Van Morrison: your views please

catacombs tape is great! seems like Van had a fairly clear idea of the Astral Weeks sound at this point ... not a perfect recording, but pretty damn fantastic for a 50 year old audience tape.

yeah i'm at "brown eyed girl" and this rules a lot

not a perfect recording

lol yeah the tape speeding up during "one two brown eyes" freaked me out at work

yeah this is gorgeous, definitely interesting to hear a little hint of what brown eyed girl would have sounded like on astral weeks

damn this version of beside you is revelatory

holy shit this catacombs tape

like holy holy holy holy

Balls, it's already been taken down!

I managed to grab a copy, my ilxmail works fine

Magic, cheers! You have mail.

Missed this before it was pulled but I love that it was Peter Wolf of all people who had this tape.

Peter Wolf knew Van back then. Apparently Morrison would make drunken phone requests to radio station Wolf DJ'd for.

BTW, Wolf was college roomies w/David Lynch!

WBCN!

Didn’t know that about Van’s requests. Hilarious.

xp chinaski didn't get your email, weird... try kern.cooper at gmail dot com

I could also just post a direct link here but I get the feeling it wouldn't be in the spirit of ilx?

I'm surprised how much I like the version of Virgo Clown from the Catacombs set. It's not a song I've been into before.

Read through the Astral Weeks book very quickly yesterday and was happy to see tyler get an acknowledgement at the very end.

90s (?) 2-CD The Story of Them Featuring Van Morrison is incredible, The Bang Masters, the unscrewed-with originals of tracks that showed up on early solo LPs, is good barefoot pop, get most 70s except maybe Hard Nose The Highway, but I think I stopped buying new stuff after Beautiful Vision, in the early 80s. Clearly need to check out some more, is what I think after hearing bluesy coountry duets with the evervescent Linda Gail Lewis, during one of the wildest (far beyond in-character) American Routes shows ever, THE KILLER, THE THRILLER & THE CHILLER: JERRY LEE LEWIS WITH SISTERS LINDA GAIL AND FRANKIE JEAN---scroll down this page a little for links to hours 1 & 2 (Van shows up in hour 2)
(playlists for both hours are also linked)
http://americanroutes.wwno.org/archives/show/1088/The-Killer-the-Thriller-the-Chiller-Jerry-Lee-Lewis-with-sisters-Linda-Gail-and-Frankie-Jean
Would like to check his album of Mose Allison songs too.

Albums That Should Exist has it:
https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2018/11/van-morrison-live-in-boston-1968.html

So, that was purely to keep the copyright alive: Make it available for one day in an obscure part of the world (the UK)

The TV was playing (in the background) a Saturday Night Live episode from Nov. 4, 1978 — I snapped to attention when the Van Morrison performance, “Wavelength,” came on... the band is super tight, lithe, springy, fluid!

Anyone know who was in that particular band? Was it basically the crew from the Wavelength album?

I searched around but can’t find much info... the clip doesn’t even seem to be YouTube, where people usually lost that stuff.

*list

This one is from a few months later (Feb 79). Someone listed the musicians in the comments.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsEdUH3j1KU

Thanks!

The new Prophet Speaks is Van's fourth album in 18 months, he again is with Joey DeFrancesco's quartet doing a mixture of originals and blues covers.

"The Prophet Speaks"

Almost Independence Day sounded even better than usual as I drove through Marin this morning. For a ten minute tune with a fair bit of repetition and sparse instrumentation, the groove and atmosphere pull you in and hold your attention. Beautiful way to start the day.

Van rules in a similar way to how Pink Floyd rules. Like, when I sit down and try to isolate why they are great, it evaporates completely and I’m left with “aw, geez, I guess I’m wrong — I guess they suck after all.” But then I hear just about anything by them and I’m like, “What am I talking about? [Pink Floyd/Van Morrison] RULES.”

speaking of pink floyd and van morrison. doesn't wish you were here sound like the guitar intro of almost independence day? and the guitar tone is very similar, those are both fenders?

yes, i've always thought so too.

Van rules in a similar way to how Pink Floyd rules. Like, when I sit down and try to isolate why they are great, it evaporates completely and I’m left with “aw, geez, I guess I’m wrong — I guess they suck after all.” But then I hear just about anything by them and I’m like, “What am I talking about? [Pink Floyd/Van Morrison] RULES."

Oddly enough, not so much when they're together tho...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpFo_E9Fq2k

I recently spent a commute trying to figure out which live version of "Wavelength" is most joyous.

The answer is Bottom Line 78. But the exercise was instructive, partly because he so rarely does anything the same way.

And I have def come to the conclusion that the trait that I am calling "joy" is most of what I seek from van. It's different from quality or chops or happiness or energy or intensity or soul or whatever. It's the incantatory Dionysian abandon.

It’s always amazes me that so many joyous tunes can come from such a surly, grumpy guy.

Xpost, I like that version of Comfortably Numb. It’s not particularly joyous of course.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GqszEwXPlc

new album three chords and the truth out 10/25. first album of all original compositions since keep me singing

new song is gorgeous

speaking of pink floyd and van morrison. doesn't wish you were here sound like the guitar intro of almost independence day?

And they both sound like Moonlight Mile.

New song is lovely - the gentle huff and wheeze of a pair of bellows returning to rest.

Interview with Ted Templeman about co-producing Van in the mid-70s. Van being a mentor?

https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/rock/8531986/ted-templeman-interview

new album stands up with all of his recent original work, really awesome

That interview was great.

Last album was pretty good, will give this one a listen.

There was an interview with him in The Guardian recently. It didn't go well:
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/oct/31/a-duel-with-van-morrison-is-this-a-psychiatric-examination-it-sounds-like-one

"I look him in the eye and tell him that I am not trying to psychoanalyse him, that his music has simply meant more to me than any other throughout my life. There is something that moves across his face but I could not name it. 'Aehhh,' he breathes. "Well, shall we end it there?" I say, and stand and shake his hand. As I do I look at (his) notepad. In the top left hand corner he has drawn an angry rectangle."

I always wonder if interviewers treat interviews with notoriously stiff interviewees as a badge of honour, along the lines of Lester Bangs' series of interviews with Lou Reed. There's a comment on Mark Prindle's website to the effect that Lou Reed perked up if you mentioned pinball machines - he apparently had an encyclopaedic knowledge of pinball machines - and I wonder if Van Morrison has a secret hobby that is the key to building a rapport with it. Perhaps he is secretly an expert on Cookie Clicker, or the XCOM games, or perhaps he has a massive Transformers collection.

I can find no evidence on the internet that Van Morrison toured Japan in the late 1970s, around the time that Diaclone first came out, but Wavelength was popular and with the funds he amassed from that record he could easily have gone on a toy-buying spree. Wikipedia's article on that record contains the word "butt". I think the cover photographer was trying to make him look sexy, and amazingly it almost worked. I'm heterosexual, but I can appreciate why ladies might have found 1977-era Van Morrison attractive.

One of the comments on The Guardian's article mentioned an interview he did with Spike Milligan for Q magazine back in 1995:
http://www.raubenheimer.nl/spikevan.html

It's not much more illuminating, although they obviously got on together. "I can't mix my personal stuff with the job, so I just talk about my job. I'm not interested in selling myself, I just sell my records, my music. So I have to censor everything I say, 'cos if I don't, they just use it against me" he says.

The Guardian's inteviewer points out that two of his management team stayed in the room in order to ensure that everything remained on-message, and I wonder if they were scared he was going to blurt out something racist? He's in his seventies, old people are notoriously off-message.

Also, who would have thought that a broken <br> tag in October 2001 would have made my words go small in 2019.

he's never a good interview, i just think he's a very guarded person who also deeply dislikes all non-music-making aspects of the record business

See you soon on the 'notably infected and/or fallen thread':

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/aug/25/van-morrison-blasts-covid-gig-limits-pseudoscience

He don't pull no punches.

Inbox: "Van Morrison to release three new anti-lockdown protest songs". The lyrics are... 😟 pic.twitter.com/uLQhYTH2na

— Stuart Dredge (@stuartdredge) September 18, 2020

http://pbs.twimg.com/media/EiL7J9yXYAMr7sx?format=png&name=900x900

http://pbs.twimg.com/media/EiL7J90X0AA9gXi?format=png&name=900x900

http://pbs.twimg.com/media/EiL7J91WsAEN1ec?format=png&name=900x900

Even disregarding the message, that is a remarkably crude assortment of doggerel from the same guy that brought us Astral Weeks.

Nobody, no, no, no, no, nobody stops me from loving you baby
So young and bold, fourteen-year old
Baby, baby, baby

indeed!

man’s a cunt, always has been

ulster prod in backward opinion shocker