Deeper Into the Mystic: More Thoughts on the Meaning of Van Morrison’s Story
This Week: The Secret Boston Story of Van Morrison’s epic album — with Ryan Walsh, John Payne, Paul Muldoon and Erik Jensen as Lester Bangs. Listen today at 2pm on WBUR or anytime on our website.
MM: I love this show! Engineer George Hicks and I are the hard core Astral Weeks fans on our crew, but the fun of this one was watching Zach, Conor, Becca and even Chris get hooked. Local writer Ryan Walsh was our guide; we were intrigued by the Boston connection Ryan uncovered: turns out Morrison wrote most of this album in 1968 while he was living on Green Street in Cambridge and performing in clubs like the Catacombs and the Tea Party. The story unfolded from there — an amazing creative accident, like Miles’ Kind of Blue or any number of unplanned artistic masterpieces, and Ryan tells it beautifully. We started with a walk around Van’s old haunts and through some of Boston’s rock history.
Ryan first published his story in Boston Magazine in 2015 and expanded it into a book, Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968 that includes great Boston political history as well as a picture of the counterculture scene here in the 60’s with its eccentric characters like the cult leader Mel Lyman
Local musician and teacher John Payne played with Van Morrison on the album. During a blizzard last month he showed up at Chris’ place with his flute and soprano sax and told stories about the accidental way the album came together and listened with us to the songs he played 50 years ago - “Astral Weeks “and “Slim Slow Slider.” It’s amazing tape; you’ll get goosebumps listening to John get goosebumps.
Other highlights from the show are the Irish poet Paul Muldoon reading the lyrics of “Madame George” and actor Erik Jenson, who played the rock critic Lester Bangs in the off Broadway show “How To Be a Rock Critic,” reading Bangs’ incredible essay “Astral Weeks.”
Mega Van fan George Hicks, our mega talented engineer at WBUR who masterfully mixed this week’s show, sent his thoughts from California:
Having first heard it 35 years ago, Astral Weeks was one of those records I forgot to remember. Working on this special program reminded me that it’s all about remembering. After I finished mixing the show, my wife Susan and I sat and listened to the album together (who does that anymore?). After that skronky, searching fade-out in “Slim Slow Slider,” left us wondering what to do when your lover has gone, we pondered John Payne’s larger, if less immediate, question: What kind of music is this? Susan said the only thing it brought to mind is the emotional power of Nina Simone, and I thought of the occasional insertions of Bach or bebop Simone would slip into her own sui generis groove music.
Like Ryan Walsh, Susan hears Astral Weeks as a single unified work — in her mind, a young man’s coming-of-age story. And that got me thinking about Lester Bang’s sprawling essay on Astral Weeks. Considering “Cyprus Avenue,” he regards the singer’s object of desire, so young and bold, fourteen years old, as indicative of “an obsessively reiterated theme of pedophilia” in Van Morrison’s early work. Absent any other examples to back up this rather troubling assertion, I’d say Lester lost the plot. He listens to “Cyprus Avenue” and pictures a 22 year-old Morrison isolated and sweating in his vocal booth in a New York recording studio, moaning furtively about some underage schoolgirl.
Well, that does kind of break the spell! But Susan and I simply imagine the singer “caught behind the wheel” as a lad of sixteen, or fifteen, even. And the spell returns. Maybe he’s young George Ivan Morrison, maybe someone else. There might be a lot of reasons why he’s unable to approach the girl; some he’s conscious of, some he’s not. Maybe he’s grounded but he took his dad’s car — again. Maybe her big brother threatened to pound him. Maybe he doesn’t feel he’s good enough for her. Who knows? For us, “Cyprus Avenue” is just another vignette from his own Remembrance of Things Past, sharply drawn yet dreamlike; another example of Van Morrison doing what he has done from “Brown Eyed Girl” on: asking us all, do you remember when…?
It’s a mark of maturity to look back on coming-of-age, infatuation, sexual and spiritual awakenings, first love, loss, and death as incisively as Morrison does on Astral Weeks. Just a year before, in the harrowing “T.B. Sheets,” from the Bert Berns sessions that produced “Brown Eyed Girl,” the boy not only doesn’t know what he’ll do when his girl is dead, he doesn’t even know how to behave in her presence while she’s still alive. But a year later, in “Slim Slow Slider,” the sometimes chiding, sometimes lamenting singer has become a fully conscious actor: before the song is over he — and we — come to know that his lover’s “brand-new boy” has a cloak and scythe; that Cadillac is a hearse, and I know you won’t be back…
Unlike Ryan Walsh, I enjoy most of Van Morrison’s later music. In a quick look back through his catalog I recalled another “fantabulous” Morrison moment from Hymns To The Silence:
Halfway through an earnest, fervent “Just A Closer Walk With Thee,” he suddenly abandons ship, diving deep, deeper, farther in search of lost time. He starts shouting/rapping/declaiming/emoting as if suddenly possessed by Dickens’ Spirit of Christmas Past; previous, previous, previous…
See me through days of wine and roses
By and by when the morning comes
Jazz and blues and folk, poetry and jazz
Voice and music, music and no music
Silence and then voice
Music and writing, words
Memories, memories way back
Take me way back, Hyndford Street and Hank Williams
Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet on Sunday afternoons in winter
SIDNEY BECHET! Sunday afternoons in winter
And the tuning in of stations in Europe on the wireless
Before, yes before it was the way it was
More silence, more breathing together
Not rushing, being
Before rock `n’ roll, before television
Previous, previous, previous…Van Morrison’s overarching message, in Astral Weeks and throughout his prolific career, is simple: Never forget what we know to be true. Never forget, what we cherished, what we feared, what destroyed us, what made us, what divided us, what drew us together.
Zach Goldhammer: One of the embedded tragedies in Walsh’s story, for me, is that the creative fervor of the ’68 Boston scene he describes seems to have largely vanished today. It’s not just that we’ve failed to memorialize the city’s counter-cultural past—we’ve also failed to keep that spirit of experimentation alive for future generations.
It’s hard to imagine now that a debt-ridden poet like Morrison would choose to come to Boston of all places to workshop his “mercurial weirdness” on stage, or that a college dropout like John Payne would be able to build a successful career as a full-time, improvising musician in this city.
Boston today is a place where few artists can truly afford to live. The larger venues in the city have turned into bloated corporate behemoths which rarely open their doors for local acts. They have also been actively hostile to hip-hop artists and failed to foster the careers of local people of color in particular. There are almost no major venues which are run by and for young people—the subterranean network of Allston basement shows hardly compares to the scale and scope of the Boston Tea Party during its heyday (or even The Catacombs at its lowest depths).
Boston isn’t necessarily unique in its short cultural memory—other cities have also failed to recognize and memorialize their bohemian pasts. As I’ve written before, Chicago has struggled to preserve the legacy of its South Side blues clubs as well as the avant-garde jazz scene which Sun Ra pioneered during his residency in that city. Yet Chicago has still succeeded in creating conditions for new experimental artists to emerge and thrive in a vibrant ecosystem of small clubs, non-profit venues, and robust, public music education programs. There’s a reason why Chicago now has the most important hip-hop scene—and arguably the most vital music scene, period—in the country today. It’s not an accident that Chance the Rapper—the artist who might be most responsible for Chicago’s musical renaissance—got his start in a publicly funded youth program hosted by the Harold Washington Library.
If we want the Van Morrison of tomorrow to find even a temporary home in Boston, we need to recreate the kind of environment that made that career possible. It may be true that Astral Weeks itself was a product of cosmic coincidence, but more mundane structures are still needed to sustain and preserve that kind of divine inspiration here in our city. Doing so requires that we recognize past moments of artistic achievement without simply preserving them in amber or viewing them as past pinnacles which can never again be reached. Boomer-era nostalgia, as Mark Blythe reminds us, can be toxic, but we can still try to channel that spirit into something new.
Jonathan Richman—who served as a snail-mail correspondent for Walsh’s research—might be the best spokesperson for what once made Boston’s cultural scene so great. This is partly because he has a fond, clear-eyed assessment of the “bratty but sincere” spirit of those 60s and 70s counter-cultural giants. One of my favorite songs of his is “They Showed Me the Door to Bohemia”—an unrecorded tribute to the Harvard Square scene which gave him his artistic start:
Well, my parents didn’t laugh at me & my pretentious artwork when I was 16
they knew I had to start somewhere
so they just dropped me off in Harvard Square
they knew that, well, Jonathan has to find his way somehow to Bohemia
that’s how it goes
he’s one of them
they didn’t mindthere I was in Harvard square
pretentious artwork in my hand
the hipsters saw me standing there
they could see this young man had to find his way
to Bohemiathat’s right, they showed me around
I even argued with the velvet underground
well, they showed me the door to Bohemia, ohthey could see that this was life or death
they showed me the door to Bohemia
they could see that this was my last breath
Let’s hope that artists in Greater Boston today can still find a little room to breath.
In the meantime, we’re lucky to have found at least one local musician who’s been able to hack it. Ryan Walsh is not only a great music writer; he’s also a local rocker in his own right. Check out his band Hallelujah the Hills—their anthemic “Wave Backwards to Massachusetts” sounds something like a spiritual successor to Richman’s “Roadrunner” (which should be our state’s official rock song, btw).
Susan Coyne’s Artist Corner:
Speaking of local artists, here are three bonus illustrations from our very own Susan Coyne—one from Chris’s talk with Zadie Smith at BU last week (not recorded, sorry) and another two from the Parkland students presentation at Harvard a week or so ago. You can support Susan’s artwork by purchasing some of her amazing prints at coyneworks.com:
And speaking of supporting the work of artists, we hope you’ll think about supporting us. This week’s show was a labor of love, and each and every one of us poured our hearts into it. We count on donations from listeners to pay for our independent show. So click on over to our donate page, and tell your friends! You can also help us earn some extra funding by listening to our shows on the RadioPublic platform (created by our old friend Jake Shapiro).
In another time, in the same place,
The OS Crew
