Van Morrison - Tupelo Honey

First performance: 04/03/1988


Coverinfo

Bruce covered the song during 2 fascinating soundchecks during the "tunnel of love tour":
 
 
1988-03-23 Omni (The), Atlanta, GA 
Bruce performed this song during a wonderful soundcheck with a lot of covers :
 

Songinfo

Tupelo Honey is the fifth studio album by Northern Irish singer-songwriter Van Morrison. It was released in October 1971 by Warner Bros. Records. Morrison had written all of the songs on the album in Woodstock, New York, before his move to Marin County, California, except for "You're My Woman", which he wrote during the recording sessions. The namesake for the album and its title track is a varietal honey produced from the flowers of the tupelo tree found in the Southeastern United States. The album features various musical genres, most prominently country, but also R&B, soul, folk-rock and blue-eyed soul. The lyrics echo the domestic bliss portrayed on the album cover; they largely describe and celebrate the rural surroundings of Woodstock and Morrison's family life with then-wife Janet "Planet" Rigsbee.
 
 
 

Other cover versions

Bruce on the artist

2011-03-00 Renegade Nation Studio, New York City

Bruce makes his debut appearance on Steven Van Zandt's Little Steven's Underground Garage radio show. The interview was broadcast in three parts on April 1, 8 and 15 on over 200 terrestrial FM radio stations
across the United States. They discuss Them, and how Bruce (with The Castiles) performed their show-stopper "Mystic Eyes" at a Battle Of The Bands contest in 1966.
Listen here
 
 

Springsteen was a huge fan of Van Morrison's old garage band Them (best known for "Gloria") in the 1960s, but it wasn't until he saw Morrison in concert sometime around 1971 that he truly understood the man's genius. He found the combination of organ and horns intoxicating, and the influence on his first two albums is unmistakable. If you don't believe that, listen to Morrison's "Domino" and Springsteen's "Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)" back to back. Van's 1968 masterpiece Astral Weeks became a particular obsession. "It was like a religion to us," Steve Van Zandt said in 2005. They even brought Morrison's bass player Richard Davis into the studio to play on Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J., and Born to Run.

desert island songs :

Van Morrison - Madame George (1968): The previous tracks helped to lay down the foundations of the figure who would become Bruce Springsteen - the rocker. But once he’d started on his artistic journey, other influences began to emerge:

"Astral Weeks was an extremely important record for me. It made me trust in beauty, it gave me a sense of the divine. The divine just seems to run through the veins of that entire album. Of course there was incredible singing and the playing of Richard Davis on the bass. It was trance music. It was repetitive. It was the same chord progression over and over again. But it showed how expansive something with very basic underpinning could be. There’d be no New York City Serenade if there hadn’t been Astral Weeks."
 

Lyrics

You can take all the tea in China
Put it in a big brown bag for me
Sail right around all the seven oceans
Drop it straight into the deep blue sea
She's as sweet as Tupelo honey
She's an angel of the first degree
She's as sweet as Tupelo honey
Just like honey from the bee
You can't stop us on the road to freedom
You can't keep us 'cause our eyes can see
Men with insight, men in granite
Knights in armor bent on chivalry
She's as sweet as Tupelo honey
She's an angel of the first degree
She's as sweet as Tupelo honey
Just like honey, baby, from the bee
You can't stop us on the road to freedom
You can't stop us 'cause our eyes can see
Men with insight, men in granite
Knights in armor intent on chivalry
She's as sweet as Tupelo honey
She's an angel of the first degree
She's as sweet as Tupelo honey
Just like honey, baby, from the bee
You know she's alright, oh she's alright with me
You know, you know, you know she's alright, she alright with me
You know, you know, you know you know
You know she's alright, alright with me
She's alright, she's alright
She's alright with me
She's alright
She's alright with me
She's alright
She's alright with me
She's al, she's alright, she's alright
She's alright with me
She's alright, she's alright, she's alright, she's alright
You can take all the tea in China
Put it in a big brown bag for me
Sail it right around all these seven oceans
Drop it smack dab in the middle of the deep blue sea
Because, she's as sweet as Tupelo honey, yes she is
She's an angel of the first degree
She's as sweet as Tupelo honey
Just like honey, baby, from the bee
She's as sweet as Tupelo honey
She's an angel of the first degree
She's as sweet as Tupelo honey
Just like the honey, from the bee
She's alright, she's alright with me
She's my baby, you know she's alright
She's my baby, she's my baby, she's alright
She's my baby