1971 Georgia Straight interviewby Rick McGrath For me, this was the big time...Van the Man! I had been a fan since 1965, when
Gloria first hit the airwaves and I rushed out to buy the first Them album.
Couldn't get enough of that Belfast Blues with the scruffy band and the obviously
intense little red-haired lead singer who could do a Mick Jagger better than
Mick.
Them Again was another knockout album, and then word came down that Van had left
the group to go off with Bert Berns and his fledgling Bang Records...good-bye
Belfast, hello London...lotsa rumours of dissention in the ranks...all pretty
well dispelled by the magical "Brown Eyed Girl" (does your copy have the original
line, making love in the green grass, behind the stadium)...and then, nada.
Whoops. Bert Berns is reported dead...way too young. Van drops out of sight for a
couple years (we talk briefly about this in the interview) and then re-emerges
triumphantly with the incomparable Astral Weeks, a concept album that
jointly tracks love and heroin from first to last sight -- "I know you're dyin',
baby, and I know you know it, too"...from the album's finale: "Slim Slow Slider",
the title of which is, of course, a reference to shooting up... What Van
records from '67 to '69 is ultimately released on a bunch of low budget LPs under
the Bang label, but Van has already moved on to the more bigtime Warner Bros.
Songs such as "Who Drove the Red Sports Car?", "Madame George", "TB Sheets", etc.
point in the direction of Astral Weeks, but use rock musicians, all of
whom lack the incredible intensity and musicianship of the jazz masters used on
Astral Weeks.
Getting this interview wasn't easy. Van didn't like the press much -- remember,
this was 1971, only a couple years after he was vilified for alleged drug use --
and his prior life as a top 40 hitman. It was set up at the Vancouver airport the
morning after the show, and I think for all of us it was a different gig: I'd
never interviewed a rock star over bacon and eggs, and I doubt if Van had much of
a conception of The Georgia Straight and just how sympathetic an underground
paper could be.... Anyways, he seemed to enjoy himself; we laughed a lot, and
members of the band listened and made a few comments, as well.
Rick: . . .to get things started. What were your feelings about the
Vancouver show generally?
Van: I think it could have been better. Sound wise it wasn't too good
because we weren't hearing each other. Stuff like that. And whoever was doing the
lights didn't know what was happening because, you know, someone would take a
solo and he would put the lights on the wrong cat, stuff like that. The guy with
the lights didn't have an ear for music, and so that part of it was all - pshew
-- the lights were up in the air. The sound wasn't too good.
Rick: You usually travel with the Street Choir--Janet Planet, Martha Velez
and Ellen Schroer. But they weren't here this time.
Van: They only come with us in situations where we can all travel
comfortably. This one happens to be a haphazard tour.
Rick: I've heard albums by Martha Velez on her own. How did you pick up on
her?
Van: The trumpet player, Keith Johnson, she's married to him. All I
remember is just one night she was there, that's all I remember.
Rick: She's got a fine voice.
Van: Yeah.
Rick: You guys are a fine band. How did you get together?
John Platania (lead guitar): I just came in and played.
Rick: This next question is sort of in response to the review of your show
in the local dailies, both of which emphasized the point that your stage presence
was less than exciting. I would like to know if you are self conscious about your
stage presence at all.
Van: Is this tape on?
Rick: Yes.
Van: You wouldn't know it (laughs). Go ahead.
Rick: Are you aware of your actions onstage, or do they just happen?
Van: It's a lot of things. It's like, I mean, when you have to get up and
travel for like six or seven hours and stuff like that. Personally, I can't
really perform my best under those conditions. I can't really do it as well as I
could because you're tired when you get there. It's hard to explain. I can only
get really into it when I'm comfortable.
Rick: What I was wondering, though, was when you get onstage, do you go
through your actions without thinking about them, or do you have a plan of some
sort?
Van: We plan most of our set; sometimes we change it when we're on. We
know what we're doing when we're on.
Rick: You don't perform the songs live the same as the album, or indeed
the same way every time.
Van: I seldom play the same thing twice. If we do play the same thing
twice I usually say "why?".
Rick: I was thinking about how the audience can be a drain on the
performer creatively. In other words, the audience, and I'm thinking about the
Doors in this instance, play the album, go to the concert, and want to hear
"Light My Fire" three years after it was released.
Van: Yeah, right.
Rick: And Jim seems to be a captive of the audience. The audience uses him
like a puppet. I think something like that is really damaging to a performer.
Van: Yeah, it's a drag. Most of the audience has a set thing and before
they come they have a set thing about the performer from radio and record
exposure. Then they expect a certain thing and when they don't get exactly what
they expect, it throws them off balance.
Rick: What I don't think the audience understands is that the recording is
a real artificial representation of the artist. The artist when he records is at
the mercy of an engineer and a vast array of gadgets.
Van: Right.
Rick: And the finished product may not be the way the artist intended.
Van: Dig it. Perhaps the truest way you can come to any kind of real
recording is doing it live, you know, you just go in and do the songs live
without any overdubbing and get it within the first two or three takes. That's
where it's really true to what you're doing. When you do a thing and mix it then
it becomes something else, a production.
Rick: I notice this same thing happening in the album -- a progression
from "Astral Weeks" to "Domino". Things are getting looser. Are you planning this
into the albums?
Van: We always try and get that It all depends on the circumstances.
Sometimes you can get it, sometimes you can't It all depends on your day, or like
who's doing what, or what engineer you've got. It's gotta lot of things.
Rick: When you go into the studio, do you go in with a pretty sure idea of
what you want the song to sound like, or do you work it out in the studio?
Van: Sometimes, like on the last album, songs were just done in the
studio. I just called the numbers and we did them for the first time in the
studio. But others we work out before we go in.
Rick: It's been two years since Astral Weeks has been released, and it was
preceded by about two years of silence....
Van: How do you mean silence?
Rick: Well, "Brown Eyed Girl" was released in 1967, and that was it until
1969.
Van: I was still recording.
Rick: What happened to that stuff?
Van: I've got some of it (laughs).
Rick: lt wasn't released on records at all.
Van: No, it wasn't released.
Rick: That's what I mean by silence.
Van: Oh, well, just because you don't have a record out.. that doesn't
have anything to do with anything. It really doesn't have much to do with music,
whether you've got a record out or not.
Rick: But as far as the public is concerned, there's a big gap between
"Brown Eyed Girl" and Astral Weeks.
Van: Are you talking about it like in terms of hit singles or something?
Rick: No, like just things released. Like, you're going to keep on
progressing as a musician, changing and evolving, but the public... like I was
not aware of what you were doing during those two years.
Van: That's another story. I don't even know what it is. It's beyond my
imagination what that is. The system or the press or whatever. I don't know what
that is. It doesn't have anything to do with me. I don't think you can really
generalize about what the public sees and what you're doing. Because what the
public sees and what you're doing are just different. The public doesn't see you
all the time, so they've just got to go on what they can get It's a very
artificial wag of doing it.
Rick: Especially when one realizes that the artist must keep changing.
Van: I do other things than playing music. I do a lot of other things
rather than that. It probably isn't a big part of my life. It's just a small
part. I think that's why. I mean, I don't know anything about the Beatles, but it
always struck me about the Beatles that everyone had this thing in their head
about the Beatles and they wouldn't accept anything else. Even if one of the
Beatles said "Here's where we're really at - blah, blah blah". they wouldn't
accept it because it would ruin the image, or something like that That's
nonsense. How can you base your life on that? Some kind of image.
Rick: It's like you spend your public moments pretending to be someone
else.
Van: Sometimes, it's not them. They probably didn't have any say about it
-- I don't know, but a lot of people don't have any say about what they're
surrounded with. Like something's promoted a certain way. You could be totally
different and be promoted as something else. People show up and they say, "Well,
we saw this ad in a paper saying you were going to act like this or sing like
this and that's something else". That's like on the other side of the tracks.
Rick: Do you find this happens to you?
Van: Not any more (laughs). I don't think it happens any more.
Rick: But it did at one time?
Van: Yeah, one time it did.
Rick: Musically, you seem to be getting back to R&B. Or is that an
assumption on my part?
Van: I think it's an assumption. Personally, I play a lot of different
kinds of music and I enjoy playing them all. I'm not getting back to one thing.
Rick: But your last two albums have been predominantly R&B and during the
concert the songs you did do off Astral Weeks were changed so that they seemed to
be like the more recent stuff. What about that?
Van: I really don't know what to say (laughs).
Jack Schroer (Saxophone): Did you really expect the Astral Weeks songs
to be the same?
Rick: No, I wasn't expecting them to be the same. What I'm mainly
interested in discovering is where your greatest musical interests lie.
Van: Oh, a lot of jazz, folk, blues, R&B, pop, rock, classical., I like a
lot of things. I'm into a lot of different kinds of music. I couldn't really say
"This is where it's at; this is what I think."
Rick: I think what we've been talking about would really shock the average
reader. Because I think that the average reader has an idea of something
happening in a performer's head when he cuts an album and after he's finished the
album all of a sudden all thoughts of going off in a musical direction stop, and
he's just supposed to stop, get out there, and somebody turns the key in his back
and he recites the album. This is so wrong. Like the story about Phil Spector
asking you about the "true meaning" of your songs.
Van: You heard about that? It was sick. I saw a program on TV last night
about Newton. And these two guys were dissecting him piece by piece. All his
ideas, and what do they know?,They're sitting there, talking about something that
they're wasting their time on. Newton just did what he did.
Rick: John Mayall once gave me some pretty good advice on the whole
criticism thing. The safest way to do it, he said, was to just sit down with the
person who made the album and rap about it The next best thing is to sit down and
just expand on the images that come from the music. This is fine, as long as the
people who we're writing for realize that what we write is just one man's
opinion, and that everyone gets different images.
Van: Right.
Rick: Like a free association thing.
Van: Yeah It's going to be one fellow's opinion, because it's going to
mean something different to everybody. But I think that someone in your position
could influence someone by writing,, say, "I think this means that", a lot of
people would read that and probably take that and say, "Well, he thinks that and
he's a writer so... and I'm sitting reading this paper so that must be where it's
at". Yeah?
Rick: Yeah A lot of people don't like to think about it that much, so they
use us.
Van: That could be a groovy way of stimulation. Somebody's got to do it
because if somebody didn't do it then a lot of people wouldn't be stimulated at
all to think about anything.
Dahaud Shaar (drummer): Most people, too, really
want to know. A person reading a paper really wants to know if this album is good
or bad.
Van: It's like I used to get these magazines, Jazz Journal. They used to
be the English equivalent of Downbeat. And all these guys used to review all the
albums and I used to read the reviews and then sometimes I'd listen to the album
and say "What?" because they just reviewed the album the way they were feeling.
If they weren't feeling good that day they'd say "This album sucks," but if they
were feeling all right, the album would be groovy. That kind of thing, you just
can't go on that.
Rick: How do you feel about people like me? I can imagine everybody and
his dog stacking a mike in your face and asking things like "What's your favorite
color, Van?". How do you feel, as an artist, when you read things written about
you?
Van: What's my reaction? A lot of times I feel like the cat was right
there, he was tight with it and he knew what was happening and he was tuned in. A
lot of times I feel that a lot of people just turn themselves off, and see it
from a long way off. They put a barrier between themselves and the music,and they
write about it like that. I think things are getting better, though. It seems
things are starting to open up. People are starting to be truthful with one
another about the whole thing.
Rick: Yeah, like writers are starting to admit they aren't gods, and are
saying instead this is what I feel about this record, or concert. Like I feel
Astral Weeks was really a concept album. I read somewhere you thought it might be
a rock opera.
Van: That all depends on what you mean by rock. A lot of people, when you
say rock think of, say, The Doors. A lot of people think of something else. I
wouldn't really say it was a rock opera. It's definitely an opera. There's more
to it than the album. The album's just a piece of it. There's a whole lot more
stuff that I've got.
Rick: It's got a definite story line.
Van: Oh yeah, there's a definite story and it all fits together. Just by
the fact that it's one album with a minimum 38 minutes. You can't really get into
it in 38 minutes. Plus the way the album was done I didn't get a chance to get
into it either. Because my producer told me you've got so much time to finish
this album and you've got to go in and do it. So I booked the time and that was
it. I only got that time. And I didn't really get into it as much as I thought I
would because of that. Because you lease out these sessions, about six sessions,
and that's all the time I had. They said "You've got to do it within this time",
whereas if I had my way it would have been a different thing.
Rick: I noticed on Astral Weeks that some of the songs and some of the
images seem to have been carried on from your earlier work. "Cypress Avenue," for
instance, has a lot in common with "Little Girl" from your "Here Comes the Night"
album.
Van: Yeah,it's a similar thing.
Rick: I listened to the albums for awhile, and then I started to realize
there seemed to be some kind of story evolving from the earlier stuff. That you
were talking personal experiences and writing about them...
Van: Right, yeah.
Rick: And that's what I really got into, that's what
I really dug, is that it wasn't just an imagination trip...
Van: No.
Rick: There was some honesty to it, some reality.
Van: Yeah. Visit Rick McGrath's website at
http://www.rickmcgrath.com/ Part of the van-the-man.info unofficial website |