Van Morrison 7: Hard Nose The Highway

Nobody following along with Van thus far would have expected him to do some major departure from his basic style. But with Hard Nose The Highway, it could be said that this was his first weird album. That’s not to say he pulled a Bowie, went disco, or even embraced an alternate religion, the latter being part of his repertoire anyway.

The worst thing about this album is the cover, followed by the title. And the cover is just horrible. A painted collage of a grassy field with cattle the same color as the stars in the nearby night sky, with a close-up of one of the characters from Kung Fu, while Our Hero crouches on the back, in front of a large moon, a few lepers hanging around a seedy bar (complete with product placement) and a couple of floating heads.

Those able to stomach the packaging enough to open the shrinkwrap would be wise to buckle in for a strange trip. “Snow In San Anselmo” is an altogether disturbing song to start, with a ghostly choir chirping about, well, snow (in San Anselmo). There’s some give and take for a few verses, a couple of double-time jazz breaks and even an endorsement of the round-the-clock hospitality of the local pancake house. From there the rest of the album has to try and keep up. “Warm Love” made the Top 40 a few months before the album came out; it’s a harmless love song, but with too many flutes for our taste. “Wild Children” struggles to celebrate the icons of his youth, and could be the first song written specifically about baby boomers. On either side he takes his first leaps into complaining about the music business—the title track treats it all as a job, echoing lines from “These Dreams Of You” at the fade, and “The Great Deception” spews a little venom.

Lester Bangs once wrote that side two was full of songs about falling leaves, but that doesn’t fairly approach what’s actually on it. First of all, it opens with a cover of “Bein’ Green”, made famous by Kermit the Frog. Now while Van wasn’t the first person to do the tune—Frank Sinatra and Buddy Rich had beaten him to it—his take is much jauntier than the melancholic lyrics usually suggest. Okay, so maybe “Autumn Song” doesn’t hold up for ten minutes, but most of the second half sounds improvised, with the band following the dynamics nicely. “Purple Heather” is a nice slow-tempo interpretation of “Wild Mountain Thyme”, with a sweet trill of strings.

Taken all together, Hard Nose The Highway really is pretty good. It does set up an autumnal mood, so if you don’t particularly like falling leaves, perhaps the individual tracks will obscure that. Because it’s so different, and probably because of its less than stellar reputation over the years, it manages to rise above its brothers. Which is particularly impressive considering that he’d at least two albums’ worth of stuff in the can, yet he picked these eight songs to represent him.

Van Morrison Hard Nose The Highway (1973)—3½