In the past few years he had tasted fame as lead singer of Them (dubbed 'Belfast's answer to the Rolling Stones' in the music press), singing on two hit singles, 'Here Comes the Night' and the proto-punk 'Gloria'. Morrison, 23, and already in retreat from pop stardom, stands in the centre of Century Sound Studios in midtown Manhattan. 'People didn't understand him.' Another friend, Billy McAllen, remembered him as being 'a bit strange, a bit weird'.įast forward to 25 September 1968. 'Van was his own master,' his boyhood friend George Jones told biographer Johnny Rogan. Years later, when his Belfast peers recalled the young Morrison, they stressed his solitary nature as well as his eccentricity. A working-class boy from a Protestant neighbourhood, he had left Orangefield school with no academic credentials, and seems to have been an aloof-to-the-point-of-arrogant teenager an only child who never quite shed his sense of aloneness. Though this anecdote may have grown in the telling, it illustrates the adolescent Van Morrison's otherness. He's upstairs in his room writing poetry.' 'Yer man can't play,' he told the other band members. Van's mother, Violet, answered, and after a few seconds of banter Walsh returned to the minibus alone. Once, before a gig in Derry, the band's minibus pulled up outside his house on Hyndford Street, east Belfast and lead singer Alfie Walsh knocked on the door. It has a quality unique to Van and only Van of 1968.I n the early Sixties the young George Ivan Morrison briefly played saxophone in a Belfast showband called the Olympics. This album is to me one of the single greatest works in modern music. but what we do know is that he is still in love with her dispite it all and her pain is still his pain. Is she dying on the inside, by becoming more and more unloving and interested in greed (remember the avarice from the first song?!?! a ha, is that the connection? ((Avarice- love of money,greed))? or is she dying physically, from the heroin or something else? we never know. but the last lines are the most disturbing of the album. or maybe wants the richer man to pay for her drug habit.? who can say. Maybe shes been revealed to be shallow and only interested in money and was lying the whole time. Not only that she has left Van for a richer man( who also happens to own the stereotypical love-gone-bad mobile, the Cadillac). It seems that she has in fact a drug addiction( i believe heroin specifically because of the white horse, metaphor, and the fact that ireland had a very bad heroin problem). People take from it whatever their disposition to take from it is." (Van Morrison, to Randy Lewis). The songs are works of fiction that will inherently have a different meaning for different people. "The songs are poetic stories, so the meaning is the same as always–timeless and unchanging. Approach it a bit the way you would a dream - things are not what they seem, but they are exactly what they feel (to each person individually). Feel the words, feel the music, and derive your meaning from that. I think a better approach to understanding the works is to ditch the narrative, like you would when reading a non-linear books (Ulysses for example). Fact is though, youre never going to achieve a satisfactory result because Morrison wrote some of these peices as a 'stream of consiousness' not 'even thinking about what he wrote' (Ritchie Yorke, Van Morrison Biographer) whilst others were 'composites.of conversations.movies, newspapers, books' and are 'totally fictional' (Van Morrison, NPR Interview). My InterpretationYou can spend alot of time trying to tie specific meanings to the songs on Astral Weeks, pinning places and metaphors together, trying to create a narrative storyline and ahcieve a definite understanding.
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