Venturing into the slip-stream of 1968

Author revisits the making of Van Morrison’s ‘Astral Weeks’

The story of how Van Morrison wrote and recorded his seminal album “Astral Weeks” during the most tumultuous year in postwar America could have been a modern epic of near Pasternakian proportions.

OK, OK. Maybe it was never going to be “Dr. Zhivago.” But it had more potential than Ryan H. Walsh wrings out of it in his disappointing and disjointed “Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968.”

Mr. Walsh, a writer and musician, takes the thread of a promising idea — that Van Morrison wrote the backbone of “Astral Weeks” while hiding out in radical Boston — and spins pure dross.

The book’s main problem is structural. It’s two or three reasonably entertaining chapters of original reporting about Mr. Morrison sandwiched around recycled newspaper stories about Boston’s counterculture. Like a Mercedes-Benz hood ornament welded onto a Pinto, the parts just don’t fit. Van Morrison was a loner, with no ties to Boston’s counterculture (unless you consider ex-J. Geils singer Peter Wolf a revolutionary).

To be fair, this probably wasn’t the book Mr. Walsh set out to write. And it probably wasn’t what Penguin Press expected when it commissioned a book three years ago.

But, as Donald Rumsfeld might say, sometimes you have to go to print with the material you have rather than the material you wish you had.

The idea for this book was hatched in 2015, when Boston Magazine published Mr. Walsh’s article about the city’s ties to Mr. Morrison’s most acclaimed record. Mr. Walsh reported that Van Morrison, 22 years old and fresh off the hit single “Brown Eyed Girl,” had lived in an apartment in Cambridge, Mass., during the spring and summer of 1968 while waiting out a contract dispute.

He passed the time by writing and rehearsing new material for an album that became known as “Astral Weeks.”

An editor at Penguin saw the magazine article, liked it, and suggested that Mr. Walsh turn it into a book. With all the baby boomerdriven rock memoirs climbing the best-seller lists in recent years, a book-length retrospective on one of pop music’s most beloved and admired records probably seemed like a surefire hit.

There was only one problem: the perpetually prickly Mr. Morrison refused to cooperate, the Boston Globe reported last March. With deadline fast approaching, Mr. Walsh, by choice or by necessity, resorted to an old reporter’s trick: He filled out his narrative with rehashed newspaper articles. A couple of them, like the tale of actor-turned-bank-robber Mark Frechette, are mildly engrossing; most of them, like the history of Mel Lyman, a Charlie Manson wannabe who operated a string of communes in Boston, Los Angeles and San Francisco, probably won’t interest anyone but New England septuagenarians.

Contrary to the title, “Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968’’ offers no new perspective on the major news events of that most traumatic year.

There are glancing references to the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy and the political riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, but they’re usually made in connection to some concurrent event in Boston.

The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., for example, is used to recycle a threadbare tale about how Boston Mayor Kevin White enticed soul singer James Brown to perform a concert to prevent urban rioting in the wake of Rev. King’s murder.

As for Van Morrison, he blusters through this book like a churlish man-child with a drinking problem. “He was a hateful little guy,’’ said Joe Smith of Warner Bros. records. “Our life was very traumatic and horrible,’’ said Mr. Morrison’s ex-wife, Janet Rigsbee.

Perhaps one reason for Van Morrison’s refusal to cooperate is his continuing ambivalence toward “Astral Weeks.’’

Although it now appears on many best-album lists, “Astral Weeks’’ flopped on release in November 1968. Its mystical, streamof-consciousness lyrics about death and rebirth, and its hushed folk- and jazz-tinged musical arrangements placed it completely outside the political and musical mainstream.

“Of all the records I have ever made, that one is definitely not rock,’’ Mr. Morrison said. “Why they keep calling it one I have no idea.”

Without the singer’s cooperation, Mr. Walsh tries to piece together Mr. Morrison’s Boston sojourn through interviews with his ex-wife and several local musicians. Their secondhand recollections, however, are a poor substitute for the musician’s personal insight.

A generation of artists, from film director Martin Scorsese to heartland rocker Bruce Springsteen, have cited “Astral Weeks” as an influence.

With the golden anniversary of “Astral Weeks” fast approaching, the timing was perfect for a look at one of pop music’s greatest achievements and its place in pop culture. Sadly, Ryan Walsh’s book is not it.