Warm love, that is. Lots of trouble and strife in this world. I hope you can find yourself a troubadour and a fire and a honey and get some warm love in your life. It’s decidedly underrated.
I have no idea who corralled who into doing what. Elvin Bishop is playing with Van Morrison. I assume that Van was available, and said, sure, I’ll be on your show, got a band handy? There are a few places where you can espy Van looking for something in the backing that isn’t there, and other places where something appears that he wasn’t expecting, but liked it. I love how he tries to hand the microphone to Elvin at the end, who’s not interested, and then drops it on the floor. Off duty is off duty, I guess.
I’ve played that song for money, and sang it, too. I stunk. We stunk. Didn’t matter. You can play that song with any old band, and it carries you along. It helps if any old band is Elvin Bishop’s, and Van sings it himself.
If you busted the seventies open like a big pinata — a pinata wearing flared pants and aviator sunglasses — I imagine the bizarre spectacle of Van Morrison with Elvin Bishop’s band backing him would about sum the decade up. Will they have Marvin Gaye fronting Black Oak Arkansas next? Rod Argent singing in front of the Isleys? Dobie Gray and Vickie Lawrence singing a duet with Redbone?
Obviously, I shoulda been a promoter.
Roaring drunk and carrying salt and iron in the pockets of my cothamore inside-out. No dice. He’ll come again.The soul of the man murdered walks the earth on Samhain when the faerie mounds vomit their wards. I haunt the pubs, a guiser with a mask of bonhomie, but to no effect. He will find me.
You can kill a man every which way. That’s the trouble. You think there’ll be some shade feigning Ellen Terry and holding out a crown and dagger dripping, but murther usually sneaks up on you in this world and haunts you from the next. Did I do that? Is a pillow over a face, sleeping, less a murder than a stick-em-up roscoe to the temple? Are there degrees to it? I don’t think so. I never laid a finger on, but that’s the point. If you put your hand in your pocket when a man reaches for it in familiarity he’s done for. He died alone, but no rutabaga will ward him off me now.
You can starve a man out and say that he died of inanition and who’s fault’s that? I moved his stone in the Samhain ring without touching it. The smoke off the bones from a stranger’s fire could not save him. It had to be me. I offered a cold shoulder and a deaf ear to him and he went away, and now he walks at my elbow like an usher.
The music’s a trifle. I V IV, dip your toe in the circle of fifths for the iim and V, a six chord thrown in to throw the dogs of boredom off the scent. Shuffle it around and play Brown-Eyed Girl if you like. It sounds like Van’s moved his folk song to B flat for the horns. But it’s straight on in.
It’s the hardest thing in music. A poem sung, a story chanted. A simple anecdote made profound. Van and his friend blew off school or whatever and went fishing and it rained and they hitchhiked and when the sun came out they went swimming and an old man gave them a drink of water because they were thirsty.
And Huckleberry Finn is just a boatride.
The greatest songwriter of the last 50 years.
I used to buy old Skinner auction pamphlets to look for furniture to copy. They had really nicely printed stuff back in the 70s and 80s. Back then, something resembling antique furniture was still being sold at auctions. The definition of what an antique is has morphed over time. It used to mean furniture that wasn’t made in a formal factory setting. Pre-Civil War, basically.
The problem was, it didn’t really exist out in the wild anymore. All of it was in collections or museums or being extinguished inexpertly by a fireman, and auction houses had nothing much to sell. So they changed the definition, informally, mind you, to anything 100 years old or so. The flea markets just soldiered on with “anything that looks vaguely old.” It’s still common for antique stores to leave all their furniture wares outside to get ruined so it looks older than it is. The patina on your antiques is probably as forced as any I make in a bucket in my workshop. And since I actually make furniture by hand, my brand-new stuff is closer to a real antique than most of what’s in an antiques store, which is mostly just humdrum homegoods from some dead, unmourned aunt’s ranch house.
But time does winnow. It’s slapdash, of course. Hard to say if Shakespeare was all that. Maybe he was the third best playwright in the greater Avon area, but the rest of the guys forgot to go to the Stratford Kinko’s and left the originals near an outhouse the day after the all-you-can-eat blood pudding special at the Pig&Pox Inn. But the sloped sides on the funnel of time do make some things more interesting, don’t they?
“St. Dennistoun Mortuary” is a coin-operated automaton, attributed to John Dennison, c. 1900. The mahogany cabinet and glazed viewing area displays a Greek Revival mortuary building with double doors and grieving mourners out front. When a coin is inserted, doors open and the room is lighted revealing four morticians and four poor souls on embalming tables. The morticians move as if busily at work on their grisly task and mourners standing outside bob their heads as if sobbing in grief. This automaton will be offered as Lot 207 at auction on June 2, 2012 at Skinner Auctioneers & Appraisers in Marlborough, Massachusetts. Estimate $4,000-6,000
And for all I know, that’s the fourteenth-best song about a mortuary. But I doubt it.
Van Morrison is not handsome. His voice is not of a particularly pleasant timbre. He refuses to project a phony aura of likeablility, and is likely incapable of projecting a real one. He’s strange and prickly and inscrutable. It’s likely that all of the members of the band he’s playing with are more musically cultivated than he is. Some might be better singers. Hell, the audience probably has dozens of people with more musical chops than he has. He only brings one unusual thing to the table. No one knows what that one thing is; they only recognize it when they encounter it.
I dint know Van Morrison from a hole in the wall though he lived downa street for a spell and saw the same sunrise on the Mystic — but me, I just saw a dead dog float by and he was gone by then anyway; way later I spotted his face over and over like a hostage taken on the label in the bin I remember it was only a buck save a penny at the building nineteen and three quarters and that needle left an electrifying little wake on the platter like a boat in the fog or a dead dog on the Mystic. There’s a song or a poem or a story like a Greek with a lyre would tell in there somewheres but he took it already.
So glad to see you
So glad you’re here
Come here beside me now
We can clean inhibition away
All inhibitions
Throw them away
And when we dance like this
Like we’ve never been dancin’ before
Oh, they were swingin’
Down at kingdom hall
Oh, bells were ringin’
Down at the kingdom hall
Oh choir was singin’
Down at the kingdom hall
Hey, liley, liley, liley
Hey, liley, liley, lo
Good body music
Brings you right here
Free flowin’ motion now
When we’re shakin’ it out on the floor
Good rockin’ music
Down in your shoes
And when we dance like this
Like we’ve never been dancin’ before
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