Van Morrison - Contractual Obligations
(soniclovenoize reimagination)
Side A:
1. Savoy Hollywood
2. Hang On Groovy
3. Twist, Shake and Roll
4. Stomp, Scream and Holler
5. Jump, Thump and Jive
6. Walk, Wobble and Roll
7. Freaky If You Got This Far
Side B:
8. The Big Royalty Check
9. Blowin Your Nose
10. Want A Danish?
11. Shake It Mable
12. Ring Worm
13. The Story of Dumb George
This admittedly is one of my more bizarre album assemblages, originally
began as a joke by a friend of mine that morphed into a dare. He jested that it couldn’t be done; challenge
accepted! Thus, this is my
”reimagination” of what could have been Van Morrison’s second album, recorded solo
for the sole purpose of fulfilling his contract with Bang Records in 1968. Aptly titled Contractual Obligations, I have
taken the 31 “revenge songs” that Van Morrison recorded, organized them by
musical key and lyrical theme, and edited the fragments together to create
thirteen more-or-less complete songs and sequenced them into a semblance of a
an album.
Let Van Morrison be an example of the plight of young artists by the
hands of corporate greed and exploitation.
Hastily signing to himself to Bang Records in 1967 in order to avoid
literal starvation, Morrison recorded an album’s worth of material he didn’t
feel amounted to an actual album. He
left the March 1967 recording sessions thinking that those eight songs—one of
them his immensely popular hit “Brown Eyed Girl”—would be released as four
separate singles. Instead, Bang Records collected
the songs and released them as Van Morrison’s debut album, Blowin Your
Mind. Not only was this done completely
without his consent, but Bang promoted the album in full psychedelic fashion,
an image Morrison himself detested. To
make matters worse, label head Burt Berns’ passing in December allowed for his
widow Ilene to impose ridiculous performance restrictions on Morrison, all
which were allowed by the contract that he himself signed.
Van Morrison’s salvation lied within a simple loophole in his contract:
deliver 36 original songs to Bang Records.
And so sometime in early 1968, Van Morrison entered a recording studio
and performed 31 intentionally half-assed bullshit songs in order to escape the
clutches of Ilene Berns. The songs were
all musically simple--often I-IV-V progressions in E or G—and the lyrics
presumably improvised, meaningless, random, inane. Some were even gibberish. Morrison had farted out over thirty nonsense
songs that were all completely unusable in an act of musical revenge, which
fulfilled his contract. Bang Records
refused to release them at the time but the collection eventually appeared as
rare bonus material on legally-questionable international anthology releases
throughout the years.
For my reimagination, we will postulate how Bang could have assembled
these throwaway fragments into some sort of cohesive album. A listen through the material will tell you
that Morrison did not put much thought into the “compositions” musically and they
follow similar chord sequences, all standard open chords within the same
harmonic family. We are thus able to easily
group most of the songs together by key.
Even luckier, many of those musically-similar compositions share similar
lyrical qualities, further identifying possible associations. Although this was undoubtedly unintentional
by Van, we can
exploit this tendency and edit these similar fragments together, creating full
songs from the fragments. Using the 31
fragments I was able to create eleven complete songs, leaving two fragments to
remain their own stand-alone songs.
Side A begins with “Savoy Hollywood” which is a combination of the
songs “Do It”,"Go For Yourself” and “Savoy Hollywood”. The beginning tape wow opens the album up mid-song
and prepares us for Van’s bumpy ride with strumming and vocal stutters. Follows is “Hang On Groovy” which is a
combination of “La Mambo”, “Just Ball” and “Hang On Groovy”, less a mockery
of the classic songs “La Bamba” and “Hang On Sloopy” but more a mockery of
Bang for expecting something more than pop-song contrivance for this album. The next four songs gather together
Morrison’s inane send-ups of movement-centric 1950s rock n’roll classics:
“Twist, Shake and Roll” (a combination of “Twist and Shake” and ”Shake and
Roll”), “Stomp, Scream and Holler” (a combination of “Stomp and Scream” and
“Scream and Holler”), “Jump, Thump and Jive” (a combination of “Jump and Thump”
and “Drivin Wheel”) and “Walk, Wobble and Roll” (a combination of “Walk and Talk”,
”The Wobble” and “Wobble and Roll”). The
fact that these song are all in a row should drive home how ridiculous
this album is, and without the proper mindset is a very painful listen. Van Morrison himself agrees, as the closing song
on side A is the stand-alone “Freaky If You Got This Far”, which it truly is.
Side B starts with an explanation of the album itself: “The Big Royalty
Check”, which is a combination of “Big Royalty Check”, “Thirty Two” and “All
The Bits”. Following is “Blowin Your
Nose”, a combination of “Blow In Your Nose” and “Nose In You Blow”, a mockery
of the first album that Morrison never approved of. “Want A Danish?” (a
combination of “Want A Danish” and “Chickie Coo”) is followed by more silliness
in “Shake It Mable” (a combination of “Shake It Mable”, ”You Say France and I
Whistle” and “Up In Your Mind”). The
most noteworthy of the “revenge songs” follows, the stand-alone ”Ring Worm”. To end Contractual Obligations, I united all
four songs about the character Dumb George and sequenced them in a logical and presumably chronological
order, called “The Story of Dumb George” (a combination of “Here Comes Dumb
George”, “Dum Dum George”, “Hold On George” and “Goodbye George”). The icing on this distasteful cake is the
original artwork by EAB, in which Bang Records’ contrived psychdelicism is
literally consuming Van Morrison.
Is this a good album? Oh, God
no, this album is fucking awful! But
intentionally awful, for good reason, and thus worth a listen. It is an absurd album, especially knowing who
this is—this is Van Morrison, a genius who combined folk, jazz, soul and pop on
his legendary Astral Weeks album, recorded under a year later from Contractual
Obligations’ horrific nonsense. With
this in mind, itin t is a fascinating look at the effects of big business on
artists, relevant even today. Sometimes,
cause is more relevant than effect and the context of the music is more
interesting than the music itself. Contractual Obligations shows us this as it lies somewhere between
pain and pleasure but as an album that never was.
Sources used:
Van Morrison - New York Sessions 67 (1997 Recall Records)
flac --> wav --> editing in SONAR & Goldwave --> flac encoding via TLH lv8
*md5, artwork and tracknotes included