BEST prolific period (68-74) ALBUM OF VAN MORRISON

astral weeks, makes sense

Astral Weeks destroys all other records ever.

-- dan selzer, Friday, May 11, 2007 9:50 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Link

weird, my vote for HBASC didn't show up. maybe I ticked something else?

Saint Dominic's Preview is the POI-fect Saturday afternoon album. Fact.

hard nose the highway deserved at least 1 vote surely

...and It Stoned Me is a strong contender to get my vote for the best album openers of 1970 poll I will get around to doing sooner or later.

Is there any news from anywhere other than Record collector about the possibility of physical releases of the material recently released as streaming/download which includes several of the titles mentioned here?
Record Collector which has just appeared on the shelves of shops locally has a news item talking about remastered Legacy expanded editions of all 33 of the titles. Since the streaming/download versions of the material are already released i would assume this must be regarding a new format. Certainly sounds more like it was from the news piece which I unfortunately can't link to.

Warners is releasing CDs for Astral Weeks and Street Choir on Oct 30.

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/van-morrison-preps-expanded-reissues-of-astral-weeks-his-band-20150827

MGGOTLAIKOO

That's Van lingo for Madam George Goes On Too Long And Is Kind Of Overwrought.
― kornrulez6969, Friday, May 11, 2007 6:48 PM (8 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yup. AW is way overrated.

nah

The Record Collector piece made it look like the other 33 lps that were released in digital versions over the summer had some form of physical version coming out. Not seen that confirmed anywhere which is why I was asking. I thought somebody else here might have heard something.
I think I may have been the first person on here to say that the Astral Weeks thing was happening. Really looking forward to at least that. But will pick up at least a couple fo the Legacy ones if there are cds appearing.

Even though I totally fall in line and agree that it's the "worst" of this run, I find myself returning to Hard Nose the Highway more often these days. 'Warm Love' is one of his best singles of the period, 'Snow in San Anselmo' is an epic opener and 'Autumn Song' is one of his best long jams.

I just saw today that there is a new Uncut special out on him. Just saw it for the first time today so assume it is pretty freshly out.
Should give some idea of what the lps are like. Though it seems to relegate It's Too Late To Stop Now to a paragraph or 2 in a couple of page long thing on the live lps collectively. Would think an lp that good would get its own entry really.

Roll on the release fo the individual lps on cd again. Hope that is happening before the medium stops being usable

I've been doing a deep dive into Van's catalog. I love every album from this era except Hard Nose and even that should've been a great album. "Warm Love" is the only cut I really like off it, but he recorded a ridiculous amount of music for that album (believing incorrectly that Warner Bros. would be willing to issue a double LP). Going through the outtakes that made it on to The Philosopher's Stone, "Wonderful Remark," "Madame Joy," "Contemplation Rose," "Not Supposed To Break Down," "There There Child," "Drumshanbo Hustle" and "Try for Sleep" on top of "Warm Love" would have made a rock solid LP, and I'll even throw in a great cover of Fleetwood Mac/Christine McVie's "Spare Me a Little" (which has never been officially released). Except for "Wonderful Remark," none of those outtakes were ever used or re-recorded for a proper album.

It's also bizarre that Van didn't release a single record between October 1974 and April 1977, because he was still recording a lot of music. It sounds like he very nearly released an LP called Mechanical Bliss, but I'm kind of glad he didn't because it's pretty disappointing, from the choice of material to the album title and crappy cover (which Steely Dan later recycled for The Royal Scam - even Donald Fagen called it the ugliest cover of the decade). Once again, fishing through The Philosopher's Stone and a few outtakes that nearly made it into the same collection, he had enough material for a great album by the end of 1975: "The Street Only Knew Your Name," "Naked in the Jungle," "When I Deliver," "Foggy Mountain Top," "Joyous Sound," "Flamingos Fly," "John Henry" (a funked up arrangement of the folk standard) and "I Have Finally Come To Realise" all would have done it. Three of those were eventually re-recorded for two of his weaker albums (A Period of Transition, Inarticulate Speech of the Heart) and in each case, the older recordings sound much better to me. ("Flamingos Fly" is a close call - it works very well in both arrangements, and they couldn't be more different.)

So two great lost albums IMHO. I wish Morrison found a better way to present them as such because that outtakes compilation went out-of-print pretty fast and until it was made available to streaming services, none of those recordings were issued anywhere else.

I think there were d/lds of a lot of that stuff released a couple of years ago. I thought there were cds due too. There is still no sign of them for the latter stuff for that era except ITLTSN which got expanded and a companion volume.
I really wanted remastered expanded versions of those studio lps. Missed getting SDP when that was released the previous time then got withdrawn shortly after. Did get VF which somebody proceeded to damage by leaving it lying around fafe up in a somewhat hostile environment. Might be able to get the surface layer cut off or however that method is done.think you got a machine that removed 1mm or something from very top which made scratches less audible. 1mm is probably too much. I definitely saw these tools for sale but never used one.

There WAS a comprehensive reissue campaign planned out for 2008 and I think 2009. They had it all scheduled and mapped out, and they got through like the first wave, which was a handful of titles. If you got any of those CD's, you may have gotten an insert that said what was coming and when. (Basically everything except a few albums that were still owned by Warner Bros.)

Then something happened and most of them never came out. I'm guessing Van got pissed off about something and blocked the rest of the campaign, which was pretty stupid because they deleted most if not all of his catalog prior to launching the campaign, so a lot of albums including some of his best ones have remained out-of-print.

Sony/Legacy kind of fixed things a bit, and that's what you've been seeing so far with the great Them set (the definitive Them collection to date), the ITLTSN set and the complete and authorized Bang set, all produced by veteran producer Andrew Sandoval. It's been slow, probably for good reason, but hopefully things will continue to come out.

I think that Verdon Fleece wad 2005 from what I remember doing while listening to it heavily. Though it is just possible that the cd that got damaged was an upgrade. I think it was the same one though.
What I was doing was definitely that year cos related events shifted to a nearby location after that point but what I was doing was site specific.