Childs Van Morrison

In The 1970s
1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-1-78952-568-7
Verlag: Sonicbond Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 128 Seiten

After the singularity of Astral Weeks in 1968, the 1970s were the formative years for the solo career of one of the acknowledged giants of modern music. Van Morrison was one of the music legends who defined the decade, with every album bringing out different aspects of Morrison's vast musical spectrum. His story is a chronicle of a Belfast artist coming to terms with the voice, the call and the dream of America, as the decade saw him work through the promise of the land of blues and jazz, westerns and railroads, big cities and backwoods. It also saw his own spiritual quest and the reimagining of a North European heritage and Irish roots alongside the realisation of emigration and exile.
Morrison forged a rich artistic catalogue that continues to the present day. Beginning with the smash hit Moondance in 1970, his output in the decade continued through Tupelo Honey via Hard Nose the Highway to 1979's Into the Music. By the end of the decade, he was again looking to Europe to recast his music for another half-century in the business, but throughout most of the 1970s, his songs centred on America as he created the foundation of an astonishing legacy.

Sequestered in rural Gloucestershire, UK, Peter Childs is starting his seventh decade. Having devoted a life to teaching English and professing about literature, he is the author or editor of dozens of previous books including The Twentieth Century in Poetry and the Encyclopaedia of Contemporary British Culture. Like many of his peers, he has always found music the purest source of shared pleasure and the true solace of the inner life of the soul. Unwilling to dance about architecture, he is delighted now to be writing about the records he loves.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Childs, Peter

Leseproben

Chapter 1

In the Beginning: Astral Weeks

Astral Weeks (1968)

Personnel:

Van Morrison: acoustic guitar, vocals

Richard Davis: double bass

John Payne: flute, soprano saxophone (‘Slim Slow Slider’) (The flautist on ‘Beside You’ and ‘Cyprus Avenue’ is not credited)

Jay Berliner: classical and acoustic guitar

Connie Kay: drums

Warren Smith Jr.: vibraphone, drums, percussion

Barry Kornfeld: acoustic guitar (‘The Way Young Lovers Do’)

Larry Fallon: harpsichord (‘Cyprus Avenue’)

All songs by Van Morrison

Producer: Lewis Merenstein

Recorded at Century Sound, New York, September-October 1968

Release date: US: November 1968, UK: September 1969

Chart places: US: -, UK: 55 (2015)

Running time: 47:10

Tracklisting: Side One: 1. ‘Astral Weeks’, 2. ‘Beside You’, 3. ‘Sweet Thing’, 4. ‘Cyprus Avenue’ Side Two: 1. ‘The Way Young Lovers Do’, 2. ‘Madame George’, 3. ‘Ballerina’, 4. ‘Slim Slow Slider’

First and foremost, Van Morrison is a singer with a range of style and a depth of expression that places him among the great modern vocalists. He’s also an accomplished musician and a consummate songwriter who’d cemented himself a place in music history by the age of 22. Born at the end of World War II – in August 1945 – he wrote and recorded at least three classic songs in advance of his musical rebirth with Astral Weeks in 1968. ‘Gloria’ – now a rock standard – was first recorded with Morrison’s band Them, one of the most highly-regarded 1960s R&B groups. The song fast became a staple of garage rock, but is additionally famous for high-profile cover versions such as Jimi Hendrix’s nine-minute 1968 rendition and Patti Smith’s reworking on her 1975 debut album Horses. In its original version, where the recording is fired by primal energy and confident swagger, ‘Gloria’ is uproarious and elemental, making it as raw a slice of blue-eyed rock and soul as ‘Louie, Louie’, ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’, or The Animals’ version of ‘The House Of The Rising Sun’.

Morrison’s second classic – ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ – is listed among Rolling Stone’s Top 500 Songs That Shaped Rock & Roll. It was his debut single as a solo artist, and went on to become one of the most requested and played songs on American radio. A sweet slice of summer-of-love pop with a ‘sha-la-la’ hook, it could’ve been recorded a dozen different ways, and took a long time to be crafted as a surefire hit. Too pop-flavoured for Morrison’s taste at the time, the Bert Berns arranged and chart-oriented single was selected from over 20 takes, with Van rebelliously scatting in the fade. Backed by the sunshine harmonies of The Sweet Inspirations, it remains Morrison’s best-known song.

The third, less well-known but foundational composition, was a blues song recorded in March 1967, with one of the darkest subjects imaginable: the fetid smell and claustrophobic feel of a girl’s sickroom as she lies stricken with disease. Far from radio-friendly but inspired by a long tradition of songs about disease, including Jimmie Rodgers’s ‘T.B. Blues’ (Rodgers died of tuberculosis), Morrison’s ten-minute ‘T.B. Sheets’ is a portrait of hopelessness when someone is terminally ill. The lyric focuses on the singer – the patient’s visitor – who is numbed by the sunlight shining through a crack in the windowpane, just wants to be free of the stale reek of the disease, needs the window opened to breathe, and above all aches to get out of the room. This is the strangest or saddest love song, told by someone who can’t cope and just wants the tuberculosis sufferer placated: by a drink of water, the radio, another visitor, calming words. Addressed directly to the crying, bedridden Julie, the song is an inexorable haunting blues that has the smell of fear, helplessness, ‘inadequacies’, evasions and ‘innuendos’, as the numbing drums, bass, guitar and organ chug on minute-after-minute without release. This is punctuated by the shrieks of a pitiless harmonica and tambourine that could be the soundtrack to a funeral procession. It became the fitting signature song for Martin Scorsese’s 1999 film Bringing out the Dead – the storyline of which follows a paramedic haunted by the patients he couldn’t save. Morrison’s long-time friend John Lee Hooker recorded a version on his 1972 album Never Get out of these Blues Alive, and the changed lyric in Hooker’s version makes it even more pertinent to Scorsese’s film, directly citing a hospital and a death wagon. Morrison himself duetted with Hooker on the album’s title track.

These three fundamentally different songs hint at Morrison’s eclecticism. They also reflect the breadth of his early musical influences. Elements of jazz, folk, country, soul, R&B, rock and classical weave throughout his 1970s output: the seminal decade of a long, distinguished solo career. He continues to make beautifully produced albums at a remarkable rate, with gems on each one. But the variety in his sound was most striking in the 1970s when each groundbreaking album was a new reputation-building addition to a still-small canon.

Morrison’s father, George, bought imported American records and was especially enamoured with New Orleans jazz but had a wide music collection: Chicago blues, crooners, Country artists, and so on. In the 1950s – looking for a better life across the Atlantic like so many Irish migrants before him – George Morrison even travelled to Detroit, hoping to settle his family in the US. It didn’t work out, but his ambition to see his family stateside was realised for a while in the 1970s after his son’s success.

Meanwhile, that son – also named George – took to being known at school by the shortened form of his middle name Ivan. As a boy, Van was exposed to a prodigious range of music, and grew to love various jazz and blues singers and musicians, band leaders, gospel singers, and a whole spectrum of seminal performers, including Jimmie Rodgers, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Jimmy Reed, Frank Sinatra, Mahalia Jackson, Sonny Boy Williamson, Little Walter, Louis Prima, and especially Lead Belly. A wealth of music came to him through disparate sources, including Van’s father’s collection, a friend’s brother’s records, the few radio stations available, and the musical influence of family and older friends. Van’s early interests led to his later love of R&B and of soul singers such as Sam Cooke, Solomon Burke, Bobby Bland and Ray Charles, not forgetting skiffle and Lonnie Donegan. Morrison told the Irish Times in 1998: ‘The very first record I ever bought was ‘Hootin’ Blues’ by Sonny Terry, and it cost 1/6d in Smithfield. I think the shop was called Smith’s. There were rows and rows of records there’. He added that he bought his first guitar in Smithfield Market too.

Morrison also used to read his father’s jazz books and devour stories about the Wild West, which would become another touchstone for his songs in the 1970s. From an early age, he visited Atlantic Records – Solly Lipsitz’s shop in Belfast – every Saturday with his dad. In the Irish Times interview, Van explained:

Solly had all the records – Jazz and blues. Bo Diddley was on London American, and you could get his records in McBurney’s (Premier Record Shop) in Smithfield. I loved Bill Haley, and I remember buying ‘Razzle Dazzle’. And Gene Vincent and Jerry Lee Lewis – he had so many good records one after another, and I bought his singles in Smithfield. I still love Jerry Lee.

As recently as 2020, Morrison told The Independent: ‘Solly was the connection for all the recordings my father was into – mainly New Orleans jazz like Sidney Bechet and Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five, and Hot Seven records. I used to pick out Lead Belly 78s. I sort of egged my father on to buy those’. Highlighting an autobiographical touch on ‘Astral Weeks’, in the late-1970s, Morrison told Rolling Stone that Huddie Ledbetter ‘was my guru. Somebody once sent me a huge poster of Lead Belly just beaming down with a 12-string guitar. I framed it and put it up on the wall, and I’ve had it on the wall everywhere I’ve been’.

Drawing particularly on jazz, Western music, blues, and also soul as the secular version of gospel, Morrison’s songwriting has remained rooted in the sounds he heard in the late-1950s; in his early career he predominantly employed the same song structures as in these records, using chords he also found in the ballads and doo-wop songs of the era. As a youth, he also developed a taste for country music, including Hank Williams and the Carter family, with an appreciation of classical music coming later. Van’s mother was an amateur singer and through community sing-alongs, Morrison was exposed to a whole raft of songs, including traditional Irish ballads like ‘The Star Of The County Down’ and other lyrics he later recorded with The Chieftains.

Violet Morrison additionally provided her son with an interest in freethinking and spirituality. She took him to Jehovah’s Witness meetings a few times and his experience...