Van himself said that he entered the project only because he never had a chance to perform the “Astral Weeks” song cycle. “Astral Weeks: Live at the Hollywood Bowl” 2009 can only demean and diminish the original, and I’m not going to willingly sully my ears. I heard 10 seconds of it on the radio before I could tear my ears away from it, much like the morbid fascination with roadkill. Van Morrison decided, 40 years after the fact, to revisit the album–two performances at the Hollywood Bowl, the original guitarist, yadda yadda, the whole “The Unique Event, Part II” syndrome. The only sacrilege performed on “Astral Weeks” was by the creator himself. It was born perfect and complete, and the ravages of the decades haven’t diminished it a bit. They added a few solo demo tracks for “Eli”, which really were a bonus if you don’t confuse them with the real thing. The record companies’ attempts to feed the market demand for new nostalgia has had little impact. Both are spiritual fountains of youthful vitality, their waters magically smoothing out the wrinkles. I know them like I know the inside of my soul. And in the last 20 years, I have continued to revisit them frequently, perhaps more than any other aural scene from those years. Both albums clock in at an unusually long 46+ minutes, so they were back-to-back on a well-worn 100 minute cassette of mine in the 1970s and 1980s.
I shared an apartment with these two albums when they saw the light of day (hell, when they shed the light of day) in the heady days of 1968. In my mind, “Astral Weeks” was always “Eli”‘s soul-brother–not the ‘blue-eyed soul’ of The Righteous Brothers and Mitch Ryder, but of serious white artists plumbing the blues roots of rock and roll, melding it with the Tin Pan Alley tradition, and forging a young, vibrant, breathtakingly transcendent idiom. Whoops, threescore years (how time flies). You can find the record on every single serious desert island (quite an image-an archipelago of babyboomer Bali Highs) and on every list of the peaks of popular music in the last half century. “Astral Weeks”, on the other hand, is universally recognized as a masterpiece. I understand that that’s a personal choice, and a rather quirky one, even though “Eli” commands immense respect in certain circles (after I wrote about it I saw Elton John on Elvis Costello’s “Spectacle”, where they were singing the praises of “Eli” like they were Laura’s mothers, in almost embarrassing hyperbole).
I’ve written about Laura Nyro’s “Eli & the 13th Confession” as a desert island album of mine. This week we’re back to the legendary summer of 1968, treating ourselves to one of the finest albums we’ve had the great honor and pleasure to embrace – Van Morrison’s “Astral Weeks”.
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