Astral Weeks

by Ryan H. Walsh

  I follow several false leads, including a Cambridge folksinger who tells me he attended Lyman’s funeral just fifteen years ago, in the early aughts. The bombshell is defused before the end of the call, as the conversation suggests he’s experiencing some form of dementia. Then, one day, someone with a connection to the community—a reliable source—agrees to talk.

  Why the secrecy surrounding Mel’s death?

  “Because it’s illegal, what happened.”

  What happened?

  “He committed suicide.”

  In California, where the act took place, suicide is not illegal. But advising or assisting a suicide is. It’s unclear if the Family assisted in any way, but Lyman informed Fort Hill’s inner circle that it was going to happen. After fighting a long illness, Mel had decided to stop battling his own body. “It was a weird way to do it, but it was his way,” the person says. The rampant rumors were entirely false; Lyman did not take on a new identity and head to Europe. According to the source, he purposefully overdosed on drugs in Los Angeles, California, sometime in 1978. What was done with his remains is unclear. His final writings, shown to David Cay Johnston in 1985, can be taken at face value:

  “I know I’m done and I’ll stop keeping that body alive. . . . It really is a lot of dead weight and I don’t feel it’s got much more use, do you know what I’m saying, I was Emerson, I was Lincoln, I was Woody Guthrie and many more but only for short periods of time and I used those instruments because they were ready for me and I used Mel Lyman in the same way and I am nobody, I just am. Don’t be sad, I’ll be Mel Lyman as long as I can and in fact I may bring him back with a bang and light him up like a neon bulb and if I don’t it’s because it wasn’t and if I do we will have a real Melvin Christ on our hands. . . .”

  Because only certain information about what happened was distributed to various tiers of the Family’s members and children, and due to the passing of a man who had spiritually united them—or controlled them—for over a decade, it was a deeply traumatic event for the Fort Hill Community. Several members simply could not accept that he was gone.

  “That’s when Jessie took over,” one tells me.

  I think back to Jessie Benton’s childhood daydream, the one where she’s secretly Persephone, the beautiful queen of the underworld. The last time Ray Riepen saw Benton, in a Kansas City bar, over a decade ago, their conversation was abruptly curtailed by several men behaving unusually territorially; “thugs,” he describes them. Riepen then wonders aloud about how much of Benton’s leadership style might have been gleaned from her late husband.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE FORT HILL COMMUNITY thrived on conflict. There was nothing holier than those moments when members “got real,” confronting one another with difficult truths. Sometimes this resulted in fistfights on the stage of Club 47, or the destruction of a magic theater they had spent years building, or holding someone in solitary confinement inside the Vault. “Their unspoken law is that you must struggle with the other person,” a psychologist friend of the community once said. Among ex-members, this is the reason most often cited for leaving. “Their lifestyle forces them to constantly examine and reveal themselves, and it is not easy to live when you are constantly personally exposed,” Wayne Hansen explained after his departure.

  It all sounds unimaginably intense and exhausting. Yet they remain, for the most part, together. There are few examples of communal living societies founded in the sixties that still exist to this day, and certainly none that were so notorious during their heyday. In their own strange way, the Fort Hill Community are survivors. As Jim Kweskin tells me, “We were and still are a beautiful family.”

  From the outside, though, it seems that what they have survived is themselves.

  In 1975, for reasons unknown, the Fort Hill Community reset their calendar year to 00. Up on Fort Ave. Terrace today, in the year 43, the imposing wall, the houses in the shadow of the tower, the archive of Avatars in the basement, and the Family inside all remain, still, unlikely as it may be, together.

  * * *

  • • •

  ON CHRISTMAS EVE 1968, three astronauts inside Apollo 8 became the first human beings to orbit the moon, glimpse its mysterious dark side with their own eyes, and view Earth as a whole planet. Right before snapping the famous photograph that would become known as “Earthrise,” backup Command Module pilot William Anders exclaimed, “Oh my God! Look at that picture over there! There’s the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty.” NASA informed the crew that its television broadcast on December 24 would garner “the largest audience that had ever listened to a human voice.” They received no guidance on what their message should contain, so the astronauts chose a passage from the book of Genesis. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” William Anders read. “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.” On Christmas Day, upon successfully exiting their lunar orbit, Command Module pilot Jim Lovell told mission control, “Please be informed there is a Santa Claus.” The spacecraft reentered the Earth’s atmosphere on December 27, safely landing in the Pacific Ocean.

  The mission had lasted six days, three hours, and forty-eight minutes. Call it an astral week.

  (l to r) Jeff Barry, Bert Berns, Van Morrison, Carmine “Wassel” DeNoia (with cigar), and Janet Planet at a Bang Records promotional party held on a boat on the Hudson River in New York City, 1967.

  Berklee student Tom Kielbania on bass at Spring Sing on Boston Common, April 20, 1968. Kielbania was a member of every one of Van Morrison’s various lineups while the singer was living in Boston.

  TV host David Silver asks Mel Lyman, “Do you think 1968 is a holy year?” Lyman replies in the affirmative. Between them, a star sculpture created by John Kostick.

  Cover image of Avatar issue 23, April 12, 1968: a protest on Boston Common with the city’s skyline in the distance.

  Avatar’s premier issue placed Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had died eighty-five years prior, on the front cover. Other cover stars included Timothy Leary and a depiction of the Statue of Liberty distributing copies of Avatar in the wake of the paper’s ban. All illustrations by Eben Given.

  A full-page ad printed in Avatar for Murray Lerner’s Festival—a 1967 documentary about the Newport Folk Festival. Top to bottom: Mel Lyman, Donovan, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez.

  “They look like Jim Kweskin and Mel Lyman, and they are. But they are also members of United Illuminating.” (l to r) Mel Lyman and Jim Kweskin on the cover of Broadside of Boston, August 1966.

  “There was a feeling in the air, you felt you were a part of something. That has disappeared. That does not exist anymore.” Jessie Benton Lyman as seen in the pages of Avatar in 1968, when the feeling was in the air.

  “This insistence on perfection and beauty is evident throughout the Fort Hill houses . . . Mel’s apartment, particularly, is beautifully appointed.” The Boston Globe explores and maps the Fort Hill Community, February 1, 1970.

  Beacon Street Union. (l to r, back to front) John Lincoln Wright, Dick Weisberg, Wayne Ulaky, Bob Rhodes, Paul Tartachny.

  “I constantly felt like I was in a dream,” David Silver remarks about his unlikely journey from a visiting instructor at Tufts University to WGBH TV show host.

  MGM Records passed along only a few specific requirements to designer John Sposato: Make it “psychedelic,” include references to the Revolutionary War, and evoke the city of Boston. This centerfold Billboard advertisement arrived on January 20, 1968.

  “Remember the Boston Sound?” Chevy Chase once asked a reporter. “Really heavy on violins.” Chamaeleon Church in their rehearsal loft. (l to r, back to front) Ted Myers, Tony Schueren, Chevy Chase, Kyle Garrahan.

  Orpheus in 1968. (l to r) Eric Gulliksen, Jack McKenes, Harry Sandler, Bruce Arnold. For Arnold, the only downside to the band’s late- sixties fame in New England was the way locals pronounced the b
and name: “Ahhh-fee us.”

  Original poster for the Van Morrison Controversy’s appearance at the Catacombs, August 9–10, 1968. At this subterranean club, Morrison first performed in the style that would define Astral Weeks.

  Unlikely movie stars and members of the Fort Hill Community: Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin grace the cover of Rolling Stone in March 1970. “The whole movie embarrassed me,” Halprin remarked about Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point.

  Spring Sing on Boston Common, April 20, 1968. At left, Emerson College student and Carole King collaborator Rick Philp on guitar. At right, Van Morrison, clad in a striped suit, smiling and confident.

  Photographer Michael Dobo was assigned to work with writer David Felton for his Rolling Stone story about Mel Lyman and the Fort Hill Community in Roxbury. Dobo snapped this picture of two Community members in front of the Highland Park tower as the sun set.

  Part one of David Felton’s “Lyman Family’s Holy Siege of America” was published as the cover story for Rolling Stone issue 98 on December 23, 1971.

  “I don’t believe in Jesus, I don’t believe in the bible, and I don’t believe in Mel Lyman.” Charles Giuliano on his former roommate’s turn toward the messianic.

  “We were out on the hilltop in the middle of the night, running around the tower at top speed, flying above the ground, it seemed.” Michael Kindman’s memoir of his time with the Fort Hill Community is one of the most in-depth accounts of what life was like under the leadership of Mel Lyman in the late sixties.

  The Velvet Underground in Cambridge, 1969. (l to r) Doug Yule, Moe Tucker, Lou Reed, Sterling Morrison. The band performed at the Boston Tea Party forty-three times between 1967 and 1970, citing it as their “favorite place to play in the whole country.”

  Parker Memorial Hall was built in 1870 as a tribute to the Reverend Theodore Parker, who had once predicted that Spiritualism would become “the religion of America.” Nearly a century later, this popular spot for Spiritualist lectures and séances housed both the Boston Tea Party and the Fort Hill Community’s Film-Makers’ Cinematheque.

  The Velvet Underground creating what The Boston Globe would later describe as their “headache-making and ear splitting” music live at the Unicorn Coffee House at 825 Boylston Street. Lou Reed on guitar, Maureen “Moe” Tucker on drums.

  The Boston Planchette: one of the calling cards of the city’s nineteenth-century reputation as “the Mecca of the spiritualistic faith.” The device was designed to transcribe messages from the afterlife; the Ouija board later came with its own variation of the planchette.

  Published in 1968, Russell H. Greenan’s debut novel tells the story of a talented painter from Boston who seeks to meet and confront God via an occult ritual.

  Peter Wolf and Van Morrison, friends for life, backstage at a May 1972 Morrison concert at the Aquarius Theater in Boston.

  The distinctive neon sign for Ace Recording Studios located at 1 Boylston Place.

  Astral Weeks producer Lewis Merenstein had worked at Herbert and Milton Yakus’s studio several times prior to auditioning Van Morrison there in 1968.

  A young Bostonian runs into the street during the middle of a citywide spontaneous celebration triggered by Lyndon Johnson’s March 31, 1968, announcement that he would not seek reelection.

  AWOL serviceman Raymond Kroll is forcefully removed from Marsh Chapel at Boston University by FBI agents, October 1, 1968.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Marissa Nadler—my wife—who put on Astral Weeks at the end of our first date and, later, told me I should get a nice writing desk. She deserves all the love that loves to love coming her way.

  Thank you to Carly Carioli, who listened to my pitch for a story about Astral Weeks’s Boston connections at a party on Beacon Street, greenlighting the piece for Boston Magazine shortly thereafter. Thank you to S.I. Rosenbaum, who edited the original story and informed me that it was merely an update of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Thank you to David Bieber and the David Bieber Archives for the resources, the guidance, and the astute suggestion that I bring pastries for one interview in particular.

  Thank you to Ed Park, my editor at Penguin Press, who reached out after reading the original article with an idea for how it could expand into a full-length book. Without his curiosity, patience, expertise, and enthusiasm, this book could not exist.

  My sincere gratitude to PJ Mark, whose assistance throughout was invaluable.

  Thank you to everyone at Penguin Press, especially Annie Badman, Karen Mayer, Emily Cunningham, Colleen Boyle, Matt Boyd, Caitlin O’Shaughnessy, Ben Denzer, Scott Moyers, and Ann Godoff.

  Thank you to my family for their lifetime of support: Mark and Ramona Walsh, my parents; Gig, Stacy, and Willy Walsh, my siblings. Thank you to Rich, Pam, and Stuart Nadler and Shamis Beckley for your persistent encouragement.

  Thank you to my oldest friends, who have always encouraged my creative endeavors and helped in countless personal ways during this entire process: Shannon Kelly Rogers, Brendan Bragg, Andrew Pierce, Jeffrey Prohaska, Julia Papps, John Benda, and Anthony Puopolo.

  My dear friend and first reader, Neal Block, whose truthful feedback has kept me creatively honest since 1999.

  Hallelujah The Hills, my American rock band, who patiently helped me balance priorities during this process and continually reminded me why stories about the creation of music are so worthwhile: Ryan Connelly, Joseph Marrett, Brian Rutlege, and Nicholas Giadone Ward. Thank you to the band’s biographer, M. Jonathan Lee, for traveling across the Atlantic Ocean with a hall of mirrors in tow just as the process of writing this book began.

  Thank you to Joyce Linehan at the mayor of Boston’s office for the access and connections made possible during research.

  Thank you to all my colleagues at ArtsEmerson, whose patience and support was so touching and meaningful. A big shout-out to my student employees, who helped me with research and interview transcriptions, especially Alicia Bettano. Also thank you to Kelly Downes, Katelyn Guerin, Camila Cornejo, and Francine Mroczek.

  Thanks to Jesse Jarnow and Sean Maloney for all of the highly specific research assistance and brainstorming.

  Thank you:

  The Allan MacDougall Popular Culture Archive at UMass, Boston, Selene Angier, Jami Attenberg, Alex Beam, Peter Bebergal, Ami Bennitt, David Berman, Gary Burns, Elizabeth Butters, Jacqueline Castel, William Corbett, Marta Crilly at the City of Boston Archives, John Darnielle, Tyler Derryberry, Andre Diehl, Dave Drago, Christen Dute, Matt Dwyer, Perry Eaton, Craig Finn, Ryan Foley, Josh Frank, Simon Gee, Fred Goodman, The Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Althea Greenan, Joe Hagan, Courtney Brooke Hall, Peter Higgins and everyone at WGBH, Mitch Horowitz, Rob Johanson, Gary Lambert, Jon Langmead, Ivan Lipton, Paul Lovell and his website punkblowfish.com, Colleen Matthews, Jonathan Miller, Rob Orchard, Matt Parish, Aaron Perrino, James Reed, Rachel Rubin, Leeore Schnairsohn, Christopher Schwaber, Evan Sicuranza, Kendall Smith, Paul Solman, Patrick Stickles, Happy Traum, Steve Trussel and his website http://www.trussel.com/f_mel.htm, Richie Unterberger, Pamela Vadakan, Chris Vogel, Tyler Wilcox.

  INTERVIEWS

  Willie “Loco” Alexander, Bruce Arnold, Paul Arnoldi, Brooks Arthur, David Atwood, Fred Barzyk, Joseph W. Bebo, June Benson, Jessie Benton, Jay Berliner, David Bieber, Mitch Blake, Scott Bradner, Paul Brinkley-Rogers, Karyl Lee Britt, Ken Brown, Alison Burke, Steve Cataldo, Dick Cluster, Lawrence Cohn, William Corbett, Richard Davis, Sally Dennison, Carmine “Wassel” DeNoia, Michael Dobo, Walter Romanus Donati, Dennis Dreher, Boyd Estus, David Felton, John Flaxman, Barney Frank, Kyle Garrahan, Charles Giuliano, Michael Goldman, Richard Goldstein, Russell H. Greenan, Fred Griffeth, Eric Gulliksen, Wayne Hansen, Aram Heller, Priscilla Hendrick, Jim Horn, Dick Iacovello, David Jenks, Myles David Jewell, Norman Jewison, David Cay Johnston, Peter Kaye, Brian Kelly, Susan Kelly, Tim Kelly, Elayne Kessler, Tom Kielbania, David Kinsman, Sydney D. Kirkpatr
ick, Dr. Stanley Klein, Jesse Kornbluth, Eric Kraft, Wayne Kramer, Jim Kweskin, Jef Labes, Jon Landau, Don Law, Erik Lindgren, David Linksy, Ivan Lipton, Greil Marcus, Jonas Mekas, Lewis Merenstein, Ralph Metzner, Paul Mills, Phil Milstein, Ed Morneau, Victor “Moulty” Moulton, Ray Mungo, Ted Myers, Holly Nadler, Buell Neidlinger, Steve Nelson, Rob Norris, Bob Olive, David Palmer, Ray Paret, John Payne, George Peper, Stephen G. Philp, John Platania, Betsy Polatin, Verandah Porche, Walter Powers, Paula Press, Arnie Reisman, Jonathan Richman, Ray Riepen, Joe Rogers, Fred Roos, Robert Rosenblatt, Peter Rowan, Dick Russell, Harry Sandler, Joel Selvin, John Sheldon, Rick Shlosser, David Silver, Harvey Silverglate, Peter Simon, Joe Smith, Warren Smith Jr., Robert Somma, John Sposato, Dick Summer, Barry Tashian, Karen Thorne, Collin Tilton, Alan Trustman, Chuck Turner, Beverly Walker, Peter Walker, Jackie Washington, Dr. Andrew Weil, Dr. Gunther Weil, Dick Weisberg, Kathy West, Dave Wilson, Peter Wolf, Steve Woolard, Herbert Yakus, Shelly Yakus, Bob Zachary, Karen Lee Ziner.