Van Morrison - Live Rarities, Volume 1: 1970-1971

If it hasn't been made obvious already, I'm a big fan of Van Morrison music in the 1960s and 1970s. (I think he's much more hit or miss since then.) I've been trying to post the best of his live music from that time.

To that end, I've posted four of his best concerts in full, from 1968, 1970, and two from 1971. Then I posted an alternate version of his classic 1973 live album "It's Too Late to Stop Now," but only using songs not on the official album OR on any of the other four live albums I've posted here. He played such a wide variety of songs in the early 1970s that that was possible, and using only soundboard quality recordings to boot.

But those five live albums don't gather up all of his worthwhile live material. There are other songs he played here and there that are interesting, usually due to their rarity. For instance, every now and then he might pull out a song he used to do with his mid-1960's band Them, or a cover version he almost never did, or a lesser known and rarely played original. This is the first of a number of albums that collects such live stray tracks.

Be warned that the sound quality in this series isn't always great. I pretty much used up the excellent soundboard recordings with my previous live postings. There are some soundboard sourced songs here sometimes, but more often one has to rely on audience recorded bootlegs. That said, I have certain standards I set for myself. I rejected a bunch of interesting songs because the sound quality wasn't listenable, in my opinion.

It's worth downloading this album for the first song here, "Astral Weeks," alone. But even though its one of his most celebrated songs, he only played it about eight times total in the 1970s. Luckily, this version comes from a pristine soundboard, and it's a great one, where the song that's seven minutes long on the studio is extended to twelve minutes here. Unfortunately, the balance was way off, with the vocals too low and the saxophone too loud. But it turns out the vocals were mostly in one stereo channel and the saxophone in the other, so I was able to boost or lower the volume of each channel to make this much more listenable.

For the remainder of this album, there are two songs former played by Them ("You're the One (That I Adore)" and "Mystic Eyes"), and one very rare original, "Beautiful Obsession." The rest are covers.

If you like this album, the series continues chronologically with four more albums. Like this one, each one is about 45 minutes long.

01 Astral Weeks (Van Morrison)
02 You're the One [That I Adore] (Van Morrison)
03 Sweet Little Sixteen (Van Morrison)
04 Danny Boy (Van Morrison)
05 Rock Me Baby (Van Morrison)
06 Beautiful Obsession (Van Morrison)
07 Mystic Eyes (Van Morrison)

https://www.imagenetz.de/jYdeC

I made the cover by taking a screenshot from a YouTube video of a 1970 concert performance.