Astral Weeks Read online

  PENGUIN PRESS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  penguin.com

  Copyright © 2018 by Ryan H. Walsh

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Excerpt from “Astral Weeks” by Van Morrison. Copyright © 1968 (renewed) WB Music Corp. (ASCAP) and Caledonia Soul Music (ASCAP). All rights administered by WB Music Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Alfred Music.

  Excerpt from “The Red Sox are Winning,” words and music by Peter H. Rowan. Copyright © 1968 (renewed) Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp. (BMI). All rights reserved. Used by permission of Alfred Music.

  Selections from What’s Happening, Mr. Silver? Courtesy WGBH Educational Foundation.

  Selections from Avatar. © 1966 by Broadside Publications. Used by permission of the publisher. Broadside cover courtesy of David Wilson and The Broadside. Photo by Rick Stafford.

  Image credits appear here.

  ISBN: 9780735221345 (hardcover)

  ISBN: 9780735221352 (e-book)

  Version_1

  FOR MARISSA

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  PROLOGUE: IN THE BEGINNING

  1: Against Electricity

  2: God’s Underground Newspaper

  3: The Silver Age of Television

  4: Paul Revere Is Shamed; Being a Brief History of the Bosstown Sound

  5: The White Light Underground

  6: Scenes from the Real World

  7: I Saw You Coming from the Cape

  8: A Little More Light into the Darkness of Man

  9: The Noises That Roar in the Space Between the Worlds

  10: Something in the Bricks

  11: We Have All Been Astrals Many Times

  EPILOGUE: AFTERWARDS

  PHOTOGRAPHS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  IMAGE CREDITS

  INDEX

  PROLOGUE

  In the Beginning

  YOU KNOW THIS STORY. At the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, twenty-three-year-old singer-songwriter and future Nobel laureate Bob Dylan defiantly led his band through a decibel-pushing, distortion-heavy electric set, including “Maggie’s Farm” and “Like a Rolling Stone,” shocking folk purists. “If I had an axe, I’d chop the microphone cable right now,” Pete Seeger grumbled. Fans booed, organizers were aghast, and Dylan had turned himself into someone else. It’s one of the true culture-shifting moments in rock ’n’ roll history. But what else happened that night?

  Though other acts followed Dylan, the evening was enveloped by a confused, mournful feeling: The festival was now a funeral. One musician was so upset by Dylan’s set that he performed an unscheduled coda. On the empty, unlit Newport stage, a skinny, twenty-seven-year-old harmonica player named Mel Lyman closed out the proceedings.

  “I wanted to save the world with music . . . I still do, but I was more naive at that time,” Lyman told a reporter in 1971. “I kept having this fucking recurring image in my sleep, of playing ‘Rock of Ages.’ Every night I’d toss around in bed, I’d say, ‘Don’t make me do it. Don’t make me do it.’ Finally I said, ‘OK, if it’s gotta be done, I’ll do it.’” Lyman was at Newport as part of Jim Kweskin’s Jug Band, but their performance had ended long before Dylan’s heretical set. As crowds streamed toward the exit, Lyman pushed out a eulogy through his instrument.

  “I played ‘Rock of Ages.’ The people heard it as they were leaving, but it was more for the musicians than the people,” Lyman explained. “The musicians were spellbound. They were hearing what they should’ve been doing. Some of the musicians were crying—I was told that later. I must’ve lost ten pounds during that song. The sweat was just pouring down. The spirit was so strong I could barely get it out—you know, the harmonica, that’s a pretty tiny hole for all that spirit to go through, that little tiny reed.” According to some reports, his rendition of “Rock of Ages” went on for half an hour.

  Within eighteen months of this performance Mel Lyman would commandeer an entire neighborhood of run-down houses in the Fort Hill area of Roxbury, an impoverished part of Boston, issue cuss-laden pronouncements through an influential underground newspaper, and declare he was God to anyone who would listen. By early 1968, more than a hundred people lived with Mel in his Fort Hill Community. Their stated goal was ever changing and hard to pin down, but on several occasions Lyman “Family” members spoke to the press about creating “the most beautiful music the world has ever known”—and it seemed that they were hell-bent on making this music in a style that was in direct opposition to Dylan’s Newport act. The Lymans rejected electric instruments, embracing traditional American folk stylings as a way to transform their lives.

  The most beautiful music the world has ever known. Some of the music that emerged from Fort Hill was certainly lovely. But this story starts with a man who undeniably made good on a similar ambition, at the same time and in the same place. He came to the idea himself, by way of a dream.

  * * *

  • • •

  IN EARLY 1968, seven miles from Mel Lyman’s Fort Hill Community and across the Charles River, a twenty-two-year-old Van Morrison had just found himself the holder of a lease for an apartment on Green Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was about to make a masterpiece.

  Born in 1945 in Belfast, Ireland, George Ivan Morrison started writing poetry as a child, “before I knew what poetry was.” His father’s vast record collection, acquired during a trip to the States, introduced Van to the mysterious world of American blues through artists like Leadbelly and Jelly Roll Morton. Beginning his music career as a teenager, he played saxophone and guitar for several acts before finding acclaim as the front man of R&B act Them, who first toured America in 1966. A stint at the Whisky a Go Go in Los Angeles led to the band jamming with Jim Morrison, sharing a bill with Captain Beefheart, and despite a 50 percent alcohol discount, running up a $2,600 tab. Another anecdote involved Van borrowing a guitar, smashing it onstage, then casually telling the sobbing ex–ax owner, “That’s art, man.”

  On June 23, Them appeared in San Francisco, where Morrison met Janet Rigsbee, a nineteen-year-old Bay Area model and aspiring actress. “I looked at him, he looked at me, and it was alchemical whammo,” she said. “I had never been to a rock concert before. We really connected in a very spiritual way, so we tried to spend as much time together as we could while he was touring up and down California.”

  “One night he would perform well, and the next night he would just glower at the audience,” Them guitarist Jim Armstrong recalled. Between shows Morrison was putting together the lyrics for “Ballerina,” an ode to Janet and one of the first pieces of Astral Weeks to be written. When Them’s work visas were not extended, the band returned to Ireland, where Van abruptly left the group. He spent part of his tour earnings on a reel-to-reel tape recorder, planted it at his parents’ house, and laid down countless hours of song ideas. He pined for Janet, trying to figure out what would come next.

  Described by one biographer as reeking of “Pall Malls, cheap cologne, and hit records,” producer Bert Berns was no one’s idea of a savior, but in 1967 Van Morrison wasn’t in a positio
n to be choosy. Berns had been the first American producer to work with Them; Morrison had been immediately enamored when he learned that Berns had written “I Don’t Want to Go On Without You” for the Drifters. Berns introduced Them to overdubs and a song of his called “Here Comes the Night.” Their version went to #2 in the United Kingdom, and #24 in the United States.

  Berns could have attached himself to one of the several post-Morrison versions of Them, but he knew to bet on the talented but currently aimless singer. Berns hoped that Morrison could become a “rock and roll version of the Irish poet Brendan Behan”—a unique vision, to say the least. He offered $2,500 to sign a contract that a desperate Morrison barely reviewed.

  Arriving in New York in 1967, Morrison was puzzled by what he found in the studio. “I showed up for the session, and forty people are there,” he later explained to a Warner Brothers executive. “Four guitar players, four keyboard players, five singers, four entire rhythm sections. It was bizarre.” In banter heard before one outtake, Morrison wishes it could be freer, remarking, “at the minute, we have a choke thing going, know what I mean?” No one did. One photo reveals an exhausted Morrison, head in his hands. Bert Berns was calling most of the shots at these sessions; he changed the lyrics and title of “Brown-Skinned Girl” at the last minute to the version we all know so well today. When Morrison was finally allowed to lay down “T.B. Sheets” in the style and arrangement he was comfortable with, he ended up sobbing in the vocal booth. “He was just torn apart,” engineer Brooks Arthur recalled. “He was sitting on the floor in a heap like a wrung-out dishcloth, completely spent emotionally.” After two days, Berns sent him back to Belfast; the producer would bring Morrison back to the States only if one of the songs became a hit. The singer told Janet that if she heard him on the radio, it meant he was on his way to find her.

  Luckily, “Brown Eyed Girl” spent sixteen weeks on the Billboard charts, peaking at #10. Berns flew Morrison back to New York. Looking for more hits, Berns was agitated when the singer played him stream-of-consciousness demos he had recorded in Belfast. Ilene Berns, the producer’s young wife, said that Morrison was out of control, even after Janet joined him in New York. Morrison would sabotage press showcases and studio sessions without warning. At a show at the Bottom Line, his onstage behavior caused the backup singers to flee mid-set. During one recording session, he flung his guitar at a wall and screamed at the musicians, who couldn’t sort out the particular issue through his Irish accent.

  On December 30, 1967, not long after an intense argument between Berns and Morrison, the producer died of a heart attack at the age of thirty-eight. Ilene was not shy about blaming Morrison. Van and Janet did not attend the funeral, which they later admitted was a terrible mistake. In early 1968, the couple relocated to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Morrison biographies tend to gloss over this pivotal moment. I wanted to find out why he came here, and why he left.

  * * *

  • • •

  ASTRAL WEEKS IS my favorite record of all time. Like its eloquent champion Lester Bangs, I also believe the record to be some kind of “mystical document,” despite the decidedly gritty circumstances around its creation. When I discovered it at twenty-two, I was experiencing my first true heartbreak—I felt like a shell of myself, carved out by loneliness. In my final year at Boston University, I’d fallen madly in love with someone, but she was torn between me and her longtime hometown boyfriend. Enter my upstairs neighbor, a palm reader whom I only knew as “Grandmother.” (She called me “Grandson.”) Studying our hands in the dim light of her apartment, she concluded that a cosmic accident had allowed us to meet—but that didn’t mean we would stay together. Grandmother turned out to be right; the woman I loved moved to San Francisco, and something held me back. I stayed in Boston, where I was born and raised.

  I had never heard of Astral Weeks; I was indifferent to Van Morrison. But something about seeing the cover, there in a record-store rack in Newton, commanded me to slap down eleven bucks and take it home. From the very first notes, the music seemed to serve as some kind of protection for the part of me that held on to hope and the idea of real love. A force field grew around me with each listen, as songs like “Sweet Thing” and “Madame George” helped beat back any encroaching cynicism. The album had presented itself in a moment when I needed to hear it, promising that I was not alone in my despair. Years later, I met a woman who put on Astral Weeks at the end of our first date. As the title track began and she held up the vinyl album cover, smiling, I can only assume my jaw hit the floor; I recalled all that talk about cosmic accidents and wondered if I was in the middle of another one. (Reader, I married her.)

  At some point I learned that part of the album’s origin story lay in my own backyard—which struck me as beyond coincidence. Over the years, I came to believe that if I could piece together the story of Van Morrison’s time on my native soil, in those months before the album came out, I would understand something vital about the music that had buoyed me in those dark days. While researching the album’s half-buried local connections, my curiosity about Boston in the late sixties grew into obsession. The music scene from which Van Morrison stocked his band, and the deeply strange tale of Mel Lyman’s Fort Hill Community, suggested an incredibly rich artistic past forgotten by all but a few present-day residents.

  As a musician myself, with a band operating out of Boston for more than ten years, I’d spent a good chunk of my life immersed in the city’s music scene. So why hadn’t these stories been passed around like legends at the Silhouette Lounge or the Middle East? Why was I blown away to learn that proto-punk and Natick native Jonathan Richman thought of Boston when he listened to Astral Weeks?

  Legendary groups like Aerosmith sprouted up in the city in the seventies, but I was more interested in what came before. Dylan’s electrified set at Newport, it seemed, had served as the inciting action for a sea change in Boston’s counterculture—literally driving people mad, and making others treat the divisions between folk and rock like lines on a battlefield. Van Morrison and Mel Lyman embodied these struggles, and nearly everyone I spoke to had a story about one of them.

  In a piece about the Pixies, Pitchfork sniffed, “Boston: a famous place but fiercely provincial, with all the reticence of small-town New England and almost no cosmopolitan sheen. We can always depend on Boston for more sports and software engineers.” This is a story about Boston before tech innovation and athletic dominance became the city’s calling cards—back when LSD and the occult, protest and serial murders were the subjects of most national news stories about life inside the Cradle of Liberty. From the comedy of errors that was MGM Records’ attempt to launch the “Boston Sound,” to the Velvet Underground’s near constant, formative residency at the Boston Tea Party, to the groundbreaking weirdness being aired weekly on WGBH—looking back on Boston in 1968 is like catching a glimpse of an upside-down, hallucinogenic version of the thriving metropolis that stands today.

  During the 1950s, Boston lost more residents than any other major city in America. Redevelopment efforts stalled in the early sixties; neighborhoods seen today as highly desirable were all but abandoned. When Mayor Kevin White was sworn into office on January 1, 1968, he spoke of a “New Boston,” with plans to fill the city of forty-eight square miles with people of exceptional talent. He could never have imagined the group of eccentrics who would, almost instantly, make his public pledge a reality.

  The story of the late-sixties counterculture in America has been told before, especially in regard to the drama unfolding in San Francisco, Chicago, and New York. But what happened in Boston has gone largely unremarked. Perhaps it has to do with the city’s Puritan roots, a natural inclination to sweep anything but victories under the rug. This is the secret history of Boston in 1968, about people desperately hunting for something intangible and incandescent, many of whom referred to that something as God. Some found it, embodied it, or impersonated it; others were crushed by it. As
Marilyn French wrote in The Women’s Room, her bestselling novel inspired by her time at Harvard in 1968, “That year itself was an open door, but a magical one; once you went through it, you could never return.”

  ONE

  Against Electricity

  JOHN SHELDON WAS SEVENTEEN YEARS OLD when a frowning, baby-faced Irish man showed up at the door of his parents’ house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Sheldon, a guitar prodigy, had recently auditioned for the songwriter. Now here the guy was on his porch, all five-foot-five of him, with a local upright bass player looming over his shoulder.

  The teenager didn’t know what to make of him. “He didn’t say very much. We played for a while, and the first thing I remember him saying was, ‘Are you available for gigs?’”

  And that was how John Sheldon became the guitarist for Van Morrison during the summer of 1968.

  Morrison was still riding the buzz of “Brown Eyed Girl,” but he certainly wasn’t a household name. His adopted hometown didn’t pay him special attention. “I remember one gig at the Boston Tea Party,” Sheldon said, “but we had no drummer.” With Van and the bass player, Tom Kielbania, they drove by Berklee School of Music and “saw this guy on the sidewalk. Tom said, ‘Hey, it’s Joe. Joe, do you want to play drums?’ This is the kind of level that things were happening at then.”

  Morrison became a constant presence in the Sheldon household. He would tie up the family phone, carrying on epic arguments with Ilene Berns over royalties for “Brown Eyed Girl.” “My parents would come down for breakfast on Sunday,” Sheldon recalls, “and it would be a bunch of people they didn’t know.” Morrison even tried to convince Sheldon’s mother to let him move into one of the rooms, along with his wife, Janet, and her son from a previous relationship, Peter. Mrs. Sheldon firmly said no, but not because she was a square. “You have to remember, this is the same house that James Taylor and other musicians would just hang out at,” Sheldon says. (Taylor had become a family friend after dating John’s older sister, Phoebe, which is how he ended up teaching Sheldon the basics on a red Duo-Sonic Fender he sold him for $100.) His parents sometimes complained about the flurry of musicians, “but I think that they liked it more than they didn’t,” Sheldon says. “It was something that was good for me. I didn’t have much else going—I wasn’t doing well in school or anything.”