Van morrison how long

Outside of the circles of his most dedicated fans, the arrival of a Van Morrison album in the 21st century has not been a news event. More recently, the global coronavirus pandemic and the ensuing prohibition of live concerts appear to have shocked and infuriated the singer. Come forward, stand up, fight the pseudo-science and speak up. Back in the fall of , Morrison announced three topical singles protesting COVID restrictions plus a petition to end the temporary ban on live concerts.

There is no easy answer to this question, but there are episodes and details from his past that help elucidate how he might have adopted this distasteful and dangerous new point of view.

Morrison has long been deeply distrustful and disdainful of authority figures, which, in his line of work, have most frequently manifested themselves as record executives. Morrison also has had a long-held interest in the occult and various religions. A homeless L. This particular release finds Morrison teaming up with singer Georgie Fame who also plays organ and a top-notch group of mostly British jazzmen tenorman Pee Wee Ellis is a ringer.

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Astral Weeks turns 50 this month. What a record. Both would agree that Astral Weeks is one of the best minute pieces of music ever created. A landmark in the fusion of rock and jazz. A masterpiece. If you only know Van Morrison from Astral Weeks , the juxtaposition might be startling.

On the cover of Astral Weeks , Van resembles a wood nymph in the midst of an intense religious experience; on the cover of No Guru , he looks like a no-nonsense English professor at an exclusive East Coast liberal arts college, or a no-nonsense TV detective portrayed by no-nonsense character actor Bill Camp.

Over the next decade, he retreated from the mainstream and into a mystical haze of jazzy, gauzy, impossibly smooth-sounding, and spiritually minded adult-contemporary records so devoid of grit that they make Sting sound like Straight Outta Compton. Hell, he had forsaken that music, right when the rest of the world caught up with it. For as much credit as Bob Dylan and Neil Young get for their anticommercial contrarianism, nobody is more perverse than Van Morrison. Ron Hubbard.

That Celtic Roxy Music L. He was the man who fell to Earth, fighting in vain to get back to paradise and yet stuck, with increasing frustration, earthbound. It also harks back musically, with its breathtakingly beautiful piano playing courtesy of longtime sideman Jef Labes. It evokes his contributions to Veedon Fleece , which rivals even Astral Weeks in the annals of Van Morrison expressing sweetly excruciating melancholy.

The fourth track is not a similarly divine summit with the almighty. Copycats ripped off my words Copycats ripped off my songs Copycats ripped off my melody.

Many Van Morrison devotees have tried and failed to wrap their heads around the confounding duality of an artist who can address the most profound mysteries of eternity in one breath, and exhibit the least admirable human traits jealousy, narcissism, hubris, oversharing in the next.

To suggest that Morrison does this knowingly is probably giving him too much credit — he repeats this self-defeating pattern over and over as his career unfolds, without any apparent insight into his own flaws, a fatal symptom of insufficient self-awareness.

In fact, it does the opposite. When I listen to Astral Weeks , I hear a young man who can still access the pain of adolescence, and yet has enough distance from that pain to romanticize it. This is the nostalgia of a person in his early 20s, who looks back on what is still in his immediate grasp and fantasizes about what it will one day be like to lose touch with it completely.

I appreciate that person — we are all that person at some point — but I can no longer relate to him.