1980).

After those three LPs helped to consolidate his “later” work as he turned 35, my attention to his career gets a bit spotty. The Eighties, in general, were not so good for artists his age, who had been in the game for twentysome years. I’d still point to No Guru, No Method, No Teacher (1986) and Irish Heartbeat (1988), an album of Irish traditional music recorded with The Chieftains, as well worth having. Then, in 1991, came the magnum opus Hymns to the Silence, on which Van mused about his early years and caught a bit o’ Gospel glory—“A Closer Walk with Thee” needs to be heard. Too Long in Exile (1993) was a jazzier than usual LP by an artist who had always stretched rock and R&B into more extended and improvised forms. Today’s song—and I could’ve chosen any of a dozen for Van’s birthday—is from Back on Top (1999), an album that reminds me a bit of No Guru, which is to say it’s meditative, a bit elegiac, but also full of a crisp sense of how to “do” Van Morrison songs. Van has done so many long, searching musical journeys on his albums, rambling through stream-of-consciousness, grabbing onto a phrase as a talismanic fragment and repeating it in various inflections as if sounding it for any magic it possesses, vocalizing with abandon at times and, more often, with a consummate craftsman’s full awareness of his powers, creating a spellbinding space in which music happens to the listener as a transposition to an interior place, perhaps even as a transformational experience (“Madam George,” for instance, but that will be saved for another time). But in all that time, we must also admit that some of Van’s output only gestures to what other songs make manifest. He’s not always in true form, in other words.

Back on Top struck me as a revisit of “classic” Van Morrison but without being derivative. If I’d never heard another Morrison LP, I’d be amazed by it. Which is to say that, if it’s not top shelf, it’s only because truly remarkable Morrison albums beat its time. This is true of some subsequent albums as well, such as 2005’s Magic Time. (I almost selected something from that album because it came out the year of my only trip to Ireland and I saw a poster for it in Dublin, and got the album—which I liked even more than Back on Top—after getting back home.)  I still need to get around to 2008’s Keep It Simple. I still find myself beguiled by Morrison’s ability to keep going, listening to the lion inside and getting it across.

“Reminds Me of You” fits the memory themes I’ve got going, and it features some truly lovely Hammond organ work by Geraint Watkins. It also features backing vocals, by Brian Kennedy, that create an interesting double vocal in which Van’s almost heartbroken tone gets matched by a voice less shaken by feeling. Call it water and rock, perhaps. Then there’s Pee Wee Ellis’s sax adding fills that are a bit breezy. It all adds up to a song that is laced with melancholy and a sense of past mistakes and misfortunes, and, maybe, a trust in a fulfillment to come, but that is also aware of joy, a tense, fitfully aware realization that keeps dawning and dimming. “Everything I do reminds me of you.” The memory is better than nothing.

“I miss you so much I can’t stand it,” the song begins and that’s its main coloration: I’m barely maintaining, I’m ready to go to pieces any second. And yet there’s a verse that, to me, makes us aware of what’s really going on: Seems like the spirit is pushing me onwards / I'm able to see where I tripped and went wrong / I'll just have to guess where my soul will find comfort / And I miss you so much when I'm singing my song. Each line has a strong caesura, as though the thoughts are being measured out, and the idea of being pushed to a realization, to seeing where he went wrong, feels palpable. There’s a groping sense in the “I’ll just have to guess” and the hope of finding comfort. Without “you,” it’s anyone’s guess if there is any solace to be found. But key is the phrase “when I’m singing my song.” This is a state of longing that comes with singing. It’s like saying that heartbreak is the basis of the song but that the song saves one from being heartbroken. The song is the comfort—and yet the song and singing it “reminds me of you.”

It’s also a song of divestiture: “I don’t have nothin’ to sell no more”; “ain’t goin’ down, no more, to the well.” What’s being refused, I guess, are easy remedies or activities that make for creature comforts. It’s time to stand face to face with, to use Ray Davies’ line, “what’s been taken from me.”

What makes me choose this song over others on the album—though I’m also very partial to “The Philosopher’s Stone,” “When the Leaves Come Falling Down,” and “High Summer”—is the tension in the vocal. It walks such a tight line, distilling a lifetime of singing the blues into a vocal with no histrionics or emoting, just an unerring sense of pitch and diction.

Happy birthday, Van, many happy returns.

My soul demands it.

DB's Song of the Day (day 199): "CUL DE SAC" (1974) Van Morrison

Van Morrison released a streak of great records from 1968 to 1974, culminating in Veedon Fleece. The only dud in that stretch is Hard Nose the Highway (1973), which can be skipped, pretty much, but that’s made up for by the extraordinary live album, Too Late to Stop Now! (1974). In any artist’s—or writer’s—life, there’s always a period, generally only noticeable in retrospect, when they hit a creative peak, are fully empowered, have the wherewithal to produce what only they can produce. At least that’s how I like to think of it. Of course, when you’re talking about creative arts that have a very commercial side to them, there’s a lot of other factors that push and pull on that notion of artists doing what they do—for the sake of their audience and their own artistry. Still, even when we come upon work much later than when it first appeared, we can feel that vibe, that sense that a work was produced under the right auspices.  With Van Morrison that’s worth thinking about, since his albums can sometimes just be almost first take affairs, just the right feel, the right spirit, and we’ve got it.

That’s the way much of Veedon Fleece was recorded. In Van’s life it was a period of transition from one marriage to another, and the time of the first visit back to Ireland since 1967 and the beginning of that great period. Don’t know what it is about Irishmen in exile, but . . . .  Anyway, Veedon Fleece, though I heard it way back in my “intro to Van” period of 1978-79, wasn’t an album in my collection till around 2002 and the release of a remastered CD. Seems there was another release in 2008 with a bonus track and an alternate take for today’s song.

“Cul de Sac” was the B-side of “Bulbs,” and both songs were done in NY with different musicians from the rest of the album. Consequently they do stand out from the more lyrical, Celtic Twilight sound of the rest of the record. “Bulbs” is a feel-good song as only Van can deliver—it’s the song that keeps alive the tradition of upbeat tunes (radio songs) like “Caravan,” “Domino,” “Wild Nights,” “Jackie Wilson Said.” But “Cul de Sac” is something altogether different.

My choice for today is no doubt dictated in part by the choice from yesterday—“Perfect” situated me in 2006 and an incredibly hot summer here in New Haven at this very time of month (I’m happy to say this summer has been mostly pleasant, so far), and maybe it’s the intensity that sends me back to memories of that time. I also think that “Cul de Sac” took over as my favorite track on the record then—as opposed to “Fair Play,” which I can remember mooning around to in the fall of 2002. I guess my love of the album was on a resurgence due to a fresh discovery. And “Cul de Sac” is a suitable celebration of “tucked away” pleasures.

Or at least that’s what I assume. It’s hard to know, sometimes, with Van, what a phrase he gets all emotive over really is meant to indicate. “Veedon Fleece” is a case in point. What is it? Besides being a great phrase that echoes a bit “Astral Weeks,” it’s not clear what it represents: something you search for, the way Jason and the Argonauts sought the Golden Fleece? OK, mythological symbolism may be intended. But a cul de sac? In normal parlance it’s simply an arrangement of streets such that the street doesn’t go “through”—it’s a dead-end, with usually a turn-around space in it. The point of living on a cul de sac is that rarely does anyone not coming to your house drive down that street. It’s more isolated, private. So it can be a figure for private activities. A “getaway,” if you like.

In the song, Van keeps mentioning that “you double-back / To a cul de sac”—like you’re going back for more. There’s also the idea, obvious enough perhaps, that a cul de sac (as an entrance and exit both) could easily be adapted to mean a certain part of the female anatomy that you enter in one state and exit in a different state. A glance at the lyrics shows Van not being coy about it: “It’s been much too long / Since we drifted in song / Lay it down wet / In this hide-away.” And that’s reason enough for me to feel the call of the revisiting, since sex to songs is something from way back in my past by the time this song was known to me, though it perhaps forms a bridge to that earlier time.

The fact that this is a love-making song is vivid enough in Van’s delivery throughout—as he follows a pace that starts slow and that he keeps punctuating with forceful vocal riffs, nowhere more so than when he starts vamping a saxophone part, taking it way down low into guttural growls. It’s the kind of scat-soloing that few rock singers ever try and Van is a master at it. At that point, words fail, y’know?

One of the phrases that Van has got hold of on this track—though not with the endless permutations of “Geronimo” on “Fair Play”—is Mount Palomar, which seems to be here as, well, an eminence, but one with a view of the stars. It’s a good enough figure for the opposite of navel-gazing, I guess—an omphalos that scans the heavens.

The guitar playing on this song is very sensual and very much in a kind of mind-meld synch with Van that happened as well on the sessions for Astral Weeks. I don’t know how he does it. But this album and Astral Weeks bookend, as his two major musical accomplishments, Van’s most magical period.

And we don’t care just who you know / It’s who you are.