Beside You

I think everyone has kinda taken the wrong outlook on this song. I know that of course the lyrics are open to interpretation and usually it means something different to each person but everyone is claiming that this is about a "Rich" girl that Van was in love with when it's not about that at all.

Morrison stated in an interview before that this was "the kind of song that you'd sing to a kid or somebody that you love. It's basically a love song. It's just a song about being spiritually beside somebody." It has nothing to do with a woman in particular but rather anyone that you love, telling them that despite their fears and troubles you will always be " Beside" them..metaphorically of course.

Again he is dreaming of this rich girl. Wishing her previous bf will disappear and he will comfort her and she will be his. He is sure its fate.

Again he is dreaming of this rich girl. Wishing her previous bf will disappear and he will comfort her and she will be his. He is sure its fate.

damn this song is good, just listen to it, 'listen and feel' as a good friend of mine says. mo0stah rocks

This is such an amazing song. The emotion is overwhelming to anyone who still holds the belief in the beauty ( if not the purity) of the human soul. That we can indeed rise in stature as far as we can fall.

This is one of my favorite songs.

"You breathe in you breathe out you breathe in you breathe out you breath in you breathe out you breathe in you breathe out And you're high on your high-flyin' cloud Wrapped up in your magic shroud as ecstasy surrounds you This time it's found you You turn around you turn around you turn around you turn around And I'm beside you Beside you"

This part has always had a special spiritual/psychedelic meaning for me.

Kinda get the feeling that Van's idealisied this girl so much that he'd give anything just to be with her. He sees her as a solution to all his problems, and that just being beside her would be the culmination of everything he's ever worked for. Unfortunately, he doesn't yet realize that the only problem with getting your dream girl to fall in love with you is that she eventually becomes real. But for now, he's just consumed by the thought of being with her, even though she seems unattainable.

To me this song is about time passing, human life. I find it very nostalgic. Perhaps a father looking upon his young son, seeing how time is fleeting, and mourns the loss of his own childhood. Probably more likely there is only one person - standing beside their younger self with compassion as they remember their young life. In any case, I shall call the older person the father, and the younger, the son.

Little Jimmy goes on his first adventure, just like any boy when they reach a certain age - that is, right on time. The falling rain give the sense of time passing in the present, slipping past.

I imagine Broken Arrow as an old American Indian mystic, pointing down the road of life. Time only goes in one direction, there is only one way to go, but its never easy.

Now the father (or the lone person) thinks back on another frozen moment, some peak experience from his own childhood, just before the Sunday church bells chime. But even in memory those bells must chime, nothing can stop time or hold it. The bells chime, the dogs bark, life goes on.

The father thinks of the boys future life, and sees that it is good, a 'diamond studded highway', alluding back to the road in Broken Arrow's prophecy. But unfortunately this means he must lose his innocence and the rapture of childhood.

The scrapbooks are I think both the literal scrapbooks which the son will throw away soon, but also the memories collected during a lifetime, which now pour from the father.

The loss of childhood, the passing of time, this visitation of the son, is painful to the father. He experiences nostalgia or sweet sadness as he consider passing time, it confounds him. He advises the son better to live in the ecstatic present a not worry about such matters.

Then the father imagines himself visiting, and actually interacting with the son (the younger version of himself). Can memories reach back in time, like a time machine? As if the father visits the child during their sleep, with a lantern, caresses them, leaves an imprint on the child. Then he's the child again, 'remembering' the same event from a different perspective 'You held it in the doorway and you cast against the pointed island breeze' - the father with a ghostly lantern in the doorway.

'Said your time was open, go well on your merry way' - This is the now, remembering what the father said - you have a life in front of you, live it well.

Now he has really recaptured the ecstasy of his childhood, breathing in, breathing out, high on the high-flying cloud etc.

The 'never wonder why' reminds me of Wordsworth's 'Above Tintern Abbey': "Their colours and their forms, were then to me An appetite; a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm, By thought supplied, nor any interest Unborrowed from the eye.--That time is past, And all its aching joys are now no more, And all its dizzy raptures."

Again he is dreaming of this rich girl. Wishing her previous bf will disappear and he will comfort her and she will be his. He is sure its fate.

My Little Jimmy, you are on the way to the other side of the tracks where you've been told by another more experienced boy where you can find the red light district. Your are unknown in that part of town; all the dogs bark at you.

Your memory of tonight will be told tomorrow like garbage spilled out into the dump.

But I will not question or condemn why you had to do this.

To the whore: Your bold enticements have brought this virgin lad to your bed where you have intercoarse. He climaxes.

Now time has passed. My Little Jimmy, I will not question or condemn you.