Recently I listened to Astral Weeks, an album credited to Van Morrison. I listen to it sometimes. And I wondered.
There’s always been, for me, a dislocation when listening to Astral Weeks. Yes, I get lost in listening to it, sail into a world. But it doesn’t fit my usual kind of music. At all. Not that everything needs it’s place, but with the music of Astral Weeks playing and singing, I’m wondering again, what is it?
It seems to me you have to start with the idea that the man credited here, Mr. Van Morrison, was a rocker. Everything he has done, everything that has happened, will tell you this. To get down to it, I think you need to look at the rock group Them. Mr. Morrison was the lead singer but, as you can see, he is not credited. Them were a rock group, people making music together. It wasn’t ‘Them featuring Van Morrison’. It was Them.
I’d say that was a name that is a little punk‐ish, and also hints at a stubborn pose. Them came from Northern Ireland, which vs. the United Kingdom, has some outland status. Especially when you ponder that the main events of rock music happened in London and that’s where they had to go—though the movement gathered musicians from all over, notably from the English Midlands and North. ‘Them’ scored three hit singles. They were notable for often rocking with a fast tempo, with a sharp 2‐stroke backbeat. That beat was almost skiffle, or a little like the non‐rock but important backbeat of the bands that backed Johnny Cash. ‘Them’ are unusual in this, most rock groups at the time were squaring the beat across four bars, the better to kick away on guitar solos or generate other lead instrument/singer swamps and firestorms. Aside from some punk jerks, and parodisers of country music, The only groups I can think of who followed these roads were The Beatles and, later on, Motorhead.
Them were also notable in another way. Perhaps due to their outsider status, they could play natural. Most English… well, I’d struggle to think of one, as it happens, an English group that could play natural as Them. Perhaps those generations of Irish love of Country music, and a singing tradition, helped? That said, Them had a notable toughness which was all their own. It ran through the group, from the drums to the guitarists to the singer.
If Them were slotted into one of those ‘Best of the Sixties’ type albums that I never listen to, they’d be seen as one of those groups who had a couple of hits in the era. Like most groups, they were a lot more than that, growing and practising and gigging and listening until they got themselves further than the local pub stage, and their music had refined into something skilled and original. And, like many others in the class‐and‐perception shifting times of the 1960’s, they were unlikely to live long. But they fit with groups like The Animals, or Black Sabbath, groups that lasted longer, but were into the music. And yes, they fell apart.
One of the powerhouses of Them was the lead singer. He had that naturalness I talked about, up a bit, comfortable phrasing on the beat. There’s a couple of things can happen at this point of breakup. First, the singer goes away and becomes part of another group. Just to pull up a name, that happened to Arthur Lee, a similarly tough, musically‐inclined singer who could compose, More often, the singer abandons rock music for a solo career, with session‐like backing. The singer and record company can control this, and the group democracy is gone. And the singer can then trade their quirks and styles as stable product. As the critic Joe Carducci pointed out, rockwise this is zero. Rock or not, it is musically defunct, with incidental interest to take here and there from a vocal or lyric.
The interest in Them’s lead singer is that he didn’t walk either road, in full. His songs were clearly not only good, but capable of being hawked on the street. And he had been a part of, and fell in again (a little), with the Tin‐Pan‐Alley hangovers still important in the 1960’s. Story is he was nailed down by contracts anyway, which needed shady deals, good will, a marriage, and a couple of years to escape. And, like any of those guys, he still performed, if only to hawk his goods. And he started exploring musical interests.
Now, it is a fact that Rock music, like many good musics, has an expressive range. The music, I’m talking about, not the lyrics or singing. It’s kind of natural for good musicians to listen to others and work with these ways of talking, or perhaps look to say something different. Which needs a new kind of music. In the late 1960’s that new music was ‘folk’ music. Plenty of rock musicians started to turn out crossover folk, usually booted along by Bob Dylan’s move from a faked‐Folk music reversing into rock. The lead singer of Them did something slightly different—though it’s happened before, and since, and will happen again. He got into some kinds of music collected under the name of Jazz. Story is, again, that he didn’t seek it himself, but had a jazz‐like folk group. And that wasn’t his only thing. He tried a white‐boy funk on a track called ‘TB Sheets’. He turned out a folk‐thing called ‘Brown‐eyed Girl’. ‘TB Sheets’ worked as music, but maybe he felt it wasn’t a music he could follow far. ‘Brown‐eyed Girl” wasn’t much or anything as music—a strummy buzz—but let him say something. ‘Brown‐eyed Girl’ was a hit, so he wasn’t going to be one of the backroom guys. He was going to be some kind of performer, like Randy Newman, or Neil Diamond.
Yeh, but Jazz? Jazz rock crossovers… well, stay away. A few rock musicians have taken on jazz within the structure of rock, and that’s both easy to understand and can work. Likely the most overt example is King Crimson, where jazz sections breach rock in an organic way. A few groups have run with Jazz in the horizontal—The Zombies, and most obviously the Doors, who found their way by letting the Jazz flow in place of a bass player. Magma anchored on rock with jazz in the drums. And so on. The point is, they found musical constructs.
But the lead singer of Them did not. He was on a folk‐flute thing, but finally got in a place to deliver the new songs. Without a band, his new and enthusiastic management hired up a crew of basically Jazz musicians, outstanding ones at that, then piled into the studio to make a solo album. Now, the usual upshot of a setup like that would be a straight sequence of songs, some awkward jazzy interjections, and a bloodless group music. You’ll find the like on numerous popular artist solo albums. What’s great about Astral Weeks is that it’s nothing like that.
The word of the rock critic Lester Bangs was, if I remember, that Van Morrison locked himself in a sound booth and barked while the musicians played. Lester Bangs was a professional, and I don’t have access to his sources, so that story may have truth in it, but it’s not the whole story. For one thing, despite tales you will hear from all sorts of people, the sign of a good worker‐for‐hire is that they will show a bit of interest in what they are doing. I find it hard to believe musicians of that ability simply set up without hearing bits of the musical constructions—the songs. Backwards from that, the horn arrangements of ‘The Way that Young Lovers Do’ have Van Morrison’s fingers all over them. So he must have talked, or given material, to the horn players. And Wikipedia gives a little more material that yes, for the outline tracks and the session, Mr. Morrison did lock himself in a booth. But everyone had outline tracks, and the musicians of both the live and studio bands talked a lot. And partly the singer was shy, and partly it was a ploy, because he wanted the musicians free to play.
Whatever happened in the studio as introduction, there is the question of how the crew of Astral Weeks talked through music. The music changes tempo. It slip‐slides into quiet areas, accelerates to peaks like low hills (like rock music’s mountainous constructions). It builds regretful reminiscence, settles into quiet states. And none of this is Jazz, not as it was performed at the time, and now… post‐Bebop, rigid in tempo, sonically flat, a setting to allow instrumental soloists to play mathematical solos. Part of these effects is down to Van Morrison’s vocal performance, still showing that toughness, still rock, still natural. The musicians move with him, but also find their own ebbs and flows. These are good players, and after years of careers, he had freed them to go where they felt, into what they thought.
And beyond that, not all of it is simply the singer and the band. See, Van Morrison found a new way of songwriting for Astral Weeks. There had been hints of that everywhere in his previous work, sure, but here it found a way out. There’s still the good use of words, by someone who knows his books and songs, in a plain‐spoken way—who the hell has used the word ‘viaducts’ in a song? Then there’s the short‐story length of ‘Brown‐eyed Girl’. On that track the music is a strum‐along, a flat arrangement, despite the skills of the players, while Mr. Morrison speaks. But on Astral Weeks Mr. Morrison can afford to drop out completely, until it seems right to pick up the story. Indeed, the whole of Astral Weeks flows from song to song less like a rigid song cycle than something ebbing and flowing. Or Mr. Morrison can even shunt up on the back of a chord, as he does on ‘The Way Young Lovers Do’ which chorus sounds less like a chorus or a bridge than the singer being overwhelmed by something into shouting his awe.
The eddies and surges of the flow, the ability to drop in and out of the flow is not where it stops. Mr. Morrison has also found a songwriting figure to go with this tale‐telling. Now, it’s sometimes forgotten that Jazz when it started was nothing like Jazz as it is now. They ought to have different words. Jazz when it started was an instrumental stew, hot, often humorous or ominous, that boiled round the structure of short pop‐music tunes. It was pretty natural to shout out the tune at the start, then revisit here and there to complete the show, just as a piece of symphonic music will lay out it’s motifs. But when Jazz started to focus on the improvisation of it’s lead players, this made the singing an issue. All that was needed was a horn man to play the tune, and then they were off. It was more of a piece to do that, than have a singer. So what is a singer to do? If they join in the improvisation, do they improvise the words? There are people can do that, it’s a skill, especially if you can blend in rhymes and lines breaks, those kind of devices but, like Rap and pop music show, it often means falling back on tropes. Another solution is to ditch the words and sing ‘shoo‐be‐doo‐be‐do’—scat‐singing—which allows a musical singer to improvise like a horn. Some can, but it’s never going to be a popular music, except as occasional novelty.
Ah, but Van Morrison, quite naturally from his material, has a solution. He repeats lines, not in a chorus way. ‘You breathe in, you breathe out’ he sings, in a row, thirteen times over. This is, aside from being what Van Morrison wanted to say, a known poetic device. It demonstrates a peaceful or meditative state of mind, or at least a mind, and a wonder. The lines can be performed with different stresses and meanings, telling a story. To borrow from The Beatles,
I want you?
I want you.
I want you!
This works well in print, but great in performance. It fits with plain‐spoken styles. That’s why it’s in, for ominous purpose, the scripts of Harold Pinter,
Olives?
Do you want olives?
Olives
And in one stroke Van Morrison has a solution (more likely, it was the other way round, Mr. Morrison wanted to do this and it works with Jazz). Now the lyrics can be useful as words, but the repetition allows him to improvise.
Put this together, and you have something unlike anything else. You have what is picked and glossed as a Pop/Rock album, one of the greats that you must hear. But it is not a rock album, is that only in trace due to the ebb and flow. Me, I’m reminded of known‐Folk music where the song and singer shape music that works in itself—I’m thinking of Doc Watson or The Carter Family. And Astral Weeks is not a pop album at all, not in intent, not in structure—only the framed harmony and occasional string overdubs qualify—and anyway, all the copies sold would fit in a wicker basket, so that’s not popular, is it? It’s also not an album for that overworked term ‘Jazz’. Richard Davies on double bass no more makes it post‐Bop than the session‐men on Hey Jude made it Romantic orchestral music. Some small‐group improvised‐conservatory musics do experiment with sonic colour, but are not interested in storytelling beyond the melodic lines. ‘Country‐Jazz’ would mean something, but you’d need to mark it off from ‘Western Swing’, and Astral Weeks was made by a guy from Northern Ireland, so maybe ‘County Jazz’? Anyway you push it, it’s a new form, and that is why I can listen to Astral Weeks, come the time and season, when post‐Bebop is not my bag.
What happened afterwards is up to you. A lot of what seemed to people to be bits and pieces were assembled into a short song album called ‘Moondance’, which is the real deal. Lester Bangs thought that nobody could live out there too long. Me, I think it’s what will happen when you hire jazzbos as your ‘band’. And the man has to earn a living as, in one song, he told us. If you take that on, then it’s the career of a singer‐songwriter—done it with integrity and obscure moves that have given up useful moments. It can be edited down. Anyway, Mr. Morrison proved he was still a rocker, and knew what he was up to all along, while taking time out to hang with John Lee Hooker.
It’s a lost byway, this album. A new form of swing, without the pris. The bold flowing songs, the tracks you can walk through like a wooded lane. The long story, openly told. Lou Reed pulled the same stunt with a track called ‘Street Hassle’ and yeh, that was a one off. So don’t try and get me down on your brand‐names. I dig Astral Weeks, that’s all, wish people would run with it more. After that, this is what we get now, still into the sounds and depth of words, still music,
On a golden autumn day
All my dreams came true in Orangefield
On a throne of Ulster day
You came my way in Orangefield
But I imagine back then, and I’m jazzing now, and pondering what Lester Bangs said,
When daytime's ghosts fall to golden glow,
I'm wondering will they rise again?
Over the trees
Over the trees