Rolling Stone: Forty Years Later, Van Morrison Returns to 'Astral Weeks'

Rolling Stone: For the first time, the rock legend performs his most acclaimed album

When Van Morrison's second solo album, Astral Weeks, hit shelves in 1968, it was a commercial failure. But in the following decades, the mystical-themed album has become one of Morrison's most beloved, influencing everyone from Bruce Springsteen to U2. ("Astral Weeks was like a religion to us," E Street Band guitarist Steven Van Zandt has said.) "The songs are timeless," says Morrison. "They remain unchanged and are as fresh today as they ever were." On November 7th and 8th, Morrison will celebrate the record's 40th anniversary by reuniting with surviving members of the studio band to perform the album in its entirety at the Hollywood Bowl. (The performances are being recorded for a live album due out next year.) We caught up with Morrison to talk about the shows and the album's legacy. "I don't really know why people love it," he says. "I do know there is nothing like it available now, nor was there anything like it then."

How did the Astral Weeks concerts come about?

I had always wanted to do these songs live with orchestration. I thought I should probably get to it now — it's time.

Why do you think the album remains such a favorite?

Maybe it speaks something to some people — I don't know. All I know is that it was a lot of hard work to make. I worked on crafting the material for years before the 1968 sessions. At the time, I was just creating: honing my songwriting and picking out words that go well with other words — and working with the musical arrangements. The album is sophisticated poetry that I set to multilayered musical arrangements; dynamic melodies course through every song.

Why did you choose Astral Weeks to perform in this special way — 40 years after its first release?

It received no promotion from Warner Bros. — that's why I never got to play the songs live. I had always wanted to play the record live and fully orchestrated — that is what this is all about. I always like live recording and I like listening to live records too. I'm not too fond of being in a studio — it's too contrived and too confining. I like the freedom of live, in-the-moment sound.

How does it feel to reunite with bassist Richard Davis and guitarist Jay Berliner, who played on the original?

It's great. I require musicians of that caliber to understand my arrangements and to bring them to life. I didn't want to settle for anything less than those who played on the original — I wish they were all still around. Connie Kay is the best drummer I have run across yet, and the strings arranger, Larry Fallon, had a great understanding of the music too. Those players on the 1968 record were great; we just kept playing straight on through at the recording session — we did not stop. With other musicians, we might have never gotten off the ground.

If you enjoy these concerts, will there be more shows in other cities?

I am doing these shows to get the live recordings with the full orchestration. I doubt there will be any more Astral Weeks shows after this one.

Are there any other albums that you would like to revisit in concert?

Just new ones.

-DAVID WEEKS

[From Issue 1065 — November 13, 2008]

Van Gives Rare Interview For L.A. Weekly

LA Weekly:

Van Morrison and Astral Weeks: LA Weekly Snags a Rare One-on-One Interview with the Elusive Singer

Van Morrison sits down with L.A. Weekly for a rare one-on-one interview to discuss the alchemy in his past and the enduring allure of his classic album Astral Weeks

When it was announced that Van Morrison would close out the Hollywood Bowl’s fall season with two nights of concerts at which he would perform his seminal 1968 album Astral Weeks from cover to cover, some longtime Morrison fans might have wondered if the mercurial Irish singer-songwriter was taking the piss out of them. It was barely a decade ago, when, in a storied appearance at New York’s intimate Supper Club venue, Morrison had virulently berated the audience for demanding material from his ’60s and ’70s repertoire (which he dubbed “ancient history”) after he opened the floor to requests. And as anyone who has seen Morrison live in the past decade can attest, the set list, while almost never the same twice, consists predominately of songs from Morrison’s two or three most recent albums, with a few token crowd-pleasers (“Moondance” and the rousing R&B anthem “Gloria,” from Morrison’s days fronting the Irish band Them) sprinkled in for good measure. Even the much-loved sing-along ditty “Brown Eyed Girl” returned to regular rotation earlier this decade following a long hiatus, if only to satisfy the fair-weather Morrison fans who had taken to loudly requesting it an nearly every concert. Yet, in the nearly two dozen times I’ve seen Morrison play live since his 1997 triple-header with Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell at UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion, the Astral Weeks material has rarely been given an airing.

Indeed, the only thing seemingly more certain than his ironclad resistance to doing any sort of “greatest hits” show or “nostalgia tour” is the fact that, where Morrison is concerned, you can never predict what he’ll do next — from one measure to the next, one song to the next, one album to the next. Pay close attention during one of his concerts — and there is little reason to suspect the atmosphere is much different in the recording studio — and you can frequently catch sight of Morrison’s band members scurrying to keep apace with their leader as he calls out sudden tempo changes, uses hand gestures to take a swelling crescendo down to a muted whisper and back again, and routinely throws curve balls into the set list. So it comes as no real surprise to hear that Morrison doesn’t view his two upcoming Bowl shows as an exhumation of the past at all but rather as something entirely new.

“I’ve never done any live gigs with those people,” says Morrison, who will perform the Astral Weeks song cycle with the support of two key collaborators from the original recordings: veteran Charles Mingus guitarist Jay Berliner and legendary bass player Richard Davis, now 78. Like many of the Astral Weeks session musicians (including the late drummer Connie Kaye), Berliner and Davis were recruited by Morrison and album producer Lewis Merenstein because of their background in jazz. “It was recorded like a jazz session, which is the way I like to do it,” Morrison recalls. “There was a lot of work put into the songs previously, when I rehearsed them, and I had done some of them live with a trio. So, the basic arrangements I had worked out then, and the rest was added to that. But the whole thing was not just that; it was more the spontaneity of what was going on [in the studio], and the reading of the material by the other people.”

But at the time, Morrison adds, there was no money to organize a proper tour — and so, despite its enduring critical acclaim (it frequently places near the top in critic and reader surveys of the greatest all-time albums: Lester Bangs famously cited it as his favorite record), Astral Weeks remains, along with 1974’s masterful, defiantly uncommercial Veedon Fleece, one of Morrison’s least-performed albums. “It’s never really been done live, and that’s kind of what my music is all about,” he says. “I just wanted to check it out for myself and re-explore it.”

The fact that I’m talking to Morrison, face to face, is nearly as rare a happening as the upcoming concerts, the singer having famously spent much of his career dodging — and, occasionally, confronting head-on — the media. During an interview for Rolling Stone in the early ’90s, he allegedly walked out of a Boston restaurant midway through, leaving the reporter to tail him down the street, while in recent songs like “New Biography” and “Too Many Myths,” Morrison has been harshly critical of the various Web sites and unauthorized pseudo-biographies that have peddled purportedly authoritative accounts of his life and work. Such incidents, coupled with his recalcitrant onstage demeanor, have earned Morrison a reputation for being “difficult,” when in fact they may merely be the telltale signs of a performer who doesn’t suffer fools gladly, pay lip service to sycophants, or buy into the conventional wisdom that someone who suffers the pain of artistic creation is obliged to be “nice” when discussing his craft.

Whatever the case, on this particular Sunday afternoon, Morrison is cordial and forthcoming, sauntering into his bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel in a dark blue, large-buttoned coat and one of his signature porkpie hats and proceeds to talk for most of the next hour about his music, musical influences and longstanding bête noire: the music industry. He describes the original Astral Weeks recording sessions, held in late September and early October 1968, as “an alchemical kind of situation, where the people involved could read the situation and come up with stuff spontaneously, and not belabor it, not overproduce or overthink it. Everybody on the sessions was like that, which was uncanny. That’s the way it worked out.”

It has not, however, always been so easy for Morrison to find musicians tuned into his wavelength. “It’s difficult to get them to do ... to go where I’m going,” he says. “That’s what you have to work on. It doesn’t have anything to do with technical ability. Well, it has something to do with it, because they need the technical ability to start with, but then they need to drop that and follow me and break it down into something that’s less complicated than that, so they can follow where I’m going.”

Where he’s going is, as often as not, into a stream-of-consciousness reverie where a single cut from a Morrison album is deconstructed and reassembled by the singer as a trancelike epic lasting as much as a quarter-hour or more. In the ’70s, songs like “Caravan” and “Cyprus Avenue” were regularly subject to such reinvention, while more recently, Morrison has favored the likes of “In the Afternoon” (from the 1995 Days Like This album) and “Burning Ground” (from the 1997 TheHealing Game album). These are the moments — the bedrock of any Morrison gig — in which he seems, per the title of his own 1979 album, to be going deeper “into the music.” Audience members similarly inclined (i.e., not the ones asking for “Brown Eyed Girl”) are invited to follow. It is then that the “healing” about which Morrison has so often sung really begins.

Simply put, it would be anathema for Morrison to appear on a stage and merely re-create a given song — note for note and beat for beat — exactly as it sounded on the album. Which is why those with tickets to see Morrison at the Bowl can be assured that, while they will hear Astral Weeks, they’ll hear it as they’ve likely never heard it before.

“I need change,” Morrison says. “In order to actually do it, it has to evolve for me. Otherwise, I don’t really want to do it; I’ll lose interest.”

The course that any one of his concerts takes, Morrison says, depends on a couple factors. “One is, if you feel like the audience can go with you, then I can stretch out more. [The other is] finding key songs where I can get these particular musicians to go along with me, because every band combination is quite different. A lot of times, you can get musicians, but they don’t have a rapport, so you have to build the set around where we can go. Some bands I’ve had can do anything, go anywhere, you know? Other bands can only do certain songs in a certain way. It just depends.”

With that in mind, for his Hollywood Bowl appearances, Morrison has built two different sets of music around two different groups of musicians. Each night, in addition to the Astral Weeks material, he will also play an introductory set of songs drawn from the breadth of his career, backed by a different band consisting of longtime Morrison accompanists John Platania and David Hayes on guitar and bass. “The first set is going to be more like the kind of band that was on Into the Music or It’s Too Late to Stop Now,” Morrison says, referencing his legendary 1974 live album recorded, in part, at the Troubador and Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. “Then the second set will be Astral Weeks. There’ll be two different bands. I haven’t done that for ... well, I don’t think I’ve ever done that.”

Although I must have heard “Brown Eyed Girl” on the radio as a kid and at any number of high school dances, it was only as a college student in the mid-’90s that I seriously discovered Morrison, my rather telescoped musical horizons up to that point having been limited to heavy metal, Top 40 and the saccharine, easy-listening dreck favored by my mother. Quite by chance, I picked up used copies of 1995’s Days Like This and 1987’s Poetic Champions Compose — neither of them considered by critics or aficionados to be among Morrison’s best albums — and began playing them obsessively, enraptured by their dense networks of interconnected images and allusions, struggling to make some mental geography out of the mystical yet entirely tangible places Morrison was singing about: an ancient highway; a factory on a street called Bread in East Belfast; a town called Paradise. Only later would I realize that many of these tropes dated all the way back to a 1968 Rosetta stone called Astral Weeks, which began with its first-person narrator venturing into the slipstream, detoured through the parlor room of an enigmatic figure named Madame George, and ended some eight tracks later with the funereal assertion: “I know you’re dying/And I know you know it to/Everytime I see you/I just don’t know what to do.”

Whether Morrison was describing the real Belfast he knew as a child or building an imagined, Joycean universe of private meanings upon its foundations, the yearning for a distant, irrecoverable past is profoundly felt, and something that continues to resonate throughout Morrison’s music of the subsequent 40 years, up to and including the epic album-closer “Behind the Ritual,” from the recent Keep It Simple release, where Morrison sings of “drinking wine in the alley ... in the days gone by.” Indeed, if Morrison has rarely seemed eager to look back over the course of his own discography, his music itself is very much about conjuring a personal and collective past, which seems to be quite alive for Morrison, hovering just out of reach, threatening to displace the present. It’s a feeling that extends to the myriad cover/tribute albums Morrison has produced in the past 15 years (including the traditional country Pay the Devil and the jazz How Long Has This Been Going On?), on which he has tipped his porkpie hat to some of the styles and artists (including Mose Allison, Lonnie Donegan, John Lee Hooker and Solomon Burke) who influenced him during his own musical education. It is perhaps the highest compliment one can pay those albums to say that Morrison’s original compositions for them are frequently indistinguishable from the “period” originals written decades earlier.

“Well, if you take it as a river, then it’s got offshoots — this stream and that stream, north stream, south stream, slipstream. All sorts of streams, you know?” Morrison says. “But it’s all connected to the source. All that stuff that I picked up in the formative years is what I’ve been able to put together as my own thing, so to speak. For me, it’s [about] going back to the source. That’s where I first got the word, or heard that sound. You can’t really say it is ‘X,’ because it just ends up being another word or a cliché. But that initial energy was turned on in me, and I was lucky enough to get to know some of the people — like John Lee Hooker, who was a very good friend over the years — and connect with whatever that is, I don’t know, some kind of energy.”

Since Astral Weeks, Morrison has issued more than 30 albums of new material, penned hundreds of songs for himself and other artists, and managed to put an enviable distance between himself and the record-company executives who have been a regular (and hardly undeserved) object of scorn and derision in such Morrison songs as “St. Dominic’s Preview,” “Drumshanbo Hustle” and “Showbusiness.” Having recently parted ways with his latest label, Universal, which he says did little to promote Keep It Simple despite the fact that the album became the highest-charting domestic release of his career, Morrison is poised to start his own label, Listen to the Lion Records, whose first release will be the live recording of Astral Weeks at the Hollywood Bowl. Yet, Morrison remains characteristically circumspect “not so much about the business” itself but “about the kind of people that the business and fame sometimes attract.”

For the man who once sang that “my job is turning lead into gold,” his own celebrity and its attendant pressures seem as much of a double-edged sword as ever. “I never bargained on fame; it’s just something I’ve had to deal with that came along with doing the music,” Morrson tells me. “It’s like I’ve got these scars,” he says, pointing at his back, “and why do I have to keep showing people the scars all the time? You know what I mean? It’s in the songs somewhere there. I still have to turn myself inside-out to do this. It’s still got a price; it’s not free. Doing these gigs — that’s got a price. I have to act. I have to perform.”

“But you still love it, don’t you?” I ask.

“The only thing I love is the music,” he says without missing a beat. “The rest of it is pure shit. The kind of shit that fame attracts is very dark. It’s very dark. I like the music, but that’s it.”

Van Morrison performs Astral Weeks at the Hollywood Bowl on Fri.-Sat., November 7-8.
-Scott Foundas

Astral Weeks: The Best Album Ever?

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

Watch Webcast of Astral Weeks Live This Friday

Fans can watch Van's November 7th show live on Friday night at the KCRW website. The show will not be archived so tune in on Friday night!

Van Morrison at the Hollywood Bowl

LIVE WEBCAST on KCRW.com

Friday, November 7 at 8pm

The first ever international webcast from the Hollywood Bowl and the first time Van Morrison has allowed a live concert broadcast.


KCRW.com will make history on Friday, November 7 by providing the first-ever live concert webcast from the Hollywood Bowl, featuring a show by legendary singer Van Morrison. The Santa Monica-based public radio station will broadcast a 45-minute set of timeless classics by the Rock and Roll Hall of famer.

While the KCRW library hosts an extensive catalogue by Van Morrison, this is the first time the station has collaborated with the artist. The show will be presented in conjunction with Listen To The Lion Films & www.vanmorrison.com. They will be recording the second half of the concert for the upcoming release Astral Weeks Live At The Hollywood Bowl. His band that night will feature the original musicians, bassist Richard Davis and guitarist Jay Berliner, who played on his classic album Astral Weeks. This is the 40-year anniversary of the album's release.

Unlike most KCRW-produced content, the show will NOT be archived so viewers will have to tune in on Friday, November 7 at 8pm to catch it live.

"All of the music directors at KCRW have a personal relationship with Van's music and it has been a thread throughout the history of the station," said Morning Becomes Eclectic producer Ariana Morgenstern. "KCRW has a long history with both the Hollywood Bowl and this artist so it seemed like a natural fit to bring this concert to the largest audience possible," she said.

KCRW recently celebrated the 10-year anniversary of our World Festival at the Hollywood Bowl. It is also the place where this idea was hatched -- Ariana Morgenstern was introduced to concert promoter Bill Silva while watching Radiohead in August and this collaboration was born out of their conversation that night.

Bill Silva Presents has produced over 10,000 events from small clubs to major stadiums all over the world, including such prodigious talents as Simon & Garfunkel, The Police, Madonna, Nirvana, Eric Clapton and Bob Dylan.

Morrison's career, spanning some five decades, has influenced many popular musical artists and he is consistently ranked among the best songwriters of all time. Watch a set of his timeless music from the comfort of your own home and portable player on KCRW.com, Friday, November 7. Find the show at www.kcrw.com/vanmorrisonlive. Full screen viewing will be available.

Van's Q&A On 'Astral Weeks' With L.A. Times

Los Angeles Times: In-depth interviews with Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee and two-time Grammy Award winning singer-songwriter Van Morrison are exceedingly few and far between. But in conjunction with his performances Nov. 7 and 8 at the Hollywood Bowl, where he’ll perform his 1968 album “Astral Weeks” in its entirety for the first time anywhere, along with other songs from throughout his career, he agreed to respond by e-mail to questions from Times staff writer Randy Lewis. The feature story will appear in Saturday's Calendar; the following is the full text of that Q&A.

What combination of opportunity and motivation was behind the decision to revisit "Astral Weeks" in a live setting now?

I am not “revisiting” it, as this is a totally different project. I had always wanted to do these songs fully orchestrated and live. I never got around to it -- then I thought, well, we have lost the great [drummer] Connie Kay already and Larry Fallon the original arranger –- so I thought I should probably get to it now. Jay [Berliner] and Richard [Davis] have never done it fully orchestrated and live before either so I see it as a new project.

Update: In the paragraph above, we originally identified Connie Kay as the bassist. He was the drummer on "Astral Weeks."

What's your thought at this stage of your career about the boldness of a 22-year-old Belfast musician with some rock hits to his credit going into a New York studio with the likes of Downbeat's jazz bassist of the year [Richard Davis], the Modern Jazz Quartet's drummer [Connie Kay] and one of Charles Mingus' collaborators [guitarist Jay Berliner]?

Well, first, I think I have probably always been more advanced in my head, in my thinking, than the calendar age of 22. My thinking musically has always been more advanced -- it is difficult to get it down onto paper sometimes, even now. And the Music on “Astral Weeks” required these great musicians because no one else could have pulled it off like they did. There is another reason, too, and that is the fact I did not settle for anyone other than these guys -- they were the ones I insisted on.

What, if any, contact has there been with Richard Davis and Jay Berliner (or Kay before his death in 1994) over the years?

Connie Kay called me a lot over the years, on a regular basis. He was the drummer on “Tupelo Honey” and “Listen to the Lion.” He is also on several recordings I did in the '80s, numbers I have not released yet. Connie was the best drummer I have run across yet. The original arranger, Larry Fallon, kept in touch with me over the years, but we had lost contact with him, unfortunately. I actually called him for this project, but I found out he had passed away not too long ago. That was a shame -- he was a great arranger. He seemed to understand this music -- which is rare and is not easy to do. I was in touch with Richard a few times over the years.

The circumstances that brought you to the East Coast of the U.S. at the time [in 1968]?

I had been with Bert Berns’ Bang Records label, and I didn’t get paid, so I was living on a shoestring -- a very hand-to-mouth existence at that time -- in Boston and for a long time after that too. I went down to New York and this is when I got the offer from Warner Brothers. They had told me they had to buy out the Bang deal. Then I got involved with [producer Lewis] Merenstein, et al. The real reason I made Astral Weeks Recordings in New York is because I was literally broke and they kept me stranded there.

Did these songs emerge more or less fully formed lyrically and melodically, or did you spend considerable time reworking, shaping and editing them during the live performances that led up to the recording session?




Well, I had already written “Ballerina,” in 1966!, if this tells you anything, and the poetry written on the backside of the “Astral Weeks” album [cover] was an excerpt from something else I had written prior to that! Matter of fact, thinking back, I had previously recorded “Madame George” and “Beside You” well before the '68 Warner release, for Bang Records. But the arrangements were nothing like what I had in mind for those songs. I had also previously played versions of a few of the songs Live at the Catacombs [club] in Boston well before going in and making what became the “Astral Weeks” recordings that ended up as the record. We made that record straight through finally like I wanted them, without stopping. We did it my way in the studio that day.

So, yes it took a very long time and a lot of thinking and arranging and hard work to structure these songs like I wanted them, like I envisioned them in my head. That was the hardest work, but then I found out I then had to work through the people in the music business, and then the people that come around as a result that you are in the music business, and that was even harder, but in a different way. All for the sake of making my music, my song.

What were you reading, listening to, experiencing, feeling after "Brown Eyed Girl" and all the Bert Berns sessions that sent you in this direction musically and philosophically?

“Brown Eyed Girl” is misunderstood. I already had that song down -- so I did not turn anywhere or change direction -- it was already done, just not released. If you listen closely you can hear there is depth to that song; there are layers of arrangement in my original version. Thing is, Bert required a “hit” record. He thought “Brown Eyed Girl” was the hit single. The song sounds catchy and pop, but [it] is really multi-dimensional. I was not happy with it, as the music in my mind is much more sophisticated than that.

I call that 'The Money Song' -- because they got all the money and I got none. What happened after that is I ended up with zero money. I was broke and depressed and remained that way for many years after that, and I just decided to make a stand for myself and do things my way, not theirs, like I was already doing in songs like “TB Sheets” and “Who Drove The Red Sports Car?”— which I guess were over the heads of those who were so-called “in the know.”

I did not ever want to be on a pop label -- I thought Bert was musically beyond that, but it turned out he was more interested in money than musical ability, song craft and poetic artistry. Despite all that, if Bert were not in with a bad crowd, I think he may have been interested in having the ears that hear. He probably did.

How did you settle on Lewis Merenstein to produce “Astral Weeks”?

Merenstein came about when my back was against the wall. I did not have a choice at the time. I was all the way on the ground. People only have a choice when they have money -- I did not have either, they made sure of that. Then I found out when you have success, then come the sharks in disguise -- and those [were] quite obvious. I did most of the [production] work myself, though, if the truth be told. I wrote it all, put it all where it needed to be.

What was the immediate aftermath for you? Was it a natural evolution, or a sharp turn toward the more easily accessible verse-chorus song structures you used in many of the songs on the "Moondance" album?

First of all “Moondance” was written by me in 1965, as an instrumental, so I did not turn toward anything other than what I had already written and done. I have always played what I feel like playing whenever I feel like playing it.

I put out records to this day that are not necessarily in a sequence of anything. Some could be written a while back, some not. There is no set pattern. I just put things out when I decide to put it out; [that] does not mean that it’s what I was thinking or doing or writing in any time frame. It usually comes down to what goes with what else, or what needs to go out whenever. It would be a mistake to think such and such because something comes out or came out when it did. My records do not require a lot of thought of ‘What is this?’ and ‘What is that?’ That would be too contrived for me.

Do you connect differently now with the "Astral Weeks" material, and what is it about these songs that make them feel like they exist outside of time? I've talked to some musicians who say they didn't understand the real meaning of some of their songs until years later; that their music reached beyond their intellectual understanding of themselves at the time.

“Astral Weeks” songs were written over a period of time -– some early 1966 -- and evolved musically. They are timeless works that were from another sort of place -- not what is at all obvious. They are poetry and mythical musings channeled from my imagination.

The songs are poetic stories, so the meaning is the same as always -- timeless and unchanging. The songs are works of fiction that will inherently have a different meaning for different people. People take from it whatever their disposition to take from it is. It is like Tolkien’s “Hobbit” -- the hobbit is what it is. I doubt he would change what the stories [are] just because time went by.

“Astral Weeks” are little poetic stories I made up and set to music. The album is about song craft for me -- making things up and making them fit to a tune I have arranged. The songs were somewhat channeled works -- that is why I called it “Astral Weeks.” As my songwriting has gone on I tend to do the same channeling, so it’s sort of like “Astral Decades,” I guess.

I am about the arrangements and the layers of depth in the music. So, no, I do not see it any differently than it is -- it just is whatever it is.

Did you know what you wanted and what you'd achieved right away?

It is all poetry I made up anyway. It’s like asking "What is art?" It is whatever the beholder decides it is. To this day most all of my music comes from a similar place. I am not exactly sure where the location it comes to me from is located, but it always comes from the realm of the imagination. It is all fiction, and like all art, listeners can take from it what they want from it -- or not.

Like the song “The Way Young Lovers Do.” What is it? I do not know -- I made it up. Anyway, what 90-year-old does not want to feel like young lovers do? Most probably would -- it is as simple as that.

It’s a funny feeling that you actually have the courtesy of asking me about my songs. Did you know there have been numerous books written about my music where none of the authors were interested in my take on my music? None of the authors have ever had the courtesy of asking me to elaborate on my own music -- 500-page books and not one word did they want from me -- on anything, ever. I have tried to offer up help and am refused. They have flat out refused all insight from me. :-)

I guess they all want to make it into something it’s not or was not intended to be by me. Anyway, it’s bizarre to me.

Does it mean anything to you that "Astral Weeks" is so highly regarded -- No. 2 on the Mojo list of all-time greatest works -- yet it took 33 years to go gold?

The music on “Astral Weeks” is sophisticated poetry that is multi-layered in sounds that I do not think the majority take the time to wrap their head around. It’s subjective. I think it would be reductive for me to try to answer why.

I’d guess there are many reasons why it took so long, but yet it is recognized. It’s different than anything then and different still than anything that is obtainable now. Maybe there is not a big market for thoughtful deep music, I do not know. It speaks different things to different people. Maybe it spoke “Don’t buy me” to some –- not sure. I have always been quite sure it is not Top 40 material.

Does "Astral Weeks" represent to you something unique and extraordinary within your own body of work, more than any other album you've made?

Now that I really think about it, this, like all of my work, comes from the collective unconscious, I suppose. That is why it speaks different things to different people. All of my records are unique unto themselves and this one is no different. It is just part of what I do as a songwriter. These are just another set of stories and poetry, like all of them.

Over time has it gotten easier or harder to make your records the way you want to make them, and why?

Harder to find musicians that understand the depth of the arrangements as I originally write them, and harder because my style is a mixture of many elements. But easier because I am my own producer and I make them myself. I have the freedom to create, rather than to be stifled by someone else’s notions or far off-the-mark ideas.

Your albums continue to sell impressive quantities of physical CDs -- nearly 2 million in the last year, I understand -- in an era when the music industry has shifted its attention to downloads and sometimes can't give music away. How do you interpret the continuing success of your music when it's not being played heavily on commercial radio or promoted intensively by record companies?

Yes, I am lucky I have an audience that is not into the fad of the download. I am very grateful for that. My fans must intrinsically understand the value of having a record in their hand. With so much standing to kill the record business and make it extinct, I think it is great there are still people who appreciate the beauty of a record -- a real record, not a purchase of bad quality air through a wire that can erase with a punch of a button :-)

People must really want to save the records -- in spite of the record business that cannot seem to see the forest for the wood.

People in the record business have always been concerned about making money, but when you were a young fan and then started out as a recording artist, there were label owners like Sam Phillips, Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler who actually had ears -- people who knew music inside and out, rather than treating it strictly like a commodity to be marketed for maximum profit. You've made no secret of your disdain for many aspects of the music business -– did you start your own record label at least in part to show what's still possible when music itself is the driving force?

Let’s put it this way: When these men started selling off and moving on it was the beginning of what is now becoming the end of the record business. For the record business to win and win big it has to have people within it that have ears for music and who understand the old greats and respect [them]. With the way things have gone, it looks more and more like there is not much of a chance for new men with ears to emerge in the music business. It’s too money driven and no one seems to know how to really do simple mathematics.

Ahmet knew the value of respecting true ability and those who were there for the long haul. Today record companies are run by 30-year-olds who are more into who “famous” came in the building. They don’t care about selling hard copy CDs, where their real long-term money is. If they did, they would stop shooting themselves in the foot by ignoring the tried and true, and stop betting on so many losing horses. And they would learn how to use a calculator.

I have been independent with my own label since late '70s early '80s. I am really not trying to set any example for anything. It is the only way I can do what I do. It is the only way I can operate.

You've written some of the catchiest pop songs in the history of rock music ("Jackie Wilson Said," "Wild Night," "Bright Side of the Road"), as well as some of the most deeply spiritual ("Listen to the Lion," "In the Garden," "When Will I Ever Learn to Live in God"). Do those come from two different places inside?

No, I think everything comes from the same place in the imagination, just a different topic du jour, so to speak. I have worked with my art of song craft, and the result of that is somewhat of an across-the-board variety. I have experimented with many types of singing and use of voice as well as many types of songs, most ending up a mixture of a lot of different styles. But I prefer writing and crafting the spiritual-leaning songs the most.

Is there a legitimate place for music that simply entertains rather than music like yours that seeks to touch the heart and soul? Conversely, is it inherently destructive to commercialize music, which is fundamentally a sacred form of human expression?

Well, I myself will start playing entertainment-type songs if the audience is not understanding, or if I get a vibe they are not really listening, or if they seem to need to go somewhere else, or if I need to go somewhere else.

When music is commercialized, others tend to copy the formula. Then we end up with the drone of the constant loop of the same old thing over and over.

When music is contrived to the nth degree I do not think it can be sacred in that form. It loses its soul its heartbeat; its freedom to be.

Were you always a spiritual seeker?

Of course. How could I be a musician or write poetry if I am not?

Has all the inner work you've obviously done led you to a deeper understanding or knowledge of your role in life? Is that a never-ending process for you?

I do therefore I am. I do not assume that I have any “role” -- I do not think I do. That word does not feel right to me. I do not wear it well.

Perhaps the better word would be “purpose,” or “mission”?

My spiritual understanding has grown only to the extent [of my knowledge] about myself. But there is no role. That is illusion placed upon me by other people. I have no illusions about who I am. As a writer interested in wordsmith, what I gain spiritually can only help me and my writing or topics of my writing. But I have no role, no role at all. I am on no mission. I am what I am, and I write what I write.

I've always admired your sax playing, because it truly seems to express something you can't get out any other way. So even though you could probably hire whatever session great you wanted --and many times you have -- those where you choose to play sax yourself seem very special. What outlet opens for you when you pick up your horn?

Thank you for the compliment. I really enjoy the sax and [in] fact, I sometimes throw in an ‘entertainment’-type of kick-up song just so I can play it. On the other hand, I like playing very spirit-driven songs like ‘St. James Infirmary’ live on the sax. Can’t beat that feeling of just taking it where it wants to go. There is a freedom in that -- a good feeling, for sure.

I've been told by record execs at Warner Bros. and Rhino that the reason there has never been a Van Morrison CD box set is that you never wanted to stop looking ahead long enough to do it. Is that true, and given this decision to return to "Astral Weeks" now, is that still the case?

Well, Warner Bros. and Rhino don’t speak for me. They do not know me. I have always been forward-thinking, but other than that I have not really thought much about it. Putting “Astral Weeks” live to orchestration is my idea of being forward-thinking.

For all B.B. King has accomplished as a guitarist and a singer, when I talked to him recently, he said "If I could sing like Bobby Bland I'd be a happy man." Do you ever have a similar view of your own abilities as a songwriter, a singer or instrumentalist?

No, I only am what I am. But I sure do like the timbre of John Lee and I wouldn’t mind if I sounded like Leadbelly.

What musicians haven't you worked with that you'd still like to?

I would have loved for Miles Davis to have played on a record of mine. Actually, he said he would, but I didn’t get to him in time. I would have loved to have played with Howlin’ Wolf, Leadbelly, Lightnin’, Mahalia Jackson, Ella, Billie Holiday, so many.