Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks / A Vertiginous Glimpse | Lester Bangs, 1968

Van Morrison / photo: Joel Brodsky

“Beside You is the kind of song that you’d sing to a kid or somebody that you love. It’s basically a love song. It’s just a song about being spiritually beside somebody.”

Van Morrison

Van Morrison at Steve Paul’s The Scene on January 27, 1969 – New York

In 1968 Morrison moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he found work performing in local clubs, with a small electric combo. Two of the musicians soon left but Morrison retained the bassist, Tom Kielbania, a student at the Berklee School of Music. Morrison decided to try an acoustic sound, and he and Kielbania began performing shows in coffee houses in the Boston area as an acoustic duo with Morrison playing guitar and Kielbania on upright bass.

Van Morrison at the Catacombs

Later, Kielbania heard jazz-trained flautist John Payne for the first time while sitting in on a jam session. He invited Payne to the club where he played with Morrison, hoping Morrison would invite him to join them. After allowing Payne to sit in on one performance, Morrison extended an invitation, which Payne accepted. The trio of Payne, Kielbania, and Morrison continued performing for four months. In the weeks they played at the Catacombs, they began to develop the template for Astral Weeks.

Van Morrison – Astral Weeks – 1968

“Astral Weeks,” insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend. It is a precious and terrible gift, born of a terrible truth, because what they see is both infinitely beautiful and terminally horrifying: the unlimited human ability to create or destroy, according to whim. It’s no Eastern mystic or psychedelic vision of the emerald beyond, nor is it some Baudelairean perception of the beauty of sleaze and grotesquerie. Maybe what it boils down to is one moment’s knowledge of the miracle of life, with its inevitable concomitant, a vertiginous glimpse of the capacity to be hurt, and the capacity to inflict that hurt.”

Lester Bangs, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, 1987

Also:
The Factory Years | Velvet Underground, Nico & Andy Warhol, New York, 1965-67