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lester series two: astral weeks when i was twelve or so i found a dusty copy of this review and to be honest, i had never even heard the record. to pretend otherwise would be insulting to the record itself. what i�m getting at is that i first lowered the needle to this record already with the knowledge that it was an excercise in the kind of miracles only silence can normally encompass. but then, when i read this, i had never heard a record like that at all. that said, when it first touched/came, as sound(wound) waves do, i was floored. it can�t be ignored that having read this (below)altered my perception of the record, but i refuse to succumb to any notion that i wouldn�t have known it had i heard it playing gently in the background of some low-lying friend or friend�s parents� living room, that i would not have been just as monstrously emaciated by it would be a foolish idea as unworthyof it as lack of humanity itself. indeed, to be human is to be deserving of this record. to be alive, to be breathing is to have earned the right to feel what can be felt but not (now nor ever) completely understood or grasped in words. i am still lounging in this room, writing this, way off topic, out of my mind in some quiet way. so when did i first hear it? i couldn�t tell you where i was or when it was even if it wanted to, which i don�t. i remember the feeling only because it never fades or wavers. the number of times this album has found itself inside of my record player is beyond what human math can discover. i have heard it more times than leaves have blown before my eyes. i�m falling into strange imagery wrapped in vagueness and nearly unintelligable, aren�t i? let me come back to the thing of it. the fact that astral weeks sounds nothing like anything else in teh morrison catalogue almost forces us to understand it as something strange and mystical, something overgrown beyond his own fathoming and yearning, something bigger than him or us: bigger in that it is us. we are astral weeks. and this? this peice of writing (which as much as any, drew me to writing like a beckoning candle), what is this? where does it come from? i can only begin to try to answer. what�s here, below, is more than a brilliant writer reviewing a record that changed his life, it�s an unsheathing of a human soul, found and lost beneath the tire-stack of this record, as anyone who listens will be, is. it is an explanation for the loss of the grand innocense of the 1960s, a communion with a devine recording that goes on and on. this record is forever, unending, the future and past of humanity. what follows is one man�s way of explaining it. �van morrison�s �astral weeks� was released ten years, almost to the day, before this was written. it was particularly important to me because the fall of 1968 was such a terrible time: i was a physical and mental wreck, nerves shredded and ghosts and psiders looming and squatting across the mind. my social contacts had dwindled to almost none; the presence of others made me nervous and paranoid. i spent endless days and nights sunk in an armchair in my bedroom, reading magazines, watching TV, listening to records, staring into space. i had no idea how to improve the situation, and probably wouldn�t have done anything about it if i had. �astral weeks� would be the subject of the peice- i.e. the rock record with the most significance in my life so far- no matter how i�d been feeling when it came out. but in the condition i was in, it assumed at the time the quality of a beacon, a light on the far shores of the murk; what�s more, it was proof that there was something left to express artistically besides nihilism and destruction. (my other big record of the day was �white light/white heat.�) it sounded like the man who made astral weeks was in terrible pain, pain most of van morrison�s previous works had only suggested; but like later albums by teh velvet underground, there was a redemptive elment in teh blackness, ultimate compassion for the suffering of others, and a swath of pure beauty and mystical awe that cut right to the heart of the work. i don�t really know how significant it might be that many others have reported variants on my initial encounter with astral weeks. i don�t think there�s anything guiding it to people enduring dark periods. it did come out at a time when a lot of things that a lot of people cared about passionatly were beginning to desintergrate, and when teh self-destructive undertow that always accompanied the great sixties party had an awful lot of ankles firmly in it�s maws and was pulling straight down. so, as timeless as it finally is, perhaps astral weeks was also the product of an era. better think that than ask just what sort of irish churchwebbed haints van morrison might be product of. three television shows: a 1970 NET broadcast of a big all-star multiple bill at the fillmore east. the byrds, sha na na, and elvin bishop have all done their respective things. now we get to three or four songs from a set by van morrison. he climaxes, as he always did in those days, with �cypress avenue� from astral weeks. after going through all the verses, he drives the song, the band, and himself to a finish which has since become one of his trademarks and one of teh all-time classic rock and roll set-closers. with consummate dynamics that allow him to snap from indescribably eccentric throwaway phrasing to sheer passion in the very next breath he brings teh music surging up through crescnedo after crescendo, stopping and starting and stopping and starting the song again and again, imposing long maniacal silences like giant question marks between the stops and starts and ruling the room through sheer tension, building to a shout of �it�s too late to stop now!� and just when you think it�s all going to surge over the top, he cuts it off stone cold dead, the hollow of a murdered explosion, throws the microphone down and stalks off the stage. it is truley only of the most perverse things i have ever seen a performer do in my life. and of course, it�s sensational: our guts are knotted up, we�re crazed and clawing for more, but we damn well know we�ve seen and felt something. 1974, a late night network TV rock concert: van and his band come out, strike a few shimmering chords, and for about ten minutes he lingers over the words �way over yonder in teh clear blue sky/where flamingos fly.� no other lyrics. o don�t think any instrument solos. just these words, repeated slowly again and again, distented, permutated, turned into scat, suspended in space and then scattered tot eh winds, muttered like a mantra till they turn into nonsense syllables, then back into the same soaring image as time seems to stop entirely. he stands there with eyes closed, singing, transportedd, while the band poises quivering over great open-tuned deep blue gulfs of their own. 1977, spring-summer, the same kind of show: he sings �cold wind in august,� a song off his recently released album �a period of transition,� which also contains a considerably altered version of the flamignos song. �cold wind in august� is a ballad, and van gives it a fine, standard reading. the only trouble is that the whole time he�s singing it he paces back and forth in a line on the stage, his eyes tightly shut, his little fireplug body kciking it�s way upstream against what must be a purgatorial nervousness that perhaps is being transferred to the cameraman. what this is about is a whole set of verbal tics- although many are bodily as well- which are there for reasons that go a long way toward defining his style. they�re all over astral weeks: four rushed repeats of the phrases �you breathe in, you breathe out� and �you turn around� in �beside you�, in �cyprus avenue,� twelve �way up on�s , �baby� sung out thirteen times in a row sounding like someon running ecstaticlly downhill toward one�s love, and the heartbreaking way he �one by one� in the third verse; most of all in �madame george� where he sings the words �dry� ad then �your eyes� twenty times in a twirling melodic arc so beautiful it steals your own breath, and then this occurs: �and the love that loves the love that loves the love that loves the love that loves to love the love that loves to love that loves.� van morrison is interested, obsessed with how much musical or verbal information he can compress into a small space, and, almost conversly, how far he can spread one note, word, sound, or picture. to capture one moment, be it carress or a twitch. he repeats certain phrases to extremes that from anybody else would seem rediculous, because he�s waiting for a vision to unfold, trying as unobtrusively as possible to nudge it alone. sometiems he gives it to you through silence, by choking off the song in mid-flight: �it�s too late to stop now!� it�s the great search, fueled by the belief that through these musical and mental processes illumination is attainable. or may at least be glimsed. when he tries for this he usually gets it more in the feeling than in the Revealed Word- perhaps musch of the feeling comes from the reaching- but there is also, always, the sense of WHAT if he DID apprehend that Word; there are times when the Word seems to hover very near. and then there are times when the Word seems to hover very near. and then there are times when we realize the Word was right next to us, when the most mundane overused phrases are transformed: i give you �love,� from �madame george.� out of relative silence, the Word: �snow in san anselmo.� �that�s where it�s at,� van will say, and he means it (aren�t his interviews fascinating?). what he doesn�t say is that he is inside the snowflake, isolated by the song: �and it�s almost independence day.� you�re probably wondering when i�m going to get around to telling you about astral weeks. as a matter of fact, there a whole lot of astral weeks i don�t even want to tell you about. bothe because whether you�ve heard it or not wouldn�t be fair for me to impose my interpretation of such lapidarily subjective imagery on you, and because in many cases i don�t really know what he�s talking about. he doesn�t either: �i�m not surprised that people get different meaning out of my songs,� he told a tolling stone interviewer. �but i don�t wanna give the impression that i know what everything means �cause i don�t...there are times when i�m mystified. 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.� there ya go i haven�t got the slightest idea what that �means,� though on one level i�d like to approach it in a manner as indirect and evocative as the lyrics themselves. because you�re in trouble anyway when you sit yourself down to explicate just exactly what a mystical documnet, which is exactly what astral weeks is, means. for one thing, what it means is richard davis�s bass playing, which compliments the songs and singing all the way with a lyricism that�s something more than jsut great musicianship: there is something about it that�s more than just inspired, something that has been touched, that�s int eh realm of the miraculous. the whole ensemble -larry fallon�s strings section, jay berliner�s guitar (he played on mingus�s �black saint and sinner lady�), connie kay�s drumming- is like that: they and van sound like they�re not just reading but dwelling inside of each other�s minds. teh facts may be far different. john cale was making an album of his own in an adjaceent studio at the time, and he has said that �morrison couldn�t work with anybody, so finally they just shut him in the studio by himself with just an acoustic guitar, and later they overdubbed the rest of it around his tapes.� cale�s story might or might not be true- but the facts are not going to be of much use here in any case. fact: van morrison was twenty-two- or maybe twenty-three years old when he made this record; there are lifetimes behind it. what astral weeks deals in are not teh facts, but truths. astral weeks, insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by teh enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend. it is a precious and terrible gifdt, born of a terrible truth, because what they see is both infanitly beautiful and terminally horrifying: the unlimited human ability to create or destroy, according to whim. it�s no eastern mystic or psychedelic vision of the emerald beyond, not is it some beaudelarean perception of the beauty of sleaze and grotesquerie. maybe what it boils down to is one moment�s knowledge of teh miracle of life, with it�s inevitable concomitant, a vertiginous glimse of teh capacity to be hurt, and the capacity to inflict that hurt. transifxed between rapture and anguish. wondering if they may not be the same thing, or at least possessed of an intimate relationship. in �T.B. Sheets,� his last extended narrative before making this record, van morrison watched a girl he loved die of tuberculosis. the song was claustrophobic, suffocating, monstrously powerful: �innuendos, inadequancies, foreign bodies.� a lot of poeple couldn�t take it; the editor of this book has said it�s garbage, but i think it made him squeamish. anyway, the point is that certain parts of astral weeks- �madame george,� �cypress avenue� take the pain in �t.b. sheets� and root the world in it. because the pain of watching a loved one die of however dread a disease may be awful, but it is at least something known, in a way understood, in a way measurable and even leading somewhere, because there is a process: sickness, decay, death, mourning, some emotional recovery. but the beaut horror of �madame george� and �cypress avenue� is precisely that the people in these songs are not dying: we are looking at life, in it�s fullest, and waht these people are suffering from is not a disease, but nature, unless nature is a disease. a man sits in a car on a tree lined street, watching a fourteen year old girl walking home from school, hopelessly in love with her. i�ve almost come to blows with friends because of my insistence that much of van morrison�s early work had an obsessivly reiterated theme of pedophilia, but here is something that at once may be taken as that and something far beyond it. he loves her. because of that, he is helpless. shaking. paralyzed. maddened. hopeless. nature mocks him. as only nature can mock nature. or is love natural in teh first place? no matter. by teh end of teh song he has entered a kind of hallucinatory ecstacy; the music aches and yearns as it rolls on out. this is one supreme pain, that of being imprisoned a spectator. and perhaps not so very far from �t.b. sheets�, except that it must be far more romantically easy to sit and watch someone you love die than to watch them in the bloom of youth and health and know that you can never, ever have them, can never even speak to them. �madame george� is teh album�s whirpool. possibly one of the most compassionate peices of music ever made, it asks us, no, arranges that we see the plight of what i�ll be brutal and call a lovelorn drag queen with such intense empathy that whent eh singer hurts him, we do too. (morrison has said in at least one interview that the song has nothing to do with any kind of transvestite- at least as far as he knows, he is quick to add- but that�s bullshit.) the beauty, sensitivy, holiness of the song is that there�s nothing at all sensationalistic, exploitive, or tawdry about it; in a way van is right when he insists it�s not about a drag queen, as my freinds were right and i was wrong about the �pedophilia�- it�s about a person, like all the best songs, all the best literature. the setting is the same as teh previous song -cypress avenue, apparently a place where people drift, impelled by desire, into moments of flesh wracking, sight-curdling confrontation with their destinies. it�s an elemental place of pitiless judgement- wind and rain figure in both songs- and interestingly enough, it�s place of teh even crueler judgements of adults by children, in btoh cases love objects absolutly indifferent to tehir would-be lovers. madame george�s little boys are downbright contemptous- liket eh street urchins who end up cannibalizing the homosexual cousin in tennesee williams�s �suddenly last summer�, they�re only too happy to come around as long as there�s music, party times, free drinks and smokes, and only too gleefully spit on george�s affections when all the other stuff runs out, the entombing winter settling in with not only wind and rain but hail, sleet, and snow. what might seem strangest of all but really isn�t is that it�s exactly those characteristics which supposedly should make george most pathetic- age, drunkenness, teh way the boys take his money and trash his love- that awakens somethin for george in teh heart of the kid whose song this is. obviously, this kid hasn�t simply �fallen in love with love�, or soemthing like that, but rather- what? why, just exactly that only sunk in the foulest perversions could one human being love another for anything other than their humanness: love him for his weakness, his flaws, finally perhaps, his decay. decay is human- that�s one of the ultimate messages here, and i don�t by any stretch of the lexicon mean decadence. i mean that in this song or whatever inspired it van morrison saw the absolute possiblity of loving human beings at their farthest extremee of wretchedness, and that the implications of that are terrible indeed, far more terrible than the mere sight of bodies made ugly by age or the seeming absurdity of a man devoting his life to the wobbly artifice of trying to look like a woman. you can say to love the questions you have to love the answers which quicken the end of love that�s loved to love the awful inequality of human experience that loves to say we tower over these, the lost that love to love the love that freedom could have been, the train to freedom, but we never get on, we�d rather wave genreously walking away from those who are victims of themselves. but who is to say that someone who victimizes himself or herself is any less worthy of total compassion as the most down and out Third World orphan in a new yorker magazine ad? nah, better to step over the bodies, at least that gives them the respect they might once have deserved. where i live, in new york (not to make it more than it is, which is hard), everyone i know often steps over bodies which might well be dead or dying as amatter of course, without pain. and i wonder in what scheme it was originally conceived that such action is showing human refuse the ultimate respect it deserves. there is of course a rationale- what else are you going to do- but it holds no more than our fear of our own helplessness int eh face of the plain of life as it truley is: a plain which extends into infinity beyond the horizons we have only invented come on, die it. as i write this, i can read in te village voice the blurbs of people opening heterosexual S&M clubs in manhattan saying things like, �S&M is just another equally valid form of love. why pople can�t accept that we�ll never know.� makes you want to jump out the fifth floor window rather than even read about it, but ti�s hardly the end of the world; it�s not nearly as bad as the hurts that go on everyhere everyday that are taken so casually by all of us as facts of life. maybe it boils down to how much you actually want to subject yourself to. if you accept for even the moment that each human life life is as precious and delicate as a snowflake and then you look at a wino in a doorway, you�ve got to hurt until you feel like a sponge for all those other assholes�s problems, until you feel like an asshole yourself, so you draw all the appropriate lines. you stop feeling. but you know that then you begin to die. so you tussle with yourself. how much of this horror can i actually allow myself to think about? perhaps the numbest mannikin is wiser than somebody who only allows their sensitivity to drive them to destroy everything they touch- but then again, to tilt madame george�s hat a hair, just to recognize that that person exists, just to touch his cheek and then probably expire because the realization that you must share the world with him is ultimatly unbearable is to go only the first mile. the realization of living is just about that low and that exalted and that unbearable and that sought-after. please come back and leave me alone. but when we�re alone together we can talk all we want about the universality of this abyss: ti doesn�t make any difference, the highest only meets the lowest for some lying succor, UNICEF to relatives, so you scratch and spit and curse in violent resignation at the strict fact that there is absolutely nothing you can do but finally reject anyone in greater pain than you. at such a moment, another breath is treason. that�s why you leave your liberal causes, leave suffering humanity to die in worse squalor than they knew before you happened along. you got thier hopes up. which makes you viler than the most scrofulous carrion. viler than the ignorant boys who would take madame george for a couple of cigarettes. because you have commited the crime of knowledge, and tehby not only walked past or over someone you knew to be suffering, but also violated their privacy, the last posession of the disposessed. such knowledge is ossibly the worst thing that can happen to a person (a lucky person), so it�s no wonder that worrison�s protagonist turned away from madame george, fled to the train station, trying to run as far away from what he�d seen as a lifetime could get him. and no wonder, too, that van morrison never came this close to looking life square in the face again, no wonder he turned to �tupelo honey� and even �hard nose the highway� with it�s entire side of songs about falling leaves. in astral weeks and �t.b. sheets� he confronted enough for any man�s lifetime. of course, having been offered this immeasurably stirring and equally frightening gift from morrison, one can hardly be blamed for not caring much about old, old woodstock and little homilies like �you�ve got to make it through this world on your own� and �take it where you find it.� on the other hand, it might also be pointed out that desolation, hurt, and anguish are hardly the only things in life, or in astral weeks. they�re just the things, perhaps, that we can most easily grasp and explicate, which i suppose shows about what level our souls have evolved to. i said i wouldn�t reduce the other songs on this album by trying to explain them, and i won�t. but that doesn�t mean that, all thigns considered, a juxtoposition of poets might not be in order. if i ventured in the slipstream my heart of silk - lester bangs, stranded, 1979
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