And It Stoned Me
The summer Van Morrison was describing had already happened — but only barely.
He was a teenager in Ballymoney, County Antrim, on a fishing trip with a friend, when a sudden rainstorm sent them looking for shelter at a stranger’s house. The stranger gave them water. Van Morrison would spend the next thirty years calling it the most important thing that ever happened to him — not the rain, not the fish, not the countryside. The water. The plain ordinary fact of someone giving two wet kids a drink.
That’s the whole song. That’s what “And It Stoned Me” is built on. Not a metaphor, not a character sketch, not a piece of craft designed to suggest transcendence. A real afternoon, a real stranger, a real glass of water, and a boy who felt something shift in the center of his chest when he drank it. Van Morrison sang it in 1970 and said it stoned him like whiskey going down — that clean, that sudden, that complete.
The album is Moondance, recorded at A&R Recording Studios in New York with producer Lewis Merenstein, largely the same team that had worked on Astral Weeks the year before. But “And It Stoned Me” is nothing like Astral Weeks. Where that record is shadowed and interior, this song is open sky. It starts with an accordion — John Platania’s guitar underneath it, the rhythm section easy and unhurried — and Van’s voice comes in without any buildup or preamble, the way memory comes in when you’re not fighting it.
“Half a mile from the county fair, and the rain came pourin’ down.”
He’s just telling you what happened. That’s the whole technique. He doesn’t frame it, doesn’t interpret it, doesn’t signal to you that a spiritual experience is incoming. He talks about the rain and the hitchhiked ride and the old man and the jug of water, and by the time he’s finished you’ve been somewhere real, which is the only kind of somewhere worth going.
There is a lot of Van Morrison that requires patience — the stream-of-consciousness stretches, the repeated phrases, the willingness to let a feeling run on past what most producers would cut. But “And It Stoned Me” has none of that excess. It’s four and a half minutes that feel like remembering something on a back porch, unhurried but not slack. Every verse earns the next. The structure is simple enough that you could teach it to a child — verse, chorus, verse, chorus, out — and the simplicity is the point. Nothing stands between you and the story. Nothing between you and the water.
What Morrison understood about the experience he was singing from — and what he seems to have understood even as a teenager standing in a stranger’s doorway — is that grace doesn’t announce itself. It arrives through the ordinary. The rain is ordinary. The road is ordinary. Two kids wet to the skin, a door opens, and someone fills a jug. The moment is ordinary in every measurable way, and it is total. That’s the thing he’s been trying to describe ever since, in song after song, for a career that now spans more than half a century. He keeps circling back to the same northern Irish countryside, the same attempt to name what it felt like to be alive and young and suddenly, completely present.
He put it first on Moondance. First track, side one. Not as a mission statement — Morrison doesn’t do mission statements — but as an establishing shot. Here is the frequency. Here is where we are tuning.
There’s a version of rock and roll history where the ’60s was all about the big statement, the march, the world being changed. And then Moondance arrives in January of 1970 and the big statement is: a glass of water given by a stranger on a rainy day stopped me cold, and I have never recovered, and I don’t want to.
“And it stoned me to my soul.”
He means exactly what he says. No irony in the word stoned, no wink at the era. Stoned like the river stoning the bank, wearing the edges smooth. Stoned still, decades later. The boy became the man who wrote the song who became the old man playing it night after night on tour, and somewhere underneath all of it is still that afternoon — the wet road, the opened door, the stranger, the jug.
Some people chase that feeling their whole lives and never find it. Van Morrison found it at fifteen in County Antrim and has been telling us about it ever since, in case we might recognize it when it comes for us. A glass of water. Out of nowhere. Free.
