Van morrison

Van Morrison is a sane man in a mad world

The dopes with tropes are at it again. This time, their target is Van Morrison. But Sir Ivan is, as Billy Joel would say, an innocent man. Morrison has been called a crank and anti-Semite because of the lyrics to his new single, ‘They Own the Media’. The Guardian, which really does have a problem with Jews, has called him a tinfoil milliner. The Forward, which used to be a serious Jewish paper, claims that Van’s title ‘espouses a classic anti-Semitic trope’. No, it doesn’t. What the lyrics say is that our media are owned by a small number of people. That their outlets habitually lie to our faces. That they want us to believe that ‘ignorance is bliss’, so let’s leave the decisions to the experts. And that we’ll ‘never get wise’ until we look behind the curtain.

van morrison

In 1968, even Boston was ankle-deep in LSD

‘And this is good old Boston/, The home of the bean and the cod,’ John Collins Bossidy quipped in 1910, ‘Where the Lowells talk to the Cabots/, And the Cabots talk only to God.’ Also home, in 1968, to Mel Lyman, a folk musician turned LSD guru who believed he was God, and to Van Morrison. The music business abounds with stories about Morrison being grumpy. In my experience, he’s perfectly reasonable. You’d be grumpy if your job obliged you to consort with thieves, liars and drummers who can’t keep time. You’d be especially irritated by people asking how you wrote Astral Weeks. Sensibly, Morrison explains that Astral Weeks was written by a different person living, as its title song says, ‘In another time/ In another place.