emergency music post: Bang Masters
Van Morrison - Bang Masters
Resources
Why now: I've owned this album for years, and I never get tired of it. Don't get me wrong, I am 100% in agreement with the popular/critical opinion that Astral Weeks is the genius record, but after absorbing it I've come to prefer the near-misses, the stumbling and fumbling of near-genius, as captured in this snapshot of Van at age 21.
This album is brilliant. If you've never heard it before, you need this album, you just don't know it yet. Ramshackle rock-n-blues, with everything just a hairsbreadth away from falling apart - just the way I like it (c.f. Palace at its best). The famous "T.B. Sheets" is heartbreaking. Apparently he had a dream that he was visiting a sick girl's bed, that she had T.B., and he woke up and sang the song to his mother pretty much as he does here. It's painful, from the piercing harmonica cries to the shattering vocal as he gasps and stutters through the startlingly real lyrics and the organ keens in the background:
Now listen, Julie baby
It ain't natural for you to cry in the midnight
It ain't natural for you to cry
Way into midnight through
Until the wee small hours
Long 'fore the break of dawn
Oh Lord, huh uh ha...Ha
Now Julie, there ain't nothin' on my mind
More further 'way than what you're lookin' for
I see the way you jumped at me, Lord, from behind the door
And looked into my eyes
Your little star-struck innuendos
Inadequacies an' foreign bodies
And the sunlight shining through the crack in the window pane
Numbs my brain
And the sunlight shining through the crack in the window pane
Numbs my brain, oh Lord
He's overwhelmed, he doesn't know what to say to her, he tries agonizingly to make small talk, even as he says to himself, hyperventilating with horror:
And I can almost smell
Your T.B. sheets
An' I can almost smell
Your T.B. sheets
On your sickbed
She wants him to sit with her, asking for a glass of water, and he makes excuses, desperately trying to get out of the death-house, the "cool room", pathetically saying he'll send someone over later - "with a bottle of wine for you baby" and finally backs out calling back that he'll turn on the radio for her.
Less grueling, more tantalizing is "Who Drove the Red Sports Car?", on which the whole band slinks through the tune as if they're trying to play the bare minimum of orchestration until Morrison comes in on the chorus notes like a triumphant trumpet blast:
Who drove the red sports car from the mansion?
And laid upon the grass, in summertime?
And who done me out, high time fashion?
And made me read between the line?
...
And who did your homework
And read your Bible?
And signed your name, every place?
And then there are a lot of catchy, ultimately inconsequential but fun to listen to uptempo numbers, including "The Midnight Special", "The Back Room", "Send Your Mind", "Chick-A-Boom". And the extraordinary version of "Madame George" in which Van seems to be at a party, egged on by drunken acquaintances who're too blotto to understand the suggestive, impressionistic lyrics. Oh, and then there's "Brown-Eyed Girl", among the first three songs he recorded for the Bang label, which then went on to become one of the biggest hits of his entire career. Now overplayed into the ground, but it's still a great song.
Here's an excerpt from the original liner notes for Blowin' Your Mind, the album Bang released without Van's consent, using a selection of the material on Bang Masters. Some of this sounds like it could be Van writing, as seen through a thin veil of publicity nonsense:
For Morrison no purpose of clouded lyrics promising jungles of purple birds or heavens of wish granting angels...for Morrison it was an infinite yearning, a hope to express the shape and smell of sheets embracing life and death...for Morrison it was and is the uncanny drive to hum of pain and women...to hum of small spaces between bed and floor...to sing of flesh and inflict...to toss darts at clouds of intangible super-structures and fantastic shapes and still hold tight to the real of dust of bottles and heartbreak.
"She comes to my room and sits on my bed and makes me feel so good." This from his pen, this from the group he formed "Them" and suddenly stardom, through the streets of London and recording studios all electric and surrounded by men of coin and dialect and repeating over and over "come on baby...once more, we got a hit" and Van blows and Van sings and Van screams and Van listens and Van says "up them all" and becomes Van and what the hell that's his friend and now he can live with himself. He's on the golden heels of success and his recordings are ubiquitous "baby please don't go" from the down home weed country of the United States of Negro America.
I mostly like the last sentence - it almost sounds like something Lester Bangs would write: "the United States of Negro America". Someone (not me!) should use that as a band name.
Resources
Why now: I've owned this album for years, and I never get tired of it. Don't get me wrong, I am 100% in agreement with the popular/critical opinion that Astral Weeks is the genius record, but after absorbing it I've come to prefer the near-misses, the stumbling and fumbling of near-genius, as captured in this snapshot of Van at age 21.
This album is brilliant. If you've never heard it before, you need this album, you just don't know it yet. Ramshackle rock-n-blues, with everything just a hairsbreadth away from falling apart - just the way I like it (c.f. Palace at its best). The famous "T.B. Sheets" is heartbreaking. Apparently he had a dream that he was visiting a sick girl's bed, that she had T.B., and he woke up and sang the song to his mother pretty much as he does here. It's painful, from the piercing harmonica cries to the shattering vocal as he gasps and stutters through the startlingly real lyrics and the organ keens in the background:
Now listen, Julie baby
It ain't natural for you to cry in the midnight
It ain't natural for you to cry
Way into midnight through
Until the wee small hours
Long 'fore the break of dawn
Oh Lord, huh uh ha...Ha
Now Julie, there ain't nothin' on my mind
More further 'way than what you're lookin' for
I see the way you jumped at me, Lord, from behind the door
And looked into my eyes
Your little star-struck innuendos
Inadequacies an' foreign bodies
And the sunlight shining through the crack in the window pane
Numbs my brain
And the sunlight shining through the crack in the window pane
Numbs my brain, oh Lord
He's overwhelmed, he doesn't know what to say to her, he tries agonizingly to make small talk, even as he says to himself, hyperventilating with horror:
And I can almost smell
Your T.B. sheets
An' I can almost smell
Your T.B. sheets
On your sickbed
She wants him to sit with her, asking for a glass of water, and he makes excuses, desperately trying to get out of the death-house, the "cool room", pathetically saying he'll send someone over later - "with a bottle of wine for you baby" and finally backs out calling back that he'll turn on the radio for her.
Less grueling, more tantalizing is "Who Drove the Red Sports Car?", on which the whole band slinks through the tune as if they're trying to play the bare minimum of orchestration until Morrison comes in on the chorus notes like a triumphant trumpet blast:
Who drove the red sports car from the mansion?
And laid upon the grass, in summertime?
And who done me out, high time fashion?
And made me read between the line?
...
And who did your homework
And read your Bible?
And signed your name, every place?
And then there are a lot of catchy, ultimately inconsequential but fun to listen to uptempo numbers, including "The Midnight Special", "The Back Room", "Send Your Mind", "Chick-A-Boom". And the extraordinary version of "Madame George" in which Van seems to be at a party, egged on by drunken acquaintances who're too blotto to understand the suggestive, impressionistic lyrics. Oh, and then there's "Brown-Eyed Girl", among the first three songs he recorded for the Bang label, which then went on to become one of the biggest hits of his entire career. Now overplayed into the ground, but it's still a great song.
Here's an excerpt from the original liner notes for Blowin' Your Mind, the album Bang released without Van's consent, using a selection of the material on Bang Masters. Some of this sounds like it could be Van writing, as seen through a thin veil of publicity nonsense:
For Morrison no purpose of clouded lyrics promising jungles of purple birds or heavens of wish granting angels...for Morrison it was an infinite yearning, a hope to express the shape and smell of sheets embracing life and death...for Morrison it was and is the uncanny drive to hum of pain and women...to hum of small spaces between bed and floor...to sing of flesh and inflict...to toss darts at clouds of intangible super-structures and fantastic shapes and still hold tight to the real of dust of bottles and heartbreak.
"She comes to my room and sits on my bed and makes me feel so good." This from his pen, this from the group he formed "Them" and suddenly stardom, through the streets of London and recording studios all electric and surrounded by men of coin and dialect and repeating over and over "come on baby...once more, we got a hit" and Van blows and Van sings and Van screams and Van listens and Van says "up them all" and becomes Van and what the hell that's his friend and now he can live with himself. He's on the golden heels of success and his recordings are ubiquitous "baby please don't go" from the down home weed country of the United States of Negro America.
I mostly like the last sentence - it almost sounds like something Lester Bangs would write: "the United States of Negro America". Someone (not me!) should use that as a band name.