Why would you like Elvis if you had the real stuff?
Posted on March 6, 2009 by David
Raised on classic rock radio, I never thought much of Van Morrison. Moondance was a pretty decent track, but not worth paying for was how I viewed it.
That all changed when someone gave me Astral Weeks on vinyl. It was akin to hearing Rod Stewart and the Faces do “Stay with Me” as in, wow, this guy used to be amazing!
Of course not amazing enough to want to pay 300 bones to hear him perform the album live this week, but certainly enough to repost this fantastic Talk of the Town piece of his reflections on one of my favorite juke boxes in New York:
When someone grouped Donegan with other practitioners of “pre-Beatles rock and roll,” Morrison pulled up short.
“That’s a cliché,” he said, adjusting his sunglasses. “I don’t think ‘pre-Beatles’ means anything, because there was stuff before them. Over here, you have a different slant. You measure things in terms of the Beatles. We don’t think music started there. Rolling Stone magazine does, because it’s their mythology. The Beatles were peripheral. If you had more knowledge about music, it didn’t really mean anything. To me, it was meaningless.”
(source)
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impeccable timing
http://www.soundopinions.org/shownotes/2009/030609/shownotes.html