Van Morrison: Enemy of the State!!!

I’ll be honest with you. I haven’t gotten a new Van Morrison album since… 1992?
I had to look that up. It would’ve been Hymns to the Silence, his 1991 album.

Hymns to the Silence was Van’s last gasp at relevancy. (You can probably guess, this is not going to be a very complementary article.)
It came at the tail end of his Zen Buddhism phase, before he segued into his Irish Jazzman/Keeper of The Blues phase.

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve listened to plenty of Van Morrison albums since then.
Van has always been one of my musical guideposts, if not one of my moral guideposts.

I own Moondance, Astral Weeks, Tupelo Honey, Wavelength, and Into The Music, and count them among my many treasures.
He is the most spiritual of songwriters/singers I know, and I’ve always cited him (along with Ricki Lee Jones) as an example of how music can actually transport you, take you from one state of mind to another.

Moondance is a joyful, brilliant work of art, one of my Top Five.
The title song from Astral Weeks is a mystical, spiritual meditation like nothing else.
There is no musician like him.

But as a person? What a pain in the ass.

Now, I don’t know him.
But if you’ve read any of the accounts of him – as in Ryan H. Walsh’s incredible Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968 – you know that “temperamental” is a gentle way of describing him.

If you’ve ever bought a ticket to his show, you know what a gamble that is.
It’s a crapshoot whether you’re going to get a masterful séance, or if you’re blowing your hard-earned cash to see him walk off the stage halfway through, or do an entire performance without once even recognizing the audience.

A common review is, “He didn’t say a word to the crowd, the whole night, except at the encore. At the end of ‘Brown-Eyed Girl,’ he waved behind him, saying, ‘The band…’ as he walked offstage.”

Well, as it turns out, Van misses playing for us.

Like a lot of musicians, Van is just trying hard to make this whole thing work out.
Like a lot of musicians, he misses the thrill of playing for a crowd.
Like a lot of musicians, he’s had his last remaining pipeline of income (touring) choked off.

So he decided to take things into his own hands.

Despite being a constant presence in the ‘60s and ‘70s, Van was never much of a protest singer.
I can’t think of a single protest song (other than protesting his mistreatment by the record companies).
He was busy singing about “making love in the green grass,” or “sailing into the mystic”.

Until now.

The thing that’s got him riled up is this Covid-19 deal.
He’s been playing a few “socially-distanced” concerts in England since the lockdown, but that wasn’t cutting it.

“We need to be playing to full capacity audiences going forward,” he wrote in an open letter on his web site, earlier his month.

“I call on my fellow singers, musicians, writers, producers, promoters and others in the industry to fight with me on this. Come forward, stand up, fight the pseudo-science and speak up.”

Van’s open letter has been reported by several news outlets, but for some reason it has been removed from his web site.

So, it was time to take the fight into the studio.

He went in with three new songs, all written in protest.
In case you didn’t get his point, the titles are, “Born to Be Free” (released Sept 24), “As I Walked Out” (to be released Oct 9), and “No More Lockdown” (to be released Oct 23).

The lyrics – what we know of them so far– are hilariously blunt.
He starts innocently enough on “Born to Be Free”:

“The birds in the trees/Know something we can’t see/’Cause they know we were born to be free”

Harmless enough. Sweet, even.

Then he drops the gloves:

“Don’t need the government cramping my style/Give them an inch and they take a mile/Take you in with a phony smile/Wouldn’t you agree?”

Who was writing this? The Tea Party?

I’m not quite sure what he’s trying to say with his chorus:

“The New Normal is not normal/It’s no kind of normal at all/
Everyone seems to have amnesia/Just trying to remember the Berlin Wall”

There you have it: Keeping your citizens safe equates to Communist Russia trapping half of Germany behind The Berlin Wall.
In Van World.

Here’s the funny thing: “Born to Be Free” is actually a pretty cool-sounding song.

Musically, it bounces down the road happily, with a friendly country guitar riding along in the backseat. Female singers jump in with nice, perky backing harmonies on the chorus.
It could be something that fit nicely on his Tupelo Honey album.  

But those lyrics…

Evidently, they’re tame compared to the fire and brimstone of “No More Lockdown”.

The BBC got ahold of those, and gave us a preview:

“No more lockdown/No more government overreach
No more fascist bullies/Disturbing our peace
No more taking of our freedom/And our God-given rights
Pretending it’s for our safety/When it’s really to enslave”

Again, one has to wonder… Are those lyrics written by Ted Cruz? Or Rand Paul?

As Jonathan Bernstein noted in his hilarious article in Rolling Stone, Van’s been whining in song for a long time now, especially as he gets older.

The song titles are a tip-off: “Why Must I Always Explain”, “I’m Not Feeling It Anymore”, “They Sold Me Out”, “How Can a Poor Boy”….
As Bernstein points out, his “crotchety rant-songs” used to be aimed at the music industry.

Now it’s getting dangerous.

Northern Ireland Health Minister Robin Swann said as much, even as he found it uncomfortable to criticize a national Irish treasure, “I don’t know where he gets his facts. I know where the emotions are on this, but I will say that sort of messaging is dangerous.”

Of course, Van’s not the only musician who took things into his own hands:
Smashmouth played for the biker gathering in Sturgis ND, leading to a spike in cases across the Midwest.
Oasis’ Noel Gallagher refuses to wear a “pointless” mask.
The Stone Roses’ Ian Brown proudly tweeted, “No lockdown, no tests, no tracks, no masks, no vax.”
The Chainsmokers got in trouble for their concert in The Hamptons.
Leave it to Jason Isbell – one of the good guys, trying hard to entertain his fans from home – to throw the best shade, at budding country singer Chase Rice, who held an ill-advised concert in June.
All of them put their fans at risk.

Look, Van – I get it.
I hear the same thing from gym owners, bar owners, hairstylists… We’re all just trying to survive.
We’re all tired of being inside.

But when you start throwing around terms like “pseudo-science,” or “fascist,” or “enslave,” you lose me.
You may have been knighted – but that doesn’t make you a great statesman. Or a scientist.

Just to be clear: I am not questioning Sir Van Morrison’s right to free speech.
He has every right to state his opinion on the Coronavirus pandemic, or the government’s handling of it.
Just like I have every right to say that he’s a doddering old fool.

Even if he did create some of the greatest music of my lifetime.