Van Morrison “What’s It Gonna Take?”
We were not prepared for this. In the beginning, our mission was simple: to investigate albums made by middle-aged men so that we might learn something about our own second halves. But our project was specifically focused on second halves rather than third chapters because (a) we were interested in music made after — but in proximity to — youthful peaks and (b) we had no precedent for artists producing important work into (and beyond) their seventies.
But all plans have flaws and all rules have exceptions. In our case, we neglected to properly consider Bob Dylan and Van Morrison (to name just two). Which meant that, we failed to imagine what comes after Past Prime — Past Past Prime. And so, to right our wrong, we started with a simple hypothesis. We posited that whereas Past Prime artists either lose their muse, their muscles or their grasp on the zeitgeist (or all of the above), Past Past Prime artists actually tighten their grip. They hold on for dear life. They reveal what matters most of all. They stop stop giving a fuck and start giving lots of fucks once again. It’s a full circle back towards important work, just with greater self-knowledge, desperation and arthritis.
In the same way that we at Past Prime were not ready for Past Past Prime, though, the universal “we” were ill-prepared for pandemic era Van Morrison. We had all gotten used to his aging Soul Man vibe, his workmanlike schedule, his top notch accompanists and his could not care less album covers. We learned to appreciate the billowy reverb of his keyboards, the strain of his upper register, and even the mild cheese of his saxophone. The man who’d spent decades searching for the mystic and the healing and the silence, decided that he was content to find a groove and stay with it — and that was alright by us. Once we all stopped waiting for another venture into the slipstream or another fantabulous night to make romance, everything was copacetic. We learned to dig Van’s Past Prime vibes.
It obviously was not just his music that had changed, it was the man himself. In the mid-Nineties he married former Miss-Ireland, Michelle Rocca, and in the mid-Aughts, the couple had two children. Around that time, he donned those black shades. And fedoras. He dropped some of the weight he’d put on over the years. He found a tailor who made bespoke suits that looked — dare I say — handsome. And while he didn’t exactly look happy in photos or on stage, he also didn’t look surly (or silly for that matter). It took some time, but Van managed to survive the purple stretchy sausage leisure suit get-up from “The Last Waltz.” And as he entered his seventh decade in music, he looked and sounded pretty darn sharp.
But then came COVID-19. And then came “Latest Record Project.” And while epidemiologists had long suggested the possibility of another global pandemic, not a single living person fan anticipated a twenty-eight track, two plus hour album from Van Morrison in 2021. To be clear, it was not the girth of the record that surprised listeners. It was not even the sound of the record, which was the same well-dressed Rhythm and Blues, performed by many of the same players that Van had enlisted previously. It was not his irascibility, which made its way onto the record, but which was in no way out of character. It was not even his views on the pandemic, which he’d grudgingly shared and stridently defended, but which did not entirely consume the material. No, the surprise was his startling directness — how he named and sang songs using plain, conversational language. Songs like “Stop Bitching, Do Something,” “They Own the Media” and, most infamously, “Why Are You on Facebook?”
These were tells that we had entered a new phase of Van-dom — that we were officially in the Past Past Prime era. These were songs written and performed by a man who was not aloof, or phoning it in, or workmanlike. These were angry songs. Petty songs. Confused songs. Terrified songs. Songs written in a style we’d not seen or heard from Van before. Historically, his lyrics were famous for their simultaneous impenetrability and expressiveness — for how they evoked meaning through feeling, repetition, symbolism and tone rather than through logic or narrative.
If I ventured in the slipstream
Between the viaducts of your dream
Where immobile steel rims crack
And the ditch in the back roads stop
Could you find me?
Would you kiss-a my eyes?
I’ve heard and sung those words more times than I can count. And you know what? I have zero idea what they mean. I just know what they sound and feel like on top of his mystical, pre-Caledonia bed of folkie Soul Jazz. I don’t know where that “Caravan” is going or why “Domino” is called “Domino.” I am pretty sure that “Veedon Fleece” is not a thing. Honestly, I don’t understand 98% of the things that Van is saying. On the other hand — and perhaps more importantly — when he sings “It ain’t why why why/It ain’t why why why/It just is,” I believe him.
Van is legendary for transmitting the ineffable. Greil Marcus has written two books that are at least partially devoted to this very subject — how Van communicates through sounds and words which, if taken literally, do not make much sense, but which, if experienced through the slipstream, speak volumes. Which is why, in 2021, millions of fans were dumbfounded when we heard him sing:
Why are you on Facebook?
Why do you need second-hand friends?
Why do you really care who's trending?
Or is there something you're defending?
Four relatively simple questions, each one in plainspoken English. These were questions that many of us had probably even asked ourselves. But they were also questions that, in a million years, no one expected to hear coming out of the mouth of George Ivan Morrison. Objectively, I knew that he spoke English. But, also, I assumed it was a hybrid version of the language — a blend of English, Gaelic and Caledonian. Before 2021, I would have sooner expected my pre-teen children to speak Sanskrit than I would have expected Van to ask me why I am on Facebook (which, for the record, I am not).
Clearly, something was amiss. And it was not a glitch, either. Van could not stop talking about conspiracies (global), suppression (government) and persecution (his own). He talked to the press about it. He tweeted about it. He sounded like so many other seventy-something year olds who’d been 8-channed, red-pilled or cable-newsed — which would not be so unthinkable except that I’d always assumed that Van was disinterested in computers and politics and the opinions of others.
Van had never sounded so far away from the mystic as he did in 2021. But, there he was. And while it was unexpected and unnerving, it was not without explanation. In 2009, Van’s tour manager, Gigi Lee, gave birth to a son who she insisted was fathered by her employer. Van denied paternity, and the case was not (to my knowledge at least) resolved. Tragically, both Ms. Lee and her infant son died less than two years later. Then, in 2016, Van’s mother, Violet, passed away. And to top it all off, in 2018, Van and his wife Michelle divorced. So, in 2021, during the onset of COVID lockdowns, if Van appeared sadder and lonelier than usual, it should not have come as a total surprise — he’d had a rough decade.
Instead of sadness or loneliness, however, we got their symptoms — anger and frustration. The man who, like clockwork, released albums and toured behind them every single year was now being forced to sit still. The sitting still — for a man who’d spent a lifetime moving around and who was now officially slowing down — must have been awfully uncomfortable. Who was Van if he was not on stage, playing his songs, searching for the slipstream, healing us and healing himself? Or, what if after all those years listening for the silence, he finally heard it — and it was terrifying?
These were questions that I wondered about — that I suppose many fans wondered about. But they were also questions that I assumed would go unanswered because Van was so busy assailing lockdown policies, questioning virologists, trolling governments and defending himself against the backlash. Well, I was wrong — boy was I wrong. Miraculously, in between battles, and just a year after “Latest Record Project Volume 1,” Van responded with “What’s It Gonna Take?,” the most critically and commercially reviled record of his career.
Deep breath. Where to start? Give me a minute. OK? OK. How about the cover? The art for “What’s It Gonna Take?” features two giant hands, attached to puppet strings, reaching over a city skyline full of government buildings, while a couple dressed in late-50s attire run away from the puppet master while those buildings dissolve into the words “WAKE UP.” I had previously believed that the cover to “Latest Record Project, Volume 1” — which resembled “Generic Theme 11” from Microsoft PowerPoint 2013 — was the nadir of his creative direction. But I was wrong. This is straight clip art propaganda — something that would get endless likes on the official “Q board,” but which is a lifetime away from the bloke who was sitting next to those big Irish wolfhounds on the peat moss in front of that old Dublin castle on “Veedon Fleece.”
If the cover’s symbolism is thinly veiled, however, the songs are fully naked. On “What’s It Gonna Take?,” Van comes out swinging. Jab after jab. Haymaker upon haymaker. Lots of offense, but moreover, completely defensive. And absolutely no filter. Five rounds in, he’s exhausted — and so are we. By round ten, he’s on the ropes, ready to throw in the towel, but he still has five more to go. Finally, fifteen songs and nearly eighty minutes later, Van has delivered an album so confounding, so maddening and so positively incongruent with the rest of his oeuvre that many fans (and critics) found it simpler to ignore it rather than to dignify or unpack. Those few who did spend time with “What’s It Gonna Take?” concluded, for the most part, that it was an unmitigated disaster. That it was everything we’d feared — petty, delusional and slapdash. That it was the thud at the end of an artistic free-fall. That it was sad, but also, that it was dangerous.
Van was well aware of the perceptions — after all, the album opener is actually entitled “Dangerous.” Yes it is! Yes he does! Van bursts out from the gate swinging, speeding up a hook nicked from the end of “Madame George.” But instead of twenty-three year old Van singing goodbye, goodbye, goodbye and telling Madame George to get on that train, seventy-six year old Van is conspiracy-theorizing and self-aggrandizing. As a performance, it’s not so bad — Van sounds lively and though it doesn’t stray far from the hook, the repetition works. The narcissism is not particularly charming, but also charisma was never Van’s strong suit. So, if I just sit on my feelings about the lyrics and enjoy the ride, it almost passes for an “Into the Music” outtake — not so bad. But then, halfway in, the reverie is broken when Van sings:
Somebody said it was about the data
That line throws me off. The way he says it — “Day-Tah.” Sharp consonants. Accent on both syllables. It’s not simply that I could not connect the guy who had spent decades searching for the mystic to suddenly be searching for statistical confidence. It was the precision of his enunciation. The greatest singing mumbler, growler, la la la-ler I have ever heard was legendary for how he almost never enunciated — for how he was more interested in sound and feel than in words. But with that single line, it becomes obvious that something was off. Very off. That a switch had flipped. And while I feared the worst for the rest of the album, I held onto the thinnest strand of good faith. I wondered if there were other, plausible explanations for the Day-Tah.
Maybe it was all a highly self-aware lark — a piece of performance art. Maybe Van was just trolling us. That seemed like an unlikely, but not impossible, hypothesis. After all, in 1967, in an effort to extricate himself from an onerous contract, he delivered a thirty-one song “go fuck yourself” that included legendary tracks like “The Big Royalty Check," “Blow In Your Nose” and “Nose in Your Blow.” And while I was unsure as to whether he had an actual sense of humor, I was at least convinced that he thought he did. So, perhaps “What’s It Gonna Take?” was not quite as earnest as I feared. Maybe it was just expensive, septuagenarian trolling.
Or, as some generous listeners have theorized, maybe “What’s It Gonna Take?” was a high concept album about isolation and depression. This second hypothesis was based on the neatness of the album’s structure — a tragedy in three acts. First, there are five upbeat numbers which verge on agitprop — that dare the masses to stand up, ask questions and reclaim their rights. This quintet includes the aforementioned opener (“Dangerous”), the title track and the perky R&B of “Fighting Back is the New Normal” and “Fodder for the Masses.” Four songs into the first act, Van is a man on a mission: awaken the people, fight the power, find the truth.
But it is “Can’t Go on This Way,” the song that closes the first act, which most foretells the tragedy to come. If the first four songs have a chirpy, upbeat energy that betrays the frustration and contempt of its lyrics, song five slows down, opens up and reverberates. The first four share the perkiness of “Bright Side of the Road” while track five resembles “Beautiful Vision” or “Inarticulate Speech of the Heart.” Whereas the album begins by choking the life out of well played R&B, track five has feel. It has groove. And it has the blues. Van is sad about the government lying. He’s bummed about Klaus Schwab (head of the World Economic Forum) and Bill Gates. But, most of all, he feels lost and lonely.
When the curtain goes up again, the war is over. Act two finds our anti-hero exhausted and isolated, feeling more like Don Quixote than Che Guevara. More than tired, however, Van sounds disinterested. Track six, "Sometimes It’s Just Blah Blah Blah,” ends with him repeating “blah blah blah” dozens of times while a bittersweet Beach Boys harmony accentuates his futility. For decades, Van had employed sounds more than language in pursuit of revelation. Scat singing. Roaring like a lion. Tying his own tongue. But his “blah blah blahs” are repetition without revelation. They’re a man running into a brick wall over and over again, full well knowing that there will be no breakthrough.
Which is probably why, at the end of the second act, tired from all the fighting, he just waves the flag and admits the truth. "Nervous Breakdown" is in part exactly what it sounds like — a broken, rattled man who cannot do what he was born to do and who is going stir crazy in isolation. But it’s also a strangely clever form, one wherein Van introduces each instrument before they appear (First we start with the drums/The the bass), describing how the song functions. It’s not so far from AC/DC’s “Let There Be Rock,” except that Van’s version is “They Won’t Let There Be Rock.” At the end of act two, Van is broken and alone. He can see the end and he wants to turn back, but he can’t.
And so, act three is the least impassioned, most despondent act of all. Van’s no longer talking to the people or to the government — he’s talking either to himself or his psychotherapist. The last five songs are fatigued — they find Van trying to jetpack out from all the commotion of his convictions, attempting to convince himself that, while he is an entertainer, that does not make him a celebrity (“I Ain’t No Celebrity”). He even wonders if everything might be different if he just changed his name and performed and toured under a pseudonym (“Stage Name”). And then, with nothing new to say, he simply talk sings his pre-concert schedule over a spare bass and drum:
Got to make it to showtime
Nowhere to hide to get down to the pool outside
If the weather is good
Then later have dinner
Then a massage in the room
Try to get some rest in the afternoon
Read a good book
Take a phone off the hook
Meditate for a while
Better outlook getting ready for my new suit
As sadly mundane as that might sound — and despite the distress of the hour that precedes it — I was still not prepared for the desolation of “Pretending,” the album’s closer. On the record’s slow fade, Van is no longer a freedom fighter or a victim. He’s not a pop star or a troubadour or a mystic or a Soul man. He’s just a broken old man, rambling the truth in stream of consciousness:
Pretending my life is not in ruins
Pretending I'm not depressed
Pretending I left it all behind
Pretending most of the time
“Pretending” is confessional in a way that music rarely is. It’s not diaristic. It doesn’t sound like notes in a journal. It sounds like something a patient says to their shrink when they have run out of feelings to suppress, stories to tell and excuses to make. It is evidence that contradicts our first theory of the album (it’s trolling performance art) as well as the second one (an artful concept album in three acts). If anything, it is validation of a third, much simpler theory — the Occam's razor theory, which suggests that “What’s It Gonna Take” was an album made quickly and emotionally by an older man who could not do the thing he wants the most (perform his music) and could not get the thing he needs the most (human connection).
Back in 1967, right before he sent Bert Berns those thirty-one ridiculous tracks to fulfill his contractual obligation, Van recorded several versions of “He Ain’t Give You None.” In one of the early takes, he stops singing and tells the engineer (and presumably the band) that he wants everything to sound “freer” — that at the moment they have a “choke thing going.” And while I am not a musician and could not describe precisely what Van wanted, I know enough to say that “What’s It Gonna Take?” has a “choke thing going.” It’s not the politics or the narcissism on the record that repels me. It’s that choke thing — the complete lack of surprise and magic and silence and reverie — that dooms the album. The suppression of freedom is both the fatal flaw of the material as well as the album’s ostensible thesis. The thing that he assails governments and technocrats for is the very thing that he is doing to his music.
Past Prime assumes a letting go — a been there, done that, can’t possibly give as many shits as I used to ethos. Imbued with this spirit, music can sometimes sound wise or relieved or bored or out of touch or, even, flaccid. But Past Past Prime assumes that there are many more yesterdays than tomorrows and that after the darkest hour, there is ultimately just darkness. It does not assume a return to form so much as an acknowledgment that we will never return to form. Imbued with this knowledge, the Past Past Prime artist is re-activated in ways that their former selves were not.
Less than five months after the release of “What’s It Gonna Take?,” after critics dismissed it and fans said “no thank you,” Van was back doing three nights at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas. And just five months after he returned to that scene of his self-loathing, he turned the page. He moved on to an amiable Skiffle record, cleverly named “Moving On Skiffle,” featuring twenty-three songs, none written by Van Morrison, and none even remotely interested in Day-Tah.