Rediscovering a 50-year old vinyl collection III: Van Morrison and the Tao of Jed

For all the dross albums and dodgy views he’s taken to spouting (“spyhtin’” if he’s in full-on Nornarsh mowad) of late, few artists occupy a more exalted place in my heart and record collecting firmament than George Ivan Morrison.

Colossal prick he may well be (there’s actually no “may well” about it but that “be” looked a little forlorn sitting there on its own), but like the proverbial pint of plain, Van very often really is your only man.

My love affair with VTM began the 1972 afternoon I walked into a Coventry city centre second-hand shop who’d filched the name Exchange and Mart (E&M) from the dead tree eBay of its day. With the store likely to feature in a few of these recollections, a little description might not go amiss here.

Dull, shabby and impossibly narrow this particular emporium of abandoned and unloved ephemera might have been, but my God its selection of second-hand albums was to die for. Best of all, having nary a clue about the artistic merits or emotional heft of what they were selling, the owners used to flog its extensive stock of vinly 12”ers for peanuts.

While I cannot remember how many terrific records I liberated from incarceration in E&M’s album racks, I know that my fingers flick past several of them every time I deep-dive into my collection. Creased of cover and scratched of surface these albums may be, but their every tiny blemish has the power to transform even the saddest moments into infinitely happier memories. With the exception of books, no other art form comes close of 12” albums’ sheer tactility in terms of one’s hands and heart.

Mine for the princely sum of 50p, the copy of Van Morrison’s Moondance I chanced upon at E&M a little over half-a-century ago was one of the first and best buys I made there. Opening up a floodgate that eventually saw me gobble up almost all of Van’s albums as first LPs and later CDs, it’s very possibly the best 50p I ever spent. Having spent 1981 to 1986 in Middle Eastern countries where heat and dust rendered records almost totally impractical, I even coughed up for four or five of my favourite Van extraordinaires on cassette.

Although far more focused than its free-flowing predecessor, Astral Weeks, Moondance was rich with the same emotional tropes that would run through VTM’s career like a raspberry ripple from Fusco’s. Here, though, the joyous spirituality (Into the Mystic) and aching nostalgia for younger, more innocent times (Caravan) came all wrapped up in a gorgeously horn-enriched R&B bow.

Best of all, the festering resentment that would start souring Morrison’s albums from 1973’s Hard Nose The Highway onwards had yet to rear its ugly head. Glad tidings indeed.

Fast forward to a year later. Eighteenth birthday fast approaching, I got my first paying job behind the sort of bar I would never in a million years spend quite so much time in front of in later life. At 33p an hour the money was pretty shitty, but licensing laws being laxer than they are today, Stoke Ex-Serviceman’s Club in Ball Hill wasn’t being over-picky about my bona fides.

Adored by the regulars (aka “old jacks”) for their low prices and loathed by the staff for the boorish behaviour they had to indulge as a result, such establishments were the Wetherspoons of their day. The workers at the car factories who formed the bulk of the membership seemingly happy to go on strike for shits and giggles, days behind the bar at the Stoke could be very long indeed.

My best mate amongst the other toilers behind the taps was a guy called Jed. (As this is the first of two Jeds who will grace this set of pieces, let us distinguish him from his later counterpart by referring to him as “Jed-i”.) Twenty two and married with a kid, Jed-i was to my 17-year old brain gifted with the sort of worldly wisdom I might envy or one day aspire to but surely never hope to attain.

Looking back with the benefit of 20:20 hindsight, Jed-i was I guess what would now be described as a proto-slacker; but WTF, he was my proto slacker. As such whatever insights he shared were manna from heaven for a callow youth whose previous concept of counter culture involved watching the digits click over on his bike’s front wheel milometer.

Irrefutable arguments about the foolishness of following norms like one’s Mum and Dad into the cul de sac of dullness called Conformity Crescent was just one of many potent strings to Jed-i’s bow. Eyes bright with post-pubescent admiration, I was easily malleable putty in my newfound bessie’s dexterous intellectual hands!

The world even then weighed down by a surfeit of sorrows, who was I to worsen its woes by doubting whatever pearls of wisdom might fall from his lips? Having been refused admittance to Woodstock (the film) a couple of years earlier, I was ultimately in no position to question his expert assessment of working class heroes like Joe Hill. Nor was I going to pooh-pooh breathtakingly simple solutions for political hot potatoes like Northern Ireland and the Middle East – ‘Like, why don’t all the nations of the world come together and force the oldies in charge to, y’know, fight stuff out among themselves?’

Most impressive of all, Jed-i was a veritable 1970s Vanopedia when it came to anything and everything to do with Ulster’s finest son. Did I know, for example, Van’s “lady” was a “hippy chick” called Janet Planet and they lived on a secluded farm with only horses for companions?

Having recently added ZigZag-style roughage to my bland, pre-hipster holy writ NME diet, I did know as it happened. Even so, it was nice to have my nugatory insights into the real life stuff that informed Van’s work confirmed. Even this many years later, I still smile ruefully at my cultural naivete when I slide Tupelo Honey out of its cover in readiness for its occasional airing.

All of which isn’t to say there was anything cynical or nasty about Jed-i. He was, at the end of the day, more of a mentor than a tormentor. Why, give it a couple more years and I’d be stepping into his denim-topped clogs and assaulting the ears of anyone gullible enough to hear me out with half-baked bletherings of my own.
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Were such a thing possible, Jed-I shot up even higher in my estimation when he offered me a spare ticket to see Van playing at Birmingham Town Hall on what later became known as the Too Late To Stop Now tour.

Would I like to hit Birmingham with him? You bet your arse I would.

There was just one tiny obstacle to my doing so. The ‘rents were decamping from Straight Street and heading home to Ireland with me in tow for the whole of the Coventry fortnight ln which the gig was set to take place.

By the time I reclaimed my place behind the bar in early August, my guru, his teachings and methods were nowhere to be seen. Less enamoured of Van than Jed-i or myself, the Stoke’s appropriately named Bar Steward, Jim, had taken a dim view of his prioritizing a gig over Tombola night, the busiest of the week. Joe Hill would have been turning cartwheels in his grave at the colossal injustice of it all.

Knowing I was going to be quitting my bar job as soon as my year in the Upper Sixth started a few weeks later, I resolved to strike a blow for my fallen comrade. I was going to stick it to The Man in the shape of Jim and the old jacks good and hard!

In those far-off days, third-rate entertainers who couldn’t carry a tune or joke in a bucket didn’t watch their dreams wither and die during auditions for the X-Factor or Britain’s Got Talent. No, they signed up with the West Midlands’ equivalent of Woody Allen’s theatrical agent Broadway Danny Rose.

Before they knew it, these talentless turns found their weekend nights eaten up with ‘starring’ roles in entertainment cavalcades at working men’s clubs the length and breadth of middle England.

And weekends at the Stoke didn’t get any starrier than when the club president stopped dragging and started cracking his knuckles in readiness to draw the Saturday night tombola.

With left-leaning union firebrands like my then best friend Pat Fox’s dad, Bruce, calling their members out on the flimsiest of pretexts, Cov’s car factories were a hotbed of toxic labour relations. The fact that strike-worthy offences included production line managers regularly having to wake slumbering union members who should have been hard at work didn’t bode well for the city’s future.

Although happy to leverage their collective bargaining power to feather their own nests, none of the ‘working men’ who drank at the Stoke gave a shit about the welfare of those pulling their pints. One night towards the end of my time there, I persuaded a bunch of other bar staff in giving the old jacks a taste of their own medicine.

The moment we chose to strike – literally – was the eagerly awaited Saturday night tombola rollover during August Bank Holiday weekend of 1973. For the first and only time, the usual between-draw rush for drinks, unfunny comic gurning, and tuneless massacres of ‘hits’ like Una Paloma Blanca held no terror for us.

No, tonight I would step forward like a Ball Hill version of Lech Walesa and tell the baying ranks of thirsty old jacks that we’d downed, if not tools, then at least towels. There would, I would boldly proclaim, be no further drinks served until such time as the club’s Committee agreed to sit down and discuss our pay and conditions.

The evening’s initial session of tombola all over, bar the post-game grumbling, the first wave of what would soon become tsunami of thirsty punters caromed up against the club bar.

‘Whisky pep!’ shouted one.

‘Two pints of muyeld and birruh!’ screamed a second.

‘Three halves of lager tops!’ banshee-wailed a third.

Faster than you could say ‘the milky bars are on me’, the entire length of the 60-foot serving area was three-deep with drinkers brandishing empty glasses and bellowing exactly how they expected them to be refilled. The only thing the anxious rabble was missing was a set of Mobs’R’Us flaming torches.

Answer and action from the various Tolpuddle Bartyrs manning the pumps and optics came there none.

As quickly as it had risen to a crescendo, the babble of voices fell silent. As always happens in such cases, one voice quickly signalled its owner’s intention to exert some kind of rule on the mob. ‘What’s going on here, then, lads?’ said Albert, the club secretary and a keen imbiber of the club’s disgusting sludge-textured mild.

The rest of my fellow strikers having sensibly slunk back to the Britvic mixers’ shelves at the rear of the bar, it was left to me to take charge. ‘We’re sick and tired of being paid crap money and the abysmal way you and the rest of the members here treat us,’ I declaimed. ‘Despite having tried to raise our concerns with you and Jim several times, you’ve never made the slightest effort to listen to or address our grievances. As a result, we’ve been left with no other option than to take a leaf out of your members’ books and withdraw our labour.’

The Mexican wave of outrage that rippled through the throng gave way to dark mutterings about who’d died and left this particular little scrote in charge.

‘I think you and I had better visit Jim’s office for a chat, young John,’ said Albert. This was not good news, as my freshly minted antagonist was a brick shithouse of a bloke and considerably less mild of temperament than the slop he drank. In the end, he and Jim simply fired me, paid me off, and told me to never, ever darken the door of their club again.

Jed-i and Joe Hill would have been proud. Given his well-publicized fondness for a drink or ten, the perma-misanthropic Mozza of later life would probably have been a lot, lot less sympathetic.

Earlier posts

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Revitalizing and rediscovering a 50-year old vinyl collection

II
https://theafterword.co.uk/rediscovering-a-50-year-old-vinyl-collectionl-the-day-neil-and-crazy-horse-came-to-cottingham/

View post on imgur.com

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moondance

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