40th Anniversary of Moondance
Van Morrison's legendary album, Moondance, was release today, February 28, 1970. 40 years ago. It was a follow up to his classic Astral Weeks. Unlike Astral Weeks, however, Moondance was a commercial success and established Van as a major artist. It peaked at #29 on Billboard's Pop Albums chart.
The single released was Come Running with Crazy Love as the B-side, which peaked at #39 on the Pop Singles chart. Crazy Love was only released as a single in Holland and did not chart. Moondance, as a single was not released until 1977 and peaked at #92.
Your Favorite Songs On Moondance
Into The Mystic (54%)
Caravan (35%)
And It Stoned Me (26%)
Crazy Love (21%)
Moondance (20%)
Brand New Day (12%)
These Dreams Of You (10%)
Glad Tidings (9%)
Come Running (7%)
Everyone (5%)
Your Thoughts:
I mentioned a while back that Moondance was the highest selling performer/sole producer abum of the 1970s. Jimmy Page had co-produced a couple of Led Zep efforts and Mike Nesmith and a cast of thousands (well, several) produced some Monkees' discs, but Moondance outsold all others where the performer produced it on his own.
Thanks for raking up the memories. Sweet.
Cheers
-Jez
Reviews
Rolling Stone
Long ago, Van Morrison reached that point where the influences on his music no longer mattered. It is as pointless to attempt to detect those influences as it would be for any musician to try to imitate him.
Van Morrison's music cannot really be imitated, because, as with Dylan's music, what one hears is not style, but personality. With each record -- Them Again, Astral Weeks, or Moondance -- one gets a sense that Van has achieved some ancient familiarity with his band and with his songs; no matter how the music changes, the long inventions of Van's singing, his full command of the musicians that play with him, and the striking imagination of a consciousness that is visionary in the strongest sense of the word, creat an atmosphere that instantly sets its own terms. Morrison's powers are clear: his strong gift for melody, his ability to move freely within virtually any sort of contemporary instrumentation, his verbal magic as inventive and literate as Dylan's, and most of all, the authenticity of his spirit.
Moondance is his first album in over a year. Unlike Van's masterful Astral Weeks, this one will be immensely popular; Van's picture already fills the windows of record stores and his new music is getting more airplay on FM stations than anything in recent memory.
Van's new album might send one back to the bright enthusiasm of "Brown-Eyed Girl" and the magic blues of Them Again; Van now sings with a magnetically full electric band, complete with piano, organ, vibes, and intricately controlled saxophones and flute. The band's performance has a stately brilliance; and if it recaptures some of the feeling of the earlier music, the past is serving as a rite of passage toward the celebrations of Moondance.
Van opens with "And It Stoned Me," a tale of boys out for a day's freedom, standing in the rain with eyes and mouths open, heads bent back: "Oh, the water, let it run all over me..." The sensuality of this song is overpowering, communicated with a classical sort of grace. "And it stoned me/To my soul/Stoned me just like jelly roll..." There is no strain for meaning in Van's words or in his voice. "Let it run all over me..." -- you feel the exhilaration almost with a sense of astonishment. The band, playing subtle, gentle rock and roll, surrounds the singer; here, as everywhere on Moondance, the horn arrangements are absolutely exquisite, as eloquent as a sermon in a backwoods chapel.
With "Caravan" one might begin to remember the early Impressions: the instantaneous aura of fantasy and desire that Curtis Mayfield created for "Gypsy Woman" tumbles down again as a fanfare on piano and the roll of drums and guitar open a composition of seductive grandeur. "Caravan" is a strange song; the images are easily real and the music is profoundly comforting, yet there's the edge of a story here that fades without ever revealing all it has to tell. "Now the caravan has all friends/Yes, they'll stay with me until the end...Gypsies...tell me all I need to know..." Woven between the fragments and framed by the textures of the horn with blazing imagination: "Turn up your radio/And let me/Hear the song/Turn on your electric light/So we can get down/To what is really wrong." The singer moves from the gypsy campfire to his lover and back again, with a lovely sort of affection. Van's singing is pure expression, pure sound; the band moves off and then forward again. A graceful soprano saxophone holds notes behind Van's words: "Now, the caravan is painted red and white/That means everyone is staying overnight..."
"It's a good thing he doesn't have much stage presence," said a friend after watching Van perform this song. "Otherwise it'd be too much to take."
"Into the Mystic" is the heart of Moondance; the music unfolds with a classic sense of timing, guitar strums fading into watery notes on a piano, the bass counting off the pace. The lines of the song and Morrison's delivery of them are gorgeous: "I want to rock your gypsy soul/Just like in the days of old/And magnificently we will fold/Into the mystic." The transcendent purity of the imagery seems to turn endlessly, giving back one's own reflection. Van's more abstract songs are mosaics of brilliantly chosen metaphors -- ambiguous and instantly recognizable. Morrison communicates directly even when he is most obscure; his visions have power, and the ambiguity of those visions is always unified by the sympathy of the music -- there is no "backup band" on Moondance any more than there is an "Lay Lady Lay." Something's been made; it stands, it won't be broken down.
Perhaps "Glad Tidings," which ends Moondance, is the song that most makes one want to come back to this album without even thinking about it. "Glad Tidings" is a vital, leaping promenade through the streets of the town; fast, clean rock and roll moves it along as striking horns guide the song, until they cue the chorus into an explosion of real joy: "Yeah, we'll send you glad tidings/From New York/DO DO DO DOOT DO DO/Open up your eyes that you may see/DO DO DO DOOT DO DO/Ask you not to read between the lines/Hoping that you come right in on time."
Moondance is an album of musical invention and lyrical confidence; the strong moods of "Into the Mystic" and the fine, epic brilliance of "Caravan" will carry it past many good records we'll forget in the next few years. Van Morrison plays on.
- Greil Marcus and Lester Bangs, Rolling Stone, 3/19/70.
Billboard
His Astral Weeks album was overlooked by the charts and praised as the aesthetic success of '69 throughout the underground. Morrison's new masterpiece should cure the public of its previous oversight with a more commercial entry, still rich with the soul/folk nuances of this sensitive lrish song surrealist. "Stoned Me," "Caravan" and "These Dreams of You" should bring this unique musical personality to rock and folk lovers.
- Billboard, 1970.
Christgau's Record Guide
An album worthy of an Irish r&b singer who wrote a teen hit called "Mystic Eyes" (not to mention a Brill Building smash called "Brown Eyed Girl"), adding punchy brass (including pennywhistles and foghorn) and a solid backbeat (including congas) to his folk-jazz swing, and a pop-wise formal control to his Gaelic poetry. Morrison's soul, like that of the black music he loves, is mortal and immortal simultaneously; this is a man who gets stoned on a drink of water and urges us to turn up our radios all the way into (that world again) the mystic. Visionary hooks his specialty.
-Robert Christgau
John Tobler
Van Morrison's 1968 LP Astral Weeks had made him a cult hero. But Moondance was his first U.S. Top 30 album, and also his first to go platinum.
Morrison was living in Woodstock's rural paradise when he wrote many of these songs, although he left the area following the influx of people after the celebrated festival. Some of the musicians he assembled for the album remained with him for several years, including guitarist John Platania, horn player Jack Schroer, and Jeff Labes on keyboards.
Moondance showcases Van Morrison as a masterly songwriter and charismatic vocalist. In contrast to the acoustic Astral Weeks, the sound is bigger, meatier, with a horn section to add punch; the songs are more tightly structured, less improvisatory. The first side of the LP is almost perfect. "And It Stoned Me" paints a vignette of adolescence with a storyteller's eye for detail, while the smoky, jazz-infused title track remains one of Morrison's best-loved songs. Ethereal sailor's ballad "Into The Mystic" is a moving meditation on the splendor of love; the shivering strings are a wonderfully appropriate complement to his vocals. Elsewhere, a celebratory air, bordering on spiritual joy, haunts many of the tracks -- witness the closing trio of "Brand New Day," "Everyone," and "Glad Tidings."
Helen Reddy had a 1971 U.S. hit with "Crazy Love," while Johnny Rivers' version of "Into The Mystic" charted in 1970. Van himself had a U.S. Top Forty hit with "Come Running." His solo career was on the rise.
- John Tobler, 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, 2005.
Reviews
Rolling Stone
Long ago, Van Morrison reached that point where the influences on his music no longer mattered. It is as pointless to attempt to detect those influences as it would be for any musician to try to imitate him.
Van Morrison's music cannot really be imitated, because, as with Dylan's music, what one hears is not style, but personality. With each record -- Them Again, Astral Weeks, or Moondance -- one gets a sense that Van has achieved some ancient familiarity with his band and with his songs; no matter how the music changes, the long inventions of Van's singing, his full command of the musicians that play with him, and the striking imagination of a consciousness that is visionary in the strongest sense of the word, creat an atmosphere that instantly sets its own terms. Morrison's powers are clear: his strong gift for melody, his ability to move freely within virtually any sort of contemporary instrumentation, his verbal magic as inventive and literate as Dylan's, and most of all, the authenticity of his spirit.Moondance is his first album in over a year. Unlike Van's masterful Astral Weeks, this one will be immensely popular; Van's picture already fills the windows of record stores and his new music is getting more airplay on FM stations than anything in recent memory.
Van's new album might send one back to the bright enthusiasm of "Brown-Eyed Girl" and the magic blues of Them Again; Van now sings with a magnetically full electric band, complete with piano, organ, vibes, and intricately controlled saxophones and flute. The band's performance has a stately brilliance; and if it recaptures some of the feeling of the earlier music, the past is serving as a rite of passage toward the celebrations of Moondance.
Van opens with "And It Stoned Me," a tale of boys out for a day's freedom, standing in the rain with eyes and mouths open, heads bent back: "Oh, the water, let it run all over me..." The sensuality of this song is overpowering, communicated with a classical sort of grace. "And it stoned me/To my soul/Stoned me just like jelly roll..." There is no strain for meaning in Van's words or in his voice. "Let it run all over me..." -- you feel the exhilaration almost with a sense of astonishment. The band, playing subtle, gentle rock and roll, surrounds the singer; here, as everywhere on Moondance, the horn arrangements are absolutely exquisite, as eloquent as a sermon in a backwoods chapel.
With "Caravan" one might begin to remember the early Impressions: the instantaneous aura of fantasy and desire that Curtis Mayfield created for "Gypsy Woman" tumbles down again as a fanfare on piano and the roll of drums and guitar open a composition of seductive grandeur. "Caravan" is a strange song; the images are easily real and the music is profoundly comforting, yet there's the edge of a story here that fades without ever revealing all it has to tell. "Now the caravan has all friends/Yes, they'll stay with me until the end...Gypsies...tell me all I need to know..." Woven between the fragments and framed by the textures of the horn with blazing imagination: "Turn up your radio/And let me/Hear the song/Turn on your electric light/So we can get down/To what is really wrong." The singer moves from the gypsy campfire to his lover and back again, with a lovely sort of affection. Van's singing is pure expression, pure sound; the band moves off and then forward again. A graceful soprano saxophone holds notes behind Van's words: "Now, the caravan is painted red and white/That means everyone is staying overnight...""It's a good thing he doesn't have much stage presence," said a friend after watching Van perform this song. "Otherwise it'd be too much to take."
"Into the Mystic" is the heart of Moondance; the music unfolds with a classic sense of timing, guitar strums fading into watery notes on a piano, the bass counting off the pace. The lines of the song and Morrison's delivery of them are gorgeous: "I want to rock your gypsy soul/Just like in the days of old/And magnificently we will fold/Into the mystic." The transcendent purity of the imagery seems to turn endlessly, giving back one's own reflection. Van's more abstract songs are mosaics of brilliantly chosen metaphors -- ambiguous and instantly recognizable. Morrison communicates directly even when he is most obscure; his visions have power, and the ambiguity of those visions is always unified by the sympathy of the music -- there is no "backup band" on Moondance any more than there is an "Lay Lady Lay." Something's been made; it stands, it won't be broken down.Perhaps "Glad Tidings," which ends Moondance, is the song that most makes one want to come back to this album without even thinking about it. "Glad Tidings" is a vital, leaping promenade through the streets of the town; fast, clean rock and roll moves it along as striking horns guide the song, until they cue the chorus into an explosion of real joy: "Yeah, we'll send you glad tidings/From New York/DO DO DO DOOT DO DO/Open up your eyes that you may see/DO DO DO DOOT DO DO/Ask you not to read between the lines/Hoping that you come right in on time."
Moondance is an album of musical invention and lyrical confidence; the strong moods of "Into the Mystic" and the fine, epic brilliance of "Caravan" will carry it past many good records we'll forget in the next few years. Van Morrison plays on.
- Greil Marcus and Lester Bangs, Rolling Stone, 3/19/70.
BillboardHis Astral Weeks album was overlooked by the charts and praised as the aesthetic success of '69 throughout the underground. Morrison's new masterpiece should cure the public of its previous oversight with a more commercial entry, still rich with the soul/folk nuances of this sensitive lrish song surrealist. "Stoned Me," "Caravan" and "These Dreams of You" should bring this unique musical personality to rock and folk lovers.
- Billboard, 1970.
Christgau's Record Guide
An album worthy of an Irish r&b singer who wrote a teen hit called "Mystic Eyes" (not to mention a Brill Building smash called "Brown Eyed Girl"), adding punchy brass (including pennywhistles and foghorn) and a solid backbeat (including congas) to his folk-jazz swing, and a pop-wise formal control to his Gaelic poetry. Morrison's soul, like that of the black music he loves, is mortal and immortal simultaneously; this is a man who gets stoned on a drink of water and urges us to turn up our radios all the way into (that world again) the mystic. Visionary hooks his specialty.
-Robert Christgau
John Tobler
Van Morrison's 1968 LP Astral Weeks had made him a cult hero. But Moondance was his first U.S. Top 30 album, and also his first to go platinum.
Morrison was living in Woodstock's rural paradise when he wrote many of these songs, although he left the area following the influx of people after the celebrated festival. Some of the musicians he assembled for the album remained with him for several years, including guitarist John Platania, horn player Jack Schroer, and Jeff Labes on keyboards.
Moondance showcases Van Morrison as a masterly songwriter and charismatic vocalist. In contrast to the acoustic Astral Weeks, the sound is bigger, meatier, with a horn section to add punch; the songs are more tightly structured, less improvisatory. The first side of the LP is almost perfect. "And It Stoned Me" paints a vignette of adolescence with a storyteller's eye for detail, while the smoky, jazz-infused title track remains one of Morrison's best-loved songs. Ethereal sailor's ballad "Into The Mystic" is a moving meditation on the splendor of love; the shivering strings are a wonderfully appropriate complement to his vocals. Elsewhere, a celebratory air, bordering on spiritual joy, haunts many of the tracks -- witness the closing trio of "Brand New Day," "Everyone," and "Glad Tidings."Helen Reddy had a 1971 U.S. hit with "Crazy Love," while Johnny Rivers' version of "Into The Mystic" charted in 1970. Van himself had a U.S. Top Forty hit with "Come Running." His solo career was on the rise.
- John Tobler, 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, 2005.
-Anonymous
The entire side one of the original vinyl record was just the perfect slab of rock music I'd ever heard when it was played to me in, I think, 1975.
-Bern
I will listen to it until to the end each time...
It's the album that brought me to this 'obsession' and feel quite fortunate 40 years later we still can still hear him perform it live..
-Bob C.