L.A. Weekly

Van Morrison Goes Astral on The Tonight Show



“I need to know that he’s going to do the three-minute-and-50-second version and not some eight-minute version,” says the Tonight Show talent booker moments after Van Morrison storms off the stage during the run-through for last Wednesday afternoon’s taping. The booker — a stern-looking woman in her 40s with curly, dark hair and thigh-high riding boots — is talking to J.R. Rich, a soft-spoken vice president of publicity for Morrison’s distributor, EMI Music, who calmly assures her that this is the first time anything like this has happened on Morrison’s Astral Weeks Live concert tour, which kicked off at the Hollywood Bowl last November and returned to Los Angeles for a three-night stand at the Orpheum last weekend. Along the way, there have been incident-free television appearances by the normally press-shy singer-songwriter on Regis, Jimmy Fallon and CBS Sunday Morning.

Moments earlier, everything seemed to be going smoothly at The Tonight Show, too, as Morrison led his band in a rendition of “Slim Slow Slider,” a song that clocked in at a mere 3:18 on the 1968 Astral Weeks studio recording, but which has been regularly “stretched out” (Morrison’s preferred term for his stream-of-consciousness improvisations) to three times that length during the Astral Weeks Livesets, making it the most radically transformed of the album’s eight tracks. On the surprisingly small Tonight Show stage, Morrison, outfitted in signature Stetson and shades, straps on the white acoustic guitar he has favored during this tour and starts to play, pausing to give a few shorthand directions to the band (“Something missing, man,” “Too much”). But in an effort to conserve his voice, strained by the previous week’s concerts in Berkeley, Morrison doesn’t sing the song full-out, instead whispering a few key lyrics here and there just to keep everyone on track. When he finishes, the show’s floor director says, “I think you should do that the way you’re gonna do it on the show.” To which Morrison replies, “It’s not a song you can rehearse like that,” and then bolts for his upstairs dressing room, where he will remain until the taping.

It’s almost a scene straight out of Morrison’s song “Showbusiness” — one of many he has written about the perils of fame and the music industry — which begins by describing “the man on the TV with the phony smile” and features a chorus in which the subject is asked to “do it just like the last one.” However, there’s nothing phony about Morrison, who rarely smiles at all — certainly never when he doesn’t mean to — and seems driven by a congenital inability to repeat himself. When he steps in front of a crowd, whether the teeming thousands of the Hollywood Bowl or the peaceful few hundred in NBC Studio 3, he seeks to transcend the apparent boundaries of any given song; to achieve a total freedom of form; to take himself, his band and the audience on a journey whose destination is anything but known.

“You get to the next level, where it’s spontaneous, and you get to the level of being, the being level, like being here and now, whatever you want to call it,” Morrison tells me later in his dressing room, where he’s cooling his heels (literally, in the case of a sore foot he has propped on a hassock) in the company of his tour executive producer, Gigi Lee. Meanwhile, Leno and company move on to rehearse a Celebrity Jeopardy parody that will also be part of the show. “Some people call it meditation,” Morrison continues. “I don’t really like that word either. It’s just creating space, really. It’s the next level up.”

Whatever you want to call it, it’s in that meditative space where an unclassifiable give-and-take seems to occur between Morrison, his band and his public; where he instinctively gauges how far into the music they — we — are willing to follow him on any given night, recalibrating midset, even midlyric, at the slightest shifts in the energy of the room. It’s where, when all the stars align, Morrison can seem like the most generous performer who has ever taken to a stage, putting so much of himself into every howl and guttural scat that you fear he might vaporize into thin air. And it’s where Morrison will strip a song we thought we knew down to its component parts and rebuild it — stretch it out — before our very ears, as if he had just figured out how to do so in that very moment, which he very well might have.

That’s not to say that Morrison is incapable of playing a 3:50 version of “Slim Slow Slider” when the occasion calls for it. But what Morrison isn’t is the sort of artist who goes out and plays a song exactly as it sounded on the album. Even the Astral Weeks Live tour, which ostensibly adheres to a more defined template than a typical Morrison show, has proven to be so fluid — with everything from arrangements and song order to the number of musicians in the band changing from one night to the next — that the live album and DVD recorded at the Hollywood Bowl, and released in February, offer only a rough approximation of the shows Morrison has more recently performed in New York, London and Berkeley. The constant has been Morrison himself, who has been playing harder — two hourlong sets a night, separated by an intermission — and more soulfully than he has in years, inviting favorable comparison to the Caledonia Soul Orchestra shows captured on his seminal 1974 live album, It’s Too Late to Stop Now. What’s more, Morrison has rarely seemed to be enjoying himself so much, flashing a broad, toothy grin; cracking up onstage at some unknown private joke at least once per night, usually during “Ballerina”; even occasionally talking to the audience.

“The playing part is okay and the singing part is okay,” Morrison says in typically taciturn fashion back in theTonight Show dressing room, “but the rest of it is pretty much the same thing, having to deal with a lot of people and situations you don’t want to deal with to get this done.” Situations, one assumes, like The Tonight Show itself, where it has now been agreed that the floor director will hold up a cue card during the song to give Morrison a 30-second warning. Not that he ends up needing it. When Morrison finally goes on, following appearances by Tim Allen and Star Trek co-star John Cho, he performs brilliantly, his voice warm and resonant, his fingers strumming the guitar strings violently as he sings the lyric “I start breaking down” — and then, with an almost imperceptible signal to the band, the final chords. Three minutes 50 and not a second more.

There is such a thing as a Van Morrison set list, I discover, when I stop by the next day’s Orpheum sound check, although the neatly typed page of about 20 titles (with a handful of others labeled as “options”) contains several songs that have not been heard at all during the Astral Weeks Live tour and omits several more that Morrison has done at almost every gig. As the band adjourns to dinner, the piano and trumpet player Paul Moran, who has been touring with Morrison for three years now, tells me that the band has to be prepared to play somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 songs at the drop of a hat — or, rather, at a shout from Morrison, who typically calls out the name of the next song he wants to play while the crowd is still applauding the previous one.

“It certainly keeps you on your toes,” adds Jay Berliner, the classically trained guitarist who performed on the original Astral Weeks recording and was “just a little” surprised when Morrison phoned him out of the blue after 40 years to ask if he’d join him on the road. Berliner, a veteran session musician whose very long resumé includes gigs with Jacques Brel and Charles Mingus and three years touring with Harry Belafonte, happily said yes, taking an extended hiatus from his seat in the orchestra of the Broadway revival of Chicago.

Ironically, Berliner says, he barely met Morrison at the 1968 Astral sessions, during which the singer locked himself in the recording booth and only occasionally stuck his head out to give terse instructions to the band. “There was a lot of smoke in the booth — I remember that,” he says with a chuckle. This time around, however, Morrison and Berliner have developed a full-bodied rapport that has been one of the consistent pleasures of the tour, the singer approaching the guitarist multiple times each night and inviting from him imaginative, flamenco-style solos, which, in turn, seem to re-energize Morrison, push him to new heights. Berliner is, in Morrison’s words, someone who “understands what it is, intuitively, and he’s got the background in order to go where he needs to go. As long as you’ve got two or three people who get where you’re going,” he adds, “they can bring the rest along.”

With the Astral Weeks Live tour winding down, Morrison tells me he may take some time off to regroup — something he hasn’t really done since a 1974-76 retreat from the spotlight prompted by his on-again, off-again battle with stage fright. “I’d like to get back to writing — not necessarily songs, just, like, my viewpoints on my experience of being in this, whatever it is,” he says. Does he mean show biz, I ask? “I don’t really know what it is,” he replies. “It’s different things to different people.”

In the meantime, Morrison is electrifying twice more on the Orpheum stage Thursday and Friday (only a flight to Europe prevents me from catching the Saturday show, too). On the first night, he holds forth with a particularly inspired “Sweet Thing” that morphs unexpectedly into the “Burning Ground” track from 1997’s The Healing Game album, making rhythmic knocks on his guitar with his right hand while pressing his harmonica to his lips with his left, singing and knocking and blowing in unison, as if the music were bursting out through his every extremity. Friday, it’s a cover of “Georgia On My Mind” that similarly brings down the house, the song seeming to rise up from so deep inside Morrison that I’m reminded of something he told me during our first interview, in November of last year, about how performing live was akin to baring scars. Which, relatively speaking, makes Morrison’s recent shows something like the concert version of the stigmata.

As Morrison prefaces the Astral Weeks set-closer, “Madame George,” by likening the song to a series of opium-induced hallucinations — “à la Fellini, if you know what I mean” — a couple seated behind me tell me they’ve driven all the way from Tulsa for the three Orpheum concerts and will not go home disappointed. This is the sort of devotion Morrison inspires in his fans and, more often than not, richly rewards. We may come to see him bare his scars, and his soul, but we also come in search of the mysterious healing that he has so often sung about, and which he seems able to find only inside his own music. We come baring our own scars and tattered souls, hopeful that before the curtain falls and the lights go up, that healing will — for him and for us — have begun.
-Scott Foundas

Van Interview On Los Angeles Fox TV Station

Astral Weeks: Live at the Hollywood Bowl DVD Reviews

Kansas City Star
‘Astral Weeks: Live’ is in another zone altogether

I nearly bawled a couple of times while watching “Astral Weeks: Live at the Hollywood Bowl: The Concert Film.”

This is one of the most astoundingly artful live performances I’ve ever seen. Plus, it celebrates an album overflowing with associations for boomers like yours truly.

Being a Van Morrison production, it’s also a tad eccentric. He never acknowledges the fans, never announces the song titles or introduces the members of his band.

We forgive him because Van Morrison is one of the great artists of the last 100 years, a singer and songwriter of such soaring imagination and aesthetic purity that I cannot name his equal.

Morrison’s 1968 album “Astral Weeks” was a landmark, simultaneously blending folk, jazz and blues in a song cycle about transcendence. It was like an encounter between William Blake and Big Joe Turner. It’s hard to believe Morrison was just 23 when he wrote and recorded it.

But while the critics raved, the public was indifferent. Though named one of the great albums of all time on numerous surveys, it took 30 years for it to go gold.

I remember being puzzled by the LP. A few years earlier Morrison had written the rock classic “Gloria” and the previous year had hit the charts with “Brown Eyed Girl.”

But “Astral Weeks” wasn’t anything like those tunes. The songs ebbed and flowed to gently lapping rhythms. Morrison’s lyrics were so cryptic that after three decades of listening I’m still not sure what they are about, yet they remain compelling. And despite the lack of obvious hooks, the songs take root deep in your consciousness.

Last November’s concert does not disappoint. Morrison and a dozen backup musicians (standouts are fiddler Tony Fitzgibbon and David Hayes, whose work on the upright bass gracefully propels each song) perform the cycle’s eight tunes.

Each number starts out sounding more or less like the recording but invariably segues into breathtaking improvisations. The driving force is Morrison’s slurred voice, more an instrument than a vehicle for lyrics. He’ll scat and repeat phrases until they take on hypnotic power.

Each song builds to a breathtaking climax, yet it’s not about volume. It’s about depth and feeling.

Yeah, you could say I liked it.
-ROBERT W. BUTLER

The Oklahoman
Van Morrison was 22 when he released "Astral Weeks,” his second and — up to then — most adventurous solo album. Fans who only knew him for the raw blues-rock of "Gloria” and "Here Comes the Night” and the free-wheeling R&B of "Brown-Eyed Girl” were caught off guard by the centerpiece "Cypress Avenue,” a delicate mix of chamber strings and harpsichord, jazzy acoustic bass and Morrison’s folky-bluesy vocal ruminations on his searching youth in Belfast. Once past the initial surprise, most fans and critics embraced the singer’s new eclecticism and painful honesty, which have remained hallmarks of his work ever since.

But with age, he’s become jazzier and brassier, often prone to extended self-indulgent excursions into meandering, scat-singing, repetitious improvisation. Such treatment works with his later material but tends to stretch many of these once emotionally fragile songs too thin, while rendering others almost unrecognizable. There’s no denying the stellar musicianship filling the Hollywood night on the blues-tinged "Slim Slow Slider” and the joyous, string-laced "Sweet Thing,” but when Morrison keeps repeating in his mush-mouthed mumble that "I believe I’ve transcended” in the long final minutes of the title song, one begins to wonder who he’s trying to convince. And his nearly unintelligible, hopped-up reading of "Cypress Avenue” wrings out all vestiges of its original youthful innocence. Purist admirers of the original work might want to pass on this jam-style update.
-Gene Triplett

Digital Entertainment News
Van Morrison has had a long career, with his second album Astral Weeks being hailed as a classic and one of the greatest ever recorded. The fact that it hasn’t sold phenomenally has not deterred the fanbase, critics, or even the artist himself. Now the whole album is presented in a live format 40 years after its initial release with Van Morrison: Astral Weeks – Live at the Hollywood Bowl: The Concert Film.

Those looking for a faithful reproduction of the album will be disappointed as things are changed around a bit. The spirit of the album is wholly intact, and the changes made are not radical. The mellow songs are still mellow, the bass and piano are still prominent, but the arrangements are given an orchestral lean that wasn’t on the album. The order of the songs is also different as performed from the track listing of the album.

This is all so that Van Morrison can simply present the songs in a way that is interesting to both him and the audience. Retained is the jazz/folk feel that the original album has, but now simply produced live. The Hollywood Bowl is a great venue and helps to produce a great rich live sound. Very little post-production work is necessary, and we get, unlike many other concert recordings, essentially what the audience heard – and in this case saw.

I have two complaints about the DVD. The first is that the whole concert is not presented here. From what I understood, Van Morrison split the evening into two separate concerts, performing about an hour’s worth of hits, then performing the Astral Weeks numbers. We get two “bonus” songs, Common One and Gloria from the other section of the concert, but this is strictly the Astral Weeks album for the most part. The whole thing lasts just over an hour and 20 minutes, less than a full concert.

My other complaint is that the camera moves around too much. While this isn’t an action packed visual spectacle like modern concerts by current bands, mostly just the band standing with their instruments, it would be nice to be able to see the same image for more than 10 seconds at a time. It really wasn’t necessary to keep the handheld cameras in motion or needlessly keep cutting away and zooming in.

For fans of Van Morrison this is an absolute must-see, as it presents one of the musician’s seminal works in a new way that is interesting and engaging. This DVD also presents fans a way to be reintroduced to an early work of the singer that they may have overlooked.
-Daniel Pelfrey

Queen Of The Slipstream Used In Farrah Fawcett Documentary

E Online Farrah Fawcett loves Van Morrison's music.

So much so that the legendary musician filmed his recent shows at L.A.'s Orpheum Theater so he could give copies to Fawcett to watch while she's at home in bed in Malibu.

Morrison's 1987 romantic ballad, "Queen of the Slipstream," is featured in Farrah's Story, Fawcett's documentary about her cancer battle premiering tomorrow night on NBC.

Ryan O'Neal, along with his grandchildren, visited with Morrison backstage after his concert this past Saturday. I'm told the actor and Fawcett have been fans of Morrison since the 1970s.
Van Morrison, Ryan O'Neal Courtesy: Kevin Scanlon f or Listen To The Lion Films

"Van is also a huge fan of Ryan and Farrah's work," says a rep for Morrison, whose new DVD, Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl, is out May 19.

Among his favorites? "Farrah in The Apostle," the rep said, "and Ryan in Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon and, of course, Love Story."

Now Magazine
Farrah Fawcett comforted by Van Morrison

Singer sends Charlie's Angels star his concert tapes

Farrah Fawcett has been watching tapes of her favourite musician performing while she battles cancer.

The actress, 62, is a huge fan of Van Morrison and his romantic ballad Queen Of The Slipstream even features in her new 2-hour documentary.

To make up for the fact that Farrah couldn't attend his recent shows at LA's Orpheum Theatre, the singer, 63, had the concerts filmed for her.

Van even met her long-term partner Ryan O'Neal, 68, backstage at his gig last Saturday to pass on his best wishes.

'Van is a huge fan of Ryan and Farrah's work,' confirms his rep.

Poll Results: Next Van Album You Like To See Live

With 485 votes, here are the results of the next Van album you want to see performed live. Thanks to all that voted.

Veedon Fleece (30%)

No Guru, No Method, No Teacher (24%)

Into The Music (23%)

Hymns To The Silence (21%)

Moondance (15%)

St Dominic's Preview (13%)

Common One (10%)

Avalon Sunset (7%)

Other (Various Albums) (7%)

Hard Nose To The Highway (6%)

Wavelength (5%)

Beautiful Vision (5%)

09-May-09 Los Angeles Concert Review

Setlist:
Northern Muse(Solid Ground)
Wild Night
Moondance
Have I Told You Lately
Help Me
Georgia
It's All In the Game
And the Healing Has Begun
Caravan
Brown Eyed Girl
Astral Weeks
Beside You
Slim Slow Slider
Sweet Thing
Cyprus Avenue
The Way Young Lovers Do
Ballerina
Madame George
Listen to the Lion
Gloria

08-May-09 Los Angeles Concert Review

Matt has this review:
It was truly spectacular. He opened on piano again with Solid Ground and the crowd quickly got into it. It was a nice little venue, only about 2,000 seats. I was sixth row, right center, seated next to Tom Quinn, who has attended every show on the AW tour. Highlights of the opening set included Georgia, Help Me and And The Healing Has Begun. I thought Caravan was only average but he really ramped it up with Help Me and And The Healing Has Begun. Through the night he played piano, sax and harmonica on several songs, and guitar on nearly all of them. It was a full two hours of music, maybe a little more. As has been the case with most of the opening sets on this tour, Van closed on a high note with Common One. It's always a crowd-pleaser because of the interaction between Van and Richie Buckley, who again did a great job keeping up with Van.

I thought the second set -- Astral Weeks -- was definitely better than the Astral Weeks set in November at the Hollywood Bowl, which I thought at the time was outstanding. You can see that he and the band are more in sync, each band member more confident with his/her role in the shows. Van was interacting with the other musicians a lot more than he had been six months earlier, especially with Berliner, and it obviously is having a positive effect on all the players. But most notable to me last night was Van's voice, as Boom pointed out. I am amazed at how strong his voice is right now, especially since he's been on the road for six months. But his voice was better last night than it was six months ago at the Bowl, holding notes longer, hitting higher notes and really expanding his range in many instances.

Slim Slow Slider was magical. Van was beating on his guitar and firing up the entire band. Sweet Thing was far better than the version played in the Hollywood Bowl show(s). Both Sweet Thing and Madame George were closer to the original album versions, very focused and intense. And Ballerina was especially good last night, very passionate and personal. But, again, Madame George may have been the real highlight of the evening for me. It didn't go on as long as the version he played in November, but Van was really into it and seemed to demand the same from the band and the crowd -- just awesome. And even though they have become regular fare on this tour, Listen to the Lion and Gloria still come off as fresh and inspired, both outstanding last night. The band was really feeling it by then and came through with lively performances in those final two songs. I think I have seen Van about 12 times over the last 23 years (I know, that's nothing compared to most listers) and this was the best. Last night's was just a stellar show and it was great meeting up with so many listers at Casey's Irish Pub before the show.

Here's to another night of beautiful music...

-Matt

Setlist:
Northern Muse/Solid Ground
Troubadours
Queen of the Slipstream
Moondance
Help Me
It's All In the Game
Caravan
I Can't Stop Loving You
Georgia
And the Healing Has Begun
Common One
Astral Weeks/Aryan Mist
Beside You
Slim Slow Slider
Sweet Thing
Cyprus Avenue
The Way Young Lovers Do
Ballerina
Madame George
Listen to the Lion
Mystic Eyes/Gloria

07-May-09 Los Angeles Concert Review

Live Daily
Rather than taking a victory lap to celebrate his reclamation of his earliest masterpiece, "Astral Weeks," Van Morrison [ tickets ] is digging deeper into the 40-year-old album's maze of openings, lush walkways and scenic vistas. His performance Thursday (5/7) on the first of three nights at the Orpheum Theater, about eight miles from where he recorded "Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl" in November, found the Belfast Cowboy engaged and caring, not just about the material, but the dynamics of the presentation as well.

Veteran acts have found anniversaries provide an excellent marketing hook to revisit classic works that, for a multitude of reasons, never were heard live. Most notably, Brian Wilson did it with "Pet Sounds" and The Zombies with "Odessey & Oracle," but in Morrison's case it's a return to his earliest solo experiment. "Astral Weeks" is a gateway for him to reconnect with a portion of his past that has not been rehashed over and over. The concert is an exploration of his open-ended melange of jazz, blues, folk and beat poetry in the manner in which it was created.

The openness of "Astral Weeks," released in 1968 but never followed up with a tour, would influence "Moondance" and some future albums, but the expansiveness of the material, the lyrics presented as incantations and the striking interplay between acoustic rhythm guitar and upright bass would never be repeated so thoroughly.
For the Hollywood Bowl shows, Morrison went for a nearly identical re-creation of the album, and the resulting live album, released on Listen to the Lion Records, confirms the reports that Morrison put on a show for the ages on those nights.

The second go-round opens the doors for Morrison to expand a bit, find spots to growl, repeat a few more phrases or let the music linger while the violist or one of the guitarists stretches out for a few bars. "Slim Slow Slider," with the previously unrecorded "I Start Breaking Down" added as a coda, was the third song in the set and the first one Morrison attacked with vigor. The band followed his signals impeccably, rising and dropping out when he thrust his arm through the air, allowing the song to unfold rather than drape, his mumbles, whispers and shouts marrying perfectly with the ambling melody. He followed with a deliciously emphatic "Sweet Thing" and an elegant "Cyprus Avenue," complete with harpsichord.

"Astral Weeks" was performed with the same 10-member band that appears on the new album, with the guitarist from the initial session, Jay Berliner, seated up front alongside Morrison.

The group expands to 14 in the first half of the show and on the finale, "Listen to the Lion." While it's only three extra musicians, it ensures that "Listen to the Lion" has a climatic push; the music swells and informs the audience that this has been a journey, not one that makes a whole lot of sense lyrically, but one that concludes on a peak with majestic views. It's visceral and enthralling.

The finale provides a contrast to the rest of "Astral Weeks" as well, enhancing the perception that Morrison is relishing the depth of field being explored. We've all felt bands driving through their material; this is rare instance of an act burrowing underground. The layering of instruments, the counterpoint and contrasts--Morrison's jazz sensibilities are intact. He has ensured that there is an airiness to the music, that Miles Davis quality wherein the notes not played can be just as significant as the ones that are.

The performance's 12-song first half, which had its pluses and minuses, shared many of the qualities of the last several Morrison tours, in which he brings together instruments from his jazz band (assembled in 2003 for "What's Wrong With this Picture?") country unit ("Pay the Devil" in 2006) and R&B-and-then-some act (last year's "Keep It Simple").

The larger ensemble dipped into a bag of obscurities--"Northern Muse (Solid Ground)" from 1982's "Beautiful Vision," "Troubadours" from 1979s' "Into the Music" and "Queen of the Slipstream" from 1987's "Poetic Champions Compose"--in addition to several of his classics. "Caravan" received a "Last Waltz"-inspired treatment; "Moondance" continues to be performed in a swing band style; and despite "Wild Night" and "And It Stoned Me" making it into the set, both were given half-baked performances.

Morrison was prodding his band in the early-going, and it paid off with a passionate reading of the 50-year-old pop classic "It's All in the Game." Evening closed with the inevitable "Gloria," but he shook things up a bit by having the band play another gem from his days in Them, "Mystic Eyes," during the intro.
-Phil Gallo

Setlist:
Solid Ground
Troubadours
Stoned Me
Wild Night
Caravan
Queen of the Slipstream
Help Me
I Can't Stop Loving You
Moondance
It's All In the Game/You Know What They're Writing About
And The Healing Has Begun
Common One/Town Called Paradise
Astral Weeks
Slim Slow Slider
Sweet Thing/Burning Ground
Cyprus Avenue
The Way Young Lovers Do
Ballerina
Madame George
Listen to the Lion
Mystic Eyes/Gloria

Van To Perform on The Tonight Show 06-May-09

From Van's website:

Don't miss Van Morrison performing live on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno - 6th May 2009!

03-May-09 Berkeley Concert Review

Pat & Mary's Review:

The ever punctual Van didn’t walk onstage until 7:40 PM , which was a good thing as most people were still coming into the theatre and locating their seats. The weather was great and the threat of rain was over for the evening. There were plenty of empty seats, and it was surprising that Van didn’t sell out in the Bay Area as he usually does.

Van came out, sat down at the piano, and played “Northern Muse.” The band was tight and Van’s voice was in great shape. He progressed through his set directing the musicians and singing his songs. Van and the band pulled the audience in and gave them a little bit more with each tune. One song that stands out was “Caravan,” and it was the string section that made it special. Whoever thought strings on this song would be a great accompaniment is a genius. Van had the crescendo and decrescendo going throughout the evening. The hoots and the hollers of the audience during the really quiet parts of the songs were a bit irritating, as you wanted to hear where Van was taking the music. Overall, the first set was outstanding and the band had it going throughout the entire set.

After a brief 15 minute intermission, the Astral Weeks set was announced. Van had changed into a black leather jacket, picked up the guitar and sang his heart out for the rest of the evening. He seemed to enjoy the Astral Weeks songs. He had not spoken a word to the audience all night, and right before “Madam George” he started telling a story about the meaning of the song. He went on to explain that the young protagonist was given something to ingest, unaware that it contained opium. He was very animated during this part, and even hit himself on the side of the head. Unlike his normal ramblings and mumblings, the audience could actually understand what he was saying. He closed out the evening with “Listen to the Lion,” “Mystic Eyes,” and “Gloria.” At this point, you could see the taillights of the limo backing up to the left side of the stage for Van. He walked offstage singing while the band played out to a loud applause. A big hand for Van and the band!

Setlist:
Northern Muse(Solid Ground)
Troubadours
Stoned Me
I Can't Stop Loving You
Moondance
Help Me
Queen of the Slipstream
Caravan
It's All In The Game
And the Healing Has Begun
Common One
Astral Weeks
Beside You
Slim Slow Slider
Sweet Thing
The Way Young Lovers Do
Cypus Avenue
Ballerina
Madame George
Listen To The Lion
Mystic Eyes/Gloria

02-May-09 Berkeley Concert Review

Mercury News
It looked like it would be a miserable night for a “Moondance.”

The wet weather, however, managed to dry up in time for the opening night of the UC Greek Theatre’s 2009 concert series, and all the fans who carted rain ponchos and umbrellas to the Berkeley venue on Saturday never had to use them.

Perhaps the threat of rain was one of the reasons why so many stayed away from the event – only a half-full house turned out to the 8,500-capacity open-air theater to see the first of two nights with rock legend Van Morrison.

Or, maybe, it was the exorbitant ticket prices, which topped out at $350 per stub.

The third plausible reason is that the occasion – the chance to see a live performance of Morrison’s most highly cherished record, 1968’s “Astral Weeks” – wasn’t quite the draw that promoters had hoped. The album is generally regarded by critics as one of rock’s all-time finest, but its sales numbers aren’t nearly as elite. It did, after all, take some 33 years before “Astral Weeks” would move enough copies to achieve gold certification (500,000-plus in sales).

Sales numbers don’t tell the story of how much this glorious song cycle, Morrison’s second solo record, means to die-hard fans. It’s not the album that produced his best-known hits – indeed, only one “Astral Weeks” track, “Sweet Thing,” would make it onto “The Best of Van Morrison” – but it is the one that most fully captures the singer’s highly individual mix of Celtic, rock, folk and jazz sounds. It’s a work that, even today, most people have difficulty in trying to classify – it’s just pure Van, at the height of his powers.

The Belfast Cowboy certainly did this material justice in concert, but he’d make fans wait until the second set before opening the book on “Astral Weeks.”

Backed by a 14-piece band, which included two percussionists, backing vocalists and a string section, the 63-year-old former Bay Area resident spent the first hour of the show reeling through the years. He performed the first number, “Northern Muse,” while seated at the Steinway piano, then moved to the microphone at center stage and began slurring out the words to some of his greatest hits, including “And It Stoned Me,” “Baby Please Don’t Go,” “Wild Night” and “Moondance.”

Morrison’s typically eclectic mix of musical flavors tilted in the first set to the country side, something the star explored at length on 2006’s “Pay the Devil,” with plenty of fiddle and some slide guitar rising to the top.

It took Morrison a while to warm up on this cold night, and the songs that came later in the set were much stronger – more alive, if you will – then what was heard early on.

Fortunately, he was good and ready by the time it came to delve into “Astral Weeks,” which the band did after coming back from a 20-minute break.

Those looking for a note-for-note, or even lyric-by-lyric, re-creation of the milestone would’ve have better served to stay home and listen to the record. Morrison went the other direction and grabbed onto what, at essence, made “Astral Weeks” such an amazing work – the sense that the star was leading the listener on a very personal musical exploration, one built on pure feeling more so than licks, riffs and melodies.

It was impossible to say how much of the mix was pure lyrical stream of consciousness, as opposed to premeditated, or to what degree improvisation factored in, although Morrison was visibly active in leading the band through changes that the players apparently weren’t expecting. One way or the other, the balancing act worked wondrously as Morrison made all eight of these tracks –and especially “Cypress Avenue” and “Ballerina” – feel exciting in fashions both familiar and new.

For those who missed Saturday’s concert, or the repeat on Sunday, think about picking up “Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl.” That newly released set, recorded late last year at one of Los Angeles’ most fabled venues, provides a good picture of what some local fans had the good fortune to experience in person.
-Jim Harrington

The SF Chronicle
Van Morrison's transcendent 'Astral' at Greek

"Astral Weeks," one of rock's most revered masterpieces, never made the Billboard Hot 100. Regardless of an epic, five-star Rolling Stone review by Greil Marcus, the record took eight years before it passed 100,000 in sales.

But Van Morrison's luminous second album has hung over his shoulder ever since. The idea that he would perform the entire album, sealing its stature as a set piece within his body of work and galvanizing the album's lofty reputation, seemed entirely improbable.

Yet there he was, under the cool, gray skies at UC Berkeley's Greek Theatre on Saturday, in the first of two weekend shows, belting "step right up, step right up, step right up," recreating the lithe, elusive sound of the original album and investing it with the power of the immediacy of live performance.

Based around light, airy arrangements for flute and two acoustic guitars that left plenty of room for the musicians to stretch out underneath Morrison's rambling narratives, "Astral Weeks" would be an especially difficult album to recreate in a concert environment. But Morrison and his 14-piece ensemble made the songs sound fresh and spontaneous, as the unwieldy orchestra proved light on its feet, taking cues from hand signals and quick nods by Morrison, who was calling plays from the line of scrimmage all evening.

He jiggered the running order of the album - shifting "Madame George" to close the set makes perfect emotional and musical sense - and let the songs run like streams of music, playing them practically end-to-end. With guitarist Jay Berliner from the original sessions winding lyrical lines into the mix, the songs rose and fell on simmering grooves, sweetened by a four-piece string section. Morrison, playing the third acoustic guitar in the band, could pump the engine of the band by stroking his guitar.

He opened with a 50-minute set that drew from throughout his catalog - from the Mississippi Delta blues of "Baby Please Don't Go" of his Them days to the big band R&B of "Magic Time," Morrison topping the swinging sound with a piercing alto sax solo. His voice warmed up and he attacked the '50s ballad "It's All In the Game," long a part of his repertoire, like a bebop horn soloist, carving jazzy little figures out of phrases such as "caress your fingertips" or "once in a while he won't call." By the time he returned for the 45-minute "Astral Weeks" performance, his voice was full of bluster and blare - rich, resonant.


The "Astral Weeks" songs explode with passion and intensity, with Morrison not feeling the need to spell everything out. The juxtaposition of his brawny bluesman's vocal style with the heart of a mystic poet has been his signature since these songs. They provided him with a basic template he has been improvising from for the past 40 years and they pushed the rock music movement further into the literary realm than it had previously been. These are not easy, simple songs, but pieces that gave the whole idea of pop music greater meaning.
-Joel Selvin

Setlist:
Northern Muse (Solid Ground)
Troubadours
And It Stoned Me
Baby Please Don't Go
Magic Time
Have I Told You Lately
Wild Night
It's All In The Game
Queen of the Slipstream
Moondance
And the Healing Has Begun
Common One
Astral Weeks
Beside You
Slim Slow Slider
Sweet Thing
The Way Young Lovers Do
Cypus Avenue
Ballerina
Madame George
Listen To The Lion
Mystic Eyes/Gloria

Ann Vansickler Bock

One of our beloved friends, and my darling wife Ann, known to some as annvanfan....has passed on.
She died peacefully in her sleep suddenly Thursday, of heart failure at the age of 53.
She was the most warm, generous, loving person you would ever want to meet and call your friend
Ann's beloved husband and friend and TRUE soulmate,
-Heshy

It was a mutual love of Van's music that brought Ann and Heshy together. We, in the Van fan community, are all so saddened by Ann's passing and we send you all of our condolences and love, Heshy.
-John

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