Astral Weeks

by Ryan H. Walsh

  What did he say? Bebo doesn’t know, but says he witnessed it a few times that summer. “I’d see him go up to a young girl, whisper something, and it was always the same reaction, every single time.”

  * * *

  • • •

  EVERYONE IN THE BAND AGREES THAT, along with the Astral Weeks songs, both “Moondance” and “Domino”—future Morrison classics—were written and developed that same summer as well. According to guitarist Sheldon, he and Van first stumbled upon “Domino” at the Boston Tea Party, fooling around onstage before the audience was admitted. It was based on Sheldon “playing a lot of treble on the guitar and playing something that sounded like ‘Mona,’” the Rolling Stones’ version of a Bo Diddley song. Morrison was on drums as Sheldon chimed out the chords. “He swung this mic over and started singing. And the song came from there. As soon as he finished he said, ‘That’s a real motherfucker.’”

  Drummer Bebo confirms that the band performed an extended version of the song that, with young Sheldon’s affinity for feedback, came off like a “musical paroxysm.” Sheldon also remembers messing around with a Grant Green song called “Lazy Afternoon” at one rehearsal; Morrison requested some alterations, and began singing a melody that would eventually morph into the song “Moondance.” Kielbania corroborates this version of events. His favorite moment from 1968 was playing “Moondance” for the first time in Cambridge: “New song. Same bass line ever since.”

  The band was remarkably busy that summer, playing at rock clubs, roller rinks, high school gyms, amusement parks, and outdoor festivals. One former Wayland High School teacher and some of his former students patch together their memories of the evening: He threw a temper tantrum onstage about feedback. He was paid $400 for the performance and someone stole his microphone after the show. Meanwhile, at the Psychedelic Supermarket, the Tea Party’s dumpy competitor, Morrison tried to quit before playing the final set. Less than ten people were in the audience, but owner George Papadopoulos demanded that they finish.* Morrison countered that Papadopoulos had promised at least a hundred people, a fact the club owner denied. “Van exploded, packing as many f-words as he could into the next few short sentences,” Bebo recalled. “I had never heard such an outburst at that point in my life.”

  Bebo explains what happened next: Van, “in a foul mood, with his back to the small audience that had finally started to arrive, turned it into a stressful rehearsal, stopping us in the middle of the songs and changing the tempos halfway through the choruses.” A young musician from Salem named Ed Morneau remembered this specific show, its sour atmosphere still shading his opinion of the singer to this day: “He performed a few tunes, then walked off. People were pissed. I immediately disliked him and still do.” John Sheldon’s overall memory of the entire summer is something akin to that night at the Psychedelic Supermarket. “It was just on the edge of madness,” he says. “It’s a miracle we played anywhere, it’s a miracle we got to any gigs at all.”

  The summer was littered with moments like these; for Morrison, a musician who had already thoroughly paid his dues, it must have been painfully humbling. After one club date, a mean-spirited audience member walked up to him and said, “You wrote that song, ‘Brown Eyed Girl’?” Morrison nodded. “When I first heard it on the radio,” the guy told him, “I thought, man, the Rolling Stones have really gone downhill.”

  Back to the Cape, this time at a churchlike venue with atrocious acoustics. “John was playing particularly loud and raucous, with a lot of out-of-tune chords and feedback,” Bebo says. Sheldon started smashing Bebo’s cymbals with the head of his guitar, apparently inspired by Pete Townshend’s onstage theatrics. After the first set, Morrison disappeared into the dressing room and his Southern Comfort, while Bebo confronted Sheldon about his cymbal attack. Sheldon admitted he got carried away. But at the top of the second set, Sheldon started to once again hit Bebo’s drums so aggressively that a cymbal stand crashed to the stage. Morrison whipped around, screaming, “It’s too fucking loud!”

  Bebo stormed off the stage to yell at the guitarist, but couldn’t find him. At last, opening a closet door, Bebo saw Sheldon inside, cutting his arm with a penknife. Bebo asked if he was crazy. Sheldon told him he was.

  “Okay, John,” Bebo said, unsure how to proceed. “Your crazy act worked.”

  But it wasn’t an act. Though Sheldon doesn’t recall this specific incident, laughing as I recount Bebo’s tale, he doesn’t doubt it happened. As a fifteen-year-old, John Sheldon had been committed to McLean Hospital, a psychiatric institution in Belmont, formerly known as Asylum for the Insane. “I was submitted in the spring of 1966,” he says. “I got out in the fall of 1967. And I met Van a few months later.”

  Years passed before Sheldon accessed his McLean files. He learned that the official diagnosis had been “adolescent turmoil,” and that the doctors’ main goal had been to get him through his awkward years without hurting himself. Unlike the horror show of Bridgewater State Hospital, McLean was beautiful, with spacious grounds designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, who became a patient there twenty-five years later. “Everyone makes the same comment,” Alex Beam writes in Gracefully Insane, his book about McLean. “It doesn’t look like a mental hospital.” The idea was simple: a calm, pastoral setting might help in easing a disturbed mind. Artists like Sylvia Plath, Ray Charles, and James Taylor—the songwriter who had taught Sheldon guitar basics as a kid—had all gone there.

  Sheldon learned to smoke pot at McLean. “You could hide anything, you could get anything, somebody was always going into town and coming back with something,” the guitarist told Alex Beam. In a strange coincidence, after Sheldon stopped playing with Morrison, the man who stepped into his place—flute player John Payne—also happened to be a McLean alum. Payne’s time at the hospital happened to overlap with that of his first cousin, once removed, who was none other than the poet Robert Lowell. According to Payne’s sister Sarah, the two relatives recognized each other on the grounds, but barely spoke in their medicated haze. “He was incredibly high and incredibly drugged,” Payne reported to Sarah, “and even though he was talking to you, he was a million miles away.”

  At the end of the eventful, traumatic Cape Cod show at the churchlike venue, Morrison’s band ambled back into the van to get back to Boston. On this particular night, their transportation had been arranged by Sheldon, not for the first time. (“When your seventeen-year-old guitar player that’s living at home has to go arrange transportation, you probably aren’t crossing all your T’s,” he jokes.) Driving home, Sheldon smashed the rental into the back of a truck on the Southeast Expressway. No one was injured, but the van now had a gaping hole in the hood. The accident might help illuminate the opaque poem on the Astral Weeks sleeve. Not only is it the album’s only mention of time spent in Massachusetts, but it specifically names Hyannis Port, the Cape Cod town where, by all available evidence, Van traveled to only twice, the second time being the show described above. The eleven-line verse takes us from Hyannis Port to Cambridgeport, where he and Janet lived. Is the Astral Weeks poem about returning home to Janet after a particularly bad show down the Cape? Could the phrase “bumper to bumper” refer to the car accident?

  Morrison would loathe this kind of connect-the-dots. In 1985 he trashed the whole genre of lyrical analysis: “People are saying, ‘Well, this means this about that, and he was going through that when he wrote this.’ . . . So you get to the point where you’re afraid to write anything, because you know somebody’s gonna make something [out] of it. . . . I’m very unanalytical about what I do.” And yet, Morrison himself has often recontextualized his own stories and lyrics over the years. (Biographer Clinton Heylin called him “the master revisionist.”)

  Safely back in Boston, Van Morrison and the Controversy next opened for California soft-rock band the Association at Frank Connelly’s Carousel Theatre in Framingham. Backstage, members of the Association excitedly talked to Morrison—t
hey were in the know. When Morrison recognized a moment to be gregarious as advantageous to his career, he could turn it on without a problem. “Much like when the DJs came backstage to talk to him,” Joey Bebo recalled, “Van was holding court.” An hour later, about to go onstage, Bebo and Kielbania commented on how nice the Association guys were; Morrison declared them to all be “faggots.” They opened with the long, electric version of “Domino.” The crowd was polite; the subsequent Boston Globe review noted that the group “never really communicated.” Even if it had been glowing, Morrison probably would’ve found fault with the assessment. Bebo once watched Morrison read a largely positive write-up, crumple up the paper, and call the writer an asshole.

  The gigs kept coming: the Cambridge Electric Ballroom, Hampton Beach Casino, an in-studio performance at Ray Riepen’s new station, WBCN, the Comic Strip in Worcester. Morrison was in Boston to work and the itinerary proves it. In August, the band played Rocky Point Amusement Park in Rhode Island. Bebo recalled “thousands of people . . . all there to see Van.” The band tried to make their basement rehearsal gear work for the gigantic outdoor venue, to little effect. What’s worse, Bebo busted the head of his snare drum on the first song. As it happened, none of that mattered: Van’s voice alone could carry a show, and the crowd was in a frenzy. Bebo had caught wind that Morrison was promised a percentage of the admission fee for this concert, and forgetting all the nights Van had paid him $150 when he himself was barely paid, the drummer tried to lead an insurrection demanding a larger piece of the take. “They all came to see me,” Morrison calmly explained before walking away. “It was a lesson I never forgot,” Bebo wrote in his memoir, “and from that moment on I understood my place.”

  Most of Van Morrison’s Boston electric band agree on what happened at the beginning and middle of the summer, but memories diverge about the end. Did the electric band record anything together? There are certainly no live bootlegs even whispered about for this lineup; Peter Wolf’s tape is of the acoustic, post-anti-electric-dream trio, and the WGBH performance is Van backed by saxophone and Kielbania on bass. According to Sheldon, someone from Bang Records came to Boston at the behest of Ilene Berns to induce Van to cut some new demos, a representative “sporting an out-of-date Beatle haircut and talking a lot about trendy, bubblegum pop songs.” He was “sort of like an operator who wanted to get a little ditty out of us.”

  It’s true that Ilene Berns eventually forced Morrison to record his contractually obligated songs for Bang. The result was the infamous “nonsense” or “revenge” recordings (sample titles: “Ringworm,” “Want a Danish”), recorded in New York the following year. As absurd as the lyrics are, they seem to confirm Sheldon’s memory of someone from Bang Records visiting Boston. “This here’s the story about dumb, dumb George / Who came up to Boston one sunny afternoon,” he sings in “Dum Dum George.” In the track, Morrison wails about a record producer who brags about making lots of money and number one hits. Because many of these contractually obligated songs seem to specifically delight in making fun of Bert Berns and his old label, it’s reasonable to assume that the “dumb” record producer who visited Boston was most likely working for Bang.

  In this session, regardless of who or what prompted it, they laid down the dirty, “rocking, really good” version of “Domino” and other new songs, though Sheldon has never heard them since. Bebo confirms that the band made some demos at Ace Recording Studios, but he recalls it being on Van’s own dime, with the goal of wooing a new label. Along with “Domino” they laid down a tune called “Lorna.” “This wasn’t like the gigs where everything was so loud and chaotic that he was just a thread in a wild tapestry of sounds barely audible through my own playing,” Bebo wrote. “It was the moment that I truly became aware of how good he really was.”

  Bebo says that the Ace producer didn’t think he was “rock” enough, and brought in another local percussionist: “You know Victor, the one-armed drummer?”

  This was Victor “Moulty” Moulton, of a garage band called the Barbarians. Moulty had lost his left arm in an explosion at fourteen, and clutched his drumstick with a prosthetic claw. The Barbarians found minor fame with their two-minute exploration of androgyny, “Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl?” Their second-biggest hit was “Moulty,” in which the drummer talk-sang, in a rich Boston accent, his personal story of overcoming teenage tragedy, on top of chords that sound a whole lot like “Hang On Sloopy.”* “[Van] needed a heavy drummer,” Moulty says, “and I was definitely heavy duty.” In Moulty’s memory, he declined Morrison’s offer to join the band after this recording session. But according to Bebo, Morrison didn’t care for Moulty’s bashing, and requested that Bebo be brought back.

  Herbert Yakus, half of the sibling team that ran Ace, says that a Van Morrison session, with or without Moulty, would have been just another day’s work compared with their usual clientele. Because of the eventual fight with his brother Milton over the royalties to “Old Cape Cod”—a hit for Patti Page in 1957 that originated at Ace—Yakus is at first reluctant to stir up the past (“That song made Cape Cod!” he yells at me). “There were weird bookies paying for women to make records all the time,” he recalls. “I had a priest who fell in love with a woman singer. He took the church’s money and paid me to cut a record with this woman. The problem was, when these songs went nowhere, they’d threaten me like it was my fault.” Another time, a woman came in with a stack of records and told Yakus, “When I die, I want you to play these records in this order as they prepare my body for burying at the morgue.” (He did.) At one point, the studio even offered to install secret recording equipment in the rooms and cars of spouses who were suspected of cheating. Ace went belly up in 1971, and save for a few recordings that Herbert decided to take home, like a Louis Armstrong session, all of it went in the trash or to other studios to be taped over.

  How and why did the band shift from what Bebo calls a “strictly electric” sound to an acoustic approach in the weeks leading up to the September recording of Astral Weeks? Bebo contends that it was all because Kielbania’s instrument broke at one of the band’s first Catacombs shows. The bass was sending nothing but electrical noise to his amplifier, as an impatient Morrison watched from a nearby table. With no hope of fixing it, Kielbania ran out of the club and into his nearby alma mater, Berklee, to borrow an acoustic bass. Bebo claims they reworked some of the newer songs “almost as if it was rehearsal. We played soft and jazzy behind Van’s wailing vocals.”

  What about John Sheldon’s memory of Van’s dream—the dream instructing him to stop using electric instruments?

  Bebo shakes his head. “I have no idea where John’s coming from, but I know he was this crazy kid. And he may have seen things a little differently, but nothing like that.” Kielbania remembers his bass crapping out on him, but doesn’t recall this as being the accidental turning of the tide. He doesn’t remember Morrison’s dream, but he doesn’t find it all that unlikely either. After all, later that fall in New York, Morrison would wake Kielbania in the middle of the night to jam on a new song that had just come to him, in a dream about an “electric radio.”

  Sheldon doesn’t waver. He recalls “rehearsing without Joey and with just Tom and me on the acoustic guitar. It was very clear that Van didn’t want any electric instruments.” He admits that his memory of Van Morrison’s dream sounds strange, but thinks it outrageous that he could have made it all up. “I remember very clearly that he said that and then next thing I know we were rehearsing acoustically.”* All the while, Van Morrison was writing and refining the songs that would end up on his 1968 masterpiece. “[Van] was doing the tracks that were to become Astral Weeks,” recalled Mick Cox, a guitarist who was recording in New York with his band Eire Apparent. “I stayed up for two or three days [in Cambridge] and recorded some stuff with him—just fantastic music.”

  By the end of the summer, the Van Morrison Controversy was fraying, Sheldon says. The original manage
r—Richard or Frank—was no longer there by August; the money was running out. Janet Planet does recall that the Boston manager wanted to charge Van an arm and a leg for every little thing he did. Soon after, Lewis Merenstein came to Ace for the audition, and the guitarist understood he’d been politely removed from the band.

  Joey Bebo, of course, has a different memory. After the Ace demo sessions, the whole band sat in a semicircle as Van asked who would be staying on after the summer ended. Bebo had the “distinct impression that something had happened over the week of cutting demo tapes”: a record contract. John Sheldon told Van that he couldn’t do it, as high school would be resuming, and Kielbania immediately said yes. Bebo was the only one who asked to sleep on it.

  The first member of his family to attend college, Bebo agonized over the decision on a night walk through Boston. “There was the Prudential, towering over the peaks of dozens of apartment buildings,” he recalled. “Suddenly I felt small . . . I felt like I lived a charmed life. I didn’t know who to thank, so I thanked God.” He burst into tears. The next morning he told Van Morrison he would return to school in September.

  Hearing the music today, Bebo says he would have “given it all up—all my education—to play with Van again. I just want to get back there.”

  Unlike Joey Bebo, John Sheldon remained in the music world long after that summer. Immediately after the Morrison gig ended, Sheldon joined the local band Bead Game, which surfaced in a lot of the Bosstown Sound coverage, though their first album didn’t appear until after the scene’s heyday. He went on to write songs that would be recorded by his old friend James Taylor. “September Grass” and “Bittersweet” both appeared on albums that went platinum for the singer-songwriter. Sheldon most recently has performed a piece called The Red Guitar, a reference to the Fender he bought off Taylor in the early sixties. I ask Sheldon if, looking back, he wishes he had some kind of writing credit for “Domino” or “Moondance.” If he could have anything, he says, it wouldn’t be royalties, but the long-lost recording of “Domino.”