Songfacts®:

• Now, listen, Julie baby
  
  "T.B. Sheets" has been described as "claustrophobic," which is fitting because the song is about Van Morrison being stuck in a room with a woman named Julie as she dies of tuberculosis. The song isn't about grieving her so much as it's about Morrison's need to get out of that room, get some cool air, and escape the pressure. It's a harsh but unflinchingly honest account of the mixed feelings one goes through in such situations.
• There is some ambiguity in the details of the song, but the general narrative is clear. Lines like "your little star struck innuendos, inadequacies an' foreign bodies" bring an element of mystery (what do "star struck innuendos" have to do with it?), but the bulk of the lyric is straightforward.
  
  So, open up the window and let me breathe
  I said, open up the window and let me breathe
  
  The real mystery of the song comes in determining if it is based on a true story. There has long been a legend that Morrison broke down crying after recording it and wasn't able to continue because the song details a real event, but there's no record of Morrison ever attesting to this, nor has anyone been able to find evidence of this Julie character.
  
  Morrison is a very private person and has been throughout his career. If "Julie" is real, he's never said so.
  
  The earliest tale of the breakdown came in the liner notes to the original album pressing. There, photojournalist Michael Michael Ochs wrote the first account of the legend, so it did in fact originate from a reliable source.
• In the book Celtic Crossroads, author Brian Hinton points to two possible subjects for the song. The first is a woman named Dee, who was an early landlady and girlfriend of Morrison's. The other is Morrison's cousin, Gloria, who died young.
• Morrison recorded the song in A&R Recording Studios, New York City, on March 29, 1967. Included on his debut album Blowin' Your Mind!, it runs 9:44.
• Bert Berns produced the song. In addition to a notable production career, Berns wrote or cowrote some classics, including "Hang On Sloopy," "Here Comes The Night," "Piece Of My Heart," and "Twist And Shout."
  
  Despite his chops, Berns angered Morrison with an unapproved release of Blowin' Your Mind!. Morrison thought they were recording tracks for four singles, but Berns packaged the recordings into an album. Morrison was powerless to stop it because he'd not read the fine print in a contract a few months earlier.
  
  In 1967, artists still viewed albums as their own art forms, not just collections of singles. In addition to the music itself, Morrison wasn't happy with the album design. Not only was the design an aesthetically muddled and unpleasant mixture of balloon letters, psychedelic sketches, and the color brown (the least psychedelic-friendly in the palette), but it also conveyed a message Morrison had no interest in conveying. Despite his place as a prominent figure among the '60s counterculture, Morrison had no interest in using, much less promoting, drugs. For all those reasons, he basically disowned the album even though it includes one of his most popular songs ("Brown Eyed Girl") and one of his most critically lauded, "T.B. Sheets."
• Martin Scorsese's 1999 film Bringing Out The Dead uses this song.
• In 2006, Ghostface Killah sampled "T.B. Sheets" for his track "Greedy Bitches."
• In 2014, Lydia Lunch and Cypress Grove covered this song on the album A Fistful of Desert Blues. At 5:03, their version is almost half as long as Morrison's original.