1970 Rolling Stone interview
Van Morrison, spiritual son and soul brother of Ray Charles and Leadbelly, jazz and blues, Ireland and America, is not for sale. That quality accounts for what the merchants would call an "erratic" career of hits - from "Gloria" with the rock band Them, in 1965, to "Wavelength" in 1978 - and misses.But the thing is, Morrison has rarely bothered to take aim. Which may have been what attracted him to the community of Woodstock, New York, in the early seventies and which made him attractive to fellow musician Happy Traum. "He was intensely involved in the music," says Traum, who, aside from performing, was an editor of the folk music magazine "Sing Out!" , an occasional writer for "Rolling Stone" and a music teacher. "Other people around him were pushing the business, but he was wrapped up in the music. And we had a lot in common - we both were into John Lee Hooker, Leadbelly and Robert Johnson." The two lived close to each other and would get together occasionally to play music "informally." One day in July 1970 - between the twenty-five-year-old Morrison's Moondance album and His Band and the Street Choir (which would result in a rare hit single, "Domino") - Traum suggested an interview. "He immediately said OK," says Happy. "He hadn't done many and wasn't very verbal, but he was willing to talk." Ben Fong-Torres Van Morrison sits on the edge of the bed and absently picks an old Gibson. He is moody, his eyes intense and his smile sudden; his Belfast accent is thick but musical, statements often lilting into a half question mark. The only child of a Scottish dockworker and his Irish wife, Van left home at the age of fifteen and has been on the streets or on the road ever since. He has settled in Woodstock, with his wife Janet, their young son Peter and a new baby girl, Shannon. Van is twenty-four now; he will probably be one of the most important singers of our time. Was Them the first group you were in? Oh, no, by no means. I used to play in a group called "Deanie Sands and the Javelins". This chick called Deanie Sands did half the singing and I did half the singing, and I played guitar. We did a sort of country-blues-rock. That was in Belfast. How does someone from Belfast get into American country blues? We get it both live and from records. Memphis Slim has been in Belfast; Jesse Fuller, Champion Jack Dupree, John Lee Hooker's been there. They've got folk clubs and rock clubs there, but it's got nothing to do with the English scene. In fact I'd go so far as to say it doesn't have much to do with the Irish scene either; it's just Belfast. It's got its own identity, its own people . . . it's just a different race, a different breed of people. There's a lot of changes here, too. Like the McPeaks [a family group of traditional Irish singers] on one hand, and some others of us on the other hand, and they're open to all kinds of music, not just one thing. Maybe a third of the people that are into R&B would go to hear the McPeaks. Jean Ritchie once told me that on her collecting trips to Ireland traditional singers would often sing turned away from a visitor, or standing behind someone, possibly because of a traditional feeling that singing is a very private experience, and in singing a song you were exposing something very private about yourself. I used to stand on my head and sing, I remember that, but I don't remember standing behind anybody. What kind of music did you have around the house when you were growing up? Everything. I heard a lot of blues records; we always had that. And I heard a few street players, street singers and dancers; and my parents played music. We lived in a pretty funky neighborhood. I mean, it wasn't a white-collar district, let me put it that way. The people weren't involved in any other place but Belfast. If you lived in London, you could relate to a whole different scene, but when you lived in Belfast, you'd just relate to that scene. Either you'd accept that, or you'd go somewhere else. But it's not like any other place in the world. Like Boston and New York, they're different places on the map . You'd have to be there to really get an idea of what I'm talking about. If I took you to some of these places and you hung out and met the people, you'd understand. But I can't even scratch the surface now because it's so delicate. Was Them a Belfast group? Yes, but as soon as things started going pretty good they didn't call us an Irish group anymore; they called it a British group, and we got stuck with that. Then, after that, we became an English group! I don't know how in the world they mistook it for an English group, 'cause if they ever heard us talk they'd know it wasn't. It was an Irish group! When was Them together? In 1964 and 1965. Around mid-1965 we all decided to split it up. I was still under contract, as was one of the other guys, the bass player, so we decided to finish the contract out. We got a new group together, but it was just the same group. I mean, the name was "Them", but it ended up that I was making records with four session men, and they were putting "Them" on the label. Then they got me and some other people on the road, and "Them" was just a name. That's all it ever was, except for the original group that played at the Maritime in Belfast. The group that played there was Them, but after we went out of that club it just wasn't the same people. Our main success was with a song I wrote, "Gloria." It was capitalized on a lot by other people, especially a lot of American groups, whereas I really didn't capitalize on it all that much. But that's another story. Then we put out a record called Them Again. We weren't putting out records at that time to get anywhere; it wasn't that scene at all. I mean, it was hard enough to get us in one place together without having to think about that. We were making records where I was making maybe three songs on an album with just studio cats, and maybe the rest of the songs with two studio cats and three members of the group. It was kinda like mishmash, and it wasn't really any good. But they released it as Them Again because obviously the record company wanted to do its thing. When I was with the group I was still kind of on my own. I was hung up with this stupid contract, but I was always on my own. I just played with Them because that was what was happening then, but I was still playing with my friends and pickin' my own stuff. I did "Brown-Eyed Girl" in 1967. One of the guys that produced some of the records for the group, Bert Berns, came over to London to meet the group. He produced one of his songs with the group, and it was a hit. He called me in Belfast from New York and said, how about getting together to do another record. I had a couple of offers, but I thought this was the best one, seeing as I wanted to come to America anyway, so I took him. The two things sort of coincided, so I came over and played him a few songs, and we made the record. Did your success on the charts change your professional life to a large extent? Well, it did, but it didn't really change me, 'cause I was still there. But I got to play in some wrong places. That's one thing, it put me in some of the worst joints I ever worked. I don't want to mention any names or offend anybody in the business, but it just put me in some awkward positions, because they were unreal , they were totally unreal. Like lip-synching to the record on a television show. I can't lip-synch, 'cause everytime I do a song I do it differently. I just can't sing any song the same way twice. I didn't really see how that had anything to do with me. Obviously, it was what they wanted, but they didn't want me . They had some kind of singer in mind for that, but it wasn't me. I just couldn't do that kind of thing. Was there a lot of pressure for you to give in to that kind of thing? Oh, sure. Bert wanted me to write a song with him that would be a hit, but I just didn't feel that kind of song. I mean, maybe that was his kind of song, but it wasn't my kind of song, so I just told him. I mean, if you want to do that kind of song, man, you should just go in and do it, get yourself a group and sing that song, but I've got my kind of song that's different. I've always been writing the kind of songs I do now, even with Them. I'd write a song and bring it into the group. And we'd sit there and bash it around, and that's all it was - they weren't playing the song , they were just playing whatever it was. They'd say, "Okay. We got drums so let's put drums on it," and they weren't thinking about the song; all they were thinking about was putting drums on it, or putting an electric guitar on it, but it was my song, and I had to watch it go down. So there was a point where I had to say, "Wait a minute. Hold it! Stop!" Because I just couldn't see my songs go down like that all the time. It was wrong. There was much more involved in them than that. Do your songs come easily to you, or do you really have to struggle with them? It all depends on the song. Some of them are hard, and I really have to work on them. One song I wrote when I was living in Cambridge - I was just involved in it for two hours. It wasn't like I planned to write it - I planned to go out for the night - and I found myself forced to write a song. Sometimes it just flows out - it all depends what the song is - but I can't be forced to write by someone else. That's just where I'm at. I can't be forced to do anything. I just have to do it my own way. To what extent are your songs about real people or events? Cyprus Avenue, for instance? You mention it on Astral Weeks. Cyprus Avenue is a pretty real place. If you're ever over in Belfast, I'll take you to see it. It's not a jive place, it's real. A lot of things I do are real. Whatever people want to confront, I can confront them with it. Of course, I don't always want to confront them with it; maybe I do because it just comes out. A guy in Boston one time asked me about this song, but he just asked me about two lines because he seemed to identify with these two lines. Well, at the time I wrote those two lines he was thinking about . . . well, you don't have to live that ; I mean, if you want to live that , that's your business, but I'm writing a song to entertain people. If I write something, it's not necessarily how I'm going to feel in a year, or tomorrow; it's just that at the time. That's what it is. An album can last for a long time; then that's the way it is. But if I do something else, it's entertainment; that's what that is. People try to pick out particular things and bring them up, when they should bring everything out because it's a total thing, a flow. There was a review in "Rolling Stone" that said, "If he had stage presence he'd be hard to take . . ." Do you know what they meant by that? Why don't you come and see the show? Do you know what he means? I've seen you in a lot of situations, and sometimes you are hard to take. You told me once after you played with the Band in Boston that you didn't feel you were able to reach such a large audience. Do you prefer a small audience? We just did that on the spur of the moment, and we didn't have our sound thing together. I go through quite a few changes; like in a period of two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, I go through a lot of changes, and sometimes I'm not doing what I really want to do. Sometimes I'm doing something because that's what's happening at the moment, that's what's available. It's all part of it, sure, but it doesn't represent where I'm at. You have a very intimate appeal to a lot of people. I think you get inside of your listeners as very few other performers do. It's almost a private relationship between you and your audience. Do you think this can be projected to a large festival audience? It all depends on what people want. Do they want to be touched? Do they really want to be part of that spiritual thing? If they want that, they can get it off me, but they can't get it by just calling it a festival . . . that's just not the way to get it. I do feel I can communicate to large groups of people, but they have to know what they're getting, and I have to know what I'm giving. It's quality, not quantity. What made you decide to produce your new album, Moondance, yourself? That's a good question because that was the hardest part. The rest comes naturally to me - singing it and playing it - but producing it was a whole other thing. It was the first time I had ever done it, and I had to tax my imagination for all sorts of stuff. It was a big job for me - it was fun, but it was hard work. The reason I decided to do it in the first place was just that I couldn't find anyone else to do it. I looked around and I spoke to a lot of cats, and I had some people come up here to Woodstock, and we pushed around ideas, but no one knew what I was looking for except me, so I just did it. Most of my own singing was done live, although sometimes we did a rhythm track and then the vocal, or sometimes the vocal and the rhythm track and then added the horns. But mostly it was live. How were all the arrangements done? Were they head arrangements, or did somebody write out charts? They were kind of head arrangements; four of us did them. The piano, horns and myself took care of all the arrangements. There were no charts, and a lot of it was spontaneous. But it wasn't like a jam; it was more than that. I did all the mixing myself, too . . . I was stuck with the engineer. I learned so much from doing it that I would never have known about because there's so many groovy people that are doing that. There's two engineers in particular, Elliott Scheiner and Tony May, who I worked with at A&R and who were really a bitch to work with, so I dug that. They gave me a lot of help on the technical end of things. Astral Weeks was produced by someone else. Did you feel as comfortable in that situation? No, I didn't really feel comfortable; I've got to say it, I didn't feel comfortable at all, even though it did justice to what I was trying to say. My producer, Lew [Merenstein], must have pulled himself up to scratch to do it, but I had something else in mind. I'm just glad that he was around at the time to do it. That's all, I'm just glad he was around because it could have come out entirely different. You know what the album scene is like, right? I've been very lucky, and I'm very grateful. Is Astral Weeks still selling steadily? As a matter of fact, it is. Astral Weeks is the kind of album . . . You know, Joe Smith [Vice President of Warner Bros.] called me and said, "We know what's going down with this album now. We're going to be selling it for another six years." It's not a pop album; it's an album that's going to be bought over a long period of time. It's not going to be a chart thing, but it's going to sell a lot. Did you consciously change the style on this new record, or did it just happen? It was more or less the songs . . . There were certain songs on this album that I had to do. I don't know if it was conscious, but everybody involved in the album, the other musicians and myself, had a certain feeling about the whole thing that went down. It was very human, and everybody enjoyed it. There was no uptightness about doing the album. I wouldn't dream of doing it any other way. It is very different from Astral Weeks, which from beginning to end is almost a continuous song. On Moondance, each song is very distinctive and separate. I'll tell you, Astral Weeks is not like one song at all. Believe it or not, Astral Weeks is a rock opera, but it was long before its time. It didn't get arranged so on the album. The way I do it personally is entirely different from the way it's done on the album. I was kind of restricted because it wasn't really understood what I really wanted on the date, so it tended to come out like it did, but it wasn't meant to be like that. I wrote it as an opera, but it didn't really surface the way it could have. When you say it was an opera, do you mean that there was a story line that could be followed? Oh, sure. A definite story line. If you were to do it over again, how would you change it so that it was in some kind of context? I would change the arrangements, because the arrangements are too samey. Guys like Richard Davis and Jay Berliner, those guys have got a distinctive style, and they're groovy for like two songs, and they can really do it, but four or five other songs should have had a change in mood. That should have happened, and it didn't. I didn't have the same mood in mind for the whole album. But that's the way I wrote it, as an opera, at the very beginning, and I've still got it like that in poetry form. How did you happen to write a song like "Madame George"? I don't know, I just remember writing it, that's all. Did you have anyone in particular in mind? Did you know anyone like that? Like what? What's Madame George look like? What are you trying to say . . . in front? So I know. It seems to me to be the story of a drag queen. Oh, no. Whatever gave you that impression? It all depends on what you want, that's all, how you want to go. If you see it as a male or a female or whatever, it's your trip. How do I see it? I see it as a . . . a Swiss cheese sandwich. Something like that. I'm not the only one that's come up with that interpretation, am I? Nobody's really hit me with that, nobody's really said that at all. Everybody gives me a quizzical look, a question-mark stare, and they think I know what they're talking about. "What about like blah blah blah . . . " and they expect me to go, "Yeah!" It's just not that simple. Just imagine we had a sponsor, and he gave you a plane ticket and me a plane ticket, two-way tickets from Woodstock to Ireland, and we got on a plane and we went from here to Belfast, and we hung out and came back, then you would know the song. But I don't think I could tell you about the song if we didn't do that. But it's part of the opera. Like I said, Cyprus Avenue is a real place with definite people, and it's true. Is Cyprus Avenue a street that only you've had personal experiences on, or is it a famous street, like, say, Mac Dougal Street, where everyone in Belfast would know that street? It's not a famous street, but it's gonna be after this is over (laughs). It's not a commercial street, though, far from it. It's near where I grew up. You ask a lot of good questions that I'd never think of. I'm sick of hearing , "What's your favorite color," or, "What kind of girls do you like." There was one point where these people I was with just thought that all there was in the world was interviews like that. I did about four a day, and I just got so pissed off I was ready to . . . Like all these teeny-bopper magazines. Everyone just asked me dumb questions, and they had dumb faces. Bang Records was a mistake for me; it was the wrong label. That just wasn't my market. You don't seem too hassled about your situation now. No, I'm pretty easy now. In the song "Astral Weeks", you mention Huddie Ledbetter. Was he an influence on you? I'd say he was the influence, not just any influence. I never got to hear him in person, which was a shame because he must've been something else. Did you ever hear his version of "Easy Rider"? That man was so great; it's hard to find people like that today. We've got Ray Charles, but when you look around, who else have you got? I mean, you've got a couple of people, but who else? I'd go as far as to say that that's how I got into the business, that's how I got here, with Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie and Jelly Roll Morton and Ray Charles. That's what made me start singing. Nowadays you say "Leadbelly," and people say, "What's this cat, crazy or something?" It's always been like that, not only over there but in America; it's like a minority thing. But the people who dig it really dig it a hundred percent, which is beautiful. As I said, the major influence was Leadbelly . . . If it wasn't for him I may never have been here, so I'm glad if I can get him into a song. I didn't really hear a lot of things that were going down when I was over there. I heard some of them and I wanted to hear more, but I couldn't because it was happening over here , which was a down for me. So I just grabbed as many Leadbelly and Guthrie and Hank Williams records as I could grab and tried to learn something. It's fantastic the way those kinds of influences work. Here's a man who lived in a whole different culture, worked his balls off all his life, and now, twenty years after his death, you are a living example of his influence. I don't think he's really dead. A lot of people's bodies die, but I don't think they die with them. I think a lot of them are still hanging around somewhere in the air. It can't be that weak because these people are so strong. You've got people like Leadbelly, like Woody, like Hooker (he's alive), you've got people of that stance who are so strong that those people can't die, they just leave something behind. I just don't believe that those people will ever die. All those people that you've mentioned would have played exactly the same music whether there was money in it for them or not. I'd like to think that the best of today's performers would be playing the same thing, too, regardless of the money aspect. I don't want to hype anybody. I don't want to say that this is biddy-biddy-bom-bom, because it's not. Because whenever they see it they'll know what it is in front, so I'm not going to hype anybody about what it is. I'm just going to let it flow, and whatever comes out is gonna be honest, otherwise I can't give it out. I'm not looking to give them what they've had, man, because what they've had is what they've had. I'm looking to give them what they haven't had. You're giving them something they haven't had, but at the same time it's something that's been culled from experience of fifty and more years ago. It's all in there. If you're talking about influences, sure, it's there. How do you learn how to speak? When you're a baby you say ma-ma and da-da; you've got to start somewhere. But I've got to the point where I don't need all those people now. I don't need somebody to go ma-ma and da-da because I've matured into my own thing. I'm very grateful that they were there, but I don't need them anymore. You find yourself. But those people are giants, man; how can you miss them? They're just giants. It's like "How Many Roads"; there's just so many people, and when somebody's really making it, you know it. There's no doubt about it. Thank God you know it, that's all, because if you don't know it, too bad. Part of the van-the-man.info unofficial website |