Van Morrison Album by Album Discussion: Part 1 (1968-1977)

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by DJ WILBUR, Sep 25, 2007.

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  1. Clarkophile

    Clarkophile Through the Morning, Through the Night

    Location:
    Oakville, ON
    Well, we haven't discussed the whole Machanical Bliss thing yet:
    http://www.harbour.sfu.ca/~hayward/van/discography/mechanicalbliss.html
     
  2. dee

    dee Senior Member

    Location:
    ft. lauderdale, fl
  3. dee

    dee Senior Member

    Location:
    ft. lauderdale, fl
    Since I've only recently become used to the songs from PS, of the songs mentioned as possible, probable, and definite, for Mechanical Bliss, I haven't quite warmed to Foggy Mountain, Twilight Zone, or Western Plain yet, but I look forward to yet another listen to these recordings this weekend. I like Naked In The Jungle and I Have Finally Come To Realise, and of course, Flamingos. There There Child has a relaxing vibe and soothing atmosphere, and I like that as well. Anyways, with the benefit of hindsight, it seems to me anyway, imo, that at the time that what would become HNTH, and then what later would become APOT, that there was no real lack of material Van recorded - quality performances included - for either release, but that the choices made for what songs to use, and which not to, played a large part in the somewhat fragile nature of how these records are generally perceived. Or something like that.
     
  4. Clarkophile

    Clarkophile Through the Morning, Through the Night

    Location:
    Oakville, ON
    The song "Mechanical Bliss" is a real oddball. "Whimsical" is one word that comes to mind; "drunk" is another. :laugh: The sheer goofiness of the song was probably the reason it was kept off The Philosopher's Stone.
    The version I've heard sounds like a rough demo to me, not a completed master.
     
  5. MikeP5877

    MikeP5877 V/VIII/MCMLXXVII

    Location:
    OH
    One thing about APOT is that the album flows pretty well because of the similar musical arrangements. If instead Van decided to add a few of his '74-76 outtakes to APOT, they would have stood out like a sore thumb. Songs like "Twilight Zone" or "When I Deliver" would have derailed the continuity of APOT, despite the fact that I like both of those songs better than anything on APOT. Does that make sense?
     
  6. Clarkophile

    Clarkophile Through the Morning, Through the Night

    Location:
    Oakville, ON
    I see what you're saying: including those songs would have broken up the tedium with quality music.:p ;)
    No, in all seriousness, I do understand: different feels, different grooves might've created an unevenness. Whatever we think of APOT, I've read quotes from Van where he said words to the effect of this was the album he wanted released, using these specific versions.

    While I think of it, I've been meaning to ask for quite some time, does anyone know when "I Shall Sing" was recorded?
     
  7. MikeP5877

    MikeP5877 V/VIII/MCMLXXVII

    Location:
    OH
    I do not know for sure but to me it sounds like an outtake from either Moondance or His Band and The Street Choir. If I recall correctly, the copyright date for this song is 1970 so it fits the time period. Art Garfunkel's recording of it came out in 1974.

    edit - I just ran across a site on the internet that lists a version by Jean and the Gaytones on a Trojan Records comp from 1971. I wasn't aware of any other released versions before Garfunkel's until now.
     
  8. Clarkophile

    Clarkophile Through the Morning, Through the Night

    Location:
    Oakville, ON
    Thanks, Mike.:righton:
     
  9. Sneaky Pete

    Sneaky Pete Flat the 5 and That’s No Jive

    Location:
    NYC USA
    Between work and Thanksgiving I have not had a chance to weigh in on APOT. I just read the thread to catch up, as always interesting, insightful, and humorous.

    I do like this album, despite the fact that it was the weakest Van album since Blowing Your Mind (and that one doesn't really count). In fact I am not certain why it is such a favorite critical whipping boy. Maybe it was that two year wait; just too much anticipation. Combine that with the fact that 1977 was the year of Elvis Costello's My Aim is True, The Talking Heads 77, plus The Ramones and the Sex Pistols, meant that it was out of step with the times. Even I was not up for new Van music that year. I was living in lower Manhattan attending Art School, mellow was no way to go in 1977. But APOT was no Veedon Fleece, that was certain.

    I think Van followed a pattern that he has repeated, return to the well of the Blues to rejuvenate his creative spark. Van always goes back to the music he fell in love with, and he often follows the "sacred" with the "profane." This is a bluesy R&B record, it's all grooves. I like the Horn charts, and the voicings, punctuated by the Bari's doing counterpoint. I like those piano triplets and the "gospel" background singers. Over time I grew to like the choir on Eternal Kansas City more than Snow In San Anselmo, because it was better integrated into the whole. I also liked the fact that Van paid tribute to the whole red hot blue devil jazz scene born out of Kansas City.

    It opens with You Gotta Make It Through This World, a suitably swampy cautionary tale that reveals that bit of "fonk" from Dr. John. It has a love song that is pure gospel, Joyous Sound. It has a tribute to the healing power of physical love, Heavy Connection.

    Finally, it has one of the most heartfelt blues in Van's canon, Cold Wind in August. If it is a metaphor it is a powerful one. That chill that hits when the first winds of Autumn unexpectedly, cut through the August heat. That is an apt metaphor for the chilly feeling that cuts you when you feel you lover has lost her fire for you. However I suspect it is based on a real experience standing in the garden, shivering. Coming down with a fever, waiting for the woman that is not coming home to meet you. Van sings it with the pure sense of resignation. To me this is one powerful performance, that speaks of lost love. Ultimately, though I think the album is about rejuvenation. This guy is through with the divorce and he is back in the saddle and out on the town.

    Because of the tepid critical response I never bought this album when it was released. I passed until a few years later when I picked it up from a cut out bin. It was after Into the Music and I wanted to keep my Van collection complete. Maybe by then I was able to hear it with fresh ears.

    The cover is a real dog. It looks like the designer just plastered down the contact sheets and set the type on a typewriter.

    RE: Mechanical Bliss, it sounds like Van covering a Noel Coward tune. It is unlike anything else he's ever done but it did make the B side of Joyous Sound. It is funny and silly, whimsical is a good description. I really wanted to see that and Feedback On Highway 101 on Philosopher's Stone.
     
  10. Sneaky Pete

    Sneaky Pete Flat the 5 and That’s No Jive

    Location:
    NYC USA
    An excerpt from a 1977 interview of Van by Richie York. The whole thing is on the Van website linked by Tom above. I found it interesting that Van was described as driving around LA in a brown Toyota. He was very down to earth. Maybe it gives a little insight into Van's mindset at the time.

    Van Morrison: The idea was to get a break from everything for a while because I've been doing it for so long. I started doing it when I was 12. I'd been performing in bands since I was 12 which represented, at that point, about 16 years of playing music. I just wanted to stop and try to get some perspective.

    RY: And you decided that it was an appropriate time after those 16 years to just stop and take a look back over it all?

    VM: Yeah, it was just a matter of wanting to review the whole thing...to try and get some relationship to what I was doing. I'd come to the point where I wasn't really putting out creatively. I didn't seem to have anything to say in that period of time after the '74 tour. There was nothing definite that I wanted to record. Some thoughts went through my head about recording some stuff that had influenced me earlier in my career like blues and early rock. But it didn't seem to really make sense at that point--it might have been taken the wrong way. A lot of people already had been into that trip.

    I just wanted to have a look at my whole musical career, get right back to when I started and why I started doing it in the first place. I wanted to find out why I wasn't getting off on what I was doing and try and make some sense out of the evolution of it. I felt kind of bored at the prospect of writing some more of my own songs because I really wasn't saying what I wanted to say. I'd found that what I wrote and put out on records somehow was not fitting into how I perform on stage.

    RY: You mean there was a creative gap developing between your recording career and your concert career?

    VM: There was a conflict--the actual putting together of the reality of the situation didn't seem to gel. I'd been doing kind of a slow ballad type of thing on records, but when it came to performing, I felt I was limiting myself. Because when you perform live, it's a different trip--it's different energy. I just felt a conflict between both of the trips. I was trying to evaluate what it meant for me to be a singer/songwriter and what that whole thing all meant.

    The trip had become boring. It wasn't exciting anymore to totally be a singer/songwriter because it wasn't working for me. Then I thought of collaborating with other people which still might happen at this point. It might not. I was just trying to break the cycle because I had gotten to a point where I was definitely sure that I was on the wrong track after about 16 years. What excited me when I first came into it was the performing aspect and doing blues-oriented material, rock/blues oriented stuff, basic stuff, basic what they call rock 'n' roll.

    Then it evolved into more of a ballad style singer/songwriter thing. And there was a conflict in trying to merge the two styles with the same band behind me. 'Cause the musicians that I would need to do ballad-oriented tunes would require musicians who were more into jazz. But they couldn't cut rock. I had to be more limited and specific about what I was doing. So I realized that what I was looking for was doing collaborations with other people--people who can play a ballad, rock, jazz. I was looking for more co-op type things than what I had been doing, which had been completely my own trip.

    RY: So you'd reached a point where you weren't getting off either on record or on stage?

    VM: It was the whole thing really. It was like I had evolved to a certain stage where I was stuck in this songwriter bag as an image. But basically at heart, I'm a rocker. And I still am. But I was caught up in the singer/songwriter bag and I wasn't really enjoying it. It was all caught up with identifying with certain things. They just weren't very stimulating things. So the fact I wasn't getting off made me realize that I really had to take a hard look at it and at the type of music that I played, which ranges from ballads to country type stuff to rock and rhythm 'n' blues. It takes in a wider spectrum. The music I really like to get off on is the old rhythm 'n' blues and rock 'n' roll stuff...that's what I really dig. And I also dig to sing ballads as well. And I also dig writing my own songs. I was just trying to find a way of integrating the whole thing, taking a look at the total picture.

    I was bored with people asking me about what does this song mean and all that ****. I mean, what does Tutti Frutti mean? Nobody to this day can really say what Tutti Frutti means. If you got down on that vibe and it turned you on, nobody bothered to find out what Tutti Frutti was all about.

    RY: It's about a feeling one assumes.

    VM: A feeling, right, it's expressing a feeling.

    RY: A case can be made that somewhere along the way in the evolution of rock 'n' roll, the basic feeling was put aside for more heady subjects.

    VM: Yeah, but I think that there are quite a few acts which have stayed with the basic feelings and that's good. And I see something of a swing back to that. For example there are quite a few people copying my early stuff now. Like it's become a reference point or something. There's quite a few people getting into that--new acts coming along that are using a lot of stuff that happened in the 50s and 60s. They're completely ignoring the 70s which is kind of a turn on because to me nothing has really gone down in the 70s.

    I like to see people reaching back for the roots and for the reason why. Not intellectually, but just for the gut feeling of what it's all about. The ****ing gut level stuff is what this music is about. That's why we're doing it. For the purpose of getting people to an excitement level. They feel something, they feel emotions. They're going to go home after that concert and remember it. Maybe they got something out of the experience rather than intellectualizing about what songs mean which is the whole head trip.

    RY: It does seem rather fruitless to try and intellectualize rock music.

    VM: Yeah, it's all gone in circles. Be Bop a Lula is one of the best songs ever written and I don't know what it's about. I don't care what it's about. It's just about basic ****--Be Bop a Lula, she's my baby. The whole trip that happened in the late 60s and 70s was kind of a throwback to a lot of folk styles. I got into it as well 'cause I started with the folk styles.
     
  11. dee

    dee Senior Member

    Location:
    ft. lauderdale, fl
    :)
    Well, it was a real pleasure hearing what could have been included on some of Van's follow-up to VF. The group of songs from Philosopher's Stone from this previous APOT era make for a wonderfully enjoyable set of music, imo - and a distinct departure from the stylings of VF too. I suppose at the time, something akin to it could have even been described as a "return to form" by some, in as much as the music is gospel, soul, r&b, funk, and a little bit of rock and pop, etc. And upon revisiting Foggy Mountain Top, Western Plain, and Twilight Zone, I warmed right up to them! Interesting how all three connote a "place" or setting. Throw in the funky Naked In The Jungle (Van's version of the heavyweight clash "Rumble In The Jungle" :p ) on that Western Plain, in the cool, airy soul of Twilight Zone from the bluesy Foggy Mountain, in the churchy r&b/hymns of Joyous Sound, There There Child, The Street Only Knew Your Name, and I Have Finally Come To Realise, and there's a group of eight songs of wonderful energy and relaxing fun amidst a multitude of backgrounds, but tied together by earthy and inspired music and performances. :righton: Van the Man!

    I Have Finally Come to Realise made me fast-forward a decade to Poetic Champions/No Guru, and specifically reminds me of some combination of Someone Like You and Have I Told You Lately. :)
     
  12. dee

    dee Senior Member

    Location:
    ft. lauderdale, fl
    I've been wondering "why" the outlaw Kid Van wasn't allowed by the Mean Parents Record Company to put out a double lp of his HN? Drumshamboo Hustle/Great Deception? I think I missed the point a little bit about that release when combing through the available recordings for those sessions now available on cd and trying to compile a single album for myself of my personal favorites - when in fact the artist's intention was to produce two lp's of recordings! With that in mind, and following Guy E's lead, I made this little comp for HN (Well, I still have to actually put it together - and I hope the record company police don't prohibit me from adding a second disc of those available recordings)! :)
    1 (Tom B approved) :winkgrin:
    Hard Nose
    Warm Love
    Contemplation Rose
    Snow In San Anselmo
    2
    Madame Joy
    Wild Children
    Laughing In The Wind
    Flamingos Fly
    3
    Lover's Prayer
    Don't Worry About Tomorrow
    Not Supposed to Break Down
    Great Deception
    4
    Being Green
    Purple Heather
    Autumn Song
     
  13. DJ WILBUR

    DJ WILBUR The Cappuccino Kid Thread Starter

    1977 Rolling Stone interview
    by Cameron Crowe
    From the May 19, 1977 issue of Rolling Stone

    LOS ANGELES -- The neighborhood is filled with a pleasant, folksy cacophony. Children are squealing as they play on their tricycles. A baseball is going on down the street. The man next door is listening to a transistor radio and working on his car in the driveway. It's a setting straight out of Father Knows Best. And it is here, sequestered in suburban Brentwood, that Van Morrison lives.

    His is a typical L.A. rent-a-home, procured for the nine months Morrison has spent recording A Period of Transition, his first album in three years. After supervising his remaining business affairs at Warner Bros., Morrison is leaving California, his home for the last six years, for good. His next base will be England.

    Van Morrison answers the door himself, throws on a tweed jacket and hops into his rented Nova for the ride out to a restaurant in Malibu. He looks peaked from spending too much time indoors, but he speaks about his career with surprising force. I'll tell you," he remarks at one point, "you gotta have a manager to take all the phone calls, but managers and producers have become really overblown things. Nobody does it like you."

    He's interested in any new artists worth listening to. "Have you heard Boston yet?" he wonders. "I'd like to go see their show. I get caught up listening to the same Ray Charles live album all the time, you know...."

    We finally pull into some beach-front steak and lobster joint--the kind where tourists come to gawk at the spectacular view of the ocean. Morrison gawks right along with them, thinking aloud: "I never really fit into California. It's strange I stayed so long. But I see sights like this and I know I'Il be missing it here...."

    Morrison tugs off his shades. He seems to have escaped any sign of aging and looks exactly as he did on the back cover of Moondance. He orders coffee and, in a shyly businesslike manner, approaches his first interview since '73.

    Sparked by all the reports that his stunning, high-kicking performance of "Caravan" nearly upended the Band's farewell concert, The Last Waltz, Van Morrison's radio airplay has grown unusually strong in the last months. Older albums like Moondance, Tupelo Honey and Saint Dominic's Preview are even beginning to pick up sales again. In the past Morrison has consistently turned his back on mass commercial acceptance, stubbornly refusing to tour or record at any pace but his own. But this time he intends to make his mark. A Period of Transition, an aggressive new collection of songs, has just been released. A touring band is being assembled for summer roadwork from Europe to the States, and in a jam session taped last month for Midnight Special (where he was joined by, among others, George Benson, Carlos Santana, Etta James, Dr. John and Tom Scott) Morrison proved his momentum is no illusion.

    The first issue at hand, though, is Morrison's three-year disappearance. "I didn't really go anywhere," he explains in a thick Belfast singsong. "I just had to stop. I wasn't getting out of it what I wanted...it just wasn't worth the hotels and the airports and all that. I've been doing this since I was 12. I personally reached a place where I wanted to take it apart so I could put it together in a way that I could live with it, and could maybe even be happy with it."

    This process included several much-publicized abandoned album projects. One of them was a nearly completed LP with jazz producer Stewart Levine on which Morrison was backed by most of the Crusaders. "I backed off from it because it wasn't feeling right. I wasn't sure whether I wanted to do a whole album."

    At 31, Morrison is notoriously difficult to work with. He freely admits that finding musicians who are compatible with him has been his biggest problem. "I've had situations where I'm offered whole bands," he says. "But they have to be tuned into what I'm actually doing, more than even the music. It's more than just playing the songs, it's the total thing ... and what I'm doing is very difficult for people to just come in and play."

    Another scrapped project had Morrison recording a rock & roll album, a throwback to his days of fronting Them ("Gloria," "Here Comes the Night"). Al Kooper was set to produce. "It never got specific; we were just tossing ideas around," Morrison sighs. "It just didn't come together."

    He then followed up a lingering hunch about Dr. John (Mac Rebennack) as a producer. "I"d had a feeling about working with Mac for a couple years. It was kind of an intuition, a basic kind of feeling that I had somewhere for Mac to fit in. So there just came a time where he was free and the vibes were right.

    "I don't like working in the studio . . . normally I get too keyed up about it. I just want to get out of there as soon as I can. But Mac slowed me down. It was really good for my head and we had a lot of fun. It came off the way I wanted it to...no real concept. Just the same players on every track. That way it's a clean album."

    In a sense. But A Period of Transition is more the authentic, dirty R&B that Van first built his reputation on in the clubs of Ireland. Is the period of transition just beginning? Is the album a document of the actual period? Is the transition over?

    Morrison gives the archetypal evasive answer: "All of that. It's been going on for about three years ...it's like, there's been lots of highs and there's been depressions... there's been starts and stops...it's just a period, you know."

    I ask him if he, like many others, feels he has made a classic piece of music. He has a ready answer.

    "I think Astral Weeks is a classic," Van says. "It's revolutionary, it was completely original. Moondance is classic. It's the first time that anybody had assimilated things that way. Not coming from the ego place now, but the way I did it was classic. I put things together that nobody's ever put together like that before. I'm proud of that.

    "I would like to have a hit single again," he continues. "It makes it more direct: like if you're playing a gig and you have a hit single, you get through to the audience quicker." Morrison fixes a stare on a couple strolling hand in hand down the beach. "The crossover between the recording and live thing is something that I've worked on for a long time. When I'm performing, I'm performing ... and it's different all the time. I am not an entertainer. No song is the same way twice, no performance is the same. It's what you find in jazz musicians . . . but I'm working in this context of rock & roll, and my trip at the minute is to integrate the records and the gigs. They just have to be taken kind of separately together.

    "A lot of times people say, 'What does this mean?' A lot of times I have no idea what I mean. If you can't figure out what it means, or it's troubling you, it's not for you. Like Kerouac, some of his prose stuff, how can you ask what it means? It means what it means. That's what I like about rock & roll-- the concept--like Little Richard. What does he mean? You can't take him apart; that's rock & roll to me."

    Morrison is anxious to clear up the notion that he may have turned his back on rock. I ask him what he thinks when he's driving along and, say, "Gloria" comes on the radio. He flashes his first big grin of the conversation. "Yeah, well, there's nothing wrong with that, man," he says. "I mean, if I can work that in my act, you know, I might do that. I might do, like, half the show rock & roll. Rock & roll is great. Some of the new stuff that's coming out is real good. Rock & roll is like total life energy, and it's great. I was listening to some of that old Them stuff yesterday. I've got this album that just came out, rereleased old stuff . . . it sounds great. Some of it sounds like it was cut yesterday. That blows me away."

    And what of Patti Smith's now-classic punk reworking of the song? Another smile.

    "Yeah," he chuckles. "I've heard that. I could even dig that for what it is. It doesn't floor me like some things. I'm the type of cat that would listen to black soul music or black gospel music ... that's what I listen to. But if something comes along like what Patti Smith is doing, I have a tendency now to accept it as what it is and I get off . . . it's just what it is and I enjoy it that way."

    Morrison seems genuinely pleased with his diplomacy. As he relaxes I sense that, in his own guarded way, he is in a happy frame of mind. Surely his happiness has something to do with this rush of productivity. "I haven't been too prolific in the last few years," he says. "But there comes a time when you have to let go of your ego. The ego is very useful for doing a lot of things, but it can also come back at you and blow your mind at times, and screw you up. I just had to let go on the whole thing, even the writing at some points. I didn't have anything specific to say. Right now there's definitely things I want to say."

    His next album will probably be another coproduction with someone in another realm of music. "I'm going to do a lot more collaboration over the years," he says excitedly. "It's great. Especially to get people from different areas that aren't close to you. Take somebody from a classical context or somebody from a country and western context-- then you've got something to work with. But if your name is on the album, you are responsible for it. In the end, it's like that song . . .." Morrison mimicks Frank Sinatra. "I'll do it my way..."

    The Last Waltz was a definite impetus for this former recluse. "I never played with Bob before," says Van. "It was a real highlight for me. I don't usually come out in situations like that. I didn't want the promotions...but it was the right situation because of something karmic. One of the basic principles is that it was not hype. Robbie didn't want to hype it and it wasn't hyped, it was a pure situation! That show couldn't be done--it's something that happens."

    Morrison had unquestionably earned his place on the stage. His effect on music can be heard in everyone from Bob Seger and Elton John to Bruce Springsteen and Thin Lizzy. Van hears it too. "In doing what I did I know I paved a certain amount of ground," he declares. "But I'm at the point now where it's paying off, no matter if people copy me or not. It doesn't matter if people are ripping me off, I just love it all. I love it because it means that it was worthwhile . . . other people are getting things from it."

    Then it dawns on him what's been playing on the restaurant's piped-in music system--his own "I Wanna Roo You" from Tupelo Honey. He is genuinely surprised. "That's me " he exclaims. It prompts a final monologue. "Success, to me, is not album sales. It's being happy with what I'm doing. Every artist, of course, wants the album to sell if they're going to stay up late at night and I work on it and think about it and come up with the songs... of course, he wants it to sell. But what's important to me is just being able to sit here and dig everything for exactly what it is, and feel good about it. To sit here and look at the Pacific and think, "That's okay, That feels good,' "

    As he drains his fourth cup of coffee, it seems the right note on which to shut off my tape recorder. I do, and Van Morrison is instantly animated. "I liked that. I dug that. Let's listen back..."

    I rewind and play back his last few words. No problem.

    "No, no," Morrison exclaims. "From the top. Let's listen to the whole thing."
     
  14. DJ WILBUR

    DJ WILBUR The Cappuccino Kid Thread Starter

    So nice to come out of a frantic week of short work week and holiday and houseguests and chaos in general and have so much herein to read and reflect on. thanks for all the great posts these last few days and to Tommy for taking good care of the thread past few days.....

    Wavelength is coming soon and we're "Maccable"...looks like Wavelength with start the "part deux" of what will be a multi album by album part thread on this artist. I for one am thrilled for all your participation to make this thread, for me, a very illuminating and entertaining one....
     
  15. Clarkophile

    Clarkophile Through the Morning, Through the Night

    Location:
    Oakville, ON
    :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh:
    Yes, our collective Van memories are almost full.
     
  16. dee

    dee Senior Member

    Location:
    ft. lauderdale, fl
    Awesome. You gus are the best.
     
  17. Sneaky Pete

    Sneaky Pete Flat the 5 and That’s No Jive

    Location:
    NYC USA
    This statement surprises me. He was about to get his wish! Thanks for the post.

    "I would like to have a hit single again," he continues. "It makes it more direct: like if you're playing a gig and you have a hit single, you get through to the audience quicker.
     
  18. DJ WILBUR

    DJ WILBUR The Cappuccino Kid Thread Starter

    several things in that article surprised me including this bit you highlight. Equally suprising to me is he was curious if the writer of a rock magazine had heard the band Boston yet? hahahaha, and that he'd come to the realization he'd need a manager to field the phone calls.

    I love this guy, he's forever cracking me up.
     
  19. Clarkophile

    Clarkophile Through the Morning, Through the Night

    Location:
    Oakville, ON
    Okay, so tomorrow at around 9:00 a.m. we'll be asking that the Gorts shut down this part of the thread and then we'll start up with Wavelength to kick off Part 2.

    Fear not, for the healin' has just begun...all right.
     

    Attached Files:

  20. DJ WILBUR

    DJ WILBUR The Cappuccino Kid Thread Starter

    Wow, he smiling again!
     
  21. MikeP5877

    MikeP5877 V/VIII/MCMLXXVII

    Location:
    OH
    He thought part 1 of the album by album thread was a success and he's eagerly awaiting part 2. :righton:
     
  22. curbach

    curbach Some guy on the internet

    Location:
    The ATX
    Better get this in before we hit part II. . .

    Session info for APOT from Heylin: All tracks recorded late 1976/early 1977 in Los Angeles. No outtakes.

    And a couple of tidbits from the gap between VF and APOT, again courtesy of Heylin:

    Van recorded quite a bit with Bill Wyman for his Stone Alone album. Then one of Van's representatives instructed Wyman not to use any of Van's performances, so Wyman wiped him fom the tapes. Later Van apparently forgot about the whole thing and asked Wyman when their album would be coming out.

    Also, at Warners urging there was an attempt to put together an outtakes collection before Van eventually scuttled the idea. Supposedly to be called Highlights, the tracklisting would have included "Laughing In The Wind", "Foggy Mountain Top", and "Try For Sleep" released on Philosopher's Stone, and as yet unreleased versions of "I Shall Sing", "Street Theory", "There There Child", "It Hurts WhenYou Want It So Bad", "Feedback Out On Highway 101", "You've Got The Power", "Naked In The Jungle", "The Street ONly knew Your Name", "All Around The World", "Don't Change Me", and "Down To Earth".
     
  23. Clarkophile

    Clarkophile Through the Morning, Through the Night

    Location:
    Oakville, ON
    'E's an adorable little cherub, is our Van.
     
  24. Clarkophile

    Clarkophile Through the Morning, Through the Night

    Location:
    Oakville, ON
    :biglaugh: :laughup:

    "I Shall Sing" deserves a legit release, for sure. I'm surprised it didn't make the cut for Philosopher's Stone.
     
  25. DJ WILBUR

    DJ WILBUR The Cappuccino Kid Thread Starter

    i'm sure he was saving it for Volume 2...

    and here we are about to launch into our own Volume 2 of the Van Morrison album by album thread...
     
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