Van Morrison Finds His Happy Place in the Mission District

If you’d been traveling down Valencia Street on Monday afternoon, you might have seen a 100-boomer-long procession snaking down the sidewalk in the light drizzle, its umbrella-toting occupants looking halfway like mourners. As one among the age 50-, 60- and 70-and-up gathered, I can verify: Our line was not for a funeral.

Rather, it was a celebration of a living legend. Van Morrison, with a touch of the deadpan, had chosen The Chapel — a former mortuary — as the site of an invite-only run-through of his new, blues-heavy album, Somebody Tried to Sell Me a Bridge. He’s in town the rest of the week over at the Palace of Fine Arts, and presumably, those five shows will yield more standard-issue sets.

On Monday, though, between the setlist, the 400-capacity room and the 3 p.m. start time, well, this was a one-of-a-kind Van Morrison show. That much was evident after he took the stage and — just two minutes into set opener “Kidney Stew Blues” — Morrison turned to his seven-piece band, and … cracked a smile and laughed?!?

If Polymarket or Kalshi, or whatever the world’s crypto weirdos are into, took bets on events to happen at a Van Morrison show, “smiling and laughing” would pay out 500 to 1. On record, he’s complained bitterly about COVID guidelines; onstage, he sometimes gets compared to Oscar the Grouch. He has lodged himself in the showbiz grump hall of fame along with Billy Joel when he is in Russia and it is the 1980s.

But man, give the Irish guy a small club and a bunch of blues songs from Black American artists like Willie Dixon, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee and Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson, and he loosens up like a rusty bolt blasted with WD-40.

During “Madame Butterfly Blues,” he jokingly “fined” keyboardist Mitch Woods with five full-finger hand signals, James Brown-style. After the rollicking “I’m Gonna Play the Honky Tonks,” an obscurity by blues singer Marie Adams, he arooooo-ed and yip yip yip yip yip yipped into the mic like an excited hound or an East Bay punk singer on drugs.

In the set’s most transcendent moment, Morrison reinvented Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That a Shame,” introducing new phrasing, rhythm and melody to create something hallowed and tender. That’s Van the singer; there was also Van the music director, conducting his band piece by piece — a piano chord here, a cymbal crash there. Morrison ad-libbed the phrase “stop breaking down” 17 times in a row while the band crested its long crescendo, turning the air into gold.

When the music writer Joel Selvin, a proud part-time grump himself, included droplets in his San Francisco Chronicle columns like “Truth be told, many people in the industry don’t like the music they are making. They go home and listen to old Van Morrison records like everyone else” — this is the Van Morrison he meant.

Naturally, over the 80-minute set, some sections lagged, with the top-notch band applying formulaic arrangements to “I’m Ready,” “Can’t Help Myself” and “Social Climbing Scene,” the latter a Morrison original about the vapid quest for clout. During his other original composition, the complainy “Somebody Tried to Sell Me a Bridge,” Morrison hunched over his printed lyrics and sang them with only a few ounces of conviction.

Then there was Van the perfectionist, kicking off “Rock Me Baby” after two false starts: “Too fast,” he said. During the first verse, in an agreeable tempo, he looked toward Woods: “Play!” Woods ran up and down the keys. “Not that much!” Morrison said. “Cut it in half!”

But the man knows what he wants, and when he gets it, everything falls into place. After an encore of Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Help Me,” the familiar three chords of “Gloria” charged in, somehow both a surprise and a foregone conclusion. For a few minutes, the crowd forgot about the troubles outside, chanting with a collective uplift of G-L-O-R-I-A, and Morrison was in his happy place of being in a bar band again.

Van Morrison performs Feb. 17, 18, 19, 23 and 24 at the Palace of Fine Arts (3301 Lyon St., San Francisco). Tickets and more information here.