Oh tease of teases!

Some time ago (not sure when; don't care enough to look it up), Rolling Stone issued its list of the 100 greatest artists of all time. J. Geils Band frontman Peter Wolf penned the entry on Van Morrison, who checked in at No. 42. In his piece, Wolf claims to have made reel-to-reel recordings of Astral Weeks in its most nascent form:

Eventually, Van managed to assemble a two-piece acoustic band and booked himself at a coffeehouse/jazz club that could only be described as subterranean. It was located three stories below a pool parlor and was deep, damp and dark. Egyptian motifs were painted on its yellow smoke-stained walls. The club justly deserved its name, the Catacombs. I borrowed a tape machine to capture the evening's music. What he performed that night later turned out to be the song cycle that made up the groundbreaking Astral Weeks. Though only a handful showed up, when Van finished playing, there was no doubt that the few present had witnessed something extraordinary.

These lost Astral Weeks tapes were also mentioned in a 2002 Boston Phoenix feature on Wolf, though it was in a paragraph simply cataloging all the detritus in the singer's Boston apartment: "Walls of music and books, art, antiques (he has a 1955 Seeburg jukebox in mint condition, for one). Mementos everywhere, some more obvious than others: zebra shoes from J. Geils's 'Sanctuary' tour; a tape reel sitting on a stack of books with the first recorded version of songs that would end up on Van Morrison's Astral Weeks."

Reading this leaves me teary-eyed. To be that close to a recording of Morrison (and presumably John Payne and Tom Kielbania) performing at the Catacombs and to not hear it—oh tease of teases! Maybe the writer asked and Wolf denied the request. Maybe the writer never asked, having been too preoccupied with Wolf's shiny jukebox. Or maybe Wolf is just a skilled fibber, an opportunist looking to exaggerate his role in the Astral Weeks narrative and the tapes don't exist at all.

Hiding in his own shadow

On Oct. 2, City Light Publishers is releasing Lit Up Inside, a new book featuring selected song lyrics from Van Morrison's exceptionally prodigious career. According to press information, the tome will contain approximately one-third of all material the Irishman has ever written. What will be included? What will be rejected? Let the speculation commence.

Please take note, because here is what definitely won't be in Lit Up Inside: a glowing foreword by music critic Johnny Rogan. This is what Rogan wrote about Morrison's approach to lyric writing in his 2006 biography, Van Morrison: No Surrender: "Meaningless repetition, poorly thought-out imagery, cloying sentimentality, cosmic buffoonery, faux and gratuitous literary name-dropping, heavy-handed symbolism or decorative words employed purely for their poetic association are all there in embarrassing abundance."

A tad harsh and unforgiving? Probably, but Rogan's assessment does address Morrison's propensity for "over"-ness in his lyrics. How he frequently overindulges, overreaches, overstates, etc. How excess is often the rule, not the exception. At his worst, Morrison gets the color schemes right, but then applies five coats of each. The Irishman's finest lyrical moments are when he sets restrictions and then enthusiastically fights against them, when he hides in his own shadow and injects his art with more magic and mystery.

"The lyrics in this book span 50 years of writing and as such are representative of my creative journey," Morrison said in a statement. I'm curious to see which songs from Astral Weeks made the cut. My guesses: "Cyprus Avenue," "Madame George," and "Ballerina."

Slainte

Recently, I stumbled upon a Beer Advocate review for an American Pale Ale named Astral Weeks. Right Proper Brewing Company of Washington, D.C., was responsible for its creation.

However, my sweet, dizzying glee turned to soul-crushing disappointment when a quick perusal of Right Proper's online beer listing revealed no beverage bearing the Astral Weeks moniker. (I did see beers called The Duke and Ornette, after Duke Ellington and Ornette Coleman, so there's clearly some cross-pollination between craft brewing and pop music going on at Right Proper.) Disappointed, I fired off an email to the company's general inquiry address. I shall report back when I get a response. This is tremendously important, mind you, for I fancy beer just as much as I fancy Astral Weeks.

Quick aside: The lone review for Astral Weeks featured this comment: "Pours a very pale yellow, like an unfiltered saison with some sticky white head." I've heard Astral Weeks described in much the same manner.

Mapping Astral Weeks' genes

If there was an Astral Weeks Genome Project, an extensive research undertaking that identified and mapped the "genes" of Van Morrison's landmark album, a section—albeit a small one—would undoubtedly be dedicated to King Pleasure (nee Clarence Beeks).

Born in Tennessee in 1922, Beeks was an early master of vocalese, a style in which lyrics are written and sung to the recorded solos of jazz musicians. Beeks had a pair of hits—"Moody's Mood for Love," in which he recorded lyrics (written by the man credited with inventing vocalese, Eddie Jefferson) to James Moody's solo in the standard "I'm in the Mood for Love"; and "Parker's Mood," which featured his own lyrics—but was neither renowned nor prolific. He made few personal appearances and refrained from recording any new material during the final two decades of his life (he died at age 58). That Morrison was even aware of Beeks and his rather limited catalogue is further testament to his father, his much-celebrated record collection, and his appetite for arcane music produced by African-Americans.

In interviews, Morrison has cited Beeks' influence upon the vocal blueprint he created for Astral Weeks, a schematic developed in Belfast and Boston that placed equal emphasis on language and delivery. For Morrison, songs grew out of the detail and depth of the words he chose, but also out of how these words were sung. He mixed in repetition, changed tempos on a dime, tinkered with volume. It's how Morrison stretched the sinew of quote/unquote rock singing and gave Astral Weeks one of its most distinctive traits.

Listen to 1954's King Pleasure Sings/Annie Ross Sings and you hear that same stretching, that same inventiveness—a pure vocal bliss that Morrison came to adore. A word is repeated and each time it's said, new meaning is given to that word—or, at least, a different inflection of meaning. Words are packed into cramped spaces so that songs merrily inflate and soar like helium-swelled balloons. Words become playthings. At particular moments, I was reminded of a child making paper airplanes and how getting creative and folding the paper in different ways can affect how the plane flies.

King Pleasure introduced Morrison to vocalese, but more importantly, he opened the Northern Irishman's ears to the extensive capabilities of the human voice—opened his mind to the idea that the human voice is not just an instrument, but an infinite field of possibilities.

Because ...

Because there's not enough "Astral Weeks" covers in which the artist is performing in front of a hutch filled with colorful plates and a map of Italy and dizzyingly bright yellow cabinetry. The vocal improvisation at the end is rather nifty; I'm also digging how the jarring camera work wonderfully contrasts with the lazy, layabout vocals and guitar strumming.

Paragraphs from the unrealized tome on Astral Weeks; or, 2,000 words of pretentious hooey

Liz Lupton, a publicist at Berklee College of Music, vigorously scrapes the soles of her shoes on the sidewalk, a gesture that reminds me of someone wiping their feet on a doormat following a long traipse through heavy mud. We inhale the fresh autumn air, which is satisfyingly sweet compared to the suffocating mustiness we just left behind, and squint as our eyes adjust from subterranean gloom to afternoon daylight.

"I went to college in Indiana and lived with four girls," Lupton tells me, "and our place wasn't nearly as gross. I feel like I need a shower."

Lupton and I are standing outside 1120 Bolyston Street in downtown Boston. This bustling block is part of Berklee's sprawling urban campus; students dart past alone or in groups, carrying bulky instrument cases and overstuffed knapsacks, hurrying to one of the college's various clinics or classes. Had I been presented the task of forming a capable backing band—for any frontman in any genre—a 30-second canvassing of my immediate area would unearth all the necessary musicians. (I think I even saw a flugelhorn.) My thoughts suddenly turn to Van Morrison and how he did just that—and right here, at Berklee, one of the world’s most prestigious music schools. And how night after night during the summer of 1968, a pair of unknown musicians followed the young Irish songwriter through the battered door behind me, down a long set of dilapidated stairways and into a shadowy cavity hollowed out of the earth beneath busy urban streets. There, the trio performed on a tiny stage to sparse yet receptive crowds.

I'm standing outside 1120 Bolyston Street, site of an old music club known as the Catacombs—its labyrinthine hallways, fixed shadows, and slight air of mystery making it truly deserving of this name. If the place where Astral Weeks' heart began beating was Morrison's cramped bedroom in his parents' home in East Belfast, then it was here at the Catacombs in Boston that the album took its first sharp and heavy breaths.

I can't help but smile. The old music club's current state—with its peculiar smells, begrimed walls, dead vermin, and piles of mouse excrement in the corners—has my accomplice visibly disgusted. Me? I am absolutely buzzing with excitement. Months of searching have delivered a most satisfying ending.

* * * * *

For me, Astral Weeks has no ending, no definitive conclusion. The album's spastic, startling terminus—the bleats from John Payne's soprano saxophone, the final, labored gasps from Richard Davis' bass, the thumping from Morrison thwacking the side of his acoustic guitar—heard during the final seconds of "Slim Slow Slider," only makes sense when it flows immediately into the opening of the introductory title track. (Accomplishing this on either vinyl or cassette—yes, I own Astral Weeks on both formats; call me a geeky completist—is obviously impossible. Meaning, regrettably, I often prefer the album on compact disc or a digital music player.) The abrupt, alien-sounding finish to "Slim Slow Slider" followed directly by the sudden, rich, melodious cacophony that kicks off "Astral Weeks" ... It's not unlike another complex work from another renowned Irishman: In James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, the fragments of words at the novel's opening and close link up to create one complete, visually arresting image. For Joyce, the end is the beginning is the end (or as he wrote in Finnegans Wake, "a commodius vicus of recirculation").

Astral Weeks is similarly cyclical—a spiral winding its way into the subconscious. Its sounds and themes and styles go around and around and come back again. Life is presented in all its circular totality: joy and despair, sin and redemption, home and exile, love and heartache, birth and death. I can't recollect the first time I heard the album; meanwhile, its perpetual presence in my life means I often can't recall my most recent listen. Astral Weeks is absolute; Astral Weeks is infinite.

If this sounds pretentious, well, I suppose that is the point. For decades now, writers have showered Astral Weeks with gleaming, glistening superlatives. Consider this passage from a 2,300-word article of devotion penned by The Guardian's Sean O'Hagan. Under a headline that boldly asks "Is This the Best Album Ever Made?", O'Hagan writes of how this release "has since come to be regarded as perhaps the greatest work of art to emerge out of the pop tradition ... Astral Weeks is a work of such singular beauty, such sustained emotional intensity, that nothing recorded before or since sounds even remotely similar—or indeed comparable."

As I ambled down the stairways and hallways of the old Catacombs club, making jokes to Lupton about the need to leave a breadcrumb trail so we can navigate our way out, I thought about all the pomp and praise I had heard or read (or even spoken or written myself) about Astral Weeks: its achievement is unparalleled in popular music, it infinitely expanded the possibilities of artistic expression, it's the rare album that exists outside both time and genre, it tops any list of the greatest records ever produced, its creator is a heroic visionary, etc., etc. Superlatives bounced around in my head; masterful words used to describe a musical masterwork.

On Bolyston Street, rubbing my still-adjusting eyes on the sleeve of my coat, I spoke with Lupton about the Catacombs' most unappealing qualities and how it would be hopelessly out of place among today's more sanitized venues. "Imagine seeing a show there," I said. "Imagine playing there."

And with those words came—not quite an epiphany or even a tiny flash of startling insight—but a slow-burning realization: For a long time Astral Weeks existed before the celestial praise, before the unembarrassed veneration, before wonderful writers like O'Hagan and Lester Bangs and Greil Marcus helped polish the album until it became the iconic, life-transforming gem that it is today. For a long, long time, Astral Weeks existed in the old Catacombs club I just toured, in a Green St. apartment in Cambridge, Mass., in a Hyndford St. bedroom in East Belfast. It existed on reel-to-reel tapes, in lyric-filled notebooks, on scraps of paper, on strummed acoustic guitars, in conversations with Morrison's friends and family and fellow musicians. It existed in the fingers and hands and hearts and minds of Morrison and the Berklee students recruited to back him, upright bassist Tom Kielbania and flautist/saxophonist John Payne.

Astral Weeks wasn't always absolute and it wasn't always infinite. It was once a shifting collection of ever-developing songs, a pure effort from Morrison to—I'm quoting the Irishman here—“break out of this rigidity” and return to a more stripped-bare approach to his music. Astral Weeks was once just a commitment, a gamble, a promise, a dream.

In "Reliable Sources," the mammoth-sized press kit Morrison's management team released in 1974, there was this line: "Ya gotta look back to see where you’re going." It's a sentiment that has come to characterize Morrison's artistry, all those songs in which he looked back at the landscapes of post-war Belfast, the narratives that inhabited those places, and the inspirations and passions that carried him through boyhood. Morrison sang so frequently about his past that it ultimately came to permanently reside in the present.

Only by looking back can one properly assess what Morrison achieved on Astral Weeks. So I'll go back—all the way back to childhood obsessions with black American artists such as Leadbelly and Brownie McGhee & Sonny Terry, to an adolescence spent in Belfast's often unnavigable world of sectarian boundaries and identity politics, to volatile tenures on Ireland's creativity-killing showband circuit. Buried in the "way back" is the Morrison who started to find stimulation in not only the world’s magnificence, but its brutality as well. Here, we discover the Morrison who began to understand that art is not always about depicting those people and places that are true, but those emotions that are true—the Morrison who came to the understanding that whenever he turned his back on his divided homeland, his medium would always bring him back to it.

You can hear all this on Astral Weeks, even when each listen tells you something different. It's a testament to the album's beauty and complexity. Are you ready to look back yet? Let’s venture in the slipstream. Let’s take a trip—back to when Astral Weeks was just a dream.

* * * * *

Artists still perform at the old Catacombs club—just not in the manner they once did. As Lupton and I descended the long flight of stairs stretching from the street door to the first basement level, we first heard the music. Through a twisting hallway we walked, down past a grimy, communal bathroom; our steps stirred papers stuck to the walls, flyers with tear-off tabs advertising the services of amp repairmen and experienced upright bassists. The hallway was lined with closed doors, each one sporting a number above it. Behind one, we heard a drummer working on heavy fills. At the next, a guitarist brashly repeated a few chords; further down the hallway, another door and a saxophonist performing a few shrieking runs.

Unlike Morrison's short residency in the summer of 1968, during which the Irishman regularly jammed with Kielbania and Payne in front of assembled crowds, these musicians played by themselves. This is because the Catacombs is now a spot for individual rehearsing. Students from Berklee College of Music, as well the nearby Boston Conservatory, come here to reserve rooms and hone their skills.

"It's a little sad—the place has lost much of its lore," Doug Ferriman told me after my visit to the Catacombs. "It's just a rehearsal space now, without any of the character it once had."

Ferriman is the founder and CEO of Crazy Dough's Pizza, which has locations throughout the Greater Boston area. One is at 1124 Bolyston St., so close to the old Catacombs club that particularly raucous student rehearsals would probably shake the establishment's walls. When Ferriman opened his Bolyston St. restaurant in 1999, the Catacombs was no longer a venue for live shows, but had essentially become an inheritance piece.

"The space was handed down from one band to the next," Ferriman explained. "The last to occupy it was a local heavy metal act. Bands used it to hang out and practice. It was a party place for any artists coming through town. I heard Bob Dylan visited—even bands like Megadeth. They would go down there to party and jam."

Ferriman said the code of secrecy surrounding the Catacombs made the space even more fascinating: "It was totally off the grid. Nobody knew about it except this small network of artists. It was very cool."

Ferriman had the opportunity to visit the Catacombs before it was purchased by its current owners, a Boston-based real estate corporation named the Hamilton Company. Pre-renovations, the space featured a 23-foot stage, an expansive dance floor, a bowling alley on the second basement level, and a wide assortment of peculiar bric-a-brac (Ferriman recalled seeing an antique barber’s chair). It ceased being an underground party destination when it was deemed to be in violation of city fire codes. (The only exit is the street-level door Lupton and I entered through.)

"I believe I was one of the last people down there before it was gutted," Ferriman said. "My memento was an old steel drum I always eyed on the wall."

Harry Sandler, co-founder of the Music Museum of New England and an artist who played at the Catacombs in the 1960s, described the venue rather aptly: "Very dark, dirty."

The Catacombs ... A space sullied by dirt and tinged with darkness, a place where old steel drums decorated the walls. A former club on Bolyston Street where Morrison discovered that with music—much like life—the thrill is in what you discover and learn along the way, not in how and where you finish. The Catacombs, where an artist created music that not only defined his career, but helped define how we look at the world and ourselves.

Personal dispatch #13

This is a dispatch from Jim Lemanowicz. He recorded a three-minute, lo-fi version of "Astral Weeks." It's wonderfully dilettante: clumsy in all the right places and smoothed over in all the wrong ones. It's further evidence that passion always trumps polish. Here is what Jim had to say about his background as well as what went into recording his cover.

I'm 47 and from Massapequa, N.Y. I've been recording since my uncle first gave me a reel-to-reel and then later a cassette recorder in the 70's. Mostly skits and sound effects. Raised on 70's AM radio, in the early 80's, I discovered rock, punk. Garage punk made me look back. I also discovered Lester Bangs via Creem reprints. And The Rolling Stone Record Guide likely was how I found out about Van.

I got a mandolin to emulate "The Battle Of Evermore," couldn't figure it out, and made my own concept album/tape about a local Chinese restaurant by bouncing between two tape recorders. A bit later, I figured out how to change the speed of a tape recorder by adding a potentiometer and started making more experimental recordings. In the late 80's, to make a more proper album with a friend, I ended up buying an electric guitar & four-track.

Shortly after, I started playing with a number of improv configurations (Deafcon then Psychoacoustics then Exploding Jazz Commode then Moodsetters then Center For Hearing & Dizziness) initially based around SUNY Stony Brook. We appeared on the air in the early mornings many, many times and eventually we played live a few times during the 90's. I've never played live outside of that context. I've never been in a covers band. In 1990, I was trained as an audio engineer on 16-track 2' tape, although I never went into the field. Since '02 or so, I have concentrated on recording by myself and releasing edits of the various things in my tape drawer under various names (Jimmy Lem, Manhattan Rubber, Vowel Samples, The Discrete Four, Stinkfinger Overdrive). Although I did some recording with the improv folks this past Memorial Day.

I love that album [Astral Weeks]. It always gives me something new, even after all of these years. Because of Lester Bang's essay on the Astral Weeks album, I've always wanted to do something with it, including a treatment for a movie at one point based on the actual album, the Bangs essay, and Jim Derogatis' description of what Lester went through in San Diego (only hinted at in the essay).

Lately, I have been recovering from illness and getting back into the swing of things by recording covers. I tried "Astral Weeks" a few times in January and February of this year, but this particular recording (from May 31) I like the best so far. I did this all in one day and I approached it as a short song. I recorded this in Ableton Live. I'm tapping out the beats on a Trigger Finger using some samples, I'm playing bass and guitar. That solo was first take and I hadn't meant to use it but I liked it as is. The mellotron sounds are me playing a G-Force M-Tron VST with an Akai MPK Mini controller. I changed the key to suit my voice. Again, I've never done covers really so I'm still learning. I believe one should never stop learning.