Following the release of Veedon Fleece Van did not record a studio album the next three years. With the next few posts I will bring some more detail to the overall picture of the discography with independent reviews and accounts as well as cover Van's 1973 Live album "It's too late to stop now" with a unique styled review and his show stopping performance at 1975's "The Last Waltz" while performing two songs alongside the Band in their farewell show.
So if you’ve been following this thread you probably got the impression that I am pretty big fan of the music and hopefully you are too, but just too prove I am a fair guy I’m bringing in another opinion here.
This is Robert Christgau…
from Wikipedia
He is an American essayist, music journalist, and the self-declared "Dean of American Rock Critics".
A little background…
Christgau grew up in New York City, where he says he became a rock and roll fan when disc jockey Alan Freed moved to the city in 1954. He left New York for four years to attend Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, graduating in 1962. While at college, Christgau's musical interests turned to jazz, but he quickly returned to rock and roll after moving back to New York.
He initially wrote short stories, before giving up fiction in 1964 to become a sportswriter, and later, a police reporter for the Newark Star-Ledger. Christgau became a freelance writer after a story he wrote about the death of a woman in New Jersey was published by New York magazine. He was asked to take over the dormant music column at Esquire, which he began writing in early 1967. After Esquire discontinued the column, Christgau moved to the The Village Voice in 1969, and he also worked as a college professor.
In early 1972, he accepted a full-time job as music critic for Newsday. Christgau returned to the Village Voice in 1974 as music editor. He remained there until August 2006, when he was fired "for taste" shortly after the paper's acquisition by New Times Media.[3] Two months later, Christgau became a contributing editor at Rolling Stone. In 2008, Christgau left Rolling Stone and followed Joe Levy to Blender, where he became co-chief music critic. Christgau had been a regular contributor to Blender before he joined Rolling Stone.
Christgau has also written frequently for Playboy, Spin, and Creem. He has previously taught during the formative years of the California Institute of the Arts. As of 2005, he was also an adjunct professor in the Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music at New York University.
Here are his brief reviews and grades for each of the albums we’ve covered so far starting with Moondance in 1970…
Moondance [Warner Bros., 1970]
An album worthy of an Irish r&b singer who wrote a teen hit called "Mystic Eyes" (not to mention a Brill Building smash called "Brown Eyed Girl"), adding punchy brass (including pennywhistles and foghorn) and a solid backbeat (including congas) to his folk-jazz swing, and a popwise formal control to his Gaelic poetry. Morrison's soul, like that of the black music he loves, is mortal and immortal simultaneously: this is a man who gets stoned on a drink of water and urges us to turn up our radios all the way into (that word again) the mystic. Visionary hooks his specialty.
A+
His Band and Street Choir [Warner Bros., 1970]
Morrison is still a brooder--"Why did you leave America?" he asks over and over on the final cut, and though I'm not exactly sure what he's talking about, that sounds like a good all-purpose question/accusation to me--but not an obsessive one, and this is another half-step away from the acoustic late-night misery of Astral Weeks. As befits hits, "Domino" and especially "Blue Money" are more celebratory if no more joyous than anything on Moondance, showing off his loose, allusive white r&b at its most immediate. And while half of side two is comparatively humdrum, I play it anyway.
A
Tupelo Honey [Warner Bros., 1971]
Van seems to be turning into a machine and a natural man simultaneously. I like the machine a whole lot--this super-bouncy product is almost as rich in cute tunes as The Shirelles' Greatest Hits. But I worry that domestic bliss with Janet Planet--who here abandons liner notes to pose with hubby fore, aft, and centerfold--has been softening Van's noodle more than the joy of cooking requires.
A-
Saint Dominic's Preview [Warner Bros., 1972]
"Jackie Wilson said it was reet petite," he shouts for openers, and soon has me believing that "I'm in heaven when you smile" says as much about the temporal and the eternal as anything in Yeats. "Listen to the lion," he advises later, referring to that lovely frightening beast inside each of us, and midway through the eleven-minute cut he lets the lion out, moaning and roaring and growling and stuttering in a scat extension that would do Leon Thomas proud. The point being that words--which on this album are as uneven as the tunes--sometimes say less than voices. Amen.
A-
Hard Nose the Highway [Warner Bros., 1973]
The relaxed rhythms are just lax most of the time, the vocal surprises mild after St. Dominic's Preview, the lyrics dumbest when they're more than mood pieces, and the song construction offhand except on "Warm Love."
B-
Veedon Fleece [Warner Bros., 1974]
I count it as progress that his muse is feeding him baseball metaphors, but Morrison hasn't vented his Gaelic soul so unabashedly since Astral Weeks. He'd get away with it if there were more than one decent song on side two. Soothing, evocative late-night music that indulges his discursive side. Favorite title: "You Don't Pull No Punches but You Don't Push the River."
B+