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  • Astral Weeks

    • Warner Bros.
    • Warner Bros.

    Best new reissue

Two of Van Morrison's essential early albums have been given deluxe reissues, with unreleased takes and alternate versions. Astral Weeks remains a singular item in his catalog, and indeed in pop music as a whole. His Band and the Street Choir stands as something of a counter, a record all about the rough and tumble joy of living.

Van Morrison released Astral Weeks in November 1968, not even 18 months after cracking the Billboard Top 10 with "Brown Eyed Girl". Much of the ebullience of "Brown Eyed Girl" derives from its AM-radio friendly arrangement, a sound encouraged by Bert Berns, the head of Van's label Bang. Berns was determined to get the record on the charts because that's where the money was, so the single sounded peppier than its lyric, a disconnect Morrison later noted. An undercurrent of melancholy desire runs through "Brown Eyed Girl"—Van pines for a moment as it's passing—and Astral Weeks brings that yearning to the forefront as it ventures into the slipstream of memories, dreams, and regret.

Generalized longing—for a lover or a friend, for a certain time or place, for a younger version of yourself—is one of the defining elements of Astral Weeks, an album where spirituality, mysticism, and death intertwine on a vast expanding plane. It is youthful and old, the first flowering of expanded consciousness, one not yet tarnished by either tragedy or cynicism but impeded by an encroaching sense of mortality. Death flows through the album but doom doesn't cloud each moment. Rather, this music comes from the perspective of a young man realizing everything he has will erode, an awareness arriving while the wonder of life has yet to fade. Morrison doesn't dwell upon such sadness so much as he brushes upon them, a sensibility mirrored in his open-ended songs—compositions that largely evade traditional structure in favor of a boundless ballad, one stripped of story but following an interior emotional narrative. There's reason why both its creator and admirers so often call Astral Weeks poetry: it has its own internal language.

Other singer/songwriters wound up using Astral Weeks as a primary text, either discovering their own voice in its viaducts or wallowing in its detours, but nobody has approached its soft, untethered spirituality, not even Van Morrison himself. In a way, Morrison's occasional disregard for the record helped fuel its cult, suggesting he tapped into a vein that frightened even him (this is a common thread among cult albums, where audiences choose to live eternally within a few dark months of an artist's life; see also Big Star's Third or Weezer's Pinkerton). Certainly, Astral Weeks seems to exist in a separate dimension from the rest of Van Morrison's catalog, its supple, soft-focus jazz-folk lacking the deeper R&B grooves of so many of his records, while its songs are often absent on compilations (tellingly, there's not a single song from it on the artist-endorsed 2007 compilation, Still on Top—The Greatest Hits). All of which underscores its separateness, playing into the myths that Astral Weeks is a record out of time and place.

But even this, the most mystical album in the classic rock canon, has prosaic beginnings. Although it gives the illusion that it was written as a piece, several of its songs were composed years earlier ("Ballerina" dates from 1966, when Them recorded a prescient version of Dylan's "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue"), with Morrison recording two of the songs—"Beside You" and "Madame George"—for Bang Records during a day-long 1967 session designed to deliver all 36 songs he owed the label. This patchwork assemblage wasn't an accident. Part of the condition for Morrison's departure from the imprint dictated that he record two Bang-era songs for his Warner debut and, if Morrison released a single in 1968, half of the copyright would belong to Berns' publishing company. Morrison had radio-friendly material at the ready—"Domino", the lead single from the subsequent His Band and the Street Choir, was kicking around in '68—but he deliberately saved these songs for a later date, choosing contemplative compositions that were frankly uncommercial. Critics and Morrison himself would occasionally lament the album's lack of promotion but that underselling seems a deliberate tactic: there were no singles by design and both the artist and Warner would benefit financially if the hits arrived somewhere down the road.

Hence, Astral Weeks is a bit of conventional artist building by Warner, a label known for being artist-friendly. Where Bang sought to shoehorn Morrison into the confines of AM radio, Warner's Mo Ostin and Joe Smith indulged their new signing, teaming him with producer Lewis Merenstein, who recruited a band of jazz players led by bassist Richard Davis, a veteran of out sessions by Andrew Hill (he played on every one of the pianist's pivotal mid-'60s Blue Note titles) and Eric Dolphy, but also straighter sessions by Brother Jack McDuff and Lou Donaldson. Modern Jazz Quartet drummer Connie Kay came next, along with guitarist Jay Berliner and vibraphonist/percussionist Warren Smith Jr., both veterans of sessions with Charles Mingus, and the group simply followed the lead of Morrison, who was playing the songs while sequestered in his separate booth. Three days—just two longer than the Bang copyright dump—was all that was needed to finish the record, with four songs completed the first day of the session. Morrison later told NPR in 2009 "That was that performance on those days" and, in a way, that's all that needs to be said about the record: it is musicians, previously unknown to each other, discovering a shared vernacular, stumbling upon something transcendent that no party attempted to conjure again.

Astral Weeks is defined by Morrison's transient collaborations, not only between the musicians in the studio but producer Merenstein. So distinct is its atmosphere, it's easy to assume this is the work of a lone auteur who crafted the compositions and arrangements, but Merenstein is the one who sequenced the album, imposing the designations "In the Beginning" and "Afterwards" to the two sides, thereby strengthening the illusion that this is a song cycle. He's also the one who directed the orchestrations and chose to clip "Slim Slow Slider" so the album shudders to a halt, the dream coming to a conclusion with a start.

The long-rumored complete version of "Slim Slow Slider" is one of four bonus tracks added to Warner's new remastered and expanded reissue of Astral Weeks; the other three include a longer version of "Ballerina" and alternate takes on "Beside You" and "Madame George", the latter with no orchestration and heavy vibes, offering a muted variation on the original. "Slim Slow Slider" does feel different in its lengthier incarnation, where it now glides to a gentler conclusion with Morrison trading lines with John Payne's saxophone, an effect that lends a slightly hopeful edge to an otherwise harrowing song. Perhaps this is closer to the author's intent—when Morrison performed Astral Weeks live at the Hollywood Bowl in 2009 he inserted the song in the middle of the set, softening its impact—or perhaps not; as Van says, either album is nothing more than a snapshot of a moment, the way those songs were performed on that day by that singer. This essential ephemera means this longer version of "Slim Slow Slider", along with its companion alternate takes, are mere grace notes to an album that ultimately can not be illuminated, only experienced.

His Band and the Street Choir, the other Van Morrison album receiving an expanded treatment in this inaugural series of deluxe reissues, stands as something of a counter to the heady Astral Weeks: it is all about the rough and tumble joy of living. Delivered almost immediately after the breakthrough of Moondance—that record came out in January 1970, His Band arrived in November of that year—His Band and the Street Choir is the first of Morrison's albums where the production is credited entirely to the man himself. He elbowed Merenstein aside during the recording of Moondance when the producer sought to bring in the Astral Weeks band for a second round—the veteran retained an executive producer credit—and Morrison labored over that album, recording for three months and work-shopping material in the studio.

**His Band and the Street Choir bore a similarly lengthy creative process but the album gives an illusion of buoyant immediacy thanks in no small part to its heavy R&B kick. Where Moondance traded in jazz—even its liveliest moment was named after a Duke Ellington song—His Band and the Street Choir relied on soul and gospel, using folk almost as an accent. "I'll Be Your Lover, Too" and "Virgo Clowns" almost offer respites from the raucous rhythms of "Domino", "Blue Money", and "Call Me Up in Dreamland", songs that sound joyous no matter what their topic (and, in the case of the two singles, they're likely about separation and nude modeling, not exactly rousing topics). When Morrison claimed Astral Weeks sounded "samey" in latter-day interviews, he had a point: it was variations on a theme, whereas His Band and the Street Choir shoehorns celebration, sweet melancholy, and reflection into 12 songs. Perhaps this doesn't make for a spiritually transcendent record but it is an album of sustenance, providing sustained pleasures for times of joy and sorrow.

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