STILL GRAPPLING WITH FAME
Van Morrison gives rare interview
Roll with the Punches Available Sept. 22
Van Morrison doesn’t give many interviews and those that he does do often leave his interviewers close to nervous collapse. He was once interviewed on TV and refused to say a single word throughout. Morrison may be 72 now, but age hasn’t blunted his edges. I ask him if the way he writes songs has changed at all over the years.
Morrison stares at me through his dark glasses.
“No,” he says eventually. Does he write as the mood takes him, or in sudden bursts of activity, I wonder.
“Sometimes,” he mutters. “Sometimes not ... Sometimes I have to write to a deadline.”
“Do you enjoy the pressure of that?”
“Not really, no.”
And then something unexpected happens. He chuckles and says, “But, you know, you can’t win them all.”
Something else about Van Morrison soon becomes clear — he considers himself to be a muchmisunderstood man. Like his near contemporaries Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, Morrison has proved an irresistible magnet to those seeking to pick apart his lyrics in order to get at the deeper meaning apparently buried within.
“I can’t stand all that analyzing,” he says. “And I think it’s probably made me more self-conscious about what I was going to say. Because a lot of the time I’m writing songs that are nothing to do with me. I might pick up an ambience about a certain place or a certain time, and that will lead into a song. But my life isn’t my songs — they’re just something that I do in the same way that someone writes a script or a story ...”
That said, there’s a song on Morrison’s new album, Roll with the Punches, called Fame that seems unmistakably personal and full of rage about the price he has paid for being famous. “Ah well, that one’s different,” he concedes. “That’s what I call a reality song. It would be about my life, yeah — and how I feel about the whole business of being famous, but those songs are few and far between.”
He was 19 when he had his first hit with Them in 1964, Baby Please Don’t Go. Right from the start he seemed possessed of a fully formed, darkly forbidding stage persona.
Far from being gloomy, he was, he says, a happy, gregarious, confident boy — he was an only child — who was very close to his parents and shared their love of music.
What the young Morrison responded to most was the poetry of the blues.
“I connected with the lyrics from a working-class point of view. Some of these guys like Lightnin’ Hopkins and John Lee Hooker were totally uneducated, but they were great poets.”
To begin with, the onstage Morrison was more of a leaping songand-dance man than a brooding introvert. “In the early days, when I was in rock ’n’ roll groups and show-bands, it was all about putting on a performance. But when I got into the blues the music was much more introverted and so the way I performed changed too. Then, when I started writing songs, that came with a lot more introspection.”
Far from valuing his uniqueness, his record company set about trying to turn him into a mainstream pop star.
Here they faced a trio of what turned out to be insoluble problems: Morrison didn’t look like a conventional pop star, he didn’t act like one and he certainly didn’t want to be one.
“I didn’t realize at the time that you were supposed to be a certain way and say certain things if you wanted to be in the club. But I didn’t want to be in the club — any club. I was already an outsider and that was OK with me. But it wasn’t OK with them. I remember sitting in offices in L.A. 22 floors up and these guys blowing cigar smoke in my face, pounding the table and saying, ‘You’ve got to do what we tell you!’ ”
Morrison’s response was to get out of town as fast as possible. “I went into hiding for a while. I slept on a friend’s couch in Boston, and all the time they were after me and issuing these threats. It was bizarre, the stuff of movies, you know.”
In the early ’70s, his problems were compounded by bursts of crippling stage fright. Fifty years on, Morrison says that he still finds performing a trial — he once described it as having to turn himself inside out on stage.
“It’s always been a dilemma for me. I’m a very private person and in order to perform I have to be something I’m not — namely an extrovert. I’ve had several psychic readings about this stuff and I remember one woman saying to me once, ‘You have the devil to pay.’ And that is what it often feels like.”
Morrison suspects he’ll never lose his reputation for being a colossal grouch.
“I think there’s been so much written about me being dead serious and never smiling and all the rest of it that the label will never go away. Which is totally absurd because there’s a lot of humour in my work — at least I think there is — and as people who come to my gigs know, there’s a lot of humour there, too.”