Van Morrison is not handsome. His voice is not of a particularly pleasant timbre. He refuses to project a phony aura of likeablility, and is likely incapable of projecting a real one. He’s strange and prickly and inscrutable. It’s likely that all of the members of the band he’s playing with are more musically cultivated than he is. Some might be better singers. Hell, the audience probably has dozens of people with more musical chops than he has. He only brings one unusual thing to the table. No one knows what that one thing is; they only recognize it when they encounter it.
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything
I Cannot Fiddle, But I Can Raise A Great State From A Little City
- , 1980s, music, Van Morrison
10 Responses
Authenticity.
Except, that's a loaded word with a scatter gun meaning. But, I know what I mean.
What is the one thing Morrison brings that you never recognize until you are faced with it? He is standing there strumming so hard on that enormous axe he might saw it in half… and you never hear one sound emitting from it. Thus… he is a great bandleader and conductor.
Add to all that, he always sounds as though he has a mouth full of marbles. Yet you can't not listen. Whatever it is, it is something.
Has the Rough God. Can ride Him.
I had a chance to see him in Oxford (England, not Miss) about a dozen years ago in a 200 seat auditorium.
But it would have cost me a $400 change fee on my ticket and blown one day of my rare weekend home, so I didn't do it.
I've regretted it ever since.
-XC
PS – Doesn't he look a bit like an early Kirk after a lost weekend full of green booze and alien lasses?
I agree, yet, he does this thing with his voice…makes my small tender hairs stand and tingle….
If it could be named, it could be reproduced. But, it can't so it can't.
I have a friend who listens to Greatest Hits vol I and II every day…since 1996 or so.
"Into the Mystic" by him is one of my all time favorite songs, and there is something so nostalgic about "Brown Eyed Girl" that resonates youth to me– it's like he captures brief moments of emotion —
some real, some magical, in his songs and voice –
I dunno. You know my background — Mitch Miller and show tunes — so…
Yep. Spot on. Thanks Sipp. E.