Ireland In 50 Albums, No 6: Astral Weeks, by Van Morrison
Van Morrison performs at a Warner Brothers party at Steve Paul's The Scene nightclub in 1969 in New York. (Picture Popsie Randolph/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty)
Van Morrison fell in love while on tour of the United States with his band Them in 1966. Janet Rigsbee was in the audience at a gig in San Francisco. When the pair locked eyes, it was “alchemical whammo”, according to the 19-year-old model.
Morrison began calling her Janet Planet. He returned to Northern Ireland, moving back in with his parents, but they pined for each other. Morrison told her that if she heard him on the radio it meant he was on his way to find her.
The record producer Bert Berns, whose songwriting credits include 'Twist And Shout', was a Them fan, having produced the group and written their hit Here Comes The Night. He phoned Morrison, inviting him to New York to sign for his record label, Bang Records.
While in New York, Morrison recorded 'Brown Eyed Girl', which was written about his muse. The song was a hit in the summer of 1967, by which time Morrison had returned to Northern Ireland because of visa issues. Berts summoned Morrison back to the United States, believing he could make him into a rock’n’roll version of Brendan Behan. He promised to sort out Morrison’s immigration status.
“I first met Van in the Coffee Kitchen off Molesworth St in Dublin,” says broadcaster and music personality BP Fallon. “I didn’t really know him, but this guy was so morose I had to do something for him. I lent him a tenner, which he seized upon very enthusiastically. Them had gone through various line-ups and had collapsed around him, or he helped it collapse; a bit of both I presume.
"They had been pop stars for a time, with girls screaming at them, but they weren’t well rewarded. They weren’t getting on. Van put the £10 towards his plane fare going to New York to sign with Bert Berns.”
Janet Planet joined Morrison when he landed in New York, but things started to go awry on the music front. Berns died from a heart attack in December 1967. This left Morrison with two problems. First, Bang Records hadn’t correctly filed the paperwork for his work permit.
He was called into an immigration office. The Vietnam War was raging at this stage. Morrison was asked if he would serve in the military. He declined the offer. To avoid deportation, Morrison and Janet Planet were married by a judge in a Lower Manhattan court house in January 1968.
Second, Morrison had hardly earned a penny from the success of 'Brown Eyed Girl'. After the death of Berns, Morrrison’s contract with Bang Records was supervised by a mobster, Carmine De Noia.
Morrison got in a funk. The story goes that one night Morrison got in a drunken argument with De Noia, who smashed an acoustic guitar over his head. Morrison was at an impasse. He was prevented from recording because of his bum record deal, and he couldn’t get a gig in New York City because its music venues were afraid to book him in case of reprisals from the Mafia.
Morrison decided to decamp to Boston with his new bride where there was a vibrant live music scene. They found a cheap apartment. Morrison cobbled together a band of student musicians in the spring of 1968. They began gigging around Boston, and rehearsing together in the house or John Sheldon, a guitarist, which was in Cambridge, on the other side of the Charles River.
Joey Bebo was the band’s drummer. He was walking down the street one day when a bass player, Tom Kielbania, who he'd gigged with around Boston, asked him if he wanted a gig. When he told him it was with Van Morrison, the name didn’t register with Bebo. He thought rock’n’roll was “silly”, and that Them’s song Gloria was “teenybopper stuff”, but he needed the gig. He was supporting himself through college so he jumped in the car with him. They went to John Sheldon's house.
“Van was standing on the front steps of the house,” says Bebo, who has written a memoir about his time with Morrison - In the Back of the Van: The Story of One Unforgettable Summer.
“He looked like a small Beethoven. He had long reddish hair and a green suit on. He was mild-mannered. We talked a little bit. He liked jazz. I thought, 'Hey, this guy's pretty cool because he knows about John Coltrane'.
"The thing about Van was that he was real. He didn't perform the songs, he played them. He was into the music. He was like a jazz cat. Playing with him was like a jam session. That’s the way it was for the whole summer. He wasn't subconscious. He was spontaneous. Every night was like a jazz gig because he'd ad-lib. He'd do things different. He never told us what to play. It was fun playing with him."
Bebo recalls a lot of hard work on the songs, rehearsing two or three hours every day. "He was a serious dude, but you could talk to him about anything. I was into smoking pot. I said, ‘Hey Van, you want to get high? You want to turn on?’ Van said, ‘No, I fried my brain and I can't smoke anymore.’ When he said he fried his brain, I could believe that. He was reticent and shy and introverted, but he was down to earth so we could talk about records we liked."
Morrison also told his American friends how he thought a lot of people resented him for leaving Ireland. "He wasn't uptight. He had no ego. He didn't say too much, but what he said was pretty memorable. I remember him being just a cool guy.”
That summer of 1968, Morrison began compiling Astral Weeks. In the kitchen of his Boston apartment, he sat with his guitar and sang while Janet Planet captured the gold dust on a tape machine, which had space to record 20 minutes at a time. He sifted through the material, discarding some sediment, keeping the gold, which he finetuned in rehearsals with his band at Sheldon’s house before road-testing at venues. There was still a legal roadblock to surmount, though.
“I knew Van had been ripped off in New York,” says Bebo. “I knew he couldn't record and he couldn't do anything about it. We went with him to see his lawyer one time, up to a big high rise in Boston. We were dressed up like circus clowns – in hippie clothes – really out of place in the lawyer’s office.
"Van was really upset when he left the lawyer because the lawyer wasn’t painting a good picture for him. When Van got upset, he would open up. I heard him swear a couple of times that summer and he sounded like a real gangster. It was beautiful.”
Light appeared at the end of the tunnel when Warner Bros heard this guy in Boston was killing it in venues around the city. Lewis Merenstein, who produced Gladys Knight, and would later work on records with Curtis Mayfield, got a call to see Morrison in Boston. Apparently, when he first heard Morrison play what would become the title track of Astral Weeks, he cried.
Merenstein said he had to produce Astral Weeks. Joe Smith, an executive with Warner Bros., was called in to fix Morrison’s contract dispute. Smith got in touch with the Mob. They told him to bring $20,000 in cash to an abandoned warehouse on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan at six o’clock one evening.
“I had to walk up three flights of stairs, and there were four guys,” recalled Smith in an interview for Ryan H Walsh’s book, Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968. “Two tall and thin, and two built like buildings. There was no small talk. I got the signed contract and got the hell out of there, because I was afraid somebody would whack me in the head and take back the contract and I'd be out the money.”
Morrison had to also fulfil a contract obligation, which stipulated he deliver three original compositions per month over the course of a year. “Van went into the studio and he deliberately recorded these gibberish songs,” says Fallon. “He gave these rubbish tracks to Bang Records and, of course, they could do nothing with them.”
Before Morrison could go into the studio to record Astral Weeks, Warner Bros insisted he work on it with professional jazz musicians. “They didn’t put him with rock’n’roll musicians, or even R’n’B musicians, they put him with jazz musicians, which was unusual at the time in the pop music business. It’s one reason why it works because of the exemplary playing on the record,” says Fallon.
Morrison invited his old band in Boston to join him in New York. They could still gig together. They decided to stay put, however, with the exception of John Payne, who ended up playing flute on the track Slim Slow Slider. Warner Bros. assembled a grade-A line-up of session musicians, including guitarist Jay Berliner, who worked with Charles Mingus and Harry Belafonte, amongst others; Connie Kay, a member of the Modern Jazz Quartet, on drums; and Richard Davis on double bass.
“I worshipped Richard Davis,” says Bebo, adding, “I probably would have disappeared on the road if I had gone to New York with Van.”
Berliner came from recording an advertising jingle for Pringles potato chips for the first studio recording, which started at seven o’clock on a late September evening. Morrison did little talking. He spent most of the time in the vocals booth, leaving his hired guns to their own devices, trusting in them.
In under three hours, they laid down three tracks, each of them in one or two takes. They were so happy with their labours, they squeezed in one more, the album’s title track, before wrapping up. They polished off the other four songs on the album in two separate sessions.
“Astral Weeks was like nothing that had come before,” says Fallon. “It's like the angels came down and French-kissed Van. The first time I heard it I was on LSD in Notting Hill Gate in London. It suited Timothy Leary’s potion very well. My friend Simon said, ‘Don't the strings sound like waterfalls.’ And they do.
"The album is partly about him looking back to his youth, and instead of singing about Route 66 or something, suddenly he’s singing about Cypress Avenue in Belfast which I'm told was an upmarket area. Van was fascinated with rich girls. And his maestro voice – when Van takes off into the mystic, we’re all on board.”
Astral Weeks was a commercial flop when it came out in November 1968. There was no single released from the album. Most critics panned it. Nick Logan, who went on to become editor of NME in the 1970s, dismissed it in his review for the influential music magazine, maintaining it was inferior to José Feliciano’s album Feliciano! which was released the same year. It was a slow burn. It took until 2001 before the album went gold, selling more than 500,000 copies.
The cultural impact of Astral Weeks, however, has been huge. It is in the conversation as one of the greatest albums of all time. It was the favourite album of comedian Bill Hicks. Bruce Springsteen was obsessed with it. As Steven Van Zandt, guitarist with Springsteen’s E Street Band, remarked: “Astral Weeks was like a religion to us.”
Springsteen hooked Richard Davis, who played double bass on the album, to play on his debut album and again on Born to Run in 1975. Philip Seymour Hoffman quoted it in his 2006 Oscars acceptance speech. Elvis Costello said it was the most adventurous rock record ever made. According to Martin Scorsese, the first 15 minutes of his movie Taxi Driver is based on it.
