T.B. Sheets
By Van Morrison
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Track listing
- A1 He Ain't Give You None 5:11
- A2 Beside You 6:07
- A3 It's All Right 5:04
- A4 Madame George 5:13
- B1 T.B. Sheets 9:44
- B2 Who Drove the Red Sports Car 5:26
- B3 Ro Ro Rosey 3:07
- B4 Brown Eyed Girl 3:06
- Total length: 42:58
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8 Issues
- Release view [combined information for all issues]
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T.B. Sheets [p] 33 rpm
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T.B. Sheets 33 rpm
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T.B. Sheets 33 rpm
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T.B. Sheets 33 rpm
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T.B. Sheets Remastered
16 Reviews
It’s an ok album, but that is typical for Van Morrison. When he’s on, he is unbeatable. When he’s not fully on, he can be difficult. I’ve tried here, but it’s not a great album to my ears. A lot of reviewers laud the song T.B. Sheets. That song actually sums up my overall feeling for the album. It just isn’t my thing, kinda flat and rambling and not in a good Van way.
Published
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One of the most real and heartbreaking songs Van Morrison ever wrote and sang, including those on 'Astral Weeks', is 'T.B. Sheets'. I remember the first time I heard this song years ago and being stunned by its pain, its reality. T.B. Sheets is a true story about watching a lover die of tuberculosis, 9 minutes and 44 seconds of anguish, regret, bargaining, pleading, mind numbing circling fragments, foreign bodies, death, with screeching harmonica and throbbing music as a back drop to a running dialogue. "The sunshine in the crack through the window pane, pain", numbs Van's brain and he pleads "open up the window and let me breath". If you have ever watched anyone die let alone a loved one you will relate. Van wails, "The cool room is a fools room and I can almost smell your TB sheets on your sick bed, I gotta go, gotta go." It's a revelation this song and as real as it gets.
The rest of the album has some interesting tracks with the incredible 'Madame George' from 'Astral Weeks', but a different earlier version and the overplayed but great 'Brown Eyed Girl'. A strange combination of songs for sure and I wonder what the producers were thinking putting them together. The song 'T.B.Sheets' I would not want to be without, along with some of the others, with a harmonic bluesy Van, a collection of early gems like 'Ro Ro Rosey', and 'Beside You' sounding like the early days when Van was with his group 'Them', Van's voice raw, raspy and intense.
The rest of the album has some interesting tracks with the incredible 'Madame George' from 'Astral Weeks', but a different earlier version and the overplayed but great 'Brown Eyed Girl'. A strange combination of songs for sure and I wonder what the producers were thinking putting them together. The song 'T.B.Sheets' I would not want to be without, along with some of the others, with a harmonic bluesy Van, a collection of early gems like 'Ro Ro Rosey', and 'Beside You' sounding like the early days when Van was with his group 'Them', Van's voice raw, raspy and intense.
Published
I first listened to the song "TB Sheets" the other day while driving, and since then it's about all I've been able to listen to. It is quite possibly the coolest song I've ever heard, and I don't mean that I think it's neat or good, but cool in the most literal sense of the word's slang application: that sort of homosexually-tinted allure that underpins all real rock-and-roll rock-and-roll; it oozes cool; sludgy coolness oil dripping down from a cool sponge, which is squeezed and fondled by Van Morrison, who is from Belfast and cool. This perhaps accounts for my initial assumption that the song was simply a freestyled free verse of badassery, voice-livened non-sequitors that could erupt in a frame-shaking exorcism of swagger Van would sometimes get after a few whiskeys. However, it is much more than this. The song describes the muted emotional devastation of watching a lover dying of tuberculosis (or "T.B.") Throughout, Van struggles to maintain his role as the designated heart-lightener, the medical advice disregarder, making fun of doctors, un-pityingly behesting her not to cry, and not mentioning her howlingly imminent death. But the act is nearly impossible to maintain. At this point, the girl is withered to a primally repulsive degree, could jar the nerves of a stranger. He could never begin to fulfill her desperately unsubtle solicitations of a last fuck. As the song progresses, he is increasingly frantic in his attempts to remain roguish and normal, again and again trying to make moves to leave, promising to return later, mentioning Darren's plan to smuggle in a bottle of wine, and turning on the radio so that she can "hear a few tunes." The scene is an assault of tragedy, and Van hasn't much time before totally losing it. But as I mentioned, the song's most intriguing quality, though, is its juxtaposition of this situation with its aesthetic. Twenty seconds in, and I would not have been too surprised had I known that Ghostface Killer once sampled "TB Sheets" for what I expect is an ultra-cool rap song; that beat, THAT BEAT! Along with his badass singing, Van's beat cruises the sewer-fogged night streets with a conisseur's eye for the extremely sexy prostitutes alongside, as I often did listening to it before I got fired from my pizza delivery job. This is a beat that will cause you to light a cigarette and think "this is the coolest sounding beat I've ever heard." Its pairing with such a grim story illustates the way a cool like Van Morrison tends to handle situations such as these: stoically, self-reliant and helplessly practical and emotionally uneducated in his reliance on keeping on while keeping on, to the dayjob days and nightclub nights, seldom to moan about it outside of this five-star song in which he is grooving out the entire time.
Published
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I'm partial to all of these strange compilations of these early VM sides. "Brown-Eyed Girl" aside, there is a lot to like. when I want to hear these songs, I reach for The Bang Masters. This one is probably the slightest but has one outstanding feature none of the other ones have: a groovy cover with a painting of Van seated next to a sunstreaming window playing his acoustic guitar under a framed portrait of the awful picture of him used on the Blowin' Your Mind! LP cover!
Published
Thank you Martin Scorcese, Nick Cage, and Bringing out the Dead
You were one of the very worst movies I ever saw in the theatre, but you did introduce me to one kick a$$ song (T.B. Sheets) by Van Morrison--a guy who I otherwise almost routinely dislike (Save for a few Them tunes, this track, the all too overplayed Brown Eyed Girl, and the key tracks here, and of course the title track from the otherwise spotty Astral Weeks).Published
A decent release with a couple alternate versions of Astral Week songs, the 45 version of Brown-Eyed Girl, several standard tunes of typical Morrison creation...and...and...and...and T.B. Sheets!!! WOW!! I thought I had heard all the great Van Morrison tunes. I was dead wrong. This song is surely one of his most inspirational tunes (and based on a true story of course). It brings all the great Morrison mannerisms and expressions along with a great groove. Astral Weeks aside, T.B Sheets belongs in the #1 position for any Van Morrison greatest hits compilation. It raised my rating for this release by an entire star. Worth the price for the song T.B. Sheets alone.
Published
Talking about Van Morrison, usually, at first, People think 'Astral Weeks' or 'Moondance' ... But for me, 'T.B. Sheets' is his first real masterpiece.
Van just left Them, and naturally people were expecting the best from the angry young Irish man ...
He could have recorded some more Rhythm & Blues standards in the vein of 'Gloria' or 'Baby Please Don't Go' and everybody would have been happy.
But the impetuous and stubborn irish Lad took another way, at the opposite ... This album is the sum of Morrison Roots, Blues, Jazz, Folk and naturally Irish and Celtic music ...
It wasn't evident to switch from a sexual anthem like 'I can only Give You Everything' to 'T.B. Sheets' a song about tuberculosis, a subject very far from the universe of the whole part of teenagers.
In fact, this album is the one of Maturity ...And its 8 songs are almost perfect, even if 'Beside you' and 'Madame George' will later be self transcended in 'Astral Weeks'.
'Brown Eyed Girl' can even figure in any 'Best of' or 'Greatest hits' ...
And just try the song 'T.B. Sheets', listen to Van suffering ... you'll suffer with him ... such a beautiful song, so much pain it gives you goose skin ... and pretty soon you're suffering with Van (no other song can do that), and it's quite the same with 'It's all Right' and its licks of guitar insinuating deep into your brain ...
Finally, I think the Anger is still there but Van Morrison is now able to express it in a much calmer way he was used to do with Them ...
So, just give back 'T.B. Sheets' the place it really deserves at the top of Van's discography !
A last thing, it's true we can find lots of different versions of this record, and some have a very poor sound ... So we have to be careful in the choice of the version of this masterpiece
Van just left Them, and naturally people were expecting the best from the angry young Irish man ...
He could have recorded some more Rhythm & Blues standards in the vein of 'Gloria' or 'Baby Please Don't Go' and everybody would have been happy.
But the impetuous and stubborn irish Lad took another way, at the opposite ... This album is the sum of Morrison Roots, Blues, Jazz, Folk and naturally Irish and Celtic music ...
It wasn't evident to switch from a sexual anthem like 'I can only Give You Everything' to 'T.B. Sheets' a song about tuberculosis, a subject very far from the universe of the whole part of teenagers.
In fact, this album is the one of Maturity ...And its 8 songs are almost perfect, even if 'Beside you' and 'Madame George' will later be self transcended in 'Astral Weeks'.
'Brown Eyed Girl' can even figure in any 'Best of' or 'Greatest hits' ...
And just try the song 'T.B. Sheets', listen to Van suffering ... you'll suffer with him ... such a beautiful song, so much pain it gives you goose skin ... and pretty soon you're suffering with Van (no other song can do that), and it's quite the same with 'It's all Right' and its licks of guitar insinuating deep into your brain ...
Finally, I think the Anger is still there but Van Morrison is now able to express it in a much calmer way he was used to do with Them ...
So, just give back 'T.B. Sheets' the place it really deserves at the top of Van's discography !
A last thing, it's true we can find lots of different versions of this record, and some have a very poor sound ... So we have to be careful in the choice of the version of this masterpiece
Published
If science ever advances to the point where cloning becomes as commonplace as getting quadruple bypass surgery, I'm going to create a veritable army of me whose sole duty will be to patrol record stores. Then, whenever someone sees a cover of one of the myriad Bert Berns quickie-cash compilations and says "Hey, "Brown Eyed Girl" is on this. I love that song!", the clone will unceremoniously swat the offense to Van Morrison's early career out of their hand and hand them a copy of Moondance or No Guru, No Method, No Teacher or Into the Music. Or, good god, just about anything else.
Well, okay, not Magic Time.
All of the Berns compilations are, to varying degrees, execrable. This one, at least, has the advantage of being relatively short.
Well, okay, not Magic Time.
All of the Berns compilations are, to varying degrees, execrable. This one, at least, has the advantage of being relatively short.
Published
CK 46093 CD
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