When Joan Shelley performed with Wilco at New York’s Beacon Theatre this March, she stood huddled on the corner of the massive stage alongside collaborator Nathan Salsburg. Beneath Wilco’s elaborate backdrop of trees and foliage, the pair might have even appeared, from certain angles, as one body, their instruments (Salsburg on guitar, Shelley alternating between guitar and banjo), overlapping both physically and sonically. And if their tight knit music and cozy positioning on stage didn’t already indicate a sense of intimacy, Shelley closed the set—which highlighted tracks from her extraordinary new self-titled album—with a traditional folk song, sans accompaniment and sans microphone. As Shelley stepped to the front of the stage to sing “Darling Don’t You Know That’s Wrong,” the audience became a part of her small circle.
It was a fitting gesture from an artist who describes her music as “the quickest way from me to another person,” whose every word seems to be chosen as a way to cut through the chaos of daily life. “It’s coming to the people instead of people coming to you,” she says of the a capella performance: “As a singer, it’s asking more from my body in order to physically do it—to turn up what you’re doing, and step outside the barrier of technology.” It makes sense that Shelley sees technology as a hurdle and not a tool. As she’s evolved as a songwriter, her songs have become more unadorned and powerful. Her two previous records on Philadelphia label No Quarter—2014’s Electric Ursa and the following year’s Over and Even—each represented massive steps forward through the deeper refinement of her craft. If you carve out a place to listen, her music fills the space around you.
Shelley’s latest record is no different. Produced by Jeff Tweedy at his Loft Studio in Chicago, Joan Shelley widens her scope, focusing on more spacious songcraft. The first single, “Wild Indifference,” is built on a series of sustained, open chords that sound like sighs of relief. But the album also marks Shelley’s starkest, simplest work to date. Early in the writing process, she found herself inspired by the most primitive of folk tunes: recordings in which performers simply sang in unison with their instrument. “I started trying to be a more playful guitarist,” she says, citing the jokey songs of cult favorite folk artist Michael Hurley as a guiding light.
The musicians who accompany her on the record, including Salsburg as well as multi-instrumentalist JamesElkington and drummer Spencer Tweedy, took a similar approach. The recordings are mostly first and second takes, just after Shelley introduced her band to the music. “They’re all excellent musicians who can feel the their way through the dark the first time through a song,” Shelley says. You can hear the collaborative energy in the music. “Where I’ll Find You” is one of the album’s most upbeat numbers: a deceptively simple song that ambles with a jazzy lightness. But deeper listens reveal complexities in the performance: Tweedy’s brush-stroked drums never find a steady pattern, looking to the cadence of Shelley’s vocals instead of the rhythm for guidance.
Shelley is quick to note the difference between “percussion” and “implied percussion,” meaning rhythms that are built into the music and not laid atop it. “I always hear percussion when we play,” Shelley says about her process with Salsburg, “The game is to just play the guitar while imagining the percussion, because spelling it out isn’t always the most interesting thing to me.” On the record, Tweedy seems to display an intuitive understanding of the concept as well; it might even take a few listens to the record before you start distinguishing which songs feature drums and which do not.
In this way, Shelley’s most collaborative album also stands as her subtlest and quietest. Like her performance at the Beacon Theatre, the process for writing these songs was one propelled by a sense of proximity and place. She had recently moved into a house in her native Louisville, Kentucky, just around the corner from Salsburg. Their closeness allowed their writing process to become more fruitful than ever, and Shelley found inspiration in her new home. “Certain houses, certain rooms,” she explains, “it’s the same way with instruments, you’re like ’There’s songs in this instrument.’ Even if it’s not the fanciest one.” The songs on Joan Shelley, while rarely making explicit references to her location, often take cues from the world around her. The opening number is called “We’d Be Home,” and it’s one of her most striking compositions. “See the morning light,” she sings, her warm fingerpicking intertwining seamlessly with Salsburg’s, “Gentle as it tries to make you new every morning.”
With its pensive tone and recurring themes of trust and self-preservation, Joan Shelley plays as a series of mantras whose power amplifies when put into practice. “How could you stand it,” she repeats in one of the album’s more ominous numbers, “if the storms never came?” Shelley assures that all resemblances to the country’s political climate are coincidental. “It’s funny how some of it can be reread in that light now,” she says. “Our inner struggles are the same we’re playing out on a national level.”
While Shelley’s inspirations are based on more insular anxieties, she remains attuned to the pulse of the world. Shortly after Leonard Cohen’s death, she shared a gorgeous cover of his Various Positions track, “Heart With No Companion.”“It seemed to really resonate with the times,” she says of his song, which warns of impending “days of shame” and “nights of wild distress.” But while Cohen’s version was featured on one of his most lavishly produced records, Shelley’s rendition is austere—even by her standards. “I wanted to cover that song so people could hear the words,” she explains, “And not be scared away by the crazy Casio keyboards.” In other words, she wanted to make it her own.
In the wake of Cohen’s final album, his death, and Trump’s election, Shelley found herself, like many Americans, in a state of—as Cohen might have put it—wild distress. “If that wasn’t the most dramatic record release, political event, and death of an artist,” she says sternly, “Then tell me another one.” She quietly shared her cover, and shortly after, considered abandoning the Internet all together. “It takes so much mental space once you’re in the feedback loop of posting and seeing and checking again,” she says, “It doesn’t make me feel good. The information’s not necessarily useful.” There’s something slightly anachronistic about hearing Shelley speak of the perils of social media, considering how the most modern technology referenced on her latest album might be a fireplace. But she sees in our times the same lesson she’s learned through her years of songwriting, the same hard-won serenity that her music reflects: to find the things that are most vital to you, to hold them close, and to know it’s enough.
English five-piece Hookworms have followed up this year’s Microshift with a new remixes EP, Microshift Remixes EP, out on November. 23rd via Domino Recordings. The four-track EP features remixes from Nik Colk Void of Factory Floor, Luke Abbott, Free Love (fka Happy Meals) and XAM (with Hookworms’ own MB). The EP will be limited to 500 physical copies and they unveiled the first track from it this past week: “Ullswater (Luke AbbottRemix).” The new remix preserves the punchy, intricate electro-rock quality of the group’s album while drawing it out for a more hypnotic, rhythmic drone. The vocals cut out about halfway through, but they keep up the intrigue with mind-numbing synths and pulsing percussion, opening the sonic palette much wider than you thought they would, especially with the outro’s strange, waterfall-like percussive elements
Hookworms – “Ullswater (Luke Abbott Remix)”, taken from ‘Microshift Remixes EP‘ released 23rd November 2018 on Domino Recordings Co
On this day in 1990, Oxford, England shoegazers Ride unleashed their debut album, “Nowhere”, at the height of shoegaze, and it still stands up as one of the genre’s defining works. The word “shoegaze” became one of my favorite musical styles. “Nowhere” is the debut album by Ride, released 15th October 1990. Rolling Stone called the album “a masterpiece”,one of [shoegazing’s] enduring moments”. Ride had released three EPs, Ride, Play, and Fall, prior to the release of “Nowhere” .
Before the ear-splitting beauty of My Bloody Valentine, the sugary noise-pop of The Jesus and Mary Chain or the washed-out soundscapes of Slowdive,
“Vapour Trail,” though this string-filled ballad wasn’t quite full-on shoegaze like the remainder of the record, its swirling, transcendent energy and chiming 12-string guitars left me wanting more. I previously knew of the band’s co-lead singer and guitarist Andy Bell as the bassist in Oasis, but after I heard him sing on “Vapour Trail” with soft-hearted conviction, At the time theybecame my new favorite band—Ride.
The opening track, “Seagull,” I was met by a guitar assault, an unrelenting drone-like groove, breakneck drums and the harmonized co-lead vocals of Mark Gardener and Bell. Sure, This LP made me completely rethink the capabilities of musical transcendence.
I’d been exposed to uplifting romanticism and isolating sadness colliding in the same song before with artists like The Smiths and The Cure, but never with such extreme poles as Ride. On the eight tracks of “Nowhere”, Ride fired a distorted wash of piercing guitars, Loz Colbert’s vigorous percussion, bassist Steve Queralt’s clamoring melodies and Gardener and Bell’s angelic vocal harmonies. Songs shift from the soft wisp of “Dreams Burn Down” and “Vapour Trail” to the chugging chaos of “Decay” and “Kaleidoscope,” but more often than not, they incorporate both delicate allure and fierce annihilation within the same song.
Ride are a musical contradiction, and the best shoegaze music excels at contradiction. One of the things that kept pulling me back to Ride’s “Nowhere” and the rest of their discography and separated them from other shoegaze bands I love—was their refusal to obscure their harmonious vocals. If you were to transcribe the lyrics of bands like Cocteau Twins or My Bloody Valentine, you’d probably get a different set of words with each attempt due to their washed out sound mix. But with Ride, they preserved their distorted onslaught of instrumentals while allowing their shimmery pop vocals a la The Byrds or Teenage Fanclub to remain fully audible. Its opening cut, “Seagull,” is a stunning exploration of strung-out guitar notes and elongated vocal textures; a mission statement, for what would be one of shoegaze’s most pristine moments. “Definitions confine thoughts, they are a myth” Mark Gardener muses, The Songs like “Seagull” and “Polar Bear” display the perfect fusion of Gardener and Bell’s vocals with their discernible Oxford tongue and even those turned off by their wall of sound would admit to being charmed by their vocal match made in heaven.
The discourse around shoegaze seems mostly to be structured around a Holy Trinity dynamic, with Slowdive, Ride and My Bloody Valentine making up the trio of essential bands within the genre. Ride, though, were never quite as exclusive to reverb and hushed vocals as the other two, tailing off into Britpop, the total opposite of shoegaze, territory far too often to be considered their greatest. “Nowhere”, though, was arguably the highlight of their discography—a cohesively immersive, stunningly crafted shoegaze coup.
For a brief moment in 1990, Ride defied definition—crafting one of the most mind-bending and utterly stunning records of the era. Leaving “Nowhere” out of any record collection is totally inexcusable.
I’ve since come to know and love the overwhelming disarray of My Bloody Valentine, the hypnotic spirituality of early Verve, the sprightly, quiet firestorm of Lush and the intricate shoegaze-pop of DIIV, but it all began with Ride’s Nowhere. I’m not sure I would be able to come to grips with the harsh underbelly of bands like those along with the ambient work of Grouper or the atmospheric dream-pop of Galaxie 500 if it weren’t for the noisy, divine abyss of shoegaze via Ride’s Nowhere. I view Ride and Nowhere as the essential connecting tissue between the jangle pop of The Stone Roses, the dream-pop of The Ocean Blue, the discordant haze of My Bloody Valentine and the machine-like krautrock of Toy.
Maryn Jones will release her second album as Yowler, Black Dog In My Path, the follow-up to 2015’s excellent The Offer. We’ve heard two tracks from it already, “WTFK” and “Angel” and Jones says about the new album, and today she’s sharing a third single, “Where Is My Light?”
It’s a meditative storm cloud, with massive guitars and booming drums that make Jones’ anxieties feel even more insurmountable against the tempest. “Where is my joy among these pieces that we scream into space?” she asks to the void. “Where is my gentle reason, and the light within my cave? Where have you been?” It sort of serves a sequel to Jones’ solo track from last year, “The Light,” when the warmth exuded in that song feels hard to find.
Here’s what Jones had to say about the track in a statement:
‘Where Is My Light?’ is about feeling isolated after a big & unexpected life transition. During this time I had a lot of time to think about what was important to me, what served me and made me experience real joy, and what did not. It’s about being an artist under capitalism and all the mess that that can cause in your brain. It’s about missing the natural world and all the beauty you see when you’re on the road, and hating your stupid fucking phone.
Singer-songwriter Gregory Alan Isakov’s new album, Evening Machines, showcases his emotionally evocative songwriting style; rich in narrative detail and beautifully contemplative.
Isakov was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. He and his family immigrated to the States in the mid-1980s and settled in Philadelphia. As a teenager, he began touring and moved to Colorado to study horticulture. He self-released his debut album in 2003, and he’s built a following on a series of lush, honest, ethereal songs that embody modern folk, influenced along the way by Leonard Cohen and blues-folk musician Kelly Joe Phelps. Over the years, Isakov’s songs have appeared in a number of television shows. His songs often have atmospheric, cinematic qualities and while placements in shows like Girls, Californication and Rectify have served his career well, the recent use of “If I Go, I’m Goin” (from 2009’s This Empty Northern Hemisphere) on the final episode of the new Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House is a perfect example of how Isakov’s sense of narrative and quiet intensity can elevate a visual medium.
The video for “San Luis,” a cut from Isakov’s newest album. It’s a mesmerizing, sprawling road video beautifully shot by director Andy Mann, who filmed it with his fellow video and photography colleagues, Keith Ladzinski and Chris Alstrin.
Isakov had this to say about the song:
“I started this song in the San Luis Valley in southern Colorado, a place I often draw from when writing. The song followed me around for about a year and finished itself in California, on the central coast. Andy called me soon after I had returned to Colorado and said he was shooting a short film about artists and wanted me to meet him at Great Sand Dunes National Park for a few days. Any chance I get to hang out with him, I’ll take. He, along with some other National Geographic photographers and friends were traveling the Southwest, documenting the artist’s process. We camped a couple nights and talked about writing, photography–and got caught in a gnarly sandstorm, our tents blowing away in the distance. It was a surreal and beautiful few days.
I reached out to Andy a few months back, to ask if we could use some of the footage for a video for the song. I wanted to make sure the landscape that we had experienced together made it in. I loved collaborating with him; he really is a master at what he does.”
The photography for “San Luis” is wondrously expansive and moody. It seductively captures the wide open sky above the Great Sand Dunes National Park, as well as the land and wildlife found there. The video opens on a shot of morning breaking, before following Isakov in his camper through the park. A campfire roars. A spectacular night sky twinkles brilliantly. As a banjo gently strums, Isakov’s pensive guitar pushes the song into stirring solitude.
“Weightlessness, no gravity. / Were we somewhere in-between? / I’m a ghost of you, you’re a ghost of me. / A bird’s-eye view of San Luis”
Simply put, the video for “San Luis” invites you in to a place that you never want to leave.
BMG Records will issue a 50th anniversary edition of The Kinks‘ 1968 album The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society in October. The Enormous 11-disc super deluxe edition • 2018 remasters • 174 tracks
The band’s sixth studio album was originally issued in November ’68 and would be the last album by the original line-up (bass player Pete Quaife departed in early 1969). Describing the album today, Ray Davies says it’s about “the ending of a time personally for me in my life. In my imaginary village. It’s the end of our innocence, our youth. Some people are quite old but in the Village Green, you’re never allowed to grow up. I feel the project itself as part of a life cycle.”
The super deluxe edition is an eleven-disc set, no less. It contains a double vinyl LP with stereo and mono versions (both 2018 remasters) and a 12-track ‘Continental’ (Swedish) version on vinyl.
In addition there are five CDs of content as described below:
CD1: 2018 Stereo Remaster, from the original HD tape transfers + bonus tracks of singles, B sides and original album related tracks
CD2: 2018 Mono Remaster, from the original HD tape transfers + bonus tracks of singles, B sides and original album related tracks
CD3: Village Green Sessions – Including alternate versions, mixes and backing tracks, many previously unreleased
CD4: Village Green At The BBC – TV performance track audio and band interviews, many previously unreleased
CD5: Preservation, Sessions, Live & Demos – including mid 70s recordings, previously unreleased home demos, Ray Davies live in Denmark 2010 and unreleased track ‘Time Song’.
The three remaining discs are a trio of replica seven-inch singles, reproduced in picture sleeves. They are:
Days / She’s Got Everything (1968)
Starstruck / Picture Book (1968)
The Village Green Preservation Society / Do You Remember Walter? (1969)
There are 174 tracks in total (see full track listing at the bottom of this post) with “many previously unreleased tracks and versions”, including the previously unreleased track ‘Time Song’ which was performed by The Kinks at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in January 1973. This track was Davies’ commentary on the UK joining what was then called The Common Market. Ray says “This song was recorded a few weeks later but never made the final cut on the Preservation Act I album. Oddly enough, the song seems quite poignant and appropriate to release at this time in British history, and like Europe itself the track is a rough mix which still has to be finessed.” This track features in the box set and the 2CD edition.
Check out the previously Unreleased track ‘Time Song’ :
The box set comes with a 52-page hardcover book with extensive sleeve notes and new band interviews and includes essays by Pete Townshend and other writers. It boasts “special packaging” with debossed box cover, foil & metallic text, linen cloth finish and a ‘bespoke accessories holder’.
It also comes with what we like to call ‘stuff’… broadly categorised as ‘memorabilia’. This includes a poster of VillageGreen LP inner gatefold; Empire Liverpool 1968 tour poster; glossy 10” x 8” photos from Hampstead Heath 1968 photoshoot; colour press photo with reproduced band signatures; Bournemouth 1968 gig ticket; PYE Records promo card; ‘Days’ sheet music etc.
The other three physical editions are a 2CD deluxe ‘art of the album’ which features the stereo and mono remasters and bonus tracks (49 tracks in total), plus single disc vinyl and CD versions with just the stereo remaster.
The Kinks “Are The Village Green Preservation Society” 50th anniversary editions are out on 26th October 2018. The UK box set price of £94 seems pretty good for all that content .
QUICKSILVER MESSENGER SERVICE – ” Live At The Old Mill Tavern ” March 29th 1970
QMS are/were a great guitar band, the first three albums are a guitarfest but 1970 QMS are not that band. While I accept Dino Valenti was a good singer here he definitely dominates the main parts of this set. A lot of this album is material which was still to be released but on the band’s standard track “Mona”Cippolina does not get enough chance to shine (the band was down to one guitarist). Nicky Hopkins plays as good as ever on keyboards.
The last tracks are two jams with James Cotton on harp which at 15 mins is a classic West Coast work out. It is worth it for that alone.
The Quicksilver line up during this era was: Dino Valenti, Gary Duncan, John Cipollina, David Freiberg, Greg Elmore and Nicky Hopkins. This is the line up that recorded “Just For Love” and “What About Me”.
The sound quality is actually rather good for a 40 year old soundboard reel to reel tape recording. It does take a few minutes for the bass to get dialed in the mix. There were a few audio gremlins happening that night on stage as well. These are discussed in the booklet accompanying the release. The recording could also use a bit more low end. Still, this is definitely one of the best sounding Quicksilver archive releases. It pretty much blows away the Bear label releases.
The total playing time is just over 65 minutes. The majority of songs are from the Dino era so if you don’t like those, you might want to look elsewhere. Most of the songs are very well played versions with the exception being the first version of Baby Baby. There is a reference to Edward during one of between song breaks. It’s a shame that something from Shady Grove isn’t among the song lists. Blues legend James Cotton joins in the the last two jams. There were three jams on the circulating copies. All in all, a cool performance from the Old Mill .
QUICKSILVER MESSENGER SERVICE – Live At My Father’s Place Rosyln NY January 31st 1976
QUICKSILVER MESSENGER SERVICE – Fillmore Auditorium: 5th February 1967
One of the very earliest known live recordings by this psychedelic jam band, legends who conquered San Francisco and later the world, Quicksilver Messenger Service!
Features the rare Jim Murphy-led 5 piece line-up laying down the acid blues grooves the band would follow throughout their career with tracks such as Suzy Q, Smokestack Lightnin, Babe I’m Gonna Leave You,Hoochie Coochie Man, and more! . The performance is typically good from that period. QMS was like other bands (Steve Miller Blues Band, Santana Blues Band as they were originally named) early on during that time–heavily indebted to the blues–but the blues songs are played with excitement with several good guitar solos/duels. Murray’s vocals and harp playing don’t distract from the performances. And Freiberg plays his viola on a couple of tunes. And with songs that appeared on their first album, this is a real time machine before the Dino Valenti era and the band’s sound changed.
Available on both CD and gorgeous 2LP vinyl set!
The band that became Quicksilver Messenger Service originally was conceived as a rock vehicle for folk singer/songwriter Dino Valenti, author of “Get Together.”” Living in San Francisco, Valenti had found guitarist John Cipollina and singer Jim Murray. Valenti’s friend David Freiberg (joined on bass, and the group was completed by the addition of drummer Greg Elmore and guitarist Gary Duncan As the band was being put together, Valenti was imprisoned on a drug charge and he didn’t re-join Quicksilver until later.
QUICKSILVER MESSENGER SERVICE – Fillmore Auditorium: 5th November 1966
Nice package of good quality recording from 1966 of embyronic Quicksilver Messenger Service, then formed less than a year and already a bay area favourite.
This is absolutely terrific and a must for fans of Quicksilver Messenger Service especially their earlier pre-DinoValenti days. There’s been a glut of live QMS CD’s lately, and a few have been “OK” but this is the best yet. Jim Murray’s excellent vocals really make you wonder what they would’ve been like if he stuck around. The songs are shorter than their later lengthy explorations, but there’s enough classic Cipollina guitar solos to satisfy his disciples. It comes is a nice digipak with an insert. There was a superb 2LP set back in the day called “Maiden Of The Cancer Moon” that was a terrific performance by the four piece line-up that recorded their first album, housed in a beautiful jacket with decent sound for the day. I had been hoping and praying that someone would release those tapes on CD one day. Well that day has come with the excellent 2CD digipak set “Live At The Fillmore June 7, 1968′” the best live document of that era since “Happy Trails” .Greatly expanded with far better sound, except for a rough “Pride Of Man” opener where the sound mixer was getting his bearings. Both of these recent archival releases are essential for any fan of QMS.
Jim Murray – vocals, percussion; John Cipollina – guitar, vocals; Gary Duncan – guitar, vocals; David Freiberg – bass, vocals; Greg Elmore – drums
Along with contemporaries Big Brother and the Holding Company, Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead,Quicksilver Messenger Service were among the earliest of the San Francisco “Summer of Love” bands who frequented the Avalon, the Fillmore and other area venues. Originally conceived as a band to back San Fran folk-rocker Dino Valenti (best known for writing The Youngbloods’ classic “Get Together”), the band, Quicksilver Messenger Service, had to go on without their frontman in 1965, when Valenti got busted for drugs and sent away to prison. He was in and out of jail for the next two years, and after a failed attempt at forming a band called the Outlaws with Gary Duncan, Valenti officially rejoined Quicksilver in 1970. By then, the group had already built a sizeable following as one of the Bay Area’s hottest club bands.
This is probably the earliest known professional live recording of the band, made in 1966 at the Fillmore Auditorium. Less than a year old at the time of this recording (though some of their members had begun working together in 1963), the band was still finding its way through a maze of old blues tunes, early psychedelic drug influences and originals they were writing at the time.
Their musicianship is remarkably strong on this early recording, especially considering other popular bands breaking through the Bay Area club scene at the time could barely play. Quicksilver’s version of “Susie Q” was completely lifted almost note for note some years later by another Bay Area-based band: Creedence Clearwater Revival. There was an obvious interest in Muddy Waters‘ music, with the band performing two covers of his songs at this show: “I Got My Mojo Working” and “Hoochie Coochie Man.” But not everything here works. The band’s attempt at a pop ballad, “Stand By Me,” lacks cohesive direction and suffers from horribly off-key vocals and out of tune instruments.
Guitarist John Cipollina (whose younger brother would become the bassist in Huey Lewis and the News), spearheaded the band’s idea to use dual lead guitars and would eventually leave Quicksilver in 1970 to form his own band, Copperhead. In 1989, he died at the age of 45 from emphysema, aggravated by years of respiratory problems. Bassist David Freiberg eventually left to join his friends in the Jefferson Airplane in 1972, morphing into the Jefferson Starship around the same time.
During this unique time in the history of American rock music, there were few groups that played as prominent and formative a part in developing the “San Francisco sound.” Here’s a chance to experience the band in all their early, unvarnished glory – indispensable.
QUICKSILVER MESSENGER SERVICE – Live at the Fillmore: 7th June 1968
Songs from “Unreleased Gold and Silver” and the superiorly recorded “Maiden of the Cancer Moon – originally on Psycho Records. Also some from a bootleg called “Smokin Sound” its nice to hear “Pride of Man” despite the huge drop out in sound after Cipollina’s solo. All of this is pretty well recorded, I have to say. Not bad for tapes of the age they are. Duncan is too loud in the mix, as another viewer remarked. However one can appreciate this if one remembers how Duncan used to live in the shadow of Cipollina. Of course the reason that is was that Cipollina had “that sound” which distinguished him from so many other players of that time. Duncan, the great player that he was, could not compare to that. Its widely know too that Cipollina’s amplification live was a fearsome beast,
This recording, taken from a two-night, four-show run, with Quicksilver opening for Electric Flag and Steppenwolf, is essential concert listening. Fans of the quartet lineup that recorded the first QMS LP and Happy Trailswill love these sets, as they took place right between the production of those first two LPs.
On this set, the first LP material is represented both by their cover of Hamilton Camp’s “Pride Of Man” and their own “Dino’s Song.” These were both regional hits in California at the time, and easily accessible for new audiences, which New York City was for QMS in 1968. We’re also treated to a cover song, “Back Door Man,” that was recorded during the first album sessions, but rejected in favor of original material. Here it is played with aggressive enthusiasm. Even though the setlist is relatively tame, the band is obviously giving it their best in order to win over the NYC audience.
They return to the first album for their set closer, “Gold And Silver.” This number is one of the finest performances by the original band ever captured on tape. this song is just as infectious. With blazing guitar solos interweaving, powerful counterpoint bass playing and the unusually swinging drum rhythms, this tune truly smokes. If the audience wasn’t convinced of QMS’ originality prior to this song, this final number must have finished the job – and this recording stands as proof.
They close with another tour de force, Bo Diddley’s “Mona,” which includes some inspired jamming with hints of “Maiden Of The Cancer Moon” and “Calvary”, clocking in at twelve minutes altogether. This is not only another hot performance, but gives one great insight into where they would be heading musically on their next album, Happy Trails.
John Cipollina – guitar, vocals; Gary Duncan – guitar, vocals; David Freiberg – bass, vocals; Greg Elmore – drums
QUICKSILVER MESSENGER SERVICE – Live At The Winterland Ballroom 1st December 1973
Previously unreleased live recording of a gig from around the band’s ‘Coming Thru’ album. The show clocks in at over an hour, as I soon there realized that I was definitely getting the most out of this disc’s four tracks (of a total of eight) that ran over the eight-minute mark. The suitable opener – the nine-minute “Losing Hand”, “Mojo”, [always like hearing QMS play this tune], one that I’m vaguely familiar with “The Hat” and the wailing “Who Do You Love”.
This performance was taken from a December 1st, 1973 concert at Winterland in San Francisco, which had Quicksilver Messenger Service headlining a bill that also included the Sons of Champlin and John Cipollina’sColumbia label recording group, Copperhead. There is some extant film footage of the Copperhead and QMS sets, which can be found on the expanded, two DVD reissue of the documentary John Cipollina: Electric Guitar Slinger. The film of QMS performing “Who Do You Love?” is also posted on Youtube.
The live performance itself is stunning. One of the complaints leveled by some reviewers of the Valenti QMS lineups, is that his frontman act reigned in the jamming facet of the band. Not so here. Perhaps it was the energy of the double drum kits, or the challenge of playing before a large Winterland audience with promoter Bill Graham cracking the whip, but Duncan and Cipollina take no prisoners here, pushing the music higher and higher. The band is tight and the playing is energetic and focused. The highlights include an excellent take on the blues standard, “Losing Hand”, done in a Latin jazz rock arrangement similar to “Fresh Air”, a scorching version of Valenti’s “Mojo”, and a 19 minute jam up on “Who Do You Love” that includes a spacy psychedelic section.
The Band of John Cipollina – guitar, Dino Valenti – lead guitar flute, congas, & vocals, David Freiburg – keyboards, Mark Ryan – bass and Greg Elmore – drums. a tandem drum kit battery, and Harold Aceves in the drum seats. Gary Duncan – bass, guitar, vocals;
Headlining a bill that featured Sons Of Champlin and John Cipollina’s band, Copperhead, this Quicksilver Messenger Service recording proves that even at the tail end of their years on Capitol Records, this was a band that was far more compelling onstage than they ever were in the studio. Few QMS live recordings are known to exist from the 1972-’73 era and this one, recorded in December of ’73, captures the band just before they initially split up. By the early 1970s, Dino Valenti was essentially the bandleader and was providing the vast majority of their material. However, on this performance, the original members, Gary Duncan, John Cipollina, David Frieberg and GregElmore are all on board, maintaining a strong link to their past. The core band is augmented by a second drummer and a percussionist. Mark Ryan takes the bass responsibilities, allowing Frieberg to concentrate on piano and keyboards. Although Gary Duncan was often ill during this era, his distinctive guitar playing is often full of fire and John Cipollina is also in fine form. On many of these songs, they bring an improvisational approach to the instrumental sections that are quite captivating, lending a balance to the groups more song oriented sound. The band still has plenty of creativity here and this set is remarkable and surprising in a number of ways.
The first surprise is the opening number, where they apply a prototype Quicksilver-style arrangement to “Losing Hand,” a piano based blues written by Ray Charles. Never recorded by the band, this rarity is a very impressive performance that finds a nice balance between the raw aggressive feel of Happy Trails era material and the more polished rock oriented sound of the later albums. Another rarely performed tune, “Play My Guitar,” a song from the 1971 Quicksilver LP follows, featuring trademark psychedelic guitar from Duncan and Cipollina that smokes the studio version. At this point, everyone is fully warmed up, so they sink their teeth into “Mojo,” the strongest rocker on the band’s final Capitol album, Comin’ Thru. The sparks fly as they burn through this number for nearly 10 minutes, allowing Duncan and Cipollina to fully flex their impressive guitar chops. They may have been nearing the end, but onstage Quicksilver still had tremendous energy.
To close the set, they deliver a nearly 40 minute continuous sequence that begins by coupling one of their most beloved songs, “What About Me” with an intriguing take on the Just For Love album track, “The Hat.” The crowd roars its approval in all the obvious places during “What About Me,” which features plenty of Valenti’s penetrating vocals. Midway through its dreamy flow, the band drops way down while Valenti improvises. Although no recordings have ever surfaced of Valenti’s early years on the folk circuit, this little sequence gives one a fleeting glimpse of his root sound and style. Eventually the group transitions into “The Hat” – 10 delightful minutes revolving around a relaxed infectious groove. They might not be recognized for it, but this same groove and nearly identical guitar riffs fueled several mid-’70s hits by other artists. Just when one expects them to end this remarkable sequence, Duncan starts veering off, with the rest of the group following his lead. As they continue the familiar sound of “Who Do You Love” emerges and they are suddenly blazing into a ferocious jam.
After several minutes, Duncan takes the lead vocal and it sounds as if we have journeyed back to 1968. With two drummers, as well as a percussionist, the rhythm section provides a strong foundation so that Duncan and Cipollina can cut loose. And cut loose they do with blazing guitar solos and plenty of improvising for the next 5 or 6 minutes. This is a cosmic performance in every sense of the word, with blazing guitar solos and a pummeling rhythm that must have convinced any doubters that this band could still pull it off.
Following this initial onslaught, the band heads into a spacey vamp with the guitarists adding creepy processed guitar effects, which build into a barrage of controlled noise, before unexpectedly, they stop! However, they are not finished and begin slowly building back up. Right before the 15-minute mark, they rip back into “Who Do You Love” proper, still blazing with energy. They are playing so furiously, that Duncan forgoes singing on the reprise and instead lets the guitars do all the talking, before bringing the night to a close with a big crescendo-style ending. It’s a remarkable performance that shows this final incarnation of the original group in a most positive light.
“Brown Eyed Girl” hit the radio waves 50 years ago. The hit became a landmark moment for its singer, Van Morrison, who had just left his home of the Belfast-born Irish soul troubadour Van Morrison and his band Them to break out on his own. “Brown Eyed Girl” was a start, but it wasn’t what Morrison saw himself doing.
Throughout his career, Morrison has weaved into many genres, but the thread of deep spirituality has bound the pieces together. His perspectives have shifted dramatically — from mystic poeticism to born-again Christianity and everything between, even dabbling in Scientology — but it’s always there, and it’s part of what makes his catalog so fascinating. he has remained a conspicuously remote rock star, with a well-earned reputation as one of the truly difficult and diffident figures in popular music. Tales of his crankiness are legendary, and include hectoring inattentive audiences, abusing fellow musicians both on and off stage,
Van Morrison is one of rock’s greatest poets, and no matter what he’s preaching or what the band’s playing, it’s profound and it’s certainly always got soul.
Astral Weeks
Morrison first came to prominence as a preternaturally gifted teenager fronting the gritty Blues soul act Them. By 1967, he had already composed the now standards “Gloria” and “Brown Eyed Girl,” which remain two of his best-known songs. But the idiosyncratic and complicated Morrison was always a one-man gang at heart, and the inevitable launch of his solo career would bring to bear the intensely sad, sublime and inventive chamber pop of Astral Weeks, an instantly legendary album whose luminous power has only increased with age.
It’s almost impossible to pick one track from the close-stitched tapestry that is Astral Weeks, where every song – excepting, perhaps, the smooth swing of The Way Young Lovers Do makes persuasive claim to being a masterpiece. Morrison’s dreamtime evocation of postwar Belfast was recorded in a handful of hours with some of America’s finest jazz musicians, relying on intuition and alchemy to bring the songs of memory and rebirth to vivid life. Madame George exemplifies the album’s mood of heightened nostalgia, its pitch of ecstatic longing. Earlier attempts at the song recorded with Berns came out sounding boorish and flat-footed. Now working with New York producer Lewis Merenstein, Morrison and his hired hands instinctively divine the heart of it, capturing an entire street world in 10 minutes with three simple acoustic guitar chords, fluttering flute, backstreet violin and Richard Davis’s double bass, the elastic anchor which holds the whole thing together. The charismatic drag queen of the title – an amalgam of six or seven different people, according to Morrison – is a wonderfully elusive construct around whom a rich cast of characters spin. Although his lyricism has never been more colourful or evocative, the key line is a simple one: “Say goodbye.” Madame George is one long letting go: to time, place, people; above all to innocence. It ranks among the most beautiful and heartbreaking farewells in popular music.
“To be born again / To be born again / From the far side of the ocean,” Morrison sings on the title track, signaling a personal reinvention; not only from his new home in America, but of rock music entirely. Astral Weeks is where it really begins. Morrison mixed the acoustic folk he had been playing in Boston coffee shops with a new jazz ensemble, featuring musicians who had played with the likes of Miles Davis, Frank Sinatra, Charles Mingus and the Modern Jazz Quartet.
Morrison showed the band his acoustic songs and told them to add what they felt. The classical guitar and flute flutter between string arrangements, Morrison’s spiritual poetry dancing atop, while Richard Davis’s double bass drives straight through, grounding it all. The songs are loose and free.
Astral Weeks was an insane idea: a largely improvised 47-minute jazz-folk song-cycle that wed a passionate spirituality to tales of Belfast’s most pronounced outcasts: junkies, transvestites, and disenfranchised souls of every variety. In its way, Astral Weeks was every bit as subversive and daring as the Velvet Underground’s thematically similar White Light/White Heat, released the same year. In some ways it was more so. While the Velvets swathed their tales of deviance and deprivation inside apocalyptic walls of feedback and dissonance, Van went the other way, with gentle, slow building beauty eerily offsetting the desperation of the album’s inhabitants.
Astral Weeks was an inarguably masterful record, but its baroque, drawn-out tales held little in the way of commercial promise.
There’s no other record like Astral Weeks. Its 47 minutes seem to be over in the blink of an eye, leaving you questioning everything you knew about music.
Moondance
Van followed it up with Moondance, an album full of brief, catchy, and often spectacular songs, including two unimpeachable classics: the rough and ready “Caravan” and the borderline transcendent slow burn “Into The Mystic.” The album was justifiably a million-seller, and from that point forward Van remained a bona fide commercial proposition as well as an artistic one,
Moondance is based around punchy R&B and concise pop songs. Side one is packed with five outstanding compositions; the title track, where Van plays Sinatra, is the most well known, but ‘Crazy Love’ is pretty, ‘Caravan’ is jaunty, ‘Into The Mystic’ is lovely and esoteric, while ‘And It Stoned Me’ is all of the above.
While Astral Weeks was a loose exploration, Morrison ditched the jazz ensemble for a new band for its follow-up. Moondance is far more structured, though he hides that with the freewheeling imagery of gypsies and idyllic county fairs. His spirituality is in full force here, from the baptism of “And It Stoned Me” (“Oh the water/Let it run all over me”) to the gospel of “Brand New Day.”
Morrison followed the loose abstractions of Astral Weeks with the precise opposite – a collection of tight, honed, radio-friendly blue-eyed soul made with the crack band of local musicians he had assembled near his then home in Woodstock. The 10 tracks on Moondance offer up an embarrassment of riches, but the killer cut is this mysterious tale of being “born before the wind, oh so younger than the sun”, and sailing the “bonny boat” into some sublime metaphysical harbour. Pinned down by Morrison’s rattling acoustic rhythm guitar, John Klingberg’s propulsive bass, and the totemic foghorn, Into the Mystic provides the spiritual heft on an album more concerned with transmission than transcendence.
Moondance would define what people would come to expect from a Van Morrison record: the swinging blue-eyed soul of an Northern Irish folk rocker enamored with early R&B. Side 1 is stacked with many of his best known songs: “And It Stoned Me,” “Moondance,” “Crazy Love,” “Caravan” and “Into the Mystic.” And side 2 is just as good. The dual saxophones of Jack Schroer and Collin Tilton keep the music from veering too far off into other genres, pulling the country rock of “Come Running” and the bluesy “These Dreams of You” right back into Morrison’s signature style.
His Band and the Street Choir
Van Morrison seemed to have aged quite a bit by 1970. He began writing and producing everything himself, relying heavily on song structure instead of the jams of Astral Weeks. His Band and The Street Choir is a confident step in the same direction as Moondance, but Morrison loosens up his grip to create a freer, more organic record — even leaving in some of the studio chatter. Moondance and His Band, were released in the same year, are like twins. They share a lot of the same genetic makeup, but they both pull in different directions, eager to prove themselves.
You know how the second side of Moondance was pleasant but unmemorable?His Band And The Street Choirs essentially is an entire album of the same thing – nicely arrangements, delivered in Van Morrison’s unmistakable voice, but the song-writing isn’t as sharp as on his other early albums. His Band And The Street Choir is generally grouped with the surrounding albums – Moondance and Tupelo Honey are as part of the domestic trilogy, chronicling Morrison’s life with Janet Planet in Woodstock in upstate New York.
Only a couple of the tunes from His Band And The Street Choir stick with me. Opener ‘Domino’ is a horn infused R&B song that’s still Van Morrison’s biggest hit in the US. And the closer ‘Street Choir’ has a big memorable chorus (“Why did you leave America?”) and more dramatic tension than the rest of the album. The remainder of Street Choir is often with less interesting lyrics than his best work.
There’s enough of Van Morrison’s enjoyable early sound to make His Band And The Street Choir interesting to fans.
Although always overshadowed by its multi-platinum sibling, His Band widens Van’s range. He runs through sax-filled soul rock on “Domino” (which topped even “Brown Eyed Girl” as his most successful single), folk on “Virgo Clowns,” and straight blues on “Sweet Jannie.” It’s loose and free but quintessentially Van.
Tupelo Honey
Although he moved to Marin County, California, to record Tupelo Honey, Woodstock, N.Y. is at the heart of the album. Lyrically, Morrison revels in his pastoral life that fell apart as Woodstock became a hippie destination after the 1969 festival.
Like many of his compatriots before him, Van Morrison relocated to America, although in his case it was due to a woman rather than a potato famine. While Van Morrison had lived in the U.S.A. since the start of his solo career, Tupelo Honey’s country textures make for his most American sounding album. Living in Woodstock, VanMorrison was living close to The Band, and they’re perhaps one influence on the rootsier sound here.
It’s perhaps symptomatic that the strongest tracks – opening single ‘Wild Night’ and the epic title track – are those closest to Van Morrison’s more typical R&B. If you’re not in the right mood, Tupelo Honey‘s agenda of doe-eyed domestic bliss can be nauseating, but despite the throwaway nature of several tracks the overall effect is often charming. The booklet artwork helps; Van, with his tight pants and little beard, looks like a cute Celtic mythological figure. The central song on Tupelo Honey is the gorgeous title track; it starts off with beautiful organ, joined by Van’s delicate vocal intoning “She’s as sweet as tupelo honey/She’s an angel of the first degree.” The other two epic tracks are also enjoyable; ‘You’re My Woman’ isn’t startlingly original, but carries through on a wave of euphoria, while ‘Moonshine Whiskey’ has a fluid catchy chorus that contrasts with the taut verses.
The standout tracks are the snappy lead-off single ‘Wild Night’, with a stylish bass entrance into the introduction, and ‘Old Old Woodstock’ which evokes the languid and rural tone of some of The Band’s work. The low point is ‘I Wanna Roo You’, which is even worse than the title suggests.
The lesser tracks do mesh into Tupelo Honey, as the whole album has a lightweight tone; a collection of mellow -tinged love songs. It’s enjoyable enough, but Tupelo Honey is one of Morrison’s lesser albums from his early catalogue.
The country waltz “(Straight to Your Heart) Like a Cannonball” finds him retreating to nature — “Sometimes it gets so hard/ And everything, everything don’t seem to rhyme/ I take a walk out in my backyard and go.” And although he abandoned the full-blown country-and-western theme he had planned for Tupelo Honey, the twang survived. “When That Evening Sun Goes Down” bops with honky-tonk piano and slide guitar.
Saint Dominic’s Preview
Morrison genre hops more blatantly than ever on Saint Dominic’s Preview. He comes out swinging on the opener, “Jackie Wilson Said,” awash with saxophones and one of the catchiest hooks Morrison has ever written. But he wastes no time switching to the flute-heavy “Gypsy” and the Ray Charles jazz of “I Will Be There.” Morrison plays each style so convincingly, it’s barely noticeable how wide he’s reaching. But these three are really just an aperitif for what comes next.
Morrison’s superlative run of driving R&B singles in the early 1970s – Come Running, Domino, Blue Money, Wild Night had turned him into a US pop star, a development he professed to loathe, naturally. That particular populist strain of writing peaked with this frantic, appealingly odd slice of finger-snapping soul-pop from 1972’s Saint Dominic’s Preview. Paying homage to the great American R&B star, one of the few vocal stylists who could hold a candle to the Belfast Cowboy, Morrison is at his most unaffected and exuberant.
There’s no poetry here, just a string of “do-do-do-dos”, “bop-shoop-bops” and “dang-a-lang-a-langs” to express the sheer joy of being head over heels in love. Dexys Midnight Runners had the big UK hit with the song in 1982 , but Van’s remains the definitive reading. You can imagine the wee fellow high-kicking his way through it, letting it “all hang out”, and very possibly tearing the seat of his trousers in the process.
Three-minute marvels stood toe to toe with phenomenal existential meditations, such as the spectacular, harrowing ten-minute wonder “Almost Independence Day,” from 1972’s brilliant St. Dominic’s Preview.
The last four tracks contain some of Morrison’s deepest moments. The 11-minute “Listen to the Lion” is surprisingly sparse. He manages to draw out the song’s minimal lyrics, repeating lines like “I shall search my soul” and “Lookin’ for a brand new start.” He changes each line slightly as he repeats, not in a trance, but magnetically drawn to each one. The title track and “Redwood Tree” owe much to Morrison’s new life in California but with more spirituality than anything on Tupelo Honey. The latter culminates with the lines “Won’t you keep us all from harm/ Wonderful redwood tree” delivered joyously like a gospel Thoreau. Similar to “Listen to the Lion,” album closer “Almost Independence Day” is a winding stream-of-consciousness epic. With only a few repeated words, Morrison leaves the listener completely in awe.
It’s Too Late to Stop Now
Morrison once said, “When I go into the studio, I’m a magician,” and working through this list, it’d be hard to argue against that. It seems obvious that he prefers the control of the studio to live performances where anything could go wrong. Even now, he has a reputation as an inconsistent performer, offering little to no banter between songs and often refusing to play the hits. But when he was on, he was untouchable.
It’s Too Late to Stop Now is Morrison’s Live at the Apollo. He fully embodies the soul singers he worshipped to deliver definitive versions of some of his songs — looser than ever, throwing ad-libs like a preacher speaking in tongues. Van runs through his classics like “Domino” and “Wild Night” with feverish energy, even singing along with the horns on “These Dreams of You.” A few times on the record, he catches his breath with slower tunes like “Cypress Avenue” or “Saint Dominic’s Preview” before jumping right back with fire. The maddening energy peaks on “Gloria,” where Morrison shows himself transformed from garage-rock singer to showstopping rhythm-and-blues man.
Morrison’s peerless double live album, It’s Too Late to Stop Now, is revisited this month in an expanded box set. Recorded during his 1973 tour, it captures him at a career peak, performing with the 11-piece Caledonia SoulOrchestra, a superlative band augmented with two horn players and a string quartet. The new material – 45 tracks – only serves to emphasise the jaw-dropping power and versatility of Morrison in full flood. It includes two previously unheard versions of Listen To the Lion, his epic incantation from Saint Dominic’s Preview; the one recorded at the Rainbow in London just about shades it for sheer vocal abandon, not to mention Bill Atwood’s soaring trumpet part. The song itself is the ultimate expression of Morrison’s compulsion to heed the internal voices that drive his music, the seemingly painful search for his inner lion. Over a slow, stop-start shuffle, the words are pared to a bare minimum. “I will search my very soul,” is the digested read; this is all about sound and feel. Many years later Morrison described it as “a song about me. Probably the only one”.
Veedon Fleece
Veedon Fleece is the ultimate hidden gem of Morrison’s catalog. Following the dissolution of his marriage, he returned to Ireland for first time since 1967. But Veedon Fleece isn’t really a breakup album Morrison already had a new fiancee at the time of his trip. It’s the sound of a man at a crossroads in his life, a wanderer coming home after a self-imposed exile, during which he failed to find a permanent place for himself.
Eventually, Van’s more meditative, experimental side became dominant again, resulting in both his best ever work and his most disappointing commercial results. 1974’s Veedon Fleece was a return to the geographic and emotional terrain of Astral Weeks, a Gaelic preoccupied masterclass packed with more melancholy, longing and despair than a mass audience was prepared to embrace. Its commercial failure would send a demoralized Morrison into a multi-year hiatus from releasing music. It is perhaps his greatest ever work.
After moving to America in 1967, Morrison spent the next six years in exile from Ireland. On his return in 1973 for a holiday, he immediately found the muse rapping at his window. He flew back to his home near San Francisco with a hatful of strange and beautiful songs, infused with Celtic twilight and preoccupied with a grail-like object that gave his next album its title but the significance of which even Morrison has since been unable to adequately explain. Reminiscent of Astral Weeks in its instrumentation, flow and questing spirit, Veedon Fleece is one of his greatest works. Any selection from the album is bound to be representative rather than definitive, but this brooding, contemplative march is a highlight, inspired by Morrison’s visit to the Wicklow town of Arklow, his head “full of poetry”. James Rothermel’s high, lyrical recorder soars over “God’s green land”, and when the strings swoop in at the start of the third verse, the force of the music perfectly conveys the gravitas of Morrison’s “soul-cleansing” excursion.
Veedon Fleece was the last album from Van Morrison’s initial run of solo records; subsequently he went into semi-retirement for three years, only emerging to appear in The Band’s The Last Waltz. In some respects, it’s almost the completion of the circle begun with Astral Weeks; , Veedon Fleece is more steeped in acoustic mysticism than any of his releases since Astral Weeks, and it’s similarly loose in feel. It’s also more noticeably more Irish than anything he’d released previously; there’s little R&B here, using more folk-oriented, acoustic instrumentation, and the lyrics reference William Blake and figures from Irish mythology.
The songs that take place in America deeply contrast with his descriptions of Ireland. “You can’t slow down and you can’t turn around/ And you can’t trust anyone,” he sings on “Who Was That Masked Man.” That paranoia comes right before the sunny description of Ireland on “Streets of Arklow” where he sings, “And our souls were clean/ And the grass did grow.”
Side 2 especially basks in the warm nostalgia of home with songs like “Cul de Sac” and “Country Fair.” On “You Don’t Pull No Punches, But You Don’t Push the River,” Morrison describes the search for the mythical “Veedon Fleece,” but musically he’s not searching, for the first time in years. He mostly treads through the jazzy folk he once covered on Astral Weeks, sounding more confident than ever.
Wavelength
Wavelength immediately showers you with warmth. “So glad you made it, so glad you’re here,” Morrison sings on opener “Kingdom Hall,” the perfect greeting to what might be his most accessible record, packed start to finish with pop-rock classics.
Wavelength is Morrison’s first attempt at incorporating synths, but it’s still firmly a ‘70s record. The title track swims in warm synths, courtesy of Van’s former Them bandmate Peter Bardens, but they’re never the star. The guitar is high in the mix, right beneath Morrison’s voice and the gospel harmonies.
The Band’s Garth Hudson bookends the album with electronics, tearing through a keyboard solo in “Kingdom Hall” and adding grand synths to closer “Take It Where You Find It,” but the organ and accordion on “Venice U.S.A.” keep Wavelength from wandering too far toward the sky. The album doesn’t rely too heavily on synths — it’s a balancing act that’s prevented the record from sounding dated almost 40 years later.
Like the albums that followed it, Wavelength is slick and commercial, and the style suits Morrison as his vocals are unique enough that a generic musical backing isn’t a problem. It does mean that Wavelength can’t coast by on atmosphere like some of Van Morrison’s previous work did; the album is a little monotonous in places, and some of the songs drag on too long, and it works best when he’s laying on the pop hooks.
There are pop hooks galore on pop songs like the title track and ‘Kingdom Hall’, while the short, punchy ‘Natalia’ is arguably the most memorable piece. The gentle ‘Hungry For Your Love’, with Morrison playing electric piano is melodic and memorable, while the most significant piece is the closer ‘Take It Where You Find It’, which slowly builds into a nine minute epic, with the refrain centering around “lost dreams and found dreams in America”.
After the tentative A Period of Transition, Wavelength is a step forward for Van Morrison; its more polished sound would be utilised for 1979’s career highlight Into The Music.
Into the Music
After the commercial success of Wavelength, Morrison looked inward, turning to spiritual writing in a new way. Songs like “Full Force Gale,” which features a slide guitar solo from Ry Cooder, and “Rolling Hills” show him embracing Christianity for the first time in his music. The strings played by Toni Marcus complement the lyrics beautifully, but his signature horn swells and sax solos are still there.
Following a directionless mid-to-late 1970s, Morrison wrapped up the decade with one of his most enjoyable albums, Into the Music, a breezy declaration of spiritual and musical regeneration. With a sensational new band, spearheaded by former James Brown horn player Pee Wee Ellis and freewheeling violinist Toni Marcus, he hit upon a powerful folk-soul hybrid which on the album culminated in a monumental 11-minute version of the 1950s standard It’s All in the Game. Van’s more accessible musical instincts were also back on track. The one-two punch of Bright Side of the Road (a minor hit in the UK) and this rousing declaration of being “returned to the Lord” is one of Morrison’s most uplifting opening sequences, and the most effortlessly immediate music he had made since the days of Brown Eyed Girl. Whether or not you care for the God-talk, Full Force Gale is an irresistible expression of rebirth, a punchy pop gospel testament which sweeps away any doubters.
His early records revolve around searching — for a home, for love, for meaning — but starting in the late ‘70s, he seems to have it all figured out. His point of view may change from album to album, but in the moment he delivers these perspectives as truth. And for that moment, you’ll believe him. In “Angeliou,” Morrison perfectly sums up why we listen to his records: “It wasn’t what you said/ But just the way it felt to me/ As I listened to your story/ About a search and a journey/ Somewhere inside/ Just like mine.”
Into The Music is a blue-print of the adult contemporary direction than Van Morrison would pursue during the 1980s, but the song writing is so sharp that it’s his best album. It’s slickly produced and loaded with backing vocalists, strings, saxophones, and other adult contemporary paraphernalia, but for these joyous songs the sensory overload approach works beautifully, like being swept away by a wave of intertwined sexual and spiritual power.
No Guru, No Method, No Teacher,
His preoccupations became steadily more spiritual in nature, although the bile of his industry-related frustrations never abated. It all came together on the stunning 1986 release No Guru, No Method, No Teacher, an astoundingly underappreciated album that Okkervil River’s Will Sheff writes about with great insight
Van’s last full-length masterpiece was No Guru, No Method, No Teacher, released 30 years ago. From its pointed title onward it found him shucking off many of the formal teachings that had infiltrated his music over the past several years – Christianity, Scientology, Rosicrucianism – to reconnect with his enduring muses: nature, pantheistic spirituality and a deep absorption with the past.
In the Garden brings all three themes together in six minutes of pure rapture. Morrison transports himself back to “the garden wet with rain” of Astral Weeks, taking the listener, trancelike, through what he later described as “a meditative process”. The music is unspeakably gorgeous, a wonderfully tensile ensemble performance lead by JefLabes’ rippling piano motif, every quiver held in check through to the ecstatic climax, where Morrison turns the album title into a mantra. Though he tends to favour more workmanlike material in concert these days, this remains the transcendent high point of Morrison’s recent live appearances.
Typical of Van, that gorgeous and wistfully autumnal album commences with a memorably dyspeptic complaint: “Copycats stole my words/ Copycats stole my songs/ Copycats stole my melodies…” It’s a funny sentiment, but it’s not wrong. The litany of timeless artists who have borrowed liberally from the musical vocabulary Morrison created is enormous. It is fair to assert that the careers of everyone from Bruce Springsteen to Elvis Costello to Dan Bejar would look immensely different without the presence of Van The Man’s influence. It is nearly assured that none of them would disagree, but the fact of it remains wildly under reported.
I’m still forming an opinion on this, but so far I think it’s one of his better albums from the period, with earthier arrangements. Like a 1980s’ take on his spacier mode – akin toAstral Weeks or Veedon Fleece. ‘One Irish Rover’ is pretty, ‘Foreign Window’ is punchy with its memorable horn riff.
Common One
This 15-minute excursion from 1980s meditative Common One became the fulcrum of Morrison’s live shows for the next decade, an open-ended opportunity for the band to vamp and for he and Ellis to engage in extended call-and-response routines about topics as obscure as brass bands and Seamus Heaney’s publisher. Summertime in England is the deepest of Deep Van, an improvised jumble of some of Morrison’s most pressing musical, spiritual and literary preoccupations. Partly inspired by the open spaces of Miles Davis’s In a Silent Way, it’s a deeply ambitious, highly eccentric, improvised blend of snappy rhythm, hymn-like half-time passages, funky organ, vaulting strings and free-flowing horns.
The action moves from the Lakes to the Vale of Avalon as Morrison pictures Wordsworth and Coleridge “smokin’ up in Kendal”, evokes Mahalia Jackson coming “through the ether”, pays homage to Yeats, Joyce, Eliot and, of course, William Blake, and eulogises about a woman in a red robe – “high in the art of sufferin’” – with whom he plans an assignation in the long grass. The conclusion of all this magnificent madness? “It ain’t why, why, why – it just is.”
Into The Music was among Van Morrison’s most accessible efforts; its followup is among the least. Common One plunges directly into mystic spiritual territory, and with two songs passing the 15 minute mark there’s little in the way of pop hooks. Losing pianist Mark Jordan from the Into The Music band changes the feel of the record significantly; Common One is more open sounding and jazz oriented, with more room for improvisation from VanMorrison’s vocals, and the saxophone and trumpet.
The result is arguably the most divisive album of Van Morrison’s career, as its lengthy song structures push it close to jazz (as admirers would classify it) or easy listening (as its detractors would label it); and there’s justifiable grounds for regarding Common One as a flat-out masterpiece, a noble failure, or as an outright snooze fest.
While it’s not immediately compelling, the ambient atmosphere of the longer pieces is quite unique in VanMorrison’s catalogue. A couple of the shorter pieces are accessible enough; ‘Satisfied’, which Christgau accurately categorises as “the only vaguely fast one”, could have fit nicely onto Into The Music with its punchy R&B arrangement, while ‘Wild Honey’ is concise and prettily melodic, with a sentimental arrangement and lyric (“don’t you feel my heart beat/just for you”) that rubs up nicely against the more esoteric material. The more esoteric, fifteen minute material comprises of ‘When Heart Is Open’, a subdued improvisational piece based on Miles Davis’ In A Silent Way, and the more urgent ‘Summertime In England’, where Van Morrison rants about T.S. Eliot and William Blake. Add in the charming opener ‘Haunts Of Ancient Peace’, and there’s plenty of really good material here.
Common One takes some effort to decode, and it’s probably the least approachable album that Van Morrison ever made, but there’s plenty to enjoy for dedicated fans.
Avalon Sunset
Before Morrison’s long slide into genre exercises – a skiffle album here, a country record there, jazzin’ at Ronnie Scott’s – and the undistinguished collections of too-solid blues and R&B that have defined his music over the past two decades, he enjoyed a late-80s commercial renaissance with Avalon Sunset. The album marks the lush, string-drenched apogee of his preoccupation with a peculiarly British strain of ancient mysticism. Forget the singularly unlikely Cliff Richard duet (Whenever God Shines His Light) which finally got The Man on Top of the Pops, and head instead to this magnificent miniature Coney Island is an orchestrated gem over which Morrison recites – in thick east Belfast vernacular; check out the way he says “face” – an autumn bird-watching trip through the County Down where the “craic was good” and so, apparently, was the grub: “Stop off at Ardglass for a couple of jars of mussels and some potted herrings, in case we get famished before dinner”. Somebody once tracked the route taken in the song and concluded that Morrison must have deployed William Burroughs’ cut-up technique on his road map, but such literalism misses the point. This is a journey into the heart of life’s simple joys, a note-to-self to seize contentment when it appears, even in such seemingly mundane pleasures as “stopping off for Sunday papers at the Lecale District”. A mere 123 seconds it may be, but Morrison’s eternally restless soul has rarely sounded at such peace. “Wouldn’t it be great if it was like this all the time?”
Avalon Sunset, Van Morrison’s 19th studio album, was a commercial success, and his fastest album to reach gold status in the UK. But while it attracted more attention than usual, it feels like Morrison is treading a well worn path by this point, To Van Morrison’s credit, he was able to write a popular standard on Avalon Sunset, unusual for a pop artist into the third decade of their recording career; ‘Have I Told You Lately’ was popularised by Rod Stewart, and has been co-opted as a popular wedding tune, but it’s a love song to God.
Similarly, the other songs that deal most explicitly with faith are also strong. It’s possible to dismiss the Cliff Richard duet ‘Whenever God Shines His Light’ as mawkish, but I like the contrast between Richard’ boyish tenor and Morrison’s emotive yelp. ‘When Will I Ever Learn to Live in God’ is tuneful and thoughtful.
Avalon Sunset is a solid album with no obvious throwaways, but besides these highlights I don’t have a whole lot of use for it; it’s mostly Van Morrison dispensing wisdom over a smooth backing. Unless you’re a hardcore fan, you’re probably better off finding the album’s best songs on a compilation.
Beautiful Vision
Beautiful Vision is one of Van Morrison’s most settled, comfortable albums, like a calmer take on the Into The Music sound, and it’s relatively insular with its low key explorations of spirituality and Irish heritage. Even if he’s sometimes treading water musically, there are plenty of great songs here, and it’s one of his more consistent, most substantial records, even if it’s less adventurous and less universal than his earlier work.
Beautiful Vision is one of Van Morrison’s most settled, comfortable albums, like a calmer take on the Into The Music sound, and it’s relatively insular with its low key explorations of Christianity and Irish heritage. But even if he’s treading water musically, there are plenty of great songs here, and it’s one of his more consistent, most substantial records, even if it’s less adventurous and less universal than his earlier work. Guests include Mark Knopfler, who plays guitar on ‘Cleaning Windows’ and ‘Aryan Mist’, while Morrison himself plays piano on the closing instrumental ‘Scandinavia’, where his sprays of notes are melodically compelling.
Enforcing an initial reaction that Beautiful Vision is bland and uninteresting, at least a couple of these songs are abjectly uneventful – the monotonous title track and ‘Aryan Mist’ both wander past without adding anything to the record. But digging deeper, there are a couple of catchy potential singles in the form of ‘Cleaning Windows’ and ‘Dweller On The Threshold’, the former a seemingly autobiographical tale from Van Morrison’s days in Belfast inspired by R&B, and the latter balancing wistful lyrics with a fast tempo. The standout track, though, is ‘Across The Bridge Where Angels Dwell’, where R&B, jazz, and gospel are fused into a glorious whole, Van Morrison’s voice floating above the female backing vocals. The two Celtic influenced pieces, ‘Northern Music (Solid Ground)’ and ‘Celtic Ray’, give the album a solid beginning,
The insular world that Morrison creates here isn’t ideal for neophytes, but Beautiful Vision is like a more mature, calmer version of Into The Music, and it’s not as far from that album’s greatness as it may seem on first impression.
Hard Nose The Highway
You can’t go too far wrong with Van Morrison’s 1968-1974 period; Hard Nose The Highway is justifiably reckoned as one of his lesser albums from the era, but it’s still an enjoyable listen. If St. Dominic’s Preview was a brilliant summation of Van Morrison’s career up to that point, then Hard Nose The Highway is arguably a predictable retread.
The record also has more of a smooth, jazz-inflected feel, and it’s a little blander than usual, but it’s still sonically creative in the opening ‘Snow In San Anselmo’, which is one of the weirder successes in the Van Morrison catalogue. The two covers, the traditional British ballad ‘Wild Mountain Thyme’, referred to here as ‘PurpleHeather’, and the more bizarre choice of ‘Bein’ Green’ are also an indication of Van Morrison running out of ideas, but they’re nicely performed, and none of the above objections detract from the fact that most of the songs on this album are perfectly solid.
Despite the overall feeling that it’s a relatively minor work, the major issue with Hard Nose The Highway is simply that the ten minute track ‘Autumn Song’ drags more than it should; a pleasant but generic jazz tune is stretched out to unnecessary proportions, far less interesting than the previous record’s ‘Listen To The Lion’. The lyrical agenda of ‘The Great Deception’ is blatant (“Have you ever heard about the great Rembrandt/Have you ever heard about how he could paint/And he didn’t have enough money for his brushes”), but works fine musically.
The main appeal of Hard Nose The Highway is the pair of opening tracks; ‘Snow In San Alselmo’ is one of VanMorrison’s best arty tracks, with a eerie feeling and weird choir, while ‘Warm Love’ is one of his best commercial songs, with an accessible melody and utilising his pretty upper register. The title track is perfectly solid, while he also manages to bring something new to the somewhat over-used ‘Purple Heather’.
Hard Nose The Highway isn’t Van Morrison’s strongest album by any stretch of the imagination; it’s the quietly under-achieving record between two milestones, but Morrison was in such good form at this time that even his under-achievements are worth hearing.
TB Sheets
During Van Morrison’s spell in Them, the brutally, brilliantly reductive Belfast band he fronted between 1964 and 1966, there had been glimmers of an artistic sensibility at odds with the turbo-boosted dockside R&B of songs like Gloria and Baby Please Don’t Go. On My Lonely Sad Eyes, Hey Girl and an aching cover of John LeeHooker’s Don’t Look Back, Morrison was reaching for something deeper and more revelatory. It wasn’t until he made his first solo recordings in New York with Bert Berns in 1967, however, that he began forging a distinct creative identity. The antithesis of the jaunty Brown Eyed Girl, TB Sheets is the first great Morrison immersion: 10 minutes of crawling, bloodied blues, sticky with the sweet stench of decay. Taking cues from gnarled old death songs like TB Blues, Morrison conjures something entirely idiosyncratic. The “Julie baby” dying of tuberculosis was, according to various sources, either an old high school friend, his London landlady or a work of fiction. Whoever she may be, Morrison delivers us, with unremitting focus, into her fetid room, creating a suitably claustrophobic, choking musical backdrop of stabbing organ, stinging blues licks and searing harmonica. His agitated death-watch veers between compassion (“I cried for you”), impatience (“I gotta go, I’ll send somebody around later”), awkward empathy, guilt and mortal dread. When words fail, he snuffles at the window like a hunted boar. When the recording was over – apparently; perhaps apocryphally – Morrison burst into tears. Not an easy listen, but grimly unforgettable.
Them
Every Van Morrison collection needs something from Them. Both of their albums, The Angry Young Them and Them Again, were recently reissued, but if you manage to find one of the many compilations out there, you get the bonus of their non-album singles like “Baby, Please Don’t Go” and “Richard Cory.”
In the two years they were together (1964 – 1966), Them recorded garage rock classics like “Gloria” and “Here Comes the Night.” The blues rock of his youth remains part of Morrison’s career even now, although tightened up considerably. Them’s music is an important document of a burgeoning young rock star about to become the VanMorrison we all know today.
More Perfect is back with something totally new and exciting. They just dropped an Album 27: The Most Perfect Album is like a Constitutional mix-tape, a Schoolhouse Rock for the 21st century. The album features original tracks by artists like Dolly Parton, Kash Doll, and Devendra Banhart: 27+ songs inspired by the 27 Amendments. Alongside the album they’ll be releasing short stories deep-diving into each amendment’s history and resonance. In this episode, we preview a few songs and dive into the poetic dream behind the First Amendment.
TheMore Perfectpodcast from WNYC Studios is turning its insightful political analysis into educational activism with the announcement of 27: The Most Perfect Album, a compilation of original songs inspired by the 27 Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
The set features a song, and in some cases more than one, for each amendment by a diverse and highly acclaimed group of artists, They Might Be Giants . The accompanying podcast will also add to its star power with voice-over narration from award-winning actor Jeffrey Wright.
The first release is folk singer-songwriter Kevin Morby’s take on the 24th Amendment’s elimination of poll taxes, . It’s a blues-driven tune that only Morby’s observational lyrics and circuitous storytelling could conjure. He reflects the history of the legislation by noting small financial grievances and sacrifices that accrue throughout time until it becomes clear that nothing can break the cycle except the right to vote.
27: The Most Perfect Album is set to drop on September. 18th and will coincide with the premiere of More Perfect’s third season, which will break down each amendment and apply it to the modern day. Though the series will serve a much different tune than its companion album, it’s certain to strike a chord.
In a statement, More Perfect creator and host Jad Abumrad says, “The mission of this album is to take these sometimes forgotten words and animate them through the power of music. These 27 amendments not only outline our basic rights as Americans, but they also show a country changing, evolving, re-imagining itself. Striving (and not always succeeding) to be better. These songs will be a way to say that these words matter.”
THE ICONIC BRITISH ROCK BAND’S PERFORMANCES FOR THE BBC – REMASTERED A DELUXE 8 DISC 48-PAGE HARDBACK BOOK SET CELEBRATING 50 YEARS OF FAMILY
“there was no more innovative group at the time, nobody bettered Family for imaginatively corralling pop, rock, folk, R’n’B and jazz.” UNCUT
Growing out of the R&B boom of the early 60s, Family’s sound evolved into a unique mix of blues, folk, jazz, psychedelia and high energy rock’n’roll built around the distinctive vocals of frontman Roger Chapman, Charlie Whitney’s innovative guitar playing and Rob Townsend’s intelligent drumming.
At the BBC is the most comprehensive release of Family’s recordings for the BBC, featuring seven CDs containing tracks beginning with their first session for “Top Gear” on 26th November 1967 and running up until their last session with John Peel on 22nd May 1973. The eighth disc is a DVD of nine live tracks from iconic BBC shows including “Top of the Pops” & “The Old Grey Whistle Test” and a rare performance on ITV’s “Doing Their Thing”.
This book set boasts 20 previously unreleased recordings including new versions of “Scene Through The Eye Of A Lense”, “Old Songs New Songs” and “The Weaver’s Answer”. All CD audio has been newly remastered for this release.
Also included in the 48 pages of this deluxe hardback book are John Peel’s now legendary interviews, introductions and anecdotes, new liner notes, a rare poster replica promoting Family Entertainment and rare photographs including shots from the lens of Michael Putland & Jill Furmanovsky. At the BBC is presented in a deluxe hardboard slipcase.
“They’ve got a fantastic blend of sound, the best I’ve heard in a long time.” John Lennon
“Roger Chapman is, without doubt, one of the all-time great lead vocalists.” Bob Harris
