Some have called it the greatest rock or pop album ever..
..even though there really is no pop or rock on it:
Recording of [Van Morrisson's Astral Weeks] took place at Century Sound
Studios in New York City during three sessions in September and October 1968,
although most participants and biographers agree that the eight songs were
culled from the first and last early evening sessions. Except for John Payne,
Morrison and the assembled jazz musicians had never played together before and
the recordings commenced without rehearsals or lead sheets handed out.
The cover
art, music and lyrics of the album portray the symbolism equating
earthly love and heaven that would often feature in Morrison's work. With a
blending of folk,
blues, jazz, and classical
music, it was a complete departure from his previous pop hit,
"Brown Eyed Girl" (1967). Astral Weeks
is often referred to as a song cycle or concept
album with lyrics described as impressionistic,
hypnotic,
and stream-of-consciousness.
...Astral Weeks has stream of consciousness and poetic lyrics that
evoke emotions and images instead of coherent, intellectual ideas and narratives.[40]
A folk rock album,[1]
it has been described as impressionistic,[41][42]
as having a blend of folk, blues, jazz, and classical music[43]
and as "genre-defying".[41]Although usually described as a song cycle[44]
rather than a concept album, the songs do, when considered in their totality,
seem to link together as one long song, forming an "intangible narrative
of unreachable worlds"[45]
and delivered with what one writer calls "a masterpiece of virtuoso
singing".[46]
According to Charlie Gillett, the album has meditative songs
that combine themes of nostalgia, drama, and Morrison's personal mysticism and
are performed in a white soul style.[2]The album embraces a form of symbolism that would eventually become a staple
of Morrison's songs, equating earthly love and heaven, or as close as a living
being can approach it. Morrison and Davis's upright bass can be interpreted as
the earth opposing Kay's percussion and the string arrangement representing
heaven and with Berliner's lead acoustic guitar residing on a plane in between.[47]
Wilipedia
Having read all that, it somehow seems sacrilegious that such an album can
be reduced to a YouTube clip:
But it seems so appropriate that what is perhaps the greatest album has
elicited what some have called “The greatest album review ever.” Even the review of the review is a work of
art.( That is my review of the review of the review.). Here's an excerpt of Phillip Francis making the case that Lester Bangs' review is the greatest:
That’s right, I am saying that the best album reviews are premised on a confessional
moment in which the reviewer lets the reader know that he or she is aware of
the perversity of the task at hand and must be forgiven for the
violation. The reader is willing to forgive, at least I hope, because he
or she knows that something must be said by someone, that silence too has its
inadequacies when it comes to the experience of music. In the best album
reviews, the reader and the writer, I believe, enter into an unspoken agreement
concerning the paradox of aesthetic experience—both parties recognizing that
the album demands expression while remaining stridently resistant to all
representation. The greatest album reviewers are those who have somehow
figured out a way to get something down on paper amidst the push and pull of these
contrary demands and the windstorms of inevitable failure that they kick up..
..The inevitable inadequacy of all album reviews might sound like the recipe
for a soup of frustrated reviewers. But in fact the reviewers’
consciousness of their inability to succeed can cultivate in certain
temperaments an explosive sense of creative freedom—a hot tamale, say, to
follow the culinary metaphor. I think this hot tamale experience is what
Martin Luther was hoping to generate when he advised human beings to “sin boldly,”
and to throw themselves on the mercy of God. It is this feeling of having
nothing to lose and nothing to hide that animates the greatest review writers
of all time, and gives their writing the palpable sense of abandon that, as it
turns out, is most adequate to the task at hand. So, what is it that the
greatest review writer manages to accomplish in the vast freedomous space
generated by the sensation of the hot tamale? What should they
accomplish? Can we generate a checklist?..
One of the things that is striking about his review of Astral Weeks is that
it required a different sort of ritual. It was not based on a week long
album-binge. It was written on the ten year anniversary of the album’s
release. It is often said that Lester Bangs’ greatest gift was his
prescience. He seemed to know where things were headed culturally ten or
twelve years before anyone else could figure it out. He was the guy
writing on the wall. But, again, for this review of Astral Weeks—given
that it was retrospective—Lester was unable to rely on his trademark
skill. He had to leave the crystal ball at home. I believe that
this is part of what heightens the vulnerability of this piece of writing—it's
written by a man who for a moment cast aside his trademarks and his rituals.
…and is there anything more persistently human than such vulnerability? ..
Lester is touching on many, many things here. But at the
core he is suggesting that the man who made Astral Weeks, the one who
sounds like he is in terrible pain, is the man who has just opened up the
precious and terrible gift of life—and is holding its contrariness to his
chest. He is rapt in the pangs of beauty and the burdens of
freedom. He is eternally thankful and infinitely full of disgust.
The faculty of love, he discovers, is also the faculty of violence. The
God who made the lamb made thee. link
-
Even though Van himself speaks in less mystical terms, note how a recording enegineer remembers the album being made:
"A cloud came along, and it was called the Van Morrison sessions. We
all hopped upon that cloud, and the cloud took us away for awhile [sic], and we made
this album, and we landed when it was done"(link)
Just when you laugh at the hyperbole, he adds:
“This is not an exaggeration, this
is not just trying to be poetic."
-
So where to start?
Maybe the album itself..
Or the entire Bangs review:
Astral Weeks
by Lester Bangs
from
"Stranded" (1979)
Van Morrison's Astral Weeks
was released ten years, almost to the day, before this was written. It was
particularly important to me because the fall of 1968 was such a terrible time:
I was a physical and mental wreck, nerves shredded and ghosts and spiders
looming and squatting across the mind. My social contacts had dwindled to
almost none; the presence of other people made me nervous and paranoid. I spent
endless days and nights sunk in an armchair in my bedroom, reading magazines,
watching TV, listening to records, staring into space. I had no idea how to
improve the situation and probably wouldn't have done anything about it if I
had.
Astral Weeks would be the subject of this piece - i.e., the rock record
with the most significance in my life so far - no matter how I'd been feeling
when it came out. But in the condition I was in, it assumed at the time the
quality of a beacon, a light on the far shores of the murk; what's more, it was
proof that there was something left to express artistically besides nihilism
and destruction. (My other big record of the day was White Light/White Heat.)
It sounded like the man who made Astral Weeks was in terrible pain, pain
most of Van Morrison's previous works had only suggested; but like the later
albums by the Velvet Underground, there was a redemptive element in the
blackness, ultimate compassion for the suffering of others, and a swath of pure
beauty and mystical awe that cut right through the heart of the work
I don't really know how significant
it might be that many others have reported variants on my initial encounter
with Astral Weeks. I don't think there's anything guiding it to people enduring
dark periods. It did come out at a time when a lot of things that a lot of
people cared about passionately were beginning to disintegrate, and when the
self-destructive undertow that always accompanied the great sixties party had
an awful lot of ankles firmly in it's maw and was pulling straight down. so, as
timeless as it finally is, perhaps Astral Weeks was also the product of
an era. Better think that than ask just what sort of Irish churchwebbed haints
Van Morrison might be product of.
Three television shows: A 1970 NET
broadcast of a big all-star multiple bill at the Fillmore East. The Byrds, Sha
Na Na, and Elvin Bishop have all done their respective things. Now we get to
see three of four songs from a set by Van Morrison. He climaxes, as he always
did in those days, with "Cyprus Avenue" from Astral Weeks.
After going through all the verses, he drives the song, the band, and himself
to a finish which has since become one of his trademarks and one of the
all-time classic rock 'n' roll set-closers. With consumate dynamics that allow
him to snap from indescribably eccentric throwaway phrasing to sheer passion in
the very next breath he brings the music surging up through crescendo after
crescendo, stopping and starting and stopping and starting the song again and
again, imposing long maniacal silences like giant question marks between the
stops and starts and ruling the room through sheer tension, building to a shout
of "It's too late to stop now!," and just when you think it's all
going to surge over the top, he cuts it off stone cold dead, the hollow of a
murdered explosion, throws the microphone down and stalks off the stage. It is
truly one of the most perverse things I have ever seen a performer do in my
life. And, of course, it's sensational: our guts are knotted up, we're crazed
and clawing for more, but we damn well
know we've seen and felt something.
1974, a late night network TV rock
concert: Van and his band come out, strike a few shimmering chords, and for
about ten minutes he lingers over the words "Way over yonder in the clear
blue sky / Where flamingos fly." No other lyrics. I don't think any
instrumental solos. Just those words, repeated slowly again and again,
distended, permutated, turned into scat, suspended in space and then scattered
to the winds, muttered like a mantra till they turn into nonsense syllables,
then back into the same soaring image as time seems to stop entirely. He stands
there with eyes closed, singing, transported, while the band poises quivering
over great open-tuned deep blue gulfs of their own.
1977, spring-summer, same kind
of show: he sings "Cold Wind in August", a song off his recently
released album A Period of Transition, which also contains a
considerably altered version of the flamingos song. "Cold Wind in
August" is a ballad and Van gives it a fine, standard reading. The only
trouble is that the whole time he's singing it he paces back and forth in a
line on the stage, his eyes tightly shut, his little fireplug body kicking its
way upstream against what must be a purgatorial nervousness that perhaps is
being transferred to the cameraman.
What this is about is a whole
set of verbal tics - although many are bodily as well - which are there for
reason enough to go a long way toward defining his style. They're all over Astral
Weeks: four rushed repeats of the phrases "you breathe in, you breath
out" and "you turn around" in "Beside You"; in
"Cyprus Avenue," twelve "way up on"s, "baby" sung
out thirteen times in a row sounding like someone running ecstatically downhill
toward one's love, and the heartbreaking way he stretches "one by
one" in the third verse; most of all in "Madame George" where he
sings the word "dry" and then "your eye" twenty times in a
twirling melodic arc so beautiful it steals your own breath, and then this
occurs: "And the love that loves the love that loves the love that loves
the love that loves to love the love that loves to love the love that
loves."
Van Morrison is interested, obsessed
with how much musical or verbal information he can compress into a small space,
and, almost, conversely, how far he can spread one note, word, sound, or
picture. To capture one moment, be it a caress or a twitch. He repeats certain
phrases to extremes that from anybody else would seem ridiculous, because he's
waiting for a vision to unfold, trying as unobtrusively as possible to nudge it
along. Sometimes he gives it to you through silence, by choking off the song in
midflight: "It's too late to stop now!"
It's the great search, fueled
by the belief that through these musical and mental processes illumination is
attainable. Or may at least be glimpsed.
When he tries for this he
usually gets it more in the feeling than in the Revealed Word - perhaps much of
the feeling comes from the reaching - but there is also, always, the sense of
WHAT if he DID apprehend that Word; there are times when the Word seems to
hover very near. And then there are times when we realize the Word was right
next to us, when the most mundane overused phrases are transformed: I give you
"love," from "Madame George." Out of relative silence, the
Word: "Snow in San Anselmo." "That's where it's at," Van
will say, and he means it (aren't his interviews fascinating?). What he
doesn't say is that he is inside the snowflake, isolated by the song:
"And it's almost Independence Day."
you're probably wondering when
I'm going to get around to telling you about Astral Weeks. As a matter
of fact, there's a whole lot of Astral Weeks I don't even want to tell
you about. Both because whether you've heard it or not it wouldn't be fair for
me to impose my interpretation of such lapidarily subjective imagery on you,
and because in many cases I don't really know what he's talking about. he
doesn't either: "I'm not surprised that people get different meanings out
of my songs," he told a Rolling Stone interviewer. "But I
don't wanna give the impression that I know what everything means 'cause I
don't. . . . There are times when I'm mystified. I look at some of the stuff
that comes out, y'know. And like, there it is and it feels right, but I can't
say for sure what it means:
There you go
Starin' with a look of avarice
Talking to Huddie Leadbetter
Showin' pictures on the walls
And whisperin' in the halls
And pointin' a finger at me
I haven't got the slightest idea
what that "means," though on one level I'd like to approach it in a
manner as indirect and evocative as the lyrics themselves. Because you're in
trouble anyway when you sit yourself down to explicate just exactly what a
mystical document, which is exactly what Astral Weeks is, means.
For one thing, what it means is Richard Davis's bass playing, which complements
the songs and singing all the way with a lyricism that's something more than
just great musicianship: there is something about it that more than inspired,
something that has been touched, that's in the realm of the miraculous. The
whole ensemble - Larry Fallon's string section, Jay Berliner's guitar (he
played on Mingus's Black Saint and the Sinner Lady), Connie Kay's
drumming - is like that: they and Van sound like they're not just reading but dwelling
inside of each other's minds. The facts may be far different. John Cale was
making an album of his own in the adjacent studio at the time, and he has said
that "Morrison couldn't work with anybody, so finally they just shut him
in the studio by himself. He did all the songs with just an acoustic guitar,
and later they overdubbed the rest of it around his tapes."
Cale's story might or might not be
true - but facts are not going to be of much use here in any case. Fact: Van
Morrison was twenty-two - or twenty-three - years old when he made this record;
there are lifetimes behind it. What Astral Weeks deals in are not facts
but truths. Astral Weeks, insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record
about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins,
their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of
vision they can comprehend. It is a precious and terrible gift, born of a
terrible truth, because what they see is both infinitely beautiful and
terminally horrifying: the unlimited human ability to create or destroy,
according to whim. It's no Eastern mystic or psychedelic vision of the emerald
beyond, nor is it some Baudelairean perception of the beauty of sleaze and
grotesquerie. Maybe what it boiled down to is one moment's knowledge of the
miracle of life, with its inevitable concomitant, a vertiginous glimpse of the
capacity to be hurt, and the capacity to inflict that hurt.
Transfixed between pure
rapture and anguish. Wondering if they may not be the same thing, or at least
possessed of an intimate relationship. In "T.B. Sheets", his last
extended narrative before making this record, Van Morrison watched a girl he loved
die of tuberculosis. the song was claustrophobic, suffocating, mostrously
powerful: "innuendos, inadequacies, foreign bodies." A lot of people
couldn't take it; the editor of this book has said that it's garbage, but I
think it made him squeamish. Anyway, the point is that certain parts of Astral
Weeks - "Madame George," "Cyprus Avenue" - take the
pain in "T.B. Sheets" and root the world in it. Because the pain of
watching a loved one die of however dread a disease may be awful, but it is at
least something known, in a way understood, in a way measureable and even
leading somewhere, because there is a process: sickness, decay, death,
mourning, some emotional recovery. But the beautiful horror of "Madame
George" and "Cyprus Avenue" is precisely that the people in
these songs are not dying: we are looking at life, in its fullest, and what
these people are suffering from is not disease but nature, unless nature is a
disease.
A man sits in a car on a tree-lined
street, watching a fourteen-year-old girl walking home from school, hopelessly
in love with her. I've almost come to blows with friends because of my
insistence that much of Van Morrison's early work had an obsessively reiterated
theme of pedophilia, but here is something that at once may be taken as that
and something far beyond it. He loves her. Because of that, he is
helpless. Shaking. Paralyzed. Maddened. Hopeless. Nature mocks him. As only
nature can mock nature. Or is love natural in the first place? No Matter. By
the end of the song he has entered a kind of hallucinatory ecstasy; the music
aches and yearns as it rolls on out. This is one supreme pain, that of being
imprisoned a spectator. And perhaps no so very far from "T.B.
Sheets," except that it must be far more romantically easy to sit and
watch someone you love die than to watch them in the bloom of youth and health
and know that you can never, ever have them, can never speak to them.
"Madame George" is the
album's whirlpool. Possibly one of the most compassionate pieces of music ever
made, it asks us, no, arranges that we see the plight of what I'll be
brutal and call a lovelorn drag queen with such intense empathy that when the
singer hurts him, we do too. (Morrison has said in at least one interview that
the song has nothing to do with any kind of transvestite - at least as far as he
knows, he is quick to add - but that's bullshit.) The beauty, sensitivity, holiness
of the song is that there's nothing at all sensationalistic, exploitative, or
tawdry about it; in a way Van is right when he insists it's not about a drag
queen, as my friends were right and I was wrong about the
"pedophelia" - it's about a person, like all the best songs,
all the greatest literature.
The setting is that same as
that of the previous song - "Cyprus Avenue", apparently a place where
people drift, impelled by desire, into moments of flesh-wracking,
sight-curdling confrontation with their destinies. It's an elemental place of
pitiless judgement - wind and rain figure in both songs - and, interestingly
enough, it's a place of the even crueler judgement of adults by children,
in both cases love objects absolutely indifferent to their would-be adult
lovers. Madame George's little boys are downright contemptuous - like the
street urchins who end up cannibalizing the homosexual cousin in Tennessee
Williams's Suddenly Last Summer, they're only too happy to come around
as long as there's music, party times, free drinks and smokes, and only too
gleefully spit on George's affections when all the other stuff runs out, the
entombing winter settling in with not only wind and rain but hail, sleet, and
snow.
What might seem strangest of
all but really isn't is that it's exactly those characteristics which
supposedly should make George most pathetic - age, drunkenness, the way the
boys take his money and trash his love - that awakens something for George in
the heart of the kid whose song this is. Obviously the kid hasn't simply
"fallen in love with love," or something like that, but rather -
what? Why just exactly that only sunk in the foulest perversions could one
human being love another for anything other than their humanness: love
him for his weakness, his flaws, finally perhaps his decay. Decay is human -
that's one of the ultimate messages here, and I don't by any stretch of the
lexicon mean decadence. I mean that in this song or whatever inspired it Van
Morrison saw the absolute possibility of loving human beings at the farthest
extreme of wretchedness, and that the implications of that are terrible indeed,
far more terrible than the mere sight of bodies made ugly by age or the seeming
absurdity of a man devoting his life to the wobbly artifice of trying to look
like a woman.
You can say to love the
questions you have to love the answers which quicken the end of love that's
loved to love the awful inequality of human experience that loves to say we
tower over these the lost that love to love the love that freedom could have
been, the train to freedom, but we never get on, we'd rather wave generously
walking away from those who are victims of themselves. But who is to say that
someone who victimizes himself or herself is not as worthy of total compassion
as the most down and out Third World orphan in a New Yorker magazine ad?
Nah, better to step over the bodies, at least that gives them the respect they
might have once deserved. where I love, in New York (not to make it more than
it is, which is hard), everyone I know often steps over bodies which might well
be dead or dying as a matter of course, without pain. and I wonder in what
scheme it was originally conceived that such an action is showing human refuse
the ultimate respect it deserves.
There is of course a rationale -
what else are you going to do - but it holds no more than our fear of our own
helplessness in the face of the plain of life as it truly is: a plain which
extends into an infinity beyond the horizons we have only invented. Come on,
die it. As I write this, I can read in the Village Voice the blurbs of
people opening heterosexual S&M clubs in Manhattan, saying things like,
"S&M is just another equally valid form of love. Why people can't
accept that we'll never know." Makes you want to jump out a fifth floor
window rather than even read about it, but it's hardly the end of the world;
it's not nearly as bad as the hurts that go on everywhere everyday that are
taken to casually by all of us as facts of life. Maybe it boiled down to how
much you actually want to subject yourself to. If you accept for even a moment
the idea that each human life is as precious and delicate as a snowflake and
then you look at a wino in a doorway, you've got to hurt until you feel like a
sponge for all those other assholes' problems, until you feel like an asshole
yourself, so you draw all the appropriate lines. You stop feeling. But you know
that then you begin to die. So you tussle with yourself. how much of this
horror can I actually allow myself to think about? Perhaps the numbest mannekin
is wiser than somebody who only allows their sensitivity to drive them to
destroy everything they touch - but then again, to tilt Madame George's hat a
hair, just to recognize that that person exists, just to touch his cheek and
then probably expire because the realization that you must share the world with
him is ultimately unbearable is to only go the first mile. The realization of
living is just about that low and that exalted and that unbearable and that
sought-after. Please come back and leave me alone. But when we're along
together we can talk all we want about the universality of this abyss: it
doesn't make any difference, the highest only meets the lowest for some lying
succor, UNICEF to relatives, so you scratch and spit and curse in violent
resignation at the strict fact that there is absolutely nothing you can do but
finally reject anyone in greater pain than you. At such a moment, another
breath is treason. that's why you leave your liberal causes, leave suffering
humanity to die in worse squalor than they knew before you happened along. You
got their hopes up. Which makes you viler than the most scrofulous carrion.
viler than the ignorant boys who would take Madame George for a couple of
cigarettes. because you have committed the crime of knowledge, and thereby not
only walked past or over someone you knew to be suffering, but also violated
their privacy, the last possession of the dispossessed.
Such knowledge is possibly the worst
thing that can happen to a person (a lucky person), so it's no wonder
that Morrison's protagonist turned away from Madame George, fled to the train
station, trying to run as far away from what he'd seen as a lifetime could get
him. And no wonder, too, that Van Morrison never came this close to looking
life square in the face again, no wonder he turned to Tupelo Honey and
even Hard Nose the Highway with it's entire side of songs about falling
leaves. In Astral Weeks and "T.B. Sheets" he confronted enough
for any man's lifetime. Of course, having been offered this immeasurably
stirring and equally frightening gift from Morrison, one can hardly be blamed
for not caring terribly much about Old, Old Woodstock and little homilies like
"You've got to Make It Through This World On Your Own" and "Take
It Where You Find It."
On the other hand, it might
also be pointed out that desolation, hurt, and anguish are hardly the only
things in life, or in Astral Weeks. They're just the things, perhaps,
that we can most easily grasp and explicate, which I suppose shows about what
level our souls have evolved to. I said I wouldn't reduce the other songs on
this album by trying to explain them, and I won't. But that doesn't mean that,
all thing considered, a juxtaposition of poets might not be in order.
If I ventured in the slipstream
Between the viaducts of your dreams
Where the mobile steel rims crack
And the ditch and the backroads stop
Could you find me
Would you kiss my eyes
And lay me down
In silence easy
To be born again
Van Morrison
My heart of silk
is filled with lights,
with lost bells,
with lilies and bees.
I will go very far,
farther than those hills,
farther than the seas,
close to the stars,
to beg Christ the Lord
to give back the soul I had
of old, when I was a child,
ripened with legends,
with a feathered cap
and a wooden sword.
Federico Garcia Lorca
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