I can’t remember whether he took the photo or not. Once a man came along on a bicycle and asked if he could take our photograph we didn’t even tell him off, only shrugged, I think, and turned away. We would set up our speakers in the window and blast our music through it while we sat and talked or sang. It was a narrow, tar-covered ledge that could fit one person lying down length-wise or the three of us seated side by side with our legs dangling over the edge. Joni Mitchell, Gillian Welch, Emmylou Harris with Mark Knopfler, Alison Krauss with Robert Plant, and sometimes I’d go off on a tangent when I’d want to hear Dylan, which the others would tolerate, more or less, and also we listened to Van Morrison.Įventually we discovered we could climb out through the kitchen window and onto the roof that overhung the front porch. We listened to the same things over and over again. We listened to a lot of Sam Cooke, especially the gospel songs. But Sam sang, and she sang all the time, and she had an achingly clear, shimmering voice, and she sang with such a sense of wonder and joy that soon I was singing, too, not only when I was alone, and even with the windows open. Up to then I had been shut up into myself as tightly as a matchbox. During that time we drank a lot, smoked a lot of weed, listened to a lot of music, loudly, and sang. It was just a brief period that we lived together.
#VAN MORRISON ASTRAL WEEKS HOW TO#
I liked to think that the record could show me how to live, how to be in the world. Later, things between us grew difficult, even sour, but back then, we were all a little in love with each other. We were raw, exposed, each of us with our own little handful of trauma. We each had wide eyes and a penchant for feeling things so intensely we didn’t always know how to manage ourselves. I was living on the second floor of a lovely, dingy house with two other girls. At that time my thoughts were about as mystical and vague as Van’s seemed to be: I liked to think that the record could show me how to live, how to be in the world. I was in college when I started listening to Astral Weeks. Walsh’s new book, Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968, he “planned, shaped and rehearsed” the songs that became the record Astral Weeks, which is my favorite record in the entire world. Before the night was over, he’d picked up an acoustic guitar and smashed it down over Morrison’s head.įor reasons not entirely unrelated, Morrison soon fled New York for Boston where, according to Ryan H. Van was short-tempered and drunk, and Wassel was Wassel. One night, Wassel went to see Van Morrison at his hotel. “I throw open the window, pick him up, flip him, shake him out by the ankles. “So here’s this disc jockey,” he said in 2001. When bribery failed, he used other means. When Van Morrison’s producer died abruptly of a heart attack at the end of 1967, Morrison’s contact at Bang Records became Carmine “Wassel” DeNoia, a “low level” mobster later convicted of bribing radio DJs to play certain records more heavily than others. Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.
0 kommentar(er)
