Hippies vs. Punks: Van Morrison's Into the Music (1979)

If you are like me, the chronology of work produced by the great trinity of singer-songwriter solo artists -- Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Neil Young -- is not difficult to recapitulate until the beginning of the Hippie vs. Punks period, 1975 - 1979. Then things get murky.

Most of us know Dylan's Desire (1976) and Neil Young's Zuma (1975), and hopefully we have all listened to Van Morrison's Veedon Fleece (1974) into the triple figures. But who can say whether Neil Young's American Stars 'n Bars comes before or after Comes a Time? Or whether Dylan's Shot of Love antedates or follows Saved?

For Van Morrison this "Bermuda Triangle" period begins later because after the breakup-from-Janet-Planet album Veedon Fleece he takes a recording hiatus before reappearing in 1977, the big year for UK Punk, with A Period of Transition, basically naming the departure of the Aquarian Zeitgeist, which he then follows up the next year with the successful "New Wave" album, Wavelength.

The murkiness of Van the Man's discography begins, for me at least, with his last album of the 1970s, Into the Music (1979). I have always been under the impression that Beautiful Vision (1982) follows Wavelength. It doesn't. Beautiful Vision actually follows the Celtic rocker, Common One (1980).

I say all this to emphasize the point made last week in relation to Wavelength. The late-70s were a confusing time. Old verities were vanishing. And a simple sort of satori to bring this home is the attempt to chronologize the oeuvre from this period of the trinity of our modern masters, Dylan-Morrison-Young.

Apropos of this, the last few weeks I have traveled directly into the "heart of darkness," immersing myself in Into the Music. Though I would identify myself, like my father, as a Van Morrison man, I was not familiar with this record. I think I might have heard it once or twice back in the day. If I reach way back I might have a vision of a sun-bleached album cover and the smell of lavender perfume so strong it makes me gag.

The backstory of Into the Music is that Van, alienated by Wavelength, went for a reboot. So he traveled to the English countryside and walked the fields at dawn, getting into the music by plucking out songs on his guitar. The result, as the 1970s come to a close and Jimmy Carter greases the skids for the Reagan-Thatcher lurch to the right, is -- believe it or not -- a critic's choice album of the year (#4 on Robert Christgau's Pazz & Jop Dean's List for 1979).

I say "believe it or not" because the album is so sugary and earnest it is hard to hear it as anything other than a precursor of the Boomer nostalgia, perfectly captured by the Big Chill (1983), that is about to burst forth in the 1980s as Reaganism takes hold.

But Into the Music provides an amazingly accurate template for the type of record that Morrison would perfect in the 1980s once he leaves off his Celtic Scientology synthesizer voodoo (an album that I never tire of, 1983's Inarticulate Speech of the Heart).

You can hear it all in two tracks -- "Troubadours" (above) and "And the Healing Has Begun" (below).

In "Troubadours" Van introduces the piccolo trumpet and stroviola (not your usual rock'n'roll instruments) to go along with the strings and other horns to create a signature "neo-Avalon" sound that would become a staple of  '80s albums like No Guru and Poetic Champions, an ideal accompaniment for the one-time Hippie now a solid burgher drinking his delicious Peet's coffee and scanning the morning business page.

From there it gets worse. "And the Healing Has Begun" is the type of Vegas showtune that Van has been able to extrude for the last 30 years as if he is the artistic equivalent of a plastic injection mold. Listening to it with its caws and whoops and "yeows!" one can't help but see the lads and lasses hoofing a Riverdance while the aging Boomers sip white wine in the audience and smile.

Of course we must doff our caps because it is after all 1979 and none of this was visible back then. Though it is hard to accept that Christgau was being sincere when he labeled Into the Music a pick hit, awarding it a rare A, and describing it as "Van's best album since Moondance."

The Colt 45 Chronicle #85

Below is a drinking yarn (remember, this is "The Colt 45 Chronicle") written to a friend, Mark, who, just back from a sojourn in Morocco, was teaching English in Madrid. It recounts an evening of malt liquor imbibing with another friend, Erik, who I am still friends with to this day. He too is a bachelor who has seen through the "battle-of-the-sexes" veil of tears.

What I remember about the lady he was traveling with when they visited us, me and my wife, in New York City that summer is that she was pretty and sexually attractive in a demure way (despite my disdainful comments below). Erik always had a facility for appealing to the ladies.

Summer 1989

Another day spent alone in 22A. No calls from the agency. And this after I thought it certain that I'd get work for Thursday and Friday, and, here it is, well nigh Friday morn. Ashley is doing some part-time secretarial work because I'm too much the dunce to find steady employment. 

The saddest part about the whole thing is that I just shuffle around the apartment consoled by the excuse that I have to wait by the phone in case a call comes in when I could be downtown exploring the Bowery or taking the slow 'B' out to Coney Island with a copy of Lucretius in my coat pocket, or sitting in the grand reading room of New York Public Library reconstructing my lost magnum opus on Kant and Frege and Derrida. 

Get this, Ashley walked in the door this very instant and handed me a fat letter, and whatdaya know, it's from you! I didn't pick up the mail today, and here it is 9:00 PM and Ashley's carrying your letter, and it's about Morocco. -- Oh, man, that's quite a tale, a real study in vulnerability: hashed and cheap scotch drunk and in northern Africa among unfamiliar questionable company -- it's enough to make you never want to get out of bed and the USA.

I think of you often and welcome the opportunity to sit down with coffee and beer and cigar and pop off an epistle to Madrid. I should probably write more about city social activities, but they're all drink oriented, and without much splendor -- no fights or romances or extreme embarrassments; in fact, all they're good for is the knowledge that they're not worth mentioning. Another thing I have learned from these dull escapades is that Ashley and I should never follow Jessica to a party because the only people who are gonna be there are homosexuals or ugly women or sad-sack poltroons.

Well, it's now 9:29 PM, but a day later. I had to discontinue last night's effort when our house guests returned from their city sightseeing. An old friend of Ashley's from high school; I knew him too back then, but he was a class below me, and we were never very friendly; a really very nice guy though with some interesting stories to tell about a young man's life on the road alone on a motorcycle in Mexico, working for minimum wage at a Seattle bakery, going to graduate school at the University of Virginia trying to get an English MA. He and his lady friend traveled the whole distance from Charlottesville, VA on his bike (a 650cc BMW), going as far up as Vermont just to camp and tool around.

So anyway, they return and Erik, that's the guy's name, promptly puts forth that he has two beers left and is going down to get more. Yes! A man after my own heart. I offer to go down with him, and off we go, leaving the women to chat over topics unknown. We arrive at the deli, and I suggest malt liquor. He agrees and we get four quarts of Colt 45 and two of Coors. I feel slightly guilty, as I always do when it comes time -- buddy by your side in front of the dew-dropped sliding glass cooler door -- to gather together the evening's beer repast for fear that I am too zealous and snatch out too many bottles. But Erik says nothing, and, in fact, on the elevator ride up he goes into a narrative about how he was drinking beers, quart bottles, with two Mexicans on the Guatemalan border, and how these guys kept going for more bottles until each drinker had consumed five quarts a piece; at which point, said Erik, he could barely stand and had to excuse himself and go puke in the sand somewhere. And I'm thinking to myself, Good. A good beer drinker, a la you, Mark; not any of this Gary halfway-there shit. 

We walk in the door, plunk down the bottles on the living room floor, fetch some glasses, and the evening begins.

Erik and I each have our quart of Colt. For the ladies, we pour out a couple of glasses of the Coors. I'm a little saddened when Erik's friend calls out "Thank you" after I've filled her glass to only the halfway point (and this after Erik had told me at the deli that she was good for at least a quart). Worse than sad, it makes me a little paranoid, starts me thinking that here's a girl that normally drinks 32 oz. of beer all by herself but now for some reason doesn't feel obliged to; so it's either that she's tired, which isn't good because I had hoped we were on our way to a real roarer, or she doesn't like our company -- thinks we're strange and up to no good. She is from Irvine, CA -- yes, yes -- and has just finished her MA and it is has to do with medieval English literature. Eee gad. 

This plays on my mind a bit, but I attempt to counteract it's effect by picking up my swill pace, and sure enough, after not too long, I start to feel better and the conversation takes off.  

We start talking about high school, dropping names comparing notes exchanging anecdotes laughing rubarbing, all of which is very well and good for the three of us Ashlanders, but, casting a glance over to the futon, I see that it doesn't interest in the slightest the Beowulf-reading teetotaler. And there's no reason it should. High school memorabilia is very personal and private, like family gossip or soiled underpants, and, if the truth be told, I'm glad that wasn't me sitting there having to listen to three strangers (as it turns out, Ashley told me after they left today, they'd been going out for just a short time, and that she'd basically got to know Erik on the trip) gabbing about a bunch of people who have absolutely no meaning or importance to my life. 

So anyway, the paranoia creeps back and I start throwing in little howdayado's like, "And where did you go to high school? And what year were you? 1982? Yeow, so was I!" You know, all that painful sacrificial trying-to-be-a-good-host shit, which in the end isn't going to do anything but make everyone uncomfortable because it so obvious that you don't give one farthing of a flying fuck where the person went to school or what year they graduated or what period they took their PE.  

So I stopped trying to incorporate her into the conversation and settled for stepping up my picked-up swill pace. The end result of which is that one hour later I'm moving on to my fourth quart and Eric's still rapping away on his second. (Lucky for me, I had a quart of Miller left over from a previous bout, ice-cold hiding in the back of the fridge). I've managed pretty much to put Beowulf out of mind; I'm spinning records, slapping backs, waxing ecstatic on the shortcomings of university pedagogy, giggling and sweating and shouting and cussing and striding out of the room for long pisses. But when I crack that fourth quart I look over at her and she's up to her old tricks -- horrible tired disdain yawning out of her cow mouth and peering out of her pig eyes. Bam! I'm right back to my old paranoid brain ache. Fortunately, I'm drunk now, and all I can think of is blurting out to Erik that we should swap wives -- not out of any loin-born lust for Beowulf or any sense of dissatisfaction with Ashley -- but rather out of calculated need to fuck Beowulf so deeply and painstakingly, and after the fashion of a dog, that my paranoia would somehow be wonderfully exorcised.

Instead, I cruise through quart four, put on Neil Young's ZUMA, and on my way back from doing that steal the last of Ashley's Coors. It's decided that we need to go to bed. I say okay.

Oh, God, big beer drinker Mike, and it's time for sleep and he's not ready and Erik kicks over two beers on his way to the toilet and we all shuffle off to our private unconsciousnesses and the head rests on the pillow and lights go out and the air conditioner breathes low, and that's it.

Nihilism #5

The problem with nihilism -- its Achilles' heel -- is the past. The past exists as a real other -- a god -- that is part of the self. All is not merely limitless striving.

There is an object of consciousness. One exists. It is not timeless. It is time-bound. It is the past. It usually reveals itself to me via music. Schopenhauer thought music was pure spirit.

This morning suffering through a long run, my left foot giving me trouble in form of a strained arch, a song from Mike Johnson's doleful Year of Mondays (1996) shuffled on my iPod. Hearing "Eclipse" I was transported back to the downhill slope of the Age of Grunge. The spirit world confronting me inside my mind was a recollection of a torpid time of futon lounging, book devouring and living underground, on the run from everyone and myself.

Then there was yesterday at work. For some reason I decided to YouTube Blake Babies. Sunburn (1990) popped up. Sunburn is one of those albums that will never be given the credit that it deserves in terms of creating the Age of Grunge. Sunburn represents an approach to the peak of Grunge. Mammoth Records Grunge-Pop.

I saw Blake Babies perform at CBGBs. It was 1991. The summer I devotedly listened to Rosy Jack World (1991). Rosy Jack World and the summer of 1991 -- this represents the summit for Grunge. Think Pearl Jam's Ten (1991) and, at the end of summer/beginning of fall, Nirvana's Nevermind (1991).

To end their CBGBs set that night, Blake Babies did a cover of Neil Young's "Barstool Blues." A diehard Zuma fan, I went berserk, shouting along exuberantly, gesticulating wildly. If only you could have seen Juliana Hatfield that night! She anchored the band from the lip of the stage. With her bass strapped on over a plain white t-shirt, Hatfield was the apotheosis of the real cool. Now, after crossing an ocean of time, that might seem impossible. But that night it was unquestionable.

I had not listened to Blake Babies in a long, long time. But when I heard Sunburn yesterday, it all came back. The past is alive inside of us. As I said, this is a problem for nihilism.

"Cortez the Killer" + "Country of Guns" + "Coup d'Etat"

"Cortez the Killer," that powerhouse ballad by Uber-Hippie Neal Young off Zuma (1975), greeted my ears just as I was climbing up a hill on a morning run in the sun, adding a little pep to my step:

Then as I was climbing another hill, being passed along the way by a mother pedaling a bike with a toddler on the back (proof that I was taking it easy), Zozo Afrobeat's "Country of Guns" (2008):

Finally, on the last few blocks before home, the Circle Jerks "Coup d'Etat" off their seminal Golden Shower of Hits (1983) album:

Another tribute to alphabetical sort by song title.