HUMAN WRECKAGE

Here and Now, Then and There

Saint Dominic’s Preview is my favourite Van Morrison album. The poetic rumination of the title track continues to knock me out; it meanders from cleaning windows into a spacey geography lesson while name-checking Edith Piaf, Hank Williams and the Safeway grocery chain. Dominic is the patron saint of astronomers; an uncloistered, vernacular preacher who espoused both learning and virtue: an enlightened soul roaming through the Dark Ages.

Once I’d pressed REPEAT for the second time, I decided my second favourite Van Morrison song is “And It Stoned Me,” first song on side one of, of, of… oh my God. I’m lucky enough to have seen Van twice. At both shows he ripped through that particular title track as if to repudiate it, or at least get it out of the way in a big hurry. What’s that song? Is this what I’ve got to look forward to?

The whole of my existence must remain an unknown. I’m hopeful that I’m only in the third quarter. It took so long to get here and I’ve left more than a few messes in my wake. I want a government issued vaccine pass. I want a laminated or plastic card that suggests hope. I want to know that I’m able to travel should I choose to because I’ve worked hard my entire life in the hope that one day I might have the resources, time and freedom to explore some parts the world, that all my stresses would eventually pay out at an airline ticket counter. Now, none of this can happen when we’re in the state we’re in: “It’s a long way to Buffalo and it’s a long way to Belfast city too.”

This fall promises a rewind of the past, old touchstones in brand new drag. Sometime in New York City, the latest addition to Bob Dylan’s seemingly endless Bootleg Series, due late September, concentrates on the eighties, around the time of Empire Burlesque. I loved its cover portrait; it’s almost as cool a sleeve as Street Legal. I thought it something of a return to form in the wake of his born again phase. “Tight Connection to My Heart” is as absurdly addictive as its MTV promo video was just plain absurd and the song’s a joke compared to the lovelorn bitterness and remorse of Blood on the Tracks, but what do I know? Sometimes I imagine myself on a nature hike with His Bobness: I can’t keep up, and anyway, he’s gone off the path and is out of sight; eventually I find him again.

The first time I went to Buffalo was 1978. The last time I was in Buffalo was 1981. Both visits were for the same reason, a Rolling Stones concert.  The world has changed a lot in 40 years and so have I, but the Stones never have. The Tattoo You ’81-‘82 world tour was arguably their apex, the last time they were relevant – even if that road show’s corporate sponsor was a now-defunct perfume company. The deluxe reissue of that album is to be released toward the end of October.

The strange magic on any Rolling Stones album is to be found in the grooves between the hits. Tattoo You featured two massive singles, but I could easily sequence an album around “Black Limousine” and “Worried About You” instead of “Start Me Up” and “Waiting on a Friend.” The lure of their ongoing spate of enhanced cash grab re-masters is, for someone like me, the vault-scraping companion bonus disc of unreleased songs even though some of them have circulated in bootleg form for years. Even the blindest aficionado can sometimes hear why some material has never made the airwaves. My Tattoo You hook is the band’s spare, almost elegiac, cover of Dobie Gray’s “Drift Away.”

“Thanks for the joy that you’ve given me…” It’s impossible to summarize a life lived in one popular song, but I can hear “Drift Away” at my funeral – figuratively, at least. The Devil’s music for me has always been a means of escape, an intellectual and philosophical exercise, a time machine and ultimately, a whole lotta good, clean, and down and dirty, fun. It’s part of my makeup and, gee, should I ever write another book, I cannot imagine my prose without music mentions. “Drift Away” says it all lyrically, no stone remains unturned. It is also the history of rock ‘n’ roll in one succinct, eloquent and addictive lesson: a hit for a Black American artist is earnestly and lovingly butchered by a group of pale Brits.

“Day after day, I’m more confused…” Moondance! That’s it, “Moondance.” It was out there in the ether, hovering just beyond the tip of my tongue, second song, side one.

(As I was correcting and revising this post I learned that Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts died in London, age 80.) 

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of groovy introspection since 2013. My novella Of Course You Did is out now. Visit www.megeoff.com to get outside, get outside yourself.