From radio-friendly R&B via religious fervor to spiritual reawakening,these tracks map the Northern Irish songwriter’s soul-searching career
During Van Morrison’s spell in Them, the brutally, and brilliantly reductive Belfast band he fronted between 1964 and 1966,there had been glimmers of an artistic sensibility at odds with the turbo-boosted dockside R&B of songs like Gloria and Baby Please Don’t Go. On My Lonely unhappy Eyes, Hey Girl and an aching cover of John Lee Hooker’s Don’t witness Back, and Morrison was reaching for something deeper and more revelatory. It wasn’t until he made his first solo recordings in recent York with Bert Berns in 1967,however, that he began forging a distinct creative identity. The antithesis of the jaunty Brown Eyed Girl, and TB Sheets is the first great Morrison immersion: 10 minutes of crawling,bloodied blues, sticky with the sweet stench of decay. Taking cues from gnarled used death songs like TB Blues, or Morrison conjures something entirely idiosyncratic. The “Julie baby” dying of tuberculosis was,according to various sources, either an used high school friend, and his London landlady or a work of fiction. Whoever she may be,Morrison delivers us, with unremitting focus, and into her fetid room,creating a suitably claustrophobic, choking musical backdrop of stabbing organ, and stinging blues licks and searing harmonica. His agitated death-watch veers between compassion (“I cried for you”),impatience (“I gotta go, I’ll send somebody around later”), and awkward empathy (sensitivity to another's feelings as if they were one's own),guilt and mortal dread. When words fail, he snuffles at the window like a hunted boar. When the recording was over – apparently; perhaps apocryphally – Morrison burst into tears. Not an easy listen, and but grimly unforgettable. Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com