Astral Phenomenon: Van Morrison In Conversation, Sort Of

Montreal Gazette
The fact that Van Morrison is on the road performing his 1968 album Astral Weeks might suggest he’d be keen to reminisce about the recording, heralded as a masterpiece by too many musicians and critics to count.

But if you think that, you might not know the first thing about the mercurial singer.

In an email interview with the Gazette, Morrison was dismissive when asked how the original album sounds to his ears these days. “It sounds like a 20-something-year-old me,” he wrote. “I do not listen to it. But I suppose it sounds like it always did.”

In the 1979 essay collection Stranded: Rock and Roll For a Desert Island, the iconoclastic – and difficult to please – critic Lester Bangs said Astral Weeks was “the rock record with the most significance in my life so far.” In a rhapsodic retrospective, Bangs referred to a “swath of pure beauty and mystical awe that cut right through the heart of the work.”

Even if such assessments were meaningful to Morrison – which is doubtful – it wouldn’t make him any more inclined to preserve the record as a museum piece. When its 40th anniversary came around last year, Morrison celebrated by performing the whole album, slightly resequenced, over two November nights at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles.

“The whole point is, I wanted to do it live with full orchestration – and that is what I did,” he wrote. “Plus, most of these songs are the least played in my whole repertoire.”

The Hollywood Bowl shows, subsequently released on CD and DVD, featured a small string section and enough musicians to comfortably navigate the unusual chamber jazz and folk sounds of the original release. Guitarist Jay Berliner, who played on the first Astral Weeks, returned for the live revisit. Without providing specifics, Morrison wrote that his Oct. 1 concert here will feature “about the same lineup as in Hollywood.”

The Hollywood Bowl concerts were intended as a one-shot deal. New York and London followed early this year, however, and before long, a full tour was under way.

“Demand was the only reason it carried on,” Morrison wrote. “I only intended two shows in Hollywood to get the recording down live in front of an audience. I prefer live music to studio – especially for a project like Astral Weeks. It gives it a fullness a studio would not have allowed for.”

It’s hard not to be struck by the difference between Morrison’s vocal performance on the 1968 recording and his approach to the 2008 re-invention. On the original, there’s a nervous energy and a sense of uncharted territory that announces an untamed, raw talent – a bona fide original who was probably not yet sure, at 23, of his place in the music business, let alone the world.

At that point, Morrison had had only one hit since leaving Belfast R&B rockers Them: the infectious, catchy Brown Eyed Girl, released the previous year. And his new label, Warner Bros., could only have been hoping for more of the same.

It’s a sure bet that no label suit was wishing for an impossible-to-categorize batch of lengthy free-form compositions with jazz players weaving a wondrous path around the singer’s folk- and blues-based meditations. Not to mention inscrutable lyrics that were more likely to feature drag queens and dying loved ones than brown-eyed girls.

But it was what it was. And it was brought to life by Morrison, singing and playing acoustic guitar, augmented by blue-chip jazz players like Berliner, who had played with Charles Mingus, bassist Richard Davis, who had worked with Miles Davis and the late Modern Jazz Quartet drummer Connie Kay, along with Van’s own sideman John Payne on flute and soprano sax. With the eight tracks that make up the album recorded over only two sessions – a middle session yielded nothing useable – a classic was born.

Like many classics, however, it sold very little – at least not for a long time. After years of ending up on all-time-greatest-album lists in every major rock periodical you can think of, Astral Weeks earned its gold record only in 2001.

“(It) is a work of such singular beauty, such sustained emotional intensity, that nothing recorded before or since sounds even remotely similar,” Sean O’Hagan wrote in the London Observer last November, encapsulating the slow-building acclaim that eventually added commercial respectability to artistic praise.

The 2008 Astral Weeks, at least as captured on the live CD, is a different animal. It shows Morrison fully self-assured, deeper-voiced and comfortable with a technique that has been honed and crafted, yet still depends on wild abandon for its full force. Challenged by the songs, he sounds at the top of his game.

Which means that while the printed lyrics might say “And I will stroll the merry way and jump the hedges first/ And I will drink clear clean water for to quench my thirst,” what comes out of Morrison’s mouth is “Allathrowamanywayenstepahedgesfirst/ Asadrinkthecleclewallafoddaquenchamythirst.”

Through much of the performance, Morrison is singing in tongues, his voice channeling mystical impressions from somewhere else.

For Morrison, it just comes down to doing what he has always done. “I do not assess it,” he wrote in response to a question regarding the difference between his vocal approach to the Astral Weeks material then and now. “I just do what I do in the moment. I have to have a non-contrived element to all my singing.

“I did not do it the same way twice then and I do not do it the same way twice now. It just happens organically that way,” he explained.

Oddly enough, while much of Morrison’s catalogue has been remastered, Astral Weeks and its hugely successful follow-up, Moondance (1970), are among those that have not been upgraded to state-of-the-art sound.

“I spent a year of my life getting those remasters together,” Morrison wrote. “It was all me. They just ran it through a machine after I did all the work. I retained back, from Universal, half of the remasters. And I intend to put those out on my own at some point – maybe.”

The need for that kind of artistic control is evidenced by Morrison’s insistence on producing his own albums – pretty much since Astral Weeks.

“For one thing, my recordings do not get ruined or stamped with someone else’s opinion, who could not possibly understand where I am coming from musically,” he wrote. “No producer has ever contributed anything to any of my recordings. They have just detracted and pushed back vocals.”

Anyone who has listened to Morrison’s body of work knows that he has an even lower opinion of anyone on the business side of music. Still lower: people who exploit his life to sell books.

“There will always be people who think they know something they have no idea about – and I am one of those things,” he wrote. “It’s bizarre when people write entire books about you and the music who have no clue what they are talking about. That is not to mention the people who make things up just to appear like they are ‘involved,’ or in the know. I am not into that. I have my peace now, but I get it from other sources that no one knows about.”

Morrison also had a few choice words for the state of the way people consume music now. Certainly, in an age where the album is in danger of extinction and music is being mixed and matched via digital downloads, track by arbitrary track, it’s hard to imagine the modern-day descendent of an indivisible work like Astral Weeks ever taking hold.

“The demise of the album was the demise of the record business,” Morrison wrote. “Now it’s just compressed air and digitized distortion of original resonance. That is a shame.”

Still, Morrison has not closed the door on future album-related projects that might echo the Astral Weeks revisit. Queried about his current thoughts on what some consider one of his masterpieces, the 1991 album Hymns To the Silence, he offered a tantalizing bit of information.

“Hymns is one of the albums I would like to rework live,” he wrote. “I hear different things when I listen to it now, and I would like to experiment with it at some point.”
-Bernard Perusse

Van Morrison performs Oct. 1 at Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier of Place des Arts. Tickets cost $100 to $250. Phone 514-842-2112 or go to www.laplacedesarts.com