The Guardian:
Is this the best album ever made?
On its release in 1968 Van Morrison's second album, Astral Weeks, baffled both the public and his record company. Now, 40 years later, it's regarded as unique - a mystical, dream-like blend of spontaneous blues, jazz and folk. And Van himself is finally ready to play it live...
Sean O'Hagan
In the early Sixties the young George Ivan Morrison briefly played saxophone in a Belfast showband called the Olympics. Once, before a gig in Derry, the band's minibus pulled up outside his house on Hyndford Street, east Belfast and lead singer Alfie Walsh knocked on the door. Van's mother, Violet, answered, and after a few seconds of banter Walsh returned to the minibus alone. 'Yer man can't play,' he told the other band members. 'His ma says he's not coming out... He's upstairs in his room writing poetry.'
Though this anecdote may have grown in the telling, it illustrates the adolescent Van Morrison's otherness. A working-class boy from a Protestant neighbourhood, he had left Orangefield school with no academic credentials, and seems to have been an aloof-to-the-point-of-arrogant teenager; an only child who never quite shed his sense of aloneness. Years later, when his Belfast peers recalled the young Morrison, they stressed his solitary nature as well as his eccentricity. 'Van was his own master,' his boyhood friend George Jones told biographer Johnny Rogan. 'People didn't understand him.' Another friend, Billy McAllen, remembered him as being 'a bit strange, a bit weird'.
Fast forward to 25 September 1968. Morrison, 23, and already in retreat from pop stardom, stands in the centre of Century Sound Studios in midtown Manhattan. In the past few years he had tasted fame as lead singer of Them (dubbed 'Belfast's answer to the Rolling Stones' in the music press), singing on two hit singles, 'Here Comes the Night' and the proto-punk 'Gloria'. His first solo album - released in 1967, and entitled, in the spirit of the time, Blowin' Your Mind - had yielded another hit, the buoyant 'Brown-Eyed Girl'. Now, though, newly signed to Warner Brothers, he was intent on reinvention .
Strumming gently on an acoustic guitar, he begins to sing the first of several strange, stark songs he has been recently performing in small venues on the east coast to general disinterest. Around him, listening intently, are gathered three jazz musicians of the highest calibre: bassist Richard Davis, who had played with the likes of Miles Davis and Sarah Vaughan, guitarist Jay Berliner, best known for his work with Charles Mingus, and drummer Connie Kay, a member of the esteemed Modern Jazz Quartet. They had been assembled, alongside arranger Larry Fallon, by producer Lewis Merenstein, who on first hearing the songs had immediately sensed that they would not work in a rock setting.
If the young Van Morrison felt awed in such exalted company, he did not show it. In fact, he betrayed little emotion at all, and throughout the session, spoke only to the technicians. 'There wasn't much communication,' recalls Richard Davis, who now teaches music at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 'As far as I can recall, I don't think I exchanged one word with the guy. We just listened to his songs one time, and then we started playing.'
Brooks Arthur was the sound engineer on that same session, though, inexplicably, his name would be left off the subsequent album credits. When he talks about it today, 40 years later, regret soon turns to excitement in his voice. 'From the moment Van hit the first note I knew we were involved in something special,' he recalls. 'You have to understand, everything was live. There were no music charts. He ran it down once for the players and went into the vocal booth. Then we got the sound levels right and I hit the red light and he started singing.'
That first working day comprised two three-and-a-half-hour studio sessions, during which three extended songs were recorded. 'There wasn't too much stopping and starting,' says Arthur. 'Van took off and the musicians went with him. They were serious players, they didn't have to think about it, they just did it instinctively, and it caught fire. We were working at the speed of sound. I tell you, we were breathing rarefied air in there.'
On 15 October the musicians and sound men reconvened. In another two short sessions, according to Merenstein, they produced 'six or seven songs, two of which just didn't fit the mood of the album'. Larry Fallon then spent another day overdubbing strings and horns on certain tracks. Throughout Morrison remained uncommunicative, self-absorbed. 'People told me later that he was shy,' says Davis, 'but to me he seemed aloof, maybe a bit moody. He was caught up in his own thing. He communicated through his singing.'
It still seems scarcely credible that, under such strained conditions, an album was created that has since come to be regarded as perhaps the greatest work of art to emerge out of the pop tradition. Released in November 1968, Astral Weeks is a work of such singular beauty, such sustained emotional intensity, that nothing recorded before or since sounds even remotely similar - or, indeed, comparable. Elvis Costello would later describe it as 'still the most adventurous record made in the rock medium', adding that 'there hasn't been a record with that amount of daring made since'. When I spoke to Nick Cave about it a few years ago, he spoke enviously of 'its power to mesmerise and disturb', and wondered 'at the sheer nerve of this young guy to attempt something so obsessive and uncompromising, and then actually pull it off'.
Initially, though, Astral Weeks was greeted by both the critics and the public with utter bemusement. The NME compared Morrison's extraordinary voice to the mannered Latin stylings of José Feliciano. Initial sales were disappointing and it received little support from Warner Brothers. 'They just didn't know what to do with it so they did nothing,' says Merenstein, scathingly. 'They were expecting "Brown Eyed Girl", and the first thing I played them was a seven-minute song about rebirth with no electric guitars and an acoustic bass. They just shook their heads.'
Since then though Astral Weeks has gone from a cult album to an acknowledged classic and has been celebrated, alongside the likes of Dylan's Blonde on Blonde and the Beatles' Sgt Pepper's, in countless best albums of all-time lists. It was voted No 2 in a Mojo magazine critics' poll of 1995 and at No 19 in Rolling Stone's selection of the 500 Greatest Albums Ever Made in 2003. More surprisingly, it was also voted ninth greatest album of all time in the more populist Music of the Millennium poll conducted by Channel 4, the Guardian, HMV and Classic FM in 1997.
Now comes the news that the ever-contrary Morrison, having continually shrugged off Astral Weeks' legendary status in interviews over the years, will be performing the album in its entirety at two shows at the Hollywood Bowl on November 7-8. The concerts are an intriguing prospect but it turns out that I am not alone in wondering at the wisdom of such a risky undertaking. 'How does that old Buddhist saying go?' says Merenstein. 'Something like, "You can't bathe in the same river twice." I hear he is going to record the concerts for a live album, too. Man, I have mixed feelings about that. Part of me thinks, just leave it alone. It's a moment in time that has become timeless. It's just too unique, too magical to try and recreate.'
Astral Weeks is that rare thing in pop music, an album that lives up to its own legend. Its singularity lies, as Costello points out, in its vaulting ambition. It is neither folk nor jazz nor blues, though there are traces of all three in the music and in Morrison's raw and emotionally charged singing. There are no solos save for the ethereal flute and soprano saxophone improvisations that are woven through the last, and shortest, song, 'Slim Slow Slider', the album's elegaic coda. Throughout, there are interludes of breathtaking beauty when the music surges and subsides, rises and falls, around Morrison's voice.
And it is that voice, by turns flinty and tender, beseeching and plaintive, that is the most extraordinary instrument of all. It is the sound of someone singing to himself, utterly immersed in the words that are pouring out of his mouth. This is that adolescent aloofness transmuted into a kind of enraptured self-assurance. 'His voice has so much integrity and conviction,' says the singer Beth Orton. 'It's as if he has sung the whole album into being just by his conviction, his absolute self-belief.'
At times Morrison seems overwhelmed by the intensity of the feelings he is attempting to express. 'His voice is a thing of quite extreme beauty,' says the psychologist and author Adam Phillips, a longtime fan of the album. 'What is extraordinary is the emotional atmosphere he creates in the songs and the sense that he is not even remotely concerned about communicating with an audience or a listener. He's just singing out his songs, and we are, in a sense, listening in.'
It has long been my contention that Astral Weeks is an album rooted in adolescence; its confusions and frustrations, its often volcanic emotional turbulence. On 'Cyprus Avenue' he is 'caught' and 'captured' by adolescent sexual desire, and 'conquered in a car seat'. On 'Beside You', the most dense and tortured song on the album, he sounds traumatised - though by what one never knows.
'On Astral Weeks I think he is haunted by something,' says Phillips, 'and I am not even sure he knows what it is. He sounds confounded, literally confounded. I don't think he has a clue what this music is about, other than it comes from somewhere deep inside him. As a psychologist, one often encounters people who harbour these sort of confused feelings but what you don't very often encounter is someone who has found a form for them. That is what is startling here, and almost unique in the medium of popular music.'
For all that, there is a mood of exultancy and, in places, abandonment, on Astral Weeks: words break down or are repeated until they lose their literal meaning and become mantras of desire and loss. 'I always think Astral Weeks sounds somehow victorious,' says Beth Orton. 'It's as if he has won a great victory but lost so much too. He sounds altered.'
There are few moments in popular music as affecting as the repeated refrain on 'Madame George' of the line, 'dry your eye, your eye, your eye...' as the strings swell around his voice then fall away, leaving just his acoustic strumming and Davis's wonderfully insistent bass pulse. It is the sound of someone trying to retrieve the irretrievable: lost youth, lost innocence, lost love; and at the same time realising the impossibility of ever experiencing those heightened moments again.
Astral Weeks is also a long goodbye, both to his younger self and to the city of his youth, a prelapsarian Belfast untouched by bomb or bullet. It was recorded just as the Troubles began, and remains, alongside Derek Mahon's poetry and Gerald Dawe's memoir, My Mother-City, one of the most tender... evocations of a straight-laced and hard-edged city, whose more progressive youth were embracing the creeping bohemianism of the times. On his brief return to Belfast after Them split, Morrison hung out for a time with an arty student crowd, but he was an outsider there too.
The two songs on Astral Weeks that are most infused with a sense of place - 'Cyprus Avenue' and 'Madame George' - are also undercut with the deepest sense of melancholy and longing. 'What he is tapping into on those songs is a collective experience,' says Dawe, a Belfast-born poet who knew the young Van Morrison. 'It's about describing the familiar in extraordinary detail, even as you are leaving that familiarity behind once and for all. Van grew up in an intense, tight-knit community, and knew early on that he did not fit into that community, that he was, as artists often are, an outsider. That feeling was really brought home to him when he returned to Belfast after his brief pop stardom. He didn't fit, and knew he would have to leave again, this time for good. All those complex emotions echo through Astral Weeks. That's why it resonates so deeply with people from home, many of whom have left there with the same anxieties of belonging.'
Astral Weeks may be the moment when Van Morrison accepts that he can never truly go home again. 'Ain't nothing but a stranger in this world,' he sings towards the end of the title track, echoing the gospel hymns of his youth. 'I got a home on high...'
When I interviewed Morrison back in 1987 he did not want to talk about Astral Weeks at all. We met in the Chelsea Arts Club. He arrived very late and for the first hour was tight-lipped and combative. It was only when we moved off the subject of his music that he began to open up. 'Basically, Irish writers, and I include myself here, are writing about the same things,' he mused at one point. 'Often it's about when things felt better. Either that, or sadness... It's the story about going back and rediscovering that going back answers the question, or going back and discovering it doesn't answer the question. Going away and coming back, those are the themes of all Irish writing.'
In a way, Van Morrison has grappled with those same themes ever since. For a long time his albums were about the great quest for home, the search for a place to belong, be that a tradition or a belief system or an actual landscape. In his songs he has drawn on Romanticism and esoteric theosophy, and evoked the names of John Donne and WB Yeats, TS Eliot and Seamus Heaney. On Astral Weeks, though, there is no questing. He is simply there, transported by his words and his voicing of them. No one in popular music, including Van Morrison himself, has since come close to that exalted place.
How Van the man found his voice
Born George Ivan Morrison on 31 August 1945 at 125 Hyndford Street, Belfast, Northern Ireland.
Courtesy of his father George's extensive jazz and blues record collection, he grows up listening to the likes of Ray Charles, Leadbelly and Mahalia Jackson.
1958 Joins the Sputniks as a saxophone player. Later groups he plays in include Deanie Sands & the Javelins, the Olympics and the Monarchs.
1964 Forms Them, and the group begin a residency in the Maritime Hotel in Belfast. Two hit singles follow: 'Baby Please Don't Go'/ 'Gloria' (November 1964) and 'Here Comes the Night' (March 1965).
1968 Astral Weeks, his masterpiece, is released.
1970 Changes direction again and releases Moondance, a soul-jazz classic.
1973 Tours with his finest band, the Caledonian Soul Orchestra, and in 1974 issues one of the great live albums, It's Too Late to Stop Now.
It is followed in October by Veedon Fleece, a record that some critics compare to Astral Weeks.
1980 Releases Common One the first of a series of albums, among them Inarticulate Speech of the Heart (1983) and No Guru, No Method, No Teacher (1986) that explore themes of transcendence and spirituality.
2008 Decides finally to revisit Astral Weeks. He will play the album in its entirety at the Hollywood Bowl this Friday and Saturday.
Sod Sgt Pepper's...
Having just listened to Van Morrison's 'Astral Weeks' over and over again last week while writing about it for the Observer Review, I am more convinced than ever of its unassailable greatness. Nothing in popular music compares with it in terms of its passionate intensity. No one in popular music has sung like that before or since.
The late Spike Milligan, of all people, once described Van Morrison's voice as a mixture of 'menace and abandonment'. You can hear what he means on 'Astral Weeks', but you can also hear joy, angst, celebration, desire and regret. While the lyrics are often impressionistic, the voice is extraordinarily articulate – emotionally articulate. It can shift from the harsh to the tender, the guttural to the gentle often in the space of a single line. All the while, the music ebbs and flows around it, everything sounding heightened and spontaneous. You can hear what Beth Orton is talking about when she says it sounds like a record 'that has been willed into being' by Van Morrison. The voice is all, the words, the music the melodies and rhythms all seem to flow from it.
As much as I love certain other classic albums – 'Revolver', 'Blonde On Blonde', 'The Velvet Underground and Nico', 'Pet Sounds', 'Kind of Blue', 'What's Going On?', 'Five Leaves Left' - I have never listed to them as often, or as closely, as I have to Astral Weeks. It always draws me in.
Oddly, it is a record that did not change the course of pop music the way Sgt Pepper's or Pet Sounds did, nor did it impinge on the collective imagination as soon as it appeared. It has slowly gained an audience over the years. I think that has to do with its difference – you won't hear anything else like it even if you trawl though the rest of Van Morrison's epic body of work. It seems to have arrived out of nowhere, and no one has run with its possibilities ever since.
What else can I tell you? Sometimes I wish I knew who 'Madame George' was, if indeed it was one person in particular. The image of her/him 'playing dominoes in drag' still intrigues; a whole other, hidden Belfast emerges from that line. And why does the landscape shift from Belfast to Ladbroke Grove in the final song? And who is the girl that's dying? Who knows? Who cares? The songs have their own logic, the strange, ever-shifting logic of dreams and heightened recollections.
Here's a quote from the writer and philosopher, George Steiner: 'Music means. It is brimful of meanings that will not translate into logical structures or verbal expressions. In music, form is content, content form…In ways so obvious as to make any statement a tired cliché, yet of an undefineable and tremendous nature, music puts our being as men and women in touch with that which transcends the sayable…' Enough said.
-Sean O'Hagan
The Belfast Cowboy's Finest Hour:
Recorded in New York over two days in 1968, Astral Weeks still sounds like nothing before or since. Unlike other classic albums, Pet Sounds, say, or The Velvet Underground & Nico, it is not a record that has had a huge effect on the evolution of popular music. It is too intimate, too inward-looking for that, and may be the closest a pop record has come to expressing adolescent desire in all its confusions.
Initially conceived as a song cycle by Morrison, who had pitched up in Cambridge, Massachusetts on the run from the pop process that had briefly propelled his Belfast beat group, Them, into the mainstream, Astral Weeks was such a quantum leap from the proto-punk of Them's 'Gloria' and 'Here Comes the Night' that it left many contemporary critics bemused and his core audience baffled. NME originally compared it unfavourably to the songs of José Feliciano.
Morrison had been performing some of the songs for a year or so with a jazz guitar/ flute/bass line-up in small shows on the east coast. In the studio, he somehow conveyed his vision to seasoned jazz session men such as Jay Berliner (guitar), Connie Kay (drums) and Richard Davis (bass). Together, reputedly over two eight-hour sessions - the horns and strings were dubbed later - they created something both new and timeless, a music that was neither folk nor jazz nor blues, but used elements of all three to weave songs that stretch the very notion of 'the song' to the limit. Underneath Morrison's darkly beautiful voice, Richard Davis's bass guitar throbs like a pulse, propelling the songs and the unfolding vision, amplifying the sense of urgency that undercuts most of the album.
At its centre is 'Madame George', a nine-minute odyssey though the streets of Belfast that seems to hinge on an encounter with a transvestite 'playing dominoes in drag'. If the words don't add up, the voice goes places most rock singers can only dream off. Morrison repeats phrases, words, syllables, dismantling language in an attempt to express the unsayable, to transcend the limits of mere words. If his voice never quite loses its flinty Belfast edge, Morrison moves from the tender to the plaintive, often in a single line, and at certain moments - as when he repeats the phrase 'dry your eye' as the strings fall away leaving only acoustic guitar and bass - he seems close to rendering what he would later call the 'inarticulate speech of the heart'.
Suffice to say, no one in pop music, before or since, has sounded so consumed by what they are singing, so destabilised by desire, so 'out there' in their voicing of the desperation and intensity of adolescence. There is joy here, too, though, and on songs such as 'The Way Young Lovers Do' and 'Sweet Thing', you'll believe a white man can sing soul.
Morrison was 22 when he recorded Astral Weeks, but, as the late Lester Bangs noted, 'There are lifetimes behind it.' It is an impressionistic diary of a young man's loss of innocence as well as a heartfelt farewell to Belfast, the city of his birth, a city that was just about to enter a new dark age as Astral Weeks was being recorded. An unconscious elegy then, too, for a prelapsarian Belfast, untouched by bomb or bullet. Ultimately unreadable, utterly singular, it remains one of those rare albums that actually lives up to the extravagant claims made on its behalf, not least because it sits outside 'rock' or 'pop' or whatever generic label you want to throw at it. As close as pop has come to the condition of art.
Burn it: Madame George; Sweet Thing
How it felt for bass player Richard Davis: 'Some people are disillusioned when I tell them about making the record. People say: "He must have talked to you about the record and created the magic feeling ..." To tell you the truth, I don't remember any conversations with him. He kept to himself. He didn't make any suggestions about what to play, how to play, how to stylize what we were doing. We were into what we were doing, and he was into what he was doing, and it coagulated.'
Drummer Connie Kay: 'I asked him what he wanted me to play, and he said to play whatever I felt like playing. We more or less sat there and jammed, that's all.'
-Sean O'Hagan
The 'Masterpiece' that Is Astral Weeks:
When Van Morrison sings, "To never, never wonder why at all," is he commenting on the many of us who are so busy just dealing with life that we never stop to consider our circumstances? Or perhaps don't have the luxury to do so, or to change them or to even consider the possibility of changing them?
That line is from "Beside You," a song that appears on Morrison's 1968 album Astral Weeks, and it is just one example of what makes this album a masterpiece. I tend to use words such as "masterpiece" and "classic" way too casually. Certainly, at the time I use them, I really feel that the music in question is deserving. But time is the great leveler, and only with the passing of time does it become truly clear (sometimes) which albums are the great ones, and which were a passing fancy. Astral Weeks has lifted me up, inspired me, challenged me, made me think about life and just made me feel alive for over 30 years. Every time I hear Morrison sing "To never, never wonder why at all," I can't help but consider my life. Where I've been, where I am right now, and where I'm headed.
Morrison covers a lot of emotional/spiritual/soul-searching ground over the course of Astral Weeks' eight songs. Much of the writing is abstract ("If I ventured in the slipstream/ Between the viaducts of your dreams"). The album is Morrison's version of a coming-of-age novel; it's also a love story. Some of it makes literal sense, some of it just feels right. No matter how many times one listens to Astral Weeks, there's something new to discover: a line, a vocal twist and turn, a musical revelation.
The British writer Barney Hoskyns called Astral Weeks "a unique tour de force of hippie-soul troubadourism that made its maker an icon of musical mysticism...."
"More than anything else," Hoskyns wrote in a 2001 Mojo article, "Astral Weeks is about the power of the human voice — ecstatic agony, agonising ecstacy. Here is an Irish tenor reborn as a White Negro — a Caucasian Soul Man — pleading and beseeching over a bed of dreamy folk-jazz instrumentation: acoustic bass, brushed drums, vibes and acoustic guitar, the odd string quartet — and of course flute."
It was a 1969 review in Rolling Stone by Greil Marcus that first hipped me to this album, that caused me to tune into Van Morrison. In the late '60s I was a teenager with not a whole lot of money, and I had to pick and choose which albums to spend my $3 on (yeah, you could buy a new vinyl album for about $3 back then). So when it was first released, I didn't rush out and buy Astral Weeks, the second solo album from the former leader of Them (perhaps best known for the international hit "Gloria").
I didn't even think I liked Van Morrison. Or, rather, I distinctly didn't like him, based on two songs that I heard way too much of: a nine-plus-minute-long song called "T.B. Sheets" that seemed to be played near-constantly on the underground FM radio stations KMPX and then KSAN during the late '60s, and the title track off Morrison's 1970 album Moondance.
The problem for me was Morrison's voice. I just didn't like it. Why? I have no idea. All I can think is that it's one of those voices that you have to get used to. Maybe it was just too real for a 15-year-old. Whatever.
Marcus' words about Morrison's album — he described Astral Weeks as "a unique and timeless album" — stuck with me, and in the early '70s I eventually picked up a copy. Wow! What a revelation. Here was an album as good in its own way as Bob Dylan's masterpieces, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. Point being, this was simply one of the great albums, a perfect album.
Van Morrison had, until Astral Weeks, made rock and blues recordings with the help of rock musicians. Yes, he had an expressive and distinct voice, but the music of Them (or what I heard on the radio, anyway) in no way prepared me for the leap he'd made with Astral Weeks.
After Them ended, Morrison, an Irishman, had moved to New York City in 1966 and, a year later, recorded his first solo pop hit, "Brown Eyed Girl," which appeared on the very so-so album, Blowin' Your Mind! (which also included "T.B. Sheets"). Morrison disliked that album. He wanted to part ways with its producer, Bert Berns, and Berns' Bang label; Berns was also managing Morrison. Berns died of a heart attack in December 1967; Morrison hired a new manager, who in turn paired him up with Lewis Merenstein, a producer who'd worked with jazz legend Thelonious Monk. Morrison was signed to a new label, Warner Bros., that was willing to let him make whatever kind of album he wanted (Warner's had also signed up Jimi Hendrix and the Grateful Dead — they needed hip young artists and were willing to give them an unprecedented degree of artistic freedom).
Merenstein assembled a group of jazz musicians to record the album that he would title Astral Weeks. Jazz musicians? The pairing of a rock 'n' roll singer with jazz cats was really something new. The session band that Morrison worked with was exceptional. It included guitarist Jay Berliner (who had played on a number of Charles Mingus albums, including the amazing Black Saint and the Sinner Lady), percussionist/vibraphonist Warren Smith, Jr. (who had played with Mingus and would do sessions with everyone from Aretha Franklin and Tony Williams to Sam Rivers and Joe Zawinul), drummer Connie Kay (of the Modern Jazz Quartet), acoustic bassist Richard Davis (he'd recorded with Eric Dolphy, Billie Holiday and numerous others) and the talented saxophonist/ flautist John Payne (the only one without Grade A credits). A string section, conducted by Larry Fallon, was used to flesh out some of the songs.
"I'd never played with a musician of his calibre before," Payne told Hoskyns. "Here was a guy whose sense of rhythm and phrasing went very, very deep. I'd never had that feeling from a singer before. He was a big jazz listener his whole life, and that had a lot to do with his phrasing, which was unbelievably good and varied. It took me years to realise how much he'd taught me."
The album was recorded in two or three days — on September 25 and October 15 (there was a third day, but apparently nothing usable came from it) — at Brooks Arthur's Century Sound studio on West 52nd Street in New York, like a jazz session. The musicians created an ethereal mood music that brought out the artist/poet in Morrison. Astral Weeks is a work of art; it has the sound of a semi-improvised art piece. Rock music (is this rock music?) had never sounded like this before. (Marcus once wrote that Richard Davis "provided the finest bass playing ever to appear on a rock & roll record.")
The resulting music is neither rock nor jazz. It's a strange hybrid that exists on its own terms. The album concludes with the beautifully downbeat "Slim Slow Slider," with its sneering putdown of a former lover: "I saw you early this morning/ With your brand new boy and your Cadillac/ You're gone for something/ And I know you won't be back/ I know you're dying baby/ And I know you know it too."
Is the story that Astral Weeks tells a tragedy then? Yes and no. Sure, if "Slim Slow Slider" is the end, then the end is not just death, but what I would call "soul death." From the perspective of the character — the poet — that Morrison plays as he sings "Slim Slow Slider" to the girl who broke his heart, she has left him (betrayed him?) for someone brand new, a "boy," and for money, a glamorous lifestyle (certainly that's what the Cadillac represents).
Yet because one is, almost literally, forced to listen again and again to Astral Weeks, it's as if "Slim Slow Slider" leads right back into the title track, which is the album's opener, and so, again, we return to the beginning and to those wondrous lines, "If I ventured in the slipstream/ Between the viaducts of your dreams."
-Michael Goldberg
Lester Bangs On Astral Weeks:
Van Morrison's Astral Weeks was released ten years, almost to the day, before this was written. It was particularly important to me because the fall of 1968 was such a terrible time: I was a physical and mental wreck, nerves shredded and ghosts and spiders looming and squatting across the mind. My social contacts had dwindled to almost none; the presence of other people made me nervous and paranoid. I spent endless days and nights sunk in an armchair in my bedroom, reading magazines, watching TV, listening to records, staring into space. I had no idea how to improve the situation and probably wouldn't have done anything about it if I had.
Astral Weeks would be the subject of this piece - i.e., the rock record with the most significance in my life so far - no matter how I'd been feeling when it came out. But in the condition I was in, it assumed at the time the quality of a beacon, a light on the far shores of the murk; what's more, it was proof that there was something left to express artistically besides nihilism and destruction. (My other big record of the day was White Light/White Heat.) It sounded like the man who made Astral Weeks was in terrible pain, pain most of Van Morrison's previous works had only suggested; but like the later albums by the Velvet Underground, there was a redemptive element in the blackness, ultimate compassion for the suffering of others, and a swath of pure beauty and mystical awe that cut right through the heart of the work
I don't really know how significant it might be that many others have reported variants on my initial encounter with Astral Weeks. I don't think there's anything guiding it to people enduring dark periods. It did come out at a time when a lot of things that a lot of people cared about passionately were beginning to disintegrate, and when the self-destructive undertow that always accompanied the great sixties party had an awful lot of ankles firmly in it's maw and was pulling straight down. so, as timeless as it finally is, perhaps Astral Weeks was also the product of an era. Better think that than ask just what sort of Irish churchwebbed haints Van Morrison might be product of.
Three television shows: A 1970 NET broadcast of a big all-star multiple bill at the Fillmore East. The Byrds, Sha Na Na, and Elvin Bishop have all done their respective things. Now we get to see three of four songs from a set by Van Morrison. He climaxes, as he always did in those days, with "Cyprus Avenue" from Astral Weeks. After going through all the verses, he drives the song, the band, and himself to a finish which has since become one of his trademarks and one of the all-time classic rock 'n' roll set-closers. With consumate dynamics that allow him to snap from indescribably eccentric throwaway phrasing to sheer passion in the very next breath he brings the music surging up through crescendo after crescendo, stopping and starting and stopping and starting the song again and again, imposing long maniacal silences like giant question marks between the stops and starts and ruling the room through sheer tension, building to a shout of "It's too late to stop now!," and just when you think it's all going to surge over the top, he cuts it off stone cold dead, the hollow of a murdered explosion, throws the microphone down and stalks off the stage. It is truly one of the most perverse things I have ever seen a performer do in my life. And, of course, it's sensational: our guts are knotted up, we're crazed and clawing for more, but we damn well know we've seen and felt something.
1974, a late night network TV rock concert: Van and his band come out, strike a few shimmering chords, and for about ten minutes he lingers over the words "Way over yonder in the clear blue sky / Where flamingos fly." No other lyrics. I don't think any instrumental solos. Just those words, repeated slowly again and again, distended, permutated, turned into scat, suspended in space and then scattered to the winds, muttered like a mantra till they turn into nonsense syllables, then back into the same soaring image as time seems to stop entirely. He stands there with eyes closed, singing, transported, while the band poises quivering over great open-tuned deep blue gulfs of their own.
1977, spring-summer, same kind of show: he sings "Cold Wind in August", a song off his recently released album A Period of Transition, which also contains a considerably altered version of the flamingos song. "Cold Wind in August" is a ballad and Van gives it a fine, standard reading. The only trouble is that the whole time he's singing it he paces back and forth in a line on the stage, his eyes tightly shut, his little fireplug body kicking its way upstream against what must be a purgatorial nervousness that perhaps is being transferred to the cameraman.
What this is about is a whole set of verbal tics - although many are bodily as well - which are there for reason enough to go a long way toward defining his style. They're all over Astral Weeks: four rushed repeats of the phrases "you breathe in, you breath out" and "you turn around" in "Beside You"; in "Cyprus Avenue," twelve "way up on"s, "baby" sung out thirteen times in a row sounding like someone running ecstatically downhill toward one's love, and the heartbreaking way he stretches "one by one" in the third verse; most of all in "Madame George" where he sings the word "dry" and then "your eye" twenty times in a twirling melodic arc so beautiful it steals your own breath, and then this occurs: "And the love that loves the love that loves the love that loves the love that loves to love the love that loves to love the love that loves."
Van Morrison is interested, obsessed with how much musical or verbal information he can compress into a small space, and, almost, conversely, how far he can spread one note, word, sound, or picture. To capture one moment, be it a caress or a twitch. He repeats certain phrases to extremes that from anybody else would seem ridiculous, because he's waiting for a vision to unfold, trying as unobtrusively as possible to nudge it along. Sometimes he gives it to you through silence, by choking off the song in midflight: "It's too late to stop now!"
It's the great search, fueled by the belief that through these musical and mental processes illumination is attainable. Or may at least be glimpsed.
When he tries for this he usually gets it more in the feeling than in the Revealed Word - perhaps much of the feeling comes from the reaching - but there is also, always, the sense of WHAT if he DID apprehend that Word; there are times when the Word seems to hover very near. And then there are times when we realize the Word was right next to us, when the most mundane overused phrases are transformed: I give you "love," from "Madame George." Out of relative silence, the Word: "Snow in San Anselmo." "That's where it's at," Van will say, and he means it (aren't his interviews fascinating?). What he doesn't say is that he is inside the snowflake, isolated by the song: "And it's almost Independence Day."
you're probably wondering when I'm going to get around to telling you about Astral Weeks. As a matter of fact, there's a whole lot of Astral Weeks I don't even want to tell you about. Both because whether you've heard it or not it wouldn't be fair for me to impose my interpretation of such lapidarily subjective imagery on you, and because in many cases I don't really know what he's talking about. he doesn't either: "I'm not surprised that people get different meanings out of my songs," he told a Rolling Stone interviewer. "But I don't wanna give the impression that I know what everything means 'cause I don't. . . . There are times when I'm mystified. I look at some of the stuff that comes out, y'know. And like, there it is and it feels right, but I can't say for sure what it means."
There you go
Starin' with a look of avarice
Talking to Huddie Leadbetter
Showin' pictures on the walls
And whisperin' in the halls
And pointin' a finger at me
I haven't got the slightest idea what that "means," though on one level I'd like to approach it in a manner as indirect and evocative as the lyrics themselves. Because you're in trouble anyway when you sit yourself down to explicate just exactly what a mystical document, which is exactly what Astral Weeks is, means. For one thing, what it means is Richard Davis's bass playing, which complements the songs and singing all the way with a lyricism that's something more than just great musicianship: there is something about it that more than inspired, something that has been touched, that's in the realm of the miraculous. The whole ensemble - Larry Fallon's string section, Jay Berliner's guitar (he played on Mingus's Black Saint and the Sinner Lady), Connie Kay's drumming - is like that: they and Van sound like they're not just reading but dwelling inside of each other's minds. The facts may be far different. John Cale was making an album of his own in the adjacent studio at the time, and he has said that "Morrison couldn't work with anybody, so finally they just shut him in the studio by himself. He did all the songs with just an acoustic guitar, and later they overdubbed the rest of it around his tapes."
Cale's story might or might not be true - but facts are not going to be of much use here in any case. Fact: Van Morrison was twenty-two - or twenty-three - years old when he made this record; there are lifetimes behind it. What Astral Weeks deals in are not facts but truths. Astral Weeks, insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend. It is a precious and terrible gift, born of a terrible truth, because what they see is both infinitely beautiful and terminally horrifying: the unlimited human ability to create or destroy, according to whim. It's no Eastern mystic or psychedelic vision of the emerald beyond, nor is it some Baudelairean perception of the beauty of sleaze and grotesquerie. Maybe what it boiled down to is one moment's knowledge of the miracle of life, with its inevitable concomitant, a vertiginous glimpse of the capacity to be hurt, and the capacity to inflict that hurt.
Transfixed between pure rapture and anguish. Wondering if they may not be the same thing, or at least possessed of an intimate relationship. In "T.B. Sheets", his last extended narrative before making this record, Van Morrison watched a girl he loved die of tuberculosis. the song was claustrophobic, suffocating, mostrously powerful: "innuendos, inadequacies, foreign bodies." A lot of people couldn't take it; the editor of this book has said that it's garbage, but I think it made him squeamish. Anyway, the point is that certain parts of Astral Weeks - "Madame George," "Cyprus Avenue" - take the pain in "T.B. Sheets" and root the world in it. Because the pain of watching a loved one die of however dread a disease may be awful, but it is at least something known, in a way understood, in a way measureable and even leading somewhere, because there is a process: sickness, decay, death, mourning, some emotional recovery. But the beautiful horror of "Madame George" and "Cyprus Avenue" is precisely that the people in these songs are not dying: we are looking at life, in its fullest, and what these people are suffering from is not disease but nature, unless nature is a disease.
A man sits in a car on a tree-lined street, watching a fourteen-year-old girl walking home from school, hopelessly in love with her. I've almost come to blows with friends because of my insistence that much of Van Morrison's early work had an obsessively reiterated theme of pedophilia, but here is something that at once may be taken as that and something far beyond it. He loves her. Because of that, he is helpless. Shaking. Paralyzed. Maddened. Hopeless. Nature mocks him. As only nature can mock nature. Or is love natural in the first place? No Matter. By the end of the song he has entered a kind of hallucinatory ecstasy; the music aches and yearns as it rolls on out. This is one supreme pain, that of being imprisoned a spectator. And perhaps no so very far from "T.B. Sheets," except that it must be far more romantically easy to sit and watch someone you love die than to watch them in the bloom of youth and health and know that you can never, ever have them, can never speak to them.
"Madame George" is the album's whirlpool. Possibly one of the most compassionate pieces of music ever made, it asks us, no, arranges that we see the plight of what I'll be brutal and call a lovelorn drag queen with such intense empathy that when the singer hurts him, we do too. (Morrison has said in at least one interview that the song has nothing to do with any kind of transvestite - at least as far as he knows, he is quick to add - but that's bullshit.) The beauty, sensitivity, holiness of the song is that there's nothing at all sensationalistic, exploitative, or tawdry about it; in a way Van is right when he insists it's not about a drag queen, as my friends were right and I was wrong about the "pedophelia" - it's about a person, like all the best songs, all the greatest literature.
The setting is that same as that of the previous song - "Cyprus Avenue", apparently a place where people drift, impelled by desire, into moments of flesh-wracking, sight-curdling confrontation with their destinies. It's an elemental place of pitiless judgement - wind and rain figure in both songs - and, interestingly enough, it's a place of the even crueler judgement of adults by children, in both cases love objects absolutely indifferent to their would-be adult lovers. Madame George's little boys are downright contemptuous - like the street urchins who end up cannibalizing the homosexual cousin in Tennessee Williams's Suddenly Last Summer, they're only too happy to come around as long as there's music, party times, free drinks and smokes, and only too gleefully spit on George's affections when all the other stuff runs out, the entombing winter settling in with not only wind and rain but hail, sleet, and snow.
What might seem strangest of all but really isn't is that it's exactly those characteristics which supposedly should make George most pathetic - age, drunkenness, the way the boys take his money and trash his love - that awakens something for George in the heart of the kid whose song this is. Obviously the kid hasn't simply "fallen in love with love," or something like that, but rather - what? Why just exactly that only sunk in the foulest perversions could one human being love another for anything other than their humanness: love him for his weakness, his flaws, finally perhaps his decay. Decay is human - that's one of the ultimate messages here, and I don't by any stretch of the lexicon mean decadence. I mean that in this song or whatever inspired it Van Morrison saw the absolute possibility of loving human beings at the farthest extreme of wretchedness, and that the implications of that are terrible indeed, far more terrible than the mere sight of bodies made ugly by age or the seeming absurdity of a man devoting his life to the wobbly artifice of trying to look like a woman.
You can say to love the questions you have to love the answers which quicken the end of love that's loved to love the awful inequality of human experience that loves to say we tower over these the lost that love to love the love that freedom could have been, the train to freedom, but we never get on, we'd rather wave generously walking away from those who are victims of themselves. But who is to say that someone who victimizes himself or herself is not as worthy of total compassion as the most down and out Third World orphan in a New Yorker magazine ad? Nah, better to step over the bodies, at least that gives them the respect they might have once deserved. where I love, in New York (not to make it more than it is, which is hard), everyone I know often steps over bodies which might well be dead or dying as a matter of course, without pain. and I wonder in what scheme it was originally conceived that such an action is showing human refuse the ultimate respect it deserves.
There is of course a rationale - what else are you going to do - but it holds no more than our fear of our own helplessness in the face of the plain of life as it truly is: a plain which extends into an infinity beyond the horizons we have only invented. Come on, die it. As I write this, I can read in the Village Voice the blurbs of people opening heterosexual S&M clubs in Manhattan, saying things like, "S&M is just another equally valid form of love. Why people can't accept that we'll never know." Makes you want to jump out a fifth floor window rather than even read about it, but it's hardly the end of the world; it's not nearly as bad as the hurts that go on everywhere everyday that are taken to casually by all of us as facts of life. Maybe it boiled down to how much you actually want to subject yourself to. If you accept for even a moment the idea that each human life is as precious and delicate as a snowflake and then you look at a wino in a doorway, you've got to hurt until you feel like a sponge for all those other assholes' problems, until you feel like an asshole yourself, so you draw all the appropriate lines. You stop feeling. But you know that then you begin to die. So you tussle with yourself. how much of this horror can I actually allow myself to think about? Perhaps the numbest mannekin is wiser than somebody who only allows their sensitivity to drive them to destroy everything they touch - but then again, to tilt Madame George's hat a hair, just to recognize that that person exists, just to touch his cheek and then probably expire because the realization that you must share the world with him is ultimately unbearable is to only go the first mile. The realization of living is just about that low and that exalted and that unbearable and that sought-after. Please come back and leave me alone. But when we're along together we can talk all we want about the universality of this abyss: it doesn't make any difference, the highest only meets the lowest for some lying succor, UNICEF to relatives, so you scratch and spit and curse in violent resignation at the strict fact that there is absolutely nothing you can do but finally reject anyone in greater pain than you. At such a moment, another breath is treason. that's why you leave your liberal causes, leave suffering humanity to die in worse squalor than they knew before you happened along. You got their hopes up. Which makes you viler than the most scrofulous carrion. viler than the ignorant boys who would take Madame George for a couple of cigarettes. because you have committed the crime of knowledge, and thereby not only walked past or over someone you knew to be suffering, but also violated their privacy, the last possession of the dispossessed.
Such knowledge is possibly the worst thing that can happen to a person (a lucky person), so it's no wonder that Morrison's protagonist turned away from Madame George, fled to the train station, trying to run as far away from what he'd seen as a lifetime could get him. And no wonder, too, that Van Morrison never came this close to looking life square in the face again, no wonder he turned to Tupelo Honey and even Hard Nose the Highway with it's entire side of songs about falling leaves. In Astral Weeks and "T.B. Sheets" he confronted enough for any man's lifetime. Of course, having been offered this immeasurably stirring and equally frightening gift from Morrison, one can hardly be blamed for not caring terribly much about Old, Old Woodstock and little homilies like "You've got to Make It Through This World On Your Own" and "Take It Where You Find It."
On the other hand, it might also be pointed out that desolation, hurt, and anguish are hardly the only things in life, or in Astral Weeks. They're just the things, perhaps, that we can most easily grasp and explicate, which I suppose shows about what level our souls have evolved to. I said I wouldn't reduce the other songs on this album by trying to explain them, and I won't. But that doesn't mean that, all thing considered, a juxtaposition of poets might not be in order.
If I ventured in the slipstream
Between the viaducts of your dreams
Where the mobile steel rims crack
And the ditch and the backroads stop
Could you find me
Would you kiss my eyes
And lay me down
In silence easy
To be born again
-Van Morrison
My heart of silk
is filled with lights,
with lost bells,
with lilies and bees.
I will go very far,
farther than those hills,
farther than the seas,
close to the stars,
to beg Christ the Lord
to give back the soul I had
of old, when I was a child,
ripened with legends,
with a feathered cap
and a wooden sword.
-Federico Garcia Lorca
Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl
