Amazing Things Part One

From: supplement to The Chicago Tribune, Sunday, September 7, 2008.

Dude—Sweet Van.

Van Morrison, circa 2007 (left); Zoot of The Electric Mayhem (right)

I.

I feel only the slightest twinge of guilt stating that I have nearly unwavering contempt for the music and persona of Van Morrison. You know: Van the Man, or The Belfast Cowboy? Whew. The former sounds like the tagline for Van Wilder 3 and the latter, the inevitable stage name of the star attraction of an international gay gentleman’s club.

Morrison has proven to be an enormous influence on U2 front man Bono, who, though slightly less-so than fellow one-monikered goofs Taco and Falco, is clearly one of the most ridiculous entertainers known to the modern world.

Brown Eyed Girl? Hate it. Wild Night? Hate it. Domino? Hate it. I despise them all with exasperation. The only thing more embarrassing than the song Moondance—except for, perhaps, sweaty, contempo-jazz lunkhead Michael Bubblé’s version of it? The entire album of the same name. Morrison’s blubbering affectation on Crazy Love is so utterly stupid; it makes me want to tear my teeth out.

That blunt instrument commonly known as the blue-eyed soul (a term, lest we forget, also associated with Michael Bolton) of George Ivan Morrison is tirelessly resurrected from the blue-eyed graveyard to bludgeon movie audiences over the head with prescribed emotion every time something presumably sad or wonderful happens. (See When a Man Loves a Woman, Nine Months, Phenomenon, One Fine Day, Michael, The Matchmaker, As Good as it Gets, Patch Adams, Bridget Jones’s Diary, etc.) And didn’t Julia Roberts dance around and try on clothes or something to Brown-Eyed Girl in the insipid, gouge-your-own-eyes-out-inducing Pretty Woman? (Come to think of it, it was probably Pretty Woman by Roy Orbison.) No matter; even if she didn’t, you can easily imagine it, which is precisely the point.

The music of Van Morrison­, itself a lazy appropriation of black American soul and R&B, has been enlisted, utterly lazily, to permeate the subconscious with a representation of a specifically white, yet hep to the American black experience, world-weariness that blankets both pain and whimsy.

Like, say for, “Honey, I have brain cancer,” cue Crazy Love. And for a flashback to when an uptight professional mom was a freewheeling college girl, cue Brown Eyed Girl. Slather, rinse, repeat. The possibilities and variations, as you know, are endless.

It’s not unlike the kitchen scene in The Big Chill. Or when Murphy Brown would sing and dance to her beloved Motown records. Behold the middle-aged, white, well-to-do Boomers who get it. They empathize with and understand black suffering, so they get to partake in the catharsis of black music. It always reeked of entitlement, and forced me to avert my eyes in some fashion. This was partially out of embarrassment for the actors and writers, but mostly out of shame, due to shared pigment hue. Reportedly, a remake of The Big Chill is in the works with an all-black cast, and I am hoping and praying that it will update the classic kitchen sequence to see its black characters doing the dishes to Ratt or Tesla or something, reliving their ‘80s hair-metal heyday. It would only be slightly more ridiculous, though certainly less offensive.

II.

So that musty, slow-aged portion of Van Morrison is nowhere to be found on his 1968 album Astral Weeks. It is, quite simply, a miraculous piece of work. And it was so bizarrely conceived, and its success so contingent on myriad factors, that its very existence seems as unlikely as the occurrence of any other natural, extraordinary thing. It stuns you during its stay, and when it departs, it leaves you awestruck and shaken, wondering where it came from.

And its title is fantastic, though not the best I’ve ever heard. That distinguished honor belongs to fellow red-haired Webelos compatriot Donnie Cappy, whose poem entitled Why Does My Dick Get Hard When it Touches a Church Pew? has yet to be dethroned.

When I decided to write a little something about Astral Weeks after Madame George shuffled its way into my headphones and made me want to vomit joy, I was under the impression that Astral Weeks was a hidden gem of sorts. I only know of one other person who loves it, and he is not coincidentally the only other person I know that has even heard it.

I hadn’t heard it, or any of Astral Weeks for that matter, in quite some time, and Madame George blindsided me. Immediately and for days after. I couldn’t listen to anything else. What struck me was—you know how you’re always bullied with the false, clichéd mischaracterization of punk rock as being only four tossed-off chords (automatically disqualifying every song by The Clash or Fugazi)? Well, here’s a song that’s, literally, only three chords, with absolutely no variation in the order in which they’re played. And it’s like ten minutes long!

But there’s something swirling around those three chords. Something marvelous, where the architects of the work’s legacy can be found.

III.

Morrison was a mere 22 years old when he recorded Astral Weeks. This makes perfect sense, given the way it expertly bottles the breezy swagger and unrest of youth, but is utterly baffling when considering the ludicrous shit I was up to when I was 22. (I’m pretty sure I was that age when I chipped my front tooth on a 40oz. bottle of Magnum Malt liquor while drunkenly bashing the drums to the original composition Casper, the Friendly Jesus.) A contract dispute with former label Bang Records (for whom he recorded Brown Eyed Girl) proved to be a bit hilarious and a bit sad, with bad blood being drawn by the drafting of lawsuits. Warner Bros. Records would eventually duke it out with Bang, but before that would happen, Morrison would be denied work in the clubs of New York because they were too chicken to risk enduring the ire of Bang. And he was still under contract with them, which prevented him from recording for another label. So Morrison developed the compositions of Astral Weeks in the mean streets of Cambridge, MA, without no home for his songs.

Noting that Morrison was “twenty-two—or twenty-three—when he made this record,” Lester Bangs has said of Astral Weeks “there are lifetimes behind it.” The incomparable Greil Marcus (the best rock critic most people have never heard of) championed Astral Weeks when editing the 1979 book Stranded, where Bangs’s (the only rock critic most people have ever heard of­) tender assessment appears. Bangs claims that Astral Weeks provided him with “proof that there was something left to express artistically besides nihilism and destruction.” He heralded it as “a record about people stunned by life . . . because what they see is both infinitely beautiful and terminally horrifying: the unlimited human ability to create or destroy, according to whim.” Bangs was particularly fond of Madame George, considering it the centerpiece of the album. So passionate was he, that he accused Morrison of being a liar for claiming that the title character of Madame George wasn’t a transvestite.

Additionally, Marcus claims that Martin Scorcese told him, somewhat inexplicably, that Astral Weeks served as the primary influence on the first half of Taxi Driver.

So, as it turns out, me and my friend (who recently texted me this summation of Astral Weeks: “That shit is nuts”) aren’t Astral Weeks’ only admirers. In 2003, Rolling Stone magazine placed it at #19 on its list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time; in 1995 MOJO put it at #2 on its list of the 100 Best Albums. Though it failed to chart upon hitting the streets in 1968, it went gold about seven years ago—33 years after its release.

How on earth does an album with no singles or discernible fan base weasel its way into the revered Establishment’s canon? Everybody knows, minimally, the Top 20 albums from Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. Everybody knows Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (No. 1), or at least With a Little Help From My Friends, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds and When I’m Sixty-Four; everybody knows Pet Sounds (No. 2), or at least Wouldn’t it Be Nice? and God Only Knows; everybody knows The Velvet Underground and Nico (No. 13), or at least All Tomorrow’s Parties and Heroin; and everybody knows Thriller (No. 20) because its, well, Thriller. So, then, everybody must know Astral Weeks, or its songs The Way That Young Lovers Do, Sweet Thing and Slim Slow Slider, right?

The Apples in Stereo aped the Pet Sounds-era Beach Boys before Panda Bear did, and Pavement aped the Velvet Underground before Cold War Kids aped Pavement. So where are the Astral Weeks imitators? Isn’t that the true measure of creative success?

IV.

In 1969 to ‘70, and before he was my father, Charles Allan Larson was also known as Birth Control, radio operator for the heavily armed infantry of the First Cavalry in the sort of Vietnam immersion Rushmore’s Max Fischer adeptly surmised as being in the shit. During his allotted five days of R&R in October of 1969, which he spent in Hong Kong, he bought an AMPEX turntable and had it shipped back to the States.

Much to my grandparents’ chagrin, he later decided to take advantage of the Army’s early release program, extending his tour in Vietnam by 55 days so that, rather than serve stateside, he would be honorably discharged upon his return to the States. As further incentive, the Army granted participants in the program seven days leave. Problem was, soldiers were only allowed to go to designated R&R sites, which ran for five days rather than seven. So the U.S. Army kept those two days for itself, and my father again returned to Hong Kong for five days after giving up on Bangkok, where he really wanted to go. See, there were no flights to Bangkok scheduled, and he’d be goddamned if he was going to wait on some plane that might never show, and watch a rare, albeit short, reprieve from the terrors and boredom of the bush mingle with the smoke fleeing the cherry of his Camel Filter. It was around this time that he saw an ad for a then-state-of-the-art AMPEX reel-to-reel tape player advertised in the military newspaper Stars and Stripes. It was home before he was, in Illinois, where Charlie was the name his mother called him, rather than the shifty, complicated enemy of the bush.

I had previously thought that my father had purchased his Hi-Fi system while on R&R in Saigon. But, as he recently told me:

As far as Saigon goes, it was off limits to the First Cavalry. The closest I got was a guy I met named "Frenchy" from the 1st of the 12th Cavalry and I left the R&R center and went to an ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) officers club and had a few drinks and it was on the outskirts of Saigon. Fortunately we didn't get caught.

At any rate, in 1969, Warner Bros. Records predated the flimsy plastic K-Tel revolution with the introduction of its Warner/Reprise Loss Leaders. These mail-order-only double compilation albums were offered up for sacrifice by Warners for a mere $2 in an effort to promote its exponentially expanding, drug-addled roster of the new talent it otherwise had little idea what to do with. My father, smitten with the Leaders’ bang-for-your-buck quality upon seeing an advertisement printed on the inner sleeve of some other Warners full-length, ordered the first two: The 1969 Warner/Reprise Songbook, which featured the Jimi Hendrix Experience (Red House), The Electric Prunes (Finders Keepers) and the would-be immortal (except for its mortality) Wide, Wide River of Shit by disturbed New York weirdos The Fugs; and The 1969 Warner/Reprise Record Show, featuring Neil Young with Crazy Horse (Cinnamon Girl), Jethro Tull (Fat Man) and the best-ever song by the Mothers of Invention, Electric Aunt Jemima, which is also, as far as I know, the only good song ever written about pancake mix.

Slim Slow Slider appeared on The 1969 Warner/Reprise Songbook, which I discovered in 1991, when I was about seventeen while pilfering my father’s record collection. I had never heard anything like it; it made me feel, I don’t know . . . weird. Maybe that’s why—though it may only hint at the dizzying form and function of Astral Weeks and even if it is the final song to appear on the album—Slim Slow Slider seems to me a logical and likely entrance to Astral Weeks. It certainly was for me, and maybe the brass at Warners knew it would be for others, too, when they slapped it on Songbook. Or perhaps they just had to put something from Astral Weeks on there, so why not its shortest song?

So there lay Astral Weeks, this unheard relic, manifested in cassette form and nursing a giant gash in its spine presumably administered by a near-impotent hacksaw. It certainly didn’t have the appearance of a classic; it just lay there, half-buried in the other non-performing specters of the cutout bin at anti-savings juggernaut Musicland. So then, for me, Slim Slow Slider earned the distinction of becoming the sole piece of music from either of the aforementioned Warner/Reprise Loss Leaders (I already had Smash Hits by The Jimi Hendrix Experience) to translate to a sale of the album from whence it came.

I knew less about the recording process then, about most everything really, and would, therefore, not have burdened myself with noticing the adept yet abrupt tape edit at 3:26 in Ballerina, or the odd, accidental-sounding dropout of the string section at 2:43 in Madame George. And it took me quite awhile to figure out that the elasticity of the bass was due to the fact that it was an upright. But I thought Astral Weeks was pretty adventurous, and it was certainly a useful tool in sinking to lower depths when I was already sunk pretty damned low, as teenagers are prone to do. The Way Young Lovers Do was easily my favorite track on the album for what I thought was its precise songwriting, as I mistook the arrangement of it for its songwriting. But what resonated with me most and still does about Astral Weeks is the way the varied instruments seem to haphazardly swirl around one another without submerging the whole thing into the piths of chaos.

But I never gave it the same undivided attention as I did to my then current favorite records, like say, Ten, by Pearl Jam or the predatory pornography disguised as progressive hippie-ism that is Blood Sugar Sex Magic by the embarrassingly cocksure Red Hot Chili Peppers—both of which I preferred to Nevermind, to which I felt a certain disconnect. (Though my appreciation for Nirvana has outlived and eclipsed that of Pearl Jam and the disposable Peppers a hundred times over, I’m still baffled at how Kurt Cobain is considered the spokesman of a generation; he’s clearly awesome, but his provocative, confrontational, drug-addled femininity is too unique, and his lyrics are too obtuse to represent anything other than Kurt Cobain.) And then came Pavement and Dinosaur jr, with whom the levels of my obsession and admiration knew no limits. Astral Weeks was always there, though, as countless once-loved records fell forever out of favor.

So all that was quite a long time ago, and may be of no greater importance to this dialogue other than to demonstrate the absurdity and unlikelihood of anything that occurs of ever occurring. That the brilliance of Astral Weeks, though not in any way understood, was not entirely lost on the naïveté and privilege of one brazen youth. And that, strangest of all, Van Morrison and his Astral Weeks would come home with a soldier from the jungles of Vietnam.

It is paramount, then, to clarify that the subject manifested in this writing is explicitly guilty by association. That is; it is not only the very least profound thing to have come from my father’s stint in the bush, but utterly laughable in its dependency on something with as much gravitas as a soldier’s tour of duty in a famously tumultuous Conflict, however integral to my ever hearing the damned thing it may be.

V.

In Astral Weeks, the first song on the album of the same name, Morrison howls:

There you go
Takin’ good care of your boy
Seein’ that he’s got clean clothes
A-puttin’ on his little red shoes
A-pointin’ a finger at me
And here I am
Standing in your sad arrest
Tryin’ to do my very best
Lookin’ straight at you

These lines didn’t necessarily resonate with me back then, but they sure do now. I have assigned intensely personal meaning to them, and I’m apparently allowed to do so: Morrison has long lamented, generously, that his lyrics’ meaning are contingent upon who is listening to them. According to Bangs, Morrison told Rolling Stone, “I look at some of the stuff that comes out, y’know. And like, there it is and it feels right, but I can’t say for sure what it means.” The most surprising thing about the words of Astral Weeks may not be their ability to forcefully grab hold of specific, personal assignations varying from these ears to those ears, but to change along with the age of the listener over the short period of time she or he is allotted.

Used to be the song Astral Weeks made me want to drop out; y’know, like the Peter Sellers character in I Love You, Alice B. Toklas!, or The Manson Family, only with less disastrous or murderous results. It made me want to smoke pot all day and make love in an enormous wheat field sporting a Jesus beard, flailing around in a white robe. It made me long for an era I wasn’t part of and perhaps had seen in a laundry detergent commercial. Now, when the thought of living in a field enters my mind, all I can think is where is mutherfuckers supposed to poop?

The song Astral Weeks has moved me to tears quite recently though, and not because of the realization that the ideal of a perpetually stoned Jesus look-alike wearing dirty, tattered clothes is nothing to aspire to, unless you’re maybe hoping to wear the hat of the village burnout or the helmet of a bicycle messenger (the possible exception being the Barnard Hughes character in The Lost Boys).

It’s due to the hope and despair communicated by words and echoed in the instrumentation. It’s due to the egg shaker toe-tapping around in the left channel and expertly giving way to the quivering, racing string section, letting the song breathe while heightening its gentle dramatics. It’s due to that glorious and commanding upright bass, sounding and keeping time like waves and sediment plunking the bottom of a rusted aluminum boat before squeaking into a higher register, stubbornly repeating the same note so melodically. It’s due to the twittering flute and its circling, unburdened pep. It’s due to the classical guitar’s delicate and proper noodling relegated to the right channel, in service to making its presence known without drawing undue attention to itself. It’s due to the two-chord progression of Morrrison’s acoustic, dead center and percussively advancing the agenda of the melody. It’s due to Morrison’s words of bewilderment and to their delivery, and more than a little to the warm spring reverb luxuriously coating their tones and annunciation. And its due to the effortlessness by which it harnesses all of this in its execution, easing into your unconscious and seizing your heart by the throat, never really letting it go, maybe even for years after you’ve heard it.

VI.

From song to song, Astral Weeks never quite lets you settle in, often engaging in the business of hijacking a heightened emotion and leaving it for dead by the side of the road, only to erect another in its place. Like when the peppy, major scale joie de vivre of the title track segues into the minor scale, foreboding depths of Beside You, whose title, when howled in pain by Morrison, sounds more threatening than promissory, as destiny necessarily manifests as a lifelong, joyless struggle routed in shared misfortune:

And I’ll stand beside you
Beside you, child
To never never wonder why at all
No no no no no no no no
To never never wonder why at all
To never never wonder why it’s gotta be
It has to be

Though it’s exceptionally beautiful, it’s nearly too crushing to listen to. It has to be. It’s brutish and bullying, and bankrupt in its idealism. But it’s not without tenderness. It’s Stanley Kowalski screeching Stella! on the Rain-slicked streets of New Orleans. It’s the romanticism of the suffering inherent in being dragged down to crawl on the bottom by and alongside the one you’re with.

And though the following may in fact be a reference to smoking drugs:

You breathe in
You breathe out
You breathe in
You breathe out
You breathe in
You breathe out
You breathe in
You breathe out
And your high on your high flying cloud

it is chugged out in such a heightened state of paranoia and panic, it makes the usual celebratory High Times model of weed smoking and the counterculture it has sustained for the better part of 50 years (e.g., Half-Baked, Dazed and Confused, hip-hop) seem more sinister and unappealing than Just Say No crusaders Nancy Reagan and Gary Coleman could have ever imagined was possible.

And then Sweet Thing appears, which may be my favorite song on Astral Weeks (but then, any of them might be), with its cascading strings and slightly overdriven, ragtag high hat. That same high hat also keeps time, albeit in support of the ride, in the collision of energetic bravado that is The Way Young Lovers Do. Besides inexplicably missing That from the title (Morrison employs the words the way that young lovers do for the chorus), The Way Young Lovers Do, as has been previously stated, was an early favorite of mine from Astral Weeks, its constitution constantly expanding and retracting, threatening to joyfully burst into a thousand particles.

Though The Way Young Lovers Do is perhaps the most accessible track on Astral Weeks, its velvetey rythym is deceptively tricky. I have a vague remembrance of, for the longest time, being stunned and utterly confused by it, as I was by Led Zeppelin’s Black Dog, and son of Black Dog, Something Out of Nothing by Soul Asylum. Unfortunately, I rarely find myself in such a situation these days. Though it frustrates me to no end, I love that feeling of trying to get it. But I have had some trouble recently with much of The Bedlam in Goliath by The Mars Volta, Real by Lupe Fiasco, and the opening of Rape This Day by Tomahawk, whose thundering drum hits throw me off every goddamned time.

VII.

Without intending to diminish the brilliance of Van Morrison’s songwriting on Astral Weeks—and it is unequivocally brilliant—the notion of hearing his performing Astral Weeks sans the marvelous accompaniment present on the album is particularly deflating. Though Morrison had performed the brunt of Astral Weeks alongside a trio of thoughtfully selected musicians throughout Massachusetts prior to entering the studio, none of them played on the album. Producer Lewis Merenstein is credited with putting together a studio band of seasoned jazz musicians: Modern Jazz Quartet drummer Connie Kay; guitarist Jay Berliner, who played on Charles Mingus’s fantastic Black Saint and the Sinner Lady; and the impossibly talented and dexterous Richard Davis on upright bass. While the occasional horns masterfully blowing along with John Payne’s flute and Larry Fallon’s breezy string arrangements (and harpsichord on Cyprus Avenue) are certainly integral to the texture and mood of Astral Weeks, it’s Davis’s incomparable upright bass lines that clearly impose the definitive context and fluidity of Astral Weeks.

Revered alt/art-rock trailblazer John Cale, who was situated in a recording studio with derelict-rock outfit the Velvet Underground just down the hall from Morrison and his assembled musicians during the Astral Weeks sessions, has controversially stated: “Morrison couldn’t work with anybody, so finally they just shut him in the studio by himself. He did all the songs with just an acoustic guitar, and later they overdubbed the rest of it around his tapes.” This has all but been proven not to be the case. Davis—himself by all accounts no fan of our man Van, purportedly due to his lack of professionalism—claims there was little guidance from Morrison. Connie Kay told Rolling Stone: “I asked him what he wanted me to play, and he said to play whatever I felt like playing. We more or less sat there and jammed.”

It is essential however, to note that jamming, as used here, has little, if any, relation to the bastardization of the term, which has unfortunately come to signify the disparate clutter that is inevitably born of the cacophony birthed by musicians hell-bent on random improvisation with nary a thought as to what the other guy is playing. Jamming is generally styled around a lead sheet—noting any chord progressions and time changes—as a framework for improvisation. Morrison had no lead sheet, much to Davis’s chagrin, but, rather, Morrison chose to show his collaborators the chord changes by playing them on his guitar.

In the hands of less adept performers, the results could have been disastrous. As producer, Merenstein proved particularly prescient in this regard: his assemblage of musicians of the highest caliber, albeit beholden to a different form of musical expression, provided a previously unknown quantity, reconfiguring Morrison’s simple, folksy compositions to weep with lavish, extravagant orchestration. It was an unusually happy arranged marriage between the confines of pop songwriting and the experimentation of raucous jazz improvisation. The two disparate styles compliment each other quite impossibly, and often quite literally, from the snare rolls evoking the “soldier boys” Morrison sings of in Madame George to the tide-rolling bass line crashing like the waves on “some sandy beach” in the particularly venomous final track of Astral Weeks, Slim Slow Slider, where Morrison, as jilted lover, unleashes his contempt and longing for the former object of his affection. As Slim Slow Slider ends, so does Astral Weeks, collapsing into a fluttering, beatnik-inspired freakout, leaving you bloodied and invigorated, wondering what the hell just happened.

VIII.

Actively seeking information in the hopes of assigning universal meaning to a held-dear artistic endeavor is not without its perils. Depending on how closely you hold it, the process may just take the thing itself from you, and forever change it, too, by clouding it with the impurity inherent in over-thunk application. Or it might ruin it. And though, here, none of the peripheral or pertinent information concerning the making of Astral Weeks has diminished my experience of listening to it, I wouldn’t necessarily say it has enhanced it either. And I must say, the more information I gather regarding the making or supposed meaning of the eight masterpieces on Astral Weeks, the further I stray from the purity of the person I was when I first heard it. Boy, do I long for those days of discovery.

Astral Weeks is unmistakably the work of a young man, assigning proper respect to joy and pain and their requisite co-mingling, howling with uncertainty for what came before and what comes next. Its performer is such an unreal, perfect expression of a youth so singular that, though we may all age with his work, no dearth of new interpretations or meaning to extract from it, he is frozen in time, stubbornly refusing to age. And that’s fine. The Astral Weeks Morrison, amidst his ragtag band of instrumentalists, died with its release or, at the very least, went missing, never to be heard from again. Morrison has, reportedly, been playing the entirety of Astral Weeks (with the exceptions of Beside You and Slim Slow Slider) in recent concerts, though I can’t imagine. But good for him.

The stars must have been aligned: Morrison never sounded better than, or even remotely like, he did on Astral Weeks before or after, thanks to the most-bizarrely perfect collaboration between him and his gloriously makeshift band, as orchestrated by a visionary producer. Which leads me to the inevitable conclusion, that who you surround yourself with, whether friend or foe, lover or adversary, may just make you better than you really are.