Astral Weeks: Van Morrison’s Wispy Irish Blues Masterpiece

Join In Sheep’s Clothing for a listening session on St. Pat’s Day featuring Van Morrison’s masterpiece, and brilliant albums by Thin Lizzy, Enya, Sinéad O’Connor and the Cranberries.

By the time Astral Weeks arrived in December, 1968, Van Morrison had already moved through several phases of his career. He first broke out as the singer for the Belfast R&B band Them, scoring hits with songs like “Gloria,” then reached the charts again as a solo artist with “Brown Eyed Girl.” Released while the San Francisco Summer of Love still hung in the air, with hippies gobbling acid and chasing electric revelation, Astral Weeks offered something very different. Something that, once absorbed into the psyche, shot through the synapses and rewired brains. The Beatles had released the utterly weird Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band a few months earlier. Astral Weeks, in hindsight, feels like some sort of negation.

On Tuesday, we’ll be celebrating St. Patrick’s Day with Morrison’s Astral Weeks and other Irish classics during a listening session at Only the Wild Ones in Venice. With a brilliant system and smart acoustics, it will be a rare opportunity to experience such beauty in a group setting, and away from the other raucous beer-guzzling celebrations. We’re also playing records from Sinead O’Connor, Van Morrison, Enya, the Cranberries and more.

Limited capacity tickets are available now via dice.

“I’m not surprised that people get different meanings out of my songs,” Morrison told a Rolling Stone interviewer, as quoted in Lester Bangs’ essential essay on Astral Weeks. “But I don’t want to 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, you know, and like, there it is, and it feels right, but I can’t say for sure what it means.”

If you only read one thing on Astral Weeks, in fact, it’s that Bangs essay. Written for a book called “Desert Island Discs,” Bangs lays out why it’s his favorite record. Here he is writing about Morrison performing “Cypress Avenue” live.

With consummate 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 the 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 gonna surge over the top he cuts it off stone-cold dead, the hollow of a murdered explosion, throws his 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.

He calls Astral Weeks “a great search fueled by the belief that through these musical and mental processes, illumination is attainable, or may at least be glimpsed.” Bangs writes that the album, “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. There’s 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.” You can hear a reading of the whole essay here:

Recorded in New York with a small group of jazz and folk musicians — mostly members of the Modern Jazz Quartet — the album is built on hard acoustic guitar strums, strings that cut through the arrangements and Richard Davis’s bass, which often carries the melody (at least when Morrison’s not doing that work). Over it all, Morrison sings in long, searching lines underscored by sounds that drift between folk, jazz and chamber music. At the time, the record confused many listeners and sold modestly. Critics loved it and the performances Morrison gave to promote it.

From Billboard’s 1968 review of Astral Weeks:

VAN MORRISON, “Astral Weeks” (Warner Bros.-7 Arts): Van Morrison sings in delicate violin dreams saddened by his wispy Irish blues. He is one of rock’s finest poets, reading his delirium like e.e. cummings reading from his own work. His lyrics often lost in the fast flow, his voice freaking to stifled, inside cries, Morrison celebrates the mood, never the mutation which, for Morrison, is second to feeling. His tender “Madame George” is a portrait painted in surrealistic sleep talk, in Cajun moans and secret cadences loosely set against an instrumental background that sounds like classical chamber musicians tuning up. Born in Ireland, raised on American folk and blues, Morrison tosses flowery fantasies at the jerking rock ‘n’ roll battalions, stalling them with cloudy lyrics to consider and a mood to sleep off like a hangover. His albums, so beautifully poetic and ethereal, will last as long as rock itself, for hard to pin down to wear out, like chasing butterflies.

From a 1969 Cashbox review of Morrison performing at Ungano’s in New York:

Looking back upon the first three Van Morrison incarnations, the period of Them and two top ten records and the air-banned original version of “Gloria”; the period of “Brown Eyed Girl”; and the recent “Astral Weeks” soft-voiced jazz period; the only thing immediately evident is that Van Morrison has a talent that borders on genius. Although Van has also found commercial success upon several occasions, he has never been able to fuse his commercial and aesthetic appeal into a blend that would find him the mass audience of devotees he deserves. … The band is still feeling its way, and the audience seems willing to go along for the ride.

From another 1969 Cashbox live review, this one from The Scene in New York:

His new thing is softness. Gone (at least temporarily) is the hard, electric, blues sound which marked his earlier efforts. Now he is accompanied by flute, drums, his own acoustic guitar, and a standup bass (latter was missing last night, but no problems ensued) … What remains the same are Van’s songs, filled with fantastic imagery, and Van’s incredible singing style. Van sort of mumbles, running back and forth over lyrics, and this is what the audience has finally learned to comprehend. And they loved it.

Grab tix for our St. Patrick’s Day listening session at Only the Wild Ones in Venice, available now via dice.