A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - Episode 170: “Astral Weeks” by Van Morrison

Episode Date: November 21, 2023

Episode 170 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Astral Weeks”, the early solo career of Van Morrison, and the death of Bert Berns.  Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a forty-minute bonus episode available, on “Stoned Soul Picnic” by Laura Nyro. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

A History of Rock Music in 500 songs by Andrew Hockey Episode 170 Astral Weeks By Van Morrison Before we start, a quick warning This episode contains discussion of organised crime activity and of sudden death It also contains excerpts of songs which hinted attraction to underage girls

and discuss terminal illness If those subjects might upset you, you might want to read the transcript rather than listen to the episode. Anyway, on with the show. Van Morrison could have been the co-writer of Peace of My Heart. Burke Burns was one of the great collaborators in the music business, and almost every hit he ever had was co-written, and he was always on a lookout for new collaborators. And in 1967, he was once again working with Van Morrison, who he'd worked with a couple of years earlier when Morrison was still the lead singer,

of them. Towards the beginning of 1967, he had come up with a chorus but no verse. He had the hook, take another little piece of my heart. Burns was writing a lot of songs with heart in the title at the time, and wanted Morrison to come up with a verse to go with it. Van Morrison declined. He wasn't interested in writing pop songs, or in collaborating with other writers. And so Burns turned to one of his regular collaborators, Jerry Ragevoy. And it was Ragevoy who added the verse as one of the biggest successes of Burns' career. The story of how Van Morrison came to make the album that's often considered his masterpiece is intimately tied up with the story we've been telling in the background for several episodes now,

the story of Atlantic Records Sailed to Warner's, and the story of Bert Burns' departure from Atlantic. For that reason, some parts of the story I'm about to tell will be familiar to those of you who have been paying close attention to the earlier episodes. But as always, I'm going to take you from there to somewhere we've never been before. In 1962, Bert Burns was a moderately successful songwriter who had written or co-written songs for many artists, especially for artists on Atlantic records. He'd written songs for Atlantic artists like Laverne Baker, and when Atlantic's top pop producers Libre and Stoller started to distance themselves from the label in the early 60s, he had moved into production as well, writing and producing Solomon Burke's big hit, Cry to Me.

When you're leaves you all alone And nobody calls you're on the phone Don't you feel like a cry? Well, here I am a honey Come on He cried to me He was the producer and writer or co-writer Of most of Burke's hits from that point forward

But at first he was still a freelance producer And also produced records for SEPTA records like the Aisy Brothers version of Twist and Shout Another song he'd co-written, that one with Phil Medley. And as a jobbing songwriter, of course his songs were picked up by other producers. So Libra and Stoller produced a version of his song

Tell Him for the exciters on United Artists. Burns did freelance work for Libra and Stoller, as well as the other people he was working for. For example, when therefore a protégé, Phil Specter, released his hit version of Zippa-Doo, they got Burns to come up with a knock-off arrangement of how much is that doggie in the window, released as by Baby Jane and the Rockabies, with a production credit, produced by Lieber and Stoller, directed by Bert Burns.

And when Leibre and Stoller stopped producing work for United Artists, Burns took over some of the artists they'd been producing for the label, like Marve Johnson, as well as producing his own new artists, like Garnet Mims and the Enchanters, who had been discovered by Burns' friend Jerry Ragovoy, with whom he co-wrote their Crybaby. Burns was an inveterate collaborator. He was one of the few people to get co-writing credits with Libre and Stoller,

and he would collaborate seemingly with everyone who spoke to him for five minutes. He would also routinely reuse material, cutting the same songs time and again with different artists, knowing that a song must be a hit for someone. One of his closest collaborators was Jerry Wexler, who also became one of his best friends, even though one of their earliest interactions had been when Waxler had supervised

Full Spector's production of Burns' Twist and Shout for the Top Notes, a record that Burns had thought had butchered the song. Burns was, in his deepest bones, a record man. Listening to the records that Burns made, there's a strong continuity in everything he does. There's a love there of simplicity.

Almost none of his records have more than three chords. He loved Latin sounds and rhythms, a love he shared with other people working in Brill-building R&B at the time, like Leibrand Stoller and Specter, and great voices in emotional distress. There's a reason that the records he produced for Solomon Burke were the first R&B records to be labelled Soul. Burns was one of those people for whom feel and commercial success are inextricable.

He was an artist, the records he made were powerfully expressive, but he was an artist for whom the biggest validation was getting a hit. Only a small proportion of the records he made became hits, but enough did that in the early 60s he was a name that could be spoken of in the same breath as Libra and Stoller, Spectre, and Baccarac and David. And Atlantic needed a record man. The only people producing hits for the label at this point

were Libra and Stoller, and they were in the process of stopping doing freelance work and setting up their own label, Redbird, as we talked about in the episode on the Shangri Lars. and anyway, they wanted more money than they were getting, and Jerry Wexler was never very keen on producers wanting money that could have gone to the record label. Wexler decided to sign Burt Burns up as a staff producer for Atlantic,

towards the end of 1963, and by May 1964 it was paying off. Atlantic hadn't been having hits, and now Burns had four tracks he wrote and produced for Atlantic on the Hot 100, of which the highest charting was My Girl Sloopy by the Vibrations. Even higher on the chart so was the Beatles' version of Twist and Shout. That record, indeed, had been successful enough in the UK that Burns had already made exploratory trips to the UK and produced records for Dick Rowe at Decker,

a partnership we heard about in the episode on Here Comes the Night. Burns had made partnerships there which would have vast repercussions for the music industry in both countries, and one of them was with the arranger Mike Leander, who was the uncredited arranger for the Drifter's Session for Under the Boardwalk, a song written by Artie Resnick and Kenny Young and produced by Burns recorded the day after the group's lead singer

Rudy Lewis died of an overdose. Burns was making hits on a regular basis by mid-1964 and the income from the label's new success allowed Jerry Wexler and the Ertigin brothers to buy out their other partners, our met Ertigan's old dentist, who had put up some of the initial money, and Miriam Beanstock,

the ex-wife of their initial partner, Herb Abramson, who'd got Abramson's share in the company after the divorce, and who was now married to Freddie Beanstalk of Hill and Range Publishing. Wexster and the Ertogans now owned a whole label. Burns also made regular trips to the UK to keep up his work with British musicians. And in one of those trips, as we heard in the episode on Here Comes the Night,

he produced several tracks for the group them, including that track written by Burns. And a song written by the group's lead singer Van Morrison, Gloria. But Burns hadn't done much other work with them, because he had a new project. Part of the reason that Wexer and the Ertogans had gained total control of Atlantic was because, in a move pushed primarily by Wexler.

They were looking at selling it. They'd already tried to merge with Libre and Stoller's Red Bird Records, but lost the opportunity after a disastrous meeting. But they were in negotiations with several other labels, negotiations which would take another couple of years to bear fruit. But they weren't planning on getting out of the record business altogether. Whatever deal they made, they'd remain with Atlantic, but they were also planning on starting another label.

Bird Burns had seen how successful Libre and Stoller were with Redbird and wanted something similar. Wexler and the Ertogans didn't want to lose their one hitmaker, so they came up with an offer that would benefit all of them. Burns' publishing contract had just ended, so they would set up a new publishing company, Web 4, named after the initials, Wexler, Ertigan and Burns, and the fact that there were four of them.

Burns would own 50% of that, and the other three would own the other half, and they were going to start up a new label, with $17,000 of the Atlantic partners' money. That label would be called Bang, for Bert, Armet, Neshwe and Gerald, and would be a separate company from Atlantic, so not affected by any sale. Burns would continue as a staff producer for Atlantic, for now, but he'd have his own label, which he'd have a proper share in, and whether he was making hits for Atlantic or Bang, his partners would have a share of the profits.

The first two records on Bang were Shake and Jerk by Billy Lamont, a track that they licensed from elsewhere and which didn't do much, and a more interesting track co-written by Burns. Bob Feldman, Richard Gutterer, and Jerry Goldstein were brill-building songwriters who had become known for writing My Boyfriend's Back, a hit for the Angels, a couple of years earlier. He went away and you hung around and bothered me every night. And I wouldn't go out with you.

You said things that weren't very nice My boyfriend's back And you're going to be in trouble The double and true With the British invasion The three of them had decided To create their own foreign beat group As they couldn't do British accents

They pretended to be Australian And as the Strange Loves Named after the Stanley Kubrick film Dr Strange Love They released one flop single They cut another single A version of Bo Diddley but the label they released their initial record through didn't want it.

They then took the record to Atlantic, where Jerry Waxa said that they weren't interested in releasing some white men singing Boe Dedly, but Armat Ertigan suggested they bring the track to Bert Burns to see what he thought. Burns pointed out that if they changed the lyrics and melody, but kept the same backing track, they could claim the copyright in the resulting song themselves. He worked with them on a new lyric, inspired by the novel Candy, a statistical pornographic novel co-written by Terry Southern, who had also co-written the screenplay to Dr. Strangelove.

Burns supervised some guitar overdubs, and the result went to number 11. Burns had two other songs on the Hot 100 when that charted, too. Them's version of Here Comes the Night, and the version of Van McCoy's song, Baby I'm Yours, he produced for Barbara Lewis, three records on the chart on three different labels. But despite the sheer number of charting records

had. He'd never had a number one until the Strange Loves went on tour. Before the tour, they'd cut a version of My Girl Sloopy for their album, Burns always liked to reuse material, and they started performing the song on the tour. The Dave Clark Five, who they were supporting, told them it sounded like a hit, and they were going to do their own version when they got home. Feldman, Gutterer and Goldstein decided they might as well have the hit with it as anyone else. Rather than put it out as a Strange Love's record, their own record was still rising up the charts and there's no reason to be your own competition.

They decided to get a group of teenage musicians who supported them on the last date of the tour to sing new vocals to the backing track from the Strange Love's album. The group had been called Rick and the Raiders, but they argued so much that the Strange Loves nicknamed them the Hatfields and the McCoys, and when their version of My Girl Sloopig, retitled Hang On Sloopie, came out.

It was under the band name The McCoys. Burns was becoming a major success, and with major success in the New York music industry in the 1960s, came Mafia involvement. We've talked a fair bit about Morris Levy's connection with the mob in many previous episodes, but mob influence was utterly pervasive throughout the New York part of the industry,

and so, for example, Richard Gutterer of the Strange Loves, used to call Sunny Francaise of the Colombo Crime family Uncle John they were so close. Francazi was big in the record business too, even after his conviction for bank robbery. Burns, unlike many of the other people in the industry, had no scruples at all about hanging out with Mafiosi. Indeed, his best friend in the mid-60s was Tommy Aboli,

a member of the Genovese crime family who had been in the mob since the 20s, starting out working for Lucky Luciano. Burns was not himself a violent man, as far as anyone can tell, but he liked the glamour of hanging out with organised crime figures, and they liked hanging out with someone who was making so many hit records. And so while Lieber and Stoller, for example,

ended up selling Red Bird records to George Goldner for a single dollar, in order to get away from the mafiosi, who were slowly muscling in on the label, Burns had no problems at all in keeping his own label going. Indeed, he would soon be doing so without the involvement of Atlantic records. Burns' final work for Atlantic was in June 16, when he cut a song he had co-written with Jeff Barry for the Drifters, inspired by the woman who would soon become Atlantic's biggest star.

The way Burns told the story in public, there was no real bad blood between him, Wexer and the Urtogans. He'd just decided to go his own way, and he said, I will always be grateful to them for the help they've given me in getting bang started. The way Burns' wife would later tell the story, story. Jerry Wexler had suggested that rather than Burns owning 50% of Web4, they should start to split everything four ways, and she had been horrified by this suggestion, kicked up a stink about it, and Wexer had then said that either Burns needed to buy the other three out, or quit

and give them everything, and demanded Burns pay them $300,000. According to other people, Burns decided he wanted 100% control of Web 4, and raised a breach of contract lawsuit against Atlantic, over the usual royalty non-payments that were endemic in the industry at that point, when Atlantic decided to fight the lawsuit rather than settle. Burns' mob friends got involved and threatened to break the legs of Wexer's 14-year-old daughter, and the mob ended up with full control of bang records, while Burns had full control of his publishing company. Given later events, and in particular given the way Wexler talked about Burns until the day he died,

with a vitriol that he never used about any of the other people he had business disputes with, it seems likely to me that the latter story is closer to the truth than the former. But most people involved weren't talking about the details of what went on, and so Burns still retained his relationships with many of the people in the business, not least of them Jeff Barry. So when Barry and Ellie Greenwich had a new potential star, it was Burns they thought to bring him to, even though the artist was white,

and Burns had recently given an interview saying that he wanted to work with more black artists, because white artists simply didn't have soul. Barry and Greenwich's marriage was breaking up at the time, but they were still working together professionally, as we discussed in the episode on Riverdeep Mountain High, and they had been the main production team at Red Bird. But with Redbird in terminal decline, they turned elsewhere when they found a potential major star

after Greenwich was asked to sing backing vocals on one of his songwriting demos. They'd signed the new songwriter, Neil Diamond, to leave from Stoller's company Trio music at first, but they soon started up their own company, Talleyrand Music, and signed Diamond to that, giving Diamond 50% of the company and keeping 25% each for themselves, and placed one of his songs with Jay and the Americans in 1965. That record made the top 20, and had established Diamond as a songwriter.

But he was still not a major performer. He'd released one flop single on Columbia Records before meeting Barry and Greenwich. But they thought he had something, and Bert Burns agreed. Diamond was signed to Bang Records, and Burns had a series of pre-production meetings with Barry and Greenwich before they took Diamond into the studio.

Barry and Greenwich were going to produce Diamond for Bang, as they had previously produced tracks for Red Bird, but they were going to shape the records, according to Burns' aesthetic. The first single released from Diamond's first session, Solitary Man, only made number 55, but it was the first thing Diamond had recorded to make the Hot 100 at all.

The second single, though, was much more Burt Burns' sort of thing, a three-cord song that sounded like it could have been written by Burns' especially after Barry and Greenwich had added the Latin-style horns that Burns loved so much. Indeed, according to some sources, Burns did make a songwriting suggestion. Diamond's song had originally been called Money Money, and Burns had thought that was a ridiculous title, and suggested calling it Cherry Cherry instead. That became Diamond's first top ten hit.

While Greenwich had been the one who had discovered Diamond, and Barry and Greenwich were the credited producers on all Diamond records as a result, Diamond soon found himself collaborating far more with Barry than with Greenwich. So, for example, the first number one he wrote, for the monkeys rather than himself, ended up having its production just credited to Barry. That record used a backing track recorded in New York by the same set of musicians used on most bang records, like Al Goregoni on the guitar, and Ross Savicus on bass. Neil Diamond was becoming a solid hitmaker, but he started rubbing up badly against Burns. Burns wanted hits and only hits, and Diamond thought of himself as a serious

artist. The crisis came when two songs were under contention for Diamond's next single in late 1967, after he'd had a whole run of hits for the label. The song Diamond wanted to release Shiloh was deeply personal to him. But Berg Burns had other ideas. Shiloh didn't sound like a hit, and he knew a hit when he heard one. No, the clear next single, the only choice, was Kentucky Woman. But Burns tried to compromise as best he could. Diamond's contract was up for renewal, and you don't want to lose someone who has had, as Diamond had at that point,

five top 20 hits in a row, and who was also writing songs like, I'm a believer, and red red wine. He told Diamond that he'd let Shiloh come out as a single, if Diamond signed an extension to his contract. Diamond said that not only was he not going to do that, he'd taken legal advice and discovered that there were problems with his contract which let him record for the labels. The word exclusive had been missed out of the text, among other things. He wasn't going to be recording for Bang at all anymore. The lawsuits over this would stretch out for a decade, and Diamond would eventually win, but the first few months were very, very difficult for

Diamond. When he played the Bitterend, a club in New York, stink bombs were thrown into the audience. The Bitterend's manager was assaulted and severely beaten. Diamond moved his wife and child out of Manhattan, borrowed a gun, and, after his last business meeting with Burns, was heard talking about how he needed to contact the district attorney and hire a bodyguard. Of the many threats that were issued against Diamond, though. The least disturbing was probably the threat Burns made to Diamond's career. Burns pointed out to Diamond in no uncertain terms that he didn't need Diamond anyway. He already had someone he could replace Diamond with. Another white male solo singer with a guitar who could churn out guaranteed hits. He had Van Morrison. When we left Van Morrison,

them had just split up due to the problems they had been having with their management team. Indeed, the problems Morrison was having with his marriages seem curiously similar to the issues that Diamond was having with Bert Burns, something that could possibly have been a warning sign to everyone involved, if any of them had known the full details of everyone else's situation. Sadly for all of them, none of them did. Them had had some early singles success, notably with the tracks Burns had produced for them,

but Morrison's opinion of their second album, them again, was less than complimentary, and in general that album is mostly only remembered for the version of Bob Dylan's It's All Over Now Baby Blue, which is one of those cover versions that inspires subsequent covers more than the original ever did. Them had toured the US around the time of the release of that album, but that tour had been a disaster. The group had gained a reputation for incredible live shows, including performances at the Whiskey Ago-Go-Go, with the Dawes and Captain Beefheart as their support acts. But during the tour, Van Morrison had decided,

that Phil Solomon, the group's manager, was getting too much money. Morrison had agreed to do the tour on a salary rather than a percentage, but the tour had been more successful than he'd expected, and Solomon was making a great deal of money off the tour, money that Morrison believed rightfully belonged to him. The group started collecting the money directly from promoters, and got into legal trouble with Solomon as a result. The tour ended with the group having $10,000 that Solomon believed,

quite possibly correctly, that he was owed. Various gangsters whose acquaintance the group had made offered to have the problem taken care of, but they decided instead to come to a legal agreement. They would keep the money, and in return Solomon, whose production company the group was signed to, would get to keep all future royalties from the them tracks.

This probably seemed a good idea at the time, when the idea of records earning royalties for 60 or more years into the future seemed ridiculous, but Morrison in particular came to regret the decision bitterly. The group played one final gig when they got back to Belfast, but then split up, though a version of the group led by the bass player Alan Henderson continued performing for a few years to no success.

Morrison put together a band that played a handful of gigs under the name Them Again, with little success, but he already had his eyes set on a return to the US. In Morrison's eyes, Bert Burns had been the only person in the music who had really understood him, and the two worked well together. He had also fallen in love with an American woman, Janet Planet, and wanted to find some way to be with her. As Morrison said later, I had a couple of other offers, but I thought this was the best one, seeing as I wanted to come to America anyway. I can't remember the exact details of the deal. It wasn't really that

spectacular, money-wise, I don't think, but it was pretty hard to refuse from the point of view that I really respected Bert as a producer. I'd rather have worked with Bert than some other guy with a bigger record company. From that angle, it was spectacular because Bert was somebody that I wanted to work with. There's little evidence that Morrison did have other offers. He was already getting a reputation

as someone who it was difficult to work with, but Ian Burns had a mutual respect, and on January 9, 1967, he signed a contract with Bang Records. That contract has come in for a lot of criticism over the year, but it was actually, by the standards in operation in the music business in 1967, a reasonably fair one. The contract provided that, for a $2,500 a year advance, Bang would record 12 sides in the first year, with an option for up to 50 more that year, and options for up to four more

years on the same terms. Bang had the full ownership of the masters and the right to do what they wanted with them. According to at least one biographer, Morrison added clauses requiring Bang to actually record the 12 sides a year and to put out at least three singles and one album per year while the contract was in operation. He also added one other close which seems telling. Company agrees that company will not make any reference to the name them on phonograph records or an advertising copy in connection with the recording of artist. Morrison was, at first, extremely happy with Burns. the problems started with their first session.

Let me hear, who's got the figure on the intro? You're talking out of the intro is the heart. Right. Here we go, rolling on two. On three. When Morrison had played the songs he was working on for Burns, Burns had remarked that they sounded great with just Morrison and his guitar, so Morrison was surprised when he got into the studio

to find the whole standard New York session crew there. The same group of session players who were playing for everyone, from the monkeys to Laura Nero, from Neil Diamond to the Shangri-Lars, along with the sweet inspirations to provide backing vocals. As he described it later, this followed Bert, he made it the way he wanted to, and I accepted that he was producing it. I'd write a song and bring it into the group, and we'd sit there and bash it around, and that's all it was. They weren't playing the songs, they were just playing whatever it was. They'd say, okay, we got drums, so let's put drums on it. And they weren't thinking about the song, all they were thinking about was putting

drums on it. But it was my song, and I had to watch it go down. The first song they cut was brown-eyed girl, a song which Morrison has said was originally a calypso, and was originally titled Brown-skinned Girl, though he's differed in interviews as to whether Burns changed the lyric, or if he just decided to sing it differently without thinking about it in the session. Burns turned brown-eyed girl into a hit single, because that was what he tended to do with songs, and the result sounds a lot like the kind of record that Bang were releasing for Neil Diamond. Morrison has, in later years, expressed his distaste for what was done to the song, and in particular he said that the backing vocal part by the sweet inspirations was added by Burns

and he disliked it. Morrison has been very dismissive of brown-eyed girl over the years, but he seems not to have disliked it at the time, and the song itself is one that has stood the test of time, and is often pointed to by other songwriters as a great example of the writer's craft. I remember reading one interview with Randy Newman. Sadly, while I thought it was in Paul Zollos Songwriters on Songwriting, I just checked that and it's not, so I can't quote it precisely,

in which he says that he often points to the line behind the stadium with you as a perfect piece of writing, because it's such a strangely specific detail that it convinces you that it's actually happened and that means that you implicitly believe the rest of the song. Though it should be made very clear here that Morrison has always said over and over again that nothing in his songs is based directly on his own experiences

and that they're all products of his imagination and composites of people he's known. This is very important to note before we go any further because brown-eyed girl is one of many songs from this period in Morrison's career, which imply that their narrator has an attraction to underage girls. In this case, he remembers making love in the green grass in the distant past, while he also says, Saw you just the other day, my how you have grown,

and that particular combination is not perhaps one that should be dwelt on too closely. But there is, of course, a very big difference between a songwriter treating a subject as something that is worth thinking about in the course of a song and writing about their own lives. And that can be seen on one of the other songs that Morrison recorded in these sessions, TB Sheets. It seems very unlikely indeed that Van Morrison actually had a lover die of tuberculosis,

as the lover in the song does. And while a lot of people seem convinced that it's autobiographical, simply because of the intensity of the performance, Morrison apparently broke down in tears after recording it. Nobody has ever found anyone in Morrison's life who fits the story in the song, and he's always ridiculed such suggestions. What is true, though, is that TB sheets is evidence against another claim that Morrison has made in the past,

that on these initial sessions the eight songs recorded were meant to be the A and B sides of four singles, and there was no plan of making an album. It is simply not plausible at all to suggest that TB sheet, a slow blues about terminal illness that lasts nearly ten minutes was ever intended as a single. It wouldn't have even come close to fitting on one side of a 45. It was also presumably at this time that Burns brought up the topic of peace of my heart. When Burns signed Irma Franklin, it was as a way of getting at Jerry Wexler, who had gone from being his closest friend to someone he wasn't on speaking terms with,

by signing the sister of his new signing Aretha. Morrison, of course, didn't co-write it. He'd already decided that he didn't play well with others, but it's tempting to think about how the song might have been different had Morrison written it. The song in some ways seems a message to Wexler. Haven't you had enough for me already? But it's also notable how many songs Burns was writing

with the word heart in the chorus, given that Burns knew he was on borrowed time from his own heart condition. As an example, around the same time he and Jerry Ragegovoi co-wrote, Peace of My Heart. They also co-wrote another song, Heart Be Still, a flagrant lift from Peace Be Still by Aretha Franklin's old mentor of Reverend James Cleveland, which they cut with Lorraine Ellison. Burns's heart condition had got much worse as a result of the stress from splitting with Atlantic,

and he had started talking about maybe getting open heart surgery, though that was still very new and experimental. One wonders how he must have felt listening to Morrison's singing about watching someone slowly dying. Morrison has since had nothing but negative things to say about the sessions in March 1967, but at the time he seemed happy. He returned to Belfast almost straight away after the sessions on the understanding that he'd be back in the US if brown-eyed girl was a success. He wrote to Janet Plyett in San Francisco telling her to listen to the radio. She'd know if she heard Brown-eyed Girl that he would be back on his way to see her. She soon did hear the song, and he was soon back in the US. By August, Brown-Eyed Girl had become a substantial hit,

making the top ten, and Morrison was back in the state. He was starting to get less happy with Burns, though. Bang had put out the eight tracks he'd recorded in March as an album, titled Blow in Your Mind, and Morrison thought that the crass pseudo-psychodelia of the title, line of notes and cover was very inappropriate. Morrison has never been a heavy user of any drugs other than alcohol, and didn't particularly want to be associated with them. He also seems to have not realised that every track he recorded in those initial sessions would be on the album, which many people have called one of the great one-sided albums of all time. Side A, with brown-eyed girl, he ain't give you none, and the extended TB sheets, tends to get far more loved than side

be, with five much lesser songs on it. Burns held a party for Morrison on a cruise around Manhattan, but it didn't go well. When the performer Tiny Tim tried to get on board, Carmine Wassle Danoia, a mobster friend of Burns' who was Burns' partner in a studio they'd managed to get from Atlantic as part of the settlement when Burns left, was so offended by Tim's long hair and effeminate voice and mannerisms that he threw him overboard into the harbour. De Noya was meant to be Morrison's manager in the US, working with Burns, but he and Morrison didn't get on at all. At one point, De Noia smashed Morrison's acoustic guitar over his head

and only later regretted the damage he'd done to a nice guitar. And Morrison and Burns weren't getting on either. Morrison went back into the studio to record four more songs for a follow-up to Brown-Ey Girl, but there was again a misunderstanding. Morrison thought he'd been promised that this time he could do his songs the way he wanted, but Burns was just frustrated that he wasn't coming up with another brown-eyed girl, but was instead coming up with slow songs about trans women. Burns overdubbed party noises and soul backing vocals onto Madam George,

possibly in an attempt to copy the Beach Boys' party album with its similar feel, but it was never going to be a Barbara Anne. In the end, Burns released a band, one of the phyller tracks from blowing your mind, Ro Roe Roe Rosie, as the next single, and it flopped. On December the 29th, Burns had a meeting with Neil Diamond, the meeting after which Diamond decided he needed to get a bodyguard. After that, he had a screaming row over the phone with Van Morrison,

which made Burns ill with stress. The next day he died of a heart attack. Burns' widow Eileen, who had only just given birth to a baby a couple of weeks earlier, would always blame Morrison for personal. pushing her husband over the edge. Neither Van Morrison nor Jerry Waxler went to the funeral, but Neil Diamond did. He went to try to persuade Eileen to let him out of his contract,

now Burns was dead. According to Janet Planet later, we were at the hotel when we learned that Bert had died, we were just mortified because things had been going really badly, and Van felt really bad because I guess they'd parted having had some big fight or something. Even though he did love Bert, it was a strange relationship that lived and died in the studio.

I remember we didn't go to the funeral, which probably was a mistake. I think Van had a really bad feeling about what was going to happen. But Morrison as later mostly talked about the more practical concerns that came up, which were largely the same as the ones Neil Diamond had, seeing in 1997, I'd signed a contract with Burt Burns for management, production, agency and record company, publishing the whole lot, which was professional suicide, as any of the same. lawyer will tell you now, then the whole thing blew up. Bert Burns died and I was left broke. This was the same mistake, essentially, that he'd made with Phil Solomon, and in order to get out of it,

it turned out he was going to have to do much the same for a third time. But it was the experience with Burns specifically that traumatized Morrison enough that 25 years later he would still be writing songs about it, like big-time operators. York, and they'd try to have me deported, stop me from getting work, blackness and me all over, were vicious and they were mean, they were big time operators, the music business scene.

The option to renew Morrison's contracts with Burns' companies came on the 9th of January, 1968, less than two weeks after Burns' death. After his death, Burns' share of ownership in his companies had passed to his widow, who was in a quandary. She had two young children, one of whom was only a few weeks old, and she needed an income after their father had died. She was also not well disposed at all towards Morrison,

who she blamed for causing her husband's death. By all accounts the amazing thing is that Burns lived as long as he did, given his heart condition and the state of medical science at the time, but it's easy to understand her thinking. She wanted nothing to do with Morrison and wanted to punish him. On the other hand, her late husband's silent partners didn't want to let their cash cow go, and so Morrison came under a huge amount of pressure in very different directions. From one side, Carmine de Noya was determined to make more money off Morrison,

and Morrison has since talked about signing further contracts at this point with a gun literally to his head, and his hotel room being shut up. But on the other side, Aileen Burns wanted to destroy Morrison's career altogether. She found out that Bert Burns hadn't got Morrison the proper work permits and reported him to the immigration authorities. Morrison came very close to being deported, but in the end he managed to escape deportation by marrying Janet Planet. The newly married couple moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts to get away from New York and the mobsters, and to try to figure out the next steps in Morrison's career. Morrison started putting together a band,

which he called the Van Morrison Contraversy and working on new songs. One of his earliest connections in Massachusetts was the lead singer of a band called The Hallucinations, who he met in a bar where he was trying to get a gig. The Hallucinations lead singer was called Peter Wolfe and would much later go on to become well known as the lead singer with the Jay Giles band.

He and Morrison became acquaintances and later became closer friends when they realised they had another connection. Wolf had a late-night radio show under the name Wuffer Guffer and he'd been receiving anonymous requests for obscure blues records from a fan of the show. Morrison had been the one sending in the requests, not realising his acquaintance was the DJ. Before he got his own band together, Morrison actually guested with the hallucinations

at one show they did in May 1968, supporting John Lee Hooker. The hallucinations had been performing Gloria since them single had come out and they invited Morrison to join them to perform it on stage. According to Wolf, Morrison was very drunk and mentored in Cod Japanese for 35 minutes and tried to sing a different song while the band played Gloria. The audience were apparently unimpressed, even though Wolf shouted at them,

Don't you know who this man is? He wrote the song! But in truth, Morrison was sick of Gloria and his earlier work and was trying to push his music in a new direction. He would later talk about it, having had an epiphany after hearing one particular track on the radio. Like almost every musician in 1968, Morrison was hit like a lightning bolt by music from Big Pink, and he decided that he needed to turn his music in the same direction.

He started writing the song Brand New Day, which would later appear on his album Moon Dance, inspired by the music on the album. The Van Morrison controversy started out as a fairly straightforward rock band, with guitarist John Sheldon, bass player Tom Kilbania, and drummer Joey Bebo. Sheldon was a novice, though his first guitar teacher was the singer James Taylor, but the other two were students at Berkeley and very serious musicians. Morrison seems to have had various managers involved in rapid succession in 1968,

including one who was himself a mobster, and another who was only known as Frank. but one of these managers advanced enough money that the musicians got paid every gig. These musicians were all interested in kinds of music other than just straight rock music. And as well as rehearsing up Morrison's hits and his new songs, they would also jam with him on songs from all sorts of other genres, particularly jazz and blues.

The band worked up the song that would become Domino, based on Sheldon jamming on a Bow deadly riff, and another time the group were rehearsing a Grant Green jazz piece, Lazy Afternoon. Morrison started messing with the melody, and that became his classic song, Moon Dance. No recordings of this electric lineup of the group are known to exist, though the backing musicians remember going to a recording studio called Ace Recordings at one point in cutting some demos, which don't seem to circulate. Ace was a small studio which, according to all the published sources I've read, was best known for creating song poems, though it was a minor studio even in the

song poem world. For those who don't know, song poems were essentially a con, aimed at wannabe songwriters who knew nothing about the business. Companies would advertise you too could become a successful rich songwriter if you sent in your song poems, because anyone who knew the term lyric could be presumed to know too much about the music business to be useful. When people sent in their lyrics, they'd then be charged a fee to have them put out on their very own record, with tracks made more or less on a conveyor belt with quick head arrangements, sung by session singers who had just handed a lyric sheet and told to get on with it, and thus were created such classics prized by collectors as I like yellow things,

Jimmy Carter says yes, and Listen Mr. Hat. Obviously, for the most part, these song poems did not lead to the customers becoming the next Ira Gershwin. But oddly, even though Ace Recordings is not one of the better-known song poem studios, it seems to have produced an actual hit song poem,

one that I don't think has ever before been identified as such until I made a connection, hence be going on this little tangent. Because in researching this episode, and noticed something about its co-owner Milton Yakas' main claim to fame. He co-wrote the song Old Cape Cod, and to quote that song's Wikipedia page, the nucleus of the song was a poem written by Boston area housewife Claire Rothrock, for whom Cape Cod was a favourite vacation spot.

Old Cape Cod and its derivatives would be Rothrock's sole evident songwriting credit. She brought her poem to Ace Studios, a Boston recording studio owned by Milton Yacchus, who adapted the poem into the song's lyrics. And while Yakas had written other songs, including songs for Patty Page who had the hit with Old Cape Cod, apparently Paige recorded that song after Rothrock brought her the demo after a gig, rather than getting it through any formal channels. It sounds to me like the massive hit and classic of the American songbook, Old Cape Cod, started life as a song poem, and if you're familiar with the form, it fits the genre perfectly.

Wade little villages here and there You're sure to fall in love with old cave If you like the taste of a lobster stew Serve by a window The studio was not the classiest of places Even if you discount the song poems its main source of income was from cutting private records with mobsters' wives and mistresses singing,

and dealing with the problems that came along when those records weren't successful. And it also had a sideline in bugging people's cars to see if their spouses were cheating, though Milton Yakas's son Shelley, who got his start at his dad's studio, later became one of the most respected recording engineers in the industry, and indeed had already worked as assistant engineer

on music from Big Pink. and there was actually another distant connection to Morrison's new favourite band on these sessions. For some reason, reports differ. Bebo wasn't considered suitable for the session, and in his place was the one-handed drummer Victor Malti Moulton, who had played with the Barbarians, who'd had a minor hit with,

Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl, a couple of years earlier. A later Barbarian single, in early 1966, had featured Malti telling his life story, punctuated by the kind of three-cord chorus that would have been at home on a Burr-Burn single. But while that record was credited to the barbarians, Moulton was the only barbarian on the track, with the instruments and backing vocals instead being provided by Leavon and the Hawks. Shortly after the Ace sessions,

the Van Morrison controversy fell apart, though nobody seems to know why. Depending on which musician's story you listen to, either Morrison had a dream that he should get rid of all electric instruments and only use acoustic players, or there was talk of a record deal but the musicians weren't good enough, or the money from the mysterious manager, who may or may not have been the one who was a mobster, ran out.

Bieber went back to university, and Sheldon left soon after, though Sheldon would remain in the music business in one form or another. His most prominent credit has been writing a couple of songs for his old friend James Taylor, including the song Bitter Sweet on Taylor's Platinum Selling Best of, on which Sheldon also played guitar. Morrison and Kilbania continued for a while

as a duo, with Morrison on acoustic guitar and Kilbania on double bass, but they were making very different music. Morrison's biggest influence at this point, other than the band, was King Pleasure, a jazz singer who sang in the vocalese style we've talked about before, the style where singers would sing lyrics to melodies that had previously been improvised by jazz musicians. You are the soul who snaps my control. Such a funny thing, but every time you're near me, I never can behave. You give me a smile and then I'm wrapped up in your magic. There's music all around me, crazy music, music that keeps calling me so very close to you.

Morrison and Kilbania soon decided that to make the more improvisatory music they were interested in playing. They wanted another musician who could play. solos. They ended up with John Payne, a jazz flute and saxophone player, whose biggest inspiration was Charles Lloyd. This new lineup of the Van Morrison Controversy, acoustic guitar, double bass, and jazz flute, kept gigging around Boston, though the sound they were creating was hardly what the audience was coming to see the man who'd had that brown-eyed girl hit the year before I would have expected, even when they did brown-eyed girl, as the one live recording of that lineup, made by Peter Wolfe, shows. That new style, with melodic bass underpinning freely extemporizing jazz flute and soulful vocals,

would become the basis of the album that to this day is usually considered Morrison's best. But before that could happen, there was the matter of the contracts to be sorted out. Warner Reprise Records were definitely interested. Warner's had spent the last few years buying up smaller companies like Atlantic, Autumn Records and Reprise, and the label was building a reputation as the major label that would be. give the artists the space and funding they needed to make the music they wanted to make. Idiocyncratic artists with difficult reputations, deserved or otherwise, like Neil Young, Randy Newman, Van Dyke Parks, the Grateful Dead and Joni Mitchell

had all found homes on the label, which was soon also to start distributing Frank Zapper, the Beach Boys and Captain Beefheart. A surly artist who wants to make mystical acoustic songs with jazz flute accompaniment was nothing unusual for them, and once Joe, The Joe Smith, the man who had signed the Grateful Dead, was pointed in Morrison's direction by Andy Wickham, an A&R man working for the label. Everyone knew that Morrison would be a perfect fit, but Morrison was still under contract to Bang Records and Web 4. And those contracts said, among other things, that any other label that negotiated with Morrison would be held liable for breach of contract. Warners didn't want to show their interest in Morrison because a major label wanting to sign him

would cause Bang to raise the price of buying him out of his contract. Instead, they got an independent production company to sign him with a nod and wink understanding that they would then license the records to Warners. The company they chose was Inherit Productions, the production arm of Schwade Marenstein, a management company set up by Bob Schwade, who had previously worked in Warners as Publishing Department, and record producer Louis Marenstein.

Marenstein came to another demo session at Ace Recordings, where he fell in love with the new music that Morrison was playing, and determined he would do everything in his power to make the record into the masterpiece it deserved to be. He and Morrison were, at least at this point, on exactly the same page, and bonded over their mutual love of King Pleasure. Morrison signed to Shwade Marenstein, just as he had with Bert Burns and before him Phil Solomon,

for management, record production and publishing. Shwade Memmstein were funded by Warner's and would license any recordings they made to Warner's, once the contractual situation had been sorted out. The first thing to do was to negotiate the release from Web 4, the publishing company owned by Eileen Burns. Shwade negotiated that, and Morrison got released on four conditions. He had to make a substantial payment to Web 4. If he released a single within a year, he had to give Web 4 the publishing. Any album he released in the next year had to contain at least two songs published by Web4, and he had to give Web4 at least 36 new songs to publish within the next year. The first two conditions were no problem at all. Warner's had the money to buy the contract out, and Marenstein's plans for the first album

didn't involve a single anyway. It wouldn't be too much of a hardship to include a couple of Web4 published tracks on the album. Morrison had written two songs, Beside You and Madam George, that had already been published, and that he was regularly including in his album. live sets. As for the 36 new songs, well, that all depended on what you called a song, didn't it? It's a very common disease. Actually, you're very lucky to have ringworm, because you may have had something else. You've got ringworm. Morrison went into a recording studio and recorded 31 ostensible songs. Most of them last in one minute to within a few seconds either way, in which he strummed one or two chords and spoke sang whatever words came into his head.

For example, one song, Here Comes Dumb George, just consists of the words, here comes dumb George repeated over and over. Some of the songs, like Twist and Shake and Hang-on groovy, a parodying Burt Burns as songwriting style, others like, waiting for my royalty check, Blow in your nose, and nose in your blow, are attacks on bang's business practices. Several of the songs, like, Hold on George, here comes dumb George,

dumb George, and goodbye George, are about a man called George who seems to have come to Boston to try and fail to make a record with Morrison. And want a Danish, is about wanting a Danish pastry. But in truth, this description is still making these songs

sound more coherent than they are. The whole recording is of no musical merit whatsoever, and has absolutely nothing in it which could be considered to have any commercial potential at all, which is of course the point, just to show utter contempt to Eileen Burns and her company. The other problem that needed to be solved was Bang Records itself, which was now largely under the control of the mob. That was solved by Joe Smith. As Smith told the story, a friend of mine who knew some people said I could buy the contract for $20,000. I had to meet somebody in a warehouse on the third floor on 9th Avenue in New York. I woke up there with

$20,000 bills, and I was terrified. I was terrified I was going to give them the money, get a belt on the head, and still not wind up with the contract. And there were two guys in the room. They looked out of central casting, a big wide guy and a tall thing guy. They were wearing suits and hats and stuff. I said, I'm here with the money. You got the contract. I remember I took that contract and ran out the door and jumped from the third floor to the second floor and almost broke my leg to get on the street, where I could get a cab and put the contract in a safe place back at Warner Brothers. But the problem was solved, and Lewis Marinstine could get to work translating the music he'd heard Morrison playing into a record. He decided that Kilbania and Payne were not suitable

for the kind of recording he wanted, though they were welcome to attend the sessions in case the musicians had any questions about the songs, and thus they would get session pay. Kilbania was, at first, upset by this, but he soon changed his mind when he realised who Marenstein was bringing in to replace him on bass for the session. Richard Davis, the bass player, who sadly died two months ago as I write this, would later go on to play on many classic rock records by people like Bruce Springsteen and Laura Nero, largely as a result of his work for Morrison, but at the time he was known as one of the great jazz bass players, most notably having played on Eric Dolphys out to lunch.

Kilbania could see the wisdom of getting in one of the truly great players for the album, and he was happy to show Davis the parts he'd been playing on the songs live, which Davis could then embellish. Davis later always denied this, but it's obvious when listening to the live recordings that Kilbania played on before these sessions that Davis is playing very similar lines. Warren Smith Jr., the vibraphone player,

had played with great jazz musicians like Charles Mingus and Herbie Mann, as well as backing Lloyd Price, Aretha Franklin and Janice Joplin. Connie Kay, the drummer, was the drummer for the modern jazz quartet, and had also played sessions with everyone from Ruth Brown to Miles Davis. And Jay Berliner, the guitarist, had played on records like Charles Mingus's classic, The Black Saints and the Dinner Lady. There was also a flute player, whose name

nobody now remembers. Although all of these musicians were jobbing session musicians, Berliner came to the first session for the album that became Astral Weeks, straight from a session recording a jingle for Pringle's Potato Chips, they were all very capable of taking a simple song and using it as an opportunity for jazz improvisation. And that was what Merenstein asked them to do. The songs that Morrison was writing were lyrically oblique, but structurally they were very simple, surprisingly so, when one is used to listening to the finished album. Most of the songs were, harmonically, variants of the standard blues and R&B changes that Morrison was used to playing. Cypress Avenue and the way

young lovers do, for example, are both basically 12-bar blueses. Neither is exactly a standard 12-bar blues, but both are close enough that they can be considered to fit the form. Other than what Kilbania and Payne showed the musicians, they received no guidance from Morrison, who came in, ran through the songs once for them, and then headed to the vocal booth. None of the musicians had much memory of Morrison at all. Jay Bill Inner said, This little guy walks in, past everybody, disappears into the vocal booth, and almost never comes out, even on the playbacks he stayed in there,

while Richard Davis later said, Well, I was with three of my favourite fellas to play with, so that's what made it beautiful. We were not concerned with Van at all. He never spoke to us. The sound of the basic tracks on Astral Weeks is, is not the sound of a singleuteur, as one might expect given its reputation. It's the sound of extremely good jazz musicians improvising based on the instructions given by Lewis Marinstein, who was trying to capture the feeling he'd got

from listening to Morrison's live performances and demos. And because these were extremely good musicians, the album was recorded extremely quickly. In the first session, they cut four songs. Two of those were songs that Morrison was contractually obliged to record because of his agreement with Web 4, Beside You and Madam George, two songs that Burt Burns have produced,

now in radically different versions. The third song, Cyprus Avenue, is the song that has caused most controversy over the years, as it's another of the songs that Morrison wrote around this time that relate to a sexual or romantic interest in underage girls. In this case, the reasoning might have been as simple as that the song is a blues, and Morrison may have been thinking about a tradition of lyrics like this in blues songs like Good Morning Little School Girl.

Whatever the cause, though, the lyrics have, to put it mildly, not aged well at all. That song would be a standard set closer for live performances for much of the 70s. For the fourth and final song, though, they chose to record what would become the title track for the album, Astral Weeks, a song that was a lot more elliptical, and which seems in part to be about Morrison's longing for Janet Planet from afar, but also about memories of childhood. And also, one of the first songs to bring in Morrison's fascination with the occult and spirituality, something that would be a recurring theme throughout his work.

as the song was partly inspired by paintings by a friend of Morrison's, which suggested to him the concept of astral travel. Morrison had a fascination with the idea of astral travel, as he had apparently had several out-of-body experiences as a child, and wanted to find some kind of explanation for them. Most of the songs on the album came, by Morrison's own account, as a kind of automatic writing,

coming through him rather than being consciously written, and there's a fascination throughout with, to use the phrase from Madam George, Childhood Visions. The song is also one of the first songs in Morrison's repertoire to deliberately name-check one of his idols, something else he would often do in future, where he talks about talking to Hugh D.L.

Lead Belly. Astral Weeks was a song that Morrison had been performing live for some time, and Payne had always enjoyed doing it. Unlike Kilbania, he had no compunction about insisting that he was good enough to play on the record, and he eventually persuaded the session flute player to let him borrow his instrument, and Payne was allowed to play on the track. or at least that's how the story is usually told pain is usually credited for playing on madame george too even though everyone agrees that astral weeks was the last song of the night but people's memories can fade over time either way pain's interplay with j bell inner on the guitar became such a strong point of the track that there was no question of bringing the unknown session player back

album. There was then a six-day break between sessions, during which time Payne and Kilbania went to get initiated into Scientology, a religion with which Morrison himself would experiment a little over a decade later, though they soon decided that it wasn't worth the cost of the courses it'd have to take, and gave up on the idea the same week. The next session didn't go so well. Jay Berliner was unavailable, and so Barry Cornfield, a fokey who played with people like Dave Van Monk, was brought in to replace him. Cornfield was perfectly decent in the role, but they'd also brought in a string section with the idea of recording some of the songs

which needed string parts live. But the string players they brought in were incapable of improvising, coming from a classical rather than jazz tradition, and the only track that got used on the finished album was The Way Young Lovers do, by far the most conventional song on the album. A three-minute soul ballad structured as a waltz 12-bar blues, where the strings are essentially playing the same parts that a horn section would play on a record by someone like Solomon Burke. It was decided that any string or horn parts on the rest of the album would just be done as overdubs. It was two weeks before the next and final session for the album, and that featured the return of J. Bill Iner on guitar. The session started with Sweet Thing and ballerina,

two songs that Morrison had been playing live for some time, and which were cut in relatively quick order. They then made attempts at two more songs that didn't get very far, royalty and going around with Jesse James, before Morrison, stuck for something to record, pulled out a new lyric he'd never performed live, slim, slow slider. The whole band ran through the song once,

but then Merenstein decided to pare the arrangement down to just Morrison, Payne, on soprano sax rather than on flute, and Warren Smith, Jr. That track was the only one where, after the recording, Marenstein didn't compliment the performance, remaining silent instead. Payne said maybe everyone was just tired, or maybe they were moved by it. It seems likely it was the latter. The track eventually got chosen as the final track of the album because Merenstein felt that it didn't fit conceptually with anything else and it's definitely a more negative track than the others

and seems to be in some ways a throwback to T.B. Sheets. In the studio recording, the track ends with a long instrumental jam but if it was going to be the last track, that didn't fit, so Merenstein edited it to come to an abrupt end. The track is also the only one on the album not to have strings overdubbed, and it brings the album to a stark, disturbing end. And that ending is a tribute to Merenstein's skills as a producer. Morrison has, in the years since, been extremely disparaging of Marenstein's contributions,

calling him someone who came around and watched his practice and called himself a producer. But at the same time, Morrison has also been insistent that the sound of the album isn't what he intended, and that Marenstein wrecked it. Similarly, Morrison has also stated on many occasions that the songs were all written as some kind of opera or single story. But we know that isn't the case. Two songs were included due to the contractual obligation to Web 4, and the final sequencing was Marinstein's work. Morrison has always had a great need for control over certain parts of the recording process, but in others, like sequencing and mixing, he's generally left things to other people.

In this case, Marinstein sequenced the album into two sides, which he labelled in the beginning and afterwards, and sequenced the album so that it ends with a death and sudden stop. But if you turn the album over and start it over, it starts with a rebirth. After the basic tracks have been called, Larry Fallon was brought in to arrange string and horn overdubs, and also to play harpsichord on Cyprus Avenue. Fallon had previously been the arranger of the overdubs on Nico's album Chelsea Girl, which had a very similar feel.

Here's room 115, filled with the Centem Queens, magic margaro, you wonder just How high they go They come now See them run now Here they come now

Cherokee Poor Fallon couldn't get a break though Despite arranging two albums Now considered classics Niko had famously said I asked for simplicity And they covered it in flute They added strings

And I didn't like them But I could live with them But the flute The first time I heard the album I cried and it was all because of the flute This time, of course, the flute was the one instrument that Van Morrison had insisted on, but Morrison later said, They ruined it, they added the strings, I didn't want the strings,

and when they sent it to me it was all changed. That's not Astral Weeks. Nobody was really happy, in fact, except Marenstein. Morrison thought that his vision had been compromised, though it's notable that when, 40 years later, he performed the album live to present his vision of it, he stuck so closely to the arrangements on the record that Davis was sacked from the gigs

because he refused to play note for note the same things he played in 1968 and the record label had wanted more brown-eyed girl and were worried they paid out a lot of money and risked dealing with gangsters for something utterly uncommercial. But Merenstein's vision for the album proved right in the long run. The album wasn't a huge commercial success at the time

but it's one of those albums that remains as fresh decades later as when it was released, and to this day it's one of those albums that appears at or near the top of every best album ever list, justling for place with revolver, pet sounds, what's going on, never mind, and other records with unassailable reputations. And it immediately became influential on other musicians. Johnny Rivers, now a few years past his commercial peak and trying to reinvent himself as a James Taylor-style soft folk rocker, titled his next album Slim, Slim, Slow Sliders. and included two versions of the title track as opening and closing tracks on the album. Slum slow slide of snow.

That album also included another Morrison song, Into the Mystic from his next album. And Bruce Springsteen was hugely influenced by the record, to the point that his first album, Greetings from Asprey Park NJ, seems to be written in conscious imitation of Morrison's style, and even features Richard Davis on bass on one track. Off in the distance reflects across the flatlands with a naked field, off in the parts unknown. The woman strove, his polished chrome,

and lies beside the aim. Stringsdean later said of the album, It made me trust in beauty, it gave me a sense of the divine. It was the same chord progression over and over again, but it showed how expansive something with very basic underpinning could be. That basic underpinning, though,

was what led to the departure of John Payne. He explained later, the big problem for a jazzer is those three chords. I mean, I marvel at how those rock and blues guys can continue. It was getting less exciting to play with him. His replacement, Graham Blackburn, lived in Woodstock, and through Blackburn, Morrison was invited to play at the Woodstock Sound Festival, not the more famous Woodstock Festival later that year,

but a more intimate gathering. Morrison was still obsessed with the band and Bob Dylan, and desperately wanted to get to know them, and hanging out after the shows with happy and arty trougham, two local folk musicians who were part of Dylan's circle, he found out that Garth Hudson and Richard Manuel were moving out of her house, just up the road from Dylan. Morrison immediately moved in and started hanging around with the band, though he never got to be close to Dylan, who was already getting disillusioned with the town

due to the sheer number of people coming there now that they knew he and the band were based there. Indeed, according to Morrison, he only met Dylan once while he was living there and didn't recognise him as he'd grown a beard and changed his hairstyle. As Morrison put it, he just looked like a normal Jewish guy. Morrison did, though, become fairly friendly with the band, and in particular got to know Mary Martin, the person in an Albert Grossman's office who had first alerted Grossman to the group,

and who by this point was a manager herself, managing Larry Cohen, among others. Morrison started putting together a full band, because he'd decided that the next album was going to be an actual hit, unlike Astral Weeks. That album is, contractually, part of the same deal with Lewis Merenstein, But after an initial session with much the same musicians,

Morrison insisted on bringing in his own band and going with his own idea of how things should sound, a rhythm section and two horns. The version of the title track of Moon Dance that made the album is apparently produced by Mementstein using Morrison's musicians, but that would be the last time they would work together. Mary Martin took over Morrison's management and gave an ultimatum on Morrison's part.

He was no longer going to be managed or produced by Merenstein, or he wasn't going to work at all. Merenstein was given an executive producer credit on the Moondance album, but it was the first album to be credited to Morrison as sole producer, although the actual process was more complicated. and Shelley Yakus, one of the engineers on the album, who'd got his started ace, remembered they're not really being any producer. Most of the arrangements were by keyboard player Jeff Labes,

working from Morrison's ideas, and the album was mixed by the engineer Elliot Shiner, with drummer Gary Malabar being the only musician at the mixing sessions. Moon Dance was a very, very commercial album compared to its predecessor, and there's more than a little of the feel of Bert Burns to it. Two of its tracks even have backing vocals from Judy Clegg, Emily Houston, and Jackie Verdell, three singers who had at various times sung with the drink hard singers and sweet inspirations. as he said later

Astral Weeks was a success musically and at the same time I was starving practically not eating so for the next album I realised I was going to have to do something like rock or starve so I tried to forget about the artistic thing because it didn't make sense on a practical level one has to live

perhaps though he would never admit it he'd realise that Bert Burns may have had a bit a point. Van Morrison's career has continued for more than 50 years after recording Moon Dance and has had some incredible highs, and in those later decades he's written several songs that have become much-loved standards, and made a huge amount of impressive music, though there have, of course, been low-lights, and the less said about his more recent political pronouncements, the better. He's also had a number of fights with record companies, managers, co-producers, and backing musicians, as he's remained. He's remained in the

in search of a kind of creative control that he's never truly reached, and possibly never can truly reach, given his equal need for collaboration. But he's one of the few people I've covered in this podcast to be making new music that's still worthy of attention. Indeed, just this month, he's released a new album which has made the top 40 on the album's charts this week. It's his second charting album this year, both of them albums of covers, one of Skiffle and one of Rock and Mole, covering a lot of artists that will be familiar to listeners to this podcast, people like Johnny Burnett,

Johnny Kid and the Pirates, and Bill Haley. But at the same time, in those intervening 55 years, almost all the music he is recorded has been delineated by two poles, the abstraction, mysticism, and jazz exploration of astral weeks,

and the commerciality and songcraft of Moon Dance and Brown-eyed Girl. And while he's made many excellent albums, and Morrison fans may argue over what his third best album is, whether it's the transcendent Irish mysticism of Vieden Fleece, the wonderful live soul performances of it's too late to stop now, or perhaps a late period gem like The Healing Game, nobody is in any doubt what the top two albums would be,

and almost everyone, except possibly the man himself, would agree with the assessment of Lewis Merenstein. Think of it. Astral Weeks and Moon Dance and Never Again, tons of albums, nothing equal to those albums. A history of rock music and 500 songs is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Each week, Patreon backers will get a 10-minute bonus podcast. This week's is on Stone Soul Picnic by Laura Nero.

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