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WITH AMERICAN AVATAR BEHIND THEM, the Lyman Family returned to music. They attempted to record something to set the new band apart from the Jug Band legacy. In late July 1969, Lyman and Kweskin asked their old bandmates Maria and Geoff Muldaur to put down some vocals at Petrucci & Atwell Studios on Newbury Street, not far from WBCN’s headquarters. They recorded a transcendent version of Curtis Mayfield’s “People Get Ready,” with the Muldaurs’ vocals bringing tears to Mel’s eyes. The rekindling of this creative collaboration was short-lived, as Maria and Geoff were given the hard sell to join the FHC later that same night. “Hey, I love Mel because he’s a great guy, not because he’s God,” Geoff explained. The room went deathly silent; the Muldaurs were not invited back.
The other acts working at Petrucci & Atwell knew to keep their distance from the Fort Hill Community singers. According to musician David Palmer, the Lyman crowd took over the studio while he was working on material there with his old friend Rick Philp, who was briefly Van Morrison’s first Boston guitarist in 1968. Women from the FHC began hanging around, charming the entire staff, Palmer says of the Lymans. “They wanted nothing but their music recorded there.”
Freaked out, Palmer and Philp went elsewhere, but things would soon get far worse for Philp. On May 24, 1969, a few weeks after performing with Van Morrison at the Ark club, Rick Philp went to a house on Beacon Street to retrieve a few of his guitars that had gone missing. He was never seen alive again.
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PHILP AND PALMER had known each other since their high school days in Warren, New Jersey, where they started a group called the Myddle Class. If the name sounds familiar, it’s because they were the headlining band at the 1965 concert that would mark the Velvet Underground’s first show ever: an eight p.m. engagement at a school gym in Summit, New Jersey. (Ticket price: $2.50.)
The unlikely pairing was facilitated by Al Aronowitz, who managed both bands. He was new to the job, but not to the music world. A longtime New York Post music critic, Aronowitz introduced Bob Dylan to the Beatles, and was present at the Basement Tapes sessions. As for the Myddle Class, Aronowitz’s babysitter had told him about them.
A few months before the Summit High show, Aronowitz introduced the young band to husband-and-wife songwriting team Carole King and Gerry Goffin, and together they started cutting tracks. “Their music had an edgy sense of urgency,” King wrote in her memoir, A Natural Woman, raving about Philp’s “inventive guitar parts” and the band’s “raw but unmistakable” talent. On the first single, “Free as the Wind,” King and Goffin shared writing credits with young Philp and Palmer. “New label, new group and new Goffin-King material has smash hit possibilities,” Billboard raved. “Folk rocker is a powerhouse!”
Aronowitz sent the Myddle Class out on the road when he could, which tightened up an already powerful live band. But for all its talent, the Myddle Class kept missing their big break. “The band was just not going to work, and we could feel it,” Palmer said in 2015. “Carole and Gerry were having problems in their relationship. . . . It was just bad, bad timing for everybody concerned.” Philp enrolled at Emerson College in Boston, and Palmer followed in the summer of 1968.
Handsome, polite, and thoughtful, Rick Philp hadn’t let his band’s flirtation with fame go to his head. Because of his father’s pressure to pursue a business career, his wardrobe consisted mostly of suits. Beneath the bourgeois trappings was a phenomenal guitarist. “The deep love for writing and playing music that possessed him was impenetrable,” his girlfriend, Kathy West, later wrote.
No one involved recalls how Rick Philp was introduced to the ex-singer of Them. But by March 1968, he was rehearsing with a short-lived Boston combo—the first of three—that Van Morrison fronted during his Bay State exile. Bassist Tom Kielbania remembers being impressed that Philp had recorded demos for the Monkees, and felt he was a good fit.* For this lineup, Morrison used a rehearsal room at the National Express Recording Studio in the South End. June Benson, who lived above the studio, remembers hearing Morrison before she saw him. “The music was daily. ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ played almost endlessly that summer,” she says. “We would try and talk over it, clean the house with it blaring, eat with it blasting. It was just never ending when Van was there.”
This first Boston band—Philp, Kielbania, and a forgotten drummer—played one confirmed show: Morrison’s first live appearance in Boston, Spring Sing, in front of what would be one of his largest audiences for the entire year. It was also the first show in which Morrison used the enigmatic moniker the Van Morrison Controversy. In Dick Iacovello’s pictures of the band, a long-haired Morrison, resplendent in a multicolored striped suit and tie, commands the stage; at times, he even smiles. Rob Norris, a Myddle Class fan and future member of a Lou Reed–less VU, was bowled over by the show, comparing the sound to Van’s Blowin’ Your Mind!
After the semester ended, Rick Philp chose working with Carole King over Van Morrison; he and his roommate, Harvey “Dog” Alter, made the long drive to Los Angeles together. King had rented a house in Laurel Canyon for Philp, Alter, and Kathy. During this summer in L.A., it became increasingly clear to Kathy that Harvey was growing a little too possessive of Rick. After the first night, Harvey scolded the reunited couple for keeping their door closed. Later, Harvey told Rick and Kathy a disturbing story from his summer restaurant job, in which he witnessed a meat slicer blade decapitate the operator. He smiled as he recounted the incident, the truth of which they couldn’t determine.
Back in Boston, in late 1968, there were two mysterious fires in Rick and Harvey’s apartment; trying to stay positive, Rick noted to Kathy that the guitars were undamaged. The arson squad found evidence that the fires were purposely set. The following spring, the guitarist moved to Brighton to distance himself from Harvey Alter. Philp’s letters to Kathy depict someone trying to keep his head above water; even good news was immediately followed by a sense of sinking hope. “I’m playing with Van Morrison May 1,” he wrote, noting in the same letter that his father had told him to get a real job—to stop being so “dirty and disgusting.”* Kathy recalls the most heartbreaking line: “That crap about people are basically honest and really want some kind of meaningful relationships with other people is just bullshit.” Shortly after the letter was mailed, Rick’s guitars were mysteriously stolen. Fed up with Boston, he made plans to get to L.A. as soon as the semester ended.
Sometime during the week of May 19, Philp received a phone call from Alter. Harvey said he’d found Rick’s guitars, and if he came by their old basement apartment at 233 Beacon Street, he could take them back. Within a few days, some of Philp’s classmates and professors noticed he was missing.
Rick had mentioned to a friend that he was going to Harvey’s apartment to retrieve his guitars; this information was passed along to detectives. Five days after that attempt to retrieve his instruments, police entered Alter’s apartment to find Rick’s decomposing corpse under some blankets on Alter’s bed.
“He’s dead,” Harvey Alter told the officers. “I killed Rick.” He was twenty-two years old.
The medical examiner called it a “complex homicide,” involving multiple blows to the head, a broken chair leg, and a length of rope. Rick’s history professor, John Coffee, recalls the story that eventually emerged: Harvey Alter had had a crush on Rick, who wasn’t gay. Yet so long as Harvey didn’t come on to him, Rick didn’t see a problem. “But he started coming on to Rick. So Rick moved . . . and Harvey said, you know, ‘If I can’t have him, nobody can.’”
His lawyer devised an elaborate defense, proposing that the two young men had taken drugs and engaged in consensual sex. Things had gotten out of hand, the lawyer said, as the drugs (it’s never clear which ones) kicked in. Kathy and others close to Rick saw this as pure fabrication: Rick was only an occasional marijuana user, and had never displayed any bisexual tendencie
s. After two weeks of testimony, the judge accepted a plea of the lesser charge of manslaughter on Alter’s behalf, citing the drug use as a major factor in his decision. “It is unfortunate, that so many of our young people who have a chance to gain an education spill it down the drain by the use of illegal drugs,” the judge declared, adding in a bizarre aside that he wished more college students would attend murder trials to witness “real tragedies” instead of going to see the musical Hair.
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IN VAN MORRISON’S EVOLVING BOSTON LINEUP, the teenage John Sheldon replaced Rick Philp sometime in May 1968. I ask Sheldon if, in a way, it makes sense that Morrison rejected the frenetic, electric version of the songs that Sheldon was pushing that summer in an attempt to create shelter in his otherwise turbulent situation. Sheldon says, “He was looking for something in the music—he was searching for something—and he wasn’t getting it with the rock and roll thing.”
Producer Lewis Merenstein heard this searching, this quest, in September 1968, when Van’s audition of “Astral Weeks” at Ace Studios stunned him to the core. He tells me this repeatedly over the phone, then even more emphatically when we meet outside a coffee shop near his home in Manhattan. In aviator glasses and black baseball cap, the eighty-year-old Merenstein seems tall even though he never gets up from his motorized scooter. His voice is frail, and I lean forward to catch his words.
In the live room at Ace studio, Merenstein wasn’t even certain that Morrison understood what he was singing about; it was like hearing something being poured out of the man’s subconscious. Merenstein said to his partner, Bob Schwaid, “Bob, what are we wasting time for? Let’s go make a record.” The three drove to New York City that same night, he says. En route, Merenstein tried to tell Morrison about some of the bands and albums he had worked with previously. “He wasn’t impressed. So I stopped talking.” They deposited the singer at a hotel, and the three arranged to meet at Schwaid and Merenstein’s Midtown office in the morning.
This would be the first time Morrison had returned to New York since fleeing earlier in 1968. “I won’t go into details but I think it’s sufficient to say Bert Berns & Bang was a Fucked Up Bad Scene,” Morrison once wrote to a musician friend. Was he nervous that Carmine “Wassel” DeNoia might come around? When he arrived at the office the next day, he needed a drink. “There’s never a drink with Van,” Merenstein says. “I don’t know how long we were there, but he finally got talking about his music.” They discussed who would play on the album; Morrison suggested his Boston musicians, but Merenstein opposed the idea. “We had a fight over it,” he says. “But I had more conviction about why it should be my way.”
A compromise was reached: Merenstein would choose the musicians, but Morrison could bring Tom Kielbania and John Payne from Boston to New York. They wouldn’t play on the record, but Warner Brothers would pay them to attend the sessions—out of courtesy, and in case something about their arrangements needed clarification. The next day, Morrison came to Merenstein’s office and played him all the potential songs for the record.
Was Merenstein surprised that it was so different from “Brown Eyed Girl”? “Everything he did surprised me,” he says. “It was just him and a guitar. It was so awesome I can’t even tell you how moved I felt by his ability to communicate.”
Upon first hearing the song “Moondance,” Merenstein briefly considered including it on the album. But it was “too warm, too lovey” for Astral Weeks. Merenstein contacted jazz bass player Richard Davis to book him for the project and to explain to him the other musicians he wanted present at the sessions—some by name, some just by referencing the instrument and feel he wanted. Merenstein and Davis became close friends in the ensuing decades, but when the producer speaks about Davis’s musicianship, he still sounds worshipful. “Davis’s playing is the foundation that the Earth is floating on!”
The first session was booked for September 25, 1968, at Century Sound Studios on 135 West Fifty-second Street.
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BEFORE THE FIRST NOTE was committed to tape, Payne and Kielbania knew they wouldn’t be on the record. “I’m sorry, Tom, I really am,” Morrison said, in an unusual show of emotion. Kielbania was upset by the news, but there was some consolation in learning that his replacement was Richard Davis. “I idolized him at that time,” the former Berklee music student says. “I was a freaking jazz musician, after all!” If the two Bostonians had a loose plan to talk their way onto the record, Tom’s chances were dashed the moment Davis walked in the door. For John, there was still hope.
The studio filled up with Merenstein’s chosen team: Davis on bass, Jay Berliner on guitar, Connie Kay on drums, and Warren Smith Jr. on vibraphone—all respected jazz musicians. (A New York flute player who appears on two tracks goes unnamed in the liner notes, and none of the musicians can recall who it was.) In the control room, Brooks Arthur, the engineer and owner of Century Sound Studios, manned the boards, while Merenstein stood behind him. Payne and Kielbania sat on the couch, watching. It was dusk as they tuned up their instruments; most of them had already worked a session or two earlier that day. Consulting his work diary from that year, guitarist Jay Berliner notes he had just recorded jingles for both Noxzema and Pringles potato chips before showing up to start working on one of the most celebrated albums of all time. There was no project title yet; Berliner’s gig diary merely says “Van Morrison.”* None of the musicians had heard of him before.
Berliner remembers the unusual way the band was introduced—or not introduced—to the star of the project. “This little guy walks in, past everybody, disappears into the vocal booth, and almost never comes out,” he said. “Even on the playbacks, he stayed in there.” The other musicians confirm this. Davis, now retired and living in Wisconsin, focuses on what he found important about the sessions. “Well, I was with three of my favorite fellas to play with, so that’s what made it beautiful. We were not concerned with Van at all, he never spoke to us.”
Van’s default mode of noninteraction was familiar to his Boston bandmates, but this level of shyness was extreme. “He seemed spaced out,” Payne told biographer Clinton Heylin, “as though he was in a lot of personal pain.” Perhaps, in the presence of players who were part of the Modern Jazz Quartet or Charles Mingus collaborators, Morrison simply became overwhelmed by nerves. His old producer Bert Berns had always had too many ideas; now, in the company of a producer who just wanted to let things happen naturally, the freedom could have been disorienting. Berliner swears the singer’s isolation booth was full of some kind of smoke (Berliner claims Morrison called it “vegetable weed”), but no one else has this exact recollection.
“I don’t know what he was doing in there!” Davis says. “He’s a strange fella!”
Perched on a stool, Morrison clutched his guitar, opened the binder of his new songs that Janet Planet had collated for him, and waited for Brooks Arthur to hit record. For the session musicians, this was just another gig, but for Morrison, it must have felt like the last chance to breathe life into his faltering career—to be born again, as the title track proclaims. It is a point of contention whether lead sheets or chord charts were provided, but Davis believes Morrison just strummed the song and sang it from the booth once or twice, with the musicians improvising their parts on top of his composition minutes later. Tom Kielbania claims he demonstrated some bass lines he had developed back in Boston for Davis; Davis denies this, but Payne confirms it.
That a group of players who had been knee-deep in ad-jingle-land hours before then pivoted to create the singularly beautiful music found on Astral Weeks seems incredible, but by all accounts this was actually the case. Guitarist Jay Berliner’s schedule was so flanked by commercial work, in fact, he joked that he could have mistaken the session for another advertising job. “Astral Weeks, I mean, what a long jingle,” he says, laughing. “And what are we selling here, exactly?”
Jingles are thirty seconds; pop songs, about three minutes. But Morrison’s new compositions called for takes that could stretch beyond nine minutes. Kielbania recalls that what ended up on the album was often an edit of a much longer jam. Jay Berliner finds this plausible, and recalls Lewis Merenstein at the control booth window smiling, rolling his hand in a “keep going!” motion. That first night, they laid down “Beside You,” “Cyprus Avenue,” and the epic “Madame George,” which hit the five-, seven-, and nine-minute mark in their final versions. Everyone was so pleased with the results that they started to talk about trying one more before calling it quits.
When John Payne heard it was going to be “Astral Weeks,” a song he had been playing with Van live back in Boston, he began to loudly campaign for permission to perform. “John was basically crying when I told him he wouldn’t be on the album,” Lewis Merenstein recalls. “I said, ‘It’s not anything to do with your playing, it’s just not the concept I had.’” Payne begged the hired flutist to let him borrow his instrument, as he had left his own at the Chelsea Hotel.
“Oh man, I just wanna go home,” the unknown musician replied, yawning.
“Please,” Payne said, with all the intensity of a young man recognizing the special opportunity before him. “Please let me play on this song.”
Merenstein and the weary flutist finally gave in, and John Payne took a seat inside the live room. The twenty-two-year-old Harvard dropout and second cousin to poet Robert Lowell had just talked his way into a session with some of New York’s best jazz musicians. “I was a cocky kid I guess,” Payne says. “I thought I was hot stuff. I was a little nervous, but mostly I was just excited because I had been playing with him and I knew I could do it.” By all accounts, the song that appears on the album is the very first take. “The interaction between Jay Berliner and me playing off each other and the whole way Van was just there listening to it was just amazing,” Payne says. “I still think it’s the best thing in the record. The first track.” The unknown flutist—name lost to history—was not called back for the subsequent sessions.
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