Van Morrison “A Sense of Wonder”
When the spark of youth has left you, but age has not given you your oracle status yet, you sit there in the record bins, paunchy and unappreciated. And from that middle-aged stoop Van Morrison released “A Sense of Wonder.” The cover art features a photo of Morrison peeking out from behind a frame of leaves that have been air-brushed into autumn. This is a truly crappy, slapdash cover, and yet, suspiciously, the grumpiest man in popular music is smiling. Something is up. It’s a long fall from Tupelo Honey’s edenic cover showing Van leading then-wife Janet Planet on horseback, through the shady trees, in the evening light, slipping away in the cool, cool evening, in the late night light, listen to the silence, down the ancient road, listen….evening….listen. Where “Tupelo Honey” feels organic, as if recorded in a barn with musicians on an imaginary commune, “A Sense of Wonder” uses the synthetic tools of the era — synthesizers and reverb to try to ram a backdoor into the mystic.
Listening to the first Them album, “The Angry Young Them!” Van sounds like Oscar the grouch recorded live from inside the trashcan and it is…incredible. To the undiscerning ear, “A Sense of Wonder” can sound like a 1984 Bar Mitzvah band. This is not the result of an overbearing hit single-seeking producer. There is nothing resembling a hit on the album. For the past prime artist, nothing is fair. When they’re young, everything they do sounds authentic. Past prime, they have more experience, state of the art recording facilities, and yet, the sound they come up with just drains the life out of you. There seems to be some tragic middle-aged virus that clouds the ears of even the greatest of artists. What, for instance, could have possessed Van Morrison to record “Evening Meditation”, an instrumental “hum-along” that finds Van trying to jerk-off a synthesizer to take him back to 1342 Ireland.
There are some types of culturally specific music that cannot be penetrated by outsiders: Tejano, Klezmer, and the Irish jig of “A Sense of Wonder’s” seventh track, “Boffyflow and Spike.” I have no reference to evaluate a jig. I can only say: “Here it is — behold — a jig!” The opening song “Tore down a la Rimbaud”, an upbeat track about being tired, works well enough. But, in its subject, you hear the seeds of those literary obsessions that ultimately doom “Let the Slave (Incorporating the Price of Experience)”, wherein Van sinks into his worst habit: the spoken word jam. This atrocity — literature-music fusion — pops up a couple of more times in his catalogue. At peak, Van did blend rock, R&B, blues, folk, jazz and made his own genre. Past prime, rattling off some poetry to music, sounds like a good idea. It’s that middle aged virus again; it clouds the ears. Forgive him — he’s given us so much. The title track, which can be found in an alternate acoustic form online, is quite beautiful. But the album version is so heavily marred by the mystical production, you can barely bother.
There is a point to all of this and it is found in track four, “The Master’s Eyes.” This is why we really spend our time sifting through the mediocrity. It’s one of Van’s trademark spiritual, soul searching journey songs that reminds us that this is the man who hypnotized us in those astral weeks. He takes us back to the avenue, back to the corner, back to where the healing began. Isn’t a diamond in a pile of shit in some ways more spectacular? He did it again, 30 lbs heavier, 500 hairs balder, somewhere, with mostly reverb, synths and a sense of wonder.