Van Morrison

The Irish singer-songwriter has identified himself with poets from Blake to Yeats, and like those "poetic champions," he has searched for the right words, the right feeling, as if for the Holy Grail.

By Sean Elder

Sep 19, 2000 | Van Morrison opened his 1999 album, "Back on Top," with a song called "Goin' Down Geneva." Sung as a straight blues in the style of one of Morrison's heroes, Bobby "Blue" Bland, "Goin' Down Geneva" is in the tradition of road-weary blues tunes, a milepost on the endless highway of touring performers who don't know which hat rack to call home. "It's not easy, baby," Morrison sang in his gruff voice, "living on the exile plan."

But this Irishman's exile has always been self-imposed. He has wandered through Europe and the United States, sometimes in the footsteps of his idols, then back to Ireland and Great Britain. The soul stops on this number aren't Memphis and Mobile, though, but Salzburg and Montreux. Of Geneva he sings, "Vince Taylor used to live here, nobody's ever heard of him."

You may never have heard of him either, but as lovers of rock arcana know, Vince Taylor was an American rockabilly singer who came to Europe to make it big. His "Brand New Cadillac" (covered to great effect by the Clash on "London Calling") was a couple of minutes of hiccuping hysteria and remains his chief claim to fame. David Bowie has acknowledged Taylor as one of the models for his fictional rock messiah, Ziggy Stardust; Taylor met Bowie in London and showed him on a map where the flying saucers were going to land. He made his last appearance on stage dressed as Jesus, saying, "I won't be needing this band anymore. In fact, I won't be needing any of you. 'Cause I have places to go, and, and a father to return to."

Taylor died about 10 years ago, and Van Morrison is one of the few who has stopped to wonder "just who he was, just where he fits in." Maybe he sees the singer's tale as a cautionary one, a there but for the grace of God thing. Sure, Morrison's recordings with Them in the '60s were greater successes than "Brand New Cadillac," but there was no guarantee he would go anywhere solo. Indeed, much of the singer-songwriter's output seemed designed to thwart success. From the brooding deathbed scene drawn in "T.B. Sheets" (1967), to the obscure song cycle of "Astral Weeks" (1968) and all the oblique and ethereal lyrics that came later -- not to mention his forays into jazz, Irish and country music -- Morrison has placed unwelcome mats before his house. He has been contemptuous of journalists, difficult with his collaborators and, at times, barely tolerant of his fans. Like some musical Andy Kaufman, he does not seem to care what people think of what he's doing. And woe unto his imitators.

But for every counterintuitive move he has made, Morrison has played the savvy entertainer as well. He began recording 35 years ago, an eternity in any branch of popular music, and through each stage has managed to hit the charts here and abroad with an impressive array of hits, including "Gloria," "Brown Eyed Girl," "Domino," "Wild Night" and "Wavelength." He has recorded almost 30 albums as a solo performer (not including his collaborations with artists as diverse as the Chieftains and Georgie Fame) and as he has gone through labels he has kept a sharp eye on each album's marketing and reception.

Morrison defends most of his work with a poet's pride, but can crank out an instant standard like "Have I Told You Lately (That I Love You)" He has walked out on audiences without warning, but can still hold them in his thrall. He sometimes wanders through his own lyrics like a man looking for his keys, picking up this, discarding that, but knows a good phrase when he coins it: "I want to rock your gypsy soul," "Torn down ` la Rimbaud," "You don't pull no punches, but you don't push the river," et al. And like Bob Dylan, to whom he owes such a debt and with whom he shares so many characteristics (paranoia, inarticulateness, divine inspiration and maddening inconsistency), he found out "when you reach the top you're on the bottom."

The "top" that Morrison sings of in the title track of "Back on Top" is a sort of personal Golgotha: "Saw me climbing to the top of the hill/You saw me meeting with the fools on the hill ..." Looking at the legend of a nut gone flake like Vince Taylor, the sometime-Christian Morrison might just count his blessings. He's played the angry young man, the wandering mystic and sometimes the mad hatter, but nobody has nailed him down yet.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

When I was a young boy
Back in Orangefield
I used to gaze out
My classroom window and dream
And then go home and listen to Ray sing
"I believe to my soul" after school
-- "Got to Go Back," 1986

George Ivan Morrison was born Aug. 31, 1945, in a working-class neighborhood in Belfast, Northern Ireland. His parents were Protestants, though his mother, Violet, briefly became a Jehovah's Witness. (Van's memories of those revival-like meetings were recalled in the 1978 song "Kingdom Hall.") An only child, Morrison had his father's record collection to keep him company. George Sr., a shipyard electrician, had a passion for American music and the 78s to prove it. As a boy, Van fell under the spell of Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie, Muddy Waters, the Carter Family, Mahalia Jackson and his perpetual favorite, Leadbelly ("He was my guru," Morrison once remarked).

"He struck me as a talented kid from the very earliest days," childhood friend George Jones (not that George Jones) recalled in John Collis' biography, "Van Morrison: Inarticulate Speech of the Heart," "but he was very shy, left to his own devices at home a lot while his parents were at work. But his father had these blues records. They were his friends. With the common denominator of music he could get on with people."

Next Page: We all had to grow our hair long like the Rolling Stones

• View blog reactions