Van Morrison’s Record for the Hours of Prayer
A retrospective review of Van Morrison’s 1980 album, Common One
Your Gospel can be comprehended
without looking for its source.
And painters paint their pictures only
that the world, so transient as you made it,
can be given back to you,
to last forever.
—Rainer Maria Rilke [1]
1. Introduction
When I first published this essay on Substack in September 2022, I hadn’t thought to include excerpts from the perennial poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke to illustrate my analogy comparing his poetry with Van Morrison’s sublime musical achievement, Common One (1980). I wanted to correct that by updating the essay and republishing it. I’m working on a new book called The Undeclared War that will compile many of my essays published on Substack since starting up two years ago, especially those that deal with the global power grab of pandemic restrictions. But it got so dark I had to leaven the proceedings with a section of my writing on music, appropriately titled “A Musical Interlude.” On my other blog at WordPress, chameleonfire1, established in 2011, I spent more than a decade writing about great music. For several years I reviewed on that blog American and Canadian blues artists represented by renowned US promoter Frank Roszak and Canadian promoter Brian Slack of Zeb Media.
Martin Mull is reputed to have said that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” And I certainly wouldn’t want to be put in the same category of music critics, many of whom seem to be an inherently contrarian or even belligerent breed. The Golden Age of Rock ‘n’ Roll—from 1967–75 in my view—was, oddly enough, full of music critics who seemed to love savaging new records, even those we now consider undisputed classics. From my perspective, why write about records you hate? Let them wither on the vine if they’re that bad. Time is precious, so why not direct readers to music with the potential to feed their souls?
Of course, any form of art or music criticism is notoriously subjective, since what is deemed transcendent to one set of ears or eyes may seem like sludge to another. Still, some of the prejudices laid down in that era—most notably the annoyingly dismissive “Prog Rock is pretentious” trope—linger on in the music critics of music history behemoth Allmusic, becoming practically an unquestioned dogma. (I happen to love Prog Rock and consider it to be the greatest musical fusion genre in history.) It’s amusing to read the users’ reviews on Allmusic, which as often as not come to diametrically opposite conclusions from the house critics.
I’ve always believed that art has a capacity to heal and that this is why in times of war, social upheaval and chaos, people often turn to poetry and music. George Bernard Shaw, for all his foibles, was bang on the money when he said: “Without art, the crudeness of reality would be unbearable.” In these post-pandemic times, with nearly half a million dead in Ukraine and 30,000 civilians murdered in Gaza, “the crudeness of reality” is at its lowest, darkest ebb. There were precious few rays of light in the darkness of pandemic authoritarianism but among them were Peter Jackson’s release of Get Back, a glorious restoration and expansion of Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s original film Let It Be. I literally wept watching some of the scenes in this film of great Beatles songs becoming reality for the first time. I wrote about it in “Beatles to the Rescue” in February 2022 and a version of that essay will be included in The Undeclared War.
The other ray of light slicing through the pandemic darkness was Morrison’s 2021 release, Latest Record Project Vol. 1, proving that his talent hasn’t abated one whit, which I wrote about in “Where Have All the Rebels Gone? Indeed.” [2] Unlike his peers among rock royalty, Morrison hasn’t forgotten that one of the hallmarks of classic era rock ‘n’ roll was its capacity for social critique, not conformity. Recall the lyrics to Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son,” Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth,” Edwin Starr’s “War,” and Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War,” to name only a handful. The propping up of a government regime of experimental mRNA “vaccines”—since proven to have the worst adverse events track record of any vaccine ever released—by artists such as Neil Young, Elton John, Joni Mitchell and others betrays this legacy of speaking truth to power in popular music. (Had Neil Young forgotten his own record, Living With War, protesting America’s war in Iraq?)
As we wade through the neck-deep corruption of a New Dark Age, every once in awhile we need a Sanity Break, whether your chosen version of that is a Netflix binge or a Sunday afternoon spent over a book with a cup of tea. (The latter would certainly be my choice, augmented by a few spins of classic albums on the turntable.) My contribution to today’s Sanity Break will be a retrospective review of Van Morrison’s mostly overlooked 1980 album Common One. In a career spanning more than 50 years and nearly as many albums, it’s not surprising that a few gems might be overlooked. Morrison seemed to be on a roll in the early 1980s, and his follow-up album Beautiful Vision continues to ride a wave of spiritually-infused musicality that lasted most of the decade.
Morrison’s Stream of Poetic Consciousness
From the earliest years of his career, Van Morrison has had two major streams of musical expression: the straightforward, Memphis horns, balls-to-the-wall white R&B he does so well, with great melodic and lyrical hooks—think Moondance (1970) and his early singles with Them; and the mystical, music as fantasy carpet ride—think Astral Weeks (1968) or Common One (1980). [2] Being Irish, he couldn’t help but absorb through cultural osmosis his country’s wealth of traditional music as well. I was surprised and delighted to hear one of his earliest forays into Irish trad on Into the Music (1979), “Rolling Hills,” a delightful foreshadowing of his rollicking Celtic album with The Chieftains a decade later, Irish Heartbeat (1988). Morrison seemed to have the innate wisdom early in his career not to allow himself to be locked into a single, definable sound. Separated by only two years, it’s hard to imagine two more different albums than Astral Weeks and Moondance coming from the same artist.
There have been many tributaries in a legendary career like Morrison’s, but these seem to be the two main streams of his creativity. Like Astral Weeks, many of his 1980s records are infused with a questing spirit, a reaching for the divine, in albums such as No Guru, No Method, No Teacher, Poetic Champions Compose, Beautiful Vision and Enlightenment. Common One is an early and often overlooked entry in this musical canon. I contend that it’s Van Morrison’s musical equivalent of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s Book for the Hours of Prayer (1905), also translated from the German as The Book of Hours: Love Poems to God.
Yeats too is mentioned in the lush, sensuous composition found on Common One, “Summertime in England,” along with other literary luminaries. Morrison is drawing from a deep well of Anglo-Irish literature. T.S. Eliot, Coleridge, Blake, Wordsworth and gospel singer Mahalia Jackson are all invoked in Morrison’s impassioned vocals as inspirational muses, with a nod to J.D. Salinger’s rakish protagonist in Catcher in the Rye. Morrison not only invokes James Joyce, he models the structure of Common One on the tumbling stream of consciousness in Ulysses or Finnegan’s Wake. Now, I can already hear the argument: “Sure, it’s easy to name-check great authors, but that doesn’t automatically give your song literary depth.” This misses the point. Morrison here is shaman, breathing the holy names in an incantatory way to induce the trance. Like consciousness itself, his music moves like a river, constantly branching off into myriad tributaries:
Just as a fountain’s higher basins
spill down like strands of loosened hair
into the lowest vessel,
so streams the fullness into you,
when things and thoughts cannot contain it.
—Rainer Maria Rilke [3]
Why do I say Rilke rather than Yeats seems to better fit the role of guiding spirit on Common One? Rilke’s epoch-making book of poems opened up a whole new landscape of non-sectarian spirituality, a spirituality that wasn’t afraid of either Dionysian ecstasy or Jungian shadows. In a promotional video for Morrison’s first book of selected lyrics, Lit Up Inside, interviewer David Meltzer notes: “There are themes that keep recurring; there’s a notion of a spiritual element; there’s a notion of a revelation being just over the threshold.” Actress Kim Cattrall, who read from the book at its Belfast launch in 2016, speaks of his “commitment to keep growing and exploring and asking questions.” [4]
Morrison himself, at the London launch for the book, spoke of the part of Belfast he grew up in having “signs all over the place that said, ‘you must be born again,’ and quotes from John, Bible quotes.” This was the original impetus for writing songs he calls “religious without being religious.” Morrison also cites William Blake as an important element of his eclectic influences, mixed in with hearing Mahalia Jackson singing The Lord’s Prayer on American Armed Forces radio. Rilke sums it up in the lines: “But now, like a whispering in dark streets, / rumours of God run through your dark blood.” [5] The dark streets of Belfast, illuminated by reflections of the divine in music and poetry.
There’s a sense in both Common One and Into the Music of a man set free from the crippling neuroses and intoxicating indulgences of his era. The feeling is one of celebration. It’s a sense we seem to have lost in these dark latter days. And as with Rilke’s vision, it’s an abandon not of physical sensuality but of the spirit, sensing divine immanence everywhere in its continual quest for the transcendent. After a brief mid-70s period where Morrison felt he’d lost his mojo, this was a stunning artistic comeback, a declaration of spiritual independence.
From the first track, the aptly named, gorgeous “Haunts of Ancient Peace,” you get the sense of an artist having reached a new plateau of spiritual grace—one of those rare instances of universal union that yogis strive their entire lives to achieve. The synthesis of the lyrical theme and musical tone in this song is breathtaking, a rare artistic accomplishment. The feeling of redemption, Southern Baptist style, rings out in “Satisfied,” with its gospel call-and-response backing vocals: “I’m satisfied / with my world / ’cause I made it / the way it is…” As with the album’s cover image of a man alone walking the grassy moors, Morrison on Common One finds rejuvenation in Nature, “walkin’ up that mountainside / Look down in the valley down below…”
Much of the majestic beauty of Common One must be attributed to the ethereal sax and flute stylings of Pee Wee Ellis. The combination of his sensitive, sweeping lines and Morrison’s get-down, gut-level, alternating with restrained, even whispered vocals, singing the lyrics of someone in the midst of an epiphany is truly magical. Ellis was obviously the ideal collaborator for Morrison on an album of such joyful release. The freewheeling approach to musical structure is always risky, just as it is in poetry. Even the greats stumble, as Beat poet Allen Ginsberg did often with his long, loping, Whitman-esque lines. Freedom from constraint or form can often lead to discordant chaos. But not here. Morrison’s signature vocal improvisations and his lyrics pull us in every time—a river whose current we can’t resist. Dip into its flow on “Spirit” and “When Heart is Open” and quickly find yourself carried along in its warm, willowy arms, moving “like a deer across the meadow.” This is clearly a summertime album, with its set piece “Summertime in England” the very heart of it. The only other album I can think of that so joyously and effortlessly emanates the blissful, languorous days of summer is XTC’s Skylarking.
As a writer, I pay close attention to words. Lyrics are the thread that pulls me through the song, especially if they’re well crafted, like Leonard Cohen’s song-poems. It always annoyed me that I couldn’t understand Mick Jagger’s lyrics. Sure, I loved his sensuous drawl. But as a writer I was looking for the clarity that strikes the imagination like a bell and leaves an indelible image, like in “Street Fighting Man” and “Sympathy for the Devil,” arguably the Stones’ lyrical peak. Morrison captures such a moment of clarity with, “Will you meet me / with your red robe dangling all around your body,” and the refrain, “Oh my common one with the coat so old / and the light in her head” on “Summertime in England.” Whoever that woman is, I can see her in my mind’s eye when he sings those lines. Precisely the effect every poet strives for.
But most of the lyrics aren’t concerned with painting quaint images of summer rambles or indulging nostalgia for lost loves. This is the poet on pilgrimage, like the cover image of the walker on the ridge with his walking stick. Whether he’s on the road to Carmino de Santiago or the Ring of Kerry doesn’t matter. Morrison has never sounded so loose, so relaxed, riding a wave of spiritual release that builds and fades in intensity like a gentle summer storm. Although Morrison would revisit this stream throughout the musical poeticisms of his 1980s period, it’s hard to imagine a more perfectly realized musical image of spiritual pilgrimage than he crafted on Common One. For most of us, even the most dedicated yogi, such moments of blissful union are rare and fleeting, thus, all the more treasured for their rarity. For the artist, the equivalent is that moment of serendipity when everything—words, music, shape, design, colour—comes together in a harmonious whole that sings like struck crystal and never stops singing:
May what I do flow from me like a river,
no forcing and no holding back,
the way it is with children.
—Rainer Maria Rilke [6]
A lost gem from an era studded with musical treasure.
[1] Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, trans. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy (New York: Riverhead Books/Penguin Group, 1996; 2005 ed.), pp. 111, 159.
[2] Listen on YouTube:
[3] Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, trans. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy ibid., p. 161.
[4] Lit Up Inside book launch video, Van Morrison official website: https://www.vanmorrison.com/about/lit-up-inside
[5] Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, trans. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy ibid., p. 97.
[6] Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, trans. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy ibid., p. 65.
Enjoyed the article, reading credit being given where it was due. I too applauded him for Where Have All The Rebels Gone?, having been wondering the same thing. Young's and Mitchell's performances were nauseating. Apart from his obvious allegiance to the major owner of the rights to his music, Young probably also hoped people would miss the irony in the title of that track on Royce Hall 1971 The Needle and the Damage Done. I also applauded Trevor-in-Trimley (https://trevorintrimley.substack.com) for the perfect response Letter to Joni Mitchell, which I really hope somebody drew her attention to.
But, as I'm sure you're aware, one should be mindful that the pedestals these kind of personalities have been put on draw the eye away from much sordid and suspicious circumstances tucked behind the pedestal, such as connections with military and intelligence agencies, militarism, pedophilia, and murder/suspicious deaths. Two recommended reads on that score are Michael Walker’s Laurel Canyon: The Inside Story of Rock-and-Roll’s Legendary Neighborhood, and, especially, David McGowan's Weird Scenes Inside Laurel Canyon.