What's with Van Morrison?

I don't think anyone is questioning his talent or visionary work. It's his mercurial behavior that is so confounding.

 

Everyone is doin' it nowadays. Performing albums of yore in their completion has been the touring craze for a few years now.

 

It's just a job you know and it's no sweet lorraine.

 

Morrison is and always was arrogant, self absorbed, extremely moody, very critical of others, nothing new, but still a great entertainer.

 

Like many famous performers, just that he doesn't have the social skills to hide it....

 

So true

 

I think the commonality here (aside from them both being mercurial and not really understanding the internet) is that they both employed a company called Web Sherriff to enforce their intellectual property claims. They effectively have a boiler room of people who are constantly googling the artists they're paid to enforce and sending out DMCA notices for anything they think is their IP.

It's effectively a form of legal bullying - the blogger thing is ridiculous because the author in question would definitely be allowed to use the album cover under the fair use provisions (criticism, review or parody) of the constitution, but because litigating a spurious claim like that is costly and time consuming the blog host just gives in to their demands.

 

Didn't know that about Web Sheriff. Very interesting that both acts use them!

 

I don't know about Prince, but Van must have stopped using the Web Sheriff.

YouTube was scrubbed clean of Van Morrison except for official videos when the Web Sheriff was on the case, but a few years ago videos started slowly migrating back and have remained.

Don't get me started on what happened to the Michael Hayward's great Van Morrison fan site during the purge.