Van Morrison

Van Morrison was born George Ivan Morrison on August 31, 1945, in Bloomfield, a working-class part of east Belfast, Northern Ireland. His father kept an enormous record collection of blues, jazz, and gospel imports, an unusual thing for the neighborhood at the time, and that collection gave the young Morrison an early, deep exposure to American roots music well before he picked up an instrument himself.

He left school as a teenager to play in Belfast showbands, working the local circuit before forming Them in 1964. The band scored UK and US hits, including “Gloria” and “Here Comes the Night,” the latter written and produced by Bert Berns^[10], but Morrison grew frustrated with the band’s management and internal turnover, and Them effectively dissolved after a rocky 1966 US tour^[1].

Berns, who by then had launched his own label, Bang Records, lured Morrison back to New York in early 1967 to record as a solo artist^[10]. Over two days that March, Morrison cut the batch of songs that produced his breakout single “Brown Eyed Girl,” only to discover that Bang had quietly stitched the session into a full album, Blowin’ Your Mind!, released without his input or approval^[2]. The arrangement soured further when Berns died suddenly of a heart attack in December 1967, leaving Morrison in a contract dispute with Berns’ widow that dragged on for years and, by some accounts, left him owing new recordings to the label as part of the eventual settlement^[8][7].

That turbulent, exploitative introduction to the American music business shaped Morrison’s guarded, often prickly relationship with the industry for the rest of his career, and it is frequently cited as the root of his reluctance to discuss his own biggest hit or to trust label executives generally^[7][8]. He nonetheless used the Bang chapter as a launching point, signing with Warner Bros. shortly after and channeling the wreckage of the period into Astral Weeks in 1968, the record that established him as one of the most distinctive songwriters of his generation.

That fresh start took Morrison to Cambridge, Massachusetts in early 1968, where he lived on Green Street and worked out the meditative, largely improvised sound of what became Astral Weeks during a handful of shows at a small club called the Catacombs, backed by bassist Tom Kielbania and flautist John Payne^[9]. By his bandmates' accounts it was a turbulent period, marked by money disputes with club owners and late, chaotic nights, but it led to an audition for producer Lewis Merenstein, who brought Morrison to New York to record the album at Century Sound Studios that September and October^[8].

Astral Weeks was largely ignored commercially on its November 1968 release, but its reputation grew over the following decade through critics such as Lester Bangs, who later called it the rock record of the most significance in his own life, and it eventually reached gold certification and is now regularly ranked among the greatest albums ever made^[8]. Its centerpiece, "Cyprus Avenue," draws on the real, tree-lined street of that name in Morrison's native Belfast, not far from his childhood home on Hyndford Street, and on his grandmother Joy, who lived in the area and is believed to have partly inspired another song on the album, "Madame George"^[6][7][10].