Van Morrison

Van Morrison: The Caruso of Rock and Roll

When Robbie Robertson inducted him into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993, he reached past the entire vocabulary of popular music and called Van Morrison "the Caruso of Rock and Roll." The Hall's own citation is stranger still: "Consistent. Steadfast. Enigmatic," an artist "in the purest sense," whose songs carry "the incantation of a mystic." The accompanying essay by Paul McGuinness was titled, with some accuracy, "Who am I to speak of Van Morrison?" Almost nobody, including the man himself, has ever been entirely comfortable explaining what he does.

125 Hyndford Street

George Ivan Morrison was born on 31 August 1945 at 125 Hyndford Street in Bloomfield, east Belfast, into a working-class Protestant family of Ulster Scots descent. His father George was a shipyard electrician who had spent time in Detroit and brought home what was reckoned one of the largest record collections in Northern Ireland; his mother Violet had sung and tap-danced.

That collection is the single most important fact of his artistic life. In a terraced house in postwar Belfast, a boy absorbed Muddy Waters, Mahalia Jackson, Charlie Parker, Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers — blues, gospel, jazz, folk and country arriving simultaneously rather than in the sequence an American listener would have received them. The result was a musician with no clear idea which of these traditions he was supposed to belong to, and consequently no reason to choose. He was given an acoustic guitar at eleven and formed his first band, the Sputniks, at twelve. By thirteen he was a travelling musician.

Them

After a stint in the Irish showband circuit, Morrison joined Them in 1964, an R&B group whose residency at Belfast's Maritime Hotel became local legend. They produced records that outlived them: "Baby, Please Don't Go" in 1964, "Here Comes the Night" and "Mystic Eyes" in 1965, and above all "Gloria," a three-chord garage rock text that a substantial fraction of every subsequent generation of teenagers has learned to play. On the band's 1966 American tour, a young Jim Morrison of the Doors studied his namesake's stagecraft and "apparent recklessness" and took notes.

Ambushed

The solo career began badly. The producer Bert Berns persuaded Morrison to record for Bang Records in 1967; over two days he cut eight songs, which the label assembled without his involvement into an album called *Blowin' Your Mind!* One of them, "Brown Eyed Girl," reached number ten in America and became the most played song of his career — later inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2007 — and also a permanent irritation, the sunniest three minutes in a catalogue that would spend fifty years travelling in the opposite direction.

Berns died; Warner Bros. bought out the Bang contract; and Morrison, at twenty-three, was suddenly free.

Astral Weeks

What he did with that freedom in 1968 has never been satisfactorily accounted for. *Astral Weeks* was recorded across three studio sessions with jazz players and released to poor sales. It has since become the album critics reach for when they want to argue that rock music can do what poetry does — a mystical song cycle drawing on Celtic tradition and jazz phrasing, compared by serious people to French Impressionism. *Rolling Stone*, revisiting it in 2004, essentially surrendered: "This is music of such enigmatic beauty that thirty-five years after its release, *Astral Weeks* still defies easy, admiring description."

The record's method is the point. Morrison does not so much sing lines as circle them, repeating a phrase until the words dissolve into pure sound — a technique that would define everything he did afterwards, and which lifted his music into what one description calls "a kind of violent transcendence."

Moondance, and the Working Years

*Moondance*, in 1970, was the commercial answer: his first million-seller, warmer and more buoyant than its predecessor, carrying "Into the Mystic" and "Come Running." It reached only number 29 on the Billboard chart and nonetheless made him a major artist. Through the 1970s he toured with the Caledonia Soul Orchestra, later slimmed to the Caledonia Soul Express, and his biographer Johnny Rogan judged the mid-decade to be "arguably his greatest phase as a performer."

He was not enjoying it. "I dig singing the songs," Morrison said, "but there are times when it's pretty agonising for me to be out there." The 1980s turned inward toward spirituality and faith — *Into the Music*, the divisive *Common One*, *Beautiful Vision*, *No Guru, No Method, No Teacher*, *Poetic Champions Compose* — and he built his own label, Exile Productions, to keep full production control of every record. The 1990s brought three UK top-five albums and cooler reviews. Since turning seventy in 2015 he has released, on average, more than an album a year, including *Latest Record Project, Volume 1*, *Moving on Skiffle* and *New Arrangements and Duets*.

Why Van Is Called a Genius

The specific quality is a form of improvisation that belongs to jazz singers rather than songwriters: Morrison treats his own lyric as raw material to be worked in real time, repeating, stretching and fracturing a phrase until its meaning gives way to incantation. On *Astral Weeks* it produced, in three sessions with jazz musicians, an album critics have spent half a century admitting they cannot describe. The second component is synthesis: his father's record collection delivered blues, gospel, jazz, country and folk all at once, so he never learned the boundaries other musicians police. "Celtic soul" exists as a genre name because no existing one fit.

No source consulted here uses the word "genius" itself, but the surrounding vocabulary is adjacent: Robertson's "Caruso of Rock and Roll," the Rock Hall's "artist in the purest sense," the Songwriters Hall of Fame's "street poetry, jazz improvisation, Celtic invocation."

The counter-case is real. Morrison is wildly uneven — releasing more than an album a year into his eighties, with critics noting a long decline in reception since the 1990s. His gift is intuitive rather than analytical; he has never been able to explain his method, which is charming in a mystic and unhelpful as evidence. His campaign against pandemic restrictions on live music, and his clash with Northern Ireland's health officials, cost him goodwill. The honest summary is that the genius is episodic and unreproducible: it arrives inside particular performances, and no one, least of all Morrison, can summon it on request.

Legacy

The honours accumulated anyway: the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993, a Brit Award for outstanding contribution in 1994, an Ivor Novello for lifetime achievement in 1995, the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2003 with its Johnny Mercer Award in 2015, a BMI Icon award, the Americana lifetime achievement award for songwriting in 2017, multiple Grammys, and a knighthood in 2016 for services to music and Northern Ireland tourism.

But the durable inheritance is a small canon that other musicians treat as scripture — "Gloria," "Moondance," "Crazy Love," "Have I Told You Lately," "Into the Mystic" — and one uncategorisable record made by a twenty-three-year-old from east Belfast, which is still, sixty years on, defying easy admiring description.

Achievements

• Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — 1993
• Knight Bachelor
• Worked as guitarist, poet and composer