The crowning touch is “Madame George,” a cryptic character study that may or may not be about an aging transvestite but that is certainly as heartbreaking a reverie as you will find in pop music.Ī straight rock & roll band probably wouldn’t have known what to do with these songs, but the musicians Merenstein assembled moved with the lightness and freedom that the tunes demanded. Morrison depicted the streets of Belfast in a dim, hallucinatory light, peopled with characters who danced like young lovers and spun like ballerinas but who mostly struggled to reach out to each other and find the peace and calm that otherwise eluded them. They were long, most of them, and meandering, suffused with the pain of the blues and the lilt of traditional Irish melodies.
The songs he brought into New York’s Century Sound Studios were a far cry from those earlier tunes. Sheets,” a ten-minute dirge about a friend’s death from tuberculosis. to make Astral Weeks, the mercurial Irishman didn’t even have a deal with a major American label, though he had made a few solo recordings, including the sunny pop hit “Brown Eyed Girl” and the scarifying “T.B. He didn’t make any suggestions about what to play, how to play, how to stylize what we were doing.”Īt the time, Morrison’s solo career was just getting under way earlier he had led the rough rock and R&B band Them. “People say, ‘He must have talked to you about the record and created the magic feeling that had to be there….’ To tell you the truth, I don’t remember any conversations with him. “Some people are real disillusioned when I tell them about making the record,” says Richard Davis, who supplied what may be the most acclaimed bass lines ever to grace a pop record. It also sounds like the work of a group of musicians who had become finely attuned to one another through years of working together - but, in fact, Morrison had made his name with rock songs like “Gloria” and “Here Comes the Night,” and he sang Astral Weeks sitting by himself in a glass-enclosed booth, scarcely communicating with the session musicians, who barely knew who he was. He didn’t use the phrase for a song title until a year later, but Astral Weeks was the album on which Van Morrison fully descended “into the mystic.” Morrison’s first full-fledged solo album sounded like nothing else in the pop-music world of 1968: soft, reflective, hypnotic, haunted by the ghosts of old blues singers and ancient Celts and performed by a group of extraordinary jazz musicians, it sounds like the work of a singer and songwriter who is, as Morrison sings in the title track, “nothing but a stranger in this world.”
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