REMIND ME OF YOU VAN MORRISON SERIES
REMIND ME OF YOU VAN MORRISON FREE

Then, having reached an apotheosis, he lets us down easy, repeating that he’s “nothing but a stranger in this world.” “In another time/In another place” he repeats as the song slowly fades away, and by the time it’s over he’s whispering. Accompanied by a lovely flute, Davis’ great double bass, lots of acoustic guitar, and strings, Morrison slowly lets the momentum build, and build, and build, tossing off seeming non sequiturs until he’s practically speaking in tongues. Morrison’s venture into the slipstream is lovely, and if it’s difficult to follow the train of his logic it’s clear he wants to be born again. The LP opens on a majestic note with the cryptic but obviously spiritual title track. And it’s a beautiful thing, this failure to attain the unattainable he may never get to where he wants to go, but then again, none of us ever does. The LP has an autumnal tone he is mostly looking back to his days in Belfast, especially on the song’s two “story” songs, “Cyprus Avenue” and “Madame George.” Both are heartbreaking in their own ways, and the latter in particular demonstrates how he used jazz phrasing and trance-like repetition in an attempt to transcend the surly bonds of this mortal coil.

He did all the songs with just an acoustic guitar, and later they overdubbed the rest of it around his tapes.” But this is untrue Morrison WAS in a separate booth, but the other musicians were playing along in another room, all but the strings and horns that is, which were recorded after the songs had been recorded. I don’t think he ever introduced himself to us, nor we to him…” The Velvet Underground’s John Cale-who was recording in an adjoining studio-echoed Davis’ comments about Morrison isolating himself from his fellow players, saying, “Morrison couldn’t work with anybody, so finally they just shut him in the studio by himself.

“He was remote from us, ’cause he came in and went into a booth… And that’s where he stayed, isolated in a booth. Not everybody liked this approach “No prep, no meeting,” said double bassist Richard Davis, whose remarkable playing dominates the contributions of his fellow musicians. Recorded in 1967 with a crew of jazzmen only one of whom he’d met or played with, he told them to more or less wing it, and they did, to remarkable effect. I will go out on a limb and say this is more than just Morrison’s masterpiece-it’s the most spiritual rock LP ever produced, and Morrison the visionary’s most perfect expression of his attempt to utter the unutterable.Īstral Weeks was Morrison’s second LP. His vocal phrasing speaks to this search he repeats words, stuttering and stammering and scatting his way to a breakthrough to some otherworldly place, while the mostly jazz musicians behind him play ethereally lovely melodies that provide the perfect counterpoint to his quest.

REMIND ME OF YOU VAN MORRISON FREE

Less an LP than a spiritual attempt to storm Heaven, Astral Weeks showed Van Morrison to be a seeker in search of some unreachable mystical plane-like John Coltrane, only playing a kind of jazz-folk hybrid instead of free jazz. I always have to remind myself that Morrison-with his “little fireplug body” to quote Lester Bangs-is one of the Immortals, and that his 1968 album Astral Weeks is one of the best rock LPs ever recorded and certainly in my Top Ten, and this despite the fact that I don’t even like half of its eight songs.

REMIND ME OF YOU VAN MORRISON SERIES

It is unfortunate that my only clear image of the great Van Morrison is at The Band’s Last Waltz, where the pudgy Morrison, resplendent in an awful brown pants suit speckled with sequins, ends a sublime version of “Caravan” with a series of ludicrous leg kicks, all of which are unintentionally hilarious.

Remind me of you van morrison