Masses miss ‘beautiful trainwreck’
Fifty years on, critics and stars still fawn over an album Van Morrison recorded with a band he barely knew
Things seemed to be going well for Van Morrison. It was 1967, and he was riding on the success of his debut solo album, Blowin’ Your Mind!, with its pop classic Brown Eyed Girl. After the single’s 16 weeks on the Billboard 100 and peaking at No 1, the lane to being rock’s next great songwriter was wide open.
However, a tumultuous two years never really went the way they were supposed to and led the Northern Irishman to take a sharp turn and produce a jazz-rock mash-up album that shocked just about everyone:
Astral Weeks, which came out 50 years ago on November 29, 1968.
Morrison’s story is one of a man always at war. Rock critic Ryan H. Walsh’s recent Pitchfork article revisiting Morrison’s 1970 classic
Moondance, finds him essentially stalking Bob Dylan in hopes of befriending him, and squabbling with a new backing band (the Band), who saw him as “a drunken court-jester”.
But Morrison’s first true hardship came as a solo artist in December 1967, after producer Bert Berns died of a heart attack. Berns had signed him to BANG Records and produced
Brown Eyed Girl. Relations between them were strained when Berns died, with the producer wanting more pop hits while Morrison wanted to explore new musical territory. Things got worse, leading Morrison to flee New York City for Massachusetts.
Exactly what happened is murky. One legend has it that Berns’ widow, Ilene, took over the contracts, barring Morrison from the studio and New York clubs, and tried to have him deported. The other account is even darker. Berns was tied to the mob and, as the New Yorker recounted, mobster Carmine (Wassel) DeNoia began handling the contracts. DeNoia and Morrison reportedly got into a row that ended when the singer smashed a guitar over the gangster’s head, leading him to fear DeNoia would try to get him deported.
The one constant in both accounts is Morrison’s deportation concerns. “The move to Boston was completely fear-based,” Walsh said recently.
Morrison also married longtime sweetheart Janet Rigsbee (cementing his status in the United States) and began playing small clubs, school gyms and coffee shops, a world away from sweaty rock clubs.
He began refining his new sound, the one that would eventually become Astral Weeks. The songs were long, more circular, less melodic. Acoustic instruments, piccolos and flutes replaced electric bass and guitars. Percussion was sparse: spring showers rather than a thunderstorm.
They impressed people who knew music, including a Warner Bros executive named Joe Smith, who bought Morrison’s contract from BANG. (That doesn’t mean Morrison was any less of rage incarnate,
though. While his songs espoused love, Smith said, “He was a hateful little guy, but . . . I still think he’s the best rock ’n’ roll voice out there”.)
On producer Lewis Merenstein’s insistence, a (begrudging) Morrison
took the unusual step of hiring a group of jazz musicians. He met his band on the first day of recording.
“Van barely even said hello to these guys,” Walsh said. “He just showed them the compositions, and then they all just spat out those beautiful songs. I think so much of it is just this beautiful train wreck of so many different people working on it with no rehearsals.”
Still, many years later, Morrison maintained that he wasn’t necessarily trying to make a jazz-rock fusion album.
“I wanted to do it around the singing, and it had to be kind of jazzy, because that’s the way I’m singing it.
“A lot of this . . . there was no choice. I was totally broke. So I didn’t have time to sit around pondering or thinking all this through. It was just done on a basic pure survival level.”
Critics and fellow musicians fawned (and continue to fawn) over it. “It made me trust in beauty. It gave me a sense of the divine,” Bruce Springsteen has said of the album.
Walsh: “They don’t sound like recordings to me. They sound like living, breathing organisms.”
That didn’t matter to Warner Bros, though, because not enough people bought it.
In fact, when Morrison went to record his next album, Moondance ,he seemed to be searching for another pop hit reminiscent of Brown Eyed Girl. Warner’s reportedly had told him he had one last chance.
Moondance was a commercial hit and well received critically. Yet, his masterpiece, Astral Weeks, remained known to the select few who really cared to spend time unravelling it.