1997 Q Magazine interview
There is a Van Morrison story for every day of the year. Here's another one. A musician who once played in his band recalls an all night barstool debate with the great man. Morrison argued his case, an obscure philosophical point of some sort, with rising force and passion. Worn down and weary, the musician finally conceded defeat. "I agree with you, Van," he said. "You what?" demanded Morrison, momentarily thrown. "What you said. I agree with it." "Well in that case," the singer retorts, confidence returning, "in that case, you're wrong!" Such are the tales that swirl around the portly personage of the obstinate Ulsterman, fueling the legend of his one-man war on the social niceties. But Morrison has less than little time for others' opinions of him. Fame and reputation are only parts of what he contemptuously calls THE MYTH. All that matters, he keeps on insisting, is the work. Whilst he has seemed an increasingly sociable figure in recent years, he continues to approach the public aspects of his hob with a reluctance bordering on phobia. The warmth of is regard for the media was scarcely improved by his experiences of last summer, when he found himself the stuff of tabloid front pages owing to his - apparently temporary - estrangement from fiance Michelle Rocca. "I was flabbergasted by the headlines," goes a line on his new album, The Healing Game, which sounds like it must be autobiographical even if he claims his songs are not to be interpreted that way. Despite a nasty bout of flu, the Morrison who enters a Dublin hotel lounge for his first major interview in eight years is businesslike and not unwilling to talk. If his answers are rarely elaborate, they're fully considered. If he has a problem explaining his work, it's not out of truculence but from a sense of his words' inadequacy in comparison with the eloquence of his best music. As he once sang on another album, "It ain't why,. It just is." The important thing, to use one of his favorite phrases, is to keep on keeping on. And so he plays live dates almost every month nowadays, with a regular band on permanent standby, and turns out new albums with a regularity unmatched among his contemporaries. He also has a side project on the go: compiling a retrospective album called The Philosopher's Stone due to contain unreleased tracks from the past few decades. "It's hard to work out why you didn't put something out at the time," he confesses. "Usually it felt like it didn't fit, or there was enough tracks already. When I was with Warner Bros. they were very minimalist. They always said that they didn't want more than twenty minutes on a side, because they were so paranoid about recording levels. So if you had that, that was all they wanted (laughs)." How does he find it listening to his old tracks? "Now I just find that it's interesting, part of the whole work picture." Is he proud of it? "Yeah" Are there particular things he feels a special affinity for now? "Affinity? Well there's not much I don't feel affinity with. But, you know, there's certain things. Like, I heard Astral Weeks recently. It made me just sit up. It made me sit up and thing. Right, OK. I was really on to something different. There was a lot of stuff going on here that definitely off the wall and out there. And it was good. But I feel an affinity with most of it." Morrison is less nostalgic when he recollects the business side of his story, which has left him deeply suspicious of people's motives. The 22-year old visionary who made Astral Weeks in 1968 was already a scarred veteran of the pop process, as relatively carefree days in Belfast showbands gave way to his tempestuous spell in THEM. After TOP 10 hits with "Baby Please Don't Go", and "Here Comes the Night" (the epochal "Gloria" was, strangely, only a B side), he joined producer Bert Berns in America to record "Brown Eyed Girl" and other tracks, re-released last month as New York Sessions 1967. But Morrison did not feel any command over his own music until the recording of the following year's Astral Weeks, a spectral song cycle of timeless enchantment. By 1970, he looked like the embodiment of the hippy dream, married to an American girl named Janet Planet and living in Woodstock. Yet he grew to mistrust the Love Generation as much as he had the sharks of Tin Pan Alley, and railed against the rock icon status that came with his canonization as a singer/songwriter. Since 1980, he as been located largely in England, concurrently venerated as a treasure of Ireland's heritage, especially in the wake of his landmark 1988 album with The Chieftains, Irish Heartbeat. Recurrent in his work is a kind of transcendental connection with the sights and sounds of his Belfast childhood, summoned with extraordinary potency on the 1991 tracks like "Take Me Back" and "On Hynford Street". the idea reappears on The Healing Game itself (a version of which he's recorded with John Lee Hooker). For Morrison, it seems, discovery is a case of going back to things we already know inside, but have somehow lost touch with. "I think that's true," he nods. "You lose touch with it. For instance, some people find it incredible when I tell them that people used to sing and play music in the street. It just didn't happen where they came from. I think there's a whole oral tradition that's disappeared. The Healing Game is about the time when people used to sing on street corners. It came from America, where they had the doo-wop groups. That's the general idea of the song; you've never really moved from this position. You took a lot of detours but you're still back on the corner. Was street singing a big thing in Belfast? "I didn't think it was a big thing, because it was a natural thing. All around me people were making music. But I speak to other people from Belfast and they say, Oh that never happened where I lived. It seemed to be just my area. What kind of music? "Oh, country and western , skiffle, folk, all sorts." Your music has always drawn from musical sources which seem incompatible - like soul and country. Did you start out hearing everything in a equal kind of way? "We didn't have those lines drawn. When I started listening to music the Melody Maker was a jazz mag. The rock journalist hadn't been invented. So I heard blues, country music, pop music in those days, all of it with an open mind. It didn't have those restrictions of categories." But R&B was the thing you were first known for as a recording artist. "There was a group called The Monarchs and that's primarily where I started doing R&B. And then with THEM I was recording, but that's what it was called then. I had an R&B club in Belfast. It definitely wasn't pop music, that's for sure! We weren't playing pop music. But when we recorded that Bert Berns song, "Here Comes the Night", that was a poppy sort of song to begin with. The production...I think that's where everything went wrong!" (laughs) Were your problems with the business typical, or were you unluckier than most? "It was typical, it happened to a lot of people. Some just got out, but I dug in my heels, basically. I just wanted to do music and I wouldn't let them beat me at it. But a lot of people just gave up. It was typical because it wasn't a big thing. The record business wasn't this huge multi-million billion whatever it is. It wasn't an industry. It was very small, only a few dozen people in it. From the 70s it got blown up out of all proportion, and then it became ROCK. It used to be rock n' roll. When I started we were called R&B, and then after making a couple of records, we were called a pop group." Because you were in the hit parade? "Yeah, that's it. It wasn't that big and there wasn't this tremendous amount of money. You'd be getting ripped off, but just enough to keep you going. Whereas now people are getting ripped off for big, big money. What is it you dislike about pop music? "It's just never been my music, because I've always heard the real stuff, y'know? I grew up in a household where I heard all the real music, so when I heard pop I didn't have to rush out. I loved Little Richard and Fats Domino, but I had the background of hearing this other music since I was three. So it wasn't such a big injection, like with the rebellious teenagers when they heard rock and roll. Because I'd already heard similar music that was called R&B, which is where rock and roll came from. So it wasn't any big diversion. I just like all of it, pop music as well, but my preference was more for black music. I think when myself and Eric Burdon of The Animals came out of that group thing, we were the ones into black music in a big way. A lot of people who said they were into black music really weren't, but I was and I think Burdon was, and I still am. A lot of the other people who came from that era went into something else - their image was very white." In the 60s there was a new counterculture which you became disillusioned with, but were you sold on it to begin with? Did you ever think a new world was on its way? "Not really. To me, everything's always been hard, so I never had that pie-in-the-sky thing, that floating about bit. Everything for me had always been very extremely hard to do. Just to keep on keeping on, as they say. So luckily, I never got caught up in any of that shit." Why did you leave America? "I never wanted to live in America to start with. I got there by accident. Y'see, another part of this rock mythology is that I had some sort of plan worked out beforehand. It wasn't like that at all. I got to America and I didn't get paid, I was completely broke, so I had to stay there and work. I'd signed a contract with Bert Berns for management, production, agency and record company, publishing, the whole lot, which was professional suicide as any lawyer will tell you now, but in those days nobody had a clue. So that's why I went to America. Then the whole thing blew up, Bert Berns died and I was left broke and I had to find myself some other situation. That's how I ended up in America, not that I wanted to be there. When my daughter Shana grew up, that's when I left, when she became a teenager, I got out because there was no reason for me to be there any more." Did people in the 70s begin to look to musicians for answers to their problems? "Yeah. I just couldn't understand that. Why do people expect us to solve the world's problems? It's absurd. I mean, if politicians can't do it, how the hell can musicians? You have to go back to the 60s, when people were smoking dope and getting high and listening to things and perceiving things that weren't actually there. That's where it all came from. I suppose, also, that journalists were getting stoned and doing the same thing. It's another myth: "What does it mean?" You can see all sorts of things if you're drugged up, you can read anything into anything." Has anyone inspired you like the first people you heard, such as John Lee Hooker? "No. Like you said, I find I have to keep going back, because I don't find the same sort of... I haven't heard any music for a long time that's been as inspiring. I think, in every field, there hasn't been anything new since maybe the 70s. In jazz as well. I have to keep going back to find inspiration." Back to what? "I just go back to the blues. Mainly that." What's the quality that keeps you going back to the blues? "I don't know. The whole thing is non-intellectual. It resonates, you know? That's all I can put it down to. It's soul music, or whatever." Is it pointless, talking about music? "Yeah (chuckles). It's difficult when you analyze the writing the songs thing, because the songs come from the irrational part of the brain. So you're trying to talk about something rationally that's coming from the irrational part of the brain. That's why, for me, it's been pointless to try and analyze songs." Do people over-analyze you? "Yeah. They make it more than it is, actually. They blow it up out of all proportion, the reason being that they want to make themselves look better, or more intellectual...I think that's what it is! People used to analyze Dylan all the time, but they don't seem to bother him any more." With Dylan and yourself, people like to identify references in the songs. "Mmmm. A lot of it is pure fiction. There was another book out about me recently, I've scanned through it, and he's saying some stuff in there about some of the songs, like he knows what they're about, but they're PURE FICTION, they're not about anything to do with me. That's another thing. To say that all the songs are about me, that's just ludicrous. Some of them have bits of me in them, maybe 10% are part of my experience, but the rest are just fiction. For anybody to assume...I don't really understand it." Though you're irritated when people read things into your songs, it must be gratifying when your music sets something off in people's imaginations. "Oh sure, that's right, that's right. It's just the analytical side that's counter productive. Because it's coming from the non-analytical part of your brain. Creativity." Does this career become a grind for you? "It's not a grind. I'm a workaholic anyway. It's what I do, and that's good, because a lot of people are not doing what they want to be doing, it's great in that respect. In the early days it was a grind because everyone was getting ripped off, so just getting from one week to the next was all you could do. It's not that way any more, thank God." You often say that what you do is just a job. "Yeah. Maybe in the old days it was more centered around specific recordings. But the live thing is more where I'm at now. Maybe I've always been there and not known it. Maybe that's what this Healing Game thing is about." What do you enjoy about the performance? Being with your band, or the audience? "It's the rapport with the musicians." What's your relationship with an audience? Is there any big feedback element for you? "I'm not that type of performer. What I'm doing up there involves a lot of concentration, there's a lot going on. It looks easy. I suppose when you're sitting out there this all looks easy. It looks like he can take a breath or tell a few jokes or something. But what's going on up there is very complex, and if somebody does something wrong and the concentration goes....there's no time to worry about all this other stuff. There's a lot of cues going on. I mean, other performers and do that other thing, I don't do that. What I'm doing is I'm putting forth the music and it's very intense, there's no let up and everybody's on their toes all the time, from the minute they walk on stage till they come off. That's what I do. I don't do this other thing...I think I know what you're talking about, it's playing with the audience or something. I don't have time for that, so whatever the audience gets from it, that's what it is." How much do you have to get behind the meaning of a song? "It's not real, you know? This is what people don't want to believe, no matter how much you tell them. Performing isn't reality, that's why you call it performing. You're not putting your life up there on the stage, you're acting out the songs." Perhaps the quality of your singing voice makes people think you mean every word. "Well, I've seen blues singers and I thing, God they must be really down. But they come off stage and they're smiling. They've just sung about, like "I don't have money" or "My woman left me" and then they've come off and it's "Hey Man! Everything's fine." Performing is acting." Your performances are intense by any standard, so there's an assumption that you really are like that, that you walk around with a book of William Blake in your pocket, deep in contemplation... "Oh, it was taken to the extreme - just because I've read a few books, or did an interview with some guy who made a whole thing out of that. It's way over the top, that stuff." If you knew then what you know now, would you have become a musician? "I think so. The only thing that bothers me is that I don't really know why I became famous, because I wasn't one of those people that wanted it. It was something that happened to me and couldn't get back to where I was before that. It wasn't something that I set out to be, and I don't quite understand that. There's a lot of people who do want to be famous and can't be, and I never wanted to be. So, it's ironic, isn't it?" Do you find celebrity a tiresome by-product of what you do? "Well I just can't handle it, and I've never been able to handle it, and I never will. There were times when I thought I needed to do this, that and the other thing, where I could handle it, but it didn't go anywhere. I don't really want to be celebrated. You know? I just want to do the music. And celebrity is another loaded word. It isn't what it appears to be." How do you mean? "Celebrity means someone who's celebrated, but I often find celebrity can mean anything now, like someone who knows someone who knows someone who is famous, or something! It's meaningless. I always said I don't want to be a celebrity. I do the music and I keep doing what I'm doing. Do you thing music is a kind of magic? "Magic? Yeah! Sure it's magic. I think it is!" You used to talk about getting people to a meditative state in music. "I don't much like to say these things any more because, like you said about the William Blake thing, it's taken out of context. You read something ten years later and go, This guy's making a mountain out of a molehill. So I don't really like to talk in those terms any more, meditation and all that. It's just words, and they end up being meaningless words if they're taken out of context. So I don't get into that any more. It's just whatever it is that the people listen to basically." Your music has a very strong sense of place. You take your past and make it present again. "You see, in my head I never really left that. Or in my soul I never left it. Basically, I'm still there. In my head, I'm still hanging out with the corner boys. It's just that this mythology's been created about me, or about people that do what I do, and this mythology's what I'd like to break down, but it seems impossible sometimes, y'know?" Do you ever wish for other outlets? "I'd like to get some of my ideas across. Maybe in essays or in a book. Some of the stuff we've been talking about here. But other than that I can't see any other platform." What things would you put into an essay? "Dispelling myths. I'd just make people aware of the myths and dispel them as much as possible." Would that be beneficial for other performers? "Only for those that have ears to hear. A lot of people don't want to hear, but then most people want to be in the myth. They want to live in the illusion. Because maybe they're afraid not to..." 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