60. Van Morrison, "Astral Weeks"

 

Man, the journey I've had with this record.  I picked it up used in the early 90s from Reckless Records on Haight Street and had a very brief but very intense relationship with it for a few months and then promptly forgot about it.  Then I didn't listen to it at all for about 30 years until I put it on again on Friday and have barely listened to anything else since.

This weird, wonderful album is a meditation or a tone poem or a portal to another state of consciousness, as the title suggests.  The songs on it aren't really songs in the conventional sense of the term - they're wild and meandering things, almost free-form jams, which makes sense, because, according to bassist Richard Davis, that's exactly what they were.  There were no lead sheets or even basic song outlines, just Van Morrison and the musicians going at it.  This sounds like a recipe for a fucking disaster, but instead it's one of the most famous and influential albums of the 20th century.

What do we make of a song like "Madame George," an almost 10-minute long opus that reminds you of when you were "sitting on a sofa playing games of chance/With your folded arms and history books you glance/Into the eyes of Madame George."  Accentuated gently by strings and flute, Van weaves his way through an extended reverie.  It's like a dream, or a memory, flowing through you and over you and making perfect sense.  It's achingly sad somehow, and uplifting at the same time?  How does he do that?

Let's consider "Cyprus Avenue," which, as many sources will tell you, is the name of a fancy street in Belfast.  It's a tale of longing and wishing, with Davis's acoustic bass and a later-overdubbed harpsichord punctuating Van's guitar, with a violin appearing as if summoned later.  And there's "Slim Slow Slider," the only song without strings, just Van and Davis and some soprano sax and percussion.  It's as sad and reserved as it gets, obviously about drug addiction:

Slim slow slider
Horse you ride
Is white as snow
Slim slow slider
Horse you ride
Is white as snow
Tell it everywhere you go

It also has a weirdly abrupt ending - apparently there was like five more minutes of the song but producer Lewis Merenstein was like nope and just dropped the faders on that.  

I think the title track, the first song, might be my favorite.  Gorgeous opening couplet ("If I ventured in the slipstream/Between the viaducts of your dream") and some amazing lead guitar work by Jay Berliner, who brought his jazz sensibilities to the song (and really, every song on the album).  It's just a pretty song, in the best sense of the term.

I really cannot emphasize enough how much you should read Lindsay Zoladz's wonderful piece about this album and what it's meant to her.  I would have just reprinted it wholesale here if I could have.  It's one of the best pieces of music writing I've ever read.

Now you're going to get whipsawed because I just talked about how wonderful this album is but it's not in my Top 100.  Like what the hell man?  Well, a few things.  I'm really down on Van these days, given his weird turn into Covid denialism and just general assholery, plus apart from those few months 30 years ago I haven't listened to this album at all.  There are so many albums I revere and listen to all the time, and this just isn't one of them.  We will eventually hit an album on here that's in my Top 100, in a few days, in fact.  No, there are no Guided by Voices albums in the Rolling Stone Top 500, it's something else.

Is this album in my personal Top 100? No.