Strumming gently on an acoustic guitar, he begins to sing the first of several strange, stark songs he has been recently performing in small venues on the east coast to general disinterest. Now, though, newly signed to Warner Brothers, he was intent on reinvention.
His first solo album - released in 1967, and entitled, in the spirit of the time, Blowin' Your Mind - had yielded another hit, the buoyant 'Brown-Eyed Girl'. In the past few years he had tasted fame as lead singer of Them (dubbed 'Belfast's answer to the Rolling Stones' in the music press), singing on two hit singles, 'Here Comes the Night' and the proto-punk 'Gloria'. Morrison, 23, and already in retreat from pop stardom, stands in the centre of Century Sound Studios in midtown Manhattan. 'People didn't understand him.' Another friend, Billy McAllen, remembered him as being 'a bit strange, a bit weird'.įast forward to 25 September 1968. 'Van was his own master,' his boyhood friend George Jones told biographer Johnny Rogan. Years later, when his Belfast peers recalled the young Morrison, they stressed his solitary nature as well as his eccentricity. A working-class boy from a Protestant neighbourhood, he had left Orangefield school with no academic credentials, and seems to have been an aloof-to-the-point-of-arrogant teenager an only child who never quite shed his sense of aloneness. Though this anecdote may have grown in the telling, it illustrates the adolescent Van Morrison's otherness. He's upstairs in his room writing poetry.' 'Yer man can't play,' he told the other band members. Van's mother, Violet, answered, and after a few seconds of banter Walsh returned to the minibus alone. Once, before a gig in Derry, the band's minibus pulled up outside his house on Hyndford Street, east Belfast and lead singer Alfie Walsh knocked on the door. In the early Sixties the young George Ivan Morrison briefly played saxophone in a Belfast showband called the Olympics.
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