The Man

iTunes Review

The tracks comprising The Man have been issued numerous times under various titles with songs deleted and/or re-sequenced. Morrison recorded them as part of his first American recording sessions and had no idea they’d be issued in album form. The first album to appear (in 1967), Blowin’ Your Mind, was compiled by his producer Bert Berns and contained the hit “Brown Eyed Girl” (featured here in both the ‘hit’ version and an ‘alternate take’). Morrison was not a clean-cut pop singer but a mercurial soul man, as driven by the claustrophobic nine-minute blues of “T.B. Sheets” and the confrontative sexual tension of “He Ain’t Give You None,” as the smoother ebullience of “Chick-a-Boom” or “The Smile You Smile.” The hard rock guitars driving “Joe Harper Saturday Morning” and the sweaty near barroom attack of “Beside You” and “Madame George” do not prepare anyone for the hypnotizing beauty that would become his next solo work Astral Weeks, which features the latter two tunes in much radically altered forms. But The Man, like Bang Masters and others before it, show the young Morrison primed to pounce.