Listen to The Lion

By JAY COCKS

"Tell me something," Bruce Springsteen asked a while ago. "How come every year or so there's a new Van Morrison record, and every time it's great, and every time no one pays attention? Why is that?"

Good question. And there are some easy answers. Morrison is too demanding -- an eccentric performer who is likely to sing his best songs with his back turned. Too personal. Too unpredictable. Not quite presentable. And way too spiritual.

But Morrison does not make easy music, and he deserves more than easy answers. Especially now, when he has just released a new album, a 21-song, two-CD, 96-min. masterpiece, Hymns to the Silence (Polydor), that has actually crept onto the Billboard charts. It's no threat to Guns N' Roses, mind you, but at least it has made a showing. There's even a rumor that it's getting played on the radio.

Springsteen's question still pertains, however, even in the midst of these glad tidings. Morrison has been making music for more than a quarter-century, since he left his native Belfast in 1961 to sing R. and B. to G.I.s stationed in Germany. He fronted a fine Beatles-era band called Them, then went solo and traveled to America. There he flirted with the mainstream before recording Astral Weeks in 1969, an album that set what was to be, for him, a more or less unvarying pattern: wild record, wild-eyed reviews, loyal but limited audience. Since then, he has wandered in the U.S., England and Ireland (where he now lives) but has never had a commercial breakthrough commensurate with his talent.

Even Bob Dylan, Morrison's only serious rival as a prickly, personal songwriter, has enjoyed bouts of superstardom during his perpetual period of transition. Morrison, whether singing on the bright side of the road or deep from the heart of his dark and beautiful vision, does not hold out a helping hand to an audience. Reaching down into himself seems more important to him than reaching out.

He extends himself only to express himself. Alone among rock's great figures -- and even in that company he is one of the greatest -- Morrison is adamantly inward. And unique. Although he freely crosses musical boundaries -- R. and B., Celtic melodies, jazz, rave-up rock, hymns, down-and-dirty blues -- he can unfailingly be found in the same strange place: on his own wavelength.

; For anyone interested in getting serious about Morrison (no casual listeners need apply), his new set can be heartily recommended as a good way to start an obsession. Hymns focuses and redefines Morrison's themes over his long career, rather like a museum retrospective already in progress. It dips deep into autobiography, spiritual speculation and blues mythology for its themes.

There are moments when Morrison can inflect a lyric like Mose Allison, other times when he can spin out a blues line like John Lee Hooker. It's a daft and reckless mix, but Morrison makes it work through sheer force of spirit, what he once called, in a memorable song, the "inarticulate speech of the heart." His rhythms are irresistible, his lyrics like an amalgam of Yeats, Kerouac and Chuck Berry. The Irish tenor John McCormack said what distinguishes an important voice from a good one is the indescribable but crucial quality that he termed "the yarrrrragh." The yarrrrragh, critic Greil Marcus points out, is "a mythic incantation . . . To Morrison ((it is)) the gift of the muse and the muse itself."

You can hear Morrison courting this muse in the Pentecostal growls and incantations of Listen to the Lion on his 1972 album Saint Dominic's Preview, or personifying it on his new album in Village Idiot, whose protagonist "wears his overcoat in the summer/ And short sleeves in the winter time" but who is nourished by some secret spiritual serenity: "Don't you know he's onto something . . . / Sometimes he looks so happy/ As he goes strolling by."

Like this sainted idiot, Morrison seems to be sustained by some spiritual essence. He also shares with the idiot a contempt for catering to anyone, a disdain for superficial cool. Morrison, 46, looks like a cross between a puff adder and a pub keeper, and will never seem beguiling in a video. As he sings about his boyhood, weaving references to Sidney Bechet and Hank Williams into a tune that draws on the hymn Just a Closer Walk with Thee, it's obvious he is only trying to keep a clear through-line to living memory.

That connection is all that's important, and once achieved and maintained, it needs no gift wrapping. No major show-biz showmanship. No kissing up to MTV, no interviews in the press. Morrison is his own best reporter and interpreter, as he makes plain on the chiding Why Must I Always Explain: "Well it's out on the highway and it's on with the show/ Always telling people things they're too lazy to know/ It can make you crazy, yeah it can drive you insane . . ."

Some listeners might be tempted to say this Belfast cowboy -- as the Band's Robbie Robertson once called him in a song -- is, in fact, a little mad. But if so, his is a fine madness. Morrison asks his own questions ("Can you feel the silence?") and provides his own answers ("((We)) carried on dreaming in God"). Those very dreams are the songs he shares. His music is a perpetual state of grace.