How to introduce my very favourite song in the entire world in this 8th blog of #mysongscapes – while finding some relationship to my own photography, as I promised in the first blog?  And what can I say about Madame George, the genius 10-minute song from the genius album that is Van Morrison’s iconic 1968 ‘Astral Weeks’ that hasn’t already been said?

I’m not sure how one develops a taste for certain songs or types of music. Some of it is in our genes, I suspect, but much of it is in our exposure to music at periods in our lives where it gets into our bloodstream: snatches of songs our parents sang that we remember from childhood; songs, singers and musical groups heard on the radio – in my case, from the rich singer-songwriter era of the 1960s and 70s; music my kids listened to as they were growing up – reggae, hip-hop, rap, house, jungle and other strange musical genres I cannot name.

It’s clear to me that some people are simply more attuned to music than others; it forms a kind of soundtrack in their heads, whether the trigger is intrinsic or extrinsic. We sing to ourselves, we sing in the shower, we hum, tap our feet and listen to music in our cars. We go to concerts; we sing in choirs; we play in bands. Music moves us. To sit in the dining room of my late mother’s nursing home on entertainment night and watch the old melodies and lyrics light up the faces of people whose memories had long fled, it is clear that music resides in a wholly distinct part of the brain.

As for those folk songs of the 60s and 70s and more modern lyrics that evoke the stories that folk songs do so well, I’ve been a collector for many years and my CD mixes are in my car and in my kitchen (and a few friends’ homes too) where they are played regularly.

Why the philosophical preamble to Madame George? It’s just a song after all. The point I am trying to make is that this song, for some reason, speaks in a very deep way to my psyche, my consciousness, my soul… or whatever inner entity combines hearing and cognition with rapture. The music swirling around Morrison’s voice like a whirlpool is hypnotic, the lyrics mysterious – I never tire of either, but I’ve given up trying to divine what the words mean. They are all the more remarkable when you consider that they were written by a 23-year old Irish lad, living in Boston and fresh off the success of his first big song, 1967’s Brown-Eyed Girl. But in 1968 he was embroiled in a label dispute with Bang Records following owner Bert Berns’ death and looking for new management when a number of producers came to a Boston studio to hear the songs he’d been working on. One of them, Lewis Merenstein, upon hearing Morrison playing ‘Astral Weeks’ said:  “I started crying. It just vibrated in my soul, and I knew that I wanted to work with that sound.”  He took Morrison to New York and surrounded him with top-flight jazz musicians. John Payne is on flute; Richard Davis plays upright bass; Warren Smith Jr. is the percussionist; Jay Berliner plays acoustic guitar along with Morrison; and Connie Kay is on drums. A favourite part for me is the snare drum adding a military cadence to the line “Marching with the soldier boy behind”.  The strings were dubbed later and Morrison hated them, but when I listen to their sweet sound ascend after he sings ‘the cool night air like Shalimar’ it seems to me that it adds necessary lightness, but then I love strings.  The two recording sessions in September and October 1968 are the stuff of legend, but the musicians did their thing separately from Morrison, who recorded in a glass booth. Recalled Richard Davis fifty year later:  “He was remote from us, ’cause he came in and went into a booth. And that’s where he stayed, isolated in a booth. I don’t think he ever introduced himself to us, or we to him…And he seemed very shy…”  Alchemy happened nonetheless.

And who was “Madame George” anyway? Based on the lyrics, some people think he/she is a drug-taking, cross-dressing transvestite with male customers. Morrison himself has said in interviews that Madame George was just “poetry and mythical musings channelled from my imagination” and the title character based on six or seven people. There are probably as many opinions about the song’s meaning as there are adoring fans who have been bewitched by it. The strangest thing about the song is that it’s titled Madame George but Morrison sings it throughout as Madame Joy. Later, he said: “The original title was ‘Madame Joy’ but the way I wrote it down was ‘Madame George’. Don’t ask me why I do this because I just don’t know. The song is just a stream of conscious thing, like Cyprus Avenue. It may have something to do with my great aunt whose name was Joy. Apparently she was clairvoyant…. that may have something to do with it. Aunt Joy lived in the area mentioned in connection with Cyprus Avenue. She lived on a street just off Fitzroy Street which is quite near to Cyprus Avenue.”

‘Astral Weeks’ is on myriad “Best Albums of all Time” lists and has its fans among music’s cognoscenti. Elvis Costello said it is “still the most adventurous record made in the rock medium, and there hasn’t been a record with that amount of daring made since“.  Joan Armatrading credited it with opening her up to music.  Bruce Springsteen said:  “The divine just seems to run through the veins of that entire album. Of course there was incredible singing and the playing of Richard Davis on the bass. It was trance music. It was repetitive. It was the same chord progression over and over again.  But it showed how expansive something with very basic underpinning could be. There’d be no New York City Serenade if there hadn’t been Astral Weeks.”

Let’s listen. Turn your speakers up loud. Try to follow the lyrics, but shut your eyes when it comes to the incantations at the end, “the love that loves to love that loves to love that loves…..”

MADAME GEORGE, Van Morrison (1968)

Down on Cyprus Avenue
With the childlike visions leaping into view
The clicking, clacking of the high heeled shoe
Ford and Fitzroy, Madame Joy

Marching with the soldier boy behind
He’s much older now 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 Joy

That’s when you fall
Whoa, whoa, whoah.. that’s when you fall
Yeah, that’s when you fall

When you fall into a trance
Sitting on a sofa playing games of chance
With your folded arms and history books you glance
Into the eyes of Madame Joy

Then you think you found the bag
You’re getting weaker and your knees begin to sag
In a corner playing dominoes in drag
The one and only Madame Joy

And then from outside the frosty window, raps
She jumps up and says, Lord, have mercy I think that 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 Joy
Dry your eye for Madame Joy
Wonder why for Madame Joy, Whoa oh oh oh oh 

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 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   

Say goodbye to Madame Joy
Dry your eye for Madame Joy
Wonder why for Madame Joy
Dry your eyes for Madame Joy
Say goodbye

In the wind and the rain on the back street
In the backstreet, in the back street
Say goodbye to Madame Joy
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
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Say goodbye to Madame Joy
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
Say goodbye, goodbye, goodbye

Say goodbye goodbye, goodbye, goodbye to Madame Joy
Dry your eye for Madame Joy
Wonder why for Madame Joy
The love that loves to love, the love that loves to love
The love that loves to love, the love that loves to love
Say goodbye, goodbye 

Get on the train
Get on the train, the train, the train, the train, the train,
This is the train, this is the train
This is the train
Whoa, say goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye
Get on the train, get on the train

Forty years after ‘Astral Weeks’ was released, Van Morrison launched a tour highlighting the album with two concerts in Los Angeles’s Hollywood Bowl on November 7^th and 8^th, 2008. The grand finale was Madame George.  If he had once detested the strings that Merenstein dubbed over his song, he seemed to have resigned himself to the magic they added since I count a few cellos and at least one violin on the stage in the performance below.

Watching the video of Van Morrison performing the song in concert four decades later, the clear zenith of the remarkable song cycle that was ‘Astral Weeks’ with his jazz scat phrasing as he “gets on the train, the train, the train” before leaving the stage, I think two things. First, I wish I’d been there. Second, remarkably, on the very night he was performing ‘Astral Weeks’ in LA, I was at the Throckmorton Theatre in Mill Valley, California listening to his daughter Shana Morrison, below centre, with Buffy Ford-Stewart, right, singing in a tribute concert to Buffy’s husband, the late California singer-songwriter John Stewart.  I’ve written about my few years working with John’s music to create a stage treatment for it, but before writing this blog on Madame George, I hadn’t realized that Shana and her father were both singing in California on the same night, each paying tribute to remarkable music from the past.

What’s even more strange, after the show I listened to her singing Sweet Thing from ‘Astral Weeks’ a cappella in a post-performance jam session in a Mill Valley hotel room. She had recorded that song herself and has often sung with her father on tour.

Belfast

All of my ancestry is Northern Irish, as I wrote in my recent blog on Galway Bay; my maternal grandfather was born in the countryside near Belfast.  If there is a central theme in ‘Astral Weeks’ it is the city of Belfast. Cyprus Avenue is a leafy street in the well-to-do section of the city – it was the other side of the tracks from the neighbourhood where Van Morrison grew up, as it would have been for my blacksmith grandfather out in the country 25 miles away near Banbridge.  I had a look on Google Earth and today, as in 1968, it is a broad avenue lined with mature trees and the mansions are hedged for privacy.

But leaving Cyprus Avenue, we can revisit a few of the places that I saw and photographed during my trip to Ireland in the spring of 2008. There’s Belfast City Hall (1906) downtown.

We can take a walk through the ground floor of beautiful Queen’s University (1849).

But if you’re like me, you’ll need some flora with your music so let’s visit the Botanic Gardens with its statue of the Right Honourable William Thomson, Lord Kelvin at the entrance.  He was Belfast-born but teaching at the University of Glasgow when he devised the absolute temperature scale which is named the “Kelvin scale” for him. He also worked on the laws of thermodynamics and on the installation of the first telegraph cables below the Atlantic Ocean.

I was photographing cherry blossoms that spring, which is pretty obvious.

The garden’s star attraction is the stunning Palm House. From Wikipedia, I learned that “the gardens’ most notable feature is the Palm House conservatory. The foundation stone was laid by the Marquess of Donegall in 1839 and work was completed in 1840. It is one of the earliest examples of a curvilinear cast iron glasshouses in the world. Designed by Charles Lanyon and built by Richard Turner, Belfast’s Palm House predates the glasshouses at Kew and the Irish National Botanic Gardens at Glasnevin, both of which Turner went on to build. The Palm House consists of two wings, the cool wing and the tropical wing. Lanyon altered his original plans to increase the height of the latter wing’s dome, allowing for much taller plants.”

We visited on May 3^rd, and the tulips and wallflowers were at their peak.

Inside the glasshouses, there were fragrant spring bulbs and a profusion…

…. of hothouse plants like cineraria and salpiglossis.

Outside, there were families and little children and people walking dogs.

It was a delightful spring day to be in Belfast, the city where Van Morrison came of age. Where he grew up with his family in a 2-story brick terrace house on Hyndford Street in the city’s east end and first dipped his foot into music with his skiffle band, The Sputniks, at age 13, and his rhythm-and-blues band, Them, six years later.  And from there, as we know, it wasn’t long before he was “on Cyprus Avenue, with those childlike visions leaping into view”.

********

This is the eighth blog in #mysongscapes series of winter 2020 that combine music I love with my photography. If you enjoyed reading, have a look at the others beginning with:

1. Joni Mitchell’s ‘Night in the City’;
2. Paul Simon’s ‘Kodachrome’ and my life in photography;
3. Vietnam and Songs of Protest;
4. Galway Bay and memories of my grandfather and Ireland;
5. Simon and Garfunkel’s Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme;
6. The John Denver lullaby I sang to my first grandchild, Today While the Blossoms Still Cling to the Vine.
7. Gordon Lightfoot for a Snow Day

And please do feel free to leave a comment below. I love to read them.