Astral Weeks

by Ryan H. Walsh

  Six days passed between this first session and the next. Somewhere on Ninth Avenue, Warner Brothers’ Joe Smith made the successful bagful-of-twenty-grand drop-off to the sketchy associates of Bang Records. Also during this week, on the label’s payroll and with nothing better to do, John Payne and Tom Kielbania took a personality test. Before they knew it, the two Bostonians found themselves taking a Scientology class. “A new, and quite apparently phony ‘religion’ called Scientology is beginning to emerge from the lower depths,” Women’s Wear Daily reported a month before. “In the United States, it is still basically unknown except to cultists and a few curiosity seekers. But in recent days, subway posters have appeared in New York urging everyone: ‘Step into the world of the totally free.’” Kielbania remembers doing “all the stuff where you stare into people’s eyes for two hours straight and try to change their emotions.” Kielbania thought there might be something to it, but at $1,500 for a six-week course, the price was too steep.

  Van Morrison wouldn’t dabble in Scientology until the eighties (he thanked founder L. Ron Hubbard in the liner notes to 1983’s Inarticulate Speech of the Heart), but already had a deep interest in occult writing. “Van had a friend in high school who was a librarian in Belfast,” Kielbania says. “This guy had all the occult books. This guy used to read them all, and he went insane! So Van was always kinda interested in that.” That fall in New York, Morrison and Kielbania hit every occult bookstore, hunting for a particular title Van wanted: Secret of the Andes, “about flying saucers and people coming to visit this planet.” Once they found it, they dove in.

  Written by George Hunt Williamson under the pseudonym Brother Philip, this 1961 text reads like a welcome packet for visitors to our planet, its contents largely transmitted to Williamson via Ouija board. “The Earth is a classroom for gods, but a strange classroom indeed! Some of the people of the more magnificent worlds are actually envious . . . because they know that on Earth, if you can combat such negativity you have to be a powerful spirit.” As in Lou Reed’s preferred occult book, Alice Bailey’s A Treatise on White Magic (1934), the Seven Rays are also discussed here. Even more curiously, Brother Philip describes visitors to Earth he calls “astrals”:

  The astral forces are helping too. There are many great beings who are assisting both space men and yourselves. They are acting as emissaries, doing what work they can. Some of them perform fine services on the battlefields, on the streets, and in the offices, each acting as mentors and guides to the people of the world. After all, we have all been astrals many times. We have been astrals as many times as we have been mortals in that sense.

  Morrison had definitely written “Astral Weeks” by the time he and Kielbania got hold of this book, and the phrase itself had come to him even earlier—back in Belfast, where it popped into his head while staring at a painting by his friend Cecil McCarthy. The words suggest a time and a place; they roll off the tongue like an incantation, some long-lost relative of abracadabra or hocus pocus, slowly forgotten over centuries.

  “There were several paintings in the studio at the time,” McCarthy explained. “Van looked at the painting and it suggested astral traveling to him.” The painting was new, but for Morrison, the concept of an astral plane was not. In the seventies, he told interviewers about strange incidents he experienced as a child—lying in bed with “the feeling that I’m floating near the ceiling looking down,” and other “amazing projections.” His out-of-body experiences as a boy help explain the obsession with youth that runs through Astral Weeks. In these songs, the singer longs to return to an age when the world functioned like magic. “And I will never grow so old again,” he sings on the triumphant, Yeatsian “Sweet Thing.” In “Beside You” we meet Little Jimmy and a “barefoot virgin child”; in the epic “Cyprus Avenue,” the longing for youth takes on a more troubling form—what seems to be an adult yearning for a fourteen-year-old girl. The whole dreamlike plot of “Madame George” is filtered through “a childlike vision leaping into view.”

  Is it unusual for someone in his early twenties to already be so nostalgic for, and obsessed with, his youth? Around this time, Van Morrison gave Tom Kielbania a kind of clue: He was an only child. “That bothered him,” Kielbania says. “We were in some hotel room, just talking, and he said, ‘You know, people shouldn’t be allowed to just have one kid, because you miss out on a whole bunch of stuff.’” Kielbania, also without siblings, could relate. “He thought that it was a terrible thing that happened to him.”

  But writing Astral Weeks’s lyrics wasn’t necessarily so deliberate—indeed, it might have been the opposite. Fast-forward to 1986’s No Guru, No Method, No Teacher, in which Morrison surprisingly echoed some of the imagery and phrasing from his breakthrough LP from 1968. The “childlike vision” returns, as does the “garden wet with rain” of “Sweet Thing.”* When Morrison was asked how he wrote the newer song (“In the Garden”), he answered, “Oh yeah, I didn’t write that. I was sitting in my flat one night and this voice said to me, ‘Write this down,’ and I pulled out the paper and I just wrote down what he told me, and that was the song.”

  Whether you find any validity in this kind of claim, what is certain is that Morrison himself believes some of his songs arrived fully formed, via a kind of automatic writing. Janet Planet insists that Van’s writing style, circa 1968, involved a stream-of-consciousness transmission that he would record and edit down after playback. Had Morrison arrived in Boston eighty years earlier, his new songs might have been studied by William James and the American Society for Psychical Research rather than reviewed in Rolling Stone. As he told writer Ritchie Yorke in 1979, “I didn’t know what some of the stuff on Astral Weeks was about until years later. . . . If the spirit comes through in a ‘Madame George’ type of song, that’s what the spirit says. You have very little to do with it. You’re like an instrument for what’s coming through.”

  * * *

  • • •

  THE NEXT RECORDING SESSION, early on the morning of October 1, went poorly. No one was feeling it, and after three hours of an undefinable tension, Merenstein sent everyone home. Timing is everything—not only in the scheduling of a session, but in the building-block sense: Music is made up of countless choices of timing. This becomes readily apparent when listening to the alternate takes on 2015’s expanded Astral Weeks release. In take 4 of “Madame George” and take 1 of “Beside You,” Morrison makes subtle changes in phrasing and lyrics, and chooses different words to repeat over and over like a mantra, drastically altering the feel of the songs. After being so intimately familiar with the takes that make up the iconic 1968 release, hearing these recordings evokes an alternate reality, in which these classics have yet to be set in stone. It’s as if Morrison is in the same boat as the musicians who had just heard the songs moments before Merenstein hit record.

  Two weeks passed before the third and final recording session on October 15. Not only did the musicians have to nail the remaining songs, but in Merenstein’s quest to find something appropriate to place at the end of the record, the group ran through “Royalty” and “Going Around with Jesse James,” two stray numbers pulled from Janet’s binder. No one liked them, so Morrison kept flipping through, finally landing on an austere set of lyrics, for a song that wasn’t even familiar to the Boston musicians. “I used ‘Slim Slow Slider’ to make it work,” Merenstein says, about the album’s haunting last chapter. “Make it fade into the mystic.”

  The whole band played the first take. Then Merenstein called everyone into the control room, leaving Van, Davis, and Payne, now on soprano sax, to try a sparser version. After Morrison sings the lyrics about a dying ex-lover, an abstract jazz jam ensues. Merenstein later cuts the sprawl, so that the whole album seems to end on a note of helplessness, even terror: “I just don’t know what to do.”*

  After the take, Payne and Davis walked back into the control room to find everyone completely silent. Up until this point, Merenstein h
ad praised each take right after it was done. Now there was total silence. Morrison remained in the vocal booth. “Maybe everyone was just tired,” Payne says, “or maybe they were moved by it.” Merenstein’s choice to end the record with lyrics about dying was inspired: After the last notes fade, a flip of the platter results in being “born again.” Astral Weeks contains a built-in mechanism for reincarnation.

  At the subsequent overdub sessions, Payne and Kielbania again tagged along, making them witnesses to the entire process of creating the record. Arranger Larry Fallon, fresh off adding a lush orchestral sound to Nico’s Chelsea Girls, directed the horns on “The Way Young Lovers Do,” the harpsichord on “Cyprus Avenue,” and strings throughout. “Everything else was written out, but Larry wanted the guy to improvise on violin for ‘Madame George,’” Payne recalls. “The guy said he couldn’t do it. He wasn’t an improviser. So Fallon called up someone and said, ‘Get me some damn improvisers.’ So, this other guy came in and he smoked it.” Payne and Kielbania recall watching the violinist from the control booth and jumping out of their seats with enthusiasm. “He was unbelievable,” Payne says. “No one told him what to do. Tom and I were flipping out, it was so good.” Morrison, who seemed just as enthused as his Boston bandmates during the creation of these finishing touches, would feel differently about the end product before it even hit record stores. Just weeks after completion, according to Payne, Merenstein quickly put the finished product on the office turntable so that when Morrison walked in, they’d all be enjoying his incredible new LP. The singer waved away the praise and told him to turn it off. “They ruined it,” Morrison later insisted. “They added the strings. I didn’t want the strings. And they sent it to me, it was all changed. That’s not Astral Weeks.”

  Due to the Bang contract, there would be no stand-alone single from the album, but in December 1968, someone at Warner Brothers wondered if a separate nonalbum track could be released in tandem as a workaround to the contract. Berliner and Warren Smith Jr. from the Astral Weeks sessions joined Morrison, Kielbania, and drummer Buddy Saltzman at Century Sound to record a track called “The Sky Is Full of Pipers.” The idea of an Astral Weeks–esque pop single, especially with that Pink Floydian title, taunts the imagination, but the song was never released—and seems to have disappeared completely.

  “Van seemed quite happy with the album at the time, he truly did,” Merenstein tells me, sadly reflecting on the singer’s rejection of his contributions in the ensuing years. “In fact, everyone did, at the moment it was completed.”

  Morrison would spend the next four decades changing his mind about the album, and trying to figure out a way he could reclaim it as his achievement alone. His insistence that he had conceived the album as an opera seems especially suspect, since “Beside You” and “Madame George” were contractually required to appear on the record in the terms of the Bang settlement—not exactly the kind of thing that usually factors into the creation of an opera.

  He turned in the text that appears on the back of the record—that mysterious eleven-line poem that name-drops several Massachusetts locales—to Warner Brothers for printing, but did not provide a lyric sheet. Merenstein sequenced the album and titled each side, respectively, “In the Beginning” and “Afterwards.”

  “He was raw. He was being reborn, he was a child again,” Lewis Merenstein told Clinton Heylin. “He never achieved that again. He searched all over the world of poetry for various ways of expressing himself, but the rawness, the nerve endings weren’t there—because he’s not there anymore.”

  “The reason Van gets so embittered when people ask him about it is because he cannot share anything,” Merenstein explains near the end of our conversation. “Everything has to be him, him, him. The fact that he wasn’t in charge of Astral Weeks drives him crazy. But it shouldn’t! He’s a beautiful poet. He should be a kind person with love in his heart.” It’s highly curious that a man who had insisted that these songs came through him, rather than writing them himself, would be so stubborn about sharing credit with a man that Clinton Heylin describes as one of his few “genuine collaborators.” Seven months after our interview, Lewis Merenstein passed away at age eighty-one from complications related to pneumonia.

  * * *

  • • •

  IN DECEMBER 1968, Van Morrison sent for Janet Planet in Cambridge. Now that Warner Brothers had extricated him from Bang Records, what did Boston have to offer him? The music scene was dominated by psychedelic Bosstown rock now, not the folksingers who originally attracted Morrison. Richard, the Boston manager who initially seemed so helpful, had turned out to be too expensive, too eccentric. And Tom Kielbania notwithstanding, most of his bandmates had not made his music a priority: One quit to continue school, one to work with Carole King, while another tried to convert the band into something like Them at their most hyper. He had been in a frightening car accident on the way home from a gig, and harassed by police; the local underground and mainstream press had barely covered him. Sure, he’d miss his new friend Peter Wolf, but he would see him whenever his tours stopped in Boston. The Van Morrison Controversy was over.

  EPILOGUE

  Afterwards

  WHILE A RECORD PLANT PRESSED Astral Weeks to vinyl, Richard Nixon was elected president of the United States.

  In November, the same month the Beatles dropped a double album to confound the world, Astral Weeks arrived with little fanfare. The cover’s circle-in-a-square design gave it a “mystical feel,” according to producer Lewis Merenstein. Inside the circle inside the square, Morrison looks down, his hair meshing with branches and leaves. This is not the sweaty, high-as-a-kite singer that Bert Berns tried to sell on the sleeve of Blowin’ Your Mind! This is Morrison in double exposure, opening himself up to the world, about to be born again.

  “I used to sit in front of my set and play the album and think, ‘Is this going to disappear into space?’” Merenstein grumbles. He and Morrison’s manager, Bob Schwaid, would call Warner Brothers weekly and ask, “What are you waiting for—everyone to forget who he is?” The sparse marketing was deaf to the music’s charms. One print ad placed a black bar over the singer’s eyes, announcing, “Last night, this man scored,” then threw in a baseball comparison for good measure (“Eight home runs: Astral Weeks”). Bassist Tom Kielbania recalls walking into every record store in Manhattan looking for the album, without luck; according to Warner Brothers’ Joe Smith, “Nobody wanted to buy it.” The label released no single, perhaps because Ilene Berns, now in charge of Bang Records, would have contractually received a cut—or simply because no song was suitable: Over half of them unfurled past the five-minute mark.

  After plans for a European tour fizzled, Morrison, Kielbania, and John Payne’s replacement left for a promotional tour in February 1969. Afterward, Morrison decided to relocate from New York City to the Catskills town of Woodstock. Merenstein had plans for the next record, and it sounded a lot like a sequel. In the summer of 1969, the producer began tracking Moondance with nearly the same lineup that had recorded Astral Weeks: Richard Davis, Warren Smith Jr., and Jay Berliner all returned. The idea of the masterfully melodic songwriting found on Moondance paired with the feel of Astral Weeks sounds irresistible, but at the time, Morrison was rebelling against Merenstein. He had his own vision, and rejected the producer’s input. Besides, as far as anyone knew, Astral Weeks was a flop, destined for perpetual obscurity.

  Add to this Mary Martin, Albert Grossman’s former secretary, who was gunning to become Van’s new manager. Merenstein found her aggressive and manipulative; he watched his hard work crumble. Merenstein calls the Moondance experience “a horror.” All of the Astral Weeks personnel got the boot, and their takes on these songs have never been heard. While Merenstein would receive an executive producer credit, his contributions did not affect the final recordings, so much so that one of the young engineers on the project—Shelly Yakus, son of Ace Recording Studio’s Milton Yakus—doesn�
��t remember anyone producing Moondance, really. “[Schwaid and I] always felt so much pain whenever we’d talk about this,” Merenstein says of their ousting. “We never knew whether the beauty was more or the pain was more.” As the legend of Astral Weeks grew, people often wanted insight about the title’s meaning. “I’ll give you his number,” Merenstein would sigh. “You can ask him yourself.”

  Tom Kielbania’s decision to leave Van Morrison was a difficult one, but the signs were everywhere. “Do you know what it was like living in Woodstock then?” Kielbania asks. “Memorial Day weekend: The New York City chapter of the Hell’s Angels rolls in. One of these guys tried to get me to go with him someplace. And I knew if I went with him, I wasn’t gonna come back.” Kielbania raises his eyebrows and says, “Lotta black magic and stuff.” During this Woodstock residency, Kielbania’s partner, Claudette, watched someone castrate himself and then jump out a window at a party. Additionally, the couple had recently married, and now Claudette was pregnant. When Kielbania told Morrison the news, the singer replied, “I figured that was gonna happen after you got married.”

  * * *

  • • •

  WHEN VAN MORRISON replaced the jazz musicians who made Astral Weeks so special, he chose a lineup consisting almost entirely of musicians involved with the Bosstown Sound: Jef Labes of the Apple Pie Motherhood Band on keys, Third World Raspberry bassist John Klingberg, and the horn section from the Colwell-Winfield Blues Band. For decades to come, Morrison would continually rely on Boston musicians for his bands; Labes appears on eight albums, including Veedon Fleece, and Rick Shlosser, drummer for the Butter, a Bosstown-era Cream knockoff, appears on Tupelo Honey, Saint Dominic’s Preview, and Hard Nose the Highway.