Van morrison can you feel the silence

Morrison attempted to stop the book's publication and warned acquaintances away from talking, which might account for both skewed reportage and the generally hostile tone of Silence 's introduction.

But Heylin quickly reveals himself as a fastidious, evenhanded researcher, reconstructing as best he can the life of a man who's attempted to shroud himself in secrecy. If he'd never recorded another note, history would still remember him as the man behind Them's "Gloria," garage rock that reached for the transcendent. Yet the best was still to come, in a solo career that, from through , produced one of the great stretches of sustained creativity in contemporary music.

By Heylin's account, however, the man behind the music is less a monster than a classic grumpus prone to curling into a ball of whiskey and ego. All that said, I think the author is sometimes too bitter and makes harsh comments on the quality of some of Morrison's songs without giving full explanation.

Yet most of the time the judgement is justified. Despite a bit of pedantry throughout the book and the trivial focus on Morrison's ridiculous spiritual adventures, This is undoubtedly a piece of very serious and well documented music journalism. Despite a bit of pedantry throughout the book and the trivial focus on Morrison's ridiculous spiritual adventures, this is a really good piece of professional, non-flattering work on modern music.

Shelves: biography , music. I appreciated learning how he became a musician and the creation of his many albums. That said, it was hard to read about some of his "challenging" personality traits. After learning about his curmudgeonly side, I felt disappointed and part of me wishes I had never read the book. Mar 21, Kyle rated it really liked it Shelves: nonfiction , pop-culture , bio. I could tell right away. Maybe too early: maybe I just grabbed it as soon as I could, before becoming maturely wise all around.

Or maybe exactly at the right time: while it's all still fresh, before all unnecessary piles of preparation can make you stale and removed. Is that it? Is that how it should be grabbed, or if it's grabbed like that maybe that's in the end just 'grasping for straws'?

Grabbing, grasping, all belabored. Irish rock or stone, passingly interesting, hounded yet further. It's all right. The beginning's quite interesting, zig-zagging all over his career; always quite quaint, from the early outside "And It Stoned Me" to the late inside "On Hyndford Street"!

It'd be maddening if it weren't so carefully documented and shaped into good little pieces. Then of course is the dull grind of the early '60s, amateur musicianship to showband circuit to Them coherence, all the while finding a voice.

Not song lyrics now, as digressions to color the research, but little slices quoting the people themselves colleagues, etc. The shift between keeping mostly lyrics or mostly quotes from real people isn't as smooth as I might hope, but it ends up servicing the prose quite nicely for the most part. He's appropriately reverent about Astral Weeks, though, and gives the songs a lot of critical high marks while chasing down all sorts of production trivia.

It's an odd balance the music biographer sets for himself in general -- sorting through mundanities in quest of the sublime, so should these 'mundanities' who've done all the work have the spotlight they deserve or the rougher 'sublime' itself?

There are some very strange and welcome Morrison quotes too, which Heylin has compiled for us. After Blowin' Your Mind! What a curious way to neutralize a problem, by making even-more-problematic just about every other thing you've done in your life. And later, no longer musical but personal, he mentions during a break from performing "It's All In The Game" imprecisely fixed by Heylin to "a quarter of a century later" than all the acrimony surrounding suit, counter-suit, split with Janet, etc.

Or as Van the Man reflected in about the events of more than a decade earlier, when Saint Dominic's Preview had come out, in a certainly longwinded but always rather intriguing way, "Then you have a couple of albums out and you get these reviews, and these people are saying, 'Well, this means this about that, and he was going through that when he wrote this. So you get to the point where you're afraid to write anything, because you know somebody's gonna make something of it" Well, ouch, I must say.

But if you can't take the criticism when someone 'makes something of' something else , then don't originally make anything, especially if it's inside a la-la, critic-happy world where everyone's apparently a critic. Or as a similar reflection follows quoted in , about the events of or so : " So you have to pretend that there is something you are searching for [even if not], or So it seems like you're searching, but in fact you're just telling little stories" Pretending you are yourself searching equals not searching.

Well, the most I've read about 73's Hard Nose the Highway in quite a while, as well as the sabbatical to Ireland, Veedon Fleece, and plenty of others; but the attention to this or that manager or promoter or publicist, and the falling out that usually results from testing Morrison's surliness, starts to feel unnecessary.

Sure, you're allowed, but is it one-sided gossip or watery and many-sided Rashomon-like wastes? Humongous collection, fact-checked and pruned all day, but to what end? Christianity investigation, in the years starting around '79 and in the pages starting around , is in my opinion a much better outlet for Heylin's investigation.

Into the Music may have hinted at a beginning, and the next few albums developed it, but it wasn't until Inarticulate Speech of the Heart name-checked L. Ron Hubbard that he really seemed lost. But maybe he wasn't lost as much as Dylan in those same years but just searching in a New Age way? And when there's disposable income and few ties, Scientology might not be the worst? Very disillusioned he became, though: "Van said to them, 'Tell me what the secrets are and I'll tell you whether it's worth a few million.

Give me a clue. I don't know what I'm getting. If it's done it, you're in and you'll want it. If it hasn't done it, it's time for you to move on. Sounds pretty healthy actually. Throw a few thousand down the drain of a money-sucking cult started on a dare by a hack, and when it doesn't work walk away and don't throw any more down. Or the same about an actual Christianity: as friend Clive Culbertson recalls, "Paul [Jones with whom he'd been discussing religion] said, 'Van, here's the deal.

God sent a son, he died for you, you can be saved, you can go to heaven, I will not discuss it further. If he didn't, we've nothing to talk about. If he did, then you're already free. And that drove him mad Or was there are a word or a phrase synonymous with 'unhealed' said that I could know about?

I suppose such mysteries will rage still. I agree that the album Enlightenment doesn't have much, but "Real Real Gone" is pretty fun. I certainly don't expect the author to always exactly mirror how I've taken the music, but his hottest takedowns seem to touch the songs I think least deserve heat. Or maybe that's how I'd see it, you know, in the weak and sappy 'would'-heavy tendency of a Christian beat. Rogan in a sense declared Morrison 'no poet' just a working musician, petty, no mystery and Hinton in a sense declared him 'poet' not just a working musician, somebody great, with troubling ideas, a misfit , so wouldn't it be just perfect if Heylin declared him 'kinda poet'?

That would be very great, but I don't think it works quite like that. Disappointing in a sense that the conclusion is the drab, cynical one; but I won't complain much.

No one's clarified yet, though, how a person can work for years and years -- getting more and more watery, objectively some like water, but I think almost everyone would agree it's watery , with each new output -- and still be pretty rich and well-supported.

It doesn't make sense. Sure, not every record will be Moondance, but how many Beautiful Visions will be tolerated before at least a Veedon Fleece?

There might be some absurd Faustian bargain deep down there somewhere. I don't know. Jul 06, Kevin Archard rated it it was amazing. Love him or hate him, Van is a legend. The book doesn't hold back the punches and criticism, when deserved is cutting.

Having said that, so is the praise and there is plenty of that for a man who has made approaching 50 top class albums. Very few artists invited to dinner at the home of their record-company boss would end up throwing an ashtray at their host.

Or demand that a musician show up at the artist's home to rehearse at 3pm on Sunday, and then slam a door in the muso's face when he presents himself at the appointed time.

Or tour with the distinguished Irish folk group the Chieftains and tell them, moments before taking the stage, that they'd be nothing without him. Despite scoring a Top 10 hit with their second single albeit burying Morrison's first enduring classic, "Gloria", on its B-side , and another with "Here Comes the Night", Them's career was messy, with a constant turnover of personnel.

Morrison relocated to the US, signing with a producer reportedly so mobbed-up that when Warner Bros attempted to buy out his contract, they did so with a briefcase of used notes. The Warner years, commencing with the epochal Astral Weeks and Moondance albums, established him as one of the Seventies' front-rank artists, with an utterly personal blend of folk, blues, soul and jazz.

Since then he has pursued his various muses, with varying degrees of success, through a variety of idioms. A great artist: yes. A well-rounded and fully-developed individual: no.