Morrison, Van

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Van Morrison

Singer, songwriter

The release of Van Morrison’s album Astral Weeks in 1969 firmly established his reputation as a uniquely gifted musician. The album has been widely praised for its music, an upbeat synthesis of jazz and rock; its romantic lyrics; and most of all for Morrison’s singing, which reveals him to be “part Celtic bard, part soul singer, and part ecstatically scatting mystical visionary,” according to Mike Jahn in Rock: From Elvis Presley to Rock and Roll.Through twenty years of experiments and stylistic phases, Morrison has retained the respect of music critics. He “remains a singer who can be compared to no performer in the history of rock and roll, a singer who cannot be pinned down, dismissed, nor fitted into anyone’s expectations,” wrote Greil Marcus in the Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll.

Morrison was immersed in music from his earliest childhood. His father was an avid collector of classic jazz and blues records, and his mother was a jazz singer. Morrison learned to play harmonica, guitar, and saxophone when he was quite young, and by the time he reached his teens, he was playing professionally with various jazz, blues, and rock bands around his hometown of Belfast, Northern Ireland. He even spent some time in a country and western group known as Deanie Sands and the Javelins. At fifteen, he left school to tour Europe as the saxophonist with the Monarchs, a Belfast rhythm and blues band. After the tour, Morrison remained in Germany where a director had cast him as a sax player in a movie, but the project fell through long before completion. Morrison returned to Belfast, where he opened a rhythm and blues club in the Maritime Hotel. He and some friends served as the house band, Them.

Them’s intense sound quickly made them a local sensation. In 1964 they recorded two singles; one, a cover of Joe Williams’s “Baby Please Don’t Go,” garnered a great deal of British airplay and eventually made the British top ten. Them moved to London to work with record producer Bert Berns. One of the songs Morrison wrote for the band, “Here Comes the Night,” went to the number-two slot on the British record charts and broke into the U.S. top thirty. Recording with sessionmen like Jimmy Page, Them made a few more minor hits, including “Mystic Eyes” and Morrison’s “Gloria,” before embarking on a tour of the United States. The tour was only moderately successful, however. Morrison returned to England disgruntled by the inner workings of the music industry. He soon stopped performing altogether and returned to Belfast.

Bert Berns had moved to New York and formed Bang Records while Them toured. Upon hearing about Morrison’s disillusionment, he sent the singer a plane ticket and an invitation to come to New York and record some singles for Bang. Morrison accepted the producer’s

For the Record…

Name originally George Ivan Morrison; born August 31, 1945, in Belfast, Northern Ireland; son of Violet Morrison (a jazz singer); married Janet Planet (divorced, 1973).

Played tenor saxophone in the Irish rhythm and blues group the Monarchs, 1961–63; founding member of Them, 1963–66 (first U.S. tour, 1966); solo artist, 1967—(first U.S. solo tour, 1967).

Addresses: Record company —Polygram Records, 810 Seventh Ave., New York, N.Y. 10019.

offer and flew to New York in 1967. One of the singles recorded at this time, “Brown Eyed Girl,” became a top-ten hit in the United States that summer. Morrison was touring when he discovered that Berns had capitalized on the success of “Brown Eyed Girl” by releasing the other singles and demos that had been cut for Bang as an album, Blowin’ Your Mind.Although the singer was infuriated by the move, Blowing’ Your Mind was one of “the most exciting records of the time,” according to Greil Marcus, and it is still considered a classic. Berns died suddenly in December 1967, leaving Van Morrison more wary of the music business than ever and in professional limbo. Despite the popularity of “Brown Eyed Girl,” his popularity vanished. Unfocused and unsure of what direction to take, he toured the East Coast briefly, playing small clubs. Then, “brooding and drinking hard, Morrison moved to Boston, where, in an incomprehensible Belfast accent, he pestered late-night DJs for John Lee Hooker sides,” reported Marcus. “Once he was booed off the stage when a group that would later make up part of the J. Geils Band called him out of the audience to front their version of ‘Gloria.’ ‘Don’t you know who this man is?’ Peter Wolf shouted at the hissing crowd. This man wrote the song!’ But they didn’t know.”

Morrison appeared completely burnt out when he returned to Belfast several months later, but his hometown seemed to revitalize him. He wrote a set of introspective songs about childhood, initiation, death, and sex. Meanwhile, Warner Brothers had picked up his contract, and in 1968 he went into the studio with master jazz drummer Connie Kay of the Modern Jazz Quartet, bassist Richard Davis, and other top musicians to record the music he’d written in Belfast. In two days he cut one of the least classifiable and most enduring albums in rock, Astral Weeks.It is “a strange, disturbing, exalting album,” according to Marcus, “for which there was little precedent in rock and roll history when it was released…. Tempered by jazz restraint … and three levels of string arrangements, the disc moved with a rock beat and a rock feel. It was as serious an album as could be imagined, but it soared like an old Drifters 45. With Astral Weeks, Morrison opened the way to a new career, and established himself as a performer who deserved to be ranked with the creators of the very best rock and roll music.”

Many people rank Astral Weeks among the top five or ten greatest rock albums of all time and as Morrison’s best. Dave Laing and Phil Hardy wrote in their Encyclopedia of Rock: “It remains unique amongst his work: fresh, subtle and infinitely delicate. The lyrics are stream-of-consciousness romanticism, magically evoking a wealth of moods, feelings, locations, all superbly enhanced by the music. Tumbling and swelling gently, guitar, flute, sax, drums, and flowing acoustic bass create a finely textured backdrop for Morrison’s vocals, which in turn make brilliant use of scat and repetition.” Besides winning unreserved critical praise, Astral Weeks sold fairly well. The followup, Moondance, was even more popular. It combined the light, jazzy style of Astral Weeks with the emotional vigor of Them’s rhythm and blues.

In the early 1970s, Morrison married Janet Planet and moved to Marin County, California, where she had grown up. His music mellowed, reflecting his domestic contentment. The hard edge of his lyrics gave way to a romantic celebration of marital bliss, but Morrison’s creativity remained intact. The influences of country music as well as blues, soul, and jazz surfaced on albums such as Tupelo Honey and Si. Dominic’s Preview.On his 1973 tour of Europe and North America, he was accompanied by his Caledonia Soul Orchestra, an eleven-piece group that included a string quartet. Things changed dramatically late in 1973. Morrison’s marriage crumbled, and he disbanded the Caledonia Soul Orchestra to return to Belfast for the first time since 1966. After recording Veedon Fleece, a return to the profound ambiguities of Astral Weeks, he dropped out of the music scene and led a secluded life for four years.

His comeback album, 1977’s A Period of Transition, featured short jazz and rhythm and blues tunes. It was considered disappointing by some reviewers but his next album, Wavelength, was solidly acclaimed. In it, Morrison expressed a new serenity, reflecting his embrace of born-again Christianity. The lyrics in “Common One,” “Into the Music,” “Beautiful Vision,” and “Inarticulate Speech of the Heart” were filled with spiritual longing. Mark Peel related in Stereo Review that after this “string of brilliant, synthesizer-based albums, … Morrison returned to laid-back, acoustic soul-mantras and Celtic mysticism of albums like the mid-Seventies ‘Veedon Fleece’ on 1985’s ‘A Sense of Wonder.’ “In 1988, Morrison collaborated with the Chieftains for another highly praised album, Irish Heartbeat. “It would be hard to imagine a more natural merger of pop and folk than this collaboration between Van Morrison and Ireland’s preeminent old-wave traditional band, the Chieftains,” wrote a Rolling Stone reviewer. “Yet even those expectations don’t prepare one for the splendor and intense beauty of Irish Heartbeat, a collection of ballads that finds both acts at the top of their form.”

Van Morrison’s concert career has been marked by temperamental performances and chronic stage fright. At a 1979 show in New York’s Palladium, he stormed offstage in the middle of a set and refused to return. Mike Jahn characterized him in Rock: From Elvis Presley to Rock and Roll as “a painfully introverted figure who rarely gives interviews and is at a loss to explain his own lyrics. In the studio, he can sing like a soul man getting the spirit; onstage, he tends to baffle and alienate audiences by rushing through songs and remaining noncommunicative betweeen them.” But Laing points out that “at his best, Morrison is a compelling performer. Nervous, intense, he stands motionless midstage, eyes closed, while his voice seems first to take him over, then enraptures the entire theatre. Above everything, Van Morrison is a great singer. He can take a few phrases and repeat them over and over, weaving his voice around the music, gradually working his way deeper into the listener’s consciousness….His music is truly spellbinding.”