It was the kind of album that brings to mind that old saying about the Velvet Underground: Only 1,000 people heard them, but all of those people started a band.VAN MORRISON-THE ALTERNATIVE MOONDANCE-RECORD STORE DAY 2018 RELEASE. None of that, though, mattered to Warner Bros., because not enough people bought it. a hopeful message about the possibility of love, or a comment on the cycle of life that everyone goes through, that somehow remains pure and pristine.'' The album is a secret passcode that people pass along to each other. They sound like living breathing organisms. Walsh doesn't mince words: 'They don't sound like recordings to me. You know the Van Morrison song, I love, I love, I love, and he keeps repeating it like that?'ĭirector Martin Scorsese has said it inspired the first 15 minutes of 'Taxi Driver.' And musician Elvis Costello called it 'the most adventurous record made in the rock medium.' Though Morrison was in his 20s when he made it, 'there are lifetimes behind it,' wrote rock critic Lester Bangs.Īctor Philip Seymour Hoffman quoted it when he won an Oscar for 2006's 'Capote,' by thanking people and then saying of them: 'I love, I love, I love, I love, I love. It gave me a sense of the divine,' Bruce Springsteen has said of the album. I did what I had to do.'Ĭritics and fellow musicians fawned (and continue to fawn) over it. It was just done on a basic pure survival level. So I didn't have time to sit around pondering or thinking all this through. He continued to claim that he didn't feel like these were particularly special sessions. That was that performance on those days.' That was the whole point of having this particular group of people. 'I wanted to do it around the singing, and it had to be kind of jazzy, because that's the way I'm singing it,' Morrison told NPR in 2009. Still, years later, Morrison maintained that he wasn't necessarily trying to make a jazz-rock fusion album. If they had set up to make this holy album that we'd be talking about 50 years later, they would probably have practiced for weeks and rolled out the red carpet - and it probably would have failed.' There's an element of accident, or happenstance, to this. 'I think so much of it is just this beautiful train wreck of so many different people working on it with no rehearsals. 'He just showed them the compositions, and then they all just spat out those beautiful songs.' They were confused by him, (wondering), 'Who is this guy?'' Walsh said. 'Van barely even said hello to these guys. He met his band on the first day of recording. On producer Lewis Merenstein's insistence, a (begrudging) Morrison took the unusual step of hiring a group of jazz musicians such as Connie Kay of the Modern Jazz Quartet and bassist Richard Davis.

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