How to explain the disgraced criticism of George Ivan Morrison aka Van the Man aka Belfast Cowboy and in particular his 1968 masterpiece Astral Weeks? Poll after poll confirms that the reputation of Van Morrison’s epic stream of consciousness is under serious threat. The NME, while no longer occupying the position it once did, as a cutting-edge music magazine, is a useful barometer when it comes to gauging the album’s steep decline. In 1985, NME writers produced a list of the top 100 albums of all time. Morrison’s Astral Weeks was at number 2, behind Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On. In 1993, NME repeated the exercise, this time Astral Weeks was ranked 15th, Marvin Gaye had slipped to 4th, while The Beach Boys Pet Sounds, listed 20th in the previous poll, held the prestigious number one spot. In the 2003 poll, Astral Weeks had plummeted to 83rd! Pet Sounds was holding its own at #3, while What’s Going On had slipped to #27. The Stone Roses’ self-titled debut, somewhat ridiculously, catapulted the band straight to the coveted #1 spot. .
By 2013, Astral Weeks had slightly regained their position, weighing in at No. 68. The Roses had begun to wither and were slipping down to No. 7, having been usurped by The Smiths (The Queen is Dead) and Marvin and The Beach Boys had become next. next door neighbors at numbers 25 and 26. It wasn’t just the NME either, Q’ magazine’s 2006 poll putting Astral Weeks as low as 54.
Why all the fuss, I hear you ask? After all, declaring someone to have made the 54th greatest album of all time wouldn’t normally lead them to reach for the dueling pistols, would it? Well, it’s a bit like calling Pelé the 54th greatest footballer of all time or Orson Welles the 54th greatest director in Hollywood; in fact, an exception must be made. And what about Morrison’s follow-up, 1970’s Moondance, a gleefully romantic show, the polar opposite of Astral Weeks’ tortured soul, to be sure, but just as magnificent? It’s like it never existed!
This undeserved diminution of Morrison’s legacy is highlighted, yet again, in his treatment in Bob Stanley’s authorized history of modern popular music, ‘Yeah Yeah Yeah.’ While Stanley doffs his cap to Morrison for his role in the influential 1960s group Them, calling them “the loudest, most rebellious group since Johnny Burnette’s rock and roll trio” and claiming that their song “Friday’s Child “He practically invented REM”, his subsequent solo career is almost completely ruled out. There’s certainly no mention of Astral Weeks and strangely no mention of Morrison’s best-known composition, the renowned classic, “Brown Eyed Girl.”
The single, released in June 1967, has reached a stratospheric level of popularity. It is one of ten charted songs in the British music industry with over 10,000 plays on US radio. As of 2015, “Brown Eyed Girl” remains the most downloaded and streamed song of the entire 1960s. A blatant oversight on Mr. Stanley’s part, then, but he almost saved the day with his excellent physical description of Morrison: “Their lead singer was Van Morrison, who had a reddish face and a mop of red hair.” .
Of course, Van pretty much brought it on himself; he’s still around for one thing and he’s about to turn 70 very uncool. There was no “glamorous” rock ‘n’ roll death for the burly Protestant boy. He didn’t end up overdosing in a Parisian bathtub like his namesake Jim or disappearing into the snowy ether over Iowa like Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper. He didn’t hang on his mother’s coat rack, either, like Macclesfield’s sick, dispirited wretch, Ian Curtis. Neither for him, the life of a rock ‘n’ roll recluse, like Syd Barrett or Grace Slick. If Van had really thought of this, he could have retired to the Appalachian Mountains and become the very JD Salinger of rock, with Astral Weeks as his ‘Catcher in the Rye’. After all, he shared Salinger’s mystique and his bad temper!
No doubt he dabbled too far into a strange religion, whining indulgently about the sharp practices of the “music business” too often for his own good. In general, he exceeded his welcome, he became the specter of the splendid rock ‘n’ roll party. Of course, he never had too many friends in the rock press, taking a liking to him for bringing many of them to tears in the blink of an eye! He may be a simple case of ‘revenge is a dish best served cold’, but the critics haven’t been kind to him in the latter part of his career.
It fares better in the US, however, where its longtime champion, pioneering rock writer Greil Marcus, came to its defense once again with the excellent 2010 book ‘Listening to Van Morrison’. In the chapter dedicated to Astral Weeks, he declares that the quality of the record is such that ‘it leads people to take the record as a kind of talisman, to recognize others for their affection, to say ‘I’m going to my grave’. with the. I’ll never forget it.”‘ Rolling Stone’s 2003 poll ranked Astral Weeks just inside the top 20 at number 19. Even the oft-overlooked Moondance, a record that could be considered The Magnificent Ambersons to Astral’s Citizen Kane Weeks, made a rare appearance at number 65. By the way, Pet Sounds and What’s Going On both made the Top 10 in America.
Since the 1990s, Van has been at the foot of the gun, blindly following his rapidly retreating muse through every twist and turn of popular music. Unfortunately, she’s taken him down many a blind alley of nightclub soul, elevator jazz, and Chelsea retiree pop with dismal regularity. Their last fully satisfying album was 1990’s Enlightenment, which featured a soul classic in “Real Real Gone,” a rare collaboration with Irish poet Paul Durcan on the utterly unique “The Days Before Rock ‘n’ Roll,” and the song principal itself, a richly spiritual number of the kind Morrison had recorded decades before. Around this time, Van had a sort of ad hoc residence at the King’s Hotel in Newport, and it was not uncommon for him to play there two or three nights in a row. They were remarkable gigs, a far cry from the countless other times I’ve seen a half-hearted Van just going through the motions in soulless venues. Watching him turn back the clock at King’s, there was no doubt that you were in the presence of genius.
The fire that once burned deep within him, that made Astral Weeks such an incendiary record, that it threatened, in fact, to burn down the Hotel Maritime, London’s R&B circuit, and San Francisco’s legendary Fillmore Club during its happy days, long since gone out. Each record seems to diminish the legend. He didn’t reinvent himself as a Dylan-style singer and dancer, that’s true. Then again, he also didn’t cheapen himself by advertising Victoria’s Secret Ladies underwear the way Dylan did. Van didn’t sell his soul, just his soul music!
Unfortunately, there is very little archival footage of Van fronting his legendary ’60s R&B combo, Them. A couple of mild-mannered studio performances of “Baby Please Don’t Go” and his all-time classic “Gloria,” which he wrote at the tender age of 17, are all there is. Therefore, we must rely on the written word as evidence of just how emotionally charged the young Van Morrison’s performer really was. Johnny Rogan’s definitive biography, No Surrender, details a series of incidents, particularly during the band’s residency at the Hotel Marítimo. However, he also has an interesting account of a Boxing Day 1964 concert by Them in Cookstown, Co. Tyrone.
“In Cookstown, expectant fans, eager to hear the day’s popular tunes, were outraged when Them stubbornly ignored requests and persisted in playing R&B standards. A steady thud of slow claps greeted each number as Van prowled the stage platform, glaring menacingly at the audience. Morrison often acted aggressively and became downright belligerent when he faced a hostile audience. As the show was nearing a tense climax and the pennies began to rain down on the stage, he yelled into the microphone “Goodnight pigs.” The unrest soon degenerated into a near-riot with the band locked in their dressing room for four hours, while crowds ransacked the venue.
It’s probably fair to say that a few moments like this, preserved on YouTube, would have bolstered Van’s reputation among the teenagers who make up today’s NME readers and writers. Yet the rawness and venom of Morrison’s voice is still present on vinyl. “Gloria” became a staple of the set of many garage rock bands and, of course, was featured on punk poet Patti Smith’s landmark album Horses in 1975.
Time, of course, has taken its toll and Morrison’s voice these days is often characterized as “clogged” or “bloated”, but for those looking for the old works of Them or indeed Astral Weeks, a voice different wait. In his book From a Whisper to a Scream (The Great Voices of Popular Music), Barney Hoskyns describes the voice of the Belfast cowboy as “a sound at once black and white, beautiful and barbaric, yearning and furious, one that must be described as as the most exciting punk-R&B voice of all time”.
Almost unclassifiable as a disco, part soul, part folk, part jazz, Astral Weeks was unprecedented since its release in 1968, and remains unmatched nearly fifty years later. Morrison is not only a pure soul singer, with a ragged voice that can break your heart to pieces, but he also has the eye of a poet. He often can’t articulate the longing for him, can’t bring the enchanted vision of him to the surface. Sometimes he resorts to repetition, as if retracting words over and over again engraves them in stone, sometimes it’s sung to the point of inanity (“Listen to the Lion,” “In the Garden,” and many others). ). Yet rarely in the history of rock ‘n’ roll has a singer sounded as stripped down and brutalized as Morrison does on the seemingly euphoric “Beside You,” as he frantically searches for redemption that might already be beyond him. Incredibly, he reprises this soul-sapping exorcism on the enigmatic “Madame George” and the excoriating “Ballerina” a few tracks later. And I haven’t even mentioned the best song on the album, the revealing “Cypress Avenue” or perhaps the most romantic track on it, “Sweet Thing.”
Author and journalist, Paul Du Noyer, reviews the following lines from “Sweet Thing” on a song lyrics website:
“And I will drive my float through your streets and shout: Hey! It’s me, I’m dynamite and I don’t know why”,
I found out that a lovesick reader had posted “I can’t wait until a guy can feel this for me” directly below the couplet. Such is the power of a pop song, to stir the senses and make us all tremble!
One can only hope that, in the future, a good wind will support Morrison and he will return to the safe harbor of critical acclaim. Until then, we can hold on to Du Noyer’s words for comfort, as he champions Astral Weeks as a work of art that will truly stand the test of time, popularity contests notwithstanding:
“No one realized, in 1968, how long this music would last, how often it would be heard, and how much cultural commentary it would attract. What makes popular music special is not just the number of people who buy it, but the countless times they hear it and define its meaning for themselves. Over the decades, so many lives have been repeatedly enriched by this masterpiece.”
