The Night He Stole the Last Waltz: The Battles Behind Van Morrison’s ‘Caravan’
“Caravan” was never a single. It was the fourth track on side one of an album, a song about gypsies and a radio, and in the ordinary course of the record business it should have lived and died as a deep cut. Instead it became the performance by which Van Morrison is most widely known — not a recording at all, but five-odd minutes of film from Thanksgiving night 1976, when a singer deep in the grip of stage fright, dressed in a burgundy sequined suit, marched onto The Band’s farewell stage and produced what Eric Clapton later called some of the greatest live music you will ever see. The song had to fight for that moment. It was written by a man who had just seized control of his own career after a bruising apprenticeship in other people’s hands, recorded in the first flush of that freedom, and carried for years as a concert warhorse before the cameras ever caught it. Its story is the story of Morrison learning — the hard way, and then the triumphant way — that the stage, not the chart, was where his songs would win their battles.
The evidence is spread across five decades. “Caravan” anchors the live album many consider the finest ever made in rock, It’s Too Late to Stop Now. Nick Hornby chose its live version as the song he wants played at his funeral. When Morrison declined to attend his own induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the unknown band drafted to replace him, Counting Crows, reached instinctively for “Caravan” — and were famous by morning. The song about turning the radio up became a song the culture keeps turning up: in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz, in The West Wing, at hall-of-fame ceremonies and tribute nights. But before any of that, it was simply the sound of a twenty-three-year-old in a borrowed Woodstock house, listening to a neighbour’s radio he could not explain hearing, deciding that freedom sounded like a caravan rolling down the road. To understand the battles, start there — with the fight that made the singer.
A Singer at War with the Business
By the summer of 1969, when “Caravan” was written and recorded, Van Morrison had already survived the kind of early career that finishes most artists. He had been a teenage saxophonist in Belfast showbands, the frontman of Them, and a solo signing to Bang Records in New York, where “Brown Eyed Girl” made him famous in 1967 on terms he came to despise — the saga of that song and the publishing he signed away as a young man is told elsewhere in this series, and it shadowed him for years. When Bang’s founder Bert Berns died suddenly at the end of 1967, Morrison was left in dispute with the label, and the standard accounts of the period describe a grim contractual obligation session of deliberately disposable songs before Warner Bros. bought out his contract and gave him a fresh start. Freedom, he had learned, was not something record companies granted. It was something you took.
His first album for Warner, Astral Weeks, released in 1968, was the proof and the problem. Made in New York with jazz musicians assembled by producer Lewis Merenstein, it was received by critics as a masterpiece — and it sold almost nothing. Morrison was twenty-three, acclaimed, broke in all the ways that mattered, and newly certain of one thing: the next record would be made his way, with his musicians, under his direction, or not at all. He and his wife Janet Planet left the city for a house on a mountaintop near Woodstock, in upstate New York, following the gravitational pull of Bob Dylan and The Band, who had made the town the capital of a new, roots-conscious American music. There, about ten months after Astral Weeks, he began writing the songs that became Moondance.
That context is the first battle behind “Caravan”, and it explains the song’s mood. Astral Weeks had been made under the old dispensation: Merenstein had stocked the studio with elite jazz session men — bassist Richard Davis, guitarist Jay Berliner among them — and Morrison, unknown to them and barely older than a schoolboy by their standards, had sung his strange, cyclical songs into their improvisations across two autumn sessions in 1968. The result was a masterpiece he had somehow made without ever being in charge. The new songs were about arrival, appetite and daylight. “Caravan” is inconceivable as an Astral Weeks track — it is too physical, too communal, too pleased with itself. It celebrates movement without melancholy: a travelling people, a woman, a radio playing somewhere in the dark. Johnny Rogan, in his biography No Surrender, called it “a romantic portrayal of gypsy life and a testimony to [Morrison’s] love of radio”, and noted that it contains some of Morrison’s “most attractive vocal dynamics”. The gypsies in the song are not a metaphor Morrison had to research. They were the self-image of a man who had just escaped a contract: a people with no fixed address, no landlord and no boss, who carry their music with them and answer to the road.
Woodstock, the Town That Wasn’t a Festival
The Woodstock Morrison moved to was not the Woodstock of legend — not yet. It was a sleepy artists’ colony in the Catskills that had become, by accident of Dylan’s retreat there after his 1966 motorcycle crash, the refuge of musicians fleeing the industry’s capitals. The Band had made Music from Big Pink in a house in nearby West Saugerties, and the town’s atmosphere — rural, unhurried, saturated with music being made for its own sake — was exactly the antidote Morrison needed after the Bang Records years. He recruited his future from it. The musicians he rehearsed the new songs with were local players he had fallen in with: guitarist John Platania, saxophonist Jack Schroer, keyboardist Jef Labes and the rest of the band that would record Moondance. They were not session royalty. They were neighbours, and the distinction was the point — these were men who had learned the songs around him, in rooms, rather than from charts in a studio.
Then, in August 1969, the festival that took the town’s name — held, in fact, on a farm in Bethel, miles away — turned Woodstock into a brand and a pilgrimage site, and the quiet was over. Morrison and Janet Planet were among the locals who found the changed vibe impossible; they bailed on the town not long after, and the album whose sound was formed there was finished in New York studios. “Caravan” preserves the Woodstock interval exactly as it felt before the invasion: a house in the hills, a band of friends down the road, music drifting across distances it shouldn’t have been able to cross. The most famous event in the town’s history is the one its most famous musical resident of 1969 did not play. He was too busy, that summer, cutting the record that would outlast the brand.
The House, the Gypsies and the Radio
The song’s most mysterious ingredient is a sound Morrison could not account for. Living in the rural house outside Woodstock, with the nearest neighbour far down the road, he kept hearing music — a radio, playing somewhere, with impossible clarity. He explained it years later, and the explanation is stranger than the song: “I could hear the radio like it was in the same room. I don’t know how to explain it. There was some story about an underground passage under the house I was living in, rumours from kids and stuff and I was beginning to think it was true. How can you hear someone’s radio from a mile away, as if it was playing in your own house? So I had to put that into the song. It was a must.”
That is why the radio sits at the centre of “Caravan” like a household god. In the song, the caravan of gypsies has camped near the singer’s home; there is a woman — the “sweet lady” — and the shared ritual that binds the verses together is the turning up of a radio so that everyone can hear the music together. The image does triple duty. It is a memory of Woodstock, where music drifted between the houses of musicians who had retreated to the woods to make it. It is a love song’s device: the radio as the excuse and the accompaniment for closeness. And it is a mission statement from a man whose whole art came out of a wireless in Belfast — Radio Luxembourg and the American forces broadcasts, the blues and soul records that crossed an ocean and raised him. When Morrison sings about turning the radio up, he is describing the founding experience of his life. Every battle he ever fought with the music business was, at bottom, a fight to keep faith with that sound.
The craftsmanship beneath the mysticism is easy to miss because the finished record sounds so loose and joyful. But “Caravan” is carefully built: verses that rise from near-whisper to full cry, a chorus that opens like a gate, passages of wordless “la la la” singing that let the horns answer the voice, and those famous commands — turn it up — that function simultaneously as lyric, arrangement cue and audience instruction. Rogan’s praise for the “vocal dynamics” points at the essential thing: the song is a dynamic event, a series of swells and releases, designed less like a pop single than like a tide. It could not be shortened into a jingle or excerpted into a hook. It had to be experienced whole, at length, ideally in a room. Which is to say: from the beginning, “Caravan” was built for the stage, whether or not its author yet knew what the stage would do to him.
The Sweet Lady and the Travellers
The song’s human furniture rewards a closer look, because both of its presences are drawn from the life Morrison was actually living. The “sweet lady” addressed through the song belongs to the album’s presiding spirit: Janet Planet, the wife who had shared the Bang Records wars and the Woodstock exile, and whose presence hovers over Moondance so completely that the album’s original gatefold carried a fairy-tale text written by her. The record is, among other things, a newlywed’s album — “Crazy Love” is its most famous declaration — and “Caravan” folds the marriage into its larger celebration: the couple are not settling down but joining the travellers, domesticity reimagined as motion. That was a fantasy with a shelf life, and the Morrisons’ marriage would not survive the decade; but the song preserves its moment with an honesty that outlasts the fact, which is what songs are for.
The travellers themselves carried a charge for an Irish writer that an American audience might miss. In the Ireland Morrison grew up in, Travellers — the itinerant people of the roads, with their caravans and their music — were a familiar, marginal, half-romanticised presence, figures of a freedom that settled people both envied and policed. Morrison’s caravan is plainly romantic rather than documentary: his gypsies are bringers of music, camped close enough to visit, generous with their radio. But the romance is the meaning. Set the song beside its album-mates and the pattern emerges — the whole of Moondance is a record about a man rejoining the human caravan after the solitudes of Astral Weeks: fishing with a boy in “And It Stoned Me”, dancing in the moonlight in the title song, welcomed home in “Glad Tidings”. “Caravan” is where that rejoining becomes literal. The singer starts alone in a house with a phantom radio, and ends inside the encampment, asking for the music to be turned up so that no one has to listen alone. Every subsequent triumph of the song — the communal crescendos at the Rainbow, the shared stage at Winterland, the stand-ins at the Hall of Fame — is that movement repeated at larger and larger scale.
Cut First: 30 July 1969
“Caravan” was among the very first of the new songs to be recorded. It was cut on 30 July 1969 at Mastertone Studios in New York City, with Lewis Merenstein producing the session — an early date that placed it ahead of the album’s main sessions and suggests how completely formed the song already was when Morrison walked in. The musicians on the track were the nucleus of the new band he had assembled around Woodstock: John Klingberg on bass, Jef Labes on piano, Gary Mallaber on drums, John Platania on guitar, and the two-man horn section of Jack Schroer on alto saxophone and Collin Tilton on tenor saxophone. It is essentially the same line-up that would carry the album, and the sound — piano-led, horn-punched, loose but never ragged — is the Moondance sound in embryo.
What happened next, as the album sessions proper moved to A&R Studios between September and December 1969, has become one of the defining stories of Morrison’s career. Merenstein had planned to reconvene the distinguished jazz musicians of Astral Weeks for the first session; Morrison, by the account of guitarist John Platania and the standard histories of the album, refused them, insisting on his own Woodstock recruits, and effectively took the production of the album into his own hands. The credits would still carry both names — produced by Van Morrison and Lewis Merenstein — but the power had changed address. The album was recorded on eight-track tape by five different engineers, among them the young Elliot Scheiner, and it came together fast, in the white heat of a man determined that no one would ever arrange his music over his head again.
“Caravan” itself seems to have taken some cutting to get right. When Warner Bros. issued the deluxe edition of Moondance in 2013, the vault yielded take after take of the song — seven versions in all across the set, running from a first take through a long sequence of attempts and an entire “Caravan Redo” that started the song over from scratch. Coming from a songwriter caricatured as a one-take mystic, the archaeology is instructive: the looseness of the master was achieved, not stumbled into. The swells had to be paced, the horns had to be placed, the singer had to find the exact register where exhortation stays musical. Morrison’s own instruments on the record tell the same story of a man embedding himself in his band rather than fronting it: he plays rhythm guitar throughout the album, and on early pressings his tambourine can be heard rattling inside the mixes — a bandleader’s instrument, keeping time from within. When the album was finished, Elliot Landy — the official photographer of the Woodstock festival held that same summer — took the cover photograph, and Moondance went out into the world wearing the colours of the community that had produced it.
Anatomy of a Swell
Listen to how the record is put together and you can hear why it defeated radio’s formats and conquered its concert halls. “Caravan” runs four minutes and fifty-seven seconds, and almost nothing in it behaves like a single. It begins in intimacy — piano, a confiding vocal, the caravan sighted almost in passing — and then it begins the process that defines it: accumulation. Each pass through the song adds weight. The horns, held back early, start answering the voice; the voice, in turn, starts answering itself, spinning off into the wordless “la la la” passages that function like a second, purely musical lyric — the sound of a singer whose feelings have outrun his vocabulary, which in Morrison’s art is usually the moment of maximum truth. The famous refrain is not a hook in the pop sense at all. It is an instruction, issued to the band, the audience and the listener simultaneously: turn it up. In the chorus the band lands on the command with two sharp, exposed hits and then leaves space around the voice, so that the exhortation itself becomes the rhythm. You do not hum “Caravan” in the shower. You brace for it.
That architecture is a soul revue’s architecture, scaled to a rock band. Morrison grew up on the records of Ray Charles, Solomon Burke and the great bandleaders who treated a song as a service to be conducted — building the congregation verse by verse until the room levitated. “Caravan” applies that liturgy to a folk-rock song: testimony, response, exhortation, release. It also explains the song’s odd relationship with its own author’s other work. Morrison’s catalogue is full of songs about seeking — mystics, avenues, silence, healing. “Caravan” is one of the very few about having found, and the found thing is not God or a woman but a frequency: other people, tuned in, at the right volume. The battles of his career were nearly all fought in defence of that signal — against producers who would arrange it away, labels who would shorten it, and eventually against his own terror of performing it in public. The song knew all along what it needed. It needed a room, a band and a man willing to shout instructions at both.
The Album Track That FM Radio Adopted
Moondance was released on 28 February 1970 and changed Morrison’s commercial life. It reached number 29 on Billboard’s pop albums chart and became his first million-selling album, passing that mark within a year of release — a transformation for an artist whose previous record had been a succès d’estime and a commercial write-off. Warner Bros. tried to harvest a conventional hit from it, releasing “Come Running” backed with “Crazy Love” as a single for AM radio; it sputtered out at number 39 on the Hot 100. The real action was on the new FM band, where album-oriented programming was inventing a different kind of stardom. FM stations fastened on three tracks above the others: the title song, “Into the Mystic” — and “Caravan”.
Consider what that meant. “Caravan”, at nearly five minutes, with its vamps and its wordless passages and its total absence of a conventional chorus hook, was precisely the kind of record AM radio could not use and FM radio could build an identity around. It sat fourth on side one, between “Crazy Love” and “Into the Mystic”, in the heart of a sequence that has since become one of the most celebrated sides in rock. It was never given a single release of its own in the era — Morrison’s label had other candidates, and on paper they were right — so the song’s entire reputation was built by album plays, by word of mouth, and above all by performance. It entered the culture the slow way, the way hymns do. By the time it reached its most famous night, six years later, audiences already treated it as a standard, and nobody could have pointed to the chart that made it one. There wasn’t one.
The parent album’s own canonisation kept renewing the song’s licence. Moondance has never left the greatest-albums conversation since 1970, and its fiftieth anniversary in 2020 brought the usual flood of retrospectives in which “Caravan” was treated not as a curiosity but as one of the record’s load-bearing walls. In one fan-scholar’s much-shared countdown of Morrison’s fifty greatest songs, it stands at number five — ahead of almost everything he ever wrote, including songs that were actual hits. That is the strange arithmetic of the album track that FM adopted: no peak position, no gold single, no chart obituary to write, just a permanent seat near the top of every attempt to rank the man’s work. The charts measure a fortnight. “Caravan” was built, from its first Woodstock rehearsal, to be measured in decades.
Turn It Up: The Concert Warhorse
Morrison was performing “Caravan” live as early as June 1969, weeks before he recorded it — the song was road-tested before it was studio-tested, a reversal of the usual order that suited a piece built on dynamics. Through the early seventies it grew into his signature showpiece, the number in which the machinery of his art was most fully exposed: the hush, the build, the band leaning in, the singer pushing the tempo with shouted instructions that the musicians obeyed in real time. A Morrison concert in those years could be a forbidding experience — he was already famous for turning his back, truncating songs and refusing every ritual of showmanship — but “Caravan” was the exception that proved what he could do when a song gave him joy instead of obligations. It ended sets and anchored encores. It was, in the best sense, a workout: some 180 documented performances across the decades would follow that first one in 1969.
The definitive early document is It’s Too Late to Stop Now, the live album released in 1974 from his 1973 tours, routinely ranked among the greatest live records ever made — its own story is told elsewhere in this series, including the companion piece on how that album was created. Within it, “Caravan” is the centrepiece of abundance: Morrison stretches the song over a long, vamped passage, the band rising and falling under his hand, until near the climax he introduces the musicians one by one as the music surges on. It is a performance so complete that Nick Hornby, in his book Songbook — a collection of essays on his thirty-one favourite songs — named this version of “Caravan” as the song he wants played at his funeral. “In the long, vamped passage right before the climax,” Hornby wrote, “Morrison’s band seems to isolate a moment somewhere between life and its aftermath, a big, baroque entrance hall of a place where you can stop and think about everything that has gone before.” Then, with characteristic self-awareness, he noticed the catch — that this is also the passage where Morrison introduces the band, meaning his mourners would file out to the names of a dozen strangers being announced — and refused to reconsider: “I’m not changing my mind, so there.” A song that a writer of Hornby’s precision wants as the last music of his life has passed out of the category of pop altogether.
The afterlife of that live arrangement keeps confirming him. When the It’s Too Late to Stop Now archive was finally expanded in 2016 into a multi-volume set, it contained not one but two further period performances of “Caravan” — one from the Rainbow in London, taken fast, and one from the Troubadour in Los Angeles — each a different negotiation of the same swells. The filmed performance from the Rainbow on 24 July 1973, preserved from that tour and circulated officially on Morrison’s own channels, shows the warhorse at full stretch in its classic period: the band wound tight, the singer crouching into the verses and rearing up for the exhortations, the whole apparatus of build and release already so reliable that he can conduct it with a glance. Before The Last Waltz, before the burgundy suit and the leg kicks, the Rainbow “Caravan” is the evidence that the song’s greatest night was no accident of Scorsese’s cameras. Morrison had been winning this particular battle, in room after room, for years. The film merely made the winning permanent.
Thanksgiving 1976: The Reluctant Guest Steals the Show
On 25 November 1976, Thanksgiving Day, The Band played their farewell concert at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, promoted by Bill Graham and filmed by Martin Scorsese for what became The Last Waltz. Graham, incapable of understatement, served the audience a full Thanksgiving dinner before the show, and the guest list was a summit of the era: Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Eric Clapton, Muddy Waters, Dr. John, Neil Diamond and more. Morrison’s presence on that list concealed a battle all its own. By 1976 he had largely withdrawn from performance; his stage fright, documented across his biographies, had become severe, he had not released an album since Veedon Fleece in 1974, and he was living in a kind of creative semi-retirement. Accounts of the night agree that he was a deeply reluctant guest who had to be coaxed — in some tellings, practically pushed — toward the stage. He was not even granted the dignity of looking comfortable when he got there: he appeared in a burgundy sequined suit, a garment so at odds with his monastic image that it reads, in the film, like a disguise.
What happened next has been replayed so often that its improbability gets forgotten. Morrison performed two songs at the concert: a duet with Richard Manuel on “Tura Lura Lural (That’s an Irish Lullaby)” — and “Caravan”. Only “Caravan” made the film. Backed by The Band and an expanded horn section arranged by Allen Toussaint, he did not merely sing the song; he conducted it, commanded it, rode it. The performance was unrehearsed in its dynamics — the crescendos were cued live, with Morrison shouting “turn it up” and “one more time” and The Band answering him, Danko, Helm, Hudson, Manuel and Robertson following a singer they had known since the Woodstock days and plainly delighting in his possession of the room. Far Out Magazine, reassessing the film’s guest performances, judged that the greatest and most unexpectedly electrifying turn of the night came from Morrison, noting that “all through the song, he’s perfectly supported… but he is never lost in the mix”. Robbie Robertson can be heard shouting him on as “Van the Man”. And then, at the height of the ovation, Morrison did the most Morrison thing imaginable: he kicked his legs in time with the horns, bowed, and walked off — abruptly, mid-triumph, leaving The Band to play out the ending alone, as if applause were a room he had finished with.
The critics’ verdict arrived over the years and never reversed. Eric Clapton, asked in 2007 about his enjoyment of the film, said: “For me, Muddy [Waters] and Van [Morrison] steal the show. Van doing ‘Caravan’ with the leg kicks. Some of the greatest live music you’ll ever see.” Consider the field that judgment covers: Dylan, Young, Mitchell, Waters himself, Clapton himself. The reluctant guest with the stage fright, who had released nothing in two years and would rather have been anywhere else, delivered the performance by which the whole historic night is measured. The battle of The Last Waltz was not against the other stars. It was against himself — the terror, the withdrawal, the burgundy suit — and “Caravan”, the song built on crescendos he could command, was the weapon with which he won it. When the film was released in 1978, the performance entered the permanent record, and the audio version was later included on his 2007 compilation Van Morrison at the Movies – Soundtrack Hits — an album track from 1970, canonised by a film of a concert it had conquered in 1976.
It is tempting, and not unreasonable, to read that night as the hinge of Morrison’s middle career. The singer who had to be coaxed onto the Winterland stage had released no album in two years; within eighteen months he had ended the silence with A Period of Transition (1977) and followed it with Wavelength (1978), and he was back on the road, where — with long retreats still to come — he has essentially remained ever since. Careers are rarely rescued by a single guest appearance, and Morrison’s resurrection had many causes. But the film fixed an image of him in the public mind at the exact moment his own output went quiet: not the difficult recluse of the newspaper stories, but the squat, sequined figure kicking in time with a horn section, shouting a great band higher and higher, in possession of the most famous room in rock. When audiences thought of Van Morrison during his silent years, that was the Van Morrison they thought of. “Caravan” had become his stand-in — which is fitting, because standing in for him is what the song would be asked to do again.
The Empty Chair and the Stand-Ins
The song’s later history is a series of other people discovering its power in Morrison’s absence. In January 1993 he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — and, in a much-noted snub that only deepened his legend of ungovernability, he did not attend. The organisers needed a performance of his music, and the duty fell to Counting Crows, then an unknown band on the verge of releasing their first album. They performed “Caravan”. The appearance, Wikipedia’s entry on the song notes, “first brought the band to public notice” — a career ignited by standing in for Van Morrison, singing the song he sang when he stole The Last Waltz. It is hard to think of a more literal demonstration of a composition’s bankability: it could make an unknown band visible overnight, without its author in the building.
Television kept finding uses for it. “Caravan” plays in a third-season episode of The West Wing, “We Killed Yamamoto”, and generations of American viewers first met it in a first-season episode of WKRP in Cincinnati, where it is the record Dr. Johnny Fever is playing — and singing along to — on air, the radio song inside a show about radio. When Philadelphia’s WXPN compiled its listeners’ all-time 885 greatest songs in 2004, “Caravan” stood at number 254. A live performance featured in his 1990 video Van Morrison: The Concert. And in 2020, when Hot Press magazine marked Morrison’s seventy-fifth birthday with Rave On, Van Morrison, a curated series of covers of his work, Hozier — the Irish singer-songwriter who inherited more of Morrison’s mantle than anyone — chose “Caravan”. The tributes keep choosing the same song, for the same reason the DJs and film-makers do: it is the one where the singer’s whole philosophy is enacted rather than stated. Turn it up. One more time.
Why It Endures
“Caravan” endures because it is the rare song whose subject and whose story are identical. It is about a temporary encampment of travellers who make music together and move on; it became famous through temporary encampments of musicians — a Woodstock house band, a 1973 touring orchestra, The Band on their last night — making music together and moving on. It is about a radio heard from impossibly far away; it has been travelling impossibly far ever since, across formats and generations, from FM album radio to Scorsese’s film to a funeral request in a bestselling book to an unknown band’s big break in a hall of fame its author wouldn’t enter. It was written by a young man who had just fought the music business for control of his own work, and every one of its victories was won the way he won that fight: not through the charts, where it never appeared, but through insistence, repetition and the refusal to be shortened.
There is a final symmetry worth savouring. The battles behind “Have I Told You Lately”, this series’ companion piece, were battles over ownership — whose voice, whose hit, whose name. The battles behind “Caravan” were over presence: whether the singer could be made to show up at all, and what happened on the nights when showing up cost him the most. On the evidence of Thanksgiving 1976, the answer to the second question is the single greatest filmed performance of his life. The caravan, he sang, has all his friends, and will stay with him until the end. Half a century on, with the friends mostly gone and the singer still, on his own terms, turning it up — the song shows every sign of being right.