Astral Weeks Live: Back to Caledonia


Like a lot of people of my generation, I was transformed by Astral Weeks, the 1968 second solo album by Van Morrison.

On an intellectual level, it was the album that revealed to me the elasticity of music– that a performer could emerge from a pop music idiom and a vernacular tradition to completely transcend them, creating something so wholly singular and so unconstrained by formal concerns as to become a work of art outside of time and tradition. At a spiritual level, the album’s gossamer, hypnotic performance and lyrical mysticism gave me a direct experience of the absolute through music that I never got from folk mass. This was heady stuff.

It was also stuff from which its then 23-year old creator seemed to recoil. Of its 8 songs only Cyprus Avenue entered the Van Morrison performing repertoire as a regular matter. And, except for 1974’s Veedon Fleece, Morrison never came close again to the style of Astral Weeks with its open-ended song forms, ethereal soundscapes, and plainly Irish locations. (The Irish locations and references no doubt has added much to the album’s exotic allure).

Morrison’s retreat is understandable I suppose. Astral Weeks ain’t a fun collection of jaunty R&B novelties like Domino or Jackie Wilson Said. It’s a dark spiritual journey through a polymorphously perverse world–a psychological landscape based in large measure on scenes and spirits from Morrison’s native Belfast performed in a devotional style with emotional exorcism as its seeming goal. Its centerpieces, Cyprus Avenue and Madame George, revolve respectively around an obsessive relationship between an older male narrator and a 14-year-old girl; as well as a drunken party scene where a younger man gives himself to, and then callously abandons, a “lovelorn drag queen,” to quote Lester Bangs. Through performances loaded with hypnotic repetition the songs strain against a claustrophobic sense of place and an obsessive sense of sexual and emotional need in a bid for release–an escape from the need, an escape from the place (at the end of Madame George our narrator gets on a train out of Belfast), a rebirth in a better place both actual and psychological (to be born again is the signature refrain of the album’s title track).

The sound of the music also seemed impossible to duplicate–a weird and often evanescent melange of folk, blues and jazz, anchored by a rhythm section of first-call jazz musicians and layered over by Larry Fallon’s period chamber-folk arrangements of strings, and in one instance, harpsichord. Songs were stretched and improvised, rhythms dissolving and cohering, a sound as much as anything a happy accident of producer Lewis Merenstein’s choice of agile musicians like bass player Richard Davis, guitarist Jay Berliner, and drummer Connie Kay, and the space afforded by Morrison’s awkward shyness in the studio. It’s true that Morrison was performing some of this material  the club scene around Cambridge MA in a trio that featured acoustic guitar, acoustic bass, and flute–but on the evidence of the few extant recordings of that group, the sound of Astral Weeks came together only for those few studio sessions, not on stage with Morrison’s jazz-folk trio.

Where the sound and characters of Astral Weeks came from has been an obsession among Morrisonologists for years. I won’t recap the details, instead I’ll refer you to Clinton Heylin’s Morrison bio Can You Feel the Silence? for some oral history, and Lester Bangs’ famous Astral Weeks essay from Stranded: Rock And Roll For A Desert Island . It’s enough to know that, as Morrison’s post Moondance FM-radio hit career grew, he distanced himself more and more from the emotional intensity of Astral Weeks, saying, among other things that the album didn’t come out the way he wanted, that it was marred by Merenstein’s direction, and, ludicrously, that Madame George had nothing to do with a drag queen.

So, Morrison’s sudden decision last year to perform and record Astral Weeks in its entirety, on the 40th anniversary of its release, in a one time set of shows, for CD and DVD release on his new Listen to the Lion imprint of EMI, seemed more commercially calculating than artistically bold. Even Morrison was standoffish (nothing unusal for the notoriously prickly and mercurial performer), lowering expectations in press interviews, saying that he wasn’t taking the Astral Weeks show on the road, just performing it for the purposes of cranking out some product. But after the November Hollywood Bowl shows Morrison was ecstatic about what he had achieved, recapturing the sound  of Astral Weeks, delivering some of his most spirited and engaged singing on record in years, and summoning the spirit among an ecstatic, rapt audience. He quickly scheduled Astral Weeks shows in NYC this week and next, and upcoming shows in the UK.

Astral Weeks fetishists have nothing to fear from Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl. The CD delivers the goods–offering the best performances from two LA shows of a resequenced version of the album’s songs. The brilliantly responsive 12-piece band doesn’t replicate the original arrangements note for note, instead pursuing the original strategy of the moment: improvising, digging deep into the songs for their meaning, and more than on the original, following the leader.

Sure, the artist, now 63, doesn’t sound obsessed, trapped, yearning, the way he did at 23 when the wounds of need were fresh. But these are fine performances in their own right of music that has ripened, and Morrison–strumming acoustic guitar and directing the band it a way he couldn’t as a 23-year old–is in fine fiddle, singing in the upper, soaring part of his register more than he has on many recent records.

Interestingly, the most exciting performances come on two of the original album’s least cataclysmic songs.  Ballerina, a song Morrison had written towards the end of his run with his Belfast R&B band Them, is given a dynamic performance by the singer who alternately coos and growls. And Slim Slow Slider–the only Astral Weeks song set in London, a lament for a lover wasting away on heroin–gets an epic performance, restoring the original instrumental section that was edited from the 1968 performance, and gaining a deeper emotional heft as Morrison pleads with himself to cease caring for the girl in a new lyrical episode, bringing some of the original sense of need and yearning for escape to Astral Weeks Live.

Morrison’s reclamation of Astral Weeks isn’t the kind of catharsis that was Brian Wilson’s 2004 reconstruction of his lost 1967 masterpiece, Smile. Astral Weeks, after all, was never lost, and its creator never fell apart in the face of that loss. But neither is it a cynical piece of product designed to appeal to nostalgic boomers. Instead its the work of a performing artist revisiting one of his greatest works late in his career but still at the top of his game. And it has me more excited than before for the Saturday night Astral Weeks show at the WaMu Theater.

 

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February 25th, 2009
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