Van Morrison’s Somebody Tried To Sell Me A Bridge – reviewed!

As they enter their ninth decades, it’s not surprising that some of those musicians who grew up learning the foreign language of the blues should feel like returning to the source of all they became. Dylan nodded to that urge with “Goodbye Jimmy Reed”. The Stones went all out with Blue & Lonesome. Now Van Morrison, never reluctant to acknowledge his debt, gives us an 80-minute, 20-song set largely made up of material from artists he was listening to and learning from in his Belfast teens.

Future historians will marvel at the earnest diligence with which, in the British Isles, a generation took to singing about mojos and king bees and hoochie coochie men, achieving enough authenticity to convince their young audiences as they assumed the roles of men working in Mississippi cotton fields or visiting whorehouses in New Orleans, a place they had yet to visit anywhere but in their imaginations.

Musicologists will have no difficulty in identifying Morrison among the handful who used their acquired authenticity as a platform from which to reach into new dimensions of self-expression. Them’s version of “Baby Please Don’t Go”, spat out in a London studio by the 19-year-old George Ivan Morrison one day in 1964, almost 30 years after Big Joe Williams first recorded it, is arguably the most convincing British blues record of all, supercharged by the sense that already Morrison was using the force of his character to find something beyond mere emulation. He’d heard John Lee Hooker’s 1949 version of the song and sensed extra layers of mystery waiting to be explored.

So Van’s 48th studio album is a voyage of rediscovery through terrain whose appeal remains undimmed by time and familiarity. He treats the blues with the respect it deserves, but he aims to have fun along the way, while proving that, at 80, he still has the voice – albeit an octave or so lower than in his early days – to make the material live again. Without being billed as such, the set is programmed like a show, albeit a very informal one, better suited to a club than a hall.

Working in a studio in Sausalito, the northern California town where he recorded Into The Music in 1979, he’s accompanied by a very solid basic rhythm section (including his longtime bassist David Hayes) and a handful of backing singers, to whom illustrious guests are added as the songs roll by. The guitarists Elvin Bishop and Buddy Guy drop in, Taj Mahal contributes harmonica, banjo and vocals. Everybody is swimming in comfortable waters; the turnarounds and endings are part of the common language, endearing in their predictability.

Nor is the sound gussied up by technology. It’s almost as though these tracks are recorded in a rehearsal room rather than a studio, the musicians themselves working out a balance while playing together rather than relying on an engineer at a mixing desk. It would be a surprise if anything took more than a couple of takes.

Van begins with a pair of songs, the mildly saucy “Kidney Stew Blues” and “King For A Day Blues”, from the repertoire of Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson, the Texan blues shouter who also played the alto saxophone in a style somewhere between early R&B and Charlie Parker. In tribute, Morrison hooks up his own alto; he’s no Vinson, but the passionate gawkiness of his delivery fits the mood he’s summoning.

There’s a crisp “Snatch It Back And Hold It”, from Junior Wells’ classic Hoodoo Man Blues album, while Bishop makes his first appearance to add stinging licks to Hooker’s “Deep Blue Sea”. Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That A Shame” loses its New Orleans shuffle, replaced by a soulful ballad tempo that allows Morrison to own the song.

And so it continues through the covers, including a pair of murder ballads, the traditional “Betty And Dupree” and Blind Blake’s plaintive “Delia’s Gone”, on which Taj Mahal again steps forward, alternating verses with Morrison on the former, blowing lusty harp on both and then sticking around for Lead Belly’s “On A Monday”, written from inside a prison cell.

Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee’s jaunty “When It’s Love Time” and the gospel singer Marie Adams’ “Play The Honky Tonks” maintain the roadhouse mood, and Bishop is at his best on two slow blues ballads, “Madame Butterfly Blues”, written by Van’s compatriot Dave Lewis (once of psych heroes Andwella’s Dream), and “You’re The One (That I Adore)”, from the repertoire of Bobby Bland.

Buddy Guy, now in his 90th year, emerges for the double-whammy finale, a slugfest of Muddy Waters’ rousing “I’m Ready” and BB King’s “Rock Me Baby”, on which Van’s vocal elaborations – stutters, growls and shouts – show how he used the enigmatic simplicity of the blues as a teaching aid to finding and shaping his own voice.

What those lessons inspired is made clear on the slow- rolling “Loving Memories”, one of the set’s four Morrison originals. On the title track, another original, he coolly proclaims his unwillingness to fall for other people’s tricks. And over the bustling Latin rhythm of “Social Climbing Scene”, he sings: “He’s a Belfast boy and he knows just where he’s from/Don’t want no fol-de-rol, don’t want no lah-di-dah”. Be assured there’s none of that here.