Van Morrison: I’d been working on this song about the scene going down in Belfast. And I wasn’t sure what I was writing but anyway the central image seemed to be this church called St. Dominic’s where people were gathering to pray or hear a mass for peace in Northern Ireland.
Anyway, a few weeks ago I was in Reno for a gig at the University of Nevada. And while we were having dinner, I picked up the newspaper and just opened it to a page and there in front of me was an announcement about a mass for peace in Belfast to be said the next day at St. Dominic’s Church in San Francisco.
Totally blew me out. Like I’d never even heard of a St. Dominic’s Church.
Interviewer: How did the song turn out?
Morrison: Great. In fact I’m gonna be recording it in a couple of days.
Interviewer: What did you end up titling it?
Morrison: “St. Dominic’s Preview.” You know something? I haven’t a clue to what it means.
Belfast-born Van Morrison moved with his family to Northern California from Woodstock, N.Y., in the spring of 1971, settling in the leafy Marin County town of Fairfax.
During his next few years in and around San Francisco, he would write about his Bay Area life in his songs, grounding his famously mystical and abstract lyrics with splashes of local geography and color. Broadly, he captured the feelings a Northern Irish expat might have about living in an adopted home, with seemingly infinite possibilities and an uncertain future.
On side two of 1972’s Saint Dominic’s Preview, that thread is most explicit. The album’s last three cuts stitch together scenes from the Bay Area, effectively forming a nineteen-and-a-half-minute suite.
I don’t think it’s an accident Morrison put the songs together that way: one ebullient stream-of-consciousness cut whose concrete images add up to an abstract whole, one imagined personal history of an idyllic youth, and one elongated, expansive breath of nighttime summer fog and wonder. It works as half a concept album: a traveling soul’s rumination on landing somewhere new, imagining himself in its past, and learning to live in its present.
Many observers have assessed Saint Dominic’s Preview on a different axis. In a contemporary review, Rolling Stone’s Stephen Holden wrote that the album mashed up a handful of shorter “roadhouse band” songs (“Jackie Wilson Said” is the best-known) with two longer meditations reminiscent of Morrison’s 1968 breakthrough Astral Weeks; Holden found the combination “very refreshing” and complementary. Stylistically, Saint Dominic’s Preview may indeed be the best union of those two aspects of Morrison’s 1960s and ’70s heyday.
‘Make this whole thing blend’
But I hear a different story as well. Morrison doesn’t mention anything Bay Area-related until the very last moments of the album’s first side, with a whispered, passing mention to the Golden Gate as “Listen to the Lion” reaches its ethereal conclusion. Flip the record over, and forty seconds into the title track’s Caledonian soul groove, here we are:
Meanwhile back in San Francisco
We’re trying hard to make this whole thing blend
As we sit upon this jagged storey block, with you my friend
And it’s a long way to Buffalo
It’s a long way to Belfast city too
“The scene going down in Belfast,” Morrison has already told us about. But Buffalo? That was drummer Gary Mallaber’s hometown. It’s easy to imagine those two on a “jagged storey block” of San Francisco, maybe one of those hillside streets where the second story of one house abuts the first floor of another, talking about the Troubles and how far they were from their homes.
The title track, “Saint Dominic’s Preview,” does describe people “freedom marching” in the streets, but as it turned out, Morrison would disavow the full quote about the newspaper and Saint Dominic’s, the church on Bush Street.
“The only thing that happened was I mentioned to the writer that I’d seen in the paper that there was a service in St. Dominic’s in San Francisco. That was all I said, and he did the rest,” Morrison told ZigZag magazine a year later, as quoted in Peter Wrench’s Saint Dominic’s Flashback.
Either way, the title track’s lyric is specific but not linear, with a series of vivid images and emotional connections. It’s a fascinating lyric that takes big leaps, with scenes apparently from his life interspersed with others that might not be. One minute we’re seeing orange crates at Safeway in the rain (“I heard they had good oranges” in California, he once told an interviewer of his motivation for moving west, Wrench writes). Next we’re in a restaurant enjoying record company largesse with a contented singer.
Morrison’s hits were good for his label, and his label returned the favor. (“One thing I gotta admit. Warner Brothers has given me complete artistic freedom,” Morrison told Rolling Stone in 1972.) The lyric’s “cross-cutting country corner” and “Hank Williams railroad train,” with a pedal steel flourish to match, could be anywhere in America. Wherever we are, we return each chorus to “gaze out on Saint Dominic’s Preview,” whatever that might mean.
“Saint Dominic’s Preview” takes magical strides into other places too. It starts in Paris, with a church organ echoing references to Cathedral Notre Dame and Edith Piaf. And as Mallaber drives the band through the song’s hard-charging last verse, we find the narrator on 52nd Street, drinking with jet-setters “flying too high to see my point of view.”
What did the song’s narrator think of San Francisco and its people? “This town, they bit off more than they can chew,” Morrison sings, adding: “Everybody feels so determined not to feel anyone else’s pain/No one’s making no commitments to anybody but themselves.”
‘I never really fit in’
As liberated as “Saint Dominic’s Preview” feels, the song’s buoyancy might also mask some frustration. Morrison, one of the most notoriously irascible figures in rock and roll, wrote fondly of the Bay Area’s more enchanting aspects, but was he less fond of the Bay Area’s people? Five years later, as he prepared for a move back to the U.K., he told Cameron Crowe in Rolling Stone, “I never really fit into California. It’s strange I stayed so long. But… I know I’ll be missing it here.”
If he never felt quite right at home in Marin, Morrison still found plenty to like, far from working-class Belfast. After the title cut, the album moves along to the joyful, relatively brief “Redwood Tree,” which finds the narrator reminiscing about his youth among the Sequoioideae: “When we were young we used to go under the redwood tree/And it smells like rain, maybe even thunder/Won’t you keep us from all harm, wonderful redwood tree?” Imagine loving a place so much you wrote a song about growing up there, even though you didn’t.
The album closes with the long, mystical “Almost Independence Day.” Starting with Morrison’s voice and 12-string guitar in unison, following only his own internal rhythm, the song settles into a drifting groove as a Moog synthesizer evokes the nightly foghorns of early summer.
There seems to be another geographic leap in one verse, from Chinatown to the Russian River, but mostly “Almost Independence Day” takes its sweet time to tell us about very few things a couple might encounter on a date in the City: the cool evening breeze, the echoes of fireworks, the lights and boats on the bay.
Why the reference to the Fourth of July? Is it just an early summer night out? Or is it something bigger for an artist who’d just crossed the U.S. to settle anew, a long way from Belfast city? Morrison himself was in a marriage that was progressing toward dissolution; it had “effectively ended” half a year after the album’s release, according to Wrench. Could that be part of the song’s “almost independence” moment? All that is open to interpretation, but to my ears, it’s one of Morrison’s most in-the-moment songs, less carefully wrought than lived in real time.
Kicking it with The Band
After his breakup, Morrison would hang around the Bay Area for a few more years. Crowe found him living in Brentwood, Los Angeles, in 1977, and although a Rolling Stone interview from 1978 said he had been living in Sausalito, Morrison was mostly farther afield: “Nowadays I go between two places: the United States for recording, working and organizing, and Ireland — Belfast and the South — for inspiration and composing,” he said.
Morrison would return to record at Sausalito’s Record Plant repeatedly. He cut a live album at the Masonic Auditorium in 1993, and perhaps most memorably, he leg-kicked his way into moviegoers’ memories with his electrifying performance of “Caravan” in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz, documenting The Band’s Thanksgiving 1976 farewell show at the Winterland Ballroom on Post Street.
He continued to write about the Bay Area after Saint Dominic’s Preview too. The follow-up, Hard Nose The Highway, begins with the heavily orchestrated “Snow in San Anselmo,” with its discussion of rare frigid weather in Marin over breakfast at the local pancake house. Veedon Fleece’s subtler “Linden Arden Stole the Highlights” paints a somber picture of a hard-drinking expat whose life is turned upside down by an act of vigilantism in the City. More recently, there’s 2016’s nostalgic “In Tiburon,” which feels more like a list of remembrances than a complete song; despite the title, it spends a fair amount of time around the City, and even has a nod to the Outer Richmond.
On 1971’s Tupelo Honey, Morrison had sketched out his feelings on his family’s cross-country move: “When I hear that robin’s song, well, I know it won’t be long/Find out where we belong/And we’re starting a new life.” On Saint Dominic’s Preview, we hear the next chapter of a Bay Area story: finding a place to belong on a hilly street, setting aside the past and imagining a new version of one’s life, seeing and hearing and feeling and breathing the misty night, trying to make the whole thing blend. It’s a tale that’s been sung, told, or at least contemplated, by many San Franciscans, new and old.
Paul Bonanos is a writer and musician in San Francisco.