Van With musician David Hammond & playwright Brian Friel (1986)
Irish Songwriter Calls on English Muses For His Art
One reason for Van Morrison’s creative longevity is likely his devotion to the arts that so inspire him.
Beside the garden walls,
We walk in haunts of ancient peace.
At night we rest and go to sleep
In haunts of ancient peace. …
The holy grail we seek
On down by haunts of ancient peace.
We seek the new Jerusalem
In haunts of ancient peace.
They could be the words of a bard of yore, but they are lyrics from Van Morrison’s “Haunts of Ancient Peace,” from his 1980 album, “Common One.”
They are an example of how Morrison, across a four-decade career, has mined English literature for the ideas that elevate his music to elegant meditations on life.
Morrison’s “Haunts” sprang from Alfred Austin, an English poet laureate who died in 1913. The Penguin Companion to Literature takes a dim view of Austin, declaring that he wrote “20 volumes of bad verse.” With Austin’s prose, though, Morrison separated wheat from chaff. In 1901, Austin, disturbed by development, roamed his country seeking “Old England, or so much of it as is left.” According to Martin J. Wiener’s English Culture, Austin yearned for “washing days, homemade jams … morning and evening prayers.”
Morrison, an avid reader, discovered Haunts of Ancient Peace and, 78 years later, turned the 1902 travelogue into one of the most evocative songs in the Van canon.
On Aug. 31 Morrison will celebrate his 61st birthday. Some of his peers are dead, such as Beatles John Lennon and George Harrison. Others are in retirement (Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick).
But Morrison carries on. One imagines him writing and performing well into his 70s or even 80s, much like John Lee Hooker, the late bluesman he admired and with whom he collaborated.
Bob Dylan and Neil Young may get more attention, but Morrison is one of pop music’s greats because he, too, does it all. Writer of classic songs such as “Moondance,” he also plays several instruments including alto sax. But his throaty, growling voice remains his signature; as former Rolling Stone writer Greil Marcus once wrote, “The yarrrrragh is Van Morrison’s version of Leadbelly, of jazz, of blues, of poetry. It is a mythic incantation.”
Another reason for Morrison’s creative longevity may be his devotion to the arts. He has released four albums in the last five years, writing songs that draw on media ranging from films (“Just Like Greta”) to folk ballads (“St. James Infirmary”) to country music.
It is literature that has moved Morrison most profoundly, whether he has borrowed concepts or adapted the poetry of the masters.
A classic example is “A Sense of Wonder,” a 1984 album on which nearly every song springs from a revered fountain. The album begins with Morrison’s nod to a flamboyant French poet, “Tore Down a la Rimbaud” (we shall charitably gloss the fact that some listeners concluded from the pronunciation that the piece had something to do with Sylvester Stallone’s “Rambo”).
Morrison didn’t even write “Let the Slave/The Price of Experience,” the album’s centerpiece. The tune is Mike Westbrook’s. The words are William Blake’s, a manifesto of pain and joy stitched together from passages drawn from the visionary megapoems “The Four Zoas” and “America: A Prophecy,” plus a line from “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.”
Morrison’s soulful delivery reaches us via our ears but settles in our spines, tingling, freeing us, at least momentarily, from our travails:
Let the slave grinding at the mill run out into the field
Let him look up into the heavens and laugh in the bright air
Let the unchained soul, shut up in darkness and in sighing
Whose face has never seen a smile in thirty weary years
Rise and look out; his chains are loose, his dungeon doors are open …
“A Sense of Wonder” also includes Morrison’s “Ancient of Days,” a phrase drawn from the Old Testament’s Book of Daniel. Over centuries, as various religions have evolved, the phrase has acquired several connotations; in Judaism it’s usually regarded as a reference to the eternal nature of God the Father, in Christianity as a prophetic reference to Christ.
True to form, Morrison’s approach is to take a view that is open. Clearly his “Ancient of Days” is a figure of glory, but his lyrical lines draw no dogmatic lines.
And he’s not too prissy to make mystic jokes. For a while his 1974 album, “Veedon Fleece,” drove some listeners batty as they tried to figure out if Van’s fleece was some mythical icon. The Golden Fleece? A veiled reference to the Holy Grail? Morrison later confessed he just made it up.
Over the years Morrison has been stubbornly cagey about his own religious beliefs. Born in Belfast, George Ivan Morrison was raised by a mother who flirted with being a Jehovah’s Witness and a father who proudly owned a large collection of jazz and blues records. Morrison’s fusion of the sacred and secular, while obvious to listeners, isn’t something he yammers about.
Morrison can be willful in pursuit of his art. “A Sense of Wonder” was to have included his cover of William Mathieu’s adaptation of Irish poet William Butler Yeats’ “Crazy Jane on God,” but a dispute with the Yeats estate shelved the song. Fourteen years later it finally appeared on “The Philosopher’s Stone,” Morrison’s 1998 album of alternate versions and might-have-beens.
For all his gifts, “Morrison is not terribly in vogue these days,” as salon.com opined in a piece published in 2000. It was right, and nothing has changed since then. Morrison has taken his knocks in an era dominated by rappers, grrrl pop and so on, but fans still dote on him.
When Morrison plays the Austin City Limits Music Festival in mid-September, he’ll be facing a rapt audience. Perhaps the reason for their fidelity has something to with an observation in that salon article:
“It has been said that in Morrison’s music one finds questions rather than answers. Searching, seemingly unsatisfied, he has identified himself with poets from Blake to Yeats … (L)ike those ‘poetic champions’ he drops the names of, he has searched for the right words, the right feeling, as if for the Holy Grail. …
“(He) follows the primal path he laid out for himself in the 1972 song ‘Listen to the Lion.’ In 11 minutes of scatting and primal growling Morrison recounts how ‘we sailed and we sailed and we sailed/Away from Denmark/Way up to Caledonia. … All around the world … Looking for a brand new start.’ The lion that he seeks — and that he flees — is inside of him.”
Vanology: A selection
Here’s a brief look at how Van Morrison has drawn on literature and the arts.
Song: “Jackie Wilson Said (I’m in Heaven When You Smile).” Album: “St. Dominic’s Preview,” 1972. This joyous number looks to legendary R&B singer Jackie Wilson (1934-84) for its title, feel and content. Morrison’s lyrics mention Wilson’s hit “Reet Petite,” and the brisk tempo of the music bears out Morrison’s claim that he’s “so wired up/Don’t need no coffee in my cup.”
Song: “I Just Want to Make Love to You.” Album: “It’s Too Late to Stop Now,” 1974. Relative to his large repertoire, Morrison has covered few blues tunes. This exception, from Morrison’s first live album, is a slow, burning version of a Willie Dixon classic.
Song: “Summertime in England.” Album: “Common One,” 1980. Critics accused Morrison of mere name-dropping with his repeated references to Wordsworth, Coleridge, Yeats and Joyce, but this 15-minute track has a strange, misty, stream-of-consciousness appeal.
Song: “Rave On, John Donne.” Album: “Inarticulate Speech of the Heart,” 1983. Morrison raves himself, championing the power of a long-dead metaphysical poet to “rave on, down through the industrial revolution/Empiricism, atomic and nuclear age.” Too bad the studio version, soaked in echo and lugubriously executed, is so lame. Try the more energetic take on “Live at the Grand Opera House Belfast.”
Song: “Tell Me Something,” plus 12 more from the 1996 album of the same name. Morrison puts aside his own pen for an entire disc of cover versions of the songs of American blues/jazz composer and pianist Mose Allison.
Song: “Piper at the Gates of Dawn.” Album: “The Healing Game,” 1997. The lyrics were inspired by The Wind in the Willows, the classic children’s fantasy penned by Scottish author Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932).
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