After the Summer of Love
What happened after the Summer of Love in San Francisco? Naturally, the kids and the suits went off in search of the next seductive place. For a brief, weird moment, some thought that place might be Boston.
“There’s actually a much stronger underground situation here than in Frisco, precisely because Boston is one of the most uptight cities in America,” the musician Peter Rowan told Vogue magazine when it sent a writer to scope out the scene. Rowan, the future bluegrass mainstay who was in a psychedelic Boston band at the time, wasn’t kidding: As first-time author Ryan Walsh details in his “secret history” of a proud old city caught in the throes of cultural hysteria, things got pretty freaky for a minute there in the Cradle of Liberty.
Walsh, a musician and firsttime author, uses as his lodestar Van Morrison’s short stint in Boston, a detour that yielded the one-of-a-kind masterwork “Astral Weeks.” Like Robert Gordon’s “It Came From Memphis,” Walsh’s book re-creates a time and place that attracted an impressive array of characters, some of whom (like Rowan, or the DJ and rock star Peter Wolf ) went on to achieve big things, and others (like the cult leader Mel Lyman) who effectively fell off the face of the earth.
Morrison’s spell in Boston was marked by equal parts dread and ardor. He’d left New York City after bumping up against the violent underworld connected to manager Bert Berns, who died of heart failure at the end of 1967; Berns’ widow blamed his mercurial relationship with Morrison. But the singer was also in the early stages of his love affair with Janet Rigsbee, his first wife, whom he christened Janet Planet.
Part of Walsh’s book involves his own dogged pursuit of an elusive, reportedly lifechanging recording of a gig at a nightclub called the Catacombs, two floors below a pool hall, near what was then known as the Berklee School of Music. Billed as the Van Morrison Controversy, the show featured the singer with a two-man lineup “that never received any substantial credit for helping shape songs that would end up” on the classic “Astral Weeks” album. Along the way, Walsh digs himself all the way down a rabbit hole of epic, site-specific peculiarity, from the ill-fated “Bosstown Sound” record industry marketing campaign to Tony Curtis playing the Boston Strangler.
Amid a rogues’ gallery of movers, shakers and acid takers, the book’s other main man is Lyman, a nearly forgotten character whose biggest moment came as a member of the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, when he took the stage after Bob Dylan’s polarizing electric set at the Newport Folk Festival to blow a mournful elegy on his harmonica. But Lyman was also known as the leader of a mysterious commune, which published an alternative newspaper, the Avatar, that routinely claimed him to be God.
Despite Boston’s stodgy reputation, there were plenty of historic undercurrents that led to the circus scene of 1968, with “Harvardians, hippies, cyclists, stray sailors, [and] tuned-up insurance company drones” all converging on the concert hall known as the Boston Tea Party. Walsh bounds from a brief primer on the city’s central role in the development of American Spiritualism to the hallucinogenic experiments of the young Harvard professors Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (Ram Dass).
When the Velvet Underground became the de facto house band at the Tea Party, Lou Reed was deep into studying the work of the New Age forerunner Alice Bailey; in her book “A Treatise on White Magic,” she explained how to quiet your “astral body” and “call down a stream of pure white light.”
Morrison had left town by the time “Astral Weeks” was released, moving on to Woodstock, and then to Marin County. The album didn’t sell, but the next one, “Moondance,” made him a superstar. Cast as the next Manson Family in a notorious 1971 Rolling Stone expose, Lyman and his followers retreated from the public eye; Lyman’s reported death in 1978 has never been verified. None of the bands lumped in with the “Bosstown Sound” made much headway.
But if most of the mindblowing activity that took place in Boston in 1968 amounted to a hill of beans, “Astral Weeks” has belatedly come to be known as one of the greatest albums of all time. It’s a mystical, deliciously inscrutable folk-jazz record that “minted its own genre,” as Walsh writes.
“The mystery grows,” as the album’s producer, Lewis Merenstein, told the author, “because it’s all a spiritual quest that is essentially unknowable.”