...said on a show I listened to recently that there is no such thing as too much Van Morrison. Alas, one of the side-effects of the vigorous policing of intellectual property rights (in this case by the justly foundering MGM) is that The Man won't allow us to embed the clip from "The Last Waltz" picturized below.
There is this, however.
And this, a "trad" Irish heart-render that turned up on a recent episode of "Boardwalk Empire."
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Greil Marcus just wrote a book about Van Morrison in which he dismisses a run of about 15 recent albums in a paragraph as worthless.
Anybody who is still in the habit of buying Morrison's new albums (in the hope that just maybe he's still got it) will appreciate the sentiment.
But the old stuff!
Marcus in the Guardian: (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jun/05/listening-van-morrison-greil-marcus)
Morrison has, by the twists and turns, the leaps and sudden drops, the roars and shouts and silences of his voice, got under people's skin. He gets inside people, and he festers there, sparking longings too intense and elusive to satisfy, desires too abstract and ethereal to fulfil, a sense of escape, transcendence, revelation, and ecstasy so deep it can seem to trivialise ordinary life, and thus trivialise whoever has to live that life, which is to say anyone.
And Marcus can make other critics feel trivial.
I only downloaded VM's greatest hits last week, believe it or not. So clueless, I didn't even know/recall that he wrote and first recorded "Gloria."
Not sure how recent the newer ones in that collection are, but they all sound pretty good to me.
To those of us of a certain age, "Astral Weeks" is superior to EVERY (as in every) other classic album of the period (with the possible exception of a couple of Dylan albums) It's a sacred document.
I'm sorry to say that no Greatest Hits collection can even begin to touch it. (and Marcus's effusions are almost certainly AW-related. The chapter in Marcus's book on Astral Weeks is reputedly about fifty pages long.)
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