6. T.B. Sheets

Van Morrison: Blowin’ Your Mind! (Bang, 1967);
composed by Van Morrison

After THEM never quite broke, Van Morrison got a solo deal with the mobbed-out Bert Berns, as did Neil Diamond. Both signees had AM radio hits right out of the box. The catch was that Van also wanted his debut album to have its own “Desolation Row” or “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” Except that Van’s take on such quasi-mystical sexual obsession was a ten-minute epic about a real-life girlfriend dying of tuberculosis. Preceding it on the original LP side was the up-and-over “Brown Eyed Girl,” followed by a bitter cuckold’s rumination called “He Ain’t Give You None.” After which a group of studio musicians - probably wondering what the hell this Belfast maniac could possibly be going for – hit on a weird midtempo shuffle with Eric Gale’s tremeloed guitar figure continually bumping against blasts from Van’s harmonica that are the song’s hook. Every so often Van rattles off verses that sound like a verbatim transcript of what he might have said to his lover not long before she died in a bedsit with the windows open, fetching water and wine and trying to get away before the smell of death knocked him flat. He did not make it.

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day (on average) during Advent (or the moral equivalent).