Astral Decades
In the fall of 1968 I was living on NYC’s Upper West Side, near Columbia U. It had been a hell of a year between the assassinations and the Chicago riots and Richard Nixon’s election (my father had raised me to consider Nixon evil incarnate, a creature of unmitigated wickedness). I had been reclassified 1-A (losing my student deferment because I had switched graduate majors from English/Journalism to Law), and found refuge as a Junior High School teacher. NYC was short of teachers that year and had implemented a 9 week long instant teacher program that left you with a temp license and an inner city assignment. Mine was a few blocks away from where I was living, a part of the city known as Manhattan Valley. They were mean streets, but not vicious ones. Although I was licensed in English, the school I was assigned to had no openings in that subject. What they needed was a boy’s Gym & Hygiene teacher, and I was the most athletic looking male (seriously) ….and you know, I've occasionally thought that if they’d left me in that gym, I’d still be there today. Fun job. Lots more fun than teaching Junior High English, which – when a slot opened up and they took me out of the gym – drove me to enlist in the Army Reserve, making me possibly the only guy who joined the Army to get a deferment from teaching.
Anyway, it was not a great time in my life - did I mention there was also a particularly nasty teachers' strike that fall which divided the faculty and created an atmosphere of tension and anger? So, one late night that fall, heavily depressed, I was lying around listening to WBAI, a free-wheeling listener-supported radio station which featured some of the weirder and more liberating radio personalities of that or any other time. I guess it was probably Bob Fass or maybe Steve Post doing the talking. Whoever it was decided to play a new album in its entirety and let it roll. The music grabbed me instantly, and took me to a far better place than where I'd just been.
The LP was Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, and from that moment on, Van has been on my permanent A-list (even though he’s had some weak releases), and Astral Weeks has headed the list of my desert island musical selections.
Although nothing else he's ever done has been the equal of that one-of-a-kind set, his ability to do and mix r&b, jazz, folk (skittle-type and celtic), pure blues, torch, standards, and pop is – IMHO – unparalleled and unequaled in the music world. He writes great songs, has a distinctive, high-intensity voice, plays harp, sax, & guitar, and is a first-rate producer and arranger. He can rock, he can swing, he can moan the blues, stroke a love song, and get the step-dancers moving at a ceilidh. His body of work includes other outstanding albums like Moondance, Tupelo Honey, Veedon Fleece, Into the Music, Irish Heartbeat, Too Late to Stop Now (live), Enlightenment, and Down The Road.
After a series of middling albums in the early 90's, Van's last three have been excellent – Down the Road, What's Wrong With This Picture, and the just-issued Magic Time, which I've been listening to this week. It's a mix of original material with a couple of very nice takes on standards ("I'm Confessin'", Fats Waller's "Black and Blue" retitled as "Lonely and Blue"), the lovely ballads "Stranded" and "The Lion This Time", the jumping "Evening Train", the haunted "Gypsy in My Soul", and more. All in all, it's a worthy addition to the Van canon.
Anyway, it was not a great time in my life - did I mention there was also a particularly nasty teachers' strike that fall which divided the faculty and created an atmosphere of tension and anger? So, one late night that fall, heavily depressed, I was lying around listening to WBAI, a free-wheeling listener-supported radio station which featured some of the weirder and more liberating radio personalities of that or any other time. I guess it was probably Bob Fass or maybe Steve Post doing the talking. Whoever it was decided to play a new album in its entirety and let it roll. The music grabbed me instantly, and took me to a far better place than where I'd just been.
The LP was Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, and from that moment on, Van has been on my permanent A-list (even though he’s had some weak releases), and Astral Weeks has headed the list of my desert island musical selections.
Although nothing else he's ever done has been the equal of that one-of-a-kind set, his ability to do and mix r&b, jazz, folk (skittle-type and celtic), pure blues, torch, standards, and pop is – IMHO – unparalleled and unequaled in the music world. He writes great songs, has a distinctive, high-intensity voice, plays harp, sax, & guitar, and is a first-rate producer and arranger. He can rock, he can swing, he can moan the blues, stroke a love song, and get the step-dancers moving at a ceilidh. His body of work includes other outstanding albums like Moondance, Tupelo Honey, Veedon Fleece, Into the Music, Irish Heartbeat, Too Late to Stop Now (live), Enlightenment, and Down The Road.
After a series of middling albums in the early 90's, Van's last three have been excellent – Down the Road, What's Wrong With This Picture, and the just-issued Magic Time, which I've been listening to this week. It's a mix of original material with a couple of very nice takes on standards ("I'm Confessin'", Fats Waller's "Black and Blue" retitled as "Lonely and Blue"), the lovely ballads "Stranded" and "The Lion This Time", the jumping "Evening Train", the haunted "Gypsy in My Soul", and more. All in all, it's a worthy addition to the Van canon.
posted by DJStan at 10:30 AM
2 Comments:
I've always been a little puzzled by Van Morrison. When I lived in Texas my best friend was something of a Van fanatic--he had every album the man had ever recorded, and, for friendship's sake, I was always trying to get into Van, and never quite succeeding.
I bought Astral Weeks, partly because I saw it on one of those silly "best X rock albums of all times!" lists, and, to be honest, I've only listened to it a time or two. I just found it flat, and I should probably give it another chance.
The one Van album I can say I dearly love is the one he did with the Chieftons. I would use a word I'm usually embarrassed to use for it: soulful. It has Van's sorrow and pain, but the melodies are quite beautiful, and I've always loved the Chieftan's sound, and the combination seems to work very well.
Not that Van's not capable of it himself--"Have I told you lately that I love you" and "Into the Mystic" are two of my favorites, and I just don't hear anything so sweetly evocative on "Astral Weeks."
But, as I say, I'll give it another listen.
It's hard to communicate musical tastes, or any aesthetic values. A lot of the time, it just comes down to "Well, I like it" and that's that. The "greats" are usually just a result of critical consensus at any given moment, and are subject to change (consider - once again - the Salon artists vs. the Salon des refuses).
Some artists, though, like Shakespeare or Mozart or Rembrandt evoke such consistent reponses over extended periods of time that they become indisputably "great".
Van Morrison always evokes a response in me. On Astral Weeks he gets to me on every track. You might try "The Way Young Lovers Do" or "Sweet Thing", which are more accessible than the "Astral Weeks" track itself or the - IMO - sublime "Madame George". "Into The Mystic" is from Moondance - and plenty of people like that set more than Astral Weeks. It's hard to argue one way or the other.
But he may just not do it for you. I have a good friend who idolizes Frank Sinatra. I understand her, and respect the man's abilities. But - with few exceptions - I've never responded to him or his music. For another instance, both my parents were opera buffs and I was raised on it, but it never took. I just don't respond to it on any but a superficial "love the sets and costumes" level.
So try some other Van - but it's certainly possible that he's just one of those acclaimed artists you just don't respond to. When Public Frog noted that neither she nor Mr. Toad had any Dylan in their music collection, I was surprised but not shocked. We don't all respond to the same thing.
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