Want a Danish from Van Morrison?

Creamcheesedanish I knew from repeated experimentation — and subsequent disappointment — that Van Morrison records had stopped being worth owning sometime between Veedon Fleece and Wavelength — and even that mid-70s block was a marginal, iffy period. To have a truly psychedelic experience with Van required a large supply of candles and a Mexican Talavera candlestick, a painful breakup or some other source of profound melancholy, and an evening or two of total, incense-drenched immersion in Astral Weeks or a few of the more floaty tracks from Moondance or The Bang Masters. Van at his apex was a powerful force – the passion of Joe Cocker, mind-melded with the mysticism of Nick Drake.

Creem Magazine rock writer Lester Bangs on a live Van performance from the Astral Weeks era:

Just those words, repeated slowly again and again, distended, permutated, turned into scat, suspended in space and then scattered to the winds, muttered like a mantra till they turn into nonsense syllables, then back into the same soaring image as time seems to stop entirely. He stands there with eyes closed, singing, transported, while the band poises quivering over great open-tuned deep blue gulfs of their own.

Van 70S It all went downhill from there. It’s not that there was never any Van worth hearing after 1974, only that he had trouble getting back to that altered state he did so well. He searched, he stayed open, he pecked at solid ground for rabbit holes into which he might descend. But as years went by, he found fewer and fewer of them. There are beautiful tracks on nearly every Morrison record, but nothing like the kick-you-in-the-heart poetry of “T.B. Sheets” or the truly funky blues of “The Back Room.” I’ve been trying to figure out exactly when Van jumped the shark for good, and have subjectively pinned it at Common One, just as the twilight’s last gleaming transformed the 70s into the 80s. As Roger described it, Van started “mailing it in,” even going as far as to have guest singers take the lead parts from time to time.

But I still believed, mostly as a result of consistent hearsay, that live Van was a whole different thing. People returning from his shows would use words like “out of body experience” and “the room turned inside out” to describe his shows well into the early 90s. I never had the pleasure, but foolishly believed this was still the case. Then I caught an hour of live contemporary Van on Austin City Limits the other night. Excited to catch up on everything I’d missed, I settled in with a bowl of crunchy trans-fats, ready for my annual injection of soul food and… was absolutely crushed. Warmed-over, middle-age blues crap played before a warmed-over, middle age blues audience so excited to witness an idol in action that they pretended to have a good time, acted like nothing was wrong. But something was desperately wrong – there was no there there. No spontaneous levitation, no syllables repeated like percussion to lift you out of your head, no proof of God’s existence. Just warmed-over blues crap. Van was mailing it in. He just. Didn’t. Care.

So what about that Danish?

Van’s been mailing it in, off and on, for a long time now. But the way he mails it in today is very different from the way he mailed it in in 1967. Once upon a time, Bang Records had Van on contract to generate a certain number of tracks in a certain time period. Your classic Contractual Obligation. According to WFMU:

In order to fulfill his obligation to his early solo label Bang Records, Van Morrison sat down in 1967 or so and cranked out 31 songs on the spot, on topics ranging from ringworm to wanting a danish, to hating his record label and a guy named George.

The lyrics he came up with, apparently without any forethought whatsoever, beat the hell out of anything on Inarticulate Speech of the Heart or Too Long in Exile. Take “Ringworm,” for example:

I can see by the look on your face
that you’ve got ringworm.
I’m very sorry to have to tell you, but you’ve got ringworm.
It’s a very common disease.
You’re very lucky to have … ringworm
because you may have had … something else.

[audio:http://stuckbetweenstations.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/11-ring-worm-4.mp3]
Van Morrison – “Ringworm”

Fascinating to hear this proto-version of mailing-it-in. The difference between the 1967 approach to not caring and the 2007 version? He used to do it with style, and a healthy dose of dada. It gets better:

Want A Danish

You want a danish?
No, I just ate,
I’ve just ate.
D’ya’ want…
Like, I want some bread up front.
Oh, bread up front. You want a sandwich?
Have a danish.
Want a sandwich?
Have a sandwich.
Have a seat.
Have a seat,
Have a sandwich,
Have a danish.

[audio:http://stuckbetweenstations.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/22-want-a-danish-1.mp3]
Van Morrison – I Want a Danish

Need more proof of just how good “mailing it in” can sound? WFMU has graciously posted all 31 tracks, ready for download. And someone else has graciously transcribed all of the lyrics, no matter how complicated.

The truth is, in 1967, Van’s version of not caring rocked. No — it punk rocked. Today, Van’s not caring is just more milquetoast. Trouble is, the vector’s all messed up. In ’67, Van was not caring in the direction of his record label. Today, he’s not caring in the direction of you. There’s a difference. Rumor is, Van still lifts off for parts unknown … but you never know when or where it’s going to happen. Until either “T.B. Sheets” or “Ringworm” are on the regular menu again, I’m laying low.

About Scot Hacker

Scot Hacker is a web developer, teacher, and blogger living in Northern California. He is the author of Can You Get to That? The Cosmology of P-Funk and Understanding Liberace: Grooving With The Fey Heckler. He works by day as webmaster at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and Knight Digital Media Center, and runs Birdhouse Web and Mail Hosting on the side. Hacker is the author of The BeOS Bible and MP3: The Definitive Guide, and posts near-daily on random stuff at Scot Hacker's foobar blog. He's ecstatic that we're sitting on 100 years of recorded music history. How I Got Stuck When was the last time you bought a record because of the cover? 25 years before MP3s, I used to make a weekly pilgrimage to Cheap Thrills in San Luis Obispo with friends, where we'd surf through dusty wooden bins, de-flowering ourselves in a mist of vinyl, grabbing piles of cut-outs about which we knew virtually nothing. Junior Samples, Temple City Kazoo Orchestra, The Buggles, Paul Desmond, Instant Chic, Smithsonian collections, Robert Moog, Dream Syndicate... didn't matter. If the cover was cool, we assumed there was a good chance the music would turn us on. And we were often right. In that humongous wooden warehouse, between around 1977 and 1984, my musical universe bloomed. There were also duds - dumptruck loads of duds. The lesson that a great cover doesn't tell you jack about the music inside was a long time coming (the inverse correlation - that great music was often hidden behind terrible artwork - came much later). But it didn't matter, because cut-outs never cost more than a couple-three bucks, and all the good shit we uncovered made it worthwhile. In high school, I (for the most part) ignored the music going on around me. The jocks and aggies could keep their Rick Springfield and their Jefferson Starship - we were folding papers after school to The Roches and Zappa and Talking Heads and PiL. But inevitably, some of the spirit of that time stuck with me. ELO and McCartney wormed their way (perhaps undeservedly) into my heart. No one escapes high school without an indelible tattoo on their soul describing the music of that time. When I went away to college, the alt/grunge scene was being born, and getting chicks required familiarity with The Pixies and Porno for Pyros. I couldn't quite figure how these bands were supposed to be as interesting as Meat Puppets or Cecil Taylor or Syd Barrett, but I went along for the ride for a while, best I could. But I never quite "got" alt-rock. Never understood why The Pixies were elevated in the public imagination over a thousand bands I thought were so much more inventive / rocking / interesting. What exactly was Frank Black offering the world that Lou Reed had not? In general, I like music carved in bold strokes - extremely rockin', or extremely beautiful, or extremely weird... I like artists that have a unique sound, something I can hang my hat on. I love Mission of Burma and The Slits and The American Anthology of Folk Music and Devendra Banhart and Bowie and Nick Drake and Eric Dolphy and Ali Farka Toure and Marvin Pontiac. If you were to ask me who was the last great rock and roll band, I'd be likely to answer "The Minutemen." I know it's not true, but I'd say it anyway. And yet, in a weird way, I totally believe it. Today while jogging, I listened to a long interpretation by the Unknown Instructors: "Punk Is Whatever We Made It To Be" - half-spoken / half-sung sonic collage of some of D. Boon's best stanzas. Boon's powerful words rained like hammers and I felt like I was back in 1980, careening down the highway in a green VW bug with The Stooges blasting. It was that spirit of amazement that I used to live for - the one I never got from the 90s indie scene. And then, just as quickly, I thought "God, I'm living in the past. I suck." I'm stuck. I have vast collections of LPs, CDs, and MP3s. I listen to music for hours each day, and yet I'm completely out of it, musically speaking. I confess -- I've never listened to Guns-n-Roses or Pearl Jam or Prince, and I've only recently heard "Nevermind" in its entirety. If it weren't for Twitter, I wouldn't even know Lady Gaga existed. I'm oblivious to the stuff that supposedly matters to "music people." It's not like I'm totally unaware of pop music. I just have a finely tuned ability to tune out whatever doesn't interest me. I don't quite know how to explain it. I can only say that my friends register shock when they learn that I've never heard of Elliot Smith. And yet I do not feel thirsty. I'm always open to being turned on. But I learned long ago that, unfortunately, you can't trust beautiful cover art to promise great music, and you can't always trust your friends to push your music buttons. I'm happy to listen to damn near anything. And every now and then, that "anything" will turn into something that will become important to me over time. Something that will last. I like music with staying power. Belle and Sebastien have a certain appeal, but I don't think they're going to occupy even the tiniest slot in my consciousness in 20 years. But the power and inventiveness of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, John Fahey, Robert Wyatt, Can, The Carter Family, The Clash, will never dissipate. I have little interest in the "new" factor. I could not care less whether this year's model is the baddest thing going on in Atlanta or a rare gem rescued from 78 rpm oblivion by Robert Crumb. It's all the same to me. Just squeeze my lemon / 'till the juice runs down my leg. Please. A friend once said that he felt lucky to have been born so late in history, because the later you're born, the more history you have to work with. I don't think I really understood what he was saying until I was about 40. It's not about being born late, it's about this massive archive we're sitting on - the entire history of recorded music under our butts, which we can either choose to ignore or to mine for all it's worth. Every hour I spend checking out the flavor of the month is an hour I haven't spent with David Thomas or Richard Hell or Shuggie Otis. Life's too short. I'm going to use this site to drift back and forth through musical history, modernity be damned. You turn me on, I'm a radio. Let me know what I'm missing. shacker's station at last.fm