1982 Rolling Stone interview
Van Morrison's brown, two-story, shingled house sits alongside a narrow road that snakes up Mt. Tamalpais above the sleepy Marin County town of Mill Valley. From the road, only a mailbox, with a large number that looks as if it were painted by a child, indicates the presence of Morrison's home. Down a short driveway is a tall, weathered picket fence; a chainlink fence surrounds the rest of the grounds, which are concealed for the most part by shrubbery and trees. Through the gate, one can see the house; a sloping, grass-covered hill to the right of the house ends at a long, rectangular swimming pool. A few chairs and a small stone statue of a young boy stand on the hillside among the grass. Inside the gate, it's so quiet that the cars occasionally driving past are barely audible and one can hear the whir of hummingbirds flitting from flower to flower. It's the kind of peaceful retreat where a person can sit in the sun by the pool and watch deer leap over the fence and prance across the grass--which is exactly what I'm doing on a chilly winter afternoon, as I wait for Van Morrison. He's more than an hour late for an interview at his own house. It is supposed to be the conclusion of an interview session that had begun, very unexpectedly, a few weeks earlier. The message that had been left on my answering machine sometime after midnight was simple and to the point: "Van Morrison will do an interview with you tomorrow." It was a surprising bit of information, since Morrison does not like to talk to the press. During the past three years, he has given virtually no interviews. He has, apparently, regretted most of them, "because what I'm saying, most of the time, is not understood," he would tell me. Morrison is one of the more mysterious stars of popular music. He rarely tours, preferring to divide his time between his home on Mt. Tamalpais, where he lives alone, and Europe. He returns to Ireland, his homeland, for inspiration and frequently visits Copenhagen. Morrison's eleven-year-old daughter, Shannon [sic] (he was married in the late Sixties and early Seventies to a woman who called herself Janet Planet), recently spent a few months visiting him. His parents, George and Violet Morrison, have lived in the Bay Area since 1973; they run a record store, Caledonia Records, in northern Marin County. Morrison, who was born on August 31st, 1945, in Belfast, Northern Ireland, began singing when he was twelve and soon learned to accompany himself on guitar, saxophone and harmonica. He played and sang in numerous bands throughout his youth; dropping out of high school when he was sixteen to make a career of music. For several years, he toured Europe in an R&B cover band, the Monarchs, before returning to Belfast when he was nineteen and forming Them with some friends. By 1966, Them were part of the British Invasion, scoring American hits with a series of classic rock tracks, among them "Gloria," "Here Comes the Night" and "Mystic Eyes." When the group broke up in 1967, Morrison moved to America, living first in Boston, then Woodstock, before settling in Marin County about 1971. By then, he had recorded Astral Weeks, the album upon which his reputation as an Irish rock & roll mystic rests, and had established himself as a commercially successful solo artist with two Top Ten hits, "Brown-Eyed Girl" and "Domino," and several hit albums. Only in the San Francisco Bay Area have Morrison's fans had much opportunity to see him perform during the past decade. Over the years, he has appeared periodically--often with only a few days' advance notice--at all kinds of clubs and concert halls, from the Sleeping Lady Cafe (capacity 100) to showcase clubs and halls like the Old Waldorf, the Great American Music Hall and the Berkeley Community Theater. In October of last year, following the completion of a new album, Beautiful Vision, Morrison suddenly booked nine dates around the Bay Area. He gave a varied and inspired series of performances that featured material from his three latest albums (Into the Music, Common One and Beautiful Vision); a few old favorites ("Gloria" and "Tupelo Honey"); and, on at least one occasion, when he performed at the El Rancho Tropicana Convention Center in Santa Rosa, a batch of R&B tunes, including John Lee Hooker's "C.C. Rider" and Sonny Boy Williamson's "Help Me." Rumors about Van Morrison abound: He is moody, unpredictable and eccentric. He has recorded entire albums and then junked them. He's very religious and some kind of mystic. He's hell to work with. Since the media have so little access to Morrison--and since he is so reserved and oblique when interviewed--the mystique just grows. It was a few minutes after three in the afternoon when the short, stocky man with the reddish hair, the man some have called "the Belfast Cowboy," showed up for our first interview. No one in the mellow Mill Valley restaurant paid him any mind. Morrison nervously looked about the place. I waved him over to my table. "Would you like to sit here or out in the courtyard?" I asked. A look of confusion passed over his face. "Uh, where do you want to sit?" he mumbled. Once outside, Morrison seemed distracted and guarded. Seated in the shadows, with soft, recorded jazz playing in the background, he set a well-used notebook down on the small table, removed his glasses and lit a cigarette. He didn't look like the kind of guy who sells out concert halls and makes hit records. He didn't look like a "truck driver at the end of a cross-country haul," as Newsweek magazine once described him. He looked like a rather ordinary, if introspective and overweight, thirty-six-year-old man, casually dressed in black cotton-suede pants, a black wool V-neck sweater worn over a sky-blue sport shirt, and a dull-green suede jacket that stopped at the waist. Asked why he had consented to an interview after three years of silence, Morrison, whose blue eyes were clear and whose face was sprinkled with a day's growth of beard, said, "I didn't think about it. If I had, I probably wouldn't have done it." Van Morrison is considered one of the originals of rock & roll, and critics have heaped praise on him over the years. But when his critical acclaim was brought up, Morrison said solemnly, "That could just as easily change tomorrow. The same people who build you up are the same people who put you down. So I don't think about it. It doesn't matter." In fact, Morrison is not only disenchanted with rock critics, he's disenchanted with rock & roll itself. Today, the man who sixteen years ago wrote and recorded the rock standard "Gloria" and who as recently as 1977 told an interviewer, "Basically, at heart, I'm a rocker," no longer wants to be associated in any way with rock & roll. "Once you say rock & roll, people start to project and relate to you in a certain way," he said. "I'm just so far from that image you wouldn't believe it. If anybody looked at the way I live these days--it's so removed from what people think of. In fact, it's dull and boring. I've got nothing to do with that rock & roll stuff at all. I mean, when I started, when I was a teenager, to me rock & roll was Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry and people like that. But now, what is rock & roll? It's not music anymore. I did the rock & roll thing fifteen years ago. I've done it!" Morrison also said he was through touring. "I cut that out because I couldn't do it anymore. I started playing when I was twelve. I started touring when I was fifteen. I made my first record and became successful when I was eighteen. So I'd had a lot of touring under my belt even before I had any success. But by then I'd already had enough. I'd seen what that was and experienced that." When asked about his unusual choice of venues for recent performances in the Bay Area (the Japan Center and the Palace of Fine Arts), he explained, "It's a platform for some other way of doing it. The advantage is that it's not a rock & roll joint. So, you don't get that element, that atmosphere, the whole vibration that goes with that." Morrison's disenchantment with rock may account, in part, for the split between him and his former manager, rock entrepreneur Bill Graham, last year. Things got so strained between Morrison and Graham, who is known for his volatile temperament, that at one point the manager reportedly stormed up to Morrison's Mill Valley home and pounded on the front door; Morrison refused to let him in. At Bill Graham Presents, Nick Clainos, who works in the management division, refused to acknowledge that there had been any bad feelings between Graham and Morrison; apparently, they have made up. "The split was extremely amiable," said Clainos. "The deal lapsed. That's all. We may work with him again in the future. He's a very special guy to us. We'd do anything for Van Morrison." The waitress arrived, and Morrison ordered a fruit salad, a cup of coffee and a glass of orange juice. His hand was shaking slightly as he lit another cigarette. He seemed to tense up a little more with each question; he was suspicious of even the most innocuous ones. He didn't want to talk about his business affairs, his personal life or his past. "I'm not interested in the past, and the past is inevitably brought up. It's boring to me. It's not where I am, and I don't think about it anymore. What I'm doing is what I'm doing this day, this week." If Van Morrison is not an easy man to interview, he's a harder man to work for. His current and former business associates fall silent when asked about Morrison. At his record company, Warner Bros., employees stiffen at the sound of Morrison's name. And for good reason. A few years ago, Morrison had a Warner Bros. publicist fired after he referred to Morrison as "unstable" and the remark found its way into print. "I don't think you'll get anyone at this company to talk about Van," said one Warner Bros. staffer. One man who would talk about Morrison was Ted Templeman, a Warner Bros. staff producer known for his work with the Doobie Brothers and Van Halen. In the early Seventies, Templeman produced three of Morrison's albums -- Tupelo Honey, St. Dominic's Preview, and It's Too Late to Stop Now -- and he was recently quoted in 'BAM', a regional music newspaper, as saying, "I'd never work with Van Morrison again as long as I live, even if he offered me $2 million in cash. I aged ten years producing three of his albums. He's a marvelous talent, a fantastic singer, but he's fired everyone who's ever worked with him -- all his producers, his managers, his attorneys. He's so unpredictable." When I asked Templeman about his statements, he backed off quite a bit. "I've been very depressed since I said those things," he explained. "They came out wrong. I haven't been able to sleep a lot of nights over this. I'll tell you a funny story. After I did that interview, I completely forgot about it. And I had an idea for me and Jerry Wexler to do a record with Van. I talked to Van about it and he said great, and Wexler was ready to do it. In the meantime, that article came out. Van calls the record company and tells them he never wants to see me again. And I got so depressed I felt like quitting. I would make a record with him for nothing, just to make up for saying those things. "But I gotta tell you. I did stay up night after night trying to figure out how to keep up with him. What didn't come across was that it was his *genius* that I was trying to keep up with. I did have a rough time working with Van, but I'm not the only one who would say that. He's an iconoclast, really. It's like J.D. Salinger doesn't do things the way other writers do. I had trouble with Van because he'd change his mind all the time. That's the nature of the guy. But it was his brilliance that I was trying to keep up with. And what I'm saying is that I didn't get that point across. I'm probably the biggest Van Morrison fan of all time." Some of Van Morrison's other fans include Bruce Springsteen, Bob Seger, Graham Parker, Willy DeVille and Elvis Costello -- singers whose styles were strongly influenced by Morrison. "I've got no reaction to it whatsoever," Morrison said. "I never started out to make impressions on people. If that's what they want to do, that's what they're doing and that's it." So what is he trying to do? "I'm just channeling what I get," he said. "I get bits and pieces of songs and I try to put them together. I'm just channeling the creativity that's coming through me. That's all I'm doing." Asked if he is a happy man, Morrison frowned and said, "What does that have to do with anything? I don't want to discuss these things in interviews." He was silent for several minutes. Still, he remained at the table and asked if there were more questions. His fruit salad arrived, and he idly picked at it. When he didn't want to discuss something or didn't have a ready answer, he simply said, "I can't answer that question." Morrison tends to make light of his vocation. When I asked if he felt his music was more important than his lyrics, he said, "It's my job. I get paid for making records, for writing songs. I get paid for it, so I do it. It's my job, and I've been doing it for twenty years. And I don't have time to think about these things, you know. I can't. I have other things to do, which is write the songs and make records. "The thing is, when it gets down to it, it is like most people's jobs," Morrison continued earnestly. "Because when you're working in the studio and you're making an album, you have to be pregnant every year and give birth to material. It's not much different from other jobs. I mean, a recording studio is not different from a factory. It's just a factory for music. And sometimes there are moments when you get off, but it's moments. The rest of it is very hard work. And the environment is not a creative environment." Consistent with viewing the writing and recording of songs as a job is Morrison's refusal to accept the adulation of his fans. "See, the thing is, I am not my albums or performances," he said in exasperation, near the end of the interview. "That's something I do, but I'm not that." Morrison said he has no interest in contemporary pop or rock music. "I went through that a long time ago--trends and fads and all that stuff--and saw what it was, you know. It's just a passing show. That's what it is. It's just...it's for people who are into fads. It's like, 'Okay, that was good, next. Next, next, next, next.' It's like eating too much because you're hungry. More, more, more, more. "I'm not interested in popular music. Popular music is not going anywhere. It stopped growing. I think there was a time when it could have gone where jazz has gone. I feel that because of the money that's being made from it and the way it's packaged...it's gotten involved in other areas, saying things when, really, nothing is being said. And there's also the isolation, people have cut themselves off because of ego and financial considerations, mainly ego about who's on top and when, not like other artists like poets and painters and noncommercial film-makers who can't afford to do these things because they don't have the money to do them and they have to stick together to continue the form. And there's a lot of negativity in the record business. A tremendous amount of negativity. It's not a creative medium. "I think that the music business is a fixed system," said Morrison. "I think that banks are looser than the music business. I think it's very fixed, and it's gotten more so in the last five years." How does that affect him? "Well, you always hear people saying that when you reach a certain point, you can do what you want. Which is total rubbish, because the music business is simply based on sales figures. They have to sell a certain number of albums to break even and make money, and that's what the music business is based on. It's not based on music; it's based on sales. "I have no ideals about this situation at all. Like I said before, I'm doing it for several reasons. One reason is that I'm channeling music, and that's what I get coming through me, and that's what I try and put out the best way I can. I don't have any illusions about what I'm doing in the music business at all, because I know what it is...a business. It's a business." Yet Morrison manages to record what he wants. "Yeah," he said, "but I've had to fight for it. I've had to fight a long time for it, and I'm still fighting for it." Morrison also claimed he is unfazed by the commercial pressures put on him by his record company. "I'm not concerned with what people think about what I'm doing. I just do the best I can, and if you like it, good. And if you don't like it, good. It's up to you. I just do what I do. Take it or leave it." But doesn't Morrison care about how people react to his music? Doesn't it please him when his music makes people happy? "Umm. That's a difficult question. I don't think I could answer that." A cool breeze was blowing through the empty courtyard. Morrison had hardly touched his fruit salad. The tape recorder was clicked off, and Morrison asked if he could listen to the tape of our conversation. As he sat with the first ten minutes or so of the interview murmuring in the background, he seemed to relax. He said he'd recently been thinking that he would like to get on the other side of the microphone and interview some people. "But not music people," he noted. "I like to read them; I just don't like to do them." Then he smiled. I was sitting by Morrison's pool, thinking about our previous meeting, when the stillness was broken, the gate swung open and Morrison appeared. He seemed at ease, casually entering his yard. Then he noticed me and his body visibly tensed. I walked up to meet him. "I tried to call you," he mumbled. He was not smiling. "Were you home?" We walked through the gate to the driveway where his silver-gray BMW was parked. "Well, I can't do it today," he announced. He stood there uncomfortably, peering at me through plastic-framed glasses. "Things just came up. I don't know...." He shrugged. "Call me next week. Call me Monday," he said. "Uh, I hope this didn't inconvenience you." I said I'd call on Monday. He nodded. I turned away and walked to my car. I looked back and Morrison and his BMW had vanished. That's the last I saw of Van Morrison. "I've seen him change his mind five times in one hour," said a former business associate when I related the incident to him. "He's a funny guy." Part of the van-the-man.info unofficial website |