I notice that VM’s latest offering has been sitting in the most commented for a week or two and that frequently contributors have confessed a concern about his work and ‘the man’. I have spent a fair share of time on thinking about and writing about music and recently my 20 year old daughter told me that she thought that Beautiful Vision is the most fantastic record and that Celtic Ray was one of the greatest openings to an album she had ever heard. My daughter’s partner is a young man with a PhD in film and is writing about the relationship between music and film ( it’s much more nuanced than that but you don’t need the details). He asked me if there was a good book on Morrison and I reflected that the problem is that his music and his work do not really suit any typical kind of writing about music. What kind of writing is required? Is there very much to say?
I think there isn’t very much to say and a few years ago I wrote about one song ( Cul de Sac) in this space and I haven’t had the urge to repeat the experiment. Perhaps until now. Most music writing is biographical in long form and Clinton Heylin’s characteristically impatient, judgmental and mean spirited bio left the reader as exhausted as Heylin seemed to be. I mean, really, Clinton, if you don’t want to write about these people then don’t. If all you have to say is that they are disappointments as humans and that their work would be much better if they only sought your advice then move on. I know, you’ve got to earn a buck too. But a biographical approach to VM is precisely the wrong approach because the only thing that Morrison knows how to do is to sing. No Plan B.
The other approach is to consider the work: “This album is great, that album less so, haven’t the last 30 years been disappointing?”. This approach seems to make sense but it is surprisingly difficult to explain or say why one album works and others don’t. In the last thirty years it might be enough to say that his lyrical themes are uninteresting ( love, the music business and stupid people). It might be enough to say that his reliance on three/ four chord song structures have become very repetitive when combined with a band combo that is super professional but create absolutely no heat.
Heat. That could be it. Why does his music create no heat for the listener or for Morrison. You only have to look at his performance on The Last Waltz to see that on that occasion there is so much heat that everybody is surprised – he steals the show with the amount of heat he generates? Perhaps it is simply a matter that you can only jump out of the cupboard so many times before “someone gets suspicious or someone gets discovered.”
But heat is a matter of perspective – having just listened to Share your Love With Me from those Real World Studio videos he has made. In fact, here is a reasonably rich seam of analysis – what is he doing with these videos? It would seem that lockdown inspired him, forced him to put his band together, have them dress up and play. And it is quite a generous offering – hours of music, players are highlighted and as a viewer I finally get to see who Teena Lyle is. But Latest Record Project song on that video is, in my view, very poor in terms of its judgement, and the group of pros he has working for him are required to chant ‘Latest Record Project’. Fascinatingly bad.
There has been quite a lot of time spent on VM’s anti-lockdown stance and he has been vilified for this. I don’t know really why we care so much about these matters – his opinion had no affect on public policy and his anti-authoritarian stance was entirely consistent with his character. We like to feel morally superior to others so he is providing a service. His character is formed from a complete dedication, obsession with music and music only. For a time, that obsession created startling, original music ( some of which was overlooked – I feel you, Period of Transition) but after quite a long period ( around 25 years, in my view), he ran out of steam and reverted to genre pieces. Every now ang again, something good pokes through because he is a good musician.
But as a person, Morrison has not changed, has not grown, has not been able to move beyond his natural, human limitations. His limitations are partly what created him in the first place – it seems so likely that he would have received an Asperger’s diagnosis if he had been a child of this century. A key characteristic of this is extreme high functionality with obsessions and extraordinary difficulty understanding the point of view of others.
I think Morrison wishes he could have done other things but he isn’t able to do anything else. A polymath he is not and fascinatingly, I think this explains his lyrical limitations and his tendency to play that same guitar lick over and over again. Like everybody, he has found marital commitment difficult and complex and he is a simple man.
I write this because I have an interest in understanding art and artists and as a poor artist I like to learn from great ones. The vast majority of artists are limited and repetitious. The great bluesman and women of the mid-20th century were, by and large, one trick ponies and nobody really expected them to be otherwise.
Van Morrison appreciation, in stages:
– Awe
– Love
– Respect
– Disappointment
– Tolerance
– Reassessment
– Denial
– Disgust
The fantastic thing about music is the great stuff – almost invariably the artist’s early or mid-period work – is always available, and matters the most.
What did you reassess? I went through a period where I felt that even his great work was completely tainted by his shortcomings artistically and personally. I don’t feel that now. What was the nature of your reaassessment?
Reassessment works both up and down, doesn’t it? I used to love Moondance, but reassessment (based on that weak second side) changed my response to respect. I always found Hard Nose hard to like until I discovered the original double Morrison intended it to be, and now I love it. And most of his Mercury albums (which are mostly loved here) have, on reassessment, landed in “respect” or “disappointment”.
Interesting and challenging posers here, even if (one of my) response(s) is to wish all music, all art, really, were anonymous, so folk like us can’t concentrate on the artist as much as, or, often, more than their product. By dissecting and devouring the artist it gives the excuse to explain and interpret “differently”. How simple life would be just listening to the radio, humming along every so often as one you like or remember comes on. Jings, I would be a rich man without this nonsense we love to mansplain so much.
Glad you came to your senses on both of those rekkids HP.
Moondance saw the emergence if cocktail lounge jazz. If it had failed perhaps that direction would have been strangled at birth.
While broadly agree with the structure of your artistic arc, I’d probably rejig some of the points as follows
DISCOVERY
Moondance – my gateway into VTM and like they say, you never forget your first.
SURPRISE
Astral Weeks, Tupelo Honey, St Dominics. Too Late to Stop, Veedon – With one or two hiccups see below , VTM’s 70s run of albums is both terrific and terrifically varied in terms of its influences and styles.
DOUBT
While Hard Nose, Period of Transition and Wavelength all have their high points (e.g. the much maligned POT’s Kansas City, Joyous Sound and Heavy Connection), none of them really hang together as a satisfying whole.
It’s interesting that following the mid-70s trip back home to Ireland that resulted in VF and many of the songs on Philosophers Stone (e.g. Drumshanbo, Wonderful Remark), Van seems to have undergone some kind of artistic crisis as evinced by both his tours and albums of that time.
RELIEF
Rather than have his crap years in the 80s a la Dylan, Springsteen, Young, etc, Van seemed to get his fallow period out of the way in the mid-70s. As a result his late-70s run from Into the Music, Common One and Beautiful Vision – all show he’s got his mojo back and firing on all cylinders.
Despite a couple of comparatively lightweight additions to the catalogue – Inarticulate, Wonder, Belfast Opera House – aren’t going to be the Van albums you rescue from a blazing house – his run of excellent releases continued with No Guru, Poetic Champions and Irish Heartbeat.
TOLERANCE
While perfectly acceptable albums, Enlightenment, Avalon and Hymns all mark the beginning of the trend for will-this-do? cosy familiarity that would blight so many of VTM’s later albums.
DISAPPOINTMENT
The wheels started to come off big time for me with Too Long in Exile. While Days Like These and Healing Game are both pretty good, they’re outliers in a sea of jazzy wine bar noodling. Ironic that as his music got lazier and lazier his popularity seemed to grow and grow.
DISILLUSIONMENT
With Magic Time, Keep It Simple, Born to Sing, etc, etc, all hailed as – aaarrrgggghI – “real returns to form”, I perservered with Van on record for far, far longer than was wise. Finally got to the point where I’d give the free preview tracks on albums like LRPV1 a cursory listen before heading back to Veedon Fleece, Beautiful Vision, Champions or any of his wonderful run of 70s and 80s classics. And that’s where Van and I remain to this day.
Quite as valid as the list I cobbled together without really thinking it through. Although I think Denial is real enough – there were years of me wanting to think he was still making great records so hard I willed myself into believing it. Then one day you play the bugger, and feel –
I’ll pretty much go along with this timeline analysis – I started with Astral Weeks, went backwards to the T.B. Sheets boots, then rampantly lurched forward through the late 70s and 80s with Van glued in as my greatest artist alongside Joni. The ones you classify as tolerated fare a little better in my own estimation, but still sit a little lower in the pantheon than their immediate predecessors. I share your disappointment moment, and the ones I’ve bought after that are all somewhere on a descending slope to the point where I have no intention of buying his latest, and I’ll have to be particularly flush, and possibly drunk, before I risk another wallet lightening on any more.
I actually like the albums in your disappointment list but largely agree on the disillusionment list. However my concern is that much of the fairly widespread current disdain is connected to his anti lockdown views which for me are fairly irrelevant no in fact totally irrelevant. He is a musician and like most musicians will have peaks and troughs and his trough is his recent record releases. I still think his live performances are very good. I don’t think his own political views deserve a slaughtering of everything that has gone before and pretty sure his obituary when he eventually passes will be full of praise – such is the fickle society we live in that has no acceptance of anything beyond the norm or what we are told should be the norm. Getting back to the original post , as a personality I don’t think he would merit a biography as there is so little known about him as a person other than where he grew up and that he is a miserable twat.
Great post, OP. I think you sum it all up well.
From my perspective, Van Morrison is just music I grew up with. It was always playing at home, and it reminds me of my childhood. It doesn’t hurt that some of it is also really, really, really good, but even the middling stuff (Enlightenment, Days Like This) provokes only a warm glow of nostalgia.
I know the quality of his stuff goes up and down, but on some level I sort of file him alongside Rod Stewart as someone whose vocals are so strong that they could probably sing the phone book and make it interesting. I half wonder whether that doesn’t account for at least some of the loose quality control – when you have such an utterly ridiculous, completely singular voice you probably feel like you can rely on it to carry you. Obviously, RS doesn’t have an Astral Weeks in the locker, so the gap from best to worst isn’t quite as dramatic, but I think it’s a similar principle.
I agree with you entirely on the lockdown/politics stuff. In the grand scheme of things, a famous musician having some views you disagree with is pretty small beer. He sounds like a pretty unpleasant human being, but that’s fine as I don’t have any desire to ever meet him, and I strongly suspect that most rock stars fall into a similar bucket, they just hide it under the charisma. Unfortunately, it rather goes with the territory of being forcibly frozen in aspic as a teenager.
I’ve got a few books on Van. Rogan et al.
This is the best I have read.
I recommend Stuart Bailie’s recent ’75 Van Songs’ – I doubt anyone else has captured the sense of place (that place mostly being Northern Ireland, and mostly East Belfast within that) in Van’s songs:
Can I add Avoidance. This stage has worked pretty well for me on any post mid 90s VM.
I didn’t like the Rogan book, but agree with Colin on the Stuart Baillie work – short, and very specific in what it covers, but a good read and a well presented book.
Re Van himself, @Jaygee‘s summary looks about right. It is beyond dispute that Morrison’s greatest work is what he did in the 60s and 70s, and, perhaps to a slightly lesser degree, the 80s. Since then I don’t think he has made an outstanding record (though there are three or four very good ones). It is the same trajectory of Paul McCartney, Neil Young, Paul Simon, The Rolling Stones and just about anyone else I can think of. Dylan is perhaps the closest to breaking the mould, with Time Out of Mind and Rough and Rowdy Ways, and, maybe, Bowie with Blackstar and Springsteen with Western Stars, but these artists too show a general trend of decline.
But, unlike @moseleymoles I wonuldn’t advocate Avoidance. There may not be complete albums, but there are individual songs all the way through his career which I think are great and absolutely worth the admission money. There are just two albums of original material I would dispense with altogether – Keep It Simple, and the latest one. Brilliant? No, not by any stretch. Good, credible, serious, worth your attention? Yup.
By the way, great OP.
EGBDF’s earlier post re Cul de Sac is also well worth checking out, BB
Don’t agree with you at all about either Paul Simon or Neil Young who have both made later period albums in fact Paul Simons last album is a very high standard.
Yeah I like Simon’s last one too, but it isn’t Still Crazy or Rhymin’ Simon. Just as I like Three Chords and the Truth and Down the Road but they aren’t Veedon Fleece or St Dominic’s Preview. But that’s my point really – these guys are still capable of doing decent work, it just isn’t as good as their very best. But then very little is…
I think this goes to the heart of the ‘legacy fan’ issue. The credit – musically- VM has in the bank from the first twenty years of his career leads us to want and believe later work to be better than it is. Acid test as always is if this was a new artist would you persist? And the 40 minutes you put into another listen of Latest Record Project could be spent on (say) Steve Reichs Let It Rain and Alvin Lousier I am Sitting in a room which I did today.
It’s Gonna Rain even
There is a difference in the way we listen to a record by an artist whose work we know and love compared to that by a new artist. Let’s take Rough and Rowdy Ways, for example. Part of the pleasure in it comes from knowing this is Dylan late in his life, and when I listen to It, I do so knowing how he has got here, from Freewheelin’ to Blonde and Blonde to Blood on the Tracks to Time Out of Mind. And that knowledge informs the way I hear this new record now, and what I get out of it. So if I check out a record by Dylan, or Morrison, or Simon, or Cooder, It doesn’t mean I necessarily think it will better than, say, Allison Russell’s brilliant album last year, or Angel Olsen’s this year. It doesn’t even mean I’ll like it or keep listening to it (though in the case of Rough and Rowdy Ways I absolutely will). But it does mean I’ll listen to it and hear it in a different way from the way I’d hear a record by a new artist, and, even if I eventually conclude it’s rubbish, I’ll consider it an hour or two well spent.
Pretty much agree with what BB says above on the newer albums by the likes of NY and BD. Probably only buy one in every three of their new releases from the last 20 years. Gave up on Van’s more recent stuff around the time of hear me sing
Yes I think acts usually produce their best work early on when they are young. I think of the best runs of albums often being in the 1970s. That’s when rock music matured and the LP ruled. There was lots of unchartered territory to explore, the 60s having opened up many possibilities. I guess if you just keep churning out product you can at some point get some form back, if only temporarily. My approach is generally to give up with an artist once their greatest works are behind them rather that flog that dead horse when new music is mounting up to be explored. Seems a better use of my precious time. Likewise reissues and remasters with outtakes and live revelations. Not really interested in going over all that stuff but I’ll just play the originals as the artist intended.
Do you not get/listen to Dylan’s Bootleg series, D.?
We’d be deprived of tracks like Blind Willy McTell without
them.
NY’s Archives is equally worthwhile.
If only Van had more respect for/love of his back catalogue,
there’d be more than one volume of Philosopher’s Stone, too
NY’s