<p>Even with a masterly new album, will Ireland's eccentric Van
Morrison gain the success he has long deserved?
</p>
<p>By Jay Cocks
</p>
<p> "Tell me something," Bruce Springsteen asked a while ago.
"How come every year or so there's a new Van Morrison record,
and every time it's great, and every time no one pays
attention? Why is that?"
</p>
<p> Good question. And there are some easy answers. Morrison
is too demanding--an eccentric performer who is likely to
sing his best songs with his back turned. Too personal. Too
unpredictable. Not quite presentable. And way too spiritual.
</p>
<p> But Morrison does not make easy music, and he deserves
more than easy answers. Especially now, when he has just
released a new album, a 21-song, two-CD, 96-min. masterpiece,
Hymns to the Silence (Polydor), that has actually crept onto the
Billboard charts. It's no threat to Guns N' Roses, mind you, but
at least it has made a showing. There's even a rumor that it's
getting played on the radio.
</p>
<p> Springsteen's question still pertains, however, even in
the midst of these glad tidings. Morrison has been making music
for more than a quarter-century, since he left his native
Belfast in 1961 to sing R. and B. to G.I.s stationed in Germany.
He fronted a fine Beatles-era band called Them, then went solo
and traveled to America. There he flirted with the mainstream
before recording Astral Weeks in 1969, an album that set what
was to be, for him, a more or less unvarying pattern: wild
record, wild-eyed reviews, loyal but limited audience. Since
then, he has wandered in the U.S., England and Ireland (where
he now lives) but has never had a commercial breakthrough
commensurate with his talent.
</p>
<p> Even Bob Dylan, Morrison's only serious rival as a
prickly, personal songwriter, has enjoyed bouts of superstardom
during his perpetual period of transition. Morrison, whether
singing on the bright side of the road or deep from the heart
of his dark and beautiful vision, does not hold out a helping
hand to an audience. Reaching down into himself seems more
important to him than reaching out.
</p>
<p> He extends himself only to express himself. Alone among
rock's great figures--and even in that company he is one of
the greatest--Morrison is adamantly inward. And unique.
Although he freely crosses musical boundaries--R. and B.,
Celtic melodies, jazz, rave-up rock, hymns, down-and-dirty blues--he can unfailingly be found in the same strange place: on his
own wavelength.
</p>
<p> For anyone interested in getting serious about Morrison
(no casual listeners need apply), his new set can be heartily
recommended as a good way to start an obsession. Hymns focuses
and redefines Morrison's themes over his long career, rather
like a museum retrospective already in progress. It dips deep
into autobiography, spiritual speculation and blues mythology
for its themes.
</p>
<p> There are moments when Morrison can inflect a lyric like
Mose Allison, other times when he can spin out a blues line
like John Lee Hooker. It's a daft and reckless mix, but
Morrison makes it work through sheer force of spirit, what he
once called, in a memorable song, the "inarticulate speech of
the heart." His rhythms are irresistible, his lyrics like an
amalgam of Yeats, Kerouac and Chuck Berry. The Irish tenor John
McCormack said what distinguishes an important voice from a good
one is the indescribable but crucial quality that he termed "the
yarrrrragh." The yarrrrragh, critic Greil Marcus points out, is
"a mythic incantation...To Morrison [it is] the gift of
the muse and the muse itself."
</p>
<p> You can hear Morrison courting this muse in the
Pentecostal growls and incantations of Listen to the Lion on his
1972 album Saint Dominic's Preview, or personifying it on his
new album in Village Idiot, whose protagonist "wears his
overcoat in the summer/ And short sleeves in the winter time"
but who is nourished by some secret spiritual serenity: "Don't
you know he's onto something.../ Sometimes he looks so
happy/ As he goes strolling by."
</p>
<p> Like this sainted idiot, Morrison seems to be sustained by
some spiritual essence. He also shares with the idiot a
contempt for catering to anyone, a disdain for superficial cool.
Morrison, 46, looks like a cross between a puff adder and a pub
keeper, and will never seem beguiling in a video. As he sings
about his boyhood, weaving references to Sidney Bechet and Hank
Williams into a tune that draws on the hymn Just a Closer Walk
with Thee, it's obvious he is only trying to keep a clear
through-line to living memory.
</p>
<p> That connection is all that's important, and once achieved
and maintained, it needs no gift wrapping. No major show-biz
showmanship. No kissing up to MTV, no interviews in the press.
Morrison is his own best reporter and interpreter, as he makes
plain on the chiding Why Must I Always Explain: "Well it's out
on the highway and it's on with the show/ Always telling people
things they're too lazy to know/ It can make you crazy, yeah it
can drive you insane..."
</p>
<p> Some listeners might be tempted to say this Belfast cowboy--as the Band's Robbie Robertson once called him in a song--is, in fact, a little mad. But if so, his is a fine madness.
Morrison asks his own questions ("Can you feel the silence?")
and provides his own answers ("[We] carried on dreaming in
God"). Those very dreams are the songs he shares. His music is
