Random Humorous Things - A Light-Hearted Thread

[Rev. Rye]

I recently decided to stream the collected works of Van Morrison at the store. Yesterday, I played the Bang sessions, his first solo sessions after the breakup of Them, the "Brown Eyed Girl" era. And, before I get to the funny thing, I should get into the complicated Music Industry Politics that are necessary to understand it.

In the beginning, Van Morrison worked with Bang Records, and he was kind of dissatisfied. Things went from bad to worse after Bert Berns, who owned the company, died of heart failure on 30 December 1967. His wife Ilene decided that disagreements with Morrison were responsible for his death (of course, his issues with Neil Diamond doing more of the same didn't help matters) and went nuclear. She barred him from the studios, threatened enough clubs that he wasn't able to get live work, and she almost deported him back to Northern Ireland (and only a citizenship marriage stopped that plan.) He was eventually reduced to performing as part of an acoustic trio with a bassist and a flautist playing songs that would later become part of his great album Astral Weeks. Eventually, Warner Brothers signed him and eventually, they managed to smooth out some of the issues, but there remained a few conditions:

• Web IV, Berns' publishing company, demanded the rights to half of the copyright to any song Morrison wrote AND released as a single in the year starting 12 September 1968. Warner didn't release any singles from Van Morrison until 1970, when "Come Running" was released as a single from Moondance.
  
• Two songs owned by Web IV were required to appear on the album. The two songs chosen were "Madame George" and "Beside You," and they changed pretty radically.
  
• He had to write 3 songs a month for 12 months that Web IV would have complete rights to. And now for the reason I wrote this: 
  

Naturally, Van Morrison was not in the mood to fulfill that third criterion. The Bang Masters album I was originally going to play consisted of 18 tracks, half the 36 songs required. And of those 18 tracks, 1 was an alternate mix, and 2 were covers. But, he realised that they didn't all have to be "Brown Eyed Girl." So he improvised 31 half-assed songs, and, while it starts off just kind of boring, something hit me as this played:






This is Van the Man becoming a troll, and he's fucking hilarious. We start with five songs with titles like "Twist and Shake" and "Shake and Roll" and "Stomp and Scream" and "Scream and Holler" and "Jump and Thump," and then we really start to see the absurdity start to ascend. Then again, he wrote a song called "The Big Royalty Check" complaining about how he has to make money for Web IV and he hasn't gotten his own royalty checks. A few songs later, he does a song called "Freaky if You Got This Far," which I can only assume is his addressing anyone who actually listened to the damn tapes. And it gets weirder from there, with songs like "You Say France and I Whistle" or "Thirty Two," his big take that at the production of "Brown Eyed Girl". The whole tape lasts 35 minutes, and I'd be very surprised if the session lasted more than an hour. Not even enough time to tune his guitar. In all, he recorded 31 songs in one session (five short of his obligations), and I guess Ilene Burns just left it at that, because she knew he was never going to do it properly. You can find the "Contractual Obligation Session" pretty easy on YouTube.

Also, while trying and failing to find the date of this session, I found out that a recording of one of those live trio recordings (in Boston) was given an Ashcan release to extend copyright in the EU. It's not on YouTube, though.