Astral Weeks

by Ryan H. Walsh

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  OVER THE COURSE OF 1968, the Velvet Underground played the Boston Tea Party fifteen times. They kicked things off in January with the release of their second album, recorded in two days: the raucous, Nico-less, Warhol-free White Light/White Heat. On the back cover, in stark black and white, the band poses in front of the Boston Tea Party.

  Riepen booked them happily and frequently, though he still thinks they were “a joke.” In his memory, every junkie in Boston would show up to their shows because of the song “Heroin,” and Reed “would always please the crowd by singing it.” Reed was singing from experience, but the song had no connection to any current fix. According to a 1971 interview, he had tried the drug in his Syracuse University days, contracting hepatitis the very first time he shot up. This certainly didn’t mean he stopped using other substances. By the time VU started routinely playing in Boston, amphetamines were the chemical of choice for Reed and one or two others in the band. “In the 20th century, in a technological age living in the city, there are certain drugs you have to take just to keep yourself normal like a caveman, just to bring yourself up or down,” Reed would later tell his most perceptive critic, Lester Bangs. “They don’t getcha high even, they just getcha normal.”

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  “JONATHAN, CAN YOU MAKE this curve with your ring finger?” VU guitarist Sterling Morrison asked Jonathan Richman.

  Richman had brought his bingo-prize guitar to the Tea Party and lingered in a corner of the dressing room until members of the band offered him something in the way of lessons. “They physically taught me how to play,” he recounted. “That’s where I got everything.”

  The band eventually took to their sixteen-year-old mascot. “Occasionally, I drove them around in my father’s car,” Richman recalled. “I would go to some of the parties they’d go to. I was part of this crew.” Another member of the crew, Robert Somma, reported that at a certain point Richman even talked like Reed. “His friendship with the band was genuine,” he says. “But here was this kid from Natick, suddenly speaking with a Long Island accent. I think Lou barely tolerated that, but was also kind of flattered.” Richman would later pen a mea culpa with his 2010 song “My Affected Accent.”

  If the Velvets were busy, Richman would wander through Cambridge and sometimes pick up an issue of Avatar. (“I wasn’t sure I understood all of it but could see they admired this Mel fellow,” he says.) Meanwhile, another young Velvet Underground fanatic was also reading Avatar, and he felt he understood everything it published, especially the Mel-centric pages. Wayne McGuire had been arrested and convicted for selling the paper in November 1967. For his loyalty, Lyman invited him and other salesmen to Fort Hill for a celebratory dinner, and McGuire dedicated himself to turning the population of Boston on to his guru’s brilliance. Once the Velvets started frequenting the Tea Party, the band got rolled onto McGuire’s hero roster, leading to his Crawdaddy essay “The Boston Sound,” easily the most intense endorsement of the Velvets to be published during their career. “NOW IS THE TIME FOR DISTORTIONS TO BURN,” McGuire screams via typewriter, “with flaming sword in hand I will clear away those ugly growths which parade as insightful musical criticism. . . . This is a review of the Velvet Underground, this is a review of the end of the world.”

  For all his raving, McGuire audaciously predicted their future fame as one of the “primary myth-makers of our generation,” and pinpointed the hard-to-explain dynamics of their trademark drone, in full display on White Light/White Heat. The drone, McGuire wrote, “has two levels, high-pitched and low-pitched (corresponding to the drones of the central nervous systems), which are produced by two very heavy nervous systems belonging to Lou Reed and John Cale respectively. The drone is not always heard but rather felt as pure essence and perpetual presence.”* In the same breath, McGuire trashed MGM’s Boston Sound campaign, and suggested a direct connection between the Velvet Underground and Mel Lyman. They are “merely vessels through which greater forces are working and they listen attentively.” In that moment before Reed became a legend and Lyman faded into obscurity, they revealed to McGuire the two paths open to an artist in Boston 1968.*

  McGuire’s most groundbreaking insight into the Velvet Underground was that Reed’s lyrics were about something more than surface-level depravities. “All this time you probably thought the Velvet Underground was talking about drugs, homosexuality, and sadomasochism,” McGuire wrote. “Look a bit closer. ‘Sister Ray’ is not about shooting meth, fellatio or murder. Rather, it is describing the greatest cosmic upheaval in the history of man and you are living in the midst of it.”

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  ROB NORRIS HAD MOVED TO BOSTON in March 1968, straight out of high school—incredibly, because MGM’s Boston Sound campaign had convinced him the city was going to be the next San Francisco. For $80 a month, he split a place on Mission Hill with some roommates. “I didn’t really have to work,” he says. “I just basically lived at the Tea Party.”

  Norris met Lou Reed backstage at the Tea Party in 1968. The singer was scooping a sawdust-like substance out of a jar and into his mouth. They were the only two people in the back room. Reed stared at Norris before asking him if he was on amphetamines. Norris said no. Reed explained that the jar was full of wheat germ, which he gulped before shows, then subjected the young fan to an antidrug rant. Norris mentioned that he had been in the audience at Summit High School in New Jersey three years prior, witness to the first Velvet Underground concert. Reed smiled, then happily introduced Norris to the rest of the band in the other room: “He was there!”

  As part of the VU’s backstage club, Norris was shocked by how much astrology and the occult dominated the conversation. He recalls the janitor/de facto backstage manager at the Tea Party, a mystic, statuesque presence named Mitch Blake, as being the resident expert. The campus stud at the University of New Hampshire, Blake underwent a transformation while working on a farm in New Hampshire, “growing vegetables with prayer and working with a nature spirit.” “He and Lou became friends because of this interest in mysticism and astrology,” Norris says. “Lou was really into it. He was talking about kinds of healing that could be done with rays and levitation. He was very into healing, and he was very emphatic that ‘White Light/White Heat’ could be taken two different ways.” Blake concurs that, around this time, one of Reed’s chief artistic concerns was that his audience didn’t understand his lyrics at all.

  This blew Norris’s mind. If there was ever an obvious song about the thrills of an amphetamine rush, it was the album’s rollicking title track. Yet Reed explained to Norris and Blake one night that, while it definitely painted a scene of drugs and excess, it was also about enlightenment, Christian purity, and the healing power of “white light,” which Reed had discovered in a book called A Treatise on White Magic. The author, Alice Bailey, was a New Age pioneer who wrote twenty-seven books on esoteric subjects before her death in 1949—or rather, she claimed to transcribe the dictation of a Tibetan spirit, Djwal Khul. Of the many occult ideas found in her writing, Reed gravitated to her theory of the Seven Rays of Energy. Seven forms of an intangible power were beaming down to Earth, Bailey wrote; which ray a human locked on to would determine much about their personality and future. It’s not hard to imagine Reed studying Bailey, transforming “Second Ray” to “Sister Ray.” Norris theorizes that another song off the second album, “I Heard Her Call My Name,” might even be about Reed’s intense attraction to Bailey’s work. (“I know that she’s long dead and gone . . . I heard her call my name.”)

  “You will relax your physical body, endeavor to quiet your astral body as far as may be, and to steady the mind,” Bailey wrote in A Treatise on White Magic. “Call down a stream of pure white light, and, pouring it through your lower vehicles, you will cleanse away all that hinders.”

  Reed was unusually forthcoming about this side of hi
s interests in a 1969 radio interview:

  When I was in L.A. I saw a reverend who reads your aura and tells you your previous incarnations and removes entities from you. I had an entity that had to be removed. [ . . . ] I’ve been involved and interested in what they call white light for a long time. A woman named Alice Bailey who has some rather remarkable books out, she was a telepathic secretary. It’s kind of an incredible book, A Treatise on White Magic. [ . . . ] It tells you how to go out and do it all.

  At the time, Reed was fond of passing along the Treatise to people he felt were ready. Recipients include Billy Name (denizen of Warhol’s Factory, who designed the blacker-than-black cover of White Light/White Heat) and superfan Jonathan Richman. “One of my big mistakes was turning him on to Alice Bailey, that’s where that insect song comes from,” Reed told Spin in 1986. “I said, ‘Do you know, Jonathan, that insects are a manifestation of negative ego thoughts? That’s on page 114.’ So he got that. That’s a dangerous set of books.”* Richman’s consumption of White Magic helps explain what a song called “Astral Plane” is doing on his 1976 debut, The Modern Lovers. In an album largely about girl troubles and lovingly name-checking Boston locales, “Astral Plane” sticks out. “But I’ll prove my knowledge of what’s inside,” Richman sang, “when I intercept you on the astral plane.” As bassist Ernie Brooks told Vice:

  Jonathan was a big fan of Van Morrison’s album Astral Weeks—that’s such a beautiful record. I wasn’t sure if Jonathan was actually able to do that, enter a girl’s dream—but he really believed in it, which is where that song, “Astral Plane,” came from—the idea that you can communicate in another dimension with someone who’s hard to reach in everyday life.

  He’d call me in the middle of the night, saying, about a girl we both knew, “Ernie, I think I entered her dream. Do you think that’s right?”

  And I’d say, “Well, Jonathan, I guess it’s OK, I dunno . . .”

  Eventually, Van Morrison also found his way to Alice Bailey. Certainly, with an album called Astral Weeks, there’s a chance that Morrison encountered her writings while in Boston,* but concrete references to Bailey’s work didn’t show up in Morrison’s songs until the 1980s. “I’m a dweller on the threshold . . . Watch the great illusion drown,” Morrison sang in 1982, initiating a three-album, three-year stretch in which he explicitly cited Bailey’s teachings. Beautiful Vision even opens with its own “Ray” song, “Celtic Ray.” The liner notes for 1984’s Inarticulate Speech of the Heart mention Bailey’s book Glamour: A World Problem. The “illusion” Morrison sings about in “Dweller on the Threshold” is what Bailey referred to as Glamour—a mirage of fear, ignorance, and greed that traps the unenlightened. “I’ve read Glamour four or five times,” Morrison explained in 1982, “and I get different things out of it each time.”

  Morrison biographer Clinton Heylin claims Morrison’s early songwriting was, in part, “a determined study of childhood visions.” As a boy, Morrison’s solitary hours were filled with deep, intense daydreams and even instances he would later classify as astral projection. “Every now and then these experiences happen,” he said in 1972. “I’ll be lying down on the bed with my eyes closed and all of a sudden I get the feeling that I’m floating near the ceiling looking down.” Then, in 1977, “I had some amazing projections when I was a kid . . . you can have some amazing hallucinogenic experiences doing nothing but looking out your window.”

  Morrison would later reflect that no one had been around to unpack these visions, and that songwriting had become a way to share these moments with others. Musician Clive Culbertson remarked that Morrison was a “walking library” of information about ritual magic, and writer Steve Turner reported that it wasn’t unusual for a casual dinner with the singer to open with a question like “What do you think about the blood of Jesus?” By the 1990s, Morrison had pulled out of the mystic, though maybe not by choice. When a friend brought up their old Bailey fixation, Morrison sadly replied, “I haven’t got anybody to talk about that stuff anymore. Musicians don’t know about that.”

  There’s no account of Reed and Morrison ever being close, or bonding over Alice Bailey, in 1968 or beyond, save for an aside at a shambolic 1996 gig at New York’s Supper Club. Morrison wasn’t connecting with the crowd; for over half an hour, he staved off requests for old songs, arguing with an audience member over whether he was a genius. Then, according to an MTV News story entitled “Van Morrison Guided by Voices?,” he mentioned unwanted visitations, and advice from someone who’d been through it as well:

  I said, “Lou, all this stuff is going on . . . all these noises, voices in my head all the time.” So he gave me . . . the real rap. . . . He says, “You know what? When you hear the voices, ya just say that’s not me. . . . Just step back and say, ‘That’s not really me . . . that’s somebody else!’”

  The Velvet Underground’s debut as a four-piece rock band was a long time coming. Reed seemed hell-bent on cleaning house, and members’ final performances with the band always seemed to happen in Boston. Nico and John Cale played their final sets with the Velvets at the Tea Party in 1967 and 1968, respectively. Nico knew something was wrong when she showed up characteristically late and tried to walk onstage near the end of the set; Reed wouldn’t let her. The connection between the Velvets and Andy Warhol, the man who had given the band their initial notoriety, was severed in the summer of 1967 with the help of lawyers. “I’d never seen Andy angry, but I did that day,” Lou Reed told David Fricke in 1989.

  Despite the group’s lack of commercial success, several parties vied for the manager position. In the end, they chose a sketchy young man named Steve Sesnick, who promised that popularity was just around the bend. Sesnick was from New York, but he was constantly visiting the Tea Party, trying to insert himself into the club’s success. (Later he’d falsely claim to be part owner.) Sesnick so aggressively starved New York from the live VU experience that their old New York audience started showing up at the Tea Party. “You could tell,” Steve Nelson says. “The Boston crowd would look all scruffy and messy and then suddenly these hip people wearing furs and silks would walk in.”

  Cale was the last to be excised, on September 28, 1968. Sterling Morrison pinned the dismissal on Reed’s jealousy; Cale blamed Sesnick’s divisive nature and Reed’s longing to push the band toward a more mainstream sound. (The violist-bassist had recently talked about placing their guitar amps underwater for the next album.) With previously booked shows only a few weeks away, the search for a replacement began immediately.

  Doug Yule grew up in Great Neck, New York, but came to Massachusetts to attend Boston University in 1965. He began playing in cover bands soon after arriving, and in 1967 he joined the Grass Menagerie alongside Walter Powers and Willie Alexander, two Lost refugees. Menagerie’s manager found him an apartment on River Street in Cambridge, where Velvets Morrison and Reed occasionally crashed after playing the Tea Party. None of the band knew him well, and only Morrison had heard him play guitar before, but upon Sesnick’s recommendation, Yule replaced Cale without an audition in the fall of 1968. With so little time before the next set of VU tour dates, there was no room for an exhaustive search.

  Just as important, perhaps, Reed was pleased that the astrological balance of his band would be preserved: Yule was a Pisces, as was Cale. In addition to being astrologically compatible, Yule and Reed actually looked quite a bit like each other. Reed messed with audiences by introducing Yule as his brother. He also turned over lead vocal performances to Yule on some new songs, especially on recordings, to overcome the limitations of his own voice and utilize the sweetness of Yule’s delivery. For later generations of Velvet Underground fans, it comes as a shock to discover that some of the great songs on the self-titled fourth LP and the swan song Loaded feature Yule’s voice, not Reed’s.

  Though primarily a guitarist, Yule agreed to play bass. Less than twenty-four hours after accepting the job, he was in New York staying up all ni
ght with Reed, learning thirty VU songs. “I thought it was really interesting that the first song they performed was ‘Heroin,’” Steve Nelson said of VU’s December 1968 shows, their first post-Cale dates in Boston. “They were sort of saying, ‘We’re still the Velvet Underground, take this, go fuck yourself.’ It was great. Crowd still loved it.”

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  MOST NIGHTS AT THE TEA PARTY ended with a large pile of money on the office desk, but Ray Riepen wasn’t taking all that much home after expenses. Desperate to turn an otherwise total success into a profitable business, Riepen hired an ambitious BU student named Don Law to replace Steve Nelson as manager in the summer of 1968. Law seemed to be full of ideas how to expand the business. “That first night he came in wearing beige chino pants and a powder blue button-down collar shirt,” employee Betsy Polatin says, recalling the staff’s initial suspicion that Riepen had ruined things by hiring a square. But Law genuinely loved rock ’n’ roll, and under his direction, UK acts from Jeff Beck to Led Zeppelin came to play the club. These groups couldn’t yet pack stadiums stateside, but the creation of midsize ballrooms in Boston, New York, and San Francisco made it feasible for them to cross the ocean for a visit.

  Van Morrison could technically be considered one of these UK imports, save for the fact that he could walk from his apartment to the Tea Party. At the first Van Morrison Controversy show that Law booked there, the building almost burned to the ground.