Some artists chase fame. Van Morrison never did — he ran from it, in fact, and somehow became one of the most beloved singers of the last sixty years anyway. Born George Ivan Morrison on August 31, 1945, in Bloomfield, a working-class corner of Belfast, Northern Ireland, he grew up in a house where American music was the family religion. His father, a shipyard electrician, had a remarkable collection of jazz, blues, and folk records, and the young Van soaked it all in the way other boys soaked up football scores.
What came out the other end was a voice like no other — part soul shouter, part Celtic mystic — and a stubborn, restless spirit that would carry him from the garage bands of Belfast to the pantheon of great songwriters. They call him “Van the Man,” and also, more fittingly, “The Belfast Cowboy.”
The Boy Who Quit School to Play the Blues
Van was twelve years old when he formed his first group, a skiffle band called “The Sputniks,” doing most of the singing and arranging himself. By fifteen, he had quit school entirely and was out on the road, playing saxophone, guitar, harmonica, and keyboards in Irish showbands — working bands that toured military bases across Europe, playing cover versions of whatever the charts demanded.
It was a hard apprenticeship, but it made him. Night after night, he learned how to hold a room, how to find the groove in a song, and how to sing with an intensity that came straight from the gut. When he got back home, he had bigger plans. In 1963 he put together a Belfast R&B band called Them — five young men with a ferocious hunger and a frontman whose voice could tear the roof off a club.
“Gloria” and the Night the Garage Exploded
Them’s story reads like rock and roll legend. Their second single, released in late 1964, was a snarling version of Big Joe Williams’ “Baby, Please Don’t Go” with an original composition called “Gloria” on the B-side — and a young session guitarist named Jimmy Page playing rhythm on the recording. The single stormed into the UK Top 10, and “Gloria” became something even bigger: a garage-band standard that every young group in the world would learn to play.
Then came “Here Comes the Night” in March 1965. Sung by a nineteen-year-old Van Morrison, it shot to No. 2 on the UK charts and broke the Top 40 in America, making Them part of the British Invasion whether they were British or not. They toured America, including a famous residency at the Whisky a Go Go in Los Angeles, where the support act for the final week was a brand-new band called The Doors.
By 1966, though, the band had imploded. Too much touring, too little money, too many personalities. Morrison walked away, done with Them — but just getting started with himself.
“Brown Eyed Girl” and the Contract That Wasn’t
Producer Bert Berns had written and produced Them’s “Here Comes the Night,” and now he convinced Morrison to come to New York and record as a solo artist for his new label, Bang Records. During a two-day session at A & R Studios in March 1967, they cut eight songs — including a bright, jubilant number originally called “Brown-Skinned Girl.”
Released as “Brown Eyed Girl,” it became a Top 10 smash on the Billboard Hot 100 in the summer of 1967, and it remains the song most people know him by. But the story behind it was pure Van Morrison: he signed a contract he hadn’t fully read, and Bang turned those eight songs into an album called “Blowin’ Your Mind!” without even consulting him.
When Berns died suddenly of a heart attack late in 1967, Morrison was free of his contract — but almost nobody in the music business would have guessed what came next.
“Astral Weeks” — The Masterpiece Nobody Bought
Warner Bros. Records bought out his contract and gave him three recording sessions. What came out of them, released in 1968, was “Astral Weeks” — a haunting, stream-of-consciousness collection of folk-jazz epics backed by an all-star jazz band that included bassist Richard Davis and drummer Connie Kay.
Nobody bought it. It didn’t even chart. But “Astral Weeks” refused to die. Word spread among musicians and critics, and over the years it grew into one of the most revered albums ever made — a fixture on all-time greatest-albums lists, including TIME magazine’s and Rolling Stone’s, and a record that has influenced everyone from Bruce Springsteen to U2.
It’s a strange and beautiful thing: Morrison’s commercial masterpiece, “Brown Eyed Girl,” and his artistic masterpiece, “Astral Weeks,” are barely separated in time, yet they could be records by two different men.
“Moondance” and the Golden Decade
If “Astral Weeks” was the sound of a troubled soul, 1970’s “Moondance” was pure sunshine. His first million-selling album — it reached No. 29 on the Billboard charts — it gave the world “Into the Mystic,” “Caravan,” and the breezy title track. Warm, optimistic, and full of rhythm and blues swing, it established Morrison as a major artist and he never really looked back.
The first half of the 1970s was the most fertile stretch of his career. His band album “His Band and the Street Choir” delivered his biggest chart hit, “Domino.” “Tupelo Honey” (1971) was a pastoral meditation on married life built around the gorgeous “Wild Night.” “Saint Dominic’s Preview” (1972) was stirring and ambitious. He formed the Caledonia Soul Orchestra and toured the world, and the 1974 live album “It’s Too Late to Stop Now” captured one of the great live bands of the era. Four years later, his electrifying turn in Martin Scorsese’s concert film “The Last Waltz” — roaring through “Caravan” with The Band behind him — reminded the whole world what a force of nature he could be on a stage.
Decade after decade, the albums kept coming — more than forty of them reaching the UK Top 40. There were spiritual journeys like “Veedon Fleece” (1974) and “Common One” (1980), the joyful “Into the Music” (1979), and the beloved Irish roots album “Irish Heartbeat” (1988), recorded with The Chieftains.
The Man Who Walked Away From the Spotlight
Here’s something the oldies fans love about Van: he never played the game. He gave few interviews, turned his back on the celebrity machine, and treated his music as something sacred rather than something to sell. His honors kept piling up anyway — two Grammy Awards, a Brit Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music in 1994, induction into both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and, in 2016, a knighthood for services to music and to tourism in Northern Ireland.
He’s still at it, releasing more than an album a year since turning seventy. The boy from Bloomfield who learned American blues from his father’s record collection became a bridge between Belfast and the blues, between Celtic mysticism and Memphis soul.
Somewhere between “Gloria” and “Into the Mystic” sits the whole story of Van Morrison: a man who sang like the earth was trembling beneath him, who wrote songs about streets and streams and summer dances as if they were scripture — and who, through it all, answered to no one but the music itself.
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