The Prose At The End Of The Sun

      It's Sunday morning-- and despite having been a typically rotten sot as usual on Saturday night, I'm up unnecessarily early.   I am, however, enjoying my solitude, drinking mud-flavoured coffee as Van Morrison's A Night In San Francisco cascades in the background.   For those that don't know Van or the album, ANiSF is a double-CD of the Man live in SF over a decade ago.   All in all, it's a pretty damned good outing, an album that ages surprisingly well, in part because it's all about instruments; like James Brown, Van lets his musicians take entended soli, including one for an oboe (played by Kate St. John), developing and forming musical grooves as they seem most appropriate.   One of the marvels of the album is the astonishingly hale Teena Lyle, mistress of many instruments but at one point doing all the heavy musical lifting herself, flailing furiously away on what I think are conga drums as she leads the band through a chorus, her voice as ripe and full amidst that fury as just about any woman's this side of Madame Franklin's.   The premise of the album is one of fecundity: songs grow into other songs, the transitions often seamless, the scopes often massive, with Bobby Bland's I'll Take Care Of You turning into a fifteen-minute piece that finally ends up in a stormin' It's A Man's, Man's, Man's, Man's World, and an encore of Gloria taking an early detour through Johnny Kydd and the Pirates' Shakin' All Over.   Another fifteen-minute piece starts with Ray Charles' Lonely Avenue and wends through (among others) Be-Bop-A-Lula and Roy Orbison's Down The Line.   But perhaps the strongest moment, the moment most appropriate to Sunday morning and the things we tend to think we should be doing on a Sunday morning, comes early in the first disc, just as The Man is making his way through a sinewy, magisterial version of Vanlose Stairway, a song supposedly about meeting a lover in a Dutch metro station.   It's a wonderful song to begin with, but Morrison utterly remakes it.   Just over midway through the tune, Morrison bridges toward another:

You got railway carriage-charm, you got railway carriage-charm....

Ray Charles said it this way:
Did ya ever wake up in the mornin'
Just about the break of day
Reach over feel your pilla'
Where your baby used to lay,
Do all your cryin'
Like you never cried before,
You even
CrYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY so hard,
you give your blues to the neighbour next door.

And it's that elongated "Y" sound that makes all the difference: he holds it for the perfect time and with the perfect timbre, and he nails it.   There's a tough catharsis to it, a rigorous strength that denies cheap sentimentality, and it lances through musical convention even as it demonstrates a kind of showy virtuousity.   It's a note given enough muscularity and force that one almost forgets that it's a human voice making the sound, Morrison's tenor almost purely saxophonic, and it's pulled off with such apparent ease that one almost forgets that assaying to reach such a note in concert could turn so easily into embarrassing failure.   It's a moment few other musicians could pull off-- and only Ray Charles and Frank Sinatra leap to mind as ones who've been able to do it successfully.   And it's brilliant, fucking brilliant.   It sings of despair without for a second seeming timorous or reluctant, and it prepares us for the supplication of language to music that follows.   It's a dizzying moment, the sort of thing that reminds guys like me why we listen to music in the first place: it makes one forget the sad prose at the end of the sun.   This is what the human voice can do, and it almost seems like nothing at all.   It's a steeling lesson for a Sunday morning.