Above are actual photos and not stock photos of the record  

 

Summary 

This is the highly sought after 1974 original 1st press (matrix -1B and -1C) on Warner Bros Records BS 2805 of “Veedon Fleece” by Van Morrison with textured cover. Since this is a 1st press you’d expect it to sound good and you’d be right-no skips, plays through. Overall the record condition is in VG++ condition , the play grade is VG++ , and the cover grade is VG+. It has the original liner. No writing anywhere. As the original owner I stand by the quality of this record. See photos above. Just a super record. Perfect for the collector.

My listings run very long because I like to be as comprehensive as possible for you. You work hard for your money and deserve value for what you’re spending. I’ve been collecting records for over 50 years and it’s time for me to sell down my collection. If you want to know more about this record feel free to read the notes at the end of this listing. Please bid with confidence!

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Artist: Van Morrison

Album: Veedon Fleece

Label: Warner BS 2805

Country: US

Released: 1974

Genre: Rock, Funk, Soul

 

RECORD CONDITION: VG++

 

VISUAL GRADE 

Side A: VG++

Side B: VG++

 

Grading Notes:

Inspected under bright lights. Graded under Goldmine standards. I am conservative with my grading.

 

Mint>Near Mint> Exc>Very Good+>Very Good>Good+>Good>Fair>Poor

    

Other Notes:

 

Comes with original Warner liner in excellent condition.

As an experienced record collector for 50 years it’s time for me to sell down my collection since I have way too many records. To be honest I almost didn’t list this record for sale due to the fact that this is my player record for this album because it sounds great since it’s an original 1st pressing.

 

PLAY GRADE

Side A:  VG++ plays through no skips

Side B:  VG+ slight low static at times plays through no skips

 

I play grade all records and take pride is being very honest and critical in my grading. I have bought over graded records before which are only visually graded from resellers.  Musically speaking this album is amazing. 

 

LABEL GRADE

Side A EXC no writing

Side B EXC no writing

Deadwax:

Side A BS-2805 40845-1C

Side B BS-2805 40846-1B

Format: Vinyl, Album, 33 RPM LP, Stereo, Gatefold

   

COVER CONDITION

VG+ Front/Back: The cover and back have very light wear. Small residue from a price sticker on front cover. Nice spine. No splits. Pictures tell the story.

 

ADDRESS: Made in US

Tracklist

A1

Fair Play

6:12

A2

Linden Arden Stole The Highlights

2:36

A3

Who Was That Masked Man

2:42

A4

Streets Of Arklow

4:32

A5

You Don't Pull No Punches, But You Don't Push The River

8:48

B1

Bulbs

4:15

B2

Cul De Sac

5:42

B3

Comfort You

4:21

B4

Come Here My Love

2:18

B5

Country Fair

5:35

 

Companies etc

•                  Produced For –

•                  Recorded At –

•                  Recorded At –

•                  Phonographic Copyright (p) –

Credits

         Arranged By [String And Woodwind Arrangements] –

         Art Direction –

         Bass – ,

         Composed By –

         Drums – ,

         Engineer – *, , ,

         Flute, Recorder –

         Guitar – ,

         Keyboards – ,

         Photography By –

         Producer –

         Soprano Saxophone –

         Strings – , *

 

Notes

Produced for Caledonia Productions (on sleeve) / Produced for Caledonia Productions Inc. (on labels)

Recorded at Caledonia Studios, California, and Mercury Studios, New York

 

Need to know more about “Veedon Fleece”? See below

 

SHIPPING 

U.S. Domestic shipping only via USPS Media Mail: $4 for first record. $1 for each additional record. Shipping in cardboard LP record mailer. LPs are shipped outside of cover jacket. Shipping is within 1 business day of receiving payment.    

 

PAYMENT By Paypal only   

 

RETURNS 

All records are guaranteed to be in the condition stated. All returns accepted within 14 days after receiving the item. Refund will be given as Money Back after receiving the item.    

 

About “Veedon Fleece”

From Wikipedia

Veedon Fleece is the eighth by , released in October 1974 (see ). Morrison recorded the album shortly after his from wife Janet (Planet) Rigsbee. With his broken marriage in the past, Morrison visited on holiday for new inspiration, arriving on 20 October 1973 (with his at the time, Carol Guida). While there he wrote—in less than three weeks' time—the songs included on the album (except "", "Country Fair" and "Come Here My Love").

It has been compared to Astral Weeks with the same "stream of consciousness" lyrics but musically it is more , and heavily influenced by Morrison's Irish trip. It has been called a genuinely underground album that he seemed to disown quickly after recording and has been referred to as Morrison's "forgotten masterpiece".

 

Background

During the summer months of 1973, Morrison had embarked on a three-month tour with his eleven-piece band, . Although the resulting concerts and live album, have come to be known as a performing high for Morrison, the tour was physically and emotionally exhausting. Morrison decided afterwards to take a vacation break, returning to Ireland after a six-year absence obtensibly to record an national TV show.[3] Having gone through divorce proceedings earlier in the year, Morrison was now accompanied by his new fiancee, Carol Guida. The vacation visit lasted nearly three weeks during which time he only toured the southern part of the island and did not venture into his native as the country was engulfed in the .

 

Recording

In 1978, Morrison recalled that he recorded the songs about four weeks after writing them: "Veedon Fleece was a bunch of songs that I wrote and then I just recorded it about four weeks after I wrote it. When you make an album you write some songs; you might have four songs and maybe you write two more, suddenly you've got enough songs for an album." According to the drummer Dahaud Shaar, the tracks were laid down in a very informal manner: "During that time I kinda haunted the studio, and Van would come in and we'd just do tracks." David Hayes recalled about the recording sessions: "Every night for about a week he came in with two or three new tunes and we just started playing with him." Jim Rothermel also recalled that during the California recording sessions for the album the songs were often a first take and that the band members had sometimes not heard the songs previously.The strings and woodwinds were arranged by in a New York studio. The song "Come Here My Love" was inspired during the week of the sessions and another song "Country Fair" was left over from the Hard Nose the Highway album and provided a fitting sense of closure. "" and "Cul de Sac" were recut in New York later with musicians with whom Morrison had never worked before: guitarist John Tropea, bassist Joe Macho and drummer Allen Schwarzberg. Given a treatment, these songs were released as the for the album."

 

Composition

The songs, as recorded on the album, were influenced by his vacation trip to in 1973; it was his first visit since he left in 1967. (At this time his parents had moved to California and resided near him.) According to : "Veedon Fleece from a lyrical standpoint, shows maturity, renewed poetical confidence, and a direct nod to actual literary influences." Hage further comments that musically it "can be seen as a companion album to Astral Weeks . The soft and complex musical textures (often augmented by flute) of this album are the closest he will ever again get to that vaunted 1968 album."

The opening track, "Fair Play" derived its name from Morrison's Irish friend, Donall Corvin's repeated use of the Irish colloquialism "fair play to you" as a wry compliment. It's a 3/4 ballad that name checks , and . According to Morrison, the song derived "from what was running through my head" and it marked a return to the stream of consciousness channeled song-writing that had not been evident since several of the songs contained in his 1972 album, .

"Linden Arden Stole the Highlights" segues into "Who Was That Masked Man" (sung in ) which has a similar melody. The pertains to a mythological living in who, when cornered, turns violent and then goes into hiding, "living with a gun", and references a childhood interest in The Lone Ranger. Morrison described the anti-hero Linden Arden as being "about an image of an Irish American living in San Francisco - it's really a hard man type of thing, whilst the latter was a song about what it's like when you absolutely cannot trust anybody. Not as in some paranoia, but in reality."

"" describes a perfect day in "God's green land" and is a tribute to the town visited during this vacation trip. The opening lines of the song: "And as we walked through the streets of Arklow, oh the colours of the day warm, and our heads were filled with poetry, in the morning coming onto dawn" were said to "contain the thematic seeds of the whole album: nature, poetry, god, innocence re-found and love lost" by critic John Kennedy.

"" is frequently regarded as one of Morrison's most accomplished compositions. He revealed that the song owed a considerable debt to his readings in .[13] felt that this track was representative of "an experimental peak, a step beyond even his most ambitious work."

On the second side of the album, the songs "" and "" focus on to America and homecoming.

The album concludes with the love songs, "Comfort You", "Come Here My Love", and "Country Fair"—the latter two employing the traditional Irish style. To Clinton Heylin, the songs also spoke to "the healing power of love... here at last are songs that speak of what he can do for her, rather than concerned solely with his needs and wants." Heylin comments on the song, "Come Here My Love": "This is no 'Autumn Song'. Rather, it sounds a lot like a man learning how to love again."[15] Morrison spoke of "Country Fair" as having the same kind of feeling as "", although that song was used to open the album, instead of as a kind of closure.

Years before "Twilight Zone" was released as a bonus track on the 2008 re-mastered version of Veedon Fleece, had said about the version of the song on : "'Twilight Zone' is a very slow, bluesy, late-night song that would fit right in on Veedon Fleece."

 

Reception

Generally, critics initially reacted by underrating or ignoring the album altogether, as it represented a significant departure from Morrison's more familiar and . Both and printed dismissive reviews with Melody Maker commenting that the first side of the album featured "some of his least memorable shots at songwriting since Tupelo Honey". Rolling Stone called the entire album "self-indulgent ... mood music for mature hippies."[25] However, the current Rolling Stone of Morrison hails the album as "the culmination of everything Van was doing up to that point, all celtic mystic tumult in the vocals and pastoral beauty in the music" and ranks it among "his most majestic music".

critics Jason Ankenny and Thom Jurek called the album "brilliant" and commented that "With its elegiac tone and deeply autobiographical lyrics, this was a Morrison who didn't so readily associate himself with the feel-good, peace, love, and rhythm & blues sound American audiences were used to. If any album reflects a real period of transition for an artist, it's this one."

John Kennedy, critic wrote in 2004:

Veedon Fleece is a poet's album, a jazz lover's album, a masterpiece of soul-singing, a blue and green journey into the places of the heart that were first opened up for dowsing with Astral Weeks. said, "we can call 'beautiful' only that which suggests the existence of an ideal order; supra-terrestrial, harmonious and logical that yet bears within itself, like the brand of an original sin, the drop of poison, the rogue element of incoherence, the grain of sand that will foul up the entire system." This album contains all of Baudelaire's definition of beauty.[

Derek Miller of concludes: "Veedon [Fleece] is the kind of album, so frothy and thick, that requires silence when it's over. You have to turn the stereo off for a while. To me that's the better explanation for Morrison's three-year absence. He'd just finished Veedon Fleece."

 

Aftermath

This album was followed by a three-year hiatus for Morrison from recording, and except for an appearance with in 1976 on concert at , from performing live. Clinton Heylin noted that Veedon Fleece is by far the most underplayed album in Morrison's canon.By 2010, only seven of the ten songs from the album have ever been played by Morrison in concert. Of those seven, only "" and "" have been played more than twenty times live. "Fair Play" was performed for the first time live in June 2009.After Veedon Fleece, most of Morrison's albums would chart higher in the than in the , partly due to his move back to several years afterward.

The 30 June 2008 reissued and remastered version of the album contains an alternative take of "" and "Twilight Zone". "Who Was That Masked Man" from this album was listed as one of the standout tracks from the six album reissue.

 

 

Influence

Biographer has said that when he agreed to write Celtic Crossroads, it was with the hope that he might "turn a few people on to this album, above all others in Morrison's rich oeuvre."

reviewed the album on 28 November 2007 on and praised it as: "the record I always come back to again and again...It is far superior to Astral Weeks and I love Astral Weeks. This is the definitive Van album with the definitive Van song, "Who Was That Masked Man"...It's the most obvious album he's ever done about Ireland...Veedon Fleece is the only thing I listen to just before I go on stage." When asked in an interview in 2005 to name something she considered "a mind-altering work of art", she answered: "Van Morrison's Veedon Fleece."

has referred to this album as one of his favorites and names "Linden Arden Stole the Highlights" as the song that makes this album "special to (him)."

( and ) hails the record in in November 2011. When asked which record he could not be without, he answered: "At this point I’ve determined that Veedon Fleece by Van Morrison is my favorite record of all time. I love it from start to finish; it’s perfect".

 

Album cover

The album cover photograph shows Morrison sitting in the grass between two . The photographer, Tom Collins, took the original photograph that situated Morrison and the dogs adjacent to the Sutton House Hotel, a converted overlooking , where Morrison first stayed upon arriving in Ireland for his vacation.

 

Album title

Several authors have commented on the mysterious object, "Veedon Fleece" as it appears in the album title and in the lyrics of the song, "". Scott Thomas states in his review: "The Morrison-conceived Veedon Fleece is the symbol of everything yearned for in the preceding songs; spiritual enlightenment, wisdom, community, artistic vision and love."

concludes: "The Veedon Fleece...appears to be Van's Irish equivalent of the Holy Grail a religious relic that would answer his questions if he could track it down on his quest around the west coast of Ireland."

Morrison explained the title with: "I haven't a clue about what the title means. It's actually a person's name. I have a whole set of characters in my head that I'm trying to fit into things. Veedon Fleece is one of them and I just suddenly started singing it in one of these songs, It's like a stream of consciousness thing." Morrison once told a when questioned about the meaning, "It doesn't mean anything, I made it up myself."

Covers

The songs are so personal and idiosyncratic in nature that they have not been covered by well-known musicians except for versions of "Fair Play" and "Linden Arden Stole the Highlights" by . Hitchcock's first performances of the two songs were in May 1991 at . recorded a version of "Comfort You" with on her album .

 

 

All Music Review by Thom Jurek

The final album of 's remarkably prolific and innovative 1968-1974 period (followed by three years of silence), brings the singer full circle, returning him to the introspection and poignancy of . Composed following his sudden divorce from wife and subsequent retreat from the U.S., the songs are subtle and Spartan, the performances deeply felt; though less tortured and cathartic than , it's a record fraught with emotional upheaval, as evidenced by such superior moments as "Linden Arden Stole the Highlights," "Who Was That Masked Man," and "You Don't Pull No Punches, But You Don't Push the River." That said, this is one of those -- and there are several -- forgotten classics in the catalog. Because it followed hot on the heels of his universally acclaimed double live album , released only a month previous, this effort, like its likewise unheralded -- but equally wonderful -- studio effort , which was issued only six months before, the album suffered from a lack of exposure because of saturation in the marketplace rather than any lack in quality. is every bit the creative equal of its more famous predecessors. With its elegiac tone and deeply autobiographical lyrics, this was a who didn't so readily associate himself with the feel-good, peace, love, and rhythm & blues sound American audiences were used to. If any album reflects a real period of transition for an artist, it's this one. It's brilliant.

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