Walsh's original 2015 Boston Magazine article about Van Morrison's Astral Sojourn. From life-changing concerts and chilling crimes, to acid experiments and film shoots, Astral Weeks is the secret, wild history of a unique time and place.
VAN MORRISON ASTRAL WEEKS MOVIE
is assassinated the real-life crimes of the Boston Strangler come to the movie screen via Tony Curtis Howard Zinn testifies for Avatar in the courtroom. Most penetratingly powerful of all is Mel Lyman, the folk-music star who decided he was God, then controlled the lives of his many followers via acid, astrology, and an underground newspaper called Avatar.Ī mesmerizing group of boldface names pops to life in Astral Weeks: James Brown quells tensions the night after Martin Luther King, Jr. Astral Weeks is a gorgeous and deeply emotional album, unlike anything heard to that date (or heard since) Moondance being slightly more popular, in its music. Anyone who has heard Van’s first two solo albums will know what a delight they were. On the 50th anniversary of that tumultuous year, Walsh’s book follows a criss-crossing cast of musicians and visionaries, artists and hippie entrepreneurs, from a young Tufts English professor who walks into a job as a host for TV’s wildest show (one episode required two sets, each tuned to a different channel) to the mystically inclined owner of radio station WBCN, who believed he was the reincarnation of a scientist from Atlantis. Saint Dominic’s Preview is an often overlooked album in a rich Van Morrison back-catalogue. Walsh unearths the album’s fascinating backstory–along with the untold secrets of the time and place that birthed it: Boston 1968. In his first book, acclaimed musician and journalist Ryan H. Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks is an iconic rock album shrouded in legend, a masterpiece that has touched generations of listeners and influenced everyone from Bruce Springsteen to Martin Scorsese. Elvis Costello called it “the most adventurous record made in the rock medium” part of the late Jeff Buckley’s own myth is tied with his choice to cover “The Way Young Lovers Do.” The critic Lester Bangs claimed it contained “the quality of a beacon.” Joni Mitchell was so taken aback by the album that she badgered one of Van’s guitarists for information about him before finally meeting him: “What is he actually like?”Ī mind-expanding dive into a lost chapter of 1968, featuring the famous and forgotten: Van Morrison, folkie-turned-cult-leader Mel Lyman, Timothy Leary, James Brown, and many more Philip Seymour Hoffman quoted it in his Oscar acceptance speech.
VAN MORRISON ASTRAL WEEKS DRIVER
Martin Scorsese claims the first fifteen minutes of Taxi Driver are based on it. Lauded as one of the greatest albums in the rock ’n’ roll canon, Astral Weeks feels less like rock, more like a benediction, a song cycle of rebirth. The Best Music Books of 2018 - Vinyl Me Please Top 20 Rock Books of 2018 - #1, Richie Unterbergerīest Books of the Year 2018 - Best Classic Bands Luna’s Dean Wareham: Favorite Things of 2018 - Brooklyn Vegan Janet Maslin’s Top Critic Picks 2018 - New York Timesīest Music Books of the Year, #3 - Mojo Magazineīest Music Books of 2018 - Minneapolis City Pages