VAN MORRISON Blowin' Your Mind 1967 orig STILL SEALED

$

115

 VAN MORRISON
Blowin' Your Mind

 ORIGINAL 1967 LP  STILL SEALED
Bang Records 9011-218

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Blowin' Your Mind! is the solo debut album by Northern Irish musician Van Morrison released in 1967. The album was recorded on the 28th and 29th of March, 1967 and contained his first solo pop hit "Brown Eyed Girl". It was included by Rolling Stone as one of the 40 Essential Albums of 1967.

Morrison does not regard this record as a true album, as Bert Berns compiled and released it without Morrison's consent. A few months previously, Morrison signed a contract that surrendered virtually all control of the material he would record with Bang Records. The songs were recorded in March 1967 and had been intended to be released on four separate singles. The album jacket became notorious as a model of bad taste. It featured a strange swirl of circling brown vines (and drug connotation) surrounding a sweaty looking Morrison. Greil Marcus described it as a "monstrously offensive, super psychedelic far out out-of-sight exploding" design. Morrison's then-wife, Janet Planet said "He never has been, never will be anything approaching a psychedelic user - wants nothing to do with it, wants nothing to do with any drug of any kind". Later, after Berns' death, Morrison would express his displeasure on a couple of "nonsense songs" he included on the contractual obligation recording session. One was entitled, "Blow In Your Nose" and another was titled, "Nose in Your Blow." As the singer recalls, "I got a call saying it was an album coming out and this is the cover. And I saw the cover and I almost threw up, you know."

Of the eight songs on the album, all were composed by Morrison except "Goodbye Baby (Baby Goodbye)" and the last song, Midnight Special. Clinton Heylin contends that the first side of the album "makes for one of the great single-sided albums in rock", whereas Greil Marcus the album's most hostile critic, found it "painfully boring, made up of three sweet minutes of 'Brown Eyed Girl' and... the sprawling, sensation dulling 'T.B. Sheets'". "He Ain't Give You None" is an urban tale of "lust, jealousy and sexual disgust." It references Notting Hill Gate and Curzon Street in London, England, places Morrison would have been familiar with when he lived there during his earlier touring days. It contains the words, "You can leave now if you don't like what is happening." Brian Hinton compares "the delighted contempt of the singer, the song's graveyard pace, the stately organ and stinging guitar" to the Highway 61 period of Bob Dylan.