The reclusive rocker

Van Morrison has always gone his own way, said John Preston in The Daily Telegraph (U.K.). The Belfast-born singer’s breakthrough album, Astral Weeks, was unlike anything recorded before or since: poetic, hypnotic, and mysterious. “There was a lot of change around that time—1966 and 1967—and I was trying to get in everything that was going on. I had a feeling I was plugging into what Jung called the Collective Unconscious.” Record executives wanted to mold him into a mainstream pop star, but Morrison had no interest in imitating other performers or becoming cool, flamboyant, or sexy. “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!’” Instead, Morrison became even more reclusive and enigmatic—a reserve that was exacerbated by crippling stage fright. “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, ‘You have the devil to pay.’ And that is what it often feels like.”