Now Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl is also an album honoring the shows that honored that legendary album. The legend is with the album, and the legend is the album.Īstral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl was a pair of concerts held last year at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, honoring the legendary album (scheduled to be reprised February 27 and 28 at New York's Theater at Madison Square Garden). You breathe in you breathe out, baby baby baby, way upon way upon, dry your eye your eye your eye, too late to stop now, the love that loves the love that loves the love that loves the love that loves to love the love that loves to love the love that loves, I know you're dying. Guitarist Jay Berliner (Charles Mingus' The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady), bassist Richard Davis (Eric Dolphy's Out to Lunch), and drummer Connie Kay (of the Modern Jazz Quartet) create an improvisatory space for Morrison's haunted freeform meditations Larry Fallon's overdubs add strings, woodwinds, and harpsichord. A 23-year-old Van Morrison howls, he hollers, he cajoles, he grabs hold of the ineffable and caresses its edges, bending and reiterating it like an instrumental virtuoso. Morrison wrote and rehearsed much of the album while in Cambridge and Boston while in hiding amid a nasty dispute over the rights to his recordings following his big 1967 hit, “Brown Eyed Girl.” Ryan Hamilton Walsh wrote it up for Boston magazine in 2015 he later expanded it into a book.Only Astral Weeks the album could live up to Astral Weeks the legend. And we’re talking about a musician who’s recorded many fine albums over the years. The most fully realized songs on “Astral Weeks” are the title track, “Cypress Avenue” and “Madame George,” which transport you - as Morrison sings - to “another time, in another place.” Overall, “Astral Weeks” is so much better than anything else Morrison recorded that you are left in awe, wondering where it came from. Morrison supposedly didn’t like the strings that were added later, but I disagree. The melodies are simple and repetitive, giving Morrison’s singing - improvisational and heartfelt - plenty room to stretch out. It is an intensely spiritual record, explicitly on the title track, implicitly on the rest. Released in 1968, “Astral Weeks” is mostly acoustic jazz/folk/rock with a first-rate band anchored by the bassist Richard Davis. So on the same day in 1990 that I was picking up Tom Waits’ “Franks Wild Years” in the used-CD bin at Tower Records, I decided to take a chance on Morrison’s “Astral Weeks.” If I had to describe him, I’d have said he was, well, OK.īut I’d heard about an album he’d made near the beginning of his career that never got played on the radio and that supposedly established him as a genius on the order of Bob Dylan or the Beatles. I wasn’t motivated to buy any of his albums. I liked some of his stuff, not all of it. As far as I was concerned, Van Morrison was just a voice on the radio.
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