I think about death more than I probably should, but my preparation for it, at least in one regard, has been fun: nominating my funeral song, and having it formally registered in my will. (And before there’s any alarmed correspondence, I hasten to add here that my death is not imminent.)
I mean, that’s cool, right? Specifying that? It’s the ultimate mix tape, even if that “tape” is comprised of just one song. In my late teens and early twenties, I made countless mix tapes – and probably so did you, if you’re reading this – but I could never guarantee that my recipient would really listen to them. And often for good reason: these tapes weren’t really made for the recipient, but for myself. They were business cards. Ones designed to earnestly declare my cool discernment. And perhaps some of them carried cryptic clues of my ardour.
Oh, boy. The things that I thought were generous, but weren’t. I think you’ll really like this, I said, but I was just foisting my tastes. Mansplaining through mix tapes.
But the song for my funeral? I’ll have a captive audience. My mourners will be stuck with this jarringly cheerful, near 10-minute track about “merry gypsies” and turning your radio up real loud. Perhaps some will find the cheerfulness inappropriate, or discomforting. Perhaps some won’t know where to look. Perhaps some will catch themselves tapping their feet, and anxiously look around to see if anyone saw them. Great.
As I write this, I’m listening to that song. In fact, it’s now on its third turn. And that song is Van Morrison’s “Caravan”, but with a vital qualification, and one which I’ve also made in my will: it’s a live version, as heard on one of the greatest concert recordings ever released: It’s Too Late to Stop Now.
This is an important qualification, because the song as it exists on the album Moondance – compared to its performance in this 1973 concert – is the difference between night and day. The live record almost doubles the length of the track, and turns it into a long and passionate adventure.
Now, Van Morrison’s a jerk. Vicious, defensive, short-tempered. He’s also capricious, tyrannical and his music traverses the sublime to the awful. His live performances are similarly notorious for their spread: he can be a soulful God one night, and a slurring, indifferent prick the next.
But when Van catches that wave – when some holy co-ordinate of sobriety, generosity and recondite energy is found – he can stand upon that stage and make time stop. He can make songs faster, slower, larger. He can make you think that nothing else exists.
“Music is big, man,” Liam Gallagher once told me, and I don’t think I’ve ever believed that as much as I have listening to Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, or parts of his live record It’s Too Late to Stop Now, or his other performance of “Caravan” on The Band’s Last Waltz.
You either get it, or you don’t. You’re in, or you’re not. You either think that music can furnish your soul, or you don’t. But Van does, and so do I, and It’s Too Late to Stop Now exists for me as a kind of brilliant testimony to a form of soulful extremism.
On this record, Van is generous with his voice – he stretches it, improvises with it, surprisingly lengthens and twists songs with it. It’s hot and joyous, and he’s unmistakably alive. Van Morrison is a strange and unpleasant man, to be sure, but one who can summon angels.
And it’s the angels I think of, and not his vaccine scepticism and conspiracy theories, when I nominate that song for my funeral. It’s long, bright and fun. It’s rich, the glorious sum of the gifted human beings that surrounded him that night.
Of that time, Morrison said:
I am getting more into performing. It’s incredible. When I played Carnegie Hall in the fall something just happened. All of a sudden I felt like “you’re back into performing” and it just happened like that... A lot of times in the past I’ve done gigs and it was rough to get through them. But now the combination seems to be right and it’s been clicking a lot.
We are alive for now, but sometimes we need reminding of that privilege, and this song is one gorgeous reminder. I am alive, and so are you. We possess energy. But how well and how generously do we spend it? It’s curious, I suppose, that this kind of ennobling whimsy might come from so bitter a man as Van. But so it goes.