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Van Morrison: Astral Weeks
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Label: |
Warner Bros. Records |
| Released: |
1968.11.01 |
Time:
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45:05
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| Category: |
Blues |
| Producer(s): |
Lewis Merenstein |
| Rating: |
********** (10/10) |
| Media type: |
CD
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| Web address: |
www.vanmorrison.co.uk |
| Appears with: |
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| Purchase date: |
2002.02.06 |
| Price in €: |
6,99 |
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[1] Astral Weeks (Morrison) - 7:00
[2] Beside You (Morrison) - 5:10
[3] Sweet Thing (Morrison) - 4:10
[4] Cyprus Avenue (Morrison) - 6:50
[5] The Way Young Lovers Do (Morrison) - 3:10
[6] Madame George (Morrison) - 9:25
[7] Ballerina (Morrison) - 7:00
[8] Slim Slow Slider (Morrison) - 3:20
| A
r t i s t s , P e r s o n n e l |
|
VAN MORRISON - Guitar, Keyboards, Saxophone, Vocals
RICHARD DAVIS - Bass
JOHN PAYNE - Flute, Soprano Saxophone
JAY BERLINER - Guitar
CONNIE KAY - Drums
WARREN SMITH - Percussion, Vibraphone
BROOKS ARTHUR - Engineer
LARRY FALLON - Arranger
| C
o m m e n t s , N o t e s |
|
1987 CD Warner Brothers 2-1768
1987 LP Warner Brothers WS-1768
1987 CS Warner Brothers M5-1768
Recorded in New York. Includes liner notes by Van Morrison.
Quoted, recommended and worshipped by the critics for nearly 30 years,
this underground masterpiece has now become part of the establishment.
It cries to be listened to without interruption, which may explain why
it failed to reach either the UK or US charts. It wanders and weaves,
repeating themes and lyrics as if one song, yet we never tire of
"gardens wet with rain," "champagne eyes" or the wonder of how Morrison
can make a place like Ladbroke Grove seem so hauntingly evocative. The
record is also a great educator in opening your eyes beyond pop, to
soul and jazz, and although Morrison continues to return to its themes
again and again, this is his core.
Astral Weeks is generally considered one of the best albums in pop
music history. For all that renown, Astral Weeks is anything but an
archetypal rock & roll album: In fact, it isn't a rock & roll
album at all. Employing a mixture of folk, blues, jazz, and classical
music, Van Morrison spins out a series of extended ruminations on his
Belfast upbringing, including the remarkable character "Madame George"
and the climactic epiphany experienced on "Cyprus Avenue." Accompanying
himself on acoustic guitar, Morrison sings in his elastic, bluesy
voice, accompanied by a jazz rhythm section (Jay Berliner, guitar,
Richard Davis, bass, Connie Kay, drums), plus reeds (John Payne) and
vibes (Warren Smith, Jr.), with a string quartet overdubbed. An
emotional outpouring cast in delicate musical structures, Astral Weeks
has a unique musical power. Unlike any record before or since, it
nevertheless encompasses the passion and tenderness that have always
mixed in the best postwar popular music, easily justifying the critics'
raves.
William Ruhlmann, All-Music Guide, © 1992 - 2001 AEC One Stop Group, Inc.
Never mind that Van Morrison is one of the most indelible songwriters
of the 20th century--take each album on its own terms. On 1968's
seminal Astral Weeks, a twentysomething Van Morrison can be found
belting his gospelly, bluesy vocals in just as fine a form as he would
be 20 years hence. In the sociopolitical context of the times, the
album cried out about such ubiquitous '60s themes as cultural
oppression and social upheaval. But it is Morrison's vocal dexterity
and passion that maintains such timeless appeal. Take tracks like
"Madame George" or "Cyprus Avenue" and you'll find such beautiful
mourning, it'll be clear why modern songwriter Sinéad O'Connor once
publicly exclaimed: "Van Morrison should be friggin' canonized."
Nick Heil - Amazon.com essential recording
What the Critics Say...
New Musical Express (10/2/93, p.29) - Ranked #15 in NME's list of the `Greatest Albums Of All Time.'
Q Magazine (6/00, p.89) - Ranked #6 in Q's "100 Greatest British
Albums" - "...Its musical daring, mantra-like incantations and
kaleidoscopic use of language [is] still beyond cosy
categorization....recalling his provincial, '50s Belfast youth with an
almost feverish imigination and regret..."
Insgesamt ist Van Morrison einer der beständigsten und
unvergänglichsten Songwriter des 20. Jahrhunderts, doch betrachte man
jedes Album für sich: Schon auf seinem erquicklichen '68er Album Astral
Weeks verpaßte der damals um die 20 Jahre alte Van Morrison seinem
Gospel- und Blues-Gesang einen Feinschliff, als hätte er bereits 20
Jahre mehr auf dem Buckel. Im sozialpolitischen Kontext dieser Zeit
sind seine Songs als eine Art Aufschrei gegen damals so allgegenwärtige
Themen wie kulturelle Unterdrückung und sozialen Aufruhr zu sehen.
Zeitlos werden diese Songs erst dank Morrisons Fertigkeiten und seiner
Leidenschaft als Sänger. Man nehme nur das wunderschöne, wehklagende
"Madame George" oder "Cyprus Avenue" und man versteht die Worte einer
Sinead O’Connor, die öffentlich zu Protokoll gab: "Sprecht Van Morrison
endlich heilig!"
Nick Heil, Amazon.de
Wenigen ist es vergönnt, mit einem einzigen Album ihren ureigenen Stil
zu kreieren. Der frühere Them-Sänger Van Morrison schaffte das 1968 mit
seinem Solodebüt: Folk-Flair, vokale Soul-Seele und süffige Melodien
verbanden sich zu einem hypnotisch fesselnden Werk.
© Audio
With no hit single, 1968's Astral Weeks was probably a shock to pop
fans who were expecting another "Brown Eyed Girl" from Van Morrison.
Not only was Astral Weeks not a chart-friendly pop record, it barely
fit the parameters of pop at all.
Incorporating elements of jazz, folk, blues, gospel, and Celtic music,
Van Morrison created a moody, transcendent collage that sounded like
nothing that had been previously recorded. Astral Weeks was famously
recorded in under 48 hours with a backing band he barely knew, yet the
quality of musicianship -- most notably jazz veteran Richard Davis'
bass playing -- is unsurpassed.
But the most outstanding instrument on Astral Weeks is Morrison's
voice, which feverishly swoops and crescendos at every turn of a
phrase. Like most great works of art, Astral Weeks is cathartic,
affording listeners a momentary glimpse of the capacity for love -- and
its resulting pain and redemption -- in human beings, and Van's voice
is the perfect instrument for that catharsis, conveying a multitude of
emotions. There's the precious joy of "Sweet Thing," the compassion of
"Madame George," the obsession that gets him repeatedly caught up on
"Cyprus Avenue," and the drawn-out goodbye of "Slim Slow Slider," its
title a direct reference to the needle and the damage it does.
However, Astral Weeks is not so much about the lyrics as much as the
way individual phrases lunge at the listener, and the moods they
create. Repetition is used to breathtaking effect. Listen to the
quickly repeated "you breathe in, you breathe out" on "Beside You" as
it climaxes in a swirl of flamenco guitar; or the way he spins the line
"And the love that loves the love that loves the love that loves the
love that loves to love the love that loves to love the love that
loves" on "Madame George," causing each word to careen into the next.
Not surprisingly, the late Jeff Buckley -- whose voice resembled
Morrison in its range and emotive ability -- covered "The Way That
Young Lovers Do," with uncanny results.
Michelle Kleinsak - May 29, 2001
CDNOW Editorial Staff
Copyright © 1994-2002 CDnow Online, Inc. All rights reserved.
The Irish singer-songwriter Van Morrison (b. 1945) was influenced by
great American blues artists such as Leadbelly and Robert Johnson. In
the 1960s he led a group called "Them," before going solo in 1967.
Astral Weeks was his first solo album. Recorded in just a two days, it
was a daring and innovative project, containing extended tracks
("Madame George" is almost ten minutes long) that defied the standard
pop music format. Drawing inspiration not only from folk music, but
also from jazz (the album features Connie Kay, drummer of the Modern
Jazz Quartet), Astral Weeks is a seminal recording in the history of
popular song.
Philip Glass chose this recording because of his admiration for Morrison's "lyricism, originality and personal style."
Classical Insites
He didn't use the phrase for a song title until a year later, but
"Astral Weeks" was the album on which Van Morrison fully descended
"into the mystic." Morrison's first full-fledged solo album sounded
like nothing else in the pop-music world of 1968: soft, reflective,
hypnotic, haunted by the ghosts of old blues singers and ancient Celts
and performed by a group of extraordinary jazz musicians, it sounds
like the work of a singer and songwriter who is, as Morrison sings in
the title track, "nothing but a stranger in this world." It also sounds
like the work of a group of musicians who had become finely attuned to
one another through years of working together - but, in fact, Morrison
had made his name with rock songs like "Gloria" and "Here Comes the
Night," and he sang "Astral Weeks," sitting by himself in a
glass-enclosed booth, scarcely communicating with the session
musicians, who barely knew who he was.
"Some people are real disillusioned when I tell them about making the
record," says Richard Davis, who supplied what may be the most
acclaimed bass lines ever to grace a pop record. "People say, 'He must
have talked to you about the record and created the magic feeling that
had to be there . . .' To tell you the truth, I don't remember any
conversations with him. He pretty much kept to himself. He didn't make
any suggestions about what to play, how to play, how to stylize what we
were doing."
"I asked him what he wanted me to play, and he said to play whatever I
felt like playing," adds Connie Kay, the Modern Jazz Quartet drummer,
who was also in the group assembled for the session. "We more or less
sat there and jammed, that's all."
Kay was hired because Davis had suggested him; Davis got the nod
because he had often worked with Lewis Merenstein, who produced the
record and rounded up the musicians. Other musicians on the album
include guitarist Jay Berliner, percussionist Warren Smith and horn
player John Payne - all of them New York jazzmen and session players
who knew nothing about Morrison and who rarely appeared on pop records.
At the time, Morrison's solo career was just getting under way; earlier
he had let the rough rock and R&B band Them. Until he signed with
Warner Bros., to make "Astral Weeks," the mercurial Irishman didn't
even have a deal with a major American label, though he had made a few
solo recordings, including the sunny pop hit "Brown Eyed Girl" and the
scarifying "T.B. Sheets," a ten-minute dirge about a friend's death
from tuberculosis.
The songs he brought into New York's Century Sound Studios were a far
cry from those earlier tunes. They were long, most of them, and
meandering, suffused with the pain of the blues and the lilt of
traditional Irish melodies. Morrison depicted the streets of Belfast in
a dim, hallucinatory light, peopled with characters who danced like
young lovers and spun like ballerinas but who mostly struggled to reach
out to each other and find the peace and clam that otherwise eluded
them. The crowning touch is "Madame George," a cryptic character study
that may or may not be about an aging transvestite but that is
certainly as heartbreaking a reverie as you will find in pop music.
A straight rock & roll band probably wouldn't have know what to do
with these songs, but the musicians Merenstein assembled moved with the
lightness and freedom that the tunes demanded. And the arrangements,
invented on the spot by those players, were as singular as the world
they illustrated: a soothing acoustic guitar, gently brushed drums, the
caressing warmth of Davis's bass.
Not that the musicians were trying to interpret Morrison's words. "I
can't remember ever really paying attention to the lyrics," says Davis.
"We listened to him because you have to play along with the singer, but
mostly we were playing with each other. We were into what we were
doing, and he was into what he was doing, and it just coagulated."
They worked from seven to ten at night, running through songs they had
never heard before; both Davis and Kay remember that the basic tracks
were finished in a single three-hour session (the liner notes of the
compact disc say it took "less than two days"). By seven o'clock some
of the musicians had already played on two earlier sessions and Davis,
for one, credits the relatively late hour with the way "Astral Weeks"
sounds. "You know how it is at dusk, when the day has ended but it
hasn't?" Davis asks. "There's a certain feeling about the
seven-to-ten-o'clock session. You've just come back from a dinner
break, some guys have had a drink or two, it's this dusky part of the
day, and everybody's relaxed. Sometimes that can be a problem - but
with this record, I remember that the ambiance of that time of day was
all through everything we played."
The album wasn't a hit, the way "Moondance" would be in 1970, but it
was instantly recognized as one of the rare albums for which the word
"timeless" is not only appropriate but inescapable. And songs from the
LP have continued to show up in Morrison's live performances since
then. "Cyprus Avenue" was often his set closer, and as recently as last
year he performed a "Ballerina/Madame George" medley.
As for the "Astral Weeks" musicians, they don't know much more about
Morrison than they did back in 1968. "He didn't seem to be the kind of
guy who hung out with musicians, so I never got to know him," says
Davis, who now teaches music in Wisconsin, in addition to doing session
work and playing live dates.
© Copyright 2001 RollingStone.com
Backed sensitively by jazz veterans such as Richard Davis, Connie Kay,
and Jay Berliner, Van Morrison offers a brooding, melancholy,
introspective, and mature debut record. In fact, he must have stunned
listeners who'd come to expect the R&B-influenced work of Them or
the simple pop of "Brown Eyed Girl." Morrison shoots for a mood and an
atmosphere, and he carries it through the album. Most songs feature
simple, repetitive two- or three-chord structures that give the album a
trance-inducing, hypnotic feel, and until you enjoy a few listens, it
almost sounds like one long song.
Morrison's soulful and passionate vocals roam through his own mystical
lyrics filled with vivid imagery, personal reflections, and spiritual
concepts. The seemingly formless "Beside You" finds Morrison crying out
while the band adds subtle accents, mysterious and haunting. Berliner's
flamenco-tinged acoustic dances around Morrison's words. The intensity
builds on "Sweet Thing" as elegant strings hover in the background and
Morrison engages in a beautiful fantasy of love and lush scenery. ("I
will walk and talk in gardens wet with rain / and I never will grow so
old again..") The harpsichord jingles, flute whispers, bass wanders,
and strings loom on "Cyprus Avenue." On "Ballerina," he paints a deep
and honest portrait of love. The simple song foundations act as
springboards for the musicians, who gracefully fill in the colors. Even
Morrison's vocals seem improvised, featuring unique phrasing and
dramatic repetition. A delicate sonic painting.
Marc Greilsamer
Copyright © 1997-2002 Ink Blot Magazine. All rights reserved.
MUSTHEAR REVIEW:
When Astral Weeks was released in 1969, very few people got it. When I
bought the record from a friend 13 years ago, I didn't really get it
either. In fact I wanted my money back. My friend promised that the
album would grow on me if I'd just give it a few more spins. By the
third listen, Astral Weeks had completely overwhelmed me with its raw
emotional beauty. It has since ingrained itself deeply into my musical
identity. There really isn't anything else quite like Astral Weeks—it
was unprecedented when it came out and nothing has compared to it
since. Even Van Morrison, for all his creative powers, never topped
this early peak (although 1974's Veedon Fleece comes close). Nothing
written on Astral Weeks can ever truly capture its essence--the music
speaks for itself. That said, writing about the album feels like one of
the hardest things I could possibly do. Rather than try to rally my
best adjectives and sing the album's praises, I will avoid the standard
drivel and, as Van sings, "venture in the slipstream."
Astral Weeks was recorded in a marathon New York session in less than
48 hours. It was reported in Rolling Stone that one man saw God while
listening to the record on nitrous oxide. Bassist Richard Davis and
drummer Connie Kay, two of the tallest giants of jazz rhythm, walked
away from the Astral Weeks sessions scratching their heads in
bewildered wonder at the strange music they had just recorded. Jimi
Hendrix sat transfixed night after night as Van and flautist John Payne
performed songs from the album to row after row of empty seats in a
London theater. The album has since become a cultish oracle of
obsession for many: "Sweet Thing" was revived by the Waterboys on
Fisherman’s Blues; "The Way That Young Lovers Do" is sung passionately
by the late Jeff Buckley on his now-out-of-print Live At The Sin-E.
Explaination: Lush flutes, vibes, bass and violins swirl around the
gospel-soul of Van’s gut-wrenching poetry songs. Astral Weeks points in
four directions—Dylan Thomas, Charles Mingus, Igor Stravinsky, and Ray
Charles—with Van’s voice a pulling, powerful, constant magnetic North.
Here it is…astral music to set your inner compass by.
John Ballon
Whereas Bob Dylan has made a career out of continually reinventing
himself, Van Morrison invented himself once and only once on an album
called Astral Weeks. In the arc of Morrison's development as songwriter
and recording artist, Astral Weeks is both the culmination of the
tentative, and not always successful, experimentation found in the Them
and Bang recordings and the spiritual source of all that came after:
subsequent albums would explore, sometimes brilliantly, territory first
staked out in this breakthrough LP.
Many critics have used the term "impressionistic" to describe
Morrison's technique in Astral Weeks. Like impressionist paintings, the
album depicts nature as patterns of shadow, light, and color while
images (a viaduct, a garden, a railway station) appear and disappear
without ever being given concrete surfaces or well-defined outlines.
This is the result of Dylan-inspired obliqueness (e.g.; "pointed idle
breeze"), Morrison's metrically and rhythmically adventurous singing
style, and the dynamism of the backing instrumentation; guitar, bass,
and strings all compete with the singer for the listener's attention.
When all of this is filtered through Morrison's thick Belfast accent,
the listener is left with impressions instead of images, intimations in
place of explanations, mystery instead of clarity. This vagueness,
which allows ample play for a listener's own imagination, may be the
key to the album's enduring popularity with critics and fans.
One of the most elusive aspects of Astral Weeks is its underlying
narrative. Critics have been right to describe the album as a "song
cycle." While not as thematically unified as bona fide "concept albums"
like the Moody Blues' Days of Future Passed or Pink Floyd's Dark Side
of the Moon, neither is Astral Weeks a collection of unrelated, wholly
independent songs. In between its exultant beginning and cacophonous
ending, we can sense a story of young love anticipated, consummated,
and lost, a story that holds the anticipation of an event against the
event itself, charts the inevitable clash between an ideal and the hard
earth, and documents an adolescent's first realization of mortality.
"Astral Weeks," the opening song, introduces a conceit that would
become the philosophical and emotional cornerstone of all of Van's
subsequent works; the belief that love between a man and a woman is the
closest mortal, earthbound beings like ourselves can come to
experiencing Heaven (at least in this life). This marriage of the
spiritual and physical is mirrored in the album's instrumentation. The
Earth is represented by Van's urgent acoustic guitar and volcanic
singing and by Richard Davis's volatile upright bass. Heaven resides in
the percussion (Connie Kay's light snare and cymbal work, vibes,
chimes, triangle), flute, harpsichord, and the spare but gorgeous
string arrangements. In between, striding both planes, is Jay
Berliner's unclassifiable efforts on lead acoustic guitar.
The first three tracks, "Astral Weeks," "Beside You," and "Sweet
Thing," float along as if in a dream. "Beside You" is detached from any
rhythmic moorings; bass, flute, guitars, and vocals drift on a gentle,
but meandering current fraught with occasional shallows and eddies.
Morrison repeats lines, bends notes, and switches meter at every
opportunity. In doing so, he renders the opaque, Dylanesque lyrics
almost indecipherable. Only the refrain "I stand beside you" comes out
unscathed as if that is all that really matters anyway. "Sweet Thing,"
though less radical in its musical approach, is pure daydream: the
singer never abandons his use of the future tense.
The stunning "Cypress Avenue" fades out just as the dream is about to
become reality. The construction is basic blues, the landscape is
filled with objects and names, and the singer, as he approaches his
beloved, bounces awkwardly from tongue-tied bashfulness to swaggering
brashness. Somewhere between the walk down the railroad tracks at the
end of the song and the rain-drenched fields in the next song, their
love is consummated.
"The Way Young Lovers Do" is an interesting one. On its surface, with
its images of tranquil lovers walking through fields and kissing on
front stoops, it seems to deliver the romantic bliss anticipated so
fervently in "Sweet Thing." The music, however, betrays some disturbing
undercurrents. Richard Davis's bass is domineering, aggressive, and
sometimes violent, and instead of creating a lush, climactic swell, the
strings poke and prod.
"Madame George" is similarly perturbing. On a version recorded while
Van was still at Bang, it was beefed up with a raucous rock & roll
backing and "What's Going On?"-style party noises. In that context, the
song, which describes a party thrown by what seems to be a
transvestite, was a celebration of a wild afternoon. In that version,
the stoned singer sees the outrageous Madame George as a sideshow
attraction, a source of amusement, but here, with the slower tempo and
acoustic setting, revelry is displaced by a sense of detachment: the
singer has outgrown pranks and parties. The slow escape at the end of
the song ("Say good-bye...dry your eye") signals a final departure from
adolescence.
The darker moods that hide beneath the pleasant facades of "The Way
Young Lovers Do," "Madame George," and "Ballerina" finally surface on
the album's final track, "Slim Slo Slider." "Slim Slo Slider" is the
record's sparsest cut boasting only Morrison's acoustic guitar, Davis's
bass, and John Payne's eerie, reverbed soprano sax. The song, which
teeters back and forth between ecstasy and despair, wraps up with a
well-worn blues symbol of jealousy and lost love: the Cadillac. The
singer's realization that his lover has left him for a richer man is
not his last realization, however: "I know you're dying / And I know
you know it too," he laments in the final stanza. It is never made
clear whether this death is literal or metaphorical, and it doesn't
really matter. Earthly bliss is transient as is earthly life itself,
and we are helpless to do anything about it. Astral Weeks' last note is
a cacophony of Morrison slapping the body of his guitar, Davis snapping
his bass strings, and Payne forcing stray, ugly notes out of his sax.
Suddenly, everything is in shards.
Review by Scott Thomas
"...in addition to the eight songs you hear on your copy of Astral
Weeks, the two sessions produced two other tracks plus rumours of a
strange forty-five minute song which has been the subject of a good
deal of speculation.
'It's not true that we recorded a forty-five minute track for Astral
Weeks,' says Van. 'The truth is that I had a song at that time that was
about forty-five minutes long, but it wasn't recorded for the album. I
don't think that I could ever do it again. I made a rough tape
recording of it with just myself and another guitar player and we sat
down and I did it onto a small tape. But I didn't try it again because
I knew that I couldn't recapture what we had before. The original tape
was just so spontaneous. Even the lyrics were spontaneous. I could sing
them again, but I could never sing them the same way. So I never tried.'
'There were only two tracks we recorded that did not appear on Astral
Weeks. One was about Jesse James and the other about trains. They were
both just basic blues numbers. That's why they didn't fit in with the
album. They were both in another bag.'"
From the Ritchie Yorke bio, page 52
Van Morrison's Astral Weeks was released ten years, almost to the day,
before this was written. It was particularly important to me because
the fall of 1968 was such a terrible time: I was a physical and mental
wreck, nerves shredded and ghosts and spiders looming and squatting
across the mind. My social contacts had dwindled to almost none; the
presence of other people made me nervous and paranoid. I spent endless
days and nights sunk in an armchair in my bedroom, reading magazines,
watching TV, listening to records, staring into space. I had no idea
how to improve the situation and probably wouldn't have done anything
about it if I had.
Astral Weeks would be the subject of this piece - i.e., the rock record
with the most significance in my life so far - no matter how I'd been
feeling when it came out. But in the condition I was in, it assumed at
the time the quality of a beacon, a light on the far shores of the
murk; what's more, it was proof that there was something left to
express artistically besides nihilism and destruction. (My other big
record of the day was White Light/White Heat.) It sounded like the man
who made Astral Weeks was in terrible pain, pain most of Van Morrison's
previous works had only suggested; but like the later albums by the
Velvet Underground, there was a redemptive element in the blackness,
ultimate compassion for the suffering of others, and a swath of pure
beauty and mystical awe that cut right through the heart of the work
I don't really know how significant it might be that many others have
reported variants on my initial encounter with Astral Weeks. I don't
think there's anything guiding it to people enduring dark periods. It
did come out at a time when a lot of things that a lot of people cared
about passionately were beginning to disintegrate, and when the
self-destructive undertow that always accompanied the great sixties
party had an awful lot of ankles firmly in it's maw and was pulling
straight down. so, as timeless as it finally is, perhaps Astral Weeks
was also the product of an era. Better think that than ask just what
sort of Irish churchwebbed haints Van Morrison might be product of.
Three television shows: A 1970 NET broadcast of a big all-star multiple
bill at the Fillmore East. The Byrds, Sha Na Na, and Elvin Bishop have
all done their respective things. Now we get to see three of four songs
from a set by Van Morrison. He climaxes, as he always did in those
days, with "Cyprus Avenue" from Astral Weeks. After going through all
the verses, he drives the song, the band, and himself to a finish which
has since become one of his trademarks and one of the all-time classic
rock 'n' roll set-closers. With consumate dynamics that allow him to
snap from indescribably eccentric throwaway phrasing to sheer passion
in the very next breath he brings the music surging up through
crescendo after crescendo, stopping and starting and stopping and
starting the song again and again, imposing long maniacal silences like
giant question marks between the stops and starts and ruling the room
through sheer tension, building to a shout of "It's too late to stop
now!," and just when you think it's all going to surge over the top, he
cuts it off stone cold dead, the hollow of a murdered explosion, throws
the microphone down and stalks off the stage. It is truly one of the
most perverse things I have ever seen a performer do in my life. And,
of course, it's sensational: our guts are knotted up, we're crazed and
clawing for more, but we damn well know we've seen and felt something.
1974, a late night network TV rock concert: Van and his band come out,
strike a few shimmering chords, and for about ten minutes he lingers
over the words "Way over yonder in the clear blue sky / Where flamingos
fly." No other lyrics. I don't think any instrumental solos. Just those
words, repeated slowly again and again, distended, permutated, turned
into scat, suspended in space and then scattered to the winds, muttered
like a mantra till they turn into nonsense syllables, then back into
the same soaring image as time seems to stop entirely. He stands there
with eyes closed, singing, transported, while the band poises quivering
over great open-tuned deep blue gulfs of their own.
1977, spring-summer, same kind of show: he sings "Cold Wind in August",
a song off his recently released album A Period of Transition, which
also contains a considerably altered version of the flamingos song.
"Cold Wind in August" is a ballad and Van gives it a fine, standard
reading. The only trouble is that the whole time he's singing it he
paces back and forth in a line on the stage, his eyes tightly shut, his
little fireplug body kicking its way upstream against what must be a
purgatorial nervousness that perhaps is being transferred to the
cameraman.
What this is about is a whole set of verbal tics - although many are
bodily as well - which are there for reason enough to go a long way
toward defining his style. They're all over Astral Weeks: four rushed
repeats of the phrases "you breathe in, you breath out" and "you turn
around" in "Beside You"; in "Cyprus Avenue," twelve "way up on"s,
"baby" sung out thirteen times in a row sounding like someone running
ecstatically downhill toward one's love, and the heartbreaking way he
stretches "one by one" in the third verse; most of all in "Madame
George" where he sings the word "dry" and then "your eye" twenty times
in a twirling melodic arc so beautiful it steals your own breath, and
then this occurs: "And the love that loves the love that loves the love
that loves the love that loves to love the love that loves to love the
love that loves."
Van Morrison is interested, obsessed with how much musical or verbal
information he can compress into a small space, and, almost,
conversely, how far he can spread one note, word, sound, or picture. To
capture one moment, be it a caress or a twitch. He repeats certain
phrases to extremes that from anybody else would seem ridiculous,
because he's waiting for a vision to unfold, trying as unobtrusively as
possible to nudge it along. Sometimes he gives it to you through
silence, by choking off the song in midflight: "It's too late to stop
now!"
It's the great search, fueled by the belief that through these musical
and mental processes illumination is attainable. Or may at least be
glimpsed.
When he tries for this he usually gets it more in the feeling than in
the Revealed Word - perhaps much of the feeling comes from the reaching
- but there is also, always, the sense of WHAT if he DID apprehend that
Word; there are times when the Word seems to hover very near. And then
there are times when we realize the Word was right next to us, when the
most mundane overused phrases are transformed: I give you "love," from
"Madame George." Out of relative silence, the Word: "Snow in San
Anselmo." "That's where it's at," Van will say, and he means it (aren't
his interviews fascinating?). What he doesn't say is that he is inside
the snowflake, isolated by the song: "And it's almost Independence Day."
you're probably wondering when I'm going to get around to telling you
about Astral Weeks. As a matter of fact, there's a whole lot of Astral
Weeks I don't even want to tell you about. Both because whether you've
heard it or not it wouldn't be fair for me to impose my interpretation
of such lapidarily subjective imagery on you, and because in many cases
I don't really know what he's talking about. he doesn't either: "I'm
not surprised that people get different meanings out of my songs," he
told a Rolling Stone interviewer. "But I don't wanna give the
impression that I know what everything means 'cause I don't. . . .
There are times when I'm mystified. I look at some of the stuff that
comes out, y'know. And like, there it is and it feels right, but I
can't say for sure what it means."
There you go
Starin' with a look of avarice
Talking to Huddie Leadbetter
Showin' pictures on the walls
And whisperin' in the halls
And pointin' a finger at me
I haven't got the slightest idea what that "means," though on one level
I'd like to approach it in a manner as indirect and evocative as the
lyrics themselves. Because you're in trouble anyway when you sit
yourself down to explicate just exactly what a mystical document, which
is exactly what Astral Weeks is, means. For one thing, what it means is
Richard Davis's bass playing, which complements the songs and singing
all the way with a lyricism that's something more than just great
musicianship: there is something about it that more than inspired,
something that has been touched, that's in the realm of the miraculous.
The whole ensemble - Larry Fallon's string section, Jay Berliner's
guitar (he played on Mingus's Black Saint and the Sinner Lady), Connie
Kay's drumming - is like that: they and Van sound like they're not just
reading but dwelling inside of each other's minds. The facts may be far
different. John Cale was making an album of his own in the adjacent
studio at the time, and he has said that "Morrison couldn't work with
anybody, so finally they just shut him in the studio by himself. He did
all the songs with just an acoustic guitar, and later they overdubbed
the rest of it around his tapes."
Cale's story might or might not be true - but facts are not going to be
of much use here in any case. Fact: Van Morrison was twenty-two - or
twenty-three - years old when he made this record; there are lifetimes
behind it. What Astral Weeks deals in are not facts but truths. Astral
Weeks, insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people
stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their
ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of
vision they can comprehend. It is a precious and terrible gift, born of
a terrible truth, because what they see is both infinitely beautiful
and terminally horrifying: the unlimited human ability to create or
destroy, according to whim. It's no Eastern mystic or psychedelic
vision of the emerald beyond, nor is it some Baudelairean perception of
the beauty of sleaze and grotesquerie. Maybe what it boiled down to is
one moment's knowledge of the miracle of life, with its inevitable
concomitant, a vertiginous glimpse of the capacity to be hurt, and the
capacity to inflict that hurt.
Transfixed between pure rapture and anguish. Wondering if they may not
be the same thing, or at least possessed of an intimate relationship.
In "T.B. Sheets", his last extended narrative before making this
record, Van Morrison watched a girl he loved die of tuberculosis. the
song was claustrophobic, suffocating, mostrously powerful: "innuendos,
inadequacies, foreign bodies." A lot of people couldn't take it; the
editor of this book has said that it's garbage, but I think it made him
squeamish. Anyway, the point is that certain parts of Astral Weeks -
"Madame George," "Cyprus Avenue" - take the pain in "T.B. Sheets" and
root the world in it. Because the pain of watching a loved one die of
however dread a disease may be awful, but it is at least something
known, in a way understood, in a way measureable and even leading
somewhere, because there is a process: sickness, decay, death,
mourning, some emotional recovery. But the beautiful horror of "Madame
George" and "Cyprus Avenue" is precisely that the people in these songs
are not dying: we are looking at life, in its fullest, and what these
people are suffering from is not disease but nature, unless nature is a
disease.
A man sits in a car on a tree-lined street, watching a
fourteen-year-old girl walking home from school, hopelessly in love
with her. I've almost come to blows with friends because of my
insistence that much of Van Morrison's early work had an obsessively
reiterated theme of pedophilia, but here is something that at once may
be taken as that and something far beyond it. He loves her. Because of
that, he is helpless. Shaking. Paralyzed. Maddened. Hopeless. Nature
mocks him. As only nature can mock nature. Or is love natural in the
first place? No Matter. By the end of the song he has entered a kind of
hallucinatory ecstasy; the music aches and yearns as it rolls on out.
This is one supreme pain, that of being imprisoned a spectator. And
perhaps no so very far from "T.B. Sheets," except that it must be far
more romantically easy to sit and watch someone you love die than to
watch them in the bloom of youth and health and know that you can
never, ever have them, can never speak to them.
"Madame George" is the album's whirlpool. Possibly one of the most
compassionate pieces of music ever made, it asks us, no, arranges that
we see the plight of what I'll be brutal and call a lovelorn drag queen
with such intense empathy that when the singer hurts him, we do too.
(Morrison has said in at least one interview that the song has nothing
to do with any kind of transvestite - at least as far as he knows, he
is quick to add - but that's bullshit.) The beauty, sensitivity,
holiness of the song is that there's nothing at all sensationalistic,
exploitative, or tawdry about it; in a way Van is right when he insists
it's not about a drag queen, as my friends were right and I was wrong
about the "pedophelia" - it's about a person, like all the best songs,
all the greatest literature.
The setting is that same as that of the previous song - "Cyprus
Avenue", apparently a place where people drift, impelled by desire,
into moments of flesh-wracking, sight-curdling confrontation with their
destinies. It's an elemental place of pitiless judgement - wind and
rain figure in both songs - and, interestingly enough, it's a place of
the even crueler judgement of adults by children, in both cases love
objects absolutely indifferent to their would-be adult lovers. Madame
George's little boys are downright contemptuous - like the street
urchins who end up cannibalizing the homosexual cousin in Tennessee
Williams's Suddenly Last Summer, they're only too happy to come around
as long as there's music, party times, free drinks and smokes, and only
too gleefully spit on George's affections when all the other stuff runs
out, the entombing winter settling in with not only wind and rain but
hail, sleet, and snow.
What might seem strangest of all but really isn't is that it's exactly
those characteristics which supposedly should make George most pathetic
- age, drunkenness, the way the boys take his money and trash his love
- that awakens something for George in the heart of the kid whose song
this is. Obviously the kid hasn't simply "fallen in love with love," or
something like that, but rather - what? Why just exactly that only sunk
in the foulest perversions could one human being love another for
anything other than their humanness: love him for his weakness, his
flaws, finally perhaps his decay. Decay is human - that's one of the
ultimate messages here, and I don't by any stretch of the lexicon mean
decadence. I mean that in this song or whatever inspired it Van
Morrison saw the absolute possibility of loving human beings at the
farthest extreme of wretchedness, and that the implications of that are
terrible indeed, far more terrible than the mere sight of bodies made
ugly by age or the seeming absurdity of a man devoting his life to the
wobbly artifice of trying to look like a woman.
You can say to love the questions you have to love the answers which
quicken the end of love that's loved to love the awful inequality of
human experience that loves to say we tower over these the lost that
love to love the love that freedom could have been, the train to
freedom, but we never get on, we'd rather wave generously walking away
from those who are victims of themselves. But who is to say that
someone who victimizes himself or herself is not as worthy of total
compassion as the most down and out Third World orphan in a New Yorker
magazine ad? Nah, better to step over the bodies, at least that gives
them the respect they might have once deserved. where I love, in New
York (not to make it more than it is, which is hard), everyone I know
often steps over bodies which might well be dead or dying as a matter
of course, without pain. and I wonder in what scheme it was originally
conceived that such an action is showing human refuse the ultimate
respect it deserves.
There is of course a rationale - what else are you going to do - but it
holds no more than our fear of our own helplessness in the face of the
plain of life as it truly is: a plain which extends into an infinity
beyond the horizons we have only invented. Come on, die it. As I write
this, I can read in the Village Voice the blurbs of people opening
heterosexual S&M clubs in Manhattan, saying things like, "S&M
is just another equally valid form of love. Why people can't accept
that we'll never know." Makes you want to jump out a fifth floor window
rather than even read about it, but it's hardly the end of the world;
it's not nearly as bad as the hurts that go on everywhere everyday that
are taken to casually by all of us as facts of life. Maybe it boiled
down to how much you actually want to subject yourself to. If you
accept for even a moment the idea that each human life is as precious
and delicate as a snowflake and then you look at a wino in a doorway,
you've got to hurt until you feel like a sponge for all those other
assholes' problems, until you feel like an asshole yourself, so you
draw all the appropriate lines. You stop feeling. But you know that
then you begin to die. So you tussle with yourself. how much of this
horror can I actually allow myself to think about? Perhaps the numbest
mannekin is wiser than somebody who only allows their sensitivity to
drive them to destroy everything they touch - but then again, to tilt
Madame George's hat a hair, just to recognize that that person exists,
just to touch his cheek and then probably expire because the
realization that you must share the world with him is ultimately
unbearable is to only go the first mile. The realization of living is
just about that low and that exalted and that unbearable and that
sought-after. Please come back and leave me alone. But when we're along
together we can talk all we want about the universality of this abyss:
it doesn't make any difference, the highest only meets the lowest for
some lying succor, UNICEF to relatives, so you scratch and spit and
curse in violent resignation at the strict fact that there is
absolutely nothing you can do but finally reject anyone in greater pain
than you. At such a moment, another breath is treason. that's why you
leave your liberal causes, leave suffering humanity to die in worse
squalor than they knew before you happened along. You got their hopes
up. Which makes you viler than the most scrofulous carrion. viler than
the ignorant boys who would take Madame George for a couple of
cigarettes. because you have committed the crime of knowledge, and
thereby not only walked past or over someone you knew to be suffering,
but also violated their privacy, the last possession of the
dispossessed.
Such knowledge is possibly the worst thing that can happen to a person
(a lucky person), so it's no wonder that Morrison's protagonist turned
away from Madame George, fled to the train station, trying to run as
far away from what he'd seen as a lifetime could get him. And no
wonder, too, that Van Morrison never came this close to looking life
square in the face again, no wonder he turned to Tupelo Honey and even
Hard Nose the Highway with it's entire side of songs about falling
leaves. In Astral Weeks and "T.B. Sheets" he confronted enough for any
man's lifetime. Of course, having been offered this immeasurably
stirring and equally frightening gift from Morrison, one can hardly be
blamed for not caring terribly much about Old, Old Woodstock and little
homilies like "You've got to Make It Through This World On Your Own"
and "Take It Where You Find It."
On the other hand, it might also be pointed out that desolation, hurt,
and anguish are hardly the only things in life, or in Astral Weeks.
They're just the things, perhaps, that we can most easily grasp and
explicate, which I suppose shows about what level our souls have
evolved to. I said I wouldn't reduce the other songs on this album by
trying to explain them, and I won't. But that doesn't mean that, all
thing considered, a juxtaposition of poets might not be in order.
If I ventured in the slipstream
Between the viaducts of your dreams
Where the mobile steel rims crack
And the ditch and the backroads stop
Could you find me
Would you kiss my eyes
And lay me down
In silence easy
To be born again
Van Morrison
My heart of silk
is filled with lights,
with lost bells,
with lilies and bees.
I will go very far,
farther than those hills,
farther than the seas,
close to the stars,
to beg Christ the Lord
to give back the soul I had
of old, when I was a child,
ripened with legends,
with a feathered cap
and a wooden sword.
Federico Garcia Lorca
by Lester Bangs
From Stranded (1979)
When he made Astral Weeks, Van Morrison finally tore away the mask he
wore during his days as the angry young front man for Them. Released in
1968, Morrison's woeful, bluesy intonations are awash in lush, rich and
jazzy instrumentation -- a striking contrast to songs like "Gloria" and
the goaded stance he had previously held. Close listeners, I imagine,
knew he had it in him. On tracks like "Madame George" or "Cyprus
Avenue," Morrison emotes the heartfelt lines with an extra surge of
conviction, which was definitely an underlying characteristic. A lot of
credit has to go to producer Lewis Merenstein and the cast of backing
jazz musicians he rounded up. In preparing for the record, there was
hardly any verbal communication between the session players and the
reclusive singer during the two days of recording at New York's Century
Sound Studios. Drawing on pure instinct, it's an amazing testament that
the album has such a consistent and collective feel to it.
Astral Weeks was not a commercial success. On the other hand, many
music critics of the day fell over each other in giving it praise.
There was something enchanting in the way Morrison spun tales about the
streets of Belfast -- whether dealing with young lovers or ballerinas.
Here was an artist -- still in his twenties - who had suddenly grown
somnolent and reflective. Indeed, Van Morrison pulled the proverbial
rabbit out of the hat, and never lost his momentum. He established a
style that eventually took flight, and by the early 70s, won over the
required sales as well as the respect he so richly deserved. And yes,
Van the Man still continues making records and touring. Whether or not
he has another Astral Weeks in him would be -- as is everything about
him -- hard to speculate. For most mortals, one should certainly be
more than enough.
Shawn Perry
Ranked #15 in NME's list of the `Greatest Albums Of All Time.'
New Musical Express (10/2/93, p.29)
"...Its musical daring, mantra-like incantations and kaleidoscopic use
of language [is] still beyond cosy categorization....recalling his
provincial, '50s Belfast youth with an almost feverish imigination and
regret..."
Q Magazine (6/00, p.89) - Ranked #6 in Q's "100 Greatest British Albums"
ASTRAL WEEKS
If I ventured in the slipstream
Between the viaducts of your dream
Where immobile steel rims crack
And the ditch in the back roads stop
Could you find me?
Would you kiss-a my eyes?
To lay me down
In silence easy
To be born again
To be born again
From the far side of the ocean
If I put the wheels in motion
And I stand with my arms behind me
And I'm pushin' on the door
Could you find me?
Would you kiss-a my eyes?
To lay me down
In silence easy
To be born again
To be born again
There you go
Standin' with the look of avarice
Talkin' to Huddie Ledbetter
Showin' pictures on the wall
Whisperin' in the hall
And pointin' a finger at me
There you go, there you go
Standin' in the sun darlin'
With your arms behind you
And your eyes before
There you go
Takin' good care of your boy
Seein' that he's got clean clothes
Puttin' on his little red shoes
I see you know he's got clean clothes
A-puttin' on his little red shoes
A-pointin' a finger at me
And here I am
Standing in your sad arrest
Trying to do my very best
Lookin' straight at you
Comin' through, darlin'
Yeah, yeah, yeah
If I ventured in the slipstream
Between the viaducts of your dreams
Where immobile steel rims crack
And the ditch in the back roads stop
Could you find me
Would you kiss-a my eyes
Lay me down
In silence easy
To be born again
To be born again
To be born again
In another world
In another world
In another time
Got a home on high
Ain't nothing but a stranger in this world
I'm nothing but a stranger in this world
I got a home on high
In another land
So far away
So far away
Way up in the heaven
Way up in the heaven
Way up in the heaven
Way up in the heaven
In another time
In another place
In another time
In another place
Way up in the heaven
Way up in the heaven
We are goin' up to heaven
We are goin' to heaven
In another time
In another place
In another time
In another place
In another face
BESIDE YOU
Little Jimmy's gone
Way out of the backstreet
Out of the window
Through the fallin' rain
Right on time
Right on time
That's why Broken Arrow
Waved his finger down the road so dark and narrow
In the evenin'
Just before the Sunday six-bells chime, six-bells chime
And all the dogs are barkin'
Way on down the diamond-studded highway where you wander
And you roam from your retreat and view
Way over on the railroad
Tomorrow all the tippin' trucks will unload
Every scrapbook stuck will glue
And I'll stand beside you
Beside you child
To never never never wonder why at all
No no no no no no no no
To never never wonder why at all
To never never never wonder why it's gotta be
It has to be
Way across the country where the hillside mountain glide
The dynamo of your smile caressed the barefoot virgin child to wander
Past your window with a lantern lit
You held it in the doorway and you cast against the pointed island breeze
Said your time was open, go well on your merry way
Past the brazen footsteps of the silence easy
You breathe in you breathe out you breathe in you breathe out you breath in
you breathe out you breathe in you breathe out
And you're high on your high-flyin' cloud
Wrapped up in your magic shroud as ecstasy surrounds you
This time it's found you
You turn around you turn around you turn around you turn around
And I'm beside you
Beside you
Oh darlin'
To never never wonder why at all
No no no no no
To never never never wonder why at all
To never never never wonder why it's gotta be
It has to be
And I'm beside you
Beside you
Oh child
To never never wonder why at all
I'm beside you
Beside you
Beside you
Beside you
Oh child
SWEET THING
And I will stroll the merry way
And jump the hedges first
And I will drink the clear
Clean water for to quench my thirst
And I shall watch the ferry-boats
And they'll get high
On a bluer ocean
Against tomorrow's sky
And I will never grow so old again
And I will walk and talk
In gardens all wet with rain
Oh sweet thing, sweet thing
My, my, my, my, my sweet thing
And I shall drive my chariot
Down your streets and cry
'Hey, it's me, I'm dynamite
And I don't know why'
And you shall take me strongly
In your arms again
And I will not remember
That I even felt the pain.
We shall walk and talk
In gardens all misty and wet with rain
And I will never, never, never
Grow so old again.
Oh sweet thing, sweet thing
My, my, my, my, my sweet thing
And I will raise my hand up
Into the night time sky
And count the stars
That's shining in your eye
Just to dig it all an' not to wonder
That's just fine
And I'll be satisfied
Not to read in between the lines
And I will walk and talk
In gardens all wet with rain
And I will never, ever, ever, ever
Grow so old again.
Oh sweet thing, sweet thing
Sugar-baby with your champagne eyes
And your saint-like smile....
CYPRUS AVENUE
And I'm caught one more time
Up on Cyprus Avenue
And I'm caught one more time
Up on Cyprus Avenue
And I'm conquered in a car seat
Not a thing that I can do
I may go crazy
Before that mansion on the hill
I may go crazy
Before that mansion on the hill
But my heart keeps beating faster
And my feet can't keep still
And all the little girls rhyme something
On the way back home from school
And all the little girls rhyme something
On the way back home from school
And the leaves fall one by one by one by one
Call the autumn time a fool
Yeah baby my tongue gets tied
Every every every time I try to speak
My tongue gets tied
Every time I try to speak
And my inside shakes just like a leaf on a tree
I think I'll go on by the river with my cherry cherry wine
I believe I'll go walking by the railroad with my cherry cherry wine
If I pass the rumbling station where the lonesome engine drivers pine
And wait a minute, yonder comes my lady
Rainbow ribbons in her hair
Yonder comes my lady
Rainbow ribbons in her hair
Six white horses and a carriage
She's returning from the fair
Baby, baby, baby
And if I'm caught one more time
Up on Cyprus Avenue
And if I'm caught one more time
Up on Cyprus Avenue
And I'm conquered in a car seat
And I'm looking straight at you
Way up on, way up on, way up on....
The avenue of trees
Keep walking down
In the wind and the rain, darling
You keep walking down when the sun shone through the trees
Nobody, no, no, no, nobody stops me from loving you baby
So young and bold, fourteen years old
Baby, baby, baby...
Ooooh-ee
THE WAY YOUNG LOVERS DO
We strolled through fields all wet with rain
And back along the lane again
There in the sunshine
In the sweet summertime
The way that young lovers do
I kissed you on the lips once more
And we said goodbye just adoring the nighttime
Yeah, that's the right time
To feel the way that young lovers do
Then we sat on our own star and dreamed of the way that we were
and the way that we were meant to be
Then we sat on our own star and dreamed of the way that I was for you
and you were for me
And then we danced the night away
And turned to each other, say, 'I love you, I love you'
The way that young lovers do
Do, do, do, do...
Then we sat on our star and dreamed of the way that we were and the way
that we wanted to be
Then we sat on our own star and dreamed of the way that I was for you
and you were for me
I went on to dance the night away
And turned to each other, say, 'I love you, baby, I love you'
The way that young lovers do, lovers do, lovers do
Do, do, do, do....
MADAME GEORGE
Down on Cyprus Avenue
With a childlike vision leaping into view
Clicking, clacking of the high heeled shoe
Ford & Fitzroy, Madame George
Marching with the soldier boy behind
He's much older with hat on drinking wine
And that smell of sweet perfume comes drifting through
The cool night air like Shalimar
And outside they're making all the stops
The kids out in the street collecting bottle-tops
Gone for cigarettes and matches in the shops
Happy taken Madame George
That's when you fall
Whoa, that's when you fall
Yeah, that's when you fall
When you fall into a trance
A sitting on a sofa playing games of chance
With your folded arms and history books you glance
Into the eyes of Madame George
And you think you found the bag
You're getting weaker and your knees begin to sag
In the corner playing dominoes in drag
The one and only Madame George
And then from outside the frosty window raps
She jumps up and says Lord have mercy I think it's the cops
And immediately drops everything she gots
Down into the street below
And you know you gotta go
On that train from Dublin up to Sandy Row
Throwing pennies at the bridges down below
And the rain, hail, sleet, and snow
Say goodbye to Madame George
Dry your eye for Madame George
Wonder why for Madame George
And as you leave, the room is filled with music, laughing, music,
dancing, music all around the room
And all the little boys come around, walking away from it all
So cold
And as you're about to leave
She jumps up and says Hey love, you forgot your gloves
And the gloves to love to love the gloves...
To say goodbye to Madame George
Dry your eye for Madame George
Wonder why for Madame George
Dry your eyes for Madame George
Say goodbye in the wind and the rain on the back street
In the backstreet, in the back street
Say goodbye to Madame George
In the backstreet, in the back street, in the back street
Down home, down home in the back street
Gotta go
Say goodbye, goodbye, goodbye
Dry your eye your eye your eye your eye your eye...
Say goodbye to Madame George
And the loves to love to love the love
Say goodbye
Oooooo
Mmmmmmm
Say goodbye goodbye goodbye goodbye to Madame George
Dry your eye for Madame George
Wonder why for Madame George
The love's to love the love's to love the love's to love...
Say goodbye, goodbye
Get on the train
Get on the train, the train, the train...
This is the train, this is the train...
Whoa, say goodbye, goodbye....
Get on the train, get on the train...
BALLERINA
Spread your wings
Come on fly awhile
Straight to my arms
Little angel child
You know you only
Lonely twenty-two story block
And if somebody, not just anybody
Wanted to get close to you
For instance, me, baby
All you gotta do
Is ring a bell
Step right up, step right up
And step right up
Ballerina
Crowd will catch you
Fly it, sigh it, try it
Well, I may be wrong
But something deep in my heart tells me I'm right and I don't think so
You know I saw the writing on the wall
When you came up to me
Child, you were heading for a fall
But if it gets to you
And you feel like you just can't go on
All you gotta do
Is ring a bell
Step right up, and step right up
And step right up
Just like a ballerina
Stepping lightly
Alright, well it's getting late
Yes it is, yes it is
And this time I forget to slip into your slumber
The light is on the left side of your head
And I'm standing in your doorway
And I'm mumbling and I can't remember the last thing that ran through my head
Here come the man and he say, he say the show must go on
So all you gotta do
Is ring the bell
And step right up, and step right up
And step right up
Just like a ballerina, yeah, yeah
Crowd will catch you
Fly it, sight it, c'mon, die it, yeah
Just like a ballerina
Just like a just like a just like a ballerina
Get on up, get on up, keep a-moving on, little bit higher, baby
You know, you know, you know, get up baby
Alright, a-keep on, a-keep on, a-keep on, a-keep on pushing
Stepping lightly
Just like a ballerina
Ooo-we baby, take off your shoes
Working on
Just like a ballerina
SLIM SLOW SLIDER
Slim slow slider
Horse you ride
White as snow
Slim slow slider
Horse you ride
Is white as snow
Tell it everywhere you go
Saw you walking
Down by the Ladbroke Grove this morning
Saw you walking
Down by the Ladbroke Grove this morning
Catching pebbles for some sandy beach
You're out of reach
Saw you early this morning
With your brand new boy and your Cadillac
Saw you early this morning
With your brand new boy and your Cadillac
You're gone for something
And I know you won't be back
I know you're dying, baby
And I know you know it, too
I know you're dying
And I know you know it, too
Everytime I see you
I just don't know what to do
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