Spawn Of The Dublin Pubs:
Them Creatures & A Wight Named Van
by Lester Bangs
This piece was transcribed by tmcdevitt@EARTHLINK.NET, who notes:
"[These are the liner notes from] a Them double compilation album released in the U.S in 1972 (circa St. Dominic's Preview) on the PARROT/LONDON record label. Lester Bangs was a prominent rock writer/critic (many think he was the best) who died in 1982 at the age of 33 of an accidental drug overdose. I thought the liner notes were interesting enough (they also have some pretty good yucks) to post them for a devoted group of Van fans."
No one would
question that Van Morrison is one of the finest songwriters and singers of
our time, as well as being a rock 'n' roller without peer. He has cut a swath
across music which proves unmistakably that he can do it all: write some of
the tenderest odes of the day, and still get down and churn out the boogie,
should he be so inclined. Liking him is not merely a matter of belonging to
a specialized following, as with a David Bowie or even a Neil Young; his
music is so universal, and so diverse, as to be joyously inescapable. We
have grown up to Van Morrison: gone through make outs and periods of
adolescent darkness, found rock poetry sans presence in his lyrics turned up
our radios a little louder (as he counseled in "Caravan") every time he came
on, heard in his music hit singles and sheer art (though never "Art Rock")
and gorgeous combinations of the two.
Blowin' Your Mind
was Van's first album under his own name, but despite
the presence of the hit "Brown Eyed Girl" it failed to capture the large
audience he was destined for. Even
Astral Weeks, that magnificent, moody
outpouring of musical poetry reminiscent both of Bob Dylan and Walt Whitman,
would not take him to the heart of AM heaven. Moondance was the turning
point, of course, with its mellowly mutated R&B setting trends for years to
come, and with His Band and
the Street Choir he reached the point where each
successive album was guaranteed to produce at least one hit single, bridging
the gap between "serious" and vicarious mass audiences (between AM and FM,
to reduce the equation to its simplest level) more effortlessly and with
less rankling artifice than anybody since Dylan.
But what even many of his staunchest fans don't know is that Van Morrison
was an AM star along time ago, a jive prince of what many aging rockers of
23 or so are beginning to think of as the "golden era" (meaning their golden
era, the mid Sixties when they were still in high school) who hit the scene
with all roots totally assimilated by the time of his first album, a
sometime hitmaker and man whom, if you heard him at all, left no doubt that
he was destined to promulgate some non plastic surgery on the face of Pop.
Because the first Van Morrison album wasn't Blowin' Your Mind, it was
something simply called Them,
with "Here Comes the Night", pasted
prominently on the cover when that song rocketed to the Number 2 spot on the
charts in America and most everywhere else. The band was Them, and they
functioned for Van in much the same way as the Velvet Underground for Lou
Reed and John Cale, or Buffalo Springfield for Neil Young and Steve Stills,
or the Byrds for Crosby and others, or . . . but this was a birth of another
color than most of the celebrated legendary group as proving. ground for
solo superstar myths of our time. Van Morrison was Them, and the band (and
various bastardizations subject to musical chairs personnel shifts which
never raised the quality of their post-Morrison music) was one of the
tightest, rowdiest most diverse groups to emerge from the Isles in the
twilight of the Liverpool Beat era. Peter Bardens (organ, replacing a now
obscure but incredible cat after "Here Comes the Night", Bill Harrison (lead
guitar), Alan Henderson (bass), and John McAuley (drums, piano and
harmonica). Most of those names are lost now (although Bardens has
resurfaced recently with some less than train derailing albums on MGM), but
in their day they were unbeatable. Some of them hailed, like Van, from
Ireland and some from London, but their sound was enough to turn the head
around of anybody who'd thought the R&B chops of the Animals, say, were
pretty spiffy. and when you added Van's busting at the seams vocal and
compositional talents, it was enough to even make vow forget the Rolling
Stones for the duration of an LP or single side. And in 1965, that was
saying something.
The original Them had the best of everything, their British blues chops down
so solid they could let the standard forms ride and cruise out on some stuff
that was pretty damned experimental, and successfully so, for its day (some
of it still is). An impeccably tight and always driving ensemble sound, and
soloists who knew how to compress enough feeling and enough ideas into a few
deliberate seconds as to make you sob in this post Cream era of rampant
guitar ego tripping. And a little tiny cat who was pretty funny looking, it
seemed to us at the time, (we could hardly believe that the short, pudgy
replica of the gray nerd who sat behind you through a whole semester of
Driver Education and never spoke a word, that absolute antithesis of every
Superstar image ever stamped in our skulls, could be the helmsman of this
wild night's ride), and came bounding out of far left field with a voice
bigger than two Belafontes and songs that, when they weren't taking all the
best of Ray Charles and Chicago blues and Chuck Berry and Jackson and
British R&B and distilling it to rusty perfection, were taking us to sonic
zones we'd never dreamed of in all our born days, headphones or no headphones.
That was Them, named after a rousingly lurid mid 50s American sci-fi
trash flick about prehistoric monsters time warped into the middle of the
Mojave Desert discovered by a little cutie whom no official will believe
till the things are crunching their shopping centers. Like the Animals (who
took too long to shake their matching suits and ties) and The Troggs (ditto,
except their delivery told the whole salacious tale), Them were a concept
bordering on the kind of raw subversion the Rolling Stones were the pioneers
of, and the Velvet Underground, MC5, Stooges and Alice Cooper later brought
to high art. They scowled and glowered like a borough full of broken windows
on their first album cover, even if all of 'em but Van did have on ties and
one said in HIT PARADER that his ambition upon Making It was to get a Jag so
he could pick up chicks with more finesse. Like the Yardbirds, they didn't
really understand the concept of pop subversion, but Van had enough organic
spleen in front to carry all the aura of Danger the band needed. The liner
notes of Them Again, their second American release, tell it like it maybe
was: "Van Morrison, the lead singer with Them sometimes throws his advisors
into a frenzy of hair-tearing despair... moody, unpredictable, perverse,
often downright willful (sic-and god forbid!) - but always, creative. On
sessions when asked to alter the phrasing of a number or increase the tempo,
he will say with quiet rebellion: 'No! I always sing this way...the way I
feel.' and he is invariably right."
Solid! You used to read PR stories in the BEAT, with HIT PARADER, the
pre-ROLLING STONE bible of the rock cultists, about how Them would come to
Hollywood on an American tour and when not onstage Van would sit for hours
in a corner booth alone behind the biggest, darkest shades, chain smoking
and emanating a malevolent aura that mesmerized and terrified and bagged him
an early reputation as a lonely,strange, distant genius who could only
communicate to the rest of the world through his music. And, of course, much
of that was true. His songs have always veered between expressions of
traditional romantic love which would have been mawkish from a writer with
less talent and a different sensibility; and explorations of the ultimate
darknesses of the soul=97corny as that sounds, Morrison pulls it off as
authentically as the sweet stuff=97the nihilistic options the present offers
us all and occasional pictures of the desolation angels on their way down
the slag heap. And that darkness tends to be rendered just about as
romantically, with a truly Irish literary sense of doom and fear (the same
terror as epiphany found in James Joyce, and probably just about as rooted
in Catholicism).
One of the amazing things about Morrison is that he took these natural
artistic proclivities and made them work in the context of black American
R&B and white British pop music, with no loss of integrity. It was a bit as
if Samuel Beckett's deranged but jivecat son had decided to take on Herman's
Hermits just to see how far he could derail the 1964 lollipop train. Van
ended up laying a whole new set of tracks.
From the beginning Van and Them seemed determined to shatter the
mold-when you looked at the album covers you saw bank clerks and pub
crawlers, but when you listened you heard already topnotch musicianship
breaking its ass to jump out of the moptop mass and be accepted on its own
terms. The liner notes again: "Their () (a Them album) quality lies not
only in the rendering of the numbers on these tracks, but in Them's efforts
to break away from the popular image of long haired maracas shaking pop
groups (!). On this album, Them have introduced vibes, sax and flute. They
are not content to stand still musically and rest on the laurels of three
big hit records, and are moving towards a 'sound' very close to the jazz idiom."
Ego and hype, sure, but Them were hardly the forerunners of Chicago or
BS&T, out to prove they can play note perfect solos by members of big bands
from two decades ago and unite jazz and rock and classical and folk and
blues and anything else they can exploit. Them began as the apotheosis of
the tear band - some of the tracks on these two records are right out of Wayne
Cochran's dreams - and built from there into a superbly eclectic vehicle for
Van's young and rampaging consciousness. You can hear the process in the
grooves herein.
Their earliest recordings, not featured here, included an also ran single
called "Don't Start Crying Now," a legendary talking jam roughly equivalent
to the Stones' "Stoned" called "The Story of Them," and "Baby Please Don't
Go." The last was a hoary blues on more archivists' country blues
anthologies than even the archivists can count, supposedly written by Big
Joe Williams and given new life, to put it mildly, by Van and Them. In fact,
it was a big hit in England, where it became the theme song for the period
pop TV show READY, STEADY, GO and a minor (but as earthshaking for those who
had been waiting for something exactly like this as the early Stones singles
or the Who's "Anyway Anyhow Anywhere") hit in this country. Structurally it
was way ahead of its time, featuring heartbeat bass and bitterly slicing
guitar as well as Van's deja vu agonized vocal, and there are many non
purists here among us who think it the best version of the song ever laid on
wax.
Released in late '64 b/w "Gloria", it never quite made the upper brackets
of the surveys, but a few months later Parrot London was smart enough to
merely flip it over and ship "Gloria" to all the radio stations and rack
jobbers (with "Baby Please Don't Go" still the flip), and the rest is
history. Almost. Them's version of "Gloria" was a monster hit in the West,
but never quite made it across most of the rest of America. A few months
later a prototype punkrock group out of Chicago called the Shadows of Knight
covered it and hit everywhere in the country except the West, where
everybody had heard, cruised and danced to and memorized the real original
until placebos were unthinkable. The Shadows of Knight had lots of energy
and enthusiasm, but Van's and Them's "Gloria" was a chromosome blaster
before most of us even knew we had 'em to blast. It was the first distinct
rock 'n' roll classic to come from the pen of Van Morrison, and perhaps
still the greatest. I mean, "Doctor My Eyes" is fine and all, but it shore
ain't "Louie Louie" . . .
Van's second Instant & Eternal Classic was "Here Comes the Night," which
managed to become a full fledged national hit and was a delightful and
surprising change from "Gloria." Completely different, in fact, proving that
the man had as many voices and visions as we could endure before turning in
our brains for a mess of pottage. And its flipside, also still unrepresented
on U.S. albums or U.K. either as far as I know, was a devastating employment
of the classic Bo Diddley "I'm a Man" riff to build a sonic riptide that was
as adventurous in its way as what the Yardbirds did with the same material,
and its lyrics sealed forever the stigmatic mark of desolate brilliance on
Van's stout sweaty brow.
Which brings us finally to those masterpieces small and large which have
been gathered, reprogrammed and manna'd on all of us in the set you are
holding in your hands. From "Gloria" to the covers like "Out of Sight," all
the music here is vibrantly alive with the spirit feel, as Milt Jackson
would have it, both of its funky roots and its significance as solid, ripup,
bring'em on in commercial rock 'n' roll. Commercialism is much derided in
some hipper than thou quarters these days, but it's still the firstest with
the mostest pulsation when it comes to propelling you off your ass and into
some primordial rug cutting. And as gorgeous as Van's recent workhas been
(and as fine as he must feel to have somehow, finally resolved the tensions
brimming from his early music), any reasonable ear just gotta fess up to the
fact that one or two "Wild Nights" an album don't really satiate, especially
when these early Them albums were burger heaven and wham, bam, thank you
ma'am from stem to stern.
Interestingly enough, the bar-band traces were far more in evidence on
Them Again, the
second album to be released in America, than on Here Comes
The Night. (Although, since the English releases differed so drastically
from both of these in content, and American LPs were probably selected from
a body of work covering several months, sessions, and recordings from Over
There-well, it probably doesn't make too much diff vis a vis American album
chronology). And an edited edition of Them Again comprises the first record
here, minus "Call My Name" (which was as exciting as most of the material
around it and memorable for Van's pronunciation alone: "When you're burdened
down with cur/And troubles seem so hard to burr") and "Don't You Know," a
passable jazz rock thing heavy on the flute and the Ray Charles influence.
It's also worth mentioning that much of the material here was written not
by Van but by their producer Tommy Scott, who would make heavy attempts to
mold Van's sound in much the same way as Bert Bern's did later. The only
difference is that Berns had a way of turning out hits that Scott seemed to
lack. But the music is just as good, and not really vary far from Van's own
early work.
Like "Could You Would You," a great opener with strong guitar chords bearing
what Miles Davis called "the Spanish tinge" and quite close to Berns' own
Spanish Harlem musical proclivities as evidenced in Van's later work. There
is a strong organ line that puts you in mind of the Band when they're wiring
to be hot 'n' nasty, and Van sings the first line almost like Arthur Lee
would, shifting later into a classic middle period (meaning circa "Brown
Eyed Girl") Van Morrison vocal. The song is unmistakably Morrison penned,
and proves that the utterly old fashioned romanticism of his recent music is
not mere sentimental dreck (as some people, who seemingly will never forgive
him for surviving those Astral Weeks will claim), but as true an expression
of a sensitive and original sensibility as the darkness of "Mystic Eyes" and
Weeks. Why, it almost sounds like he's saying "Janney, Janney, Janney, I
love you!" at the end.
"Something You Got" is a great Chris Kenner song popularized by Chuck
Jackson, done here as a sort of mutated New Orleans R&B with a wondrously
old fashioned vocal by Van. Followed by none other than "Turn On Your
Lovelight," which is fun and tight=97to hear its familiarity is just like
breathing the airs of home, which is more than can be said for some recent
renditions. The thing that makes recorded (basically) bar band music work is
when the natural excitement and the authority of the band are so strong as
to cut through the banality and familiarity and keep your attention by the
purity of that power. It's no easy trick, but Van and Them pull it off more
than once in this album, and if I didn't want to make patrons of Good Rock
mad I'd say how delighted I am at the proximity of the organ work here to
that on the best records by stalwarts like the Kingsmen and Question Mark &
the Mysterians.
"I Can Only Give You Everything," co authored by producer Scott, is a
period piece of filler which ends up exciting enough to stand the test of
time. Its fuzz guitar line is such a cliche it's become a classic (Hint: it
wasn't recorded before "Satisfaction"), and the lyrics were gloriously rank
enough to induce the Troggs to cover it. In fact, it's just about as close
as Van Morrison ever got to true punk rock, with his vocal overtones of
Jagger, Mark Lindsay of Paul Revere and the Raiders, and even a taste of
Iggy Stooge.
Followed by the perfect contrast of a prototype Van Morrison romantic
ballad: "Fill me my cup/l'll drink your sparkling wine and tell you
everything is fine until I see your sad eyes/Throw me a kiss across a
crowded room some sunny windswept afternoon is none too soon for me to
miss/My sad eyes/Ohh not bad, eyes/Uh, glad eyes/For you my sad eyes." The
romanticism is lavish enough to verge on the stickiness and purple "poetry"
of a Rod McKuen or Erich Segal, if not for Van's strong, rich delivery, his
incredible way with words - "across a crowded room some sunny wind swept
afternoon is none too soon" rolls off his tongue and around the rhythm like
some of Dylan Thomas' more sonorous recorded cadences - and the traces of the
other, darker side of this life he never left out. The poetic sense is all
but Victorian, the wine could come from ancient Greek couplets or OMAR
KHAYYAM (though it just spills in with his wine lyrics running through
Blowin' Your Mind, the other Bang album, and just about everything on Warner
Brothers - just as with sweet young things, when the man finds a subject that
gladdens his heart he keeps returning to it - and who wouldn't), and the song
itself is just one of the most polished early expressions of his vision of
love and harmony as a state of innocence, even naivete. Van's work really
does comprise songs of innocence and experience, innocence being the
breeding ground for love and knowledge the mutable terrain where darkness
creeps up quickly from behind and mugs you in the middle of your purest
joys. Even in this song, the attraction is in the melancholy, and when he
sings "Who are you and I to wonder why we do so?" the fatalism and sense of
how little it is that things really do make sense is subtle but firm.
And if there really is a vacuum in every joy, then the only recourse is
to fill it with more wine and general animation, and pubs become
tabernacles, and parties are indicated. So side two roars off with "Out of
Sight," a great bar band cut that illustrates, like two songs on the first
Who album, the English mid 60's R&B bands fascination with James Brown. Its
instrumental break isn't going to give Brother JB any sleepless nights
(although with the kind of music he's making these days, it should), but
this music always sounds better and has more charm in retrospect. it was so
much fun to just slap it on and let all 2:21 of it grind out, especially
when you know that if it was any of today's bloated jazz rock bands it would
probably run three or four times as long and be flabby with preening solos.
"It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" is a classic cover (and covers certainly
can be classic - just ask the Stones or Ike and Tina) and perhaps the most
unusual version of this song ever recorded. The piano sounds like droplets
running down a windowpane and with Van's vocal the song becomes not Dylan's
declaration of irrevocable separation, psychic displacement and vindictive
rejection taking the form of a self righteous putdown; there's a feeling
here of real love and regret, shot through with painful resignation, as if
to say "We've both lost something, but it's no good pretending that it'll
ever come back." A very traditional rendition, in fact, far less "hip" and
independent than Dylan's-perhaps the shift in emphasis is summed up when Van
changes "your lover who just walked out the door" to "your lover who just
walked through the door." Like the emotional difference between John Lee
Hooker and Smiley Lewis singing about a breakup.
"Bad or Good" is some of the best Ray Charles influenced white pop gospel
of the period, finding a soulful strength in absolute fatalism just as
Gospel always has: "Don't even have to say one word/It ain't nothin' that
we've seen or heard/ Get out/ Get out/ Jump and shout/ Then you know what
it's all about. . . Gotta hold on when all is good/ Make out like all is
fine/ Gotta let it happen/ Bad or good." And, in spite of all obvious
influences, unmistakably a Morrison original-lyrics don't lie.
"How Long Baby" takes similar musical strains deeper into a soul blues
ballad with prominent Pop Staples type Delta echo guitar, leaving Van no
recourse but to rear up and ride the side out shouting "Bring 'Em On In".
Raveup time enhanced by the narrative style which appears in many of his
songs. When not exploring a bleak corner of some urban scene with a
novelist's attention to detail ("Madam George"), or merely reflecting the
joys of life his wife and child have brought him ("Tupelo Honey"), Van
delights in moving on, down the sidewalk, across the street, from here to
there and across the water. I saw him once on AMERICAN BANDSTAND in 1966,
stewed to the gills, and when Dick Clark tried to conduct his usual Barbie
Doll interview and asked him him what he'd been doing lately, Van drooled a
few seconds of garble and " Wuhhhlll, y'know man, just like, I just walk on
down the street, right along, and keep on comin', and come by some cafes and
see somebody or whoever, and they say and I say an' we sit and drink an'
then walk on. . ." Clark hustled him off camera in favor of a zit-creme
commercial pronto, but that reply, essentially, is what this song is about.
Places: "I was walkin' down by Queensway/ When I met a friend of mine/ He
said 'Come on back, back to my pad/ We can have a good time'" and "When I
stepped off the boat and I walked upon the dry land /Slowly!/ To the
carpark/ And I jumped in" and rolls off down the road once more, reeling in
and out of a great scat section that bridges into a blustery 50s sax solo.
Off the wall and up the avenue of dreams. When he sez "out of my mind!" it
ain't like Neil Young fainting in the back of an ambulance, it's jumping
loose enough to smash your head against the wall and pour half a pint of
Bordeaux on the wound! Shout don't stop!
The second record, which corresponds except for two dropped songs again
and some shifts in sequence to the Here Comes the Night album, is less
raucous, perhaps, not so pub-loose, but better produced and a far more
potent statement by a band and an artist beginning to feel the heady extent
of their powers. Heavier on the basis of being almost all Morrison originals
alone, it is really a landmark album in the rock 'n' roll of the Sixties
that nobody who cares about the music (or wants to have their skull
pulverized now and then) should be without. To say it's essential is to
understate its importance - it's more than history, it's timeless jive that
drives you straight out of your mind and into your body, as John Sinclair
would have it, and maybe even clear up the wall if visceral music ain't yer
cup of meat.
Opening with the showstopper of them all, "Gloria". This, folks, is the Rock
of Ages, sure as "Long Tall Sally" or "Sweet Little Sixteen" or "Let's Spend
the Night Together" or maybe even "Are You Ready". It's a demonstrative self
contained definition of rock 'n' roll that will have you moving or shrivel
you into a Librium puddle of MOR drool. It'll be heard as long as rock 'n'
roll endures, and never sound less timely than it did the day they cut it. A
paraplegic could dance to it - it has the magic that'll set you free like few
songs by the Spoonful or anybody else. Cruising for burgers to it in 1965
was more cosmic than any acid trip, and after even one hearing no one could
ever forget those creaming lyrics and how seethingly Van spat them out: "She
comes around here/Just about midnight/She makes me feel so good, Lord/Ohh, I
wanna say she make me feel alright/Cause she walkin' down my street/She
knock upon my door/And then she comes to my room/Man, she make me FEEL
ALRIGHT!!!!!"
Ah, sexism! The joys of that utterly apolitical horniness has brought a tear
to the eye of many a reminiscing campus revolutionary as he wrestles with
the problem of whether he's got a right to ask his girl to shave her legs!
In the days of "Gloria's" first ascendance, people sweated other neuroses.
Just dig "Here Comes the Night", for some real sick sentiments: "I can see
right out my window walkin' down the street my girl with another guy/His arm
around her like it used to be with me, oh it makes me wanta cry!"
"Like it used to be with me" ("his arm around her")? What is this, SUNDAY
BLOODY SUNDAY? Nahh, it's just the remarkable rhyme scheme of this song with
the all but unparalleled achievement of being simultaneously perfect and
awkward as hell. The words seem to tumble backwards over each other in true
spazz spew. Which is absolutely appropriate, since the song was about being
a poor awkward pube losing his long dream and short steady to some strutting
BMOC. Adolescent angst is technicolor and Todd AO, and if we all came clean
who has not mused more than once "twixt twelve and twenty or even after
"Wonder what is wrong with me?", just as Van does here. If you went to high
school with this song, like I did, you probably lived it too. If not, you
may even be living it now. In any case it was Them's first solid national
hit on this side of the pond, shooting straight up the charts and nudging
into the number two spot only because the new Beatles single came out at the
same time. And despite being a superhit, it's a totally bizarre song as the
lyrics attest. The way Van barks "Wow, here it comes!" is enough to keep you
awake nights, and the structure is unusual, changing from a vaguely Latinish
balladic lament (the Bert Berns touch, again; the man never quite got the
hot sauce out of his ears after his "Twist & Shout" conquered the world and
though Van didn't suffer bv it, it did make some of his music predictable)
into a sort of weirdo hillbilly roundelay, which is where the gawky lyrics
quoted came in. There's no doubt that is was much a rock 'n' roll classic in
its way as "Gloria", if destined by its form never to become such a
standard, and even ends with the protaginist playing voyeur outside the
window where the objects of his jealousy carry on in every unmentionable way
his fertile pube brain can dream up.
The next song is, simply one of the most powerful pieces of music you are
ever going to have the opportunity to hear. "Mystic Eyes" was an all-time
brain-blitz that's fully as devastating today as it ever was; vicious,
utterly nihilistic barrages of sound, coherently performed and pristinely
recorded, making the rage that much more vivid. The lyrics are cornball but
terrifying (an early liner says that the song was originally supposed to be
instrumental and they were ad-libbed in the studio, which is believable but
detracts not a whit from their impact), and the guitar lines are as
razor-edged as anything Mike Bloomfield did on Highway 61 Revisited or the
first Paul Butterfield album (both of which came out after this by the way).
"Mystic Eyes" is an exercise in pure adrenalin frenzy, Van Morrison's darker
side at its most ferociously anguished. And if that wasn't enough, it also
contains one of the best harp solos (almost certainly by Van) ever recorded.
When he finally returns to his harp after the vocal it is with a savage
snarling chomp! as of a barracuda biting down.
All of which makes "Don't Look Back," a bar-band ballad harkening back to
the other album, a welcome relief. Originally a John Lee Hooker song, it's
not as sentimentally innocuous as it might at first appear. After all, Dylan
named a movie after it. And even that's not really true, it's a beautiful
composition and performance with an unforced message that becomes neither
preachy nor sappy. When he says "Those days are gone," he means no Gee-whiz
but exactly, strongly what he says: "Stop dreaming and live on in the
future/Darlin', don't look back." Which seems doubly applicable today, even
if the appearance of an album like this one is evidence of the uses and
vitality of the past.
"Little Girl". Ah, nymphomania! Well, not necessarily, but there comes a
point where tbe honest chronicler must deal with certain recurrent themes,
as I said before, in Van's oeuvre, and this is the cookingest mutation of
"Good Morning Little School Girl" this side of Vladimir Nabokov. It has a
great chugging construction, and voyeurism of so poetic a turn as to make a
grown lecher cry: "Saw you from my window" - "Cypress Avenue", here we
come and a dreamscape middle section: "In miles and miles of golden sand/
Walkin', talkin', hand in hand". Leading to a final lust crazed raveup.
Another classic - "Sweet Little 16" was a stunner, but you shoulda seen her
little sister. Van did.
"One More Time" links generically to "Don't Look Back" and "How Long
Baby" as blues ballad and functions as throwforward to his current stuff: It
won't be long till i'm comin' on home/Gonna get you in my arms and make
love to you, darlin', just one more time." Straight to your heart like a
cannonball. The spoken section even reaffirms that "There's a girl for every
boy," which was nice to know in the 11th Grade and nice to know now if
you're in between embraces. Their lives were saved by rock'n'roll.
And rescued not even once this side but twice at least. "If You and I
Could Be As Two" comes complete with spoken intro. "I kicked my heart when I
saw you standin' there in your dress of blue/The storm was over, rny ship
sailed through!" How could it not've? Perfect penetration, perfect joy. It's
the eternal teenage dream, rendered in a classic ballad form: "What is this
feelin'?/What can I do?/If you and I could be relieved/To walk and talk and
be deceived/I'd give my all, and more I would do," even to the point of "Sew
this wicked world up at the seams." Love will win, and despite the Utopian
cast which links it to such prime slices of puppylove megalomania as the
Troggs' "Our Love Will Still Be There", Van is realist enough to declare his
willingness to be deceived, knowing full well he's gonna be anyway whether
he apprehends any sweetness or not. The most pragmatically korny anthem you
could name.
"I Like It Like That" ain't Chris Kenner's 1961 hit, today they'd probably
call it a boogie. though it's closer to a shuffle, a traditional medium
tempo R&B form common to many British getdown bands of the period. You can
dance to it and you don't need a Funk & Wagnall's to apprehend the kozmik
import of the words. Same thing applies to the closing raveup, Bobby Troup's
"Route 66", which was one of the few songs that Chuck Berry ever wrote or
popularized that the Rolling Stones managed to cut old Chuckie on, and even
though this version don't cut the Stones' (that'd be a mighty tall order),
its latter day barrelhouse piano and cheerfully (beerfully) bashing drums
make for more great party music, taking the album out on a joyous note.
In between those two mainstream whoopups, however, lies one of the
greatest pieces of pure psychedelic music ever recorded: "One Two Brown
Eyes." Sure it preceded the fad, doesn't sound anything like Chocolate Watch
Band ersatz fuzz-feedback anyway. What makes it really chilling is that it's
so lucid, deliberate and ungimmicky. Strange as anything on Astral Weeks ,
perhaps stranger, more vein chilling than "T.B. Sheets," it's put together
like no other song here or elsewhere with elements that shouldn't mix in a
month of solstices but somehow, eerily, do. Like the weird irony of the
tinkling percussive background (gIockenspiel?), not to mention the
infernally, surrealistically vindictive lyrics. Or the brilliant use of the
pocketknife alternative to bottleneck guitar, which slithers and slides and
makes all appropriate incisions, almost as if peeling skin away from a still
warm body. A further perverse twist is provided by the underpinning of a
bossa nova beat. Astrud Gilberto will never sing this, though, that's for
sure. "I'm gonna cut you down to my size," hisses Van, and you look at the
diminutive unsmiling presence on the old album cover and think
simultaneously of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE: real horror show. Well, he does say
"Don't read about it in good books," and it ain't nothing like Lou Reed
singing " Like a dirty French novel" or Joni Mitchell watching "all the
pretty people reading ROLLING STONE." Beyond Sade. Bizzaro, years ahead of
its time in both that and its structure, and totally coherent to boot. The
Chill as Van hasn't rendered it since save perhaps in some of the remote
labyrinths of Astral Weeks. And nobody can put The Chill on like he can, and
he don't even have to indulge in no juju hocus-pocus: plain old fashioned
cold blooded virulence does just fine.
This is not the latest or the last Van Morrison album you're ever going to
get, but before scrawling my John Hancock at the end of these perhaps overly
effusive notes I must say that when it comes to this man's music you're
never going to hear anything better than the best moments of these two
albums. Which is not at all to denigrate his current work, but to note that
genius never stands still and when he laid down these sides with Them he was
moving at a pace perhaps more furious than he has ever matched since, simply
because it was all new and there were so many things to say at once that the
man literally exploded. I don't know much about his personal life, which is
probably just as well for our purposes here, since I suspect that the
creative eruption comprising these records, Blowin' Your Mind and Astral
Weeks laid the same heavy tax on his soul and body as that which Dylan
endured in the process of living and recording the cycle that ended with
Blonde On Blonde. Like Dylan, Van seems to have found a modicum of the
harmony he was always lunging after in his post-apocalypse, connubial
country life. But that does not make the artistic product of the apocalypse
any less crucial and exciting - more so, if anything. Even wanting to believe
that we don't really want our heroes to immolate themselves to sate our
vicarious craving for the truth and profundity and danger they have lived,
we'll always have the disturbingly beautiful music of the outer edge to move
and keep us aware of what lies there. I think Astral Weeks was Morrison's
haunted cathedral erected on that precipice, and much of the music here
belongs to an earlier, perhaps easier and certainly more prosaic period. But
it's inescapable that some of the music here, and it is usually the very
best of it, comes from that singed outpost on that harrowing highway where
artists push against either the looming crunch of the juggernaut or outward
into sheer nothingness. And that extremism is this music's strength. "Mystic
Eyes" is strong and vital because for all its agony and desperation it's
totally unafraid.
And it's strong because, like everything around it on these two pieces of
wax, it's real rock 'n' roll of the sort that comes rarely and scores your
life without your even trying, by it's truth. Music like this can't stay out
of sight long, and if all goes well and there are no contractual snags this
company may even get around to putting out a second collection of early Van
Morrison-Them material in a few months, with all the goodies and
masterpieces that a mere two albums couldn't hold: "Baby Please Don't Go,"
"All For Myself," "Richard Cory," songs from English albums like "Just a
Little Bit," "I Gave My Love a Diamond," "You Just Can't Win," "Bright
Lights Big City," "Tbe Story of Them," "My Little Baby," "Don't Start Crying
Now" and all the others.
In the meantime, should you be standing even now in the records section of
the local department store with the plastic slit by thumbnail and this
package open, reading these words and trying to decide... don't hesitate.
Get it while you can.
Part of the van-the-man.info unofficial website
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