Van Morrison -
A Stranger In His Own World

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Van Morrison – A Stranger In His Own World

 

1. Not “The Man” He Used To Be

 

In August 2020 Van “The Man” Morrison celebrated the milestone of his 75th birthday. A professional musician since his teens, his career has now spanned an incredible six decades. However, far from slowing down in his old age, Morrison is as busy now as he’s ever been.
Since turning 70 he has released a further seven studio albums, bringing his career total to an incredible forty three, and is still out on the road, gigging regularly around the USA and Europe. When recently questioned by an unlucky journalist as to what could possibly motivate him to still be working so hard at this stage of his life, when he obviously no longer needs the money,
Morrison responded with predictably withering scorn with the curt “it’s just what I do.”
 

As well as playing bigger venues and enjoying higher chart positions than he did in his supposed heyday, the vitality of Morrison’s late career can also be verified by that most uniquely 21st century barometer of success in the music industry; Spotify streams. As of July 2020, Morrison was averaging about a million listens a month more than his contemporary and personal friend Bob Dylan, arguably a sign that he has overtaken his long term rival in popularity and can now claim to be the most respected singer-songwriter still active in the world of popular music. Although he’s been saying as much for half a century, for Van Morrison, it truly is too late to stop now.
Unfortunately, although this is unquestionably true of Morrison’s career in commercial terms, it is not an uncommon argument that he has already “stopped” long ago when it comes to being a creative force.

There is nothing unusual about a veteran musical artist cashing in on past glories while peddling inferior new material. In fact quite the opposite; it actually happens more often than not for artists who manage to sustain their career long enough. What’s unusual in Van Morrison’s case is that for the entirety of the time, a number of decades, during which he built the reputation on which he was able to dine-out on in later years, he was little more than well respected cult artist, with his jump towards major commercial success only coming as his creative powers were beginning to fade. What’s more, and even more uniquely, Morrison has spent much of the intervening years trying to distance himself from his earlier self and deny his involvement with, or even the existence of, the musical movement that gave him the platform that lead to the vast success he would enjoy later in life.

 

2. To Whom it Concerns

 

I first saw Van Morrison live in February 2012, making a pilgrimage all the way to his home city of Belfast to see him play his first live gig in Ireland, north or south, in almost a decade. Making my way from the bus station into an icy Donegall Square in the city centre, I warmed my hands against the chill of the winter night by texting a girl I was chatting with at the time. She asked me where I was and what had brought me there, my explanation drawing from her the response of “Van Morrison? Isn’t his style kind of……..old fashioned?” Needless to say, the relationship didn’t go very far, but, to be honest, I couldn’t have blamed her for her opinion. For anyone who’s knowledge of Van Morrison is limited to his offerings since the 90's and Brown Eyed Girl (i.e. the majority of people) there would be little reason to believe his music could be worth 21st century music fans investing their time into learning more about.

 

My personal fascination with Van Morrison stems from a surprise I received over 20 years ago which I have still never recovered from to this day. As a small child growing up in the 1990's, I would often stay up with my parents to watch The Late Late Show and RTE’s (Ireland’s national television station) numerous other, lesser variety shows: Kenny Live, BB Baskin and the innumerable other silly season replacements that took the place of the bigger programmes when their presenters were on holidays. There was a repertory of artists and entertainers who circulated between all of these shows, flitting from one to the next, like hummingbirds in a flower-filled meadow. The member of this motley crew that particularly sticks in my mind is Paddy Cole, a bald-headed jazz crooner and saxophonist with a northern accent, who seemed to be on at least one of those shows every second week. He was the epitome of the RTE variety show guest; an inoffensive middle-aged man, seemingly always decked out in an immaculate white dinner-jacket. His clean-cut appearance was so pleasing to the eye that the fact that he was there sing for the crowd felt like a bonus. His act consisted of playing jazz standards, the likes of Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, etc., in between equally safe and inoffensive bantering with whoever his host was that night. It was a cocktail of schmaltz perfectly mixed to appeal to the national broadcaster’s principal prime-time demographic of senior citizens.

Around that same time, I would also have become aware of Van Morrison, who must have seemed to my child’s mind to be Paddy Cole’s evil twin. Van was also a bald-headed jazz crooner and saxophonist with a northern accent, only differentiated from his more pleasant counterpart by the fact that his ever-present jacket was black instead of white and that, instead of cheerful banter, his only means of communication with the presenters would be occasional monosyllabic grunts. The little of his face that was visible from beneath his gangster's hat and thick black shades was twisted into a permanent scowl.

 

When I got a little bit older and learned more about Ireland’s show-biz culture, the most logical assumption for me to make was that both Paddy and Van numbered alongside the likes of Joe Dolan and Dickie Rock as the last survivors of the showband scene that had dominated Irish popular music from the 1950's until the advent of punk in the late 70's. For anyone reading this from outside of Ireland, Showbands were essentially just high-profile cover bands, a meat grinder under the strict control of the country’s music impresarios into which rebellious young rock and rollers were fed and emerged wearing neat matching suits and cheesy grins. They would fill large dance halls throughout the country, playing sanitized versions of contemporary pop hits by British and American bands, as well as a crowd pleasing hodgepodge of country and western, Irish folk songs and trad jazz. In a small country starved of glamour, the most famous showbands would gain exposure on national television and radio and enjoy success in the singles charts; in fact, without access to foreign media or music magazines, Irish teenagers of the time had no way of knowing whether the bands that they began seeing on television performing versions of Beatles or Stones songs were the cover acts or actually the real Beatles or Stones themselves!

 

I would only have heard a few of Morrison’s songs up to that point; Moondance probably and definitely Days Like This, which had been a huge radio hit around that time, and perhaps a few more as well. All were soft, jazzy numbers where the barking vocals were drowning in an ocean of brass. These pleasant, but completely edgeless, tunes would have done a lot to reinforce my assumptions and that Van’s place in the world of music was in the back of a mini-bus driving to gigs in town halls in places like Athlone or Tullamore.

A few years later and music was becoming the principal interest in my life as I approached my teens. Around the turn of the millennium, I began spending a lot of time researching the origins of the music that was entrancing me. In the days before high-speed internet, a lot of that involved reading actual ink and paper books, which had either been borrowed by me from the library or, nearly as frequently, left lying around the house by my music-loving father. One of these was a hard backed encyclopaedia of rock history, a massive tome bound in thick white cardboard. In those days, when information was harder to access, the book’s impressive presentation gave it an air of authority; to my pre-pubescent brain it seemed like what was contained within its pages were nothing less than the definitive account of the glorious history of rock. I was becoming very enamoured with the mythology of rock and roll and bought into in a big way the idea that the genre was more than just an art form and just as much a way of life. As the 60's had only ended about 30 years earlier at that point, most of the legends of rock and roll music were still only in their late 50's or early 60's.
The dawn of rock culture was still recent enough that those of us who cared could still feel as though we were living through a continuous movement that, even though it had started decades earlier, was still going on around us, rather than looking back at events that were now part of ancient history.
 

Although I was of course appreciative of U2, who at that point were still the most popular band in the world, I found it hard to shrug off the lingering disappointment that during the 60's and 70's, which, like many before me, I regarded as the movement’s golden era, there was no Irish artist that
I knew of who had stood shoulder to shoulder with the legends. With that disappointment constantly in mind, I was completely caught off guard one evening as I flipped lazily through my new white-backed Bible of rock and roll. Towards the back of the book there was a section on the editor’s choices for the most important albums and singles arranged by year from the mid-50's through to the books’ publication date in the early 90's. Upon reaching the page on 1968 I stopped, paused and took a further look, perhaps not able to process the enormously surprising image that looked back up at me. Nestled between The White Album and Beggar’s Banquet, which even at that stage in my musical education I was already conditioned to expect, was an album I’d never heard of, which one of the usually non-committal contributors to the book had bravely proclaimed to be “the best album of 1968.” A quarter of the page was taken up with the album’s cover art: a blurry looking image of the face of a long haired young man with his eyes closed that had been superimposed over a faded picture of a leafy tree, it’s branches dancing in far-off sunlight. The print on the album cover read Van Morrison: Astral Weeks. I couldn’t get over what I was looking at. Surely it can’t be the same guy, I remember thinking. For one thing, the guy on the album cover had hair.

 

3. In The Days Before Rock And Roll

 

George Ivan “Van” Morrison was born in East Belfast on August the 31st 1945, the child of solidly working-class Ulster-Protestant parents, George & Violet Morrison. His father worked in the city’s famous shipyard and his mother had trained as a dancer before retiring to be a home-maker. Unusually for the time, the Morrison’s only had one child. This was probably very fortunate for the young Van; anecdotes about his childhood eccentricities and mood swings indicate that if he were growing up nowadays he would probably have been labelled as being on the autism spectrum or as special needs. The Morrisons were unusually tolerant and patient with their difficult child, a great contrast to the harsh discipline most of his contemporaries would have received from their parents.

Despite coming from a culturally Protestant and Unionist background, Morrison had an unusual religious upbringing: his father was an atheist with no interest in spiritual matters while his mother had flirted with the Jehovah’s Witnesses and always encouraged Van to go out and seek his own truth, an interest he would maintain throughout his entire life. The unifying interest in the household was music: unlike most British and Irish teenagers of his generation, Van’s interest in the music of America didn’t begin with rock and roll, but with its antecedents; blues, folk, country, gospel, jazz and R&B. His father had spent some time working in America and had come back to Belfast with what many people considered to be the best record collection in the city and was encouraging of his son’s musical efforts. Throughout the entirety of his long career, Morrison has always remained much more interested in the music that inspired rock and roll than with the rock and roll scene that he himself was a part of. Although his live set lists frequently feature cover songs, they are very rarely of songs released after 1962, with the exception of the Bob Dylan numbers which crop up from time to time. Dylan and their mutual collaborators The Band aside, when speaking about music and the artist’s that influenced him, Morrison seldom talks about his contemporaries from the 60's or 70's, but almost always about the artists that came before him; Muddy Waters, Hank Williams, Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, James Brown and innumerable other less well remembered names.

Academically mediocre, the young Morrison dropped out of school at 14 and famously became a window cleaner while simultaneously beginning to gig around Belfast with showbands; at that time, surprisingly, as a saxophonist rather than as a vocalist. In the summer of 1963, just when he was about to turn 18, the young Van travelled with The Monarchs, the showband he was then playing with at the time, to Scotland for a series of gigs, which lead to further gigs in London and a residency in a club in Hamburg, where they were one of many “British” bands being signed up by the city’s local impresarios, all of whom were hoping to recreate the success the pre-fame Beatles had enjoyed in the city a few years earlier.

As many of the gigs were heavily attended by off-duty American GI's, it was here that Morrison played to American audiences for the first time. The enthusiasm they shared for his beloved R&B made him resolve that when he returned to Belfast his showband days would be behind him and he would put together a band that played nothing but American blues and soul.

 

 

 

 

4. The Angry Young Them

 

In January 1964, Morrison founded the hard-edged R&B band Them to play a weekly gig at the Maritime Hotel, which become the epicentre of Belfast’s (and eventually, Ireland’s) burgeoning rock music scene. Despite the disdain he would later express for the genre, Them were very much a garage rock band, in the same vein as the likes of The Sonics, The Stooges or the early Kinks. Styling themselves as Ireland’s answer to The Rolling Stones, who were just beginning to scandalize parents across the Irish Sea, Them became known for their sensational live shows, in which the formerly shy Morrison came out of himself like a man released from prison, becoming the centre of the band’s live act as he ran up and down the stage, howling, rolling on the ground and occasionally even flinging his shoes into the audience. Right from the beginning, it was apparent what a great vocalist Morrison was; possessing a voice which later prompted the great American rock critic Greil Marcus to say “no white man sings like Van Morrison.” Principally inspired by the heroes of gospel and R&B (an extremely vague term with numerous meanings, which, when used in reference to the music of the 50's and 60's, refers to all the African American music which would go on to evolve into soul) Morrison was blessed with an extraordinary high vocal range, which aided his ability to seamlessly blend his singing with actual howls and screams, a mastery of scat singing and vocal ad-libbing and a unique style of phrasing. His vocals were emotive to the point of almost sounding as though he were in pain; at times it sounds as if he’s squeezing all of his inner-most feelings into a ball and firing them out through his throat. As they began to attract attention around the city, record labels began to show interest as well. Phil Solomon, Belfast’s leading music agent and the most famous Irish act of the 60's, the wholesome vocal harmony group The Bachelors, was sufficiently impressed to take a punt on them and expand his empire into the world of rock and roll. He became Them’s manager and arranged a record deal with Decca Records, The Rolling Stones’ label. Only a few months after they’d begun playing together, Solomon flew the band over to London where they recorded a number of songs at a session with Burt Berns, a legendary in-house producer and songwriter for Atlantic Records, whom Solomon had personally also flown in from the other side of the ocean at great expense. Even though still only in his mid-30s, Berns was already a legend in the world of rock and roll, co-writer of such classics as Twist & Shout, Hang On Sloopy, Piece of my Heart, Cry To Me and Everybody Needs Somebody To Love. Despite the calibre of talent that he was used to working with, Berns was greatly impressed by Morrison. In truth, even at that stage, everybody involved with the group knew that the vocalist was about 90% of Them’s appeal. Not only did Morrison provide a unique vocal presence and an on-stage focal point, he was also the only member that wrote songs (when Them’s debut album, The Angry Young Them, finally arrived it was comprised of 50% R&B covers and 50% Morrison originals.)

Them’s first single, the generic blues cover Don’t Start Crying Now, was released a few months after the London sessions and deservedly sank without trace. The record’s A-side was a poor choice, as the B-side, the moody One Two Brown Eyes (the first Van Morrison original song ever released to the public) was vastly superior. With Solomon’s help and the power of Billy Harrison’s immortal guitar riff, Them’s next single, their rocked-up cover of Big Joe William’s blues standard Baby Please Don’t Go (Them’s version itself was later covered note for note by AC/DC for their debut single), made it to #10 on the UK charts after it had been used for several weeks as the theme tune to the BBC pop show Ready Steady Go. Much more importantly, it’s B-side would become the song that the band would be best remembered for; Gloria, another Morrison original, which had been the high point of their live shows since their days in the Maritime. Though it rocked far harder and was more explicitly sexual than any of the later music that he would build his brand around, Gloria still introduced the record buying public to the mystical side of Morrison’s persona. Although the narrative of Gloria is a simple tale of boy meets girl and then has sex with girl, the song’s lyrics, the mood conveyed by it’s simple but hypnotic guitar and organ riffs and the vocalist’s trance-like phrasing (especially “Come up to my room……………make me feel alright,” the famous pre-chorus line which becomes increasingly more slurred and drawn out each time Morrison repeats it) make it clear that the protagonist regards the object of his affection as being far more than simply his partner in earthly delights, but more as a gateway into a higher spiritual realm. A theme he would frequently rhapsodise about over the course of his career, Morrison’s lyrical alter-ego seems to regard the sexual act as a kind of sacred experience, such is the level of his rapture when he’s in the presence of his lover.

Although Them’s version never became a chart hit anywhere, Gloria eventually went on to greatly outshine its A-Side in terms of popularity, becoming a radio staple in the USA and inspiring a very faithful cover by Chicago band The Shadows of Night, who took it all the way to the Top 10 in the USA and sales of over a million copies. Gloria became not only a rock and roll standard but a cliché. For a generation, it was famously the default choice of first song learned by all rock guitarists when first picking up the instrument, an honour it earned due to being extremely easy to play and also because of its subversive, parent-botheringly sexual lyrics. The American humorist Dave Barry once wrote “You can throw a guitar off a cliff, and as it bounces off rocks on the way down, it will, all by itself, play Gloria.”

Them’s next hit proved to be their biggest. The poppy Here Comes The Night, a Bert Berns’ composition originally recorded a few months earlier by Lulu, made it all the way to #2 on the UK chart, the only Top 10 single Morrison notched in that country throughout his entire career, and the Top 30 in America. However, the band failed to capitalize on this success and become major chart stars, due to their refusal to “play the game” of engaging with the media. Their surly and defensive interviews (carried out not only by Morrison, who later became famous for them, but by the entire band) earned them the hatred of the press and their subsequent releases received little publicity and failed to make much of an impact on the charts. Having moved to England full time at this point and finding themselves without any further hit singles, the band spent their time touring provincial British towns, playing smaller and smaller clubs, being unable to attract an audience. After two years of constant gigging, in 1966 the band embarked on a make or break American tour, the highlight of which was a series of shows at The Whiskey A-Gogo club in LA where they were supported by future legends The Doors and Captain Beefheart. During one set, Morrison joined The Doors on stage to duet with his namesake, Jim Morrison, on a version of Gloria. The performance was sadly not recorded and remains a great moment in rock and roll history that has been lost to the ages.
Despite the undoubted high points, the tour ended acrimoniously as the band members fell out once and for all with Phil Solomon over money. Them broke up and its former members returned to Belfast, where the majority of them returned to immediate futures as unwilling members of showbands.

 

 

 

 

 

5. Bert, Bang & Brown Eyed Girl
 

Van Morrison spent an unhappy six months during the second half of 1966 trying to readjust to his old life in Belfast. Briefly in a showband with future Thin Lizzy co-founder Eric Bell, his spell back on the Northern Irish music circuit was a colossal disaster. The petulant Morrison enraged audiences all over Ulster by refusing to play Them’s hits, instead playing them the sprawling new improvisational compositions that he was working on. He was saved from obscurity in January 1967 when he received an unexpected phone call from Bert Berns. Them’s former mentor had left Atlantic and opened his own label, Bang Records, and requested that Morrison come to New York to attend a recording session.

A number of songs were recorded at the session, the stand-out being considered to be the radio-friendly Brown Eyed Girl. A bouncy and seemingly innocuous bit of pop-fluff, driven by a catchy but surprisingly intricate electric guitar lick and a choir of “sha-la-la-ing” female back-up singers, the song still contained flashes of Morrison’s genius that elevated it above many similarly summery sounding records which it has gone on to outlive. The lyrics, if carefully listened to, tell a tale of heart-breaking longing and sadness over a now finished and mythologized relationship which had gone sour (“So hard to find my way, now that I’m all on my own, saw you just the other day, my, how you have grown.”) Released as the first solo single of Van Morrison's career, it went all the way to #10 on the US Billboard Chart (in 2011 Brown Eyed Girl was given a special award by
the American Broadcast Music Institute to denote it’s status as one of only ten songs at that time
to have received over ten million radio plays in that country and for the largest percentage of the population remains the only Van Morrison song they know), prompting Morrison to move to the USA permanently where he continued his awkward relationship with the media. This included
a cringe-inducing mimed performance of his hit on American Bandstand, where he spent the entire time standing uncomfortably with his hands behind his back, rolling his eyes and looking away from the camera whenever possible.

Morrison’s enthusiasm to flee to the USA appeared to have been a rash decision, as he was soon to fall out with his record label. Tensions began to grow when Bang rush-released his first solo album without his consent, in order to cash in on the success of the hit single. The critically unloved
Blowin’ Your Mind was cobbled together from all of the tracks which had been recorded at his initial New York recording session, which Morrison claims had only been recorded with the intention of being considered for release as a collection of singles and their B-sides. It sold very poorly and was subject to generally bad reviews. Matters worsened when Bang began withholding his royalties from Brown Eyed Girl, a matter which has never been completely resolved to this day. Already unsure of where he stood with the label, things were further complicated when Berns died unexpectedly of a heart attack, leaving Morrison’s future up in the air.

He was saved when his American girlfriend Janet “Planet” Rigsby agreed to marry him, ensuring him of a visa to remain in the country. His musical career was subsequently rescued by a similar deus
ex-machina when Warner Brothers agreed to buy out his record contract. Bang Records had been part-owned by members of the Mafia, so the Warner representative who oversaw the deal had to deliver the money in a suitcase full of dollar bills which was handed over in an abandoned office building! With some unsavoury associates of Bang still looking for him, Morrison and his new wife fled New York for Boston. While essentially still in hiding there, he played low key gigs in clubs around the city, road testing the material that would eventually appear on his first album for Warner Brothers, the so-called “best album of 1968,” Astral Weeks.

 

6. Venturing in the Slipstream

Although Morrison was given free reign by his new record label during the recording of Astral Weeks , even for an era when experimental music was becoming fashionable, it’s unlikely that
Warner Brothers were thrilled to receive a full album-length song cycle of improvisational jazz-influenced folk when they were expecting a collection of Brown Eyed Girls. The album sold very poorly at first and also (surprisingly, given its present-day critical reputation) was generally badly reviewed, particularly in the UK where it was deemed to be a hopelessly pretentious attempt by a failed former pop-star to demand credibility as a serious artist. However, right from the beginning, it was championed on the other side of the water by the fledging Rolling Stone magazine.
Rolling Stone was, to my knowledge, the first magazine founded exclusively to cover rock and roll music; the other major music publications which were covering pop music at that time had mostly been founded before rock had come into existence and simply adapted over the years to cover the prevailing musical trends of the time. Rolling Stone acted as a platform to voice the opinions, not just on music, but on social and political issues, from the perspective of the rock and roll/baby boomer generation. Part of the magazine’s ethos was to promote new works by members of the rock fraternity who were attempting to treat the music as a serious art form for adults. As well as the leading lights of the genre such as The Beatles and Dylan, Rolling Stone also championed more obscure artists of the time, including the likes of Frank Zappa and The Velvet Underground.
Despite Morrison’s fervent protests that Astral Weeks was not a rock and roll album (principally due to it’s lack of electric guitar and drums), the album was still a serious-sounding musical work that a rock and roll audience could relate to, due to the simple verse-chorus nature of the songs and Morrison’s unique, but still distinctly soul music influenced, vocals stylings. Rolling Stone embraced Morrison as a significant flag bearer for their generation’s music, a status that they continue to bestow upon him decades later, despite, at this point, years and years of consistently producing mediocre albums.

The lyrics of Astral Weeks, though ambiguous and difficult to interpret (a task not made any easier by Morrison’s vocals, often made incomprehensible due to a combination of his oral gymnastics and strong Belfast accent) relate the dreamlike impressions that it's author holds of a place and time that, although recent experienced, (his childhood and adolescence, which at that point, had occurred less than a decade earlier) already seemed to come from an unreachable bygone era. Although the stories and places featured in the songs refer prinicpally to Belfast, all of them are filtered through the veil of Morrison’s recollection and likely bear little relationship to the real place. The Belfast in Astral Weeks is similar to Joyce’s version of Dublin that appeared in the pages of Ulysses; a gloomy, rain-strewn British city dominated by religious prejudice and conservatism reimagined from the perspective of a life-long outsider into a supernatural dream realm.

The clearest example of this is Cyprus Avenue, the closing track of what would have been Side One during the days of vinyl. Morrison’s concept for the song was to create a 12-bar blues number, but without any of the flashy 7th chords which are known for giving the genre it’s typical,
slightly uneasy, edge. Indeed, the harpsichord-led studio version of the song is reflective and sedate in comparison with the brass-heavy tour de force that it would later be reimagined into when it was repurposed as Morrison’s concert closer throughout the 70's. The eponymous street which inspired the song, easily one of the most beautiful in all of Ireland, can be found in an affluent suburb in
East Belfast, and has been home to many of the great and good of the city (most notably CS Lewis & Ian Paisley) over the years. The street is populated with enormous and splendid redbrick houses, which for six months of the year are almost hidden from the road by the blooming leaves of the tall trees that line its pavements. Throughout much of the year, the thick foliage makes it difficult for sunlight to penetrate down to the ground level, bathing the street in an eerie, otherworldly, green glow. It’s easy to imagine how for a young man with Morrison’s interest in the existence of spiritual alternate dimensions that such a setting could leave a strong impression on him. Despite its undoubted aesthetic qualities, the opulence in which the Avenue’s residents lived was no doubt earned through the pursuit of more traditional careers such as law or medicine. In the conservative climate of mid-20th century Northern Ireland, it’s likely that many of them would have been bemused by Morrison’s lyrics of watching a mystical damsel, her hair festooned with multicoloured ribbons, leading a convoy of horse-drawn carriages down the middle of their street.

Astral Week’s lyrics of rain-strewn gardens, sturdy ships sailing on tranquil seas, the chimes of distant church bells, as well as symbols of quaint urbanity such as winding cobbled streets (all of which most of seemed hopelessly exotic to his primarily American audience), experienced by usually nameless protagonists looking on at them from a distance, are much more a collection of emotionally evocative imagery than anything resembling cohesive narratives. The album’s most famous song, the three-chord, nine minute epic, Madame George (which so vividly described it’s mysterious protagonist’s movements that the “clicky-clacking of the high heeled shoes” were almost audible) has inspired decades of debate about its meaning, with many more literally-minded listeners believing it to be a recounting of the journey of a drag queen through the streets of Belfast, as the song mixes a list of street names like Fitzroy Avenue and Sandy Row in amongst more surreal imagery such as games of dominoes. In truth, the song’s original title was Madame Joy either accidentally or deliberately translated on the album’s sleeve as George, due to the American ear’s difficulty in interpreting Morrison’s accent. Although it’s author has unhelpfully refused to ever elaborate on its meaning, it’s most likely the case the song is, again, little more than a collection of imagery about nothing in particular.

Combined with the tangible sensation of yearning in the fragile beauty of the singer’s young voice (the line repeated at the end of the title track, “I ain’t nothing but a stranger in this world” sums up Morrison’s art and personality better than anything else that he would go on to write throughout the rest of his career) and the unique musical texture created by the messy but strangely intense twang of the string section and lead acoustic guitar lines, the album’s evocative and indefinable mood was enough for Rolling Stone to anoint Morrison as a rock and roll mystic; a cause furthered when the magazine’s staff discovered he was Irish. It made little difference (and probably wasn’t well understood by Rolling Stones’ American staff) that Morrison was an Ulster Protestant with no knowledge (at that point of his life) of the Irish language, Irish traditional music, the Irish literary tradition or Celtic spirituality. Surprisingly, given how angrily he has always reacted to anyone attempting to put any kind of labels on him or his work, the tag of “Irish” never seems to have bothered Morrison, who often refers to himself as such in his rare and grudgingly given interviews, with him even having gone on to write several songs bearing the adjective in their title, such as
Irish Heartbeat and One Irish Rover.

Whether or not he is Irish in a political sense (in over 50 years of interviews he has never divulged his opinions on any aspects of the Northern Ireland situation, despite being pressed on it many times) Morrison shares several characteristics which are stereotypically associated with Irishness; as well as the obvious gift for music, he has a veracious hunger for all kinds of literature and poetry and clearly experiences a very genuine emotional reaction when immersed in the natural world. From the first mentions of crystal streams and leafy trees and the like which went on to become frequent topics in his work, it was his twin fascinations with nature and spirituality that made his music unlike anything that had been heard before in the rock world.

Astral Weeks was the first time many became aware of what would become Morrison’s greatest contribution to popular music; using instrumental vamping (repeating a simple sequence of chords over and over again, gradually increasing in volume and intensity to stimulate an emotional response) and vocal ad-libbing as more than mere entertainment but as a tool to lead him and his audience towards enlightenment. Even today Morrison’s ability as a band leader is a sight to behold; without the benefit of a white baton to wave, or a lead instrument which his colleagues can follow along with, he has a miraculous ability to hold his backing musicians in the palm of his hand, dragging them up to the top of a mountain of cacophony with a scream and then dragging them back down it again to leave a venue in complete silence by simply reducing the volume of his voice to a whisper. In Morrison’s hands, a simple two or three chord riff, repeated over and over again becomes more than a way to clock up the minutes of a gig and instead a kind of Buddhist chant, designed to break the listener’s stream of consciousness through it’s repetition, forcing them away from the chattering of their mind and into the “eternal now” beyond time and space.
Despite the genre’s name, soul music artists seldom sing about things of the spirit, but Van Morrison is an exception to this. His co-opting of soul music’s basic techniques of repetitive chanting and
vocal call and response to opine about the beauty of God’s green earth and the hope for the revelation of the higher world of which it is but a pale reflection was a revolutionary idea (when the likes of James Brown employed the same techniques, he was seldom using it to refer to anything but getting his rocks off,) veering rock and roll away from the typically urban setting which had always been it’s default habitat. The rich acoustic instrumental backing on Astral Weeks perfectly matches the album’s nature imagery, giving it a uniquely organic and outdoorsy feeling. Setting it in this word is the reason why Astral Weeks is still held in such high regard tothis day (according to the statistics based website Acclaimed Music.net, it is the 15th most praised album in the history of music journalism) and it remains one of the few pieces of rock and roll that genuinely deserves the accolade of timeless.

 

7. A Marvellous Night for a Moondance

 

In his typically blunt and graceless fashion, Morrison later said of his magnum opus “People say Astral Weeks changed their lives but it didn’t change my fucking life!” In another unusually candid interview, he spoke of his standing in the music world at the time thusly: “I had all these reviews saying Astral Weeks was a great rock album; anyone with ears can hear there’s no rock in that at all. I had no money; I was literally starving. I realized if I wanted to make some money, I’d have to make something that sounded like a rock album.” An anti-social recluse with one foot in the next world he may be, but Morrison has also always been a surprisingly canny businessman. Throughout his career, he has always maintained a constant awareness about where his next dime has been coming from, likely a genetic throwback to his Ulster-Scots upbringing.

At the end of 1969, having just moved to the up and coming artist’s community of Woodstock, in
the appropriately name Ulster County in up-state New York (the famous festival was actually held in the neighbouring town of Bethel, the name Woodstock being used due to it's associations with the music scene,) Morrison deliberately set out to make the most commercially appealing album he possibly could, putting together a new band that contained contributors that he would go on to work with on and off for decades to come; the likes of guitarist John Platania, pianist Jeff Labes and saxophonist Jack Schroer.

The eventual album, Moondance, was a total sea change from its predecessor, despite being made up of much of the same DNA. Like Astral Weeks, the songs were still based around simple chord progressions with folksy acoustic guitar being the dominant instrument, despite still playing second-fiddle to Morrison’s saxophone-like vocal wailings which continued to deliver vaguely spiritual sounding lyrics. However, although the songs on both albums might have consisted of the same number of chords, their author’s approach to their composition was totally different on the second attempt. On Astral Weeks, the three or four chords that made up each song were generally dragged out and repeated ad-infinitum for as long as five or six minutes, allowing the lead instruments and Morrison’s vocals to improvise around them. On Moondance, although the chord changes were equally simple, they were well chosen and precisely timed, with the songs generally being tight and impeccably well structured. Numbers like Crazy Love, These Dreams of You and the famous title track (the only Irish song with has become a standard in the repertoire of many jazz acts, despite it’s author's later efforts to write more) chug along smoothly, shifting from verse to bridge to chorus and back again before a casual listener gets the chance to get bored and proving that, at heart, Morrison was a master of the pop-music form, even though he’d always be loath to admit it.

The album opens with And It Stoned Me, perhaps home to the most abrupt intro in popular music history and a good example of how Morrison had begun refining his style. The song’s narrative tells the, allegedly true, story from Morrison’s childhood, where a rained-out fishing trip with a friend led to a quasi-mystical experience, where the awe-struck boy stood under the bucketing rain and enjoyed a sensation of time standing still. Although the lyrical content is every bit as oblique as that which was found on Astral Weeks, here it’s recounted over a radio-friendly four and a half minutes of briskly-stomping acoustic guitar and piano, instead of being stretched out over seven or eight minutes of wild strumming and incoherent vocal howling, and features all the hallmarks of a pop song; a minor chord drop in the bridge, soaring high notes in the chorus and even an (admittedly acoustic) guitar solo in the middle.

Throughout Moondance, the lead instrument is John Platania’s acoustic guitar, with electric guitar being banished from all but two of the album’s tracks. The ensemble are locked into place by a rock solid, rock-band style, rhythm section, but one in which the drummer is clearly adept at jazz as well, as some of his fills sound distinctly like a man straining to be released from the leash of 4/4. With this rock music foundation holding everything in place, the album’s other principle agents of ornamentation are Jeff Labes’s clearly jazz inspired piano, which swirls like leaves in the autumn wind all over the tracks, and the water-tight soul music horn section. Although all of the influences from the subgenres that make up the “roots” of rock are evident throughout, despite the jazzy overtones, the album is still primarily a near 50/50 fusion between Dylan & The Band style-folk rock and Atlantic/Stax classic R&B. Morrison’s lyrics, while still beautifully evocative and seldom specific, are clearer and more intelligible, always appealing to the heart rather than the head just as on
Astral Weeks, but much easier for listeners to make out and sing along with.

The album’s sound could be broadly summed up as “rock” (a label that fits far more comfortably than it did Astral Weeks) or, maybe more appropriately, by the then newly coined (but still rather vague) adjective of “singer songwriter.” Breaking it down into subgenres, it can more accurately be referred to as “folk-rock soul.”

 

The whole thing comes together to perfection on Into the Mystic. Later on in his career, as the
20-something year old rock fans who had embraced Astral Weeks & Moondance aged into 40-something academics, the epithet poet began to be frequently applied to Morrison and
(unlike many other adjectives) was one that he was more than happy to accept. While its appropriateness is debatable while looking at the entire span of his work, the term poetry does not look out of place when applied to Into The Mystic.

As the opening line goes: “We were born before the wind, all so younger than the sun. Ere the bonny boat was one, as we sail into the mystic.”
What does it all mean? I’ve no idea. But in terms of the quality of the word play…….is “I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree” really incomparably better?

Inarguably, the imagery featured in the song refers to a nautical journey, but in truth, on this song, Morrison’s voice and the words he is reciting are less a narrative and more a vocalization; just another lead instrument amongst the several already present in the Moondance band; there to be experienced emotionally rather than appreciated intellectually. The destination is far less important than the journey. The dreamy non-specificity of the lyrics and vocals sit in great contrast to the achingly strict common time swing of the music, the definitive example of the bass and drums’ enormous influence over the album’s sound. Yet the contradiction is probably the song’s greatest strength; Into The Mystic is Morrison’s entire art and career, everything that he spent 50-plus minutes of free form yowling trying to convey on Astral Weeks neatly packed and presented in
3 minutes and 30 seconds. In the moments when he strains for the high note in the chorus, he sounds like a man scraping the bottom of his soul and dragging what he finds down there up to the surface for all to see. Although nothing will ever challenge Brown Eyed Girl in the consciousness of the general public, over the years Into The Mystic has gone on to become easily Morrison’s most popular song amongst his fan base.

Even though Astral Weeks is always used as the automatic go-to record to justify Morrison’s status as a musical genius, it’s probably the work of his which is least representative of this argument.
On that album, although Morrison is unquestionably the album’s focal point, the work’s magic comes from a fusion of it's author’s talents with the unrestrained and inspired improvisation of the session men who backed him on it, making it more of a collaborative effort than any of the other albums that he produced during his career. Moondance, on the other hand, was not only entirely written by Morrison but also produced and arranged by him as well, standing as a testament to Morrison’s position as a giant of popular music.

Unlike its predecessor, Moondance received rapturous reviews all round, including from the British press which had heaped scorn on Astral Weeks. More importantly, it was a huge commercial success; despite its modest chart placings (#29 in America and #32 in Britain, with a number #9 placing in the Netherlands being it’s only Top 10 appearance anywhere) the album was an immediate seller. Over the years, it has gone on to be, by a great distance, the best-selling studio album of Morrison’s career; in the USA, not only is it his only platinum certified studio album, it has allegedly sold over four million copies, more than all of his other classic 70's albums put together. I have no way of knowing whether or not the bulk of these sales came in the initial years after the album’s release or over the course of decades as the album’s reputation grew in stature. Although it took me a long time to notice it, of the many versions of Morrison’s songs that can be found on YouTube being covered by bands of the classic rock, roots or country/folk rock variety, the majority
of them are tracks taken from this album. As one perceptive critic put it “Moondance was Morrison’s one brief moment of classic rock immortality.” Dad Rock loving headbangers may love Thin Lizzy, but for those whose musical nirvana is the mythological golden age of the 60's and 70's, Morrison remains the sole Irish representative in the pantheon of rock and roll greats of the time; however, for the vast majority of fans, his influence on the era can mostly be found within the 10 tracks on Moondance.

Although it is a very fine album, I would take issue with Moondance’s status as the default best “conventional” Van Morrison record. Astral Weeks takes its place in his canon as the best work that he ever produced, but it remains kind of an anomaly; not only in his work but in rock music in general. Astral Weeks is far more about the tone and the feel of the world that Morrison and his musicians create within it than about the quality of the song-writing. As such, it is that rare album from within the sphere of popular music that is much better appreciated in its entirety than as a collection of songs from which the listener can dip in and out of or skip depending on his preference.
This bestows upon it an almost symphonic quality, giving it a rarefied feel that sets it apart from the rest of his albums and assures it of its lofty and unreachable status as the greatest thing he has ever produced. Moondance, on the other hand, is unquestionably a great album but, in my opinion, not a million miles better than several other equally great records that Van produced throughout the rest of the 70's. It also has one major flaw which is well known to everyone who is familiar with it, despite the fact I have only seen it acknowledged in print once; it is possibly the worst sequenced album in history. With the exception of the album’s most experimental (and in my opinion, by far its worst) track, the harpsichord and flute dominated Everyone, every track on Moondance is great, but there’s no denying that the five best tracks are the first five; the old Side One in the days of vinyl. These five (And It Stoned Me, the title track, Crazy Love, Caravan and Into The Mystic) have gone on to become easily the best known and most popular in terms of radio play, licencing in TV and film, covers by other artists and even on the track listing of later Van Morrison compilation albums, and have gone on to overshadow the rest of the album, making Side Two seem like something of a let-down by comparison.

 

8. The Golden Age

 

Morrison continued to use the folk-soul template that he established on Moondance as the basis of his sound for all of the other albums he made throughout the course of the 70's. Sometimes one or other of the parent genres of rock and roll came to the fore more than the others over the course of an individual album; His Band And The Street Choir leaned distinctly towards brass heavy R&B whereas Tupelo Honey was principally country rock, but, ultimately, he never strayed too far from Moondance’s winning formula. The critical and (never to be equalled by a studio album) commercial success of Moondance earned Morrison a fan-base for which to play to and continue to earn a good living from and, basically, he has kept up this modus-operandi for the 50 years that have passed since then. The famous Protestant work ethic that had influenced his career from it’s very earliest days continued to drive him and he began pumping out albums left, right and centre at a rate which has only marginally diminished over the course of his decades long career. Morrison later dismissively claimed that his prolificness during this period was less the work of a tortured artist driven to express himself and more that of a self-employed businessman working as hard as he could to keep the wolf from his door. Between 1968 and 1974, he released eight albums in six years (Astral Weeks, Moondance, His Band And The Street Choir, Tupelo Honey, Saint Dominic’s Preview, Hard Nose The Highway, It’s Too Late To Stop Now and Veedon Fleece), after which he took a well-deserved break for the next two and a half, as a result of suffering from burnout.

After playing it safe for the next two albums after Moondance, the experimentalism of Astral Weeks slowly began to creep back into Morrison’s music on the brilliant Saint Dominic’s Preview. The album’s A-Side and B-Side both ended with an over-long, improvisational number, respectively, the magnificent Listen to The Lion, a combination of Moondance’s catchy, conventional, verse-chorus pop songs with an extended Astral Weeks style ad-libbed fade out, which is usually cited by both fans and critics as amongst the best songs of his career, and the rather forgettable
Almost Independence Day. Although many music magazine’s lists and his most casual fans usually boil Morrison’s claim to greatness down to only Astral Weeks and Moondance, the better informed know that his critical reputation was earned over the entire span of this “Golden Era,” with each and every successive album being as least as good, if not better, than the last.

Looking at it half a century later, it’s hard to know exactly how big Morrison was in the early ’70s. Despite being a European by birth, professionally he was at that stage unquestionably part of the American music scene where the majority of his audience resided. That being said even there, most of his albums of the time sold only modestly (at least by the standards of major artists.) Only two of those that followed shortly after Moondance (Tupelo Honey, which sold around a million copies and the Saint Dominic’s, which has sold around half a million) come close to reaching the threshold for gold or platinum certification. In general, his chart placings were consistent but unspectacular, with his albums usually reaching the Top 30, and almost always charting higher in his adopted home of the USA than in the UK. His highest chart placing in either of those two principle music markets during this era (and for decades afterwards) was when Saint Dominic’s reached #15 in the States. Again, it’s hard to gage Morrison’s popularity at the time without knowing how many of those album sales were earned during the years that immediately followed the albums’ releases and how many were racked up over the decades as his music’s legacy grew. During the dissolution of his first marriage in 1973, a settlement from the divorce revealed that he and his wife split savings of 40,000 dollars (about 230,000 dollars adjusting for inflation); a sizeable amount to be sure for a man still in his 20’s, but a pittance in comparison to the earnings of the likes of Mick Jagger & Elton John.
The category into which Morrison probably fit best at this time was that of the “critic’s darling;” one of those artists that all of your cooler friends kept telling you to listen to, but whom you seldom heard played on the radio or while you were browsing in the supermarket, with his reputation making his name more famous than his sales figures should have allowed him to be. Although it’s unlikely to have meant much to him, such was the then still trendsetting Rolling Stone magazine’s love for him in the first half of the 70's that he appeared twice on the magazine’s front cover.
As Dr Hook famously rhapsodised, this was at the time popular culture’s ultimate accolade, an honour casually afforded to the disinterested Morrison while less hip pop stars who couldn’t get near the front cover despite probably outselling him 10 to 1 would’ve killed for the privilege.

Van Morrison threatened to actually break through to a bigger audience in 1973 with the success of a series of shows he played with an amazing backing group dubbed the Caledonia Soul Orchestra. For a series of gigs in the USA & first his UK shows since his days in Them, he was backed by an
11-piece backing group featuring a full string and horn section complimenting the standard rock band line up. The cost of bringing such an ensemble on the road must have been absolutely enormous and it’s unlikely that Morrison was a big enough name draw to merit the record company splashing out for it on the strength of his name alone. More than likely, such extravagance was afforded to him, simply due to the time the tour took place. The 1970s was the golden era of recorded music, a time when pop and rock was the primary interest of every young person and the industry was drowning in cash and cocaine. In the end, the resulting tour proved to be spectacular, with many rock publications proclaiming the gigs to be the best of the year and the commemorative live album, the incredible It’s Too Late To Stop Now, going on to become a deserved fixture on lists of all-time greatest live albums for decades to come (completists usually choose either this album or Saint Dominic’s Preview as the final entry needed to complete a “holy trinity” of best Van albums, alongside Astral Weeks and Moondance.)

In another example of his typical contrarianism, as soon as the tour was over Morrison disbanded the group. Apart from the classically tinged strings and occasional jazzy piano solos, the band on
It’s Too Late To Stop Now was very much a soul band, as they were billed in their title, with the horns being the only section challenging Morrison’s vocals for attention in the album’s mix. Fearing complacency as usual, Morrison went straight back into the studio and recorded the enigmatic Veedon Fleece, an album of piano heavy jazz-tinged folk, featuring mysterious songs with lyrics inspired by his new interest in the writings of Carl Jung and gestalt therapy for subconscious trauma, as well as a recent holiday he’d spent in the south of Ireland, the first time in his life that’d he’d spent a significant amount of time there. The most difficult album of his entire career to define, Veedon Fleece was probably something close to what Morrison had wanted to make at the time h recorded Astral Weeks, maintaining that album’s mysterious mood and inscrutable lyrics while being built on a foundation of much more disciplined song-writing and musical arrangement than he had been able to muster when he was 23. The vinyl Side-A forms a kind of mini-song suite of five songs (Fair Play, Linden Arden Stole The Highlights, Who Was That Masked Man?, Streets of Arklow and the epic You Don’t Pull No Punches But You Don’t Push The River) that, individually, probably wouldn’t rank that highly amongst the best written songs of Morrison’s career, but flow together in a way that from the rest of his catalogue only Astral Weeks has managed to do, maintaining a consistency of mood and tone that again makes them sound like a complete work, progressively moving from the dominance of the piano on the first three tracks to acoustic guitar gradually asserting it’s dominance in the mix before taking over as the lead instrument for the last two, but with the instrument’s prominence growing gradually from song to song the whole way through the side. Had the momentum been maintained throughout the entire record, it’s likely that
Veedon Fleece would indeed be universally seen as the more mature and, ultimately, superior expansion of what Morrison had been trying to do on Astral Weeks. However, Side-B is a collection of sometimes exhilarating, but very out of place sounding, electric guitar driven country rock, which ends up making the album feel much more disjointed than it needed to be.

At the time, the only way that Veedon Fleece seemed to be similar to Astral Weeks was that it was a complete flop, but in recent years it has developed a significant cult following and is developing into the “hipster’s choice” for best Van Morrison album. No less an advocate than self-confessed Van disciple Sinead O’Connor is on record as proclaiming it to be the greatest album ever made and claims to listen to it before every gig. Due to it’s inscrutability (even by Morrison’s standards) and it’s status as a cult classic, Veedon Fleece exists as a mysterious entity unto itself that almost stands apart from the rest of Van’s career; it’s as if it were an album by Nick Drake or some other equally obscure and mysterious cult hero that had somehow managed to find it’s way into the back catalogue of a superstar artist with an otherwise well-known body of work and well-established public persona. At the time, Morrison did not take its failure well; he went straight back into the studio to create his next work, the funky Mechanical Bliss, which, despite it being completed and containing at least one classic in the form of one of his greatest ever songs,
The Street Only Knew Your Name, he eventually decided not to release it.

 

He instead chose to follow up Veedon Fleece with a two year sabbatical, the longest of his entire career, during which he withdrew from music entirely, burned out by a decade of constant touring and taking some time to fully recover from his still-recent divorce. During this time, he moved back across the Atlantic from America, the land which had always inspired his music since childhood and in which he has always found the large majority of his audience, settling initially in London and drawing a definite curtain on his critical “golden-age.”

 

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