Review by New York Times Review
IN 2015, the musician and journalist Ryan H. Walsh published an article in Boston magazine about "the untold story of how Van Morrison fled record-industry thugs, hid out in Boston and wrote one of rock's greatest albums." The album was the sylvan, ineffably spiritual "Astral Weeks," released in 1968, when Morrison was 23. Walsh's article included less-than-sylvan details about cash handoffs to gangsters, someone smashing an acoustic guitar over Morrison's head and insights from the singer's first wife, Janet Rigsbee ("Being a muse is a thankless job, and the pay is lousy"). "Astral Weeks" was recorded in New York City, but it was "planned, shaped and rehearsed in Boston and Cambridge," Walsh writes in his new book, which shares its title with the album. "This fact has been a secret kept in plain view." What exactly this secret yields is a question that the book never quite answers. Morrison's work had to be conceived somewhere, after all, and the album's otherworldly pastoral vibe means that almost any earthly answer - any place other than an unknown planet covered only in ferns and flutes - would be a surprise. Van the Man, who's front and center in the montage of characters on the book's cover, didn't talk to Walsh, but that's no matter; the singer's oppositional crankiness tends not to produce much. More troubling for the project is the width of its lens. "While researching the album's halfburied local connections, my curiosity about Boston in the late '60s grew into obsession," Walsh writes. And that's how the book reads, as the record of an obsession, with the surfeit of granular detail, the loose anecdotal structure and the numerous culde-sacs that implies. This is not to say that Walsh's book lacks charm. It opens with a fresh angle on one of the stalest scenes in music history, when Bob Dylan went electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. A harmonica player named Mel Lyman, one of many musicians upset by Dylan's plugging in, took the unlit stage at the event's end, Walsh tells us, and blew a mournful version of "Rock of Ages." Less than two years later, Lyman founded the Fort Hill Community, a group of musicians and activists and dropouts who lived in a series of connected homes in the Roxbury section of Boston. Much of the book is concerned with the commune's activities, including its publication of Avatar, a controversial underground newspaper that took firm stances on the Vietnam War (anti-) and astrology charts (pro-). Lyman died in 1978, though some wondered if he faked his death. The Fort Hill Community remains extant. Most elements of Walsh's book aren't so much secret, as the subtitle has it, as just largely forgotten. Lyman was on the cover of Rolling Stone; Diane Arbus photographed him for Esquire. Walsh is certainly correct, though, when he argues that histories of '60s counterculture don't tend to focus on Boston, and his book recaptures much that might otherwise fade away. The mini-histories embedded throughout are often entertaining, like that of the avant-garde public television show "What's Happening, Mr. Silver?," a "psychedelic fever dream" that was "uninterrupted by commercials or common sense." ("Some woman called the station complaining that she hated the show and that the cuts were too quick," one person who was there remembers. "She said the show was giving her brain cancer.") Another chapter involves Mark Frechette, a member of the commune who stumbled into a starring role in Michelangelo Antonioni's film "Zabriskie Point"; another the Harvard-sponsored LSD experiments of Richard Alpert and Timothy Leary. And so on. Indicative of the problem of purpose is that just when the book might be reaching a climax, or at least a kind of synthesis, we get a long chapter about the effect of Martin Luther King's assassination on Boston's already terrible race relations. City officials attempted to manipulate, with some success, a previously scheduled James Brown concert to help keep the peace. It's a compelling moment, no doubt, but it floats more or less untethered to the rest of the book. Walsh eventually gets back to the making of Morrison's album, but over all this volume is more like a yearbook of 1968 than a story (or even two or three) from that year. Given that it was 1968, it's a yearbook with some momentous pages. But there's a reason people don't read yearbooks start to finish. JOHN WILLIAMS is the daily books editor and a staff writer at The Times.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [April 15, 2018]
Review by Booklist Review
Astral Weeks, Van Morrison's second solo studio album, is the author's favorite record of all time. Released in 1968, it perfectly encapsulates, Walsh argues, not just Morrison's musical style at the time but also the state of music itself. This account is not intended as a biography of Morrison, although it does contain biographical elements; rather, it offers the history of the album itself: its inception, the writing of the songs, and, of course, the recording process. But it's more than that, too, since Walsh realizes that you can't talk meaningfully about a piece of music without understanding its historical and social context; so in addition to the biography of an album, the book is also a chronicle of the late-1960s music scene and, to some extent, a celebration of '60s counterculture. Musician and journalist Walsh writes with the enthusiasm of a fan and the precision and depth of an expert. A first-rate book about a piece of music and the time in which it was created.--Pitt, David Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Music journalist Walsh's uneven history uses the sessions that became Van Morrison's enigmatic album Astral Weeks as an anchor for a wider history of the now-mostly-forgotten Boston music scene of 1968. That summer, Morrison left N.Y.C. to get away from the shady dealings of his producer, and to try to pursue his own musical path. He performed shows in Boston under the name the Van Morrison Conspiracy, and during his show at the Catacombs, he developed the songs that would eventually comprise Astral Weeks. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with musicians and on archival research, Walsh faithfully explores "the Bosstown Sound"-Boston's own short-lived contribution to the psychedelic sounds of the late 1960s-and chronicles the lives of Boston bands such as Beacon Street Union, Orpheus, and Ultimate Spinach (in which future Steely Dan member Jeff "Skunk" Baxter played). The city's jug-band scene, the harmonica player Mel Lyman (who started a commune whose members thought he was God), and the acid experiments at Harvard led by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert all helped to create an atmosphere that influenced the music on Morrison's album. Walsh can be an entertaining narrator, but he fails to weave his narrative threads into a seamless chronicle of rock-and-roll history. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Boston-based journalist and musician Walsh uses the creation of Van -Morrison's classic Astral Weeks album, written primarily when the singer was living in Cambridge, MA, for a year, as the framework for this history of 1968-era Boston. He examines music, underground journalism, film, public television, FM radio, and a commune for a narrative of a moment and period in a city that is often not examined. A stew of countercultural ideas, mysticism, and ground-breaking avant-garde experiments in various art forms was brewing in and around Boston at the close of the Sixties, and Walsh weaves this story while documenting -Morrison's activities leading up to the recording of his otherworldly sounding masterpiece. Using dozens of interviews as well as published accounts and history, the author paints a sprawling cultural portrait with a vivid cast of characters and events while contextualizing the city's social and cultural history. VERDICT Moving from paradigm-shifting art to the more bizarre corners of the counterculture, this book illuminates a lesser-known portion of the tumultuous cultural history of America during the late Sixties. [See Prepub Alert, 10/4/17.]-James -Collins, Morristown--Morris Twp. P.L., NJ © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A chaotic cultural chronicle of a great city during a pivotal year.A lot was happening in Boston in 1968. Looking back, writes musician and music critic Walsh, "is like catching a glimpse of an upside down, hallucinogenic version of the thriving metropolis that stands today." In his first book, the author attempts to bring it all back home, to connect a tangle of loose wires and see what one thing might have had to do with the other. Over here, we have Irish transplant Van Morrison, set to make his greatest album: a one-of-a-kind, stream-of-consciousness song cycle steeped in death and rebirth and "completely preoccupied with notions and transcendence and the sublime." Over there, we have Mel Lyman, the writer and musician who established a worshipful cult following known as the Fort Hill Community. At the same time, MGM Records was trying to invent a genre called the Boston Sound, which garnered more press than listeners. There was also a cut-up collage program on local TV, What's Happening, Mr. Silver? that was capturing everyone's attention. The documentarian Frederick Wiseman was upsetting officials with Titicut Follies, the movie The Boston Strangler was trying an unresolved case on screen, and a pre-Ram Dass Richard Alpert was turning on and tuning in with Timothy Leary. Walsh delivers plenty of information and offers some insightful stories about this timeparticularly about the making of Morrison's masterpieceand occasionally draws some interesting associations: the mystical influences, for example, that inspired the Velvet Underground, their acolyte Jonathan Richman, and Morrison himself. Unfortunately, the narrative parts fail to fully cohere. Unlike Will Hermes' Love Goes to Buildings on Fire (2011), which fully captured the changing cultural landscape of a thriving city (New York), no clear image ever quite emerges and nothing solid develops from all these coincidences.A patchy work of pop history that tells more than it shows. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
