Van Morrison on Brown Eyed Girl: He’d Rather You Didn’t Ask

Van Morrison has spent a lifetime chasing transcendence while side-eyeing his own success. From Belfast garage brat to cosmic troubadour to contrarian crank, he’s built bridges between jazz, blues, and Celtic mysticism, only to torch them when the mood strikes. His contradictions fuel his genius, visionary but stubborn, prolific but reactionary. Even Brown Eyed Girl, the pop gem that bought his freedom, is written off. Scott Shea unpacks the art and the attitude as well as the legend and the grudge.

Glad Tidings

You’re never too old to get into a new artist, especially a classic one. I learned this with Van Morrison when I was about 25 years old. I’m 49 now, so I’ve been a fan now for almost half my life. Now, in terms of age, 25 isn’t very old, but I’d been a music nut and record collector for about ¾ of my lifetime at that point and thought I’d heard them all. Sure, I was familiar with Van Morrison but kind of dusted him off as an old-time singer-songwriter from the 1970s and the singer of “Brown Eyed Girl,” which played on oldies, lite-FM and even classic rock stations incessantly in the 1980s and 1990s. In fact, I’d heard it so much, I was sick of it and would be OK if I’d never heard it again despite its infectious melody and provocative lyrics.

I was in my first post-college job and my best work friend Scott was a music buff too. He turned me on to not only Van Morrison, but other artists I’d given short shrift like the Grateful Dead, Neil Young and Lou Reed, and I introduced him to the Smiths and early rock and roll artists like Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers. But I’m most grateful for his Van introduction and what makes him even more entertaining is his quirky, curmudgeonly personality and, as it turned out, he was just as sick of “Brown-Eyed Girl” as I was.

Now, don’t misunderstand me, “Brown-Eyed Girl” is a great song, and I’ve even experienced a renewed sense of admiration for it. Since Van has become one of my favorite artists, I even leave it on when it comes on the radio now. But I always wondered why he hated his biggest hit so much. A lot of artists say they hate their biggest hit, but I always take that with a grain of salt. I think of groups like Nirvana, Guns n’ Roses and the Who who’ve said they hate their most famous songs but may have gone nowhere without them. I understand being sick of performing them, but you would think that, if they really despised them, they wouldn’t even give them that satisfaction. A quick cursory look back in those early internet days showed that Van stated that he couldn’t relate to it, has written hundreds of better songs and never made a dime off it. Fair enough, but there has to be more to it than that. Can Paul McCartney still relate to “Love Me Do?” He still pulls that one out from time to time.

According to setlist.com, Van Morrison has performed “Brown-Eyed Girl” live 844 times in its 58 years of existence. It sounds like a lot, but when you compare it to Bruce Springsteen and his signature song, “Born to Run,” which he’s performed approximately 1,851 times and is seven years younger, it’s a relatively small number. His biggest hit, “Dancing in the Dark,” which is 17 years younger than “Brown-Eyed Girl” has been played live 1,181 times as of this writing. An examination of Van Morrison’s tours and setlists shows that he’s played it live on the majority of his tours, but it was not an every-night staple. Far from it. In fact, from 1980 to 1989, he only performed it three times and by setlist.com’s statistics, he gave 371 concerts in that timeframe. Now that’s sticking to your convictions.

Wanna Be In Showbusiness?

In the mid-1960s, Van Morrison was the leader of the Irish rock and roll band Them who started as a motley group of American R&B loving musicians who played the Maritime Hotel in his hometown of Belfast, Ireland in 1964. They played the part too by being rude to reporters and always acting like they just didn’t give a shit. In his brief two-year stint as the lead singer, he gave the world garage rock classics like “Gloria,” “Mystic Eyes” and “Here Comes the Night” with the former two being written by him. He was brimming with talent, all 5’5” of him, and Decca soon gave way to just recording Van with session musicians and calling it Them. It fostered jealousy and frustration within the band and their touring lineup had more turnover than a department store staff. They only hit the British and U.S. Top 40 charts twice, but had gained a cult following, mostly because of “Gloria” and it’s famous “G-L-O-R-I-A” call and response. It was also a dirty song for its time. Released on Parrot in the U.S. in January 1965 as the B-side to Them’s cover of the old Joe Williams blues number, “Baby Please Don’t Go,” it received a good deal of airplay in Los Angeles on KRLA and on the brand new “Boss Radio” format at KHJ. What prevented it from charting nationally was the lyric “And then she comes to my room/And she makes me feel alright.”

“Gloria” painted a suggestive picture even without that part, but it was a bridge too far for radio stations and it was effectively torpedoed. Nevertheless, he toothpaste was out of the tube and it began making the rounds at high school gatherings and college frat parties. Around a year later, a rock band from Chicago called the Shadows of Knight recorded a more sanitized version for Bill Traut’s brand new Dunwich label, omitting the bedroom scene, and scored a Top 10 hit. But contemporary music aficionados preferred Them’s naughty version, and it helped increase their swagger among young music lovers.

The bloom of being in a hit band started coming off for Van around the time the Shadows of Knight were having a hit with his song. He grew weary of the façade that he was in an actual band, of which he was its source and summit. He’d been under the impression that the sessions he’d had in January 1966 with session musicians would be solo releases, but Decca used them to continue the Them brand. Not only that, but group manager Phil Solomon was pulling the old sleazy manager trick of hiring other groups to tour as Them to unsuspecting audiences and maximize his profit. These incidences sowed the seeds of Van’s hatred for the music business. He went to Solomon and told him he wanted out. Solomon agreed to it as long he retained him as manager and completed all Them’s live gigs for the next six months, which included an American tour. Van went along with it and ended his tenure with the group following their legendary Whisky a Go-Go stand on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. For more than two weeks, they performed and were supported by several hit acts and the unsigned house band, the Doors. Lead singer Jim Morrison was profoundly influenced by the Irish singer who could stand as stoically as a church statue one moment, bounce around the stage the next and then go into a stream of conscious rant influenced by poets like William Blake, Kahlil Gibran and William Butler Yeats.

But there was not a happy ending to this last tour. Solomon was the quintessential fast buck manager, and his artists came in second to the pound. He managed from afar and overlooked vital tasks like renewing work visas and paying the band. Them returned home in a rage over monies owed and broke up. Luckily for Van Morrison, Solomon blamed him for the breakup and was happy to get rid of him. He had no interest in cultivating talent, but American producer Bert Berns, who wrote and produced Them’s biggest hit “Here Comes the Night” nearly two years earlier, did.

Here Comes The Knight?

Van was a Bert Berns fan before he even came into his purview whether he knew it or not. The thirty-something producer and budding music mogul had been in the industry since 1949 when he launched Magic Records with friend and future music industry impresario Sid Bernstein. Together, they discovered Eydie Gorme and released an Esy Morales rumba record. When that folded, he spent the rest of the decade hanging out in NYC mambo clubs and slowly breaking into the music business while living with his entrepreneurial parents in the East Bronx.

Bert took a shining to the mambo sounds of the day from the records of Tito Puente and Perez Prado that drifted into his ether from the Puerto Rican neighborhoods in the South Bronx. In the late-1950s, he had a short-lived career as a recording artist, mostly under the name Russell Byrd, but found more success writing and producing for others. He finally broke through writing the Jarmels’ #12 Pop hit, “A Little Bit of Soap,” put the pedal to the metal and began writing and producing hits with a Midas touch.

His acumen caught the attention of Atlantic Records owners Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler who hired him to take over the production duties of the Drifters in 1963. The group was formed by singer Clyde McPhatter in 1953 and had a revolving door of members since his exit a year later. They also had a boatload of hits and had experienced a resurgence since Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller took over producing the struggling brand in 1959. They fired all existing members and imported the Harlem group the Five Crowns, featuring Ben E. King and Charlie Thomas as lead tenors, and produced their radical departure single “There Goes My Baby.” It made them relevant in the R&B community again and got them on the Pop charts for the first time with a bullet, peaking at #2. They followed that up with a dozen Top 40 hits, including the #1 “Save the Last Dance for Me” and handed the keys over to Bert when the hits began to trail off following “On Broadway.”

Bert’s affinity for Latin rhythms and the trendy bossa nova sound fit in well with the Drifters and got them back on track with more big hits like “Under the Boardwalk,” “I’ve Got Sand in My Shoes” and “Saturday Night at the Movies.” While at Atlantic, he also produced a steady stream of hits for Solomon Burke, Barbara Lewis and Wilson Pickett and launched his own Atlantic offshoot label with Ahmet Ertegun, his brother Neshui and Gerald, aka “Jerry,” Wexler called BANG! Everybody was on board because Bert had the keenest ear for hits since George Goldner.

Van Morrison also grew up a music lover, which was fostered in part by his father’s enormous American jazz, blues and gospel record collection. As he grew into a young man, he got to know the Bert Berns’ sound through osmosis. In his teenage years, American rock and roll and rhythm and blues were being played all over Europe and he heard his future producer’s work on the radio by way of “A Little Bit of Soap,” the Isley Brothers’ “Twist and Shout” and Solomon Burke’s “Cry to Me.” He’d written and/or produced most of them under the pseudonym Bert Russell.

He and Bert first crossed paths at the heigh of the British Invasion when Decca Records wanted to invest in Them. Bert was dispatched to London in October 1964 at the request of Decca UK A&R head Dick Rowe, the man who turned down the Beatles in 1962. Ever since they became larger than life, he was on a redemption mission and had already recaptured his reputation by signing the Rolling Stones, although nobody really knew it yet. Rowe had brought Bert in exactly one year earlier to work with some no-name artists that met with no success. As the year wore on, several British artists began having hits with American songwriting teams from the Brill Building and elsewhere, and some of them had an affiliation with Bert Berns, so he was the easiest get. This time around, Rowe provided him with a better stable of artists including Lulu and Them featuring Van Morrison.

He brought with him what he believed was a sure-fire hit in a recent composition called “Here Comes the Night” and produced it on Them and Lulu. Her version was a slow torch ballad while Them’s was an up-tempo pop song with great chord changes and progressions that took the listener on the protagonist’s emotional roller coaster ride lamenting an unfaithful lover. Bert repurposed a guitar part he’d bedded underneath Marv Johnson’s vocal in his song “Come on and Stop” a year earlier and made it the star of the arrangement. Van was impressed with Bert’s development process and, by now, knew his name and resume. As great as his hits were, Van was more into the deep tracks, particularly “I Don’t Want to Go on Without You,” Bert’s B-side to the Drifters Summer 1964 hit “Under the Boardwalk.” The other song he recorded with Them, “Baby Please Don’t Go,” featuring a blistering guitar introduction from Jimmy Page that ran throughout the song, was released first and peaked at #10. “Here Comes the Night” was stronger, however, hitting #2 in the UK and broke them in the U.S. at #24.

Their brief union left an impression on Bert, and, in early March 1967, he sought Van out. The musical times were again changing, and the instinctive producer spotted the growing preference for full-length albums filled with high-quality original songs originated by the Beatles, the Beach Boys and Bob Dylan and felt he might have something in the Irish singer. Through Phil Solomon, he learned of Them’s breakup months earlier and that Van had returned home to Belfast to try and figure out what to do with his life. Left to his own devices, he was sinking. After spending time in a monastery to convalesce from the fake, cutthroat nature of the pop music business, he fulfilled some previously scheduled Them tour dates in the Netherlands and appeared on the Dutch television program, “Fanclub.” When Bert found him, he was living with his parents and developing an unhealthy drinking habit. Bert gave him a contract, a $2,500 advance, and a plane ticket to New York to record his solo debut single.

If Van had any misgivings about this reunion, he left them in Ireland and arrived in New York near the end of the month with a handful of songs. At A&R Recording Studio in Times Square, he was surrounded by a who’s who of session musicians, including guitarists Al Gorgoni, Hugh McCracken and Eric Gale, keyboardists Artie Butler and Paul Griffin, drummer Gary Chester, and the Sweet Inspirations on background vocals. Garry Sherman led the session and wrote the charts and Brooks Arthur ran the board with jack-of-all-musical-trades Jeff Barry on hand to do whatever was needed. It was a very intimidating and tedious scene, especially for a young man who already hated how the sausage was made.

Day one of the two-day session was on March 28th and the only original Van Morrison song was the star of the show. He called it “Brown-Skinned Girl,” but the title changed very quickly to “Brown Eyed Girl.” Van has since stated that somehow, he subconsciously changed it during the recording process, but it’s more likely that the much more music industry-savvy Bert convinced him to change it. The purpose of signing Van to BANG was to get him cranking out hits like his other star act, Neil Diamond, and a song about interracial dating wasn’t going to cut it. Not yet. Not only that, but the arrangement Sherman cooked up and Gorgoni’s calypso-flavored guitar intro were too good to throw away.

On his debut solo record, Van sounded different. Gone was the nasally growl from his Them period and in its place was a much more soulful, pleasant vocal that sounded like a warm summer day. It was immediately familiar and lovable and must’ve made Bert’s heart swell with pride over nailing another one. It didn’t come out of nowhere. You can hear it in late period Them recordings like “Hey Girl” and “Mighty Like a Rose,” but it did mark the first of many overt vocal shifts for the singer.

Bert expedited the release and got it out as a late June single, right as the Summer of Love was beginning, and it fit in perfectly. But much like “Gloria,” Van had another sexual controversy on his hands with this one over his line, “Makin’ love in the green grass” near the end. For the mono single mix, typically given to radio stations, it was edited out and replaced with a reprise of the “laughin’ and a-runnin’ hey, hey” line from the first stanza. The last thing Bert wanted was his new single being blacklisted by the Gavin Report and taken off radio station playlists.

This could be where Van’s dislike of his own song had its genesis. Artists who’ve risen to the heights that he has are typically very authentic and don’t like having their work tampered with. They can be very protective and understandably so. In 2013, when Warner Brothers Records issued a five-CD box set of his 1970 “Moondance” album, which featured multiple takes of each of its 10 songs, as well as a few outtakes, Van had this to say.

“I did not endorse this, and it has happened behind my back. My management company at that time gave this music away 42 years ago and now I feel as though it’s being stolen from me again.”

The single began making noise around a month following its release when it bubbled under the Billboard Top 100 at #113. By August 5th, as it broke into the mid-60s in Billboard and Cash Box, BANG ran a beautiful full-page color ad in Cash Box and Record World magazines with a big picture of Van that introduced him to the public. Approximately two months later, it hit its peak of #10 on Billboard on September 30th and #8 on Cash Box on October 7th. It should’ve been a joyous occasion for Van and Bert, but instead it set in motion the downfall of their relationship.

Bitter End

Under normal circumstances, an artist with a Top 10 hit on his hands would be eager and anxious to promote it, but Van was the opposite. He had no belief in “Brown Eyed Girl,” no real love for it, perhaps as an effort to be contrary to everyone who rallied around it, and was surprised by its success. When it started to break, Bert brought Van back to New York where he was joined with his California girlfriend Janet Gauder, a young divorcee he’d met year earlier before a Them concert at the San Leandro Rollerena, and her young son Peter. He put them up at the City Squire Motor Inn, across the street from the BANG offices in Midtown Manhattan, but there weren’t many gigs outside of Manhattan. Van bounced between the Bitter End in Greenwich Village and Steve Paul’s “The Scene” near Times Square. He was also becoming increasingly difficult to work with.

Bert passed along personal management duties off to longtime friend and cohort Carmine “Wassel” DeNoia who didn’t fare much better. He moved Van and his entourage in the thriftier King Edward Hotel near the campus of Columbia University and finally got him out on the road for the month of October with gigs in Denver, Portland, Oregon and San Francisco. It all culminated with an appearance on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand in Los Angeles that would air on November 11th where he lip-synced awkwardly to “Brown Eyed Girl” and its recently released follow-up “Ro Ro Rosey.” It was common for Clark to walk up to his daily star performer with his microphone and ask some mildly personal questions to humanize them a little more to his viewers. It didn’t work for Van. He looked about as comfortable as a hostage when the genial host asked him what he did in his spare time.

“I kind of just, uh, walk about parts of cities in the rain and things like that,” he mumble-answered in the most Van Morrison way possible.

The truth was, throughout his career, he’d always battled stage fright. You’d never know it by looking at it, but before his knockout performance of “Caravan” in the Band’s 1978 concert-film “The Last Waltz” directed by Martin Scorcese, he had to be pushed out on stage by his manager Harvey Goldsmith.

When he returned to New York, his relationship with Bert and BANG Records came to a crashing end following two final recording sessions in November and December. One afternoon, when Wassel came to Van’s hotel room, he found the singer completely inebriated, wearing a lampshade and singing Herman’s Hermits “I’m Henry VIII, I Am.” The place was also a wreck. When he asked what happened, Van became antagonistic and menacing, letting out a loose a stream of obscenities. Wassel grabbed Van’s guitar and cracked him over the head with it.

One would think that Wassel would be the one running in fear of retribution, but the incident scared the hell out of Van who soon afterward took Janet and Peter with him to hide out in Boston and for good reason. It was an open industry secret that Bert Berns was about as mobbed up as a music mogul could get. Wassel was a low-level lackey for the Genovese crime family and served most often as the payola bag man for disk jockeys. Another one of Bert’s close friends, who he most likely met through Wassel, was Tommy Eboli, acting caporegime of the family, which specialized in extortion, loan sharking and gambling in New York and New Jersey. When Neil Diamond, Bang’s premier artist, started to break away from the label for more legitimate pastures, Berns allegedly went full mobster by having a stink bomb tossed into the Bitter End during one of Neil’s performances. Whether he ordered it or not, it scared Diamond enough to hide out in Long Island with his wife and two daughters until he could get to Los Angeles and his new label, Universal.

That wasn’t lost on Van and a major reason for his own self-imposed exile. It’s hard to process nowadays that two of the major singer-songwriters of the 1970s were at one time refugees from the Mafia, but it’s true. The heat came off considerably following Bert Berns’ untimely passing on December 30, 1967, at the age of 39 from heart failure. He’d contracted rheumatic fever as a child which caused considerable damage to his heart. During his incredibly stressful and active career in all facets of the music industry, he cheated death a couple of times, but never became health conscious. He smoked like a chimney and his temper became more explosive the more successful he got, so it was only a matter of time.

To Be Born Again

Bert’s young widow Ilene blamed Van for his death and kept the word out on him, but without Bert, the zeal from Wassel and others just wasn’t there. Still, however, she managed to keep any New York studio or venue from welcoming Van out of fear of reprisals. That didn’t stop the singer from honing his repertoire and staying fresh with live performing, which he did in Boston. He formed the Van Morrison Controversy, a completely acoustic venture, featuring local bassist Tom Kielbania and flautist John Payne and developed a revolutionary sound. “Brown Eyed Girl” had left such an indelible mark on contemporary pop music that it wasn’t long before industry producers tracked him down at shows in the Catacombs or the Carousel, but they all left confused. The voice was there, but the sound was so unmarketable and light years away from his hit single, so they walked away.

Still moody and sullen to most people, and clearly affected by his experience with Bert, Van must’ve seemed like St. Therese of Liseux to his new circle of friends compared to anyone from the music industry who darkened his doorstep. One brave soul who ventured up to visit him was Warner Brothers music executive Joe Smith who caught wind of Van’s plight. He loved his voice and thought he’d be a good fit on his family of labels, which was enjoying a hot streak of bold, new talent, including the Grateful Dead, Randy Newman, Joni Mitchell and the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Van had shared a double bill with one of Warner’s biggest artists, the Association, at the Carousel in August 1968, so Smith may have caught wind of his situation from them.

When he met up with Van, he encountered a bitter and angry young man with no love for music executives and it ended with Smith throwing his pen set at the artist as he bolted for the door. But he was a pro and understood the artist’s temperament. He still loved his voice, and all he had to do was sign him and the producers would have to deal with him. First, however, he’d have to square things with the notorious BANG Records. He was able to set up a payoff and a meeting through comedian Don Rickles’ manager Joe Scandore and boldly ventured to a Manhattan warehouse with $20,000 in cash. In the presence of four mafioso bone crushers, Smith signed the agreement, dropped the bag of dough on the floor and walked out with Van Morrison free and clear.

The singer had one obstacle to clear. He still owed BANG’s publishing arm, Web IV, 36 new songs and this is where Van was able to get the final “f-you” to Bert Berns, BANG Records and the whole seedy empire. Sometime in 1968, he strolled into a New York studio, most likely A&R or Century Sounds, and in less than an hour cranked 31 completely unusable garbage songs that have since gone down into fan lore. They were bootlegged for decades until finally being released in 2017 as part of Legacy Recordings’ Van Morrison “Authorized Bang Collection” box set. Most songs were about one minute in length, and each was a dig at Bert, his predicament and his utter disdain for the music industry. It was a nasty final note that perfectly captured Van’s cynicism and wry sense of humor.

There were seven songs that played on Bert’s “Twist and Shout” title like “Twist and Shake,” “Jump and Thump” and “Wobble and Ball,” a few about the nefarious music industry like “The Big Royalty Check” and “Dum Dum George,” which interestingly bore a similar arrangement to his future classic “Madame George” and a couple that just stated his feelings plainly like “Up Your Mind” and “Go for Yourself.” A few personal favorites are “Ring Worm,” “Want a Danish” and “Blowin’ Your Nose,” the latter of which recounted the infamous story about Bert collecting all Van’s BANG recordings and putting them out on an album called “Blowin’ Your Mind,” which had one of the worst covers in pop music history and was done without Van’s knowledge or input. He still hasn’t gotten over it.

Regardless, it put the exclamation point at end of Van Morrison’s business relationship with BANG Records, and, perhaps more importantly, no longer had to look over his shoulder. He never forgot it though and his time with Bert Berns and a few others served as the inspiration for later songs like “Drumshambo Hustle,” “Showbusiness,” “Big Time Operators” and “They Sold Me Out.” He could also now fully focus on his debut album for Warner Brothers. Joe Smith subcontracted Van with the management team of Bob Schwaid and Lewis Merenstein whose Inherit Productions had a contract with Warner Brothers Records.

Merenstein was part of the new breed of rock music producers who spoke the artists’ language and put music before profit. When he went to meet with Van in a small Boston studio and listen to him play, he was sold about 10 seconds into his song “Astral Weeks,” which would become the title of his Warner debut. Much like the Beach Boys’ “Pet Sounds,” “The Velvet Underground & Nico,” and Love’s “Forever Changes,” it made a resounding thud when it was dropped on November 29, 1968, but would go on to become a standard-bearer of the singer-songwriter movement and a fixture on many Rolling Stones and Mojo Top 10 album lists. The lack of chart placement didn’t initially endear him to the Warner brass, but that would change with his follow-up “Moondance” in 1970, which contained the classic title track and others like “Into the Mystic,” “Crazy Love,” “Caravan” and “Come Running,” which got him back into the Top 40.

Too Late To Stop Now

For what it’s worth, I always found Van Morrison’s overt disdain for “Brown Eyed Girl” a bit contrived and somewhat of a put on. It’s almost an impossible song to hate and has produced nearly 200 recorded covers by Second Hand Songs’ numbers. It seems more like it’s Van’s line in the sand to fans who only really know him for that song, and he always preferred being thought of as an artist more than a hitmaker. It’s understandable to an extent. I had the fortune of seeing him in concert at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens, New York back in 2016 and he did perform “Brown Eyed Girl” late in the show. To my amazement, a noticeable number of attendees bolted for the exits once it was finished…and he performed three more numbers and did an encore of “Gloria!”

I believe it also brings Van back to that dark time in his life. His situation with Bert Berns and BANG Records was about as dark as a cloud could get and he actually feared for his life. I’ve often wondered if he and Neil Diamond ever got together and traded Bert stories. All that drama brings with it a certain amount of post-traumatic stress. In the thick of it, Ilene Berns even tried to have Van deported when she learned that her late husband never completed the necessary paperwork required to extend his work visa. It forced a marriage to Janet that ultimately ended in divorce.

But it did seem like it wasn’t all bad. There are plenty of photos of Van in the studio during one of his BANG sessions and he’s smiling and laughing with everybody, and he never seemed like someone who’d smile for the camera just because you told him to. And for a guy so put-off by the “Blowin’ Your Mind” album, in pictures, he seems to be having a pretty good time at its release party. And Van still maintains esteem for Bert as a songwriter. “Here Comes the Night” has always had a place in his concert setlists and in the liner notes he wrote for Legacy’s 2015 “Complete Them” compilation, he was very complimentary towards his old producer’s songwriting abilities.

“I used to like hearing his songs when they were raw,” he wrote. “It had a certain kind of magic.”

One of the greatest joys of my music collecting life has been picking up all of Van Morrison’s albums. I consider him one of the Top 3 incredibly prolific living legends who still release with great frequency. The other two are Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen. To me, Van has been the most consistent of all of them. He’s about to turn 80 and puts out an album every year like clockwork. They may not be of the same caliber of some of his greatest works like “Astral Weeks,” “Veedon Fleece” “Into the Music,” or my personal favorites, “Beautiful Vision” and “Inarticulate Speech of the Heart,” but there’s always a few songs that just grab me and say he’s still got it. Thank you, Scott, for introducing me to him lo those many years ago. We’ve been friends ever since.

Further information

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