Astral Weeks — Van Morrison (1968)

Three afternoons in New York, a band who had never heard the songs, and a city remembered from four thousand miles away.

By Rafi Mercer

Most records made by session musicians sound like it. That is not an insult. It is the job — turn up, read the chart, play it properly, go home. The good ones do it invisibly and the very good ones do it invisibly for forty years and you never learn their names.

Occasionally the arrangement is missing and something else happens.

Century Sound Studios, New York, on three days in the autumn of 1968: the twenty-fifth of September, the first of October, the fifteenth. Richard Davis on double bass, who had played with Eric Dolphy. Jay Berliner on classical guitar, who had played with Mingus. Connie Kay on drums, from the Modern Jazz Quartet. John Payne on flute, Warren Smith Jr on vibraphone and percussion. Lewis Merenstein producing. All of them booked, all of them professional, none of them having heard a note of what they were about to record.

Davis has said since that Morrison barely spoke to them.

He was twenty-three and in an isolation booth. There were no charts. The instruction, more or less, was to listen and play what the song seemed to want, and what you hear on this record is very good musicians improvising in real time around a voice they had met that morning.

The circumstances behind it were ugly rather than romantic. Morrison had been locked out of recording for most of that year by a contract dispute with Bang Records, following the sudden death of the label's founder Bert Berns at the end of 1967 — a man who had wanted Morrison to make pop songs while Morrison wanted somewhere else to go entirely. Berns's widow held Morrison responsible for his death. That was the atmosphere. Warner Bros got him out of it, and the record he made once free is about a residential street in east Belfast.

Cyprus Avenue is real. Tree-lined, Victorian, wide. He grew up near it rather than on it, and the distance in that preposition is the whole album.

Because this is not a record about Belfast. It is a record about remembering Belfast from a rented room in America, which is a different thing and sounds different. Everything is held at a slight remove. Close enough to see. Not close enough to touch.

Nothing here resolves the way a 1968 record is supposed to resolve.

There is no chorus doing the heavy lifting. Songs circle. A phrase comes back and comes back and shifts by a fraction each time while Davis moves underneath, suggesting a direction without ever committing to one. Words come loose from their meanings and turn into pure sound — Morrison will repeat a handful of syllables until they have stopped being language and started being weather.

Which is either the most beautiful thing you have heard or a man declining to get to the point.

Both responses are honest. The record makes no case for itself and never has.

Side one carries a title of its own, In the Beginning, and that matters practically. It is one continuous emotional shape rather than four tracks in sequence, and dropping in halfway is like joining a conversation at the midpoint and asking everyone to catch you up.

In a listening room it asks for two things.

Volume a notch above what feels natural, because Richard Davis is effectively the lead instrument and the double bass sits low and unhurried in the mix. A modest system flattens him into atmosphere. A properly tuned one reveals that he is the one holding the entire record together — walking, doubling back, opening space and then filling it. The flute and Larry Fallon's strings sit forward and bright. The voice is close and unguarded to a degree that can be genuinely uncomfortable through good speakers.

And the whole side. Not a track. The side.

Conversation in a room tends to fall away about three minutes in, and not because anyone has asked.

It sold quietly, which is worse than badly. No hit, no single, nothing radio could use. The following year Morrison made Moondance — brass, structure, songs that end where you expect — and that is the one that sold, and the two records have been arguing with each other ever since.

Astral Weeks got where it got by the only method that suits it: one person telling another to sit down with it properly. Fifty-seven years of that. It reached the UK downloads chart for only the second time in its life last year, when Morrison turned eighty and Belfast filled a hall for him.

It is one of those albums people own more than they play. That is usually said as a criticism and I am not sure it is one. Some records are not for the commute. They are for the evening you have decided to give them, and they give back in exact proportion to what you offer, and almost nothing in the first two minutes will tell you that.

You have to stay before the record gives you a reason to.

The players packed up on the fifteenth of October and went home to whatever they had on that week. Davis said afterwards that none of them really knew what they had made.

They had been booked for the afternoon.

Quick Questions

Why does it sound so unlike other records from 1968?

Because there were no arrangements. The musicians were improvising around songs they were hearing for the first time, which is standard practice in jazz and almost unheard of in folk or rock. The looseness is not a style choice — it is what actually happened in the room.

Where should I start if I've never heard it?

At the beginning, and stay for the whole of side one. It was sequenced as a single continuous piece under its own title and it does not work in fragments. Give it forty-seven minutes and no phone.

Is Cyprus Avenue a real place?

Yes — a tree-lined residential street in east Belfast. Morrison grew up nearby rather than on it, which is arguably the point: the record observes from just outside, remembering rather than describing.

Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters. For more stories from Tracks & Tales, subscribe, or read more from the album archive.