Entertainment For Lively Minds
Harp and Angles
David Fricke's Rolling Stone review of "Astral Weeks Live at Hollywood Bowl" may have a different meaning for Word blog watchers and podcast people. He writes that Morrison brings out the blues in his music
"more emphatically — his vocal-and-harp break in 'Sweet Thing' is like a hot wind of Little Walter."
I am as yet unconvinced by the album. It seems cluttered, like Phil Spector's involved, and the bass bleeds through everything whereas Richard Davis's clarity and risk-taking were a big part of the original's genius; it also seems often in the wrong register. Compared to "It's Too Late to Stop Now" it lacks intimacy. Thankfully the call-and-response shtick that became so tiring in the 1980s is only there on the last, bonus track. The pianist Roger Kellaway, and especially Jay Berliner the original acoustic guitarist, are terrific though. So it's early days, and it's a lot more interesting than those R&B/jazzer albums he flicked out in the 1990s. Though the cover and graphic design are so ugly it's an encouragement to turn it into an MP3.
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The Teeth
Enough to keep me away. Want to hear it but my eyes might melt at the smile...
Deliberate?
Has David Fricke been eavesdropping on the podcast? The use of "harp" in the same vicinity as Little Walters "hot wind" surely belies so.........
Harp attack
I wasn't sure the headline "Van breaks wind" would get pass the Word blog taste test.
I haven't heard this record
And, frankly, I don't intend to. I fail to see why anyone would want to. Van Morrison remakes his most famous record forty years later. Is it likely to be any better? Is it likely to be interestingly different? Is he going to do anything other than mess with the perfection of what he did unconciously all that time ago? And even if you thought there might be a positive answer to any of those questions, why the hell would you take the risk?
Exactly my reaction
And it was exactly my reaction to Forever Changes Redux a few years ago. I can just about see the point of seeing it done live at the Albert Hall, for example (only just about, mind), but listening to it repeatedly on record? It's about as worthwhile a proposition as that shot-for-shot colour remake of Psycho.
[Edit: I should have read the rest of the thread first, shouldn't I.]
Singing the songs from way back when
True enough, it was extremely unlikely that he was going to follow his youthful, unique masterpiece with something that has even a hint of the same creativity. After all, he's been begrudging about the original's longevity with listeners and critics. And the whole project seems to have been done with extreme haste.
But the playing on the original album has such an improvisational, spontaneous quality to it that it has kept us listening all these years. There is always something new to hear, in their risky musical interaction, especially if you give it a rest for a year or two. It's no accident that the accusation 'jazz' is often flung at it: the original was ensemble playing, greater than the sum of its parts, and how glorious were some of those parts.
With Morrison's posturing over the years that he is no mere rock musician, and no mere purveyor of product, the gullible are intrigued to see if he can live up to the standards he espouses. Let alone the standards of his greatest record. He is capable of surprising us with a new gem that can stand alongside his past (though it's been a long time between drinks, and getting longer; I see 'Days Like This' from 1995 as his most recent important song, but maybe not his last).
Isn't "It's Too Late to Stop Now" one of the great live albums? Didn't the string quartet add something new? And 'Cyprus Avenue' have an almost unbearable tension? Or was it merely product for the Christmas market?
Wasn't there the chance that some of the individual musicians on this revival might bring something fresh to it? (And they do, especially the revelatory playing of Jay Berliner).
I agree that the odds were long. Dylan re-doing "Highway 61" live would be pointless, as the fans' bootleg compilations show. But Brian Wilson's "Smile" shows were breathtaking, against longer odds.
Usually, the extra tracks offered on "deluxe" reissues, the extravagant boxes of "Miles Davis, the Complete Tootsie Sessions," or bootleg Abbey Road outtakes, just exploit the loyal fan-base and gather dust. But Morrison's aspirations - or affectations - to stay musically alive may have led to something that made us reconsider or understand how the original succeeded (as his Chieftains album did with the songs he had released earlier). His idiosyncratic personality suggests he may not end up like Ray Charles, who ended up taking the path of least resistance to increasingly limited returns.
Novelists produce great work in their 60s and 70s: why not musicians? I'm glad Updike kept returning to Rabbit. The Beatles were wise to call it a day; like James Dean their body of work is preserved. Everyone else must age, and like wine their work can either improve or curdle. Wine buffs suggest the risk of blowing the dust off something in the cellar sometimes pays off.
Well, that's the optimistic attitude
A record is a moment in time, a product of a unique set of circumstances that can never be repeated. The wise man, having produced something which people have spent forty years describing as a masterpiece, realises that, knowingly or not, he has done something right, leaves it the hell alone and lives on whatever reflected glory it provides. He doesn't return to it and start messing with his own legacy, anymore than John Updike went back and wrote the same book again.
The producers of the Classic Albums TV series have for many years been trying to get Van Morrison to cooperate in a documentary about "Astral Weeks". He has refused and has instead agreed in principle to do "Moondance". The refusal to revisit "Astral Weeks" - and maybe the reason he has chosen to do this re-recording now - may be connected with the fact that the original recording was done for Inherit Productions, a company controlled by his management at the time. He was reluctant to do anything which might line somebody else's pocket. Re-record it live and you get the whole of the cake. The same philosophy has led many bands to re-record their old hits live on a new label. They call it "re-interpretation". Mostly it's getting new blood from somebody else's stone.
I think there is a massive difference between an artist revisiting their old songs and somebody seeking to hitch a ride on an old brand. He's included these songs in his live act for years. That's very different from putting them together in a batch and using the same title. I had a falling out with one of my kids when they went to see Gus Van Sant's stupid, pointless remake of "Psycho" before they had seen the Hitchcock one. This ia a bit like that. It seems to me that all the second one can do is tarnish the reputation of the first one.
When he's asked why he's re-doing it now he says it's because Warner Bros never promoted it at the time. It's certainly true that he wasn't on "Top Of The Pops" or on the cover of Time magazine but it's wholly misleading to say that this record passed unnoticed. I remember John Peel playing it a lot in 1968, at first as an import and then when it was released in the UK and it was widely accepted among the people who cared about such things that this was a masterpiece. It had tons of acclaim. It was the "Marquee Moon" of its day. The fact that this didn't translate into multi-platinum sales is nothing to do with the record company.
But in the end it's a matter of whether this recording is anything more than a gimmick and that's down to the quality of the music. Let me know in six months whether you're listening to version two or version one.
See also
the multiple Tubular Bellses.
"the original recording was done for Inherit Productions,
a company controlled by his management at the time. He was reluctant to do anything which might line somebody else's pocket"
Which I suppose is why his Warner Bros albums have never been remastered while his other stuff is now on remaster number 2 (or 3?).
Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails is in a similar situation with his debut album "Pretty Hate Machine". His old record company, which he loathed, went into receivership and I believe a firm of accountants now own that album. They wanted to reissue it as a Deluxe Edition (disc 1: the original album remastered, disc 2: bonus tracks) just like his second album was in 2004. He refused to do it for them as he wasn't going to get paid for his work.
I also believe writer director Bruce Robinson refused to do a commentary track for the first "Withnail and I" DVDs as he didn't want to help line someone else's pockets.
Soul business
My first reaction was similar to yours: that this was a cynical idea, to finally get some money out of this masterpiece still maddeningly owned by others; that it was also a good way to launch yet another vanity label for yet another distributor. I didn't go so far as to connect it with those rock'n'roll remakes on sale in gas stations, but that may be where it should be filed.
Damn it by the time the thing was imminent I wanted to hear it. I could hear the motifs calling and forgot about his motives. That's the vulnerability of the longterm listener. But with all my records currently in storage, and only dialup internet I've had a bit of a Van revival in 2008, and had a jones for a new take on something familiar.
A bit like the Shelby Does Dusty album. There is someone whose career has been so poorly handled, that maybe a bleeding obvious idea might help. She has the perfect voice to bring something genuinely Southern to songs which, ironically, Dusty couldn't bring herself to actually sing in Memphis. But after about three listens, it went to the back of the queue. 'Just a Little Lovin' was a good start, but the stayer was 'How Can I Be Sure,' which I think is an improvement on Dusty's. Shelby's simplicity showed the song to be a great standard with a chord sequence of perfection, whereas the cheesy Francais accordion on Dusty's got in the way. There's often something that keeps these marketing projects from the Oxfam pile.
Too Late To Stop Now
is my absolute favourite Van album, mostly for the version of Caravan that is just superb, even the introduction to the band is a wonder. It adds so much to that song and performance Van puts in is just amazing. I'm not usually a live recordings fan, but that one I'll take over any others of his catalogue. Which is why I might just listen to this.
If I can get past those teeth on the cover.