Like the white middle class it entertains, rock music exhibits a certain rootlessness, a lack of a living history. This is rock's greatest asset—it is spontaneous and free, contemporary and temporary—but it can also be a liability. The ever-recurrent rock revivals and our fondness for golden oldies express the absence of a past, the very word "revival" indicating that the past is dead. Many artists are exploring that past, but the then and the now are so disjunct that more often than not such efforts are camp, lifeless, effete and irrelevant, or crudely exploitative.
Van Morrison, one of the few (Roger McGuinn and the Band are others) for whom the American musical tradition
Read More
is passionate and alive, loves this tradition with the insight and fervor of a foreigner. There's no more zealous flag-waver than a citizen by adoption (it's significant that all but one member of the Band are Canadian). Morrison's ardor doesn't require him to imitate the past; his music is so suffused with it, that everything he writes and sings expresses and interprets the past in light of the present, and the present in light of the past.
Because Morrison's music continues an ongoing tradition, it is never diverted by faddish ephemera and never becomes dated. With no Their Satanic Majesties Request to live down, It's Too Late to Stop Now, his 11th album including two he did with Them, celebrates the entirety of Morrison's career. And unlike Bob Dylan's recent tour, for example, these recordings are not a mere remembrance of things past. Even the album's title impels us forward and all of the material, from "Gloria" to "Saint Dominic's Preview" is very much alive.
A third of the album, the standards, show where his music comes from: blues, jazz, gospel, R&B and soul. Note rock's omission: Morrison is closer to Bobby "Blue" Bland and Ray Charles (whose "I Believe to My Soul" he performs here) than he is to rock. The oldies and his own songs are of a piece equally vibrant, revealing Morrison as at once a great traditionalist and an original talent: traditionalist because of his roots, original because he never stops growing—It's Too Late to Stop Now.
Yet Morrison has never enjoyed the mass popularity he deserves. This is partly because he stands quite deliberately outside the pop/rock mainstream, but more importantly because of his relative indifference to lyrics.
On Astral Weeks he tried to write purposefully but ended up with poetastery and parodies. Recently he again tried to write purposefully, but with only intermittent success, most notably "Saint Dominic's Preview." Words seldom interest Morrison except as sounds, and without this in mind you'll be confused when he babbles "sodomysodomysodomy." He's just messing around with the words "inside of me." Having nothing to say, with only emotions to express, his songs must be felt, not thought about. What matter are the stops and starts, the twis
Morrison was at the top of his game when he cut this two-disc live set that showcases his first (and greatest) solo phase, a couple of Them classics, and key R&B covers. Van revisits the Astral Weeks stunner "Cyprus Avenue" in an American R&B showbiz manner that helps explain why a poor Irish kid would find a special kind of freedom and solace in black music.
