Like Nelson Eddy, Devon Malcolm and the composer Havergal Brian, the critic Greil Marcus has one of those names that is all the more memorable for being obviously the wrong way round. He is, of course, the doyen, high priest and panjandrum of American music writers, whose best-known book, Mystery Train (1975), dared to treat American rock with a seriousness and a dignity it had previously been denied. In the years since, Marcus has taught rock, and indeed roll, at several prestigious US universities, and settled into the role of revered cultural historian. Staring out of the flyleaf of this latest volume, he looks slightly concerned but distracted in a brainy way. Nick Hornby thinks he is the bee’s knees.
So here, you feel, is his most daunting challenge yet. Van Morrison is the most individual and uncompromising of rock performers, instinctive, crotchety, constantly yearning for something unreachable, transcendental at best, repetitive and wearying at worst. Writing about what he is trying to achieve with his music is like trying to juggle with wet fish. Marcus saw him play Astral Weeks live last year:
The sound Morrison made when he opened his mouth seemed to come out of nowhere. It was huge; it silenced everything around it, pulled every other sound around it into itself.
He describes Morrison’s early style thus:
The blues singer’s marriage of emotional extremism and nihilistic reserve, the delicacy of a soul singer’s presentation of a bleeding heart, a folk singer’s sense of the uncanny in the commonplace, the rhythm and blues bandleader’s commitment to drive, force, speed, and excitement above all.
That’s almost better than the music it describes.
When he moves from the general to the specific, however, Marcus can become as challenging as his subject. There’s a fascinating 20-page essay on Astral Weeks, an album much written about but rarely as perceptively or as thoughtfully as here. But Marcus also dedicates whole chapters to tracks from bootlegs you have never heard and never will hear. Songs on Tupelo Honey remind him of something in a novel you haven’t read, or of a conversation he had with someone 40 years ago which you weren’t present to witness. Throughout it all he writes with great, fearsome authority, handing down sonorous judgments with the small rod of lightning he keeps in his desk for the purpose.
Sixteen years of Morrison’s output — from Common One in 1980 to Tell Me Something in 1996 — are written off in a couple of sentences as simply no good. Then, apparently, Morrison rediscovers his genius with The Healing Game in 1997, and Marcus is off again, rhapsodising and eulogising. ‘Morrison dominates each song on The Healing Game — but the word song seems much too small.’ What seems bigger? Symphony? Antidisestablishmentarianism? Forgive the irritation, but I was one of many who bought The Healing Game on its release only to find that it was the same second-rate, half-hearted drivel that Morrison had been churning out for years. Marcus’s depth of knowledge, his tone of certainty and even his reputation make you listen to his critical judgments, but that doesn’t stop them being whimsical and, at times, totally bonkers.
Still, who else would write a book like this? It’s clearly the product of many, many years of listening and thinking and of a deep love of the music. It’s also wondrously bold and ambitious, taking the humble craft of rock criticism close to the level of tone poem. But it’s not a book for the general reader, or indeed anyone less than a demented fan of Van Morrison. However much you think you love his music, Marcus loves it more. He isn’t reaching out to his readership: he is closing the door against them, bolting the windows and pulling down the curtains. Which probably makes him the perfect person to write about Morrison, and this the perfect book about him, in a weird, hermetically sealed kind of way.
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