A Conversation With Van Morrison
In the often superficial realm of popular music — where the word artist takes a constant beating — Van Morrison is the real thing.
A musical giant whose importance far outreaches his commercial impact, Morrison has steadfastly followed his Celtic-soul muse during the last three decades with often remarkable results. From his days as the frontman of the fiery Belfast band Them (“Gloria,” “Here Comes the Night”) and his early solo work for Bang Records (“Brown Eyed Girl,” “T.B. Sheets”) to such classic albums as Astral Weeks, Moondance, Tupelo Honey and St. Dominic’s Preview and his more recent, less heralded triumphs like Into the Music, Avalon Sunset and No Guru, No Method, No Teacher, Morrison has consistently broken ground while always standing his own. His music has influenced the likes of U2, Bruce Springsteen and Elvis Costello and more recently a whole new generation of famous fans, such as the Waterboys and Hothouse Flowers. Still at the height of his creative powers at age forty-four, Morrison remains a true master.
He’s also a tough man to talk to. On two occasions when I was being introduced to Morrison in order to begin this story, the singer quickly ran off in the opposite direction. The first time was last fall, when he was in New York City for an extraordinary series of shows at the Beacon Theater that were being filmed for Van Morrison: The Concert, a video recently released in conjunction with the successful Best of Van Morrison compilation. The second time came this spring in Boston, where Morrison and his current band — featuring British R&B veteran Georgie Fame on keyboards — were playing an equally extraordinary series of shows at the Orpheum Theater.
After much negotiation, Morrison finally agreed to meet for lunch in Cambridge. The first restaurant we tried didn’t strike his fancy, and he fled, as I followed him through the streets of Harvard Square, tape recorder and notes in hand. Finally, Morrison found an unpretentious cafe that struck his fancy, and we settled down to talk.
Then, of course, came the hard part. In a world where celebrities gladly play the publicity game, Van Morrison is one big exception to the rule. He does not smile, he does not charm, he does not offer anecdotes freely. Instead, he sits there, mostly scowling, shooting down some topics — including, for the most part, anything to do with his records — while answering others with brutal honesty. After a flurry of questions are rejected early on, Morrison is asked if there’s anything he’d prefer to discuss. “I don’t want to talk about anything with an interviewer,” he says. In his deep, distinctive, intimidating brogue, the last phrase sounds like some horrible Irish curse.
In the end, of course, it’s not Van Morrison’s job to make an interviewer’s life easy. It is, he explains, his job to make music, and that is something he does as brilliantly as anyone alive.
You seem to have lived a life making music without being part of the music business and without making as many concessions as many of your contemporaries. How have you managed that?
The fact of the matter is that I have to be in the music business to get the product out. So I am in the music business, but I’m my own person as well. The thing is, there really wasn’t any plan in all this. Everything was basically based on survival. There was Them, then there was the Bang thing — those were certain steps in a certain direction that didn’t work. So then you try something else. But there is no plan. That’s the sort of thing I don’t understand about the music press — there’s this idea that you have some sort of a master plan. The fact is, sometimes you do something because you’ve got no money, okay? Sometimes you’re starving, sometimes you do things for that reason. It all comes down to survival, and you can’t intellectualize survival, because either you survive or you don’t. That’s the way life goes, and I’m not going to intellectualize it, because that’s only going to spoil it. That’s a job for writers, not for me.
Do you care what’s written about you?
No. What people write about you is not real. It’s just their opinion. I’ve got some good reviews I can hang on my wall, and that’s great. But what they write about me has nothing to do with me. And that’s not what it’s all about anyway. It’s about producing music, writing songs, making records and that’s what it’s about. It’s not about me, it’s about that.
So is the fame aspect of what you do just a pain in the ass?
Yeah, it is predominantly. It might get you a good room in a hotel or a seat in a restaurant, but other than that it’s a real pain in the ass, yes. In fact, it’s more than a pain in the ass. It’s hard.
What’s hard about it?
Well, people crowd your space and your privacy. They don’t understand that you’ve got a life to live and that you don’t have time for everybody. I just want to be left alone to do my work and live my life.
Still, you must get some satisfaction from the fact that your music means so much to so many people.
It’s great, sure. But what do people want — blood? What I do is work. It’s not magic mirrors. It’s real hard work.
Is the work itself a source of pride for you?
Well, if a carpenter builds a set of shelves or something, he goes, “Yeah, I’ve done that.” It feels like that. It feels like you’ve done a lot of work and there it is.
It just gets more complicated because the carpenter generally doesn’t have all these people commenting on what he does.
That’s what I was saying before — society does that. There’s all this bullshit that has absolutely nothing to do with the music.
Is it your sense that society is getting worse that way, further from the substance of things?
It’s a TV world, isn’t it? I mean, when I was a kid, I experienced life before television. The only stars I knew were in the sky. There is very little original now. It’s like Dylan said — if there’s an original idea out there, let me know. I mean, everything now is built around celebrities and television — it’s unreal. How can you find anything to hold on to in that kind of world? You can’t.
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