Whether Morrison was describing the real Belfast he knew as a child or building an imagined, Joycean universe of private meanings upon its foundations, the yearning for a distant, irrecoverable past is profoundly felt, and something that continues to resonate throughout Morrison’s music of the subsequent 40 years, up to and including the epic album-closer “Behind the Ritual,” from the recent Keep It Simple release, where Morrison sings of “drinking wine in the alley ... in the days gone by.” Indeed, if Morrison has rarely seemed eager to look back over the course of his own discography, his music itself is very much about conjuring a personal and collective past, which seems to be quite alive for Morrison, hovering just out of reach, threatening to displace the present. It’s a feeling that extends to the myriad cover/tribute albums Morrison has produced in the past 15 years (including the traditional country Pay the Devil and the jazz How Long Has This Been Going On?), on which he has tipped his porkpie hat to some of the styles and artists (including Mose Allison, Lonnie Donegan, John Lee Hooker and Solomon Burke) who influenced him during his own musical education. It is perhaps the highest compliment one can pay those albums to say that Morrison’s original compositions for them are frequently indistinguishable from the “period” originals written decades earlier.
“Well, if you take it as a river, then it’s got offshoots — this stream and that stream, north stream, south stream, slipstream. All sorts of streams, you know?” Morrison says. “But it’s all connected to the source. All that stuff that I picked up in the formative years is what I’ve been able to put together as my own thing, so to speak. For me, it’s [about] going back to the source. That’s where I first got the word, or heard that sound. You can’t really say it is ‘X,’ because it just ends up being another word or a cliché. But that initial energy was turned on in me, and I was lucky enough to get to know some of the people — like John Lee Hooker, who was a very good friend over the years — and connect with whatever that is, I don’t know, some kind of energy.”
Kevin Scanlon
Van Morrison sits down with L.A. Weekly for a rare one-on-one interview to discuss the alchemy in his past and the enduring allure of his classic album Astral Weeks
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Since Astral Weeks, Morrison has issued more than 30 albums of new material, penned hundreds of songs for himself and other artists, and managed to put an enviable distance between himself and the record-company executives who have been a regular (and hardly undeserved) object of scorn and derision in such Morrison songs as “St. Dominic’s Preview,” “Drumshanbo Hustle” and “Showbusiness.” Having recently parted ways with his latest label, Universal, which he says did little to promote Keep It Simple despite the fact that the album became the highest-charting domestic release of his career, Morrison is poised to start his own label, Listen to the Lion Records, whose first release will be the live recording of Astral Weeks at the Hollywood Bowl. Yet, Morrison remains characteristically circumspect “not so much about the business” itself but “about the kind of people that the business and fame sometimes attract.”
For the man who once sang that “my job is turning lead into gold,” his own celebrity and its attendant pressures seem as much of a double-edged sword as ever. “I never bargained on fame; it’s just something I’ve had to deal with that came along with doing the music,” Morrson tells me. “It’s like I’ve got these scars,” he says, pointing at his back, “and why do I have to keep showing people the scars all the time? You know what I mean? It’s in the songs somewhere there. I still have to turn myself inside-out to do this. It’s still got a price; it’s not free. Doing these gigs — that’s got a price. I have to act. I have to perform.”
“But you still love it, don’t you?” I ask.
“The only thing I love is the music,” he says without missing a beat. “The rest of it is pure shit. The kind of shit that fame attracts is very dark. It’s very dark. I like the music, but that’s it.”
Van Morrison performs Astral Weeks at the Hollywood Bowl on Fri.-Sat., November 7-8.
