My All-Timers: 32. Van Morrison — Astral Weeks
When I was 15, a family friend gave me a copy of Lester Bangs’s Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, a collection of writings from the crazy music journalist who was portrayed by Phillip Seymour Hoffman in Almost Famous. Bangs lived hard and died young, and his writing reflects that. He wrote like his fingers were on fire. He could take a record review and turn it into a lecture on mankind’s disposition for evil, and never would you feel like he had lost the plot. Bangs knew that music is life.
Ever since I read that book, I guess you could say I have been chasing this same aesthetic. Bangs was the first real music journalist I read, and I wanted to be like him. The problem is that I set my own bar too high. I can write until I’m 80, but I will never approach the unparalleled beauty which Bangs used as his way to relate to the world.
That book had a “review” of Astral Weeks that convinced me it was the most important, monolithic record that had ever been made. But I didn’t go anywhere near it, not for over a decade. At 15, I assumed that I wasn’t ready for Astral Weeks. I probably assumed correctly. I would not have known what to do with Astral Weeks. I hadn’t lived enough to understand it yet.
I knew that I wasn’t ready for this record because Bangs described it as “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.” Think back to when you were 15: would you have known how to relate to these ideas? Had you found yourself stalled in your skin? Maybe you had been overwhelmed by, like, how Algebra was really hard or something, but that probably wasn’t quite what Bangs was talking about. Bangs was getting at the confounding nature of being an adult and realizing at certain points in your life that you have no answers, but then maybe finding paralyzing truth in the love between yourself and another person. I hadn’t experienced any of that. Astral Weeks would have to wait.
By the time it came around on Rolling Stone’s Top 500 Albums list for our Record Club, I had the capacity to understand what Van Morrison did back in 1968. As a 28-year old listener, I no longer only wanted stuff like Bad Religion. I could lock in with the loose, hazy instrumentation of Astral Weeks and not be bored to tears. That’s not to say that it’s an impenetrable prog-rock record. It’s just that Astral Weeks passes through you like a fog and you have to get yourself ready in order to catch it.
The title track opens the record and establishes the laid-back nature of Morrison’s vision. The percussion is minimal, rarely using a driving backbeat. Guitars are either gently strummed or elegantly plucked. The true musical star of the record is Richard Davis, whose upright bass playing keeps the songs together rhythmically and provides steadiness in the face of uncertainty. Astral Weeks would not be the same without him. Listen all the way through the title track — he lets his playing go to odd places all over the frets, and Morrison just sits back, swaying in approval at Davis’s exploration of his own musical voice.
“Beside You” is the least structured song on the record, and is probably the most thrilling. Davis guides the players through the chord changes, which only barely follow time and meter, and that’s okay because the feelings that Morrison is exploring here don’t follow time and meter either. Nevermind that Morrison’s lyrics don’t always make perfect sense, as Bangs says, you’re in trouble when you try to decipher the exact meaning of a “mystical document.” “Beside You” is mystical beyond measure. It creates a mood unlike almost anything I’ve heard as it floats along, and when Morrison is suddenly gripped by his own words and frantically repeats “You breathe in, you breathe out” until he explodes and howls “and you turrrrrrn aroouuuuund,” well, I just personally don’t think music gets much better than that. Oh, maybe it actually gets better at the end of that song, when the delicate framework bubbles up like a volcano and erupts, and Morrison unloads his voice and explodes too. Just unbelievable.
And does it need to be said that Van Morrison is one of the best singers to ever live? He is transcendent on this record. His voice can do anything.
The lyrics here are mostly abstract, and their meaning can sometimes be troublesome. Bangs insists that “Cyprus Avenue” is a story of passive pedophilia — a man who obsessively watches a 14-year old girl come home from school every day. The narrator only watches. He never makes a move beyond what he is allowed. Only at the very end of the seven-minute song does he even decide to reveal that the object of his affection is 14. Bangs says this song is supposed to show the pain of loving something you can’t have, but I might have to disagree that it’s about pedophilia. Are we certain that the narrator is supposed to be an adult? Why can’t it be a young boy admiring a young girl? Yes, the narrator is “conquered in a car seat,” but he could be the passenger in a car, right? Maybe I’m nit-picking in order to not confront the possible creepiness of this song, but I think at the very least it shows that Morrison was happy with leaving us confused. His answers have to be investigated, not served to you.
Lester Bangs’s review of Astral Weeks was written in 1979, 11 years after the record came out. The conclusion of the review makes a compelling argument for why Morrison’s subsequent records didn’t handle as sensitive or hard-hitting of topics: “Such knowledge is the worst thing that can happen to a person…no wonder that Van Morrison never came this close to looking life square in the face again. He confronted enough for any man’s lifetime.” Though I haven’t dug into a ton of his later work, I can tell that this statement is probably true, and I don’t blame Morrison for shying away from the bizarre intensity of Astral Weeks. But being able to listen to it, rather than create it, is a much more satisfying and repeatable process. I hope that most of the stuff in my Top 50 will be on my record player when I’m an old man, but I am positive that Astral Weeks will be with me forever and ever.
