Astral Weeks

by Ryan H. Walsh

  Though Bay Stater Jon Landau was attuned to Morrison’s Boston connection (shouting it out in his 1971 Rolling Stone assessment of His Band and the Street Choir), that link quickly turned obscure; in 1973, The Boston Globe no less wondered why Morrison’s live show would “strangely” lean so heavily on Astral Weeks material. Over the years, an inverse relationship developed between the album’s legend and its Boston roots. As the album ascended to masterpiece stature, his Massachusetts stint became less well known. Jonathan Richman tried to keep the story alive in 1993: “Van Morrison, his Astral Weeks album, a lot of those songs were written in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He’s from Belfast. I listen to that record a lot and I think Boston, Cambridge again. I went to Cyprus Avenue in Belfast. I found it. I went there.”

  Richman found the spiritual link between Morrison’s native city and the place the singer fled to in 1968. “[Boston’s] got a kind of sad beauty to it,” Richman told Q magazine. “You know what it reminds me of? Belfast.” Morrison himself obliquely connected the two cities in “Hard Nose the Highway”—his sole published lyrical reference to his 1968 stomping grounds. But did the lyrics on Astral Weeks contain any clues to his turbulent time there? I was resigned to leaving the puzzle unsolved.

  While talking with the producer of the 2015 Astral Weeks expanded edition, I learned about an outtake still in the Vault—a song that would never see the light of day. The alternate versions that appear on the LP’s reissue—including the revelatory “Slim Slow Slider”—could legally be released without additional permission from Morrison, because they’d already been published. But “Train” would require an okay from Morrison, which the label could not secure. In Astral Weeks lore, rumors abound that “Train” was an hour long.

  Last winter, I got to hear it. There’s no question why the song was left off the album. It’s a slow-burning blues that simmers for fourteen minutes but never boils; in fact, halfway through you can hear Warren Smith Jr. get bored and change his vibraphone part from the repeated riff to a wandering arpeggio that brings to mind flashback music on an old TV show. But there’s also something remarkable, tucked in around the halfway point. Out of nowhere, Morrison intones Massachusetts place-names. The lyrics flow from the poem that appears on the album’s back cover—or is the poem a version of the lyrics?

  Inside of “Train,” you can hear the echt Irish songwriter belt out the town names of Cambridgeport and Hyannis Port as if they were fabled secret villages. It’s a surreal discovery. If “Train” had made it onto Astral Weeks, the album would have explicitly bridged Belfast and Boston, the home he hailed from and the home he had found. Think of laying a translucent map of one atop the other, the scrambled new geography revealing “some hidden wisdom,” as he puts it elsewhere in the song. There are only two songs that reference trains here, this outtake and Astral Weeks’ nine-minute climax. “Say goodbye, goodbye,” Van implores, at the end of “Madame George.” “Get on the train / this is the train.” George Ivan Morrison bids Madame George farewell, as he boards the Belfast–Boston Express, to the place where his future awaits.

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  • • •

  MOONDANCE DID ALL the things that Astral Weeks did not. The marketing was stronger and the reception was significantly warmer. “Unlike Van’s masterful Astral Weeks, this one will be immensely popular,” Rolling Stone predicted. “Van’s picture already fills the windows of record stores and his new music is getting more airplay on FM stations than anything in recent memory.” Despite their significant differences, these two albums are forever linked—by Lewis Merenstein’s involvement, by their celestial titles, and by a foundation of great songs forged in Boston. “Think of it,” Lewis Merenstein later mused. “Astral Weeks and Moondance and never again. Tons of albums, nothing equal to those albums.”

  The lionization of Astral Weeks was decades in the making. Rolling Stone’s assessment of the best music of 1968 didn’t even mention it. But sales were steady in the years to come. “We know what’s going down with this album now,” Joe Smith told Morrison in 1971. “We’re going to be selling it for another six years.” That was an understatement. Bruce Springsteen’s obsession with the record led him to tap Richard Davis to play bass on his 1973 debut and on Born to Run in 1975. “It made me trust in beauty, it gave me a sense of the divine,” Springsteen said of Astral Weeks, forty years later. “It was the same chord progression over and over again. But it showed how expansive something with very basic underpinning could be.” Critical pieces also widened the cult, none as important as Lester Bangs’s paean to the album. Simply titled “Astral Weeks,” the essay first appeared in 1978’s Stranded, a “desert island discs” anthology edited by Greil Marcus, then kicked off Bangs’s first collection, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, published in 1987, five years after his death. “It was particularly important to me because the fall of 1968 was such a terrible time,” Bangs admitted up front, and what followed was a glorious, confessional look at pain and redemption that has itself become a classic.

  Engineer Brooks Arthur recalls the moment he realized that Astral Weeks wasn’t going away; it was sometime in the nineties when he was earning a living by producing Adam Sandler’s comedy albums. “I was in the bathroom reading an issue of Rolling Stone,” Arthur says. “It said it was one of the most seminal records ever made. I couldn’t believe it.”

  The lavish praise seemed only to annoy Van Morrison; hundreds of songs later, he was still being asked about Astral Weeks. Even its classification bugged him. “Of all the records I have ever made that one is definitely not rock,” he griped. “Why they keep calling it one I have no idea.” In 2008, he did something that seemed to engage with the constant praise. If people were going to prattle on about Astral Weeks, he’d do the entire thing live at the Hollywood Bowl, even bringing back some of the original players, and release the new recording himself in an attempt to claim some of the profits he felt he deserved. When original bass player Richard Davis showed up to rehearsal, he was shocked to see that every note he had improvised in 1968 had been transferred to sheet music. Strict adherence was expected. “Do you know how crazy that is?” Merenstein says, incredulous. “For that kind of playing? After two rehearsal dates Richard was fired. He got paid and went home.”

  Arthur reports a similar story. As someone who had gone forty years without a proper engineer credit on Astral Weeks, he was ecstatic when asked to man the boards at the Hollywood Bowl show. “I told Van I would love to, but that I wasn’t as quick as I had been forty years ago,” Arthur says. “I told him I’d need an assistant engineer by my side.” He never heard back; the gig went to someone else. Besides Morrison, the only member from the original team to make it to the performance was Jay Berliner. His improvised guitar parts had been notated as well, but he wisely just pretended to follow along. Joe Smith watched from the audience. “It wasn’t a spectacular show.”

  Morrison is known as one of the world’s best living vocalists. His gruffness and unpredictability are the other side of that calling card. Aimee Mann, leader of Boston band ’Til Tuesday, once shared a meal with Peter Wolf and Morrison where she watched another dinner guest try to make small talk with the singer, asking about a former saxophone player in his band. Morrison blew a fuse. “He went, ‘Questions! Questions! Questions!’ got up, and stormed out,” Mann said. After Jef Labes became part of Morrison’s live act, he witnessed the singer sabotage his concerts, including a 1969 Symphony Hall date in Boston that he performed while lying down. At a show in Canada, Labes says, Van humped the piano, telling the crowd, “This is what you really wanna see!”

  “He’s a genius,” Labes says, “but he’s too crazy for me.”

  In the mid-seventies, Morrison stormed into the Warner Brothers offices on Christmas Eve with a set of demands for Joe Smith. When Morrison slammed down some papers on Smith’s desk, breaking his Cross pen set, Smith got so upset he grabbed Van by the tie, yanked his head to the desk, and told
the singer that he never wanted to see him again. Even in calmer times, things could get peculiar. When Smith was putting together his 1988 book Off the Record: An Oral History of Popular Music, Morrison agreed to an interview at a hotel, on the condition that he be addressed as “Mr. Johnson.” Smith spotted him in the lobby wearing an upturned overcoat and tried to say hello, but Morrison didn’t acknowledge Smith whatsoever until he reluctantly called him by his secret handle.

  In the early eighties, Morrison and Warner Brothers parted ways. “I remember we almost came to blows because he kept insisting that I guarantee him a No. 1 single,” explained label president Mo Ostin. Ex-wife Janet Planet agrees that “[Van] offends people regularly. Then as now, in ways too numerous to mention, he’s his own worst enemy.” But there’s clearly something about his contrarian personality and short fuse that has led to artistic triumphs. “If he had not said no to Bert Berns, if he had continued to be forced into that Top 40 mold at which Bert was so proudly proficient,” Planet says, “there would be no Astral Weeks.”

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  • • •

  VAN MORRISON PLAYED Boston’s Wang Theatre in the spring of 2016. I went, hoping to catch some astral magic. My hopes faded as he marched through a set of lesser-known songs and blues covers, with a pair of fan favorites tacked to the end. Walking to the train station, I ran into Peter Wolf’s friend, the one who’d advised me to bring pastries at the start of my Astral Weeks quest a year before. Wolf, he said, had been at the show, but split early. There would be no late-night cruise down Green Street during this visit. But something harkening back to 1968 did happen backstage that night: Bassist Tom Kielbania met with his old bandmate. They shared a brief, pleasant conversation.

  “I have the recording of us at the Catacombs,” Morrison said. “It’s very good!” He told his assistant to make sure Kielbania got a copy. Wolf had intimated to me that his live bootleg was never digitized, but apparently it had been. Maybe he’d forgotten, or didn’t want me to know.

  Kielbania (who told me about their encounter much later) never received a copy; digitized or prebaked, the recording remained elusive. Then out of the blue, a year after the perfunctory concert, someone got in touch with me. There was a copy of the Catacombs gig that I could listen to. (The source said only a few people had heard it, passed along by someone who used to work for Morrison.) In the course of an afternoon, I went from wondering about the secret history of Astral Weeks to listening, jaw on floor, to a show in which Van Morrison became Van Morrison.

  The recording from August 1968 clocks in at fifty-four minutes. The fidelity is astonishing: Kielbania’s upright bass, John Payne’s flute, and Morrison’s acoustic guitar all sound perfectly mixed, with Van’s majestic twenty-two-year-old voice soaring over it all. The energy in the room is palpable, and the trio sounds as if it’s been playing together for years. Every song has its revelations. They open with a new song, “Cyprus Avenue,” not yet immortalized but magisterial and intimate right out of the box. Van fine-tunes the lyrics, while Kielbania’s line is nearly identical to what Richard Davis would play on the album the following month—making it extremely likely that Kielbania did show the jazz musician some parts he had written back in Boston, despite Davis’s insistence to the contrary. Elsewhere, we hear what John Payne might have played had he been the album’s sole flutist; on the bootleg, Payne improvises parts for “Beside You” and “Madame George,” two Astral Weeks songs that he wouldn’t play on in New York. The crowd listens intently to each extended outro, waits a second after it’s over before erupting into applause. Of the eight songs, three will make it onto Astral Weeks, four if you count “Train” (here identified as “Stop That Train”). The rest includes tunes from his Bang tenure and Them’s “One Two Brown Eyes” for good measure. All of it comes alive underground, the loose arrangements erasing the clutter of the earlier recorded versions.

  Kielbania and Payne haven’t heard the music from the Catacombs since performing it fifty years ago, so I pay them each a visit. Payne marvels at how confident his playing is for someone who had heard the repertoire for the first time three nights earlier. During a few numbers, Morrison leaves wide-open spaces for him to solo, and on “T.B. Sheets,” he sounds like a Coltrane fanatic crashing a hootenanny. For Kielbania, who didn’t play a single note on Astral Weeks, this tape is precious proof of his work with Van Morrison. The version of “Brown Eyed Girl,” at once pared down and richer, might be the real revelation—the missing link between Van’s pop song past and what would unfold on Astral Weeks. As we listen to the Catacombs version, Kielbania grins. “This is the way the song should have always been!”

  Kielbania takes in the sublime blueprint of “Madame George,” noting that although only a few months elapsed between his first meeting with Van and the time the album was recorded, “this is how Astral Weeks started.” Over the song’s three chords, Morrison repeats a phrase that won’t make it to the album: “in your own magic way.”

  In its own magic way, the bootleg brings me back to a time before I was born, plunges me fully into a dream of Boston that I’d immersed myself in through interviews and ephemera, fifty years after the fact. Every note feels familiar but fresh, so that in places the legend of the album—Astral Weeks—falls away. I’m Eric Kraft or Peter Wolf or Janet Planet, listening in a state of pure awe. The Catacombs are alive.

  Then the music begins to warble, the telltale sign of a reel running out of tape. Before I realize I won’t be hearing the rest of this transcendent version of “Madame George,” the end comes violently, the music ripped away with a heartbreaking zzzzzp. I won’t be hearing the end of this plotline. Back to reality.

  * * *

  • • •

  IN MARCH 1978, Mel Lyman gave his first interviews to reporters since 1971—with a telepathic twist. “In came a young woman with long brown hair, held back from her face by a gold headband,” the Boston Herald American reported. “Her blue dress was gossamer and a star was at her throat. She knelt on the carpet before a rainbow colored ouija board which rested on a white pedestal. The ouija board was to be my hotline to Mel Lyman, and the gossamer-gowned lady in blue was to be my interpreter.” The sentences could have appeared nearly verbatim in the Boston spiritualist paper Banner of Light a century earlier. As the medium channeled Lyman into the room, Jessie Benton whispered a suggestion in the reporter’s ear: “These answers you should probably write down.” The medium opened her eyes and said, “Melvin is here.” Why, the reporter asked, after spending so long promising to change the world and expanding his community, had Mel vanished? The planchette glided across the board: “I have found—that I can actually—have a greater—effect—on this planet from—an anonymous position.”

  Mel Lyman himself was nowhere to be found.

  Since 1968, the Fort Hill Community had weathered a lot. In the wake of the Avatar obscenity trial, curiosity about the Fort Hill Community grew; word began to escape out of the Commonwealth and into distant underground newspapers and magazines like Time and National Review. “‘AVATAR IS MEL’ BUT IS BOSTON HELL?” the Berkeley Barb wondered. Esquire dispatched Diane Arbus to Roxbury; her photograph of Lyman, for a story entitled “God Is Back—He Says So Himself,” shows an androgynous man with a piercing gaze: Mel as Egon Schiele portrait.

  Lyman and Jim Kweskin led a group down to the ’69 Newport Folk Festival, ready to unleash their “argue with the audience” routine. As Kweskin determined whether the crowd really deserved to hear Lyman perform, the guru waited in the wings for his cue. “The audience didn’t go for this and started loudly demanding entertainment, especially some of the familiar Kweskin Jug Band songs,” Michael Kindman recalled. “As the mood got worse and worse, into the breach unexpectedly came Joan Baez, no fan of Mel Lyman, suddenly assuming the role of peacemaker by singing an a capella version of ‘Amazing Grace’ to calm the audience down and give them some of what they wanted.” It strangely mirrored the festival of fou
r years prior, when Lyman had consoled listeners after Dylan’s earsplitting set—electricity now replaced by confrontation. Kweskin and the others stormed off, climbed into their cars, and returned to Fort Hill. Later that night at Newport, Van Morrison performed a duo set that included “Madame George.”

  A month later, actress Sharon Tate and four others were murdered in director Roman Polanski’s home in Los Angeles. The horrific crime was part of a series of gruesome murders that would turn out to be perpetrated by a different LSD-ingesting cult, this one led by a struggling songwriter named Charles Manson. Don West, the CBS employee who tried to turn the Lyman commune into The Real World television show, was with Family member George Peper when news of the killings broke. According to West, Peper said that his Fort Hill comrades considered Manson to be the Antichrist—which was proof that Lyman was indeed God. The stage was now set: God and the Devil were on Earth, and the grand battle between good and evil could commence.

  But there was an element of recognition as well. Faith Gude’s mother, novelist Kay Boyle, reported that photos of Manson began to appear on the walls of various houses on Fort Hill; Faith explained to her that the Mansons had made “a gesture against all the things we do not believe in.” The New York Times quoted one FHC member as saying, “This cat might go out and kill people and Melvin does good, but it’s the same spirit.” Incredibly, Manson sent Mel Lyman a letter from prison, promising his allegiance and requesting that they break him free. The messiah of Roxbury later called the letter “sad.” But one of Manson’s followers claimed that there was a plan set in place involving landing a helicopter on the roof of the courthouse during the trial. (“They’re well organized,” she told Paul Krassner, editor of The Realist.)