Upon hearing of East Portland Blog’s celebration of 2011 as “The Year of Van Morrison,” Tim Midgett registered his discontent with Van by sending me this link to a WFMU blog entry about Van’s curious 1967 recording sessions undertaken for Bang Records.
http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2005/09/van_morrisons_c.html
The entry is a few years old, and at one time it had mp3 samples of the Bang Sessions songs. Sadly, the mp3s have been removed from that page. Probably because Van’s lawyers are very agressive at getting stuff off the net. (I digress here, but it has crossed my mind that I will hear from Van’s lawyers telling me that I can’t just declare 2011 to be the Year of Van Morrison, and that I have to purchase a license to do so. That’s ok, Van has worked very hard. Who is East Portland that they should stand up to the Belfast Cowboy? If I get a cease and desist order from Van, I’ll immediately declare it the Year of Bottomless Pit.)
As far as the Bang Sessions, or as here, where WFMU is describing something which might more accurately be called Bang demos, they’ve been a cruel joke on me since the 80s. They’ve appeared on vinyl, cassette and cd in the past and they’re always aggressively marketed, usually in pieces, with hushed reverence as if they were The Basement Tapes, but I’ve never enjoyed them. More than once I’ve bought some sort of compilation only to later wonder why I bothered. I like WFMU’s inference that Van was trying to be bad on purpose. That would explain some things about the quality of the Bang Sessions, considering that what Van recorded immediately after these loser Bang Sessions was the classic album, Astral Weeks.
