Hippies vs. Punks: Van Morrison's Wavelength (1978)

For the last several weeks I have had a mental block on doing this post; subsequently, I have ended up listening repeatedly to Van Morrison's Wavelength, his last great album of the 1970s, for a lot longer than I originally intended.

The mental block has to do with the importance of Van Morrison in my personal history. My father was a Van Morrison man. I grew up to the sound of Van Morrison's voice. My sisters and I would complain in chorus, "Not Van Morrison again!" When I went off to the university, I discovered for myself the joys of the Belfast crooner's work. This was during the period that Van was experiencing a creative renaissance. I would listen to No Guru, No Method, No Teacher (1986) preparing for class in the morning.

I stayed loyal all the way up to the millennium when I lost track around You Win Again (2000) and Down the Road (2002). My father sent me a copy of What's Wrong with This Picture? (2003), but I never bonded with it, nor any of the others -- Magic Time (2005), Pay the Devil (2006), Keep It Simple (2008) -- until 2012's Born to Sing: No Plan B, which is great. What's remarkable to me is how commercially successful all these recent albums have been. For instance, Born to Sing: No Plan B was a Top 40 album across the Western world -- and the others were in the same basic tony territory -- creating the odd situation where the septuagenarian Irishman is more popular now than his Moondance (1970) salad days during the Hippie revolution.

But it was the Hippie revolution powered by Astral Weeks (1968), Moondance, His Band and Street Choir (1970), Tupelo Honey (1971) and Saint Dominic's Preview (1972) that vaulted Van Morrison to super-historic stardom and tied my father (not to mention Robert Christgau) to him.

"The late '70s were rough on you guys." I have said this before to my father. When I said it to him this last time we were driving back from San Francisco after spending the day there the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend. "[Y]ou guys" was meant to refer to my father, Bob Dylan and Van Morrison.

The day before I had related the story of Bob Dylan's "Born Again" conversion, which prompted my father to quote from "When You Gonna Wake Up," off Dylan's great Christian Slow Train Coming (1979) album, about "Henry Kissinger's got you tied up in knots." Meaning? It is hard to pay attention to the news every day.

I understand how destabilizing, confusing and powerful the late-70s counterrevolution was because I lived through it with my father. At the end of 1978, when Wavelength first appeared with a Norman Seeff cover photo (with the ubiquitous late-70s background pastel highlights) of "Van the Man" decked out in crotch-hugging white disco pants and a short-sleeved Studio 54 urban chic tee, it was clear -- to me at least, and to my father as well, no doubt -- that the Hippie's day was done. There was no way in good conscience that my father, a Morrison acolyte living in the Santa Cruz Mountains trying to establish some sort of alternative education type of schooling, was going to emulate his hero. There was no going back, but the way forward was obviously false, celebrating as it did money and a superficiality.

[I'm reading Philip Jenkins' Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America (2006). Though it is not Jenkins' intention -- he's a Christian conservative academic who now teaches at scandal-plagued Baylor University -- he makes a convincing case that the Carter-Reagan swing to the right was likely a color revolution initiated by a national security state seriously on the ropes after the '60s cultural revolution, Vietnam, Watergate and the Church and Pike Committees.]

Wavelength announced unequivocally the end of the Hippie and a celebration of the counterrevolution. I never sat down and made a study of the record until the summer of 1990 when I separated from my wife (a time covered in the last Hippies vs. Punks post). I thought it would be appropriate because the album represented a period that roughly corresponds to the end of my parents' marriage; I thought maybe I was missing something, that if I just spent more time listening something would be revealed.

Despite my efforts that summer I never really shook the impression that Wavelength is superficial. Until now that is. After listening to the record for the past two-plus weeks, I have to say that of all Van Morrison's numerous albums Wavelength might be the most unique. He is struggling, not always successfully, to find a new way. There are a lot of synthesizers which seem extraneous. And there's a ska-inflected "Venice U.S.A." (the third YouTube from the top of the post), followed by the (unsuccessful) disco Celtic soul number, "Lifetimes."

But on side two, beginning with the title cut, "Wavelength" (fourth YouTube from the top of the post), everything meshes.

The songs that define the album are the last three: "Santa Fe/Beautiful Obsession" (fifth YouTube from the top), "Hungry for Your Love" and "Take It Where You Find It" (below).

They are big statements, mostly of confusion. The impression is of a guy knocked on the head by a brick falling out of the sky, and he's trying to walk it off and get his bearings. He's trying. He wants to be sincere. But he is having trouble figuring out where he is and what is going on. "Hungry for Your Love" is a smooth paean to carnality which provides a sonic chute to the nearly nine-minute, album-ending ur-statement "Take It Where You Find."

"Take It Where You Find" is Van Morrison's explicit message to the Hippies (and to himself) that the dream is over. It didn't work. The revolution died aborning. There is the beautiful chorus:

Change, change come over
Change come over
Talkin' about a change
Change, change
Change come over, now
Change, change, change come over

Followed by Van belting it out like only Van can:

I'm gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I'm gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I'm gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I'm gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I see my light
See my light
See my shining light
I see my light
See my light
See my shining light

Trite? Yes. But what else is there to say? You lost. Dust yourself off and walk on, keeping an eye on your shining light.

In the end Wavelength was a way forward for the Hippie, but only if he were willing to acknowledge that he had lost. Commercially, the album was successful, probably the most successful up until ten years later and the batch of lucrative albums beginning with Avalon Sunset; this leads me to believe that a lot of Hippies were receptive to Van's message.

Equally a way forward for the Hippie was Rick Danko's solo album from a year earlier. Interestingly, Danko did not counsel an acknowledgement of defeat by his Hippie brothers and sisters. He plowed an aural path that let the good times roll. But the Hippies apparently were having none of it. They did hanker after what Morrison and Dylan were peddling though, whether New Age mysticism or Born Again Christianity.