Charts - Spain & US: Gold; UK: Platinum.
Van Morrison’s “Astral Weeks” has always seemed like a fluke. In November, 1968, the irascible songwriter from Belfast released a jazz-influenced acoustic song cycle that featured minimal percussion, an upright bass, flute, harpsichord, vibraphone, strings, and stream-of-consciousness lyrics about being transported to “another time” and “another place.” The album was recorded in three sessions, with the string arrangements overdubbed later. Many of the songs were captured on the first or second take. Morrison has called the sessions that produced the album “uncanny,” adding that “it was like an alchemical kind of situation.” A decade later, Lester Bangs called the album “a mystical document” and “a beacon, a light on the far shores of the murk.” Bruce Springsteen said that it gave him “a sense of the divine.” The critic Greil Marcus equated the album to Bob Beamon’s record-shattering long-jump performance at the Mexico City Olympics, a singular achievement that was “way outside of history.”
Ryan H. Walsh’s new book, “Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968,” takes up Morrison’s sui-generis masterpiece and unearths the largely forgotten context from which it emerged. Though the songs on “Astral Weeks” were recorded in New York and are full of references to Morrison’s childhood in Northern Ireland, they were, in Walsh’s words, “planned, shaped and rehearsed in Boston and Cambridge,” where Morrison lived and performed for much of 1968. In documenting the milieu out of which the album came, Walsh also argues for Boston as an underappreciated hub of late-sixties radicalism, artistic invention, and social experimentation. The result is a complex, inquisitive, and satisfying book that illuminates and explicates the origins of “Astral Weeks” without diminishing the album’s otherworldly aura.
What was Morrison doing in Boston? The short answer is that he was hiding out. Stymied but full of ambition, the twenty-two-year-old songwriter had come to New York, in 1967, burdened by an onerous recording contract with the Bang Records producer Bert Berns, who’d worked with Morrison’s band Them, and who had also produced Morrison’s hit single “Brown Eyed Girl.” When Berns died of a heart attack, in December, the contract came under the supervision of a mobster friend of Berns named Carmine (Wassel) DeNoia. One night, Morrison, whose immigration status was tenuous at best, got into a drunken argument with DeNoia, who ended the conversation by smashing an acoustic guitar over the singer’s head. Morrison promptly married his American girlfriend, Janet Rigsbee (a.k.a. Janet Planet), and escaped to Boston.
Boston was home to the other major figure in Walsh’s book, Mel Lyman, a musician who reinvented himself as the messianic leader of a commune in the Fort Hill area of Roxbury, where he and his followers, known as the Lyman “Family,” commandeered an entire neighborhood of houses. As Walsh notes, the Fort Hill Community “attracted followers of a pedigree far more impressive than that of your run-of-the-mill sixties commune,” including Jessie Benton, the daughter of Thomas Hart Benton; Mark Frechette, the star of Michelangelo Antonioni’s film “Zabriskie Point”; Paul Williams, the founder of the music magazine Crawdaddy; two children of the novelist Kay Boyle; and Owen deLong, a former speechwriter for Robert Kennedy. Lyman controlled every aspect of life in Fort Hill. Members who had trouble following the rules might be given an LSD trip, guided by Lyman himself, or subjected to a rigged astrological reading. Commune members were also expected, among other duties, to distribute the provocative biweekly underground newspaper Avatar. Lyman died in 1978, but his death was kept secret until the mid-eighties. The Fort Hill Community, unlike so many other sixties communes, still exists.
There’s no evidence that Morrison and Lyman ever met, but their trajectories through the book operate like melodic counterpoints. With his harmonica, Lyman serenaded mournful fans who were departing the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, after Bob Dylan’s scandalous electrified set. In “Astral Weeks,” Morrison abandoned the amplified sound of his earlier work in favor of acoustic instruments. Lyman was a charismatic leader able to create and sustain a community through the force of his character. Morrison was hotheaded and irritating to many of the musicians who played with him, and he exasperated a series of managers. Both men believed fiercely in the power of their own internal visions and were propelled by the tumult of the late sixties. Each has a legacy that endures half a century later.
(full version: newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-miracle-of-van-morrisons-astral-weeks)