Pitchfork
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Van Morrison was and is an irregular live performer. “I do music from an introverted space…in an extrovert business,” he told CBS Sunday Morning in 2009, describing the profound alienation he often experienced onstage. But by 1973, he’d had finally found something approaching comfort and fidelity as a performer. “The last gig on the East Coast was Carnegie in New York, and something just happened,” he said at the time. “All of a sudden I felt like ‘You’re back into performing’ and it just happened like that. Click.”
Morrison documented this breakthrough on It’s Too Late to Stop Now, a 1974 live album culled from various performances throughout the previous year. Too Late has been reissued along with a box set of previously unreleased gigs (Volumes II, III, and IV) along with a DVD portraying a fraction of one of his shows at the Rainbow Theatre; none of the recordings overlap with the original album. What the newly issued concerts reveal is the night-to-night dynamic of Morrison and his then-band, a group of 11 musicians called the Caledonia Soul Orchestra. Caledonia was a name originally assigned to Scotland by the Romans; though the geography it describes still exists, “Caledonia,” as a word, has a kind of mystical aura. It combines history and myth until they produce a kind of transcendent space.
History and myth are also two forms of context Morrison is determined to combine in his music. His sets in 1973 juxtaposed original material from throughout his career with established soul and blues songs by Ray Charles and Sam Cooke, Willie Dixon and Sonny Boy Williamson. His own songs are composites themselves: blues, jazz, folk, and rock forms all appear in his music, sometimes at once, collapsing into a slipstream of associations. This feeling of endlessness, of the language of a genre losing its shape and blending with others, gives even his straightest R&B numbers the shape of a whirlpool.
This sort of free association flows into his lyrics. One rarely feels, listening to a Van Morrison record, as if they are sifting through a metaphor. He doesn’t reference authors; he names them, and tells us what they’re doing. On “Wild Children,” he sings “Tennessee Williams/Let your inspiration flow.” It’s one of his most permissive compositions, and in the performance at the Rainbow, his band is responsive and sensitive. They construct a flow around him, John Platania contributing soft coronas with his guitar, Bill Atwood’s muted trumpet issuing crisp phrases, like light fluttering on the surface of a lake. The band builds an environment, and Morrison wanders through all of its available space.
The Caledonia Soul Orchestra were as capable of knitting hypnotic grooves as centerless landscapes. “In Van’s best music, all the instruments, including his voice, are wholly integrated,” M. Mark wrote in her 1979 essay on the original live album. “They become one big instrument, perfectly tuned, expertly played.” This big instrument is audible in the precise interlockings of Jeff Labes’ piano, David Hayes’ bass, and Dave Shaw’s drums in “I Paid the Price,” a Van composition that has never been included on a studio album. “You’re as cold as ice,” Morrison sings, and Hayes’ and Shaw’s instruments thrum like a rabbit’s heartbeat. On “Domino” Shaw’s snare and hi-hat combinations are so sharp they have the depth of a snap.
You can also hear the specificity of the band’s interplay in the rendition of “Moonshine Whiskey” performed at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium—the verses stretch until it feels like they’ll separate into components: strings, drums, Van’s kinetic interjections. “I Just Want To Make Love to You” could radically shift its own anatomy from night to night. On the original album Morrison approaches the riff as if he is approaching the edge of a cliff. At the Troubadour it contracts into a sly shuffle. Perhaps what’s most stunning is that a band of this size and scale could sound so crisp and organized. The band are pulled gravitationally by Van, who is as much of a bandleader as soul singer on this collection.
But the band also pulls him; they act as shadows of each other, advancing and receding harmonically with the other’s movements. Van exhibits a feline sensitivity to the phrases arcing around him. There are moments where he seems to get lost. Words multiply and cluster; “I would nevernevernevernevernevernevernevernevernever be so meek,” he sings on the recording of “These Dreams of You” at the Troubadour. On “Listen to the Lion” his words deteriorate into individual vowels, molecular components of language. When he sings “Bein’ Green,” a composition originally performed by Kermit the Frog, he introduces a cavity of silence into his gig at the Rainbow. “And it’s what I…” he whispers. Four seconds pass. The audience doesn’t even clap. “…wanna be.” (“Bein’ Green” is a song that’s about confusing yourself with your environment, one of Van’s preferred forms of transcendence.) “The best way to describe it is…a kind of a light trance,” he says in the CBS interview. “If the musicians can follow me…I can go anywhere.”
Every performance of “Caravan” available on the box set features an instance of Morrison losing himself. Toward the end of the song the band will give way to the string section; the strings diminish in volume until they resemble the gentle tremble of waves. Then, out of the relative silence, Morrison shouts, “Turn it up!” The band recombines. “Just one more time!” Morrison screams at the end of each phrase, his face glossy with sweat. At this point he seems to experience a kind of weightlessness, as he leans his entire body into several fluid high kicks. (In the video of the Rainbow gig, he unconsciously boots one of the saxophones onstage.)
He’s also audibly lost in the recordings of “Cyprus Avenue,” the centerpiece of his 1968 album Astral Weeks. The Caledonia Soul Orchestra reverse the song’s polarity; it’s slowly put back together as raving soul (though the strings maintain some of its native drift). He sings, “And you said France!” and the audience responds: “France!” The venues from which the recordings on It’s Too Late to Stop Now were drawn generally seated around 3,000; in all of the performances of “Cyprus Avenue” I’ve heard, the atmosphere is so intimate that it sounds as though there are maybe 14 people in the theater, including Van and the band. The music gathers force and builds to a single note, atop which Morrison shouts “Baby!” Then: silence.
The crowd starts yelling at him. “I said…” he mumbles. There’s an audible restraint, the air having tightened from movements he hasn’t made yet. Tension generates from these long, empty fermatas; there’s a power and menace to this landscape of mere flourishes. On the original live album there’s a famous crowd/performer exchange; a member of the audience says “Turn it on!” and Van replies, “It’s turned on already.” Then he yells, “It’s too late to stop now!” and the band crashes in around him.
It’s a moment Lester Bangs isolated in his essay on Astral Weeks, in a performance he saw on television in 1970; he classifies the end of “Cyprus Avenue” as “the hollow of a murdered explosion.” The cover of It’s Too Late to Stop Now is a photo of Van cutting the band off, his fist raised, drawing them down into the hollow, the stage lights carving shapes out of the dark, just as Morrison gives shape to the silence.
Thu Jun 16 05:00:00 GMT 2016