Only CDs Is Sounding Like These # 26: Van Morrison, The Best of Van Morrison (1990)

A new occasional series - CDs are coming back baby! And I’m here for it. BIGTIME! Also, some albums just REALLY suit the format, right

The Best of Van Morrison is like the family wagon of CDs, it’s the mash on the side of the plate that goes with any meal, the French vanilla ice cream to follow; like Queen’s Greatest Hits or The Cars’ Greatest Hits, or Bob Dylan’s Masterpieces or Neil Young’s Decade, or, well, you get the point — it’s a suburban presence in life, it’s one of those staples of so many CD collections that you could almost be fooled into thinking it somehow undermines Van Morrison; even if part of its job was to simply collect up the fairweather fans of Have I Told You Lately and Moondance and Brown Eyed Girl and force them into a bonus 65 minutes of other music by the same guy.

My introduction to Van Morrison was the band, Them. And my introduction to Them was Baby Please Don’t Go and Gloria from various movie soundtracks and TV shows and that whole Vietnam Era of late 80s entertainment. And then sometime around then we got our first CD player, and my folks started collecting up albums they’d once owned on vinyl, well, catch-all greatest hits compilations became the trick. Get the majority of the songs you owned and the ones you didn’t but knew from the radio…

Slowly, but surely, we built a family music library of some pretty great Greatest Hits’. And one of the towering pillars of that collection was absolutely The Best of Van Morrison. As with Tony Bennett’s Unplugged and the Bob Seger compilation, and only one or two others (Prince, Miles Davis, Split Enz and anything adjacent to that band) it was music the whole family loved, together and alone.

One of the things I’ve always dug hard about this collection is its non-chronology, and how, weirdly, that makes absolute sense. Whoever compiled this had some, erm, Beautiful Vision — kicking off with the upbeat Bright Side of the Road, before diving back into Them’s past, and then on into big hits old (Moondance) and new (Have I Told You Lately) all the while playing with this safe-hands version of unpredictability, from the early 70s to the late 80s, via a few mid-60s pit stops, and then on into the big staples (Here Comes The Night, Domino, Wild Night, Jackie Wilson Said) via a deep cut like the movie soundtrack gem Wonderful Remark (from 1983’s gem, The King of Comedy).

Fuck me, this album works. It just works. They went and made a hits compilation tell its own damn story, and feel just like an album, whilst also being a reminder of all these brilliant musical postcards Van was sending; his Polaroids that slipped out of the full albums.

I became a huge fan of his nearly faultless, flawless, idiosyncratic 70s work because of this, and bought most of the albums on CD and of course on vinyl. Many of his most brilliant things (It’s Too Late To Stop Now, Veedon Fleece, A Period of Transition) aren’t even acknowledged here. The mighty Astral Weeks is just barely referenced. Same with Saint Dominic’s Preview, and Tupelo Honey. Imagine a Bob Dylan hits collection that didn’t take from Blood On The Tracks, or a Neil Young sampler that somehow ignored Harvest. You know?

That’s the depth of Van Morrison — and that glorious 70s peak. By the late 80s he was nearly forgotten and this compilation saved him. He started making mediocre and grumpy-minded, safe-sounding jazz-lite recordings, and gained even more of a reputation for being a curmudgeon to beat all. He followed this up with the slightly charming but not amazing second volume in 1993 (it has a few deep cuts that save it), and a totally superfluous money-grab attempt at a third volume in 2007. Shameless. Though to be fair, that was probably more about a record company chasing dollars than Van himself. He probably wrote 37 songs whining about them on 13 of the albums that were to follow. But both of those compilations (and the many others) somewhat undermine the integrity of this wise selection. Most crucially, it is not definitive — it leaves room for you to find some of the gems that sit on the records, and to hear the records for the individual masterpieces that so many of them are.

I hadn’t thought about this CD in absolutely years. I barely listen to Van Morrison these days, he is such a monumental cunt that I barely have time for much beyond Astral Weeks and Veedon Fleece now and then. But, wow, I got all nostalgic, pulled this out of the bag and was damn near moved to tears. By a fucking Greatest Hits compilation!

Regularly, I talk about The Cars and ELO and bands of that nature having these amazing Best Ofs, I need to make space for The Best of Van Morrison. Or do we say hold space these days, do we? Yeah, well, I’ll hold space (once again) for this. Wicked!