Saint Dominic’s Preview, In Cleveland Of All Places

On July 22, 2015, I woke up in Cleveland.

MTV News had just hired me as weekend editor, and the good folks there liked me enough to give me three days during the week too. That meant I’d hit 40 hours and what very much resembled a full-time job if I squinted a bit, which was huge for me! About a week into July, my editor Brenna stopped by my desk to ask if I’d be into covering the upcoming Alternative Press Music Awards (APMAs), a program I admitted I hadn’t heard of. “Oh, it’s fun,” she said. “Weezer will be there, and lots of Warped Tour-kinda bands. You’ll go and do a post, like, ‘9 Times My Inner Emo Kid Lost It At The APMAs, or whatever’ Sound good?”

I considered this assignment. The month prior, I’d just been sent on my first-ever work trip to cover the Firefly Festival in Delaware for Stereogum, where I was able to see Paul McCartney and Morrissey back-to-back on the same night. I was feeling confident I could get sent out again so soon and, for this particular assignment, tap into some angst I’d embraced a decade earlier, blasting Motion City Soundtrack’s “L.G. FUAD” and sipping a stolen Bud Light. I thought, too, how only a year earlier I’d been in journalism grad school dreaming of opportunities exactly like these — propelled by, a year before that, a retail gig hawking loose tea to crunchy parents in South Brooklyn. Without much hesitation, I smiled enthusiastically and said, “Sounds good! Where is it?”

“Cleveland,” she said. And it began.

After the girl I’d just started seeing sent me an obligatory 30 Rock/Cleveland video clip (and I, in turn, sent her the infamous, legendary “Fun Times in Cleveland!” ode), I flew out on a small jet and landed around noon. That night, I met up with friends for an excursion to Great Lakes Brewing Company, as you do in the City of Light, as it’s apparently been called by someone at some time). But none of that matters.

In fact, not much of what actually what down inside the Quicken Loans Arena during the awards show the following day matters for the purposes of this story. It’s not even much of a story, really, as much as one crucial moment in which I learned that Van Morrison’s “Saint Dominic’s Preview” is the greatest song ever written. Simple really.

And it happened before I even set foot inside the Q (or on the red carpet outside).

Downtown, right across the street from the Quicken Loans Arena, I ventured out of the hotel lobby the morning of the show and ventured in search of a cup of coffee and something pasty-like for breakfast. I found it at a little cafe about five minutes away. It wasn’t busy, though its emptiness on a weekday morning made me question whether it actually ever gets busy the way coffee places in big cities do. But the relative vacancy was good as it helped lead to my Big Moment. No people meant no crowd din, which meant a better aural vantage for the sounds.

I should also note that I don’t drink coffee now, but at the time, I had slipped into a comfortable routine of a small cup most mornings. Being that this was a #BusinessTrip, I had to go all in, baby. So I went for that hot bean water, and it felt good. This was, no doubt, due to the caffeine’s intoxicating effect hitting simultaneous to the Van Morrison song in question blaring overhead as I ordered, waited, and took the first few small blow-sips there at the side of the counter.

Now, I didn’t know “Saint Dominic’s Preview” then. I knew Astral Weeks, of course, and Moondance and had grown very fond of Veedon Fleece the previous winter at the urging of a friend. But I knew Van when I heard him sing. And this one sounded good, bright and positive and brimming with ebullience via joyful horns. By the time the song’s six minutes and 23 seconds were up, I heard Van honk and crow and spit out the song’s quizzical title over and over and knew it was a song I needed to know. I made a note to revisit it later, though I somehow didn’t add it to my Spotify July 2015 playlist, records show.

So why “Saint Dominic’s Preview?” Who fucking knows, man. Van shouts out Buffalo in the first pre-chorus, which is cool, and even equates it to his home of Belfast, at least in a subconscious way. The rambling verses are mostly Van intercutting actual physical scenes and locales with states of feeling. The juxtapositions kill me:

All the orange boxes are scattered
Against the Safeway’s supermarket in the rain
And everybody feels so determined
Not to feel anyone else’s pain

“Meanwhile back in San Francisco,” he flashes earlier, “we’re trying hard to make this whole thing blend.” I had just moved to New York and was renting a room in a sweltering Queens apartment where they didn’t even bother to change the sheets before I showed up. I had lost a five-year relationship but gained a new spark, and work was a week-to-week adventure with an uncertain path forward. Trying to make it blend, indeed.

There’s a certain lilt the brass takes as the saxes and trombones bleed over from the chorus to the verses that gets me stoned every time I hear it. The final time, they wash directly into one of the most evocative octets I can name offhand—eight lines that, though I couldn’t decipher them there in the coffee shop, I think I inhaled on some metaphysical level:

And the restaurant tables are completely covered
The record company has paid out for the wine
You got everything in the world you ever wanted
Right about now your face should wear a smile

That’s the way it all should happen
When you’re in, when you’re in the state you’re in
You’ve got your pen and notebook ready
I think it’s about time, time for us to begin

This is some Childe Harold shit! A travelogue with a bleeding heart, unsure of how much blood it would be wise to actually spill, that makes mention of the act of committing that precise indecision to paper. Three hours after hearing this song for the first time, I took a small notebook and a pen with me into the Q and talked to Motion City Soundtrack themselves. (I did a bunch more on my phone, because 21st century, but the sentiment was the same.)

In a wonderful live version from 1979, seven years from the song’s first release, Van tweaks the line about your face wearing a smile to something a bit more sinister: “How come your face looks worse than mine?” He’s likely talking to himself here from the point of view of an inquiring companion, cementing the plague of self-doubt and being unsatisfied that comes with being a creative. The final verse, too, gets an update. “Socializing with the white hope few” becomes “On a high-rise building with a Manhattan view, Lord have mercy!” Hard to tell which one is richer in retroactive meaning.

Van told an interviewer before the song’s release a bit about where the title came from, saying his mind got jogged upon learning of a St. Dominic’s Church in San Francisco. But what about the “Preview” part?

“You know something? I haven’t a clue to what it means,” he reportedly said. Me neither. But I know I can still feel it. If you ever find yourself outside a small cafe in Cleveland (or Belfast, or Buffalo), do yourself a favor and walk in. At worst, you get a pastry out of it.

At best, well, that’s the sweet part. You’ll know it when you hear it. And if all goes well, your face should end up wearing a smile.