They construct a flow around him, John Platania contributing soft coronas with his guitar, Bill Atwood’s muted trumpet issuing crisp phrases, like light fluttering on the surface of a lake. On “Wild Children,” he sings “Tennessee Williams/Let your inspiration flow.” It’s one of his most permissive compositions, and in the performance at the Rainbow, his band is responsive and sensitive.
He doesn’t reference authors he names them, and tells us what they’re doing. One rarely feels, listening to a Van Morrison record, as if they are sifting through a metaphor. This sort of free association flows into his lyrics. This feeling of endlessness, of the language of a genre losing its shape and blending with others, gives even his straightest R&B numbers the shape of a whirlpool. His own songs are composites themselves: blues, jazz, folk, and rock forms all appear in his music, sometimes at once, collapsing into a slipstream of associations. His sets in 1973 juxtaposed original material from throughout his career with established soul and blues songs by Ray Charles and Sam Cooke, Willie Dixon and Sonny Boy Williamson. History and myth are also two forms of context Morrison is determined to combine in his music. It combines history and myth until they produce a kind of transcendent space. Caledonia was a name originally assigned to Scotland by the Romans though the geography it describes still exists, “Caledonia,” as a word, has a kind of mystical aura. What the newly issued concerts reveal is the night-to-night dynamic of Morrison and his then-band, a group of 11 musicians called the Caledonia Soul Orchestra. Too Late has been reissued along with a box set of previously unreleased gigs ( Volumes II, III, and IV) along with a DVD portraying a fraction of one of his shows at the Rainbow Theatre none of the recordings overlap with the original album.
Morrison documented this breakthrough on It’s Too Late to Stop Now, a 1974 live album culled from various performances throughout the previous year.
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