In The Heart of The Heart of My Bookshelf, Volume II

Well, now that you have digested all of my Mad Men analysis for one season, I am sure you are looking for a break for some actual intelligent and insightful prose.  Here to give that insight to you in the second installment of his weekly column (which is now titled In the Heart of the Heart of My Bookshelf) , is Mr. Alex Ramsdell.







Up on Cyprus Avenue: Some Thoughts on Van Morrison and a Brief Observation on the Magic of Astral Weeks






Alex Ramsdell

Even as a kid, I knew that the guy singing "Brown Eyed Girl" was the man. I was hearing Morrison on Polydor's Best Of (with that Elvis-styled microphone on the front) that everybody’s parents had.  But over time I started to realize that this validated hit-list is more relevant to the gift-giving season than it is to Morrison.  It is a fine collection of individual songs, but the project it undertakes is impossible.  It shows us the industry’s “artist” as an icon and so forces a disconnect between the artist and his work.  Morrison is an album artist, or maybe even a phase artist.  Prismatic treatment diminishes the depth of exploration in his music, the fact that he is never satisfied and yet still has such a masterful command of the album form.  The Best Of is then a kind of tourism of a musical mind which cuts the continent of his poetic vision down to a list of capitals.  “Here: this is the most important,” it says to us 20 or so times.  But what is so distinct and lasting about Morrison is not the list of hits that gained him the attention of record labels and subsequent fame, but the texture of the career that envelops them.  What is essential is the linked experiences and the visible horizon of the poet’s life that we inevitably come up against in submitting to his dedication to exploration.

Astral Weeks uncovers a possibility in music that remains part of Morrison’s mission even today.  It operates largely by intuition and in doing so, captures his vision in a kind of unplanned dark.  The vision is caught, moment by moment, via the beacon light of Morrison’s voice.  It is a limited kind of chance as a mode of musicality.  This meant hiring Berklee musicians and giving them no instructions except to “go ahead and play exactly what he felt”, as bassist Jayer Berliner would later remember, letting them ultimately follow each other in following Morrison. And in these songs, the voice becomes the thing which holds the entire movement together.  Its impression extends far beyond the words and, like the wail of a banshee, becomes the justification and the very body of the soul in search of salvation.

If memory is fragmented, if it is mystical and involved in the ends of human life that exist beyond our experience of each present moment, then the notion that the narrative in Astral Weeks is fragmented holds, although it is not fragmented in an incomplete or an affected sense.  It tells the story of Belfast and its people through the eyes of the poet who is rapt in memory: a city dying, loving, leaving, changing.  The fragmentation exists in the lyrics—and here begins my chief observation—but the music sublimates the album’s crucial activity to a place where words cannot reach: the rhythm section.  This is what grounds the fragmented content in experience, gives it truth, and so lets us receive Morrison’s experience as somehow more true than fact.  The enactment of dwelling—walking with something possessing us: Madame George, a dying friend, a better place; going up to Cyprus Avenue, standing on the corner, or departing for somewhere else; meeting the edge of the Irish Sea to see yourself—this is all concretely and wordlessly rooted in the rhythm section.  There is a part of the world that exists in us and yet is outside of thought, though this very part conditions thought.  It is this other life of the body that we discover only in separation, which gives Astral Weeks its coherence.  You could call it pace, but I do not mean to say that the tempo of each song is somehow a literal equivalent to walking, or to standing on the corner.  No, the horizontal movement of the rhythm—often realized in equally emphasized eighth notes, and other times mystified by a free-form meter—is the body which completes the metaphor for the practicalities of being present in a city.  If Astral Weeks is about intersecting avenues and intersecting lives in its city, it responsibly transmits this by grounding the album in its most basic element: the movement of legs.  It goes unsaid but is there all the time.

The Veedon Fleece

“[it] is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend.”

That is Lester Bangs from his 1979 review of Astral Weeks. By just including that quote at the top of this post, I have committed – to my mind, at this time – the four cardinal sins of writing: starting with a quote, starting with someone else’s work, starting blatantly with someone else’s work, starting a music themed piece with a Lester Bangs quote.

The problem is, is that it wasn’t until I was rereading Lester Bang’s article in order to write this piece that I realized how poignant that quote is in general to life, let alone the work of Van Morrison, especially in his prolific 1968-1974 period. What Lester Bangs touches on in that quote is, at essence, what we look for in all the great works of art – the moment of epiphany, or recognition that this world is so big and that no matter how hard we try to control it or confine it with devices like art, it is ultimately made of concepts far bigger than us – love, chaos, death, nonhistory, nonexistence.  Our great art simply points us to these words and concepts.  Heidegger has explained it. Hart Crane has exhibited it. Joyce, Picasso and Jesus mastered it.

The Joyce line will have to be excused in the realm of this blog post because of the obvious Irish similarities between Van Morrison and because on Astral Weeks in the song “Madame George,” Van steals a line from the “Cyclops” episode of Ulysses when he says, “the love that loves to love the love that loves to love.”  However, Astral Weeks is the closest that music or the “song” has come to the epiphany, economy and poignancy of the short story and the epiphanies that occur in both Astral Weeks and Veedon Fleece do contain the Joycean tone and vision.

We will start with vision, but in a different sense.  My college roommate is the person who first directed me towards Veedon Fleece as he directs me towards so many musics, CDs, mp3s, .rar files, and iPods.  This same roommate also made the declaration about Animal Collective that he didn’t like to listen to them with other people – he only liked to listen to them alone.  I had written off this inclination for the most part. Admittedly, there are albums that we enjoy listening to alone. We are afraid to share our tastes or how they affect us with other people, just as we are afraid to share with other people the effects that other arts or objects in this world have on us.  However – and this is not meant to cut these arts short – those albums, books, movies, plays don’t have the overall poignancy that a Veedon Fleece has.  The reason why Veedon Fleece had me thinking about my old roommates musings on Animal Collective is because as I sunk into the album for the third time, I realized that it was opening up visions in me that were unwarranted: pictures of a dim lit room on a fall night, friends all around me enjoying the album, me and the girl I loved making small gestures of love to each other: the push back of hair, the caress of an ear, in rose-red light, the memories of family I knew passing me by in shades of sepia.  However, these were just illusions, dim shades. And as these dim shades flickered before me, I tried to place something concrete upon them: the who, the what, the Dave Eggers. Yet, that was not possible, my heart or my mind would not stop on someone or something concrete that this music directed me to, it was all illusory, it was all the vanity of who I thought I knew. 

The moment I am speaking of is the moment Lester Bangs is speaking of: the enormity of what we can comprehend.  This music was bigger than me, it had textures and nuances that needed an understanding, just as the people who moved before me in shades were part of a bigger world and that no matter how much I loved them and thought that I could perceive their taste of enjoying this music, were part of something bigger and my devices, my artifices, my designs and images could not reign that in. The music pointed me to this revelation, unwittingly or not, deservedly or not.  Now, the music is at the mercy of my medium and I will take the life out of it and wring it dry so that you all know what it speaks.

Astral Weeks took us to all the places that we knew, if perhaps more vividly than we had ever known them before.  We’ve known our Cyprus Avenues, the places where we were conquered in a car seat without a thing left to do.  Maybe you knew it as the Stop N’ Shop parking lot, or the hill at the center of your town, where you tried to take a girl, where you saw the damn creek that ran through your town and thought about how cold it got in winter and maybe, maybe you couldn’t even try to love this girl when there was something so cold sitting out there, waiting to take a hold of your soul.  Astral Weeks reminded us of walks home from school in the cold, whether it was your elementary or high school where things were warm and safe and orange, or it was your upstate college where the streets were neat and the sidewalks had just the right cracks in them and April was moist enough and everything was warm and safe and brown and reminded you of a vinyl record and a used couch.  In the end, Astral Weeks was like that description in “Cyprus Avenue” of that avenue of trees.  No matter who you are or where you are from, there is a vision in your mind that flashes, that vision of youth, and there is the place and the light that you think of – almost nearly unexplainable.  It is that sense memory that you chase after all your life, creating new memories and new senses, trying to understand what that brief flash was.  But that flash wasn’t so brief, that flash was your youth, your life and it stretches on and creates colors and smells that remind you of how big things are and how good they can be.  That tree-lined avenue is what makes you stay up at night and think of yourself as eccentric, hungry and adventurous.  That is what Astral Weeks was. Poignant, ambitious, full of energy, beauty and hunger.

If, Astral Weeks, owned those adjectives and if it was full of want and strumming guitars of heartswell and heartache, then what does Veedon Fleece have for us? What is so damn good about this album, Domino, that you’re wasting all our time with it?

“Looking for the Veedon Fleece there.”

There is a lot on Veedon Fleece to waste your time with, but we can’t go song by song and try to wring the meaning out of it all that way.  No, we’ll have to wring the meaning out of it in a whole different way.  Starting with the centerpiece of the album, which is “You Don’t Pull No Punches, But You Don’t Push the River.”  This song is the centerpiece of the album because it is the most dramatic, the most moody and it contains the title within its lyrics.  Critics and listeners have called Veedon Fleece Van Morrison’s tribute to Ireland, whether by feel or by lyrics.  The album and the song “You Don’t Pull No Punches, But You Don’t Push The River” both contain many literary references, which is one of the sticking points of pride in Ireland – most writers per capita.  However, in this centerpiece song, we are talking about “William Blake and the Eternals standing with the Sisters of Mercy/Looking for the Veedon Fleece there” and “Goin’ as much with the river as not.”  Of course, he is going to the West, which means going further into Irish tradition, but that’s not what I’m interested in.  We’re interested in the Veedon Fleece, what he’s looking for, what we’re looking for.  This is a song about looking for soul with the people in the country, the people of his country.  However, heartfelt the delivery (and there is nothing short of heartfelt on this album), this seems like an extremely artificial pose.  Going to the country to find the real soul? That is one 70’s platitude that was dragged kicking and screaming from the 60’s where it was misappropriated from the 50’s and now has become every person’s excuse to sound more considerate about life and its great mysteries than they really are.  If Van was going west to seek out soul than he was full of it.  What he was really looking for was that Veedon Fleece.  But what the hell is it?

The album is filled with outcasts. Starting with the delicate piano of “Linden Arden Stole the Highlights” (one of Elvis Costello’s favorites and you can hear him sing it in that sickening whiny damn good voice of his), we are introduced to a character who loves the morning sun and that whiskey ran like water through veins and who loves to go to church on Sunday even though he’d been drinking.  When men come from San Fran to kill him, he meets them first and kills them instead. However, he regrets it when he realizes that he loves the children of his town as if they were his own, and that it gets lonely when you’re living with a gun.  This segues into the falsetto sung “Who Was That Masked Man,” which has the first lines “Oh ain’t it lonely/when you’re living with a gun.”  What is Van doing singing about outlaws? These are outlaws who have soft spots for children and who are compared to fish bowls and who have ghosts that visit them at night, ghosts that teach them that there is good and evil in everyone.  These two outlaw songs come after the idyllic sounding opener “Fair Play” and right before the outlaw-sounding “Streets of Arklow,” which has extremely Anglican and poetic lyrics.  This brings up one of the best aspects of the album – the way that feel plays into such a big part of it.  Even though I value words as much as anyone, when it comes to music, I don’t usually pay attention to them, I pay attention to feel.  That is what much of Veedon Fleece is about.  It’s the feel.  It’s the feel of the songs and the delivery that should tell you what they’re about, not necessarily the lyrics.  “Linden Arden Stole The Highlights” does the best job of matching lyrics to feel.  It’s a simple tune about a simple man who likes to drink and there is something about that that makes him an outlaw, that makes him murder and regret it.  Murder is a strong metaphor but who doesn’t end up screwing the simple things up.  It all makes sense to drink and enjoy whiskey in the sun, just like it makes sense to go out west and look for the real soul, but we all mess that up and end up living with a gun.  Living alone, living with those burdens that separate us and make us outlaws and outcasts, but which we can shed at some point, we can escape, because no matter what they tell you, there is good and evil in everyone. That’s why we’re looking for the Veedon Fleece.


The album is about people trying to find homes.  The back to back songs of “Bulbs” and “Cul De Sac” could be part of a concept album of leaving Europe to come to America.  In “Bulbs” we get a girl trying to come to America but ends up getting caught lost and thinks back to her brothers and sisters in her homeland and the old times they used to have drinking too much together at the bar. The narrator tells us how he hears hear lonely cry while she’s standing in the shadows down where the streetlights all turn blue.  And meanwhile in “Cul De Sac” the narrator doesn’t care about who you know, but about who you are and the fact that anyone can double back to those cobblestones and end up in the quiet of the cul de sac.  This is moving stuff to focus on.  The fact that no matter how far you go, no matter the ambitions and illusions you have about who you know, you can always circle back to that cul de sac.  The cul de sac is the same as the tree-lined avenue.  Its that place that reminds you of comfort and of weakness.  The places you can find solace in because you have found yourself under those shadows where the streetlights all turn blue and you cry out for loneliness because its all you’ve got trying to make it in the world.  None of those comfortable drunken places of your mind exist anymore, they are part of your memory and this world can be too big for your memory, because while your memory is vivid, it doesn’t move. This world moves and so do you – those photographs of your friends, those still-lifes of their white wooden bookshelves with papers scattered in the air, the dry white linens, those images are foreign to you as you move away from one country to the next.  But does it change what they mean? Does it change the love you have? Your assurance of yourself?  You are looking for the Veedon Fleece there – letting out your lonely cry underneath the blue streetlights.

The best song of the album “Comfort You” is perhaps the simplest song on the album.  This song is maybe the best song of all time, by the way.  Simple in its lyrics and in its chord progression.  It has maybe the best chord progression of all time as well.  We don’t need to analyze lyrics and meaning in this song – the title says it all. If you listen to this song in the cold of winter walking on the streets, it will make you feel more alive than you have ever felt in your life.  Your gloved hands will turn to fists and you will feel like you are leading those stuttering drum kicks and that your every move prompts the band and the rhythm. The lyrics become a mantra “I want to comfort you.” I don’t think there is anything else that can be said beside that.  As Beach House so recently said about taking care of you, Van already had it beat back in ’74 with comforting you and letting your tears run wild like when you was a child down on “Cyprus Avenue where the childlike visions creep into view.”

“Looking for the Veedon Fleece there.”

So, what does the Veedon Fleece become then?  Van said he just made it up.  Is it as simple as youthful brio or hunger versus experience and maturation?  No, I don’t think it is as simple as pitting those two things against each other, otherwise it wouldn’t be as interesting as it is. Force isn’t what makes this world perpetuate itself, its hunger and its love – although force does make for some good basketball rivalries, but that is really just love in the end, isn’t it? The Veedon Fleece that we’re looking for is that protection that Van first felt that he needed when he was singing Astral Weeks.  There are obvious pains and realities in this world that we have to face in order to move forward.  Not only the pains about the world at large, about the tragedies of fate and of the luck of the dice and how you can end up in Haiti or in New Orleans when it all comes down or avoid that kind of catastrophe for your entire life, like so many do.  But also the pains about yourself, the shortcomings you have for your own ambitions and for what you can give or understand about the people you know and hope that you love.  There are those moments when we are stunned by life, completely overwhelmed and they don’t just happen when you are young – they very often happen when you are older and can be even more devastating.  However, what Veedon Fleece is trying to say, through its mood and its feeling and the control that it has over Astral Weeks’ catharsis is that maybe as you get older you have a better perspective to deal with those tragedies, because you’ve messed up the simple life with jealousy and envy, you’ve chosen your heartbreak, you’ve chosen to leave the easy life behind to cry out alone. Maybe you’ve seen your fate and chosen to live with a gun, whatever a gun may mean. I think “gun” means what Cheyenne said in Once Upon a Time in the West, when he said about Harmonica, “People like that have something inside... something to do with death.” 

And that’s what it comes down to, that Veedon Fleece is what is going to protect us from that change from what once was to what is, to what we have to inevitably face.  Being conquered in a car seat on “Cyprus Avenue” was one thing and we can’t keep those poses up our entire lives, we have to move forward and see those flashes of youth in our eyes and remember those scents and colors so vividly – the smell of saltwater, the sound of water on rock, the feel of someone’s hip and thigh, the light through trees in the summer.  However, we can always go back into that eternity and look for the Veedon Fleece there, that protection that enables us to face the inevitability of the world, that meaning that pushes us on.

Talk Talk

"Spirit of Eden" by Talk Talk is one of my favorite albums of all time. I will go on the record as saying that. When I first hear the album, from the opening moments of that very serious tuning or ambiance of the strings in the background to the mournful trumpet notes tempered with distorted guitar, I knew that this was either going to be a pretension fest that I was misled to by my trust in another music review, or the best album that I had ever listened to. Well it was close (2nd best after Bob Dylan's "Self Portrait" {easily the best concept album of all time}) Once that guitar comes in on "The Rainbow" to set the scene, mixing with the haunting harmonica (spooky!) you are immediately drawn in. I have always likened this album to Van Morrison's "Astral Weeks." Both albums deserve the accolade "organic." Because there have been perhaps only three truly organic albums (to my knowledge) in rock history: Astral Weeks, Spirit of Eden, and Laughing Stock (also by Talk Talk). "Organic" being a conception of an album born out of the idea that the musicians and lyricist would not coordinate before recording. Astral weeks was made when Van hired the best chamber musicians possible to play tracks that he would sing along to. There was minimal to no discussion of mood. On "Spirit of Eden" the tracks were not discussed or written out. Talk Talk played these songs as they went along - lighting a candle for ambience. The singer (I don't know his name as I write this so I refuse to look it up) made up lyrics as the songs went along. His voice, in the classic Jagger school, becomes another instrument, bubbling up and along with the instrumental tracks - becoming as passionate as their outbursts are and then subsiding just as quickly. This may be perhaps the best recorded rock vocal of all time.

The flowing nature of the music on this album had me thinking that the first three songs "The Rainbow," "Eden," and "Desire" were all just one song for the longest time. However, when the strange guitar and trumpet moans of "The Rainbow" fade and give way to the piano and strumming acoustic guitar of "Eden" build and then break into a laid back drum beat you sooner or later figure out that this is a different song. Here Talk Talk basically trump all of U2's 80's output. As the keyboards and guitar chime together and rise up while the singer sings "Everybody needs someone to live by" you being to think why there were ever any other bands or lyrics or sex in the world. These outbursts subside into a persistant groove that is only broken by sharp blasts of distorted guitar that then give way to the most clear out of tune acoustic guitar strokes, which then raise into another outburst. Music and instruments have never sounded as good as they do on this album.

"Eden's" guitar chime slowly fades out to quiet. The piano builds again only to die out and give way to strings from a keyboard, then just keyboard and distortion. Then the heavy synthesized organ comes in and "Desire" starts. This isn't any U2 cop out. This is "Talk Talk" and they use the power and refrain of the church organ to drive this song home. When the singer finally starts in with the lyrics you are hypnotized: "Desire, whispered, spoken." The keyboard and organ slowly build into a guitar freak out that is simply one of the best codas I have ever heard and if you do not want to rip yourself apart after you have heard it, then you must have less than half of a heart or the passion of someone who keeps the first job they are given. "Desire" is the type of song that, when you are walking along the street and see a tree in first bloom and realize that the universe and nature are eternal and you are merely a part of that eternity in a very mortal sense and temporary, ties into that deep feeling in your gut - that the world, your friends, your love is impossible and you are merely tied into its whims. "Desire" in reality and in song never gives up.

"Desire" fades and we get a reprieve of rain from the cymbals in "Inheritance." The singer's moan fits the slight jazz snare sweeps and the late night piano until we it what I guess is a chorus that springs out of stand up bass plucks and soars into synthesizer sounds that are too good to have lived past 1990 in order to be destroyed by bands who didn't know how to use them. This gives way to an interlude of clarinet and oboe that hadn't been seen since 1967. How ahead of the time and yet so retro! And once more for good measure we get the sweep of synthesizers. Talk Talk had really understood their peers at this point, had mastered the mastery of their initial angular image and the image of the 80's that was being sold in sight and sound and manipulated it into a completely new sound and art form - something that has become timeless. This is ultimately music of the 80's but set apart from it simultaneously, which is what any artist does and should do with his own generation.

"I Belive In You" is the fifth song. A slow burner that rises to a boil like all of the songs on this album. The singer starts in really haunted on this one though. This is a song that feels like a constant pivotal moment. Here is the singer's finest moment, he hits the emotive levels of "It's My Life" when the weird ghost guitar and organ songs come in. This song is a day in the mist. It makes you feel as though you are ready to explode, especially when the singer moans "Spirits" and the organ, keyboard, and choral backing voices all swirl together and fade away.

Finally, after what seems like an emotional journey, we come to the beginning of the weary "Wealth." The piano is slow and then a true churchly organ comes in and the singer belts "Take my freedom!" Just as soon as you feel redemption, the melody fades back into a low base point of piano, organ, and acoustic guitar, before rising once more into a shimmering hallelujiah. Outside of a religious sanctuary, this is the closest you come to feeling that strange grey feeling that being in any holy place gives you - for good and for bad. This song makes you see the ritual, of either worshipping, of creating, of living and makes you see the holiness. For that is what church hymns do. They are tied to an institution and institutions must always be avoided, but they make you remember the power - the absolute power of melody and intoxication. How you can be swept away by any maudlin emotion of love or worship. There ain't no Jesus and there ain't no Holy Land. I wouldn't vote for either no matter who endorsed 'em. We're always East of Eden - that's way all we have is the Spirit and that's as much a tree or an onion or a beer. And that's what the organ says to me on "Wealth" as it fades away.

A poem:


SATURDAY

The street vegetables heard you sing
Exasperated, thinking of the moon,
Never tired or angry by the oranges –
Just bloated and wanting to cry.

Your favorite movies play on Saturday
And your love seat memories come alive
Even if your skin feels less than
And your patience has drive you mad.

Subways make you think of Desolation Row,
But your mind isn’t satisfied there,
You want something fresh like parsley
A new American song in a peach crate.

The girl you know invites you over
She keeps her soul singers in a box
She tells you about the rates of sex
That a young couple should have.

While she’s asleep in the jade,
You’re out watching the lightning,
Thinking about all of the hurt feelings
And smiles you should’ve hurt much more.

So take a walk then – the backward guitar –
See the rain turn the stoplight magenta
On the pavement, feel the rain on your back;
Turn white, damp flowers into a motto.

Cars keep going but only for so long,
You’ll have to face the sunlight
Your young muscles and your friend
In her navy suit on the way to work.

The cobblestones will turn her to dust
So too will the rails you trip on
Making your way down to the waterside –
Slabs of granite waiting for a picnic.

Where is Monet to paint the crowds?
Where is Monet to paint the willow tree?
The dots gathered on the grassy shore,
The children wading shin deep in silt.

You can see the spot under the Bridge,
The spot where Hart Crane was beaten by sailors.
It’s all under water now crashing with waves
While elevators raise you to your pay.

Maybe we should all jump off of boats
And rip ourselves apart because of a song
To see the mist fall in between pine trees
To want to disappear into the day.

We could all disappear with haircuts
But then we’d all be like you
And no virtue was born of that
But here is April with its showers sure
So this May will be the best in years.
Your friend won’t tell you the story you need.
She won’t tell you of indecision in suspenders,
Of falling on the floor in delirium.
She won’t tell you the truth, because she’s your friend
And she wants to see you by the vegetables,
Alone with the moon to your right
Water in your brown, worn work loafers
And fear, alone gathered in your right hand.

That’s where your song will seed.