When That Rough God Goes Riding by Greil Marcus

Author:Greil Marcus [Marcus, Greil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2011-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

THE HEALING GAME. 1997

The black-and-white photo that appears on the face of The Healing Game—and on the disc itself, and on the back of the CD box, insisting that you look at it again and again, that you think about it—shows a short, very stocky middle-aged white man on the street, and a taller black man behind him. Both are well-dressed, in dark clothes, with dark hats. The short man, Van Morrison, is wearing blackout glasses and an expensive white shirt buttoned to the neck; the taller man, the flugelhorn player Haji Akbar, who wears a white shirt and a striped tie, gazes over Morrison’s left shoulder, as if on the lookout for trouble. It is, you can imagine without trying, a mob boss and his number one on their way to settle a score. The expression on Morrison’s face, all stone, is appallingly determined and cold.

If this is the mood you carry with you as the music starts, straight away the music tells you you’re right: the first lines of “When That Rough God Goes Riding,” the first song, describe “mud-splattered victims ... all along the ancient highway,” and you catch the echoes of a vendetta as old as the highway, some internecine tribal conflict that will never be settled. If as the Sex Pistols rammed it home in 1976 in “Anarchy in the UK” Morrison’s verses call forth the conflict in Northern Ireland between the UDA and the IRA—and London’s war against Catholic Belfast, the war that began with Cromwell and continued, as Morrison sang in 1997, under Tony Blair—the war John Lennon sang about under Edward Heath, the war Gang of Four sang about under James Callaghan—the chorus is mythic, outside of any historical time.

As soon as the scene is set everything changes, even if the story being told holds to its violence. With the first verse done, Morrison, his voice thick and heavy, glides like an athlete into the chorus, and a tremendous feeling of warmth, of being in the right place at the right time, takes hold. It carries the listener into a musical home so perfect and complete he or she might have forgotten that music could call up such a place, and then populate it with people, acts, wishes, fears. The deep burr of Morrison’s voice buries the words, which cease to matter; you might not hear them until the tenth time you play the album, or long after that. “It’s when that rough god goes riding,” he sings, drawing the words both from Yeats and down in his chest, and you might never know it’s the angel of death that has you in its embrace. “I am this serpent filled with venom,” Morrison sings later in “Waiting Game”—but here his voice, like Vito Corleone’s voice as Robert De Niro plays him, is so filled with quiet, earned authority that you trust it, you ask it to keep speaking to you, to offer you its comfort, even as the man behind it pushes a pillow into your face.

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