After seeing Morrison in concert, Warner Bros executive Joe Smith sent the producer Lewis Merenstein to audition Morrison in Boston, in early September. Walsh also details how Morrison was in Boston to escape the mob-connected men who owned a record contract he had signed in New York. “Being a muse is a thankless job, and the pay is lousy,” she joked to Walsh. Then they would listen back while he decided what lyrics to retain and how to improve the structure.
In Ryan Walsh’s 2018 book, Astral Weeks: A Secret History Of 1968, Janet Rigsbee recalled that Morrison would leave a tape recorder running while he played guitar and improvised for 20 minutes at a time. He would put that right with Astral Weeks.
Morrison had previously recorded versions of Madame George and Beside You for Bang Records, though he later admitted “the arrangements were nothing like what I had in mind for those songs”. “What are we wasting time for? Let’s go make a record” As soon as he returned from gigs to his base in Boston, Morrison refined the eight songs – Astral Weeks, Beside You, Sweet Thing, Cyprus Avenue, The Way Young Lovers Do, Madame George, Ballerina and Slim Slow Slider – that would make up Astral Weeks. Morrison spent the summer of 1968 playing small clubs and high-school gyms across New England, using a group of local musicians, including flute and soprano saxophone player John Payne, under the banner of the Van Morrison Controversy.
The sublime eight-song album, recorded over just three days (25 September, 1 and 15 October) at Century Sound Studios, 135 West 52nd Street, New York City, represented what Morrison called “sophisticated poetry that is multi-layered in sounds”, a jazz-infused acoustic song cycle behind stream-of-consciousness lyrics about being transported to “another time” and “another place”. “Sophisticated poetry that is multi-layered in sounds” He was 23, broke, depressed, drinking heavily and living in Boston with his first wife, Janet Rigsbee (aka Janet Planet), with whom he worked on a group of imaginative songs he had written as a teenager back home in Belfast and during his residence in Ladbroke Grove in London. Van Morrison was living what he called “a very hand-to-mouth existence” when he recorded the majestic Astral Weeks album in the autumn of 1968.
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