According to Sheldon, one day Morrison showed up at rehearsal with some news: he had a dream in which there were no more electric instruments. It was unclear to Sheldon if Morrison’s overnight vision was specifically about the band or the world at large, but the singer proceeded to translate his dream into a reality. Kielbania played a stand-up bass; Sheldon moved to acoustic guitar. There would be no more drums. “That’s when we started playing songs like ‘Madame George,’” Sheldon says. But he was perplexed: “Van had taken me to see Jeff Beck and introduced me, and I thought Jeff Beck was awesome. I wanted to do that kind of music. I didn’t want to go back to playing acoustic guitars.” Sheldon didn’t have a philosophical stance on electric versus folk; he just knew what excited him. Even strangers would judge his allegiance harshly. “I got off the subway in Harvard Square with my first electric guitar sticking out of a paper bag, and a guy said, ‘Oh, another one for the other team.’”
After a long summer of hitting the New England circuit hard with dozens of live shows, Van Morrison was summoned to meet a record producer named Lewis Merenstein at Ace Recording Studios, across from Boston Common at 1 Boylston Place, a wide commercial alley off the busy main road. It was hard to miss, with its neon sign and a blinking arrow pointing to the front door. Owned by brothers Milton and Herbert Yakus, Ace was a four-track facility whose specialty was recording jingles and song-poems. Someone would bring a poem in, and for a fee, Milton would compose a song around the words, while Herbert arranged a recording with session players. The author would then own a song he or she had “written,” amusing friends and family upon playback.
Accounts vary about whether Morrison and his band came to Ace just to audition for Merenstein, or if they had already been holed up for a few days to record some demos. (Merenstein was familiar with the studio, having worked freelance there in the past.) Now Morrison sat before him, and began strumming a new song.
If I ventured in the slipstream
Between the viaducts of your dreams
Thirty seconds in, “my whole being was vibrating,” Merenstein said in 2008. “I knew he was being reborn . . . I knew I wanted to work with him at that moment.”
John Sheldon remembered the producer telling Morrison, “I think you’re a genius, and I want you to make a record for Warner Brothers.” It was clear to the young guitarist that Merenstein wasn’t talking to any of the other band members.
The song Van Morrison played that day, the one that so unhinged the producer, was called “Astral Weeks,” and it would become the title track on the album that would redefine Morrison’s career. That audition at Ace was the last time Sheldon was involved with the singer. His hunch had been correct: When Morrison left to record Astral Weeks in New York soon after, he didn’t take Sheldon with him.
These days, the guitarist holds on to a “shining memory” from that summer, of Morrison sitting in his parents’ yard in Cambridge, playing those songs from Astral Weeks. “He’s out in the sun, and they’re very melancholy. They’re mournful songs.” Sheldon wanted to rock, though; his ouster would lead him back to his beloved electric guitar and a new band called Bead Game. “Maybe ten years later, a friend of mine got me stoned and put on Astral Weeks, and I went, ‘Hey, man, this is good!’”
Lauded as one of the greatest albums in the rock ’n’ roll canon, Astral Weeks feels less like rock, more like a benediction, a song cycle of rebirth. Martin Scorsese claims the first fifteen minutes of Taxi Driver are based on it. Philip Seymour Hoffman quoted it in his Oscar acceptance speech. Elvis Costello called it “the most adventurous record made in the rock medium”; part of the late Jeff Buckley’s own myth is tied with his choice to cover “The Way Young Lovers Do.” The critic Lester Bangs claimed it contained “the quality of a beacon.” Joni Mitchell was so taken aback by the album that she badgered one of Van’s guitarists for information about him before finally meeting him: “What is he actually like?”
Morrison once told an interviewer that the songs on Astral Weeks were “just channeled. They just came through.” The mystical layer adds to its allure, though the details of its origin are full of incidents that are anything but. It’s an album that was planned, shaped, and rehearsed in Boston and Cambridge. This fact has been a secret kept in plain view. The first clue is right on the album sleeve, a poem filled with Bay State references:
I saw you coming from the Cape, way from Hyannis Port all the way . . .
I saw you coming from Cambridgeport with my poetry and jazz . . .
The reasons that Van Morrison lived in the Boston area in 1968 are, to say the least, unexpected. Astral Weeks, it turns out, was born out of sheer desperation, conceived at a time when Morrison was trapped in a uniformly terrible recording contract and evading music-industry thugs during a year when America seemed hell-bent on ripping itself apart.
Despite being the author of that lousy contract, producer Bert Berns had genuine affection for the moody singer from Belfast; their working relationship was made up of both confrontations and victories. “Bert loved and identified with the rebel in Van, but wanted to keep him closer to the center when making records,” engineer Brooks Arthur recalled to biographer Clinton Heylin. “Van was obsessed with feel. Bert had great commercial sense.” In the pursuit of hits, Berns latched on to trends quickly. This is how the late-sixties wave of psychedelia became forever tied to Morrison’s debut solo album, Blowin’ Your Mind! without the singer’s knowledge in 1967—complete with a cover sporting trippy fonts and a photograph of a visibly sweaty Morrison, clearly meant to convey that the drugs had just kicked in. The liner notes double down on the concept: “And Van blows and Van sings and Van screams and Van listens and Van says ‘up them all’ and becomes Van and what the hell that’s his friend and now he can live with himself. This LP is Van Morrison. We won’t explain it to you. With this one, go for yourself.”
Morrison was furious, but he didn’t have much time to yell at Berns; the producer died three months later. If Morrison found Berns difficult to deal with, what came next was worse. At a certain point in the sixties, Bert Berns became fascinated by people associated with the mob. Fascination became friendship, and friendship turned to business. Now that Berns was dead, Morrison’s main contact at Bang Records was Carmine “Wassel” DeNoia, whose father was the inspiration for the character Nicely-Nicely in Guys and Dolls. Wassel was an even less forgiving boss than Berns. While the FBI classified him as only a “low level” mobster, he was still a scary menace. In 1975, Wassel was convicted of payola—bribing radio DJs in exchange for heavy rotation of a record—which might not sound like rough work until you hear how Wassel described a typical day. “So here’s this disc jockey,” Wassel said in 2001. “I throw open the window, pick him up, flip him, shake him out by the ankles. Ninth floor. All the change fell out of his pockets. Some friends of mine picked it up.”
Even today, Wassel hasn’t lost any of his tough-guy shtick; when I ring him up one night, he answers, “Hello, City Morgue.” He’s lived for more than fifty years on West Seventy-second Street in Manhattan. When I arrive, he’s wearing a loose white undershirt, blue pajama pants, and thick-rimmed black glasses. He’s friendly, forthcoming, and a little scattered. “I helped that guy out,” Wassel insists about Morrison. “If he ever sees me again, he better stand up and salute me!”
Wassel says he “got Bert Berns started in the music business.” Of course, Berns had been involved in the music business long before they met, so what he actually meant was that he introduced Berns to full-blown gangsters like Genovese family member Patsy Pagano—and to the quick results that brute force yielded when applied to the creative industries. Back in Berns’s day, this included everything from bullying performers back into studios, dismantling local record-bootlegging operations with a sledgehammer, and finding ways to borrow money that didn’t require a credit check. These connections gave Berns and Bang Records an advantage that could level the playing fiel
d against more-established labels.
In August 1967, Berns organized a belated record-release party for “Brown Eyed Girl” on a boat that departed from Fiftieth Street in Manhattan. Van attended with his new love Janet Rigsbee. There’s a picture from this evening hanging on Wassel’s wall. The framed photo shows the singer sporting a rare smile. Janet looks happily taken aback by the fanfare, Berns is glancing at Janet, and Wassel is in back, a giant cigar stuffed in his mouth, with eyes closed and head tilted back. Performer Tiny Tim tried to join the festivities that night, I learn, but Wassel says he threw him overboard into the Hudson River. “They had to fish him out of there,” Wassel tells me, laughing. “He was soaked.” At some point in the evening, Morrison delivered a soulful solo set for the revelers.
I ask Wassel to tell me more about what happened with Van Morrison right before the singer fled New York. For a moment he looks stumped. “Oh,” Wassel remembers, “I broke his guitar on his head.”
This is true. Here’s what happened:
One night, Wassel visited the singer at the King Edward Hotel, where Morrison and Janet were staying. They were already anxious: Morrison’s immigration papers were not wholly in order, and he was worried about being deported; his last visit to an office trying to correct the work permit issue ended with an official telling him, “You’re now deported, bye-bye.” During the encounter with Wassel, Morrison was severely intoxicated. Wassel asked about a radio he had given Morrison, which now appeared to be broken. Morrison’s temper flared up, worsened by booze, so Wassel put an end to his incomprehensible string of expletives by smashing the singer’s acoustic guitar over his head. Morrison would later tell others that he and Janet once returned from dinner to find their hotel door full of bullet holes. Neil Diamond, Berns’s other poised-to-make-it act at the time, reported similar calamities. “The unholy hell that was unleashed upon [Van] when Bert died was really horrible,” Janet recalls, noting another instance where Wassel banged on their door, screaming, “You’re finished in the business. D’you hear me?”
All of this may have had something to do with why, in early 1968, Van Morrison and Janet Rigsbee hastily got married and moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts.
* * *
• • •
BY AUGUST 1968, shortly before his audition with Lewis Merenstein, but after literally dreaming up his new acoustic sound, Morrison booked several shows under the name “The Van Morrison Controversy” to hone his new material and sound. What the titular brouhaha referred to was never specified, but the fact that his record contract led to bullet holes in a hotel door might be a good starting point. These shows took place at a nightclub called the Catacombs, at 1120 Boylston Street in the Fenway, two floors below a pool parlor. (Today, it’s a stack of rehearsal studios beneath a pizza joint.) Hieroglyphics decorated the walls. The club mostly hosted jazz, but Morrison’s poet-rock fit right in.
At this point, the band had dwindled down to Morrison on guitar and bassist Tom Kielbania. John Sheldon, the guitar wunderkind, had been ditched, and drummer Joey Bebo had left of his own volition. At a jam session near the docks of Lewis Wharf in Boston, Kielbania recruited a flute player named John Payne. Payne was twenty-two, on one of many leaves of absence from his studies at Harvard, stuck editing high school math books for Houghton Mifflin. Kielbania excitedly talked to Payne about what lay on the horizon: “We’re recording an album! We’re going to Europe!” Though Payne was strictly into jazz, the gig sounded better than staring at equations all day.
Payne remembers meeting Morrison in the back of the Catacombs: “This guy comes out, a short guy with a pageboy, a blank look on his face. Tom says, ‘Van, this is the guy I was telling you about.’ He goes, ‘Uh, eh,’ and gives me a limp hand. He was just in his own world.”
As Payne watched from the audience, Morrison and Kielbania began to play. “I listened to the first set and I didn’t like it,” Payne says. “I thought, The guy doesn’t seem like he wants me to be here, maybe the bass player is forcing me on him. And until I’m on the stage with him, I don’t get it.” Then Payne joined the pair for the second set. “I started playing a little and I could tell he had heard everything I had played and he was reacting to it. His phrasing was not independent of what I was doing, and I had never experienced that. This was alive. Then he starts the next song and it’s ‘Brown Eyed Girl.’” Payne was shocked: He was playing with the man whose voice he’d been hearing on the jukebox for months. “I could still play, but it was like, Oh my God.”
In the audience, Eric Kraft was spellbound. He’d been assigned to cover Morrison’s string of Catacombs shows for an underground weekly called Boston After Dark. Decades later, he still recalls it in vivid detail. “It was so amazing,” he says. “It changed my life, actually.” The following night, Kraft managed to get the taciturn Morrison talking. Sitting on the kitchen floor of the club, Morrison spoke of his label troubles, the songs he was writing, his hopes for himself. In turn, Kraft revealed his own dream. It was the first time he had told anyone that he wanted to be a fiction writer. Morrison told him to go for it. “The fact that it interested him was very propulsive for me,” says Kraft, who has since published eleven books in a multivolume novel about the life of his alter ego, Peter Leroy. “It pushed me forward.” That night, he went home and woke up his wife to tell her what he had just seen.
In his review, Kraft conveys the evening’s power. Van “winces and strains to bring the song up from far within him, producing at times a strangely distant sound that carries a lyric of loss and disillusionment. . . . He has total control over the number and, by now, over most of the audience as well.” Bassist Kielbania is “weaving and rocking as though there were a string tying him to Morrison’s hand. It looks like the flute player is going to work out—he improvises a fine solo. When the number ends, the applause is long and heartfelt; Karen [sic] is smiling; everybody is smiling. Christ it’s going to be beautiful. When the album comes out in October or November, buy several.”
I mention a rumor I’d heard a while back: that Peter Wolf made an audio recording of one of these nights at the Catacombs. Kraft gasps at the possibility that one of the most important moments of his life has been preserved, and might be accessed again. If they exist, Wolf’s tapes would have historic importance: Morrison reportedly performed much of Astral Weeks these nights with the Boston trio, a lineup that never received any substantial credit for helping shape songs that would end up on the album. Peter Wolf, of course, went on to be the charismatic singer for the hit-making J. Geils Band, not to mention the husband of actress Faye Dunaway, but he currently lives alone in Boston. I had to find out whether those tapes were real—and if I could hear them.
* * *
• • •
BACK AT THE CATACOMBS, Van Morrison also met the man who would extricate him from Bang Records’ mob ties.
His savior was a former Boston DJ turned Warner Brothers executive named Joe Smith. In the 1950s, Smith recalls being “the first guy who played real rock ’n’ roll on Boston radio.” In 1968, he was at the Catacombs on a tip from a colleague. Plenty of people were interested in signing Morrison, but the singer’s lack of social graces, coupled with the Bang Records baggage, wasn’t helping his cause. Smith wasn’t impressed with Morrison’s personality: “He was a hateful little guy,” he recalls. “His live performance? He may as well have been in Philadelphia. There’s no action from him. But his voice! I still think he’s the best rock ’n’ roll voice out there.” Smith set the wheels in motion right away, asking producer Lewis Merenstein to travel to Boston to audition the singer. Merenstein would narrowly beat Bob Dylan and Velvet Underground producer Tom Wilson to Boston by a matter of days. Meanwhile, Smith also needed to figure out a way to erase Morrison’s ties with the unsavory side of Bang Records. “There was a guy in town named Joe Scandore, who was Don Rickles’s manager. And he was connected,” Smith says. “I had to go to him and say, ‘How can I get this d
eal through so I can release this guy?’ And he set up the arrangement.”
The arrangement sounds completely terrifying. At six p.m. on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan, Joe Smith entered an abandoned warehouse with a sack containing $20,000 in cash. Smith remembers how it went down: “I had to walk up three flights of stairs, and there were four guys. Two tall and thin, and two built like buildings. There was no small talk. I got the signed contract and got the hell out of there, because I was afraid somebody would whack me in the head and take back the contract and I’d be out the money.”
Did he ever hear from these people again?
“No,” Smith deadpans. “They weren’t in the music business.”
Regardless, the transaction was a success; the moment that Smith dropped that sack of money on the warehouse floor, a clear path toward the creation of Astral Weeks opened up before him. Van Morrison was now signed to Warner Brothers.
* * *
• • •
WITH ITS ROOTS IN TEMPERS, outbursts, gangsters, and violence, it’s ironic that Astral Weeks ended up being an album completely preoccupied with notions of transcendence and the sublime. But the love story at its core was just as significant to Morrison’s reality in 1968.
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