Van Morrison

Being famous was extremely disappointing for me. When I became famous it was a complete drag and it is still a complete drag.

— Van Morrison

VAN MORRISON has never fit comfortably in the rock mainstream, and he hasn't had a Top 40 hit in more than twenty-five years, but he remains one of the most significant and influential artists in pop-music history. A jazz- and R&B-loving Irish mystic with an indescribably soulful voice, he sounds like the love child of Dylan Thomas and Billie Holiday--and everyone from Springsteen to Costello to Bono to head Counting Crow Adam Duritz sounds at least a bit like him.

Born in Belfast in 1945, Morrison dates his first musical memory back to his third year, when he experienced spiritual ecstasy while listening to gospel singer Mahalia Jackson on the family gramophone. For the remainder of his youth, music mollified his natural shyness, as he listened to his father's records of Leadbelly and Hank Williams and taught himself guitar. Soon thereafter, he formed the Sputniks, the first of many teen combos. Morrison was so committed to music that after he was refused entry into a band of older boys because they already had enough guitar players, he taught himself the saxophone. When he returned three weeks later and demonstrated his new skill, they signed him up.

Morrison eventually landed in Them, a rhythm-and-blues outfit whose intense sound quickly made them a local phenomenon. They cut several singles in the mid-sixties, including a cover of Joe Williams' "Baby Please Don't Go" and Morrison's own "Here Comes the Night," both of which made the British Top 10. The group embarked on a semi-successful U.S. tour, and Morrison's roiling "Gloria" became an inspiration for American garage bands. But after two albums, Morrison was already disillusioned with the music industry; he disbanded Them and returned to Belfast.

Record producer Bert Berns, who had worked with Morrison before, heard of his disenchantment and sent him a plane ticket to New York, encouraging him to record some solo singles. Morrison accepted and recorded his first solo hit, "Brown-Eyed Girl." But Morrison and Berns soon had a falling-out, and Berns, in an attempt to capitalize on the success of "Brown-Eyed Girl," released the eight-song album Blowin' Your Mind of Morrison session recordings, packaged with psychedelic cover art. Morrison was outraged, not only because the album was released without his knowledge, but because he considered the songs unfinished. (He also despised the cover art's implication that he was part of the free love and drugs trend.) To appease his star, Berns suggested they cut a proper album--The Best of Van Morrison. Morrison hated the album, saying it was really a Worst of . . . collection. (You can judge for yourself: the complete sessions are now available on the collection Bang Masters.)

Morrison got out of his contract with Berns and signed with Warner Brothers. In 1968, he went into the studio with some seasoned jazz musicians and recorded Astral Weeks in just a few days. The album's surreal, jazzy, and spontaneous feel combined with Morrison's achingly soulful vocals to establish him as one of the most creative artists of his era, and it is often named on critics' all-time top-ten lists. It was also considered the essential album for acid-heads, though Morrison denies ever having done L.S.D. ("I didn't need drugs to have experiences," Morrison said. "I had always had experiences without drugs, and so anything like that would impair them. Alcohol would impair them. It produces a false ecstasy.")

Astral Weeks was the first of a handful of albums that proved Morrison's brilliance and versatility: Moondance (1970) and His Band and Street Choir (1971) brought in R&B horns and female background vocalists, showing off Morrison's chops as a blue-eyed soul man, while Tupelo Honey (1971) and St. Dominic's Preview (1972) added more Irish, folk, and country elements to the mix. Meanwhile, on a personal level, Morrison's life was steadying--he married Janet Planet, a hippie he met in San Francisco, and settled down in Woodstock, New York, and Marin County, California. Morrison thought of Planet as a spiritual redeemer, and was thrilled by their rural domestic bliss. But she saw things differently. She was much more sociable than Morrison, and yearned to get out of the rustic isolation he treasured. Their marriage crumbled after five years. (Their daughter, Shana, has followed in her father's footsteps, touring with his band and recording duets with him on recent albums.)

The years following his divorce from Planet sent Morrison on a spiritual and philosophical odyssey, and his art suffered the consequences. Hard Nose the Highway (1973) was a critical and commercial flop that contained none of the spark of his best work, while 1974's moody, introspective Veedon Fleece failed to find an audience despite some breathtaking moments. Following these relative failures, he took three years off, and returned in 1977 with a tentative album whose title, A Period of Transition, seemed to confirm his general state of confusion. He began to regain his footing with Wavelength (1978), but it was on 1979's Into the Music that he made a full-fledged comeback. A deeply spiritual and soulful album, it was released the same year as Bob Dylan's born - again diatribe Slow Train Coming, but preached a far more forgiving and openhearted gospel.

Spirituality has continued to play an important part in Morrison's music throughout the eighties and nineties. His religious explorations have included Scientology (which helped inspire 1983's Inarticulate Speech of the Heart), and he has described himself as a "Christian mystic" (check out 1989's Avalon Sunset). His best work, though, has continued to fuse the ethereal and the earthly, especially on 1986's No Guru, No Method, No Teacher, and 1990's Enlightenment. He was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1993, and in 1995 he turned fifty, but Morrison shows no signs of slowing down: in March of 1997 he released The Healing Game his best work since Enlightenment, and his fifteenth new album in as many years.