Van Morrison - Acoustic Versions, 1968-1969

If you've been following this blog, you should know I have a special fondness for acoustic music. I also really like Van Morrison and have posted lots of his music here. It turns out that Morrison has never released any kind of "Unplugged" album. However, he did play acoustically in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and I'm going to post what I have of that. Here's the first such album.

My first priority with putting Van Morrison albums together was to create albums of all his stray tracks, the songs that weren't on any of his albums at the time. It turns out he has a lot of songs from around 1968 to 1970 that he didn't release then, and most of them still haven't been released. Many of them were acoustic performances done in the studio. I used a bunch of them to make the stray tracks albums "Nobody Really Knows" and "You Set My Soul on Fire." Here are links:

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2018/06/van-morrison-nobody-really-knows.html

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2018/06/van-morrison-you-set-my-soul-on-fire.html

I got some of those songs from some popular bootlegs of overlapping acoustic material. But those bootlegs also had many acoustic versions of songs that were released on albums at this time. So this is the first of two albums collecting those "leftovers."

On some of these songs, it's just Morrison and his acoustic guitar. But more often, he's joined by a bass player. Sometimes, there are some other instruments, especially a flute, but occasionally some light drums, or backing vocals. Still, these are definitely acoustic versions.

One problem I noticed though was that often Morrison's vocals were so loud compared to the guitar and the other music that it almost was as if they were acappella recordings. Happily, I figured out a way to improve this somewhat. I made some changes in Audacity that brought up the volume of the guitar and other instruments relative to the vocals. I liked the result so much that I did the same for a few tracks on the two albums I linked to above, and I've updated the mp3 download links for those. That said, the mix still isn't ideal, because I can only do so much with my limited editing tools. But at least it's better.

The first five songs were recorded in the summer of 1968, when the classic album "Astral Weeks" was recorded. The next four songs were recorded in the summer of 1969, when the similarly classic album "Moondance" was recorded. A "super deluxe" version of "Moondance" has been released with three albums of outtakes, yet none of these acoustic versions were included. I wonder why. The last song, "Domino," comes from the end of 1969. I included it here because I have three acoustic versions of "Domino," each of which is different and interesting. But I didn't want to put all three on the same album, so I stuck one here and the other two on the following album.

Note that three of the songs - "Bayou Girl," "I Need Your Kind of Loving," and "Wild Night" - are songs that weren't included on either "Astral Weeks" or "Moondance." For the first two songs, that's because I had two versions of still unreleased songs, so I used one version for the stray tracks albums mentioned above, and put the other versions here. A full band version of "Wild Night" ultimately appeared on the 1971 album "Tupelo Honey," but it was actually first recorded in 1968.

(It turns out Morrison wrote a great many songs around 1968 and 1969, and kept many of them for later. There must have been something magical in the air, because others like Stephen Stills, David Crosby, Lou Reed, and Cat Stevens also wrote many songs in those years, and continued to draw on that backlog years later.)

01 The Way Young Lovers Do (Van Morrison)
02 Ballerina (Van Morrison)
03 I Need Your Kind of Loving (Van Morrison)
04 Wild Night (Van Morrison)
05 Bayou Girl (Van Morrison)
06 Caravan (Van Morrison)
07 And It Stoned Me (Van Morrison)
08 These Dreams of You (Van Morrison)
09 Come Running (Van Morrison)
10 Domino [Flute Version] (Van Morrison)

https://www.imagenetz.de/cdiLW

I find the photo I chose for the cover art fascinating. It was taken at a concert at The Scene in New York City on January 27, 1969. It looks like such a small club that I'll bet only a few dozen people were there. Boy, would that have been an interesting show to attend, given that it was right between the "Astral Weeks" and "Moondance" albums! (Sadly, no bootlegs of him survive from 1969, not even in horrible sound quality.) Even though there's a drum kit in back, other photos from that night show that Morrison was only accompanied by his own acoustic guitar, plus a bassist and flutist, which was the case on many of the recordings on this album.

Since the photo was in black and white, I tried to jazz it up by colorize it with a blend from red to blue.