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(More customer reviews)This is a strange, but ultimately very rewarding, extended meditation on listening to Van Morrison. My take on the book is that Marcus is not at all interested in writing a standard critical overview of Morrison's career, and it is mercifully not the "New Biography" treatment Van so rightly fears and detests. This book ignores chronology and completely upends the standard critical take on the Van Morrison discography (Marcus dismisses as completely worthless a full fifteen of the albums he considers). Instead, it is a book about a rarely glimpsed, alternate, and far more complex and forbidding, Van Morrison that may well be a creature of Marcus's own imagining. This Van Morrison is on a quest for moments of musical transcendence of a very specific sort; a kind of transcendence that is least likely to occur when Morrison is actually singing about transcendence in a more obvious way (hence the worthlessness of most of the 80s and 90s albums). For Marcus, the albums Astral Weeks, St. Dominic's Preview, The Healing Game, Into the Music, and Veedon Fleece, along with some scattered gems from Morrison's band Them, are most successful at delivering what the Van Morrison he hears (or would like to hear) can accomplish at his best. Though the judgments Marcus makes often seem highly idiosyncratic, it is nevertheless abundantly clear that he is writing from a lifetime of deep engagement with Morrison's music. That is what, on my view, makes this book well worth reading. The overall result of reading the book for me was to return to the music. And I have to admit that Marcus is definitely on to something in his refusal to follow the usual critical narrative on Morrison. The albums and songs highlighted here do seem to have a depth and resonance alongside which Morrison's more pedestrian output seems to pale in comparison.
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"Van Morrison," says Greil Marcus, "remains a singer who can be compared to no other in the history of modern popular music." When Astral Weeks was released in 1968, it was largely ignored. When it was rereleased as a live album in 2009 it reached the top of the Billboard charts, a first for any Van Morrison recording. The wild swings in the music, mirroring the swings in Morrison's success and in people's appreciation (or lack of it) of his music, make Van Morrison one of the most perplexing and mysterious figures in popular modern music, and a perfect subject for the wise and insightful scrutiny of Greil Marcus, one of America's most dedicated cultural critics.This book is Marcus's quest to understand Van Morrison's particular genius through the extraordinary and unclassifiable moments in his long career, beginning in 1965 and continuing in full force to this day. In these dislocations Marcus finds the singer on his own artistic quest precisely to reach some extreme musical threshold, the moments that are not enclosed by the will or the intention of the performer but which somehow emerge at the limits of the musician and his song.
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