Kraft managed to get the taciturn Morrison talking the next night. Decades later, he still recalls it in vivid detail. Kraft wrote for an underground weekly called Boston After Dark-a precursor to the Boston Phoenix-and had been assigned to cover Morrison’s string of shows. In the audience, a writer named Eric Kraft was spellbound. “I could still play, but it was like, Oh my God.” Then he starts the next song and it’s ‘Brown Eyed Girl.’” Payne was shocked: He was playing with the man whose voice he’d been hearing on the jukebox for weeks.
His phrasing was not independent of what I was doing, and I had never experienced that. “I started playing a little and I could tell he had heard everything I had played and he was reacting to it. Then, in the second set, Payne joined them onstage. And until I’m on the stage with him, I don’t get it.” I thought, The guy doesn’t seem like he wants me to be here, maybe the bass player is forcing me on him. “I listened to the first set and I didn’t like it,” Payne remembers. Just…in his own world.”Īs Payne watched from the audience, Morrison and Kielbania began to play. Tom says, ‘Van, this is the guy I was telling you about.’ And he sort of goes, ‘Uh eh,’ and gives me a limp hand. Payne remembers meeting Morrison in the back of the club: “This guy comes out, a short guy with a pageboy haircut, kind of a blank look on his face. At a jam session, Kielbania recruited a flute player named John Payne. The band consisted of Morrison, bassist Tom Kielbania, and drummer Joey Bebo. Sheldon, the 17-year-old guitarist, had been ditched by this point. The club mostly hosted jazz, but Morrison’s poet rock fit right in. (Today, it’s a stack of rehearsal studios beneath a pizza joint.) Hieroglyphs and Egyptian motifs decorated the walls. Those gigs took place at a subterranean nightclub called the Catacombs, at 1120 Boylston Street in the Fenway, two floors below a pool parlor. He booked several shows under the name “The Van Morrison Controversy” to hone the new material.
By late August 1968, Morrison had already impressed Merenstein and experienced the prophetic dream that dictated his new sound.
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