Van Morrison's "Beside You"

Cry and refrain, and musical mimicry, creates works of art with cross-cultural pollination. Sympatique art where people actually converse and listen. Let’s call it jazz, let’s call it rock, lets call it street-sampled beats. Whatever works, douse it with hot sauce and cut it with vinegar. Throw it on the grill. Crack a little pepper, squeeze a little lime. “Spill the wine, take that pearl.” Eat it, chicken bones and all. Harmony, the Ancient Greeks called it––the bastard offspring of love and war.

My life is a little about living jazz, because my uncle Bob (a DJ and poet of sorts) pointed me in that direction. Naturally, jazz is not simply about jazz music. Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks is jazz because he is with his musicians. He played a few chords and refrains and then said stretch it man, you are buskers, are bluesmen and jongleurs. Are the shit. But realize that this is all part of the blues. And we all know the blues. 

To get at this concept, the rite of passage concept that is music, take Van Morisson’s “Beside You.” In the 1966 Bang session, Van is accompanied by his put-together band of New York studio musicians who have a kind of Dylan Hawks-era greased lightning thing going. The sound is boxcar Memphis South, infused with traces of Van’s gaelic roots. The R&B base and beat hard and steady, the sparse swirling Hammond B3 painting a picture of cobbled streets pattered with rain. The song gradually transcends narrow, European confines and becomes a roaming song, a leap of faith and wonder into a pasture in the fabled countryside where storied Bluesmen roam, and a mythical remembered love exists––

To wander past your window in the nighttime cross the floor

Crying as ecstasy surrounds you

Through the night air your proud time is open

Go well against the pointed idle breeze 

In the night you cry and you want spirits to tell you

Everything's alright

Go ahead and do it one more time baby

You're satisfied I guess, you're way up and the sky comes down

Kaleidoscope 

Open and just hold the lantern in the doorway,

For the freedom of it.

And you take the night air through your nostrils and you breathe

In out, in out

And you breathe just like that, just like that 

The 1968 Astral Weeks version of “Beside You” is altogether a different beast. It is about the jazz and “freedom of it” that have now fully seeped into Van’s work. Little plucks of acoustic guitar and ethereal vibes set the scene. Not a questing sound of anguish, with every sound annunciated to its tip-of-explosion adolescent peak. No more “in my room” teenage yearning and spurting glops of self-love. The music depicts a moment in which women become much more than versions of oneself, where they are the essence of earth and decision. The rite of passage has been completed, the joint passed, and man and a woman are part of the same entity, two incorporeal halves. Music that is part of the process of Aquarius learning, never quite completed but still aching like a heartstring. Jefferson Airplane’s “Coming Back to Me,” Jerry Garcia’s “To Lay Me Down,” The Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset." Well worn Turkish patterned rug on a wooden slat floor of a Victorian house in San Francisco. The original Hippy realization that we are all distinct, all part of one orgasmus. 

It is the late 1960s, everything is coming into being in a vast wave of human potential before crime and high rents hit like a heart attack. Before Van Morrison puts his “Hard Nose To The Highway” and becomes a blues curmudgeon. Astral Weeks is a great album that I am still processing. One of my mom’s favorites (in her younger years) that was for many years alien to me. And one of the albums that apparently emanated out of VW caravans along the hippy trail in Kashmir, Goa. Our paths have now converged and passed, as they often do. And I am listening with something akin to wonder––