Once, when I worked retail, in those heady, Arabian Nights-like days when employees could play their own music in the store, I was listening to the Van Morrison live album from 1974, Too Late to Stop Now, and a woman, a customer there with her portly and Limbaughed husband, complained.
"What IS this horrible noise?" she asked in a pinched manner.
"The Music?" said I.
"If you can call it that. What is it?"
"Van Morrison. You don't like it?"
"Ugh, does anyone?"
"Most people consider him to be one of the preeminent singer-songwriters of the latter half of the twentieth century."
I really said that. Exactly that. For some reason I remember that part vividly. Maybe because I, like you no doubt, are revolted that I actually speak this way.
"Well, is he anything like Beethoven?" asked the woman with a pronounced arch to her narrow and crispy eyebrow.
"No. No, he isn't. But, in fairness, no one is." I replied resignedly.
And just for the record: on another occasion I was listening to Beethoven and some gigantic golf moron complained bitterly about that, too.
Anyway, this is all a digression from my point. And my point begins at Too Late to Stop Now.
If you don't have it, you don't have a record collection. It manages to distill everything about Van Morrison and his preternatural connection to Soul. Because it came at a time in his career when, arguably, his best music was behind and right underneath him, and because he is capable of something fierce and authentic and shamanic in his live performances (if you catch him on a good night), it ends up as a sort of accidental greatest hits record. Really, unless I feel like listening to Astral Weeks, I probably listen to Too Late to Stop Now more than any of his other albums. I think it is one of the five albums I'd go into space with if I never planned to return to Earth.
But for all of its soulful, avatar of rhythm and blues, operatic splendor, Too Late to Stop Now does not capture an aspect of Morrison's music that he himself has only rarely tried to connect with. It doesn't reach for or grasp the aether in quite the way Astral Weeks did and does any time you want to take it for a spin and you're in the bath on a Sunday morning in June. And even though he isn't what he once was, the chance of maybe melding the two into a third thing, perhaps transcendental soul or rhythm and mysticism, makes me feel slightly faint.
In other words: I have high expectations.
Enter Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl.
I want it to be a revelation - an archeology of the album I love so dearly, unearthing something new and unexpected from the songs that I know too well after too many listens. It isn't quite that.
The album is really good. Van Morrison is clearly engaged in the material and the off-the-cuff feeling of the original is preserved here (the band only had one run through before performing together) intact. There is the usual Van Morrison schtick of extending, through vocal riffing and interposing of other songs for brief sections of music, each song by four minutes or so. Sometimes that can be a drag, but there is life in it for Morrison and you never get tired of listening to him pour himself and the listeners down into a trance.
I don't know that I want to go into detail about every song, but suffice it to say that fans of Astral Weeks will find plenty here to reignite their passion for the original album as well as plenty to enjoy for the first time. There are real differences in tone between the two albums - the newer, live album is bluesier and Morrison's voice gruffer, his phrasing more expressionistic, but ultimately Live at the Hollywood Bowl is a sort of reflection of the original album thrown off by a smoked glass. There are moments I like better than the source record and moments that don't come close to matching its purity and surprise.
But really, isn't this all one can ask from a live album - that it reengage, refigure, and reveal?
Like so many reviews I give (what does this say about my confidence in my opinions?) I'll just say that, if you're a fan, you'll really like it.
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