Tag Archives: Van Morrison

Brown Eyed Girl(s)

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Let’s stick with Sir Van Morrison in this, the ninth blog of #mysongscapes. The year before he recorded ‘Astral Weeks’ with ‘Madame George’, my favourite song and the subject of my last blog, he had a smash hit with the pop-infused ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ of 1967. As usual with Van, however, the song’s meaning was confusing. He originally wrote it, he has said, with a calypso flavour as ‘Brown Skinned Girl’… “kind of a Jamican song”.. but changed the words to make it more radio-friendly. The lyrics were racy for the time (even though 1967 was the hippie-flavoured summer of love). “Making love in the green grass/behind the stadium with you/My brown-eyed girl” didn’t make it past the censors for a lot of radio stations, who substituted different chorus lyrics when they played it. But it’s still the song that gets entire tables of women of all ages up dancing when it’s played by the deejay at that wedding reception. Because who doesn’t want to be Van Morrison’s “Brown-Eyed Girl”?

BROWN EYED GIRL

Hey, where did we go?
Days when the rains came
Down in the hollow
Playin’ a new game
Laughing and a running hey, hey
Skipping and a jumping
In the misty morning fog with
Our hearts a thumpin’ and you
My brown-eyed girl
You, my brown-eyed girl

Whatever happened
To Tuesday and so slow?
Going down the old mine
With a transistor radio
Standing in the sunlight laughing
Hiding behind a rainbow’s wall
Slipping and sliding
All along the waterfall, with you
My brown-eyed girl
You, my brown-eyed girl

Do you remember when we used to sing
Sha la la la la la la la la la la te da
Just like that
Sha la la la la la la la la la la te da, la te da

So hard to find my way
Now that I’m all on my own
I saw you just the other day
My, how you have grown
Cast my memory back there, Lord
Sometimes I’m overcome thinking ’bout
Making love in the green grass
Behind the stadium with you
My brown-eyed girl
You, my brown-eyed girl

Do you remember when we used to sing
Sha la la la la la la la la la la te da
Sha la la la la la la la la la la te da, la te da
(Bit by bit, by bit, by bit, by bit, by bit)
(Sha la la la la la la, la te da, la te da
Sha la la la la la la la la la la te da, la te da
(La te da, da da da da da da da da)

*********
My Brown-Eyed Girls

Okay… you knew where this was going, didn’t you? Yes, I do love my rudbeckias, whether they’re called black-eyed susans or blackeyed Susans or brown-eyed suzies or coneflowers.. whatever. In fact, at our cottage they were once the only flower I grew. Seriously. In 2002, when we were trying to keep the freshly delivered soil from sliding down the hillside at our newly-built cottage on Lake Muskoka north of Toronto, I mixed a few ounces of the tiny seeds of the native Rudbeckia hirta or wild black-eyed susan, into a sack of red fescue (Festuca rubra) seed and raked it in. Because this species is biennial, that first summer the little rosettes of foliage formed. But the following year, they flowered in golden profusion and my hillside looked magical.

Every time I walked down my stairs, it was into a sea of black-eyed susans.

I spent a lot of time crouched down photographing them.

That summer of 2003 was so magical (and I knew it was once-in-a-lifetime) so I did some impressionist stuff like this….

…. and this….

…. and this butterfly. And the following year I had a photography show to celebrate my “black-eyed susan summer”.

I asked my 92-year-old mother-in-law (then still living down the lake shore from us) to hold a little bunch of them in her hands. Ten years later, it became the final image in the slide show at her funeral service.

The black-eyed susans attracted lots of pollinators to the true flowers, the little yellow specks you can hardly see arrayed around the brown eye or cone.

Rudbeckia hirta’s botanical name means “hairy”, and you can see the hairs on the sepals and involucre, below. They also line the stem and leaves.

With so many thousands of black-eyed susans in my meadows, it was fascinating to explore them carefully. Doing so allowed me to see that nature often makes mistakes, like this mutant double flower.

And I was fascinated with the difference in size and vigor between plants grown from seed I had sown in rich, moist soil and those I’d sprinkled in dusty, dry soil near the roots of white pine trees. This phenomenon is not part of the evolutionary journey of the species, but is the result of “phenotypic plasticity”, i.e. the ability of a species to adapt to conditions without any mutational change in its genetic makeup.

As the years passed, the black-eyed susans became just part of the cast of characters in my cottage flora. They looked lovely with butterfly milkweed (Asclepias tuberosa) and pink musk mallow (Malva moschata) …..

….. and  hoary vervain (Verbena stricta)……

….. and peeking around the big, fragrant blossoms of the Orienpet lily Lilium ‘Conca d’Or’.

Rudbeckias are part of the massive Asteraceae family of composite species evolved to offer compound inflorescences composed of colourful, insect-attracting ray petals and masses of tiny “true” flowers. In my meadows I grow several of these yellow composite “daisy” flowers, including Rudbeckia hirta and Rudbeckia subtomentosa as well as Heliopsis, Silphium and Ratibida species. Not shown in the tapestry below are Coreopsis and Anthemis, also in my meadows.

For late summer, I love sweet blackeyed susan (Rudbeckia subtomentosa). This species gets its name from the subtle fragrance of the flowers that appear in clusters atop tall stems. Its newly-emerging central cone is truly brown, unlike the very dark cone of Rudbeckia hirta.  Later it turns black.

In my meadows, it flowers at the same time as New York ironweed (Vernonia noveboracensis), below and also Joe Pye weed (Eutrochium maculatum).

Throughout summer I gather blackeyed susans for bouquets. One year, I photographed a vase in my meadow filled with what was in bloom there in mid-July. Apart from Rudbeckia hirta, there’s pink Monarda fistulosa, lilac Veronicastrum virginicum ‘Fascination’, orange Asclepias tuberosa  and yellow Heliopsis helianthoides and Coreopsis lanceolata.

One rainy August day, I lined up some vintage apothecary bottles filled with what I found in bloom or fruit. Black-eyed susans were just a small part of that lovely abundance.

By September, the meadow has fewer species in flower but in the tiny bouquets below, sweet black-eyed susans (Rudbeckia subtomentosa) looked lovely with long-flowering Heliopsis helianthoides, ‘Gold Plate’ yarrow (Achillea filipendulina), goldenrod (Solidago rugosa) and the native asters, including lavender Symphyotrichum azureum, purple New England aster (Symphyotrichum nova-angliae) and white lance-leaved aster (Symphyotrichum lanceolatum).

Another year, I combined Canada goldenrod with New York ironweed and sweet black-eyed susans for a September bouquet.
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In my front yard pollinator garden in Toronto, I use the ubiquitous, award-winning perennial black-eyed susan Rudbeckia fulgida var. sullivantii ‘Goldsturm’.  It likes to seize ground so I occasionally pull it out when it wants to invade its less aggressive neighbours…..

…. but I like the rich gold as an easy, long-flowering filler plant with the pinks, blues and purples of echinacea, perovskia, liatris and sedum.

Here it is with late-blooming rough blazing star (Liatris aspera).

‘Goldsturm’ black-eyed susan is a mainstay in my friend Marnie Wright’s beautiful Bracebridge, Ontario garden, along with summer phlox and hydrangeas. (Have a look at this blog I wrote about Marnie’s garden.)

When I travel, I take note of different black-eyed susans used effectively in designs. This is sweet black-eyed susan (R. subtomentosa) in an exuberant display on New York’s High Line.

At the wonderful Legacy Prairie at Niagara Parks Botanical Garden, Rudbeckia hirta is used throughout. Here we see it mixed with wild beebalm (Monarda fistulosa)…..

…. and here with a cloud of white mountain mint (Pycnanthemum tenuifolium) and orange butterfly milkweed (Asclepias tuberosa).

Here it is with purple dense blazing star (Liatris spicata) at the front, tall vervain (Verbena hastata) in the middle and gray-headed coneflower (Ratibida pinnata) at right.

Native grasses can be good partners for black-eyed susans. At the Toronto Botanical Garden (TBG), I photographed Rudbeckia fulgida var. sullivantii ‘Goldsturm’ with little bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium).

But the TBG has lots of gardens and here we see Joe Pye weed (Eutrochium maculatum ‘Gateway’) partnering with ‘Goldsturm’.

Another summer, I photographed ‘Goldsturm’ with tall, pale-yellow Helianthus ‘Lemon Queen’ behind it and smoke bush (Cotinus coggygria ‘Purpurea’) beside it. The spike seedheads are from ligularia.

Another late-summer perennial at the TBG is great blue lobelia (L. siphilitica), which looks beautiful with R. ‘Goldsturm’.

The TBG also uses a quill-petalled cultivar of Rudbeckia subtomentosa called ‘Henry Eilers’, combining it nicely with rattlesnake master (Eryngium yuccifolium).

I adored this lighter-than-air combination of R subtomentosa ‘Henry Eilers’ matched up perfectly with the dark bottlebrush flowers of Japanese burnet (Sanguisorba tenuifolia ‘Purpurea’).

But the best design I saw using ‘Henry Eilers’ was at Terra Nova Nurseries in Oregon, where it was combined with the snakeroot Actaea simplex ‘Black Negligee’, its dark foliage accenting those dark cones perfectly.

Breeders continue to work with black-eyed susans, especially at Chicago Botanic Gardens where numerous taxa are assessed in the Bernice E. Lavin Plant Evaluation Garden, below.

There are other species of Rudbeckia native to North America that are often seen in gardens. This is brown-eyed susan (Rudbeckia triloba), below, a short-lived perennial which is often described as weedy or invasive, but its small flowers can be a good addition to a rich, moist meadow.

Rudbeckia nitida or shiny coneflower is tall with reflexed yellow petals, prominent greenish cones. The cultivar ‘Herbstsonne’ is the one most often available (though some experts believe this cultivar is actually a hybrid between R. nitida and R. laciniata).

Rudbeckia laciniata or cutleaf coneflower is usually seen in its old-fashioned double forms, ‘Hortensia’, below, or ‘Goldquelle’.

Among the showiest black-eyed susans are the gloriosa daisies, which are tetraploid versions of Rudbeckia hirta. That means they have twice the normal chromosomes, a condition created by treating them with colchicine (from autumn crocuses) or radiation. Tetraploidy results in larger flowers than normal, and the condition persists in seedlings so gloriosa daisies come true from seed. Like regular R. hirta, gloriosa daisies are usually biennial, but may flower the same year if seeds are sown indoors in winter.  Gloriosa daisies exhibit myriad colours or streaks of colour. Or they might have doubled petals.

At the Montreal Botanical Garden (MBG) one summer, I photographed a delightful meadow of gloriosa daisies – a wonderful variety of cultivars mixed with blue cornflowers (Centaurea cyanus) and orange cosmos (C. sulphureus).

 

Along the central strip in MBG’s magnificent perennial garden, they had planted rainbow chard with the dwarf gloriosa daisy ‘Toto’ and a curly carex edging.

At the Royal Botanical Garden in Burlington, Ontario, I liked seeing native bottlebrush grass (Elymus hystrix) interplanted with gloriosa daisies.

I’ll finish my Van Morrison-inspired musings with a few gloriosa beauties. This is ‘Autumn Colors’ (which is a very variable cultivar)…..

…. and ‘Denver Daisy’….

…. and ‘Cherry Brandy’…..

….. and ‘Irish Eyes’ with its lovely green cone.

Speaking of Irish eyes, mine happen to be green.  The genetics of eye colour is incredibly complex, but depends on alleles in your parents’ genome and the concentration of melanin in the iris.

I am the only one in my family of six to have green eyes – my parents both had blue eyes, and my children all have blue or greyish-blue eyes. If I wanted to be Van Morrison’s brown-eyed girl – laughing and a running hey hey/skipping and a jumping – I’d have to buy tinted contact lenses, something that makeup artists frequently use in film. I didn’t want to go that far, but I do have Photoshop. What do you think?

*********

This is the ninth 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
  8. Madame George by Van Morrison – my favourite song in the world

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

Madame George

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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 7th and 8th, 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 3rd, 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.