What's Wrong With This Picture?
I have been living with Van Morrison the last couple of weeks. First, I picked up Clinton Heylin's new biography, Can You Feel the Silence?; then last week, just as I finished the book, Morrison's new CD, What's Wrong With This Picture? hit the stores and my CD player.

Morrison's music is sublime. Indeed, if I were going to a desert island forever, I'd want Morrison's Back on Top and Down the Road in my backpack, and probably What's Wrong With This Picture?, too, even if there are at least five songs on it that talk about what a bitch it is to be a famous recording artist.

And that's a key point in understanding Morrison as a person. According to Heylin, the creator of these terrific albums is a thin-skinned, embittered man with little use for most of his fellow human beings. The adulation of his audience is a burden to him. Morrison lives eternally in the now at least as far as his music is concerned, not interested in playing his old hits and often responding to such requests with shockingly rude refusals from the stage. Yet he remembers personal and professional slights from ages past in great detail, even if he sometimes revises and embellishes the tales in the telling. (Heylin observes that Morrison is a very poor source regarding events of his own life.)

So it's an odd thing to contemplate. Here's a man whose music is, at its best, magnificent, even transcendant stuff. Think Moondance, or Astral Weeks, the 1969 album that made Morrison's reputation in a way that his records with the group Them and his solo hit "Brown Eyed Girl" never could. But it comes from the mind, heart, and soul of a person whose art does not satisfy his own soul the way it does the souls of his audience. He seems to take little sustained pleasure in his work, and is greatly suspicious of the motives of audiences, record labels, and even other musicians. And he's been this way for his whole career. Strong sales figures don't change it; love doesn't change it; even being left alone, which he claims to want most of all, doesn't change it.

Morrison is neither the first famously difficult artist in history, nor the first to produce great beauty from a tortured soul. But I can't think of another artist in whom the contrast between the outer artist and the inner man is so great. [10/27/03]