Astral Weeks

by Ryan H. Walsh

  Morrison began calling his new wife Janet Planet, “probably because it rhymed,” she says. In a mad rush, they moved into an apartment in a disheveled little building on Green Street in Cambridge. “It was not a wonderful place to live. What more than made up for the unpleasant surroundings, though, was the astonishingly fertile creative period we found ourselves in,” she remembers. The couple was broke, hungry, and hunted. But it was there, sitting at their tiny kitchen table, strumming an acoustic guitar, that Morrison wrote and refined much of Astral Weeks. “We both absolutely believed that once people heard this music Van would be back on track, career-wise,” Janet says. “I’m very thankful that the world has at length caught up with what we both knew in 1968.”

  Janet Planet kept track of Morrison’s songs and lyrics for him, listened to the demos, and helped him revise. “Van liked to work in a sort of stream-of-consciousness way back then,” she says, “letting the tape recorder continue to run while he just sort of played guitar and improvised, trying various things for twenty minutes or so at a time. Then we would go back, listen, and decide what was good, what to keep, tidy up rhyme scheme, and then try it out again. It was a fascinating process, both to witness and to be part of.” The end result of Janet’s organizational assistance would be a binder of Van’s new songs, a tome he would later flip through during the sessions trying to find a tune to close the album that satisfied Merenstein.

  From the outside, the years immediately following Astral Weeks seemed like a fairy tale for the couple: Morrison and Janet moved to Woodstock, New York, and then to California. They had a daughter named Shana. As Morrison’s muse, Janet appeared in several press photos; she even wrote the liner notes for a few albums. “We were finally really LIVING in a dreamland,” Janet Planet said, remembering the scant blissful period the couple found post–Astral Weeks. She sits atop a horse on the cover of Tupelo Honey, with a grounded Morrison proudly at her side. Her original liner notes for Moondance, titled “A Fable,” quite literally translated their story into a fairy tale. But as the myth of Van Morrison grew, his relationship with Janet shattered irreversibly. Even before California, she said, “our life was very traumatic and horrible. I couldn’t stand any more of his rage as my daily reality.” In Morrison’s account, Janet wanted too much socializing, which didn’t leave enough room for all the work he wanted to complete. “I was confusing the music with the man,” Planet recalled. “The music was everything you could hope for as a romantic. The man was a prickly bear.” In 1973, Janet left, filing for divorce a few months later.

  When I find her via her Etsy shop, Lovebeads by Janet Planet, she’s listed as Janet Morrison Minto out of Sherman Oaks, California. She can no longer bear to hear her ex-husband’s music.

  “Being a muse is a thankless job, and the pay is lousy,” she says. “I suppose it could be considered unfortunate that hearing the intro to ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ come over the grocery store’s speaker system is my signal to hit the checkout counter and get out, ASAP.”

  Imagine a world in which your memory of an early, intense, turbulent relationship gets constantly triggered by a pop song nearly as ubiquitous now as it was during its heyday fifty years ago. What mechanisms might you put in place to protect yourself from repeatedly reexperiencing that pain? To this day, however, Janet still recalls the small window of happiness the two found, and the music he conjured during their time together. “I’m sure that no one loved his artistry more or believed in his greatness more than me.”

  As for the songwriter himself, his personal thoughts on Astral Weeks change from interview to interview. He’s said it was originally planned as an opera, and also that it’s just a random assortment of songs. That the arrangements are “too samey,” and—incredibly—that it’s not a personal record. “It’s not about me,” he told NPR in 2009. “It’s totally fictional. It’s put together of composites, of conversations I heard—you know, things I saw in movies, newspapers, books, whatever. It comes out as stories. That’s it. There’s no more.”

  If Janet Morrison Minto has to walk out of a store when “Brown Eyed Girl” starts playing, perhaps Morrison’s claim that these songs have nothing to do with his own life is his strategy for dealing with the painful memories. After all, Morrison earns his living by singing those songs into a microphone every night. What would you do?

  * * *

  • • •

  PETER WOLF is a difficult man to get ahold of.

  I’m in touch with a friend of Wolf’s who sometimes facilitates meetings and interviews. The initial phone calls establish that Wolf is hesitant to share stories right now. Months pass. More calls and demurrals. Out of the blue one day I receive a phone call from a blocked number.

  “Hi, this is Peter.”

  We arrange to meet that weekend. Wolf’s friend advises me to bring some pastries or my favorite book to the interview. “I can’t tell you what it is exactly,” he instructs me, “just that it come from the heart.” The day of the interview, Wolf delays it by a few hours in the afternoon. Then I’m instructed to sit in the lobby of a nearby hotel and wait. Peter calls again, shortly after. He’s not ready to meet yet, but he asks me a dozen questions about Van Morrison that he already knows the answers to. It’s one last level of vetting, which I think I pass. Thirty minutes later I’m told that maybe Peter would like to meet at my apartment instead. I’m starting to think this is all some sort of elaborate prank.

  Wolf is Boston rock royalty, but the levels of clearance and foreplay are getting excessive. I consider returning back home when my voice mail lights up with an address and a time.

  * * *

  • • •

  IT’S 10:15 P.M. on a Saturday night and I’m walking down the hallway of a downtown high-rise toward Peter Wolf’s place carrying a box of fancy mini cheesecakes. He opens the door before I even knock. He’s wearing a dark suit and one of his signature hats. He welcomes me in and offers me a drink. The living room is set up for consuming music. For example, where you might place a television, there is a coffee table stacked with a turntable, CD deck, and receivers, flanked by two deluxe tower speakers. The walls are lined with LPs and books. I scan the room thinking I might spot the boxes that house the tapes of Morrison performing in ’68. No such luck. He returns with two tumblers of whiskey and compliments me on my choice of pastries.

  I motion to my tape recorder and tell him, “I’m going to start rolling now.” Wolf shakes his head. He hands me a pencil and a piece of paper, insisting he made Keith Richards’s biographer do the same.

  “My band then was called the Hallucinations,” Wolf begins, as I scribble to keep up. “A kind of neo-punk thing. We practiced at the Boston Tea Party on Berkeley Street. One day during rehearsal, this guy came into the club looking for a gig. He was speaking real funny.”

  The singer was already a fan of Morrison’s work. “At the time, Them’s ‘Gloria’ was like the national anthem for every garage band in the country,” Wolf says. “Even so, the gigs and opportunities in Boston weren’t coming easy. We became friends quickly. He’d come over to use my telephone, because he and Janet barely had anything at the time.”

  Meanwhile, Wolf had an overnight shift DJing at 104.1 WBCN, Boston’s new free-form radio station, where he’d take on a persona he called the Woofa Goofa. Wolf committed to doing all his on-air talking as the Woofa character, emitting a hyperfast stream-of-consciousness combination of total jive and rock ’n’ roll minutiae. Shortly after Morrison moved to town, Wolf began receiving postcards at the station requesting a myriad of obscure blues artists. As they continued to run into each other, Morrison began telling Wolf about this great Boston DJ he was listening to late at night. Wolf revealed his on-air identity, Morrison copped to being the correspondent, and the two were bonded for life.

  Morrison would come by WBCN and play records with Woofa Goofa all night long. Wolf introduced Morrison to musicians in town. They hung out after hours at cl
ubs, partied with bands that rolled through Boston. Wolf opens a small drawer in front of him and pulls out a stack of photographs, all related to his friendship with Morrison. He hands me a picture of the two of them, so happy and soused that I almost get drunk just looking at it. Wolf tells me you get really close with someone once you’ve thrown up on each other.

  Did Wolf pick up a copy of Astral Weeks right when it came out? “There’s a test pressing of it somewhere here,” he says, motioning to his wall of records. He found the album “so unexpected, almost baroque.” As he pulls various Van records off the shelf, he scans the liner notes and offers his memories of days gone by. Eventually I bring up the live recordings from 1968. “When is the last time you’ve listened to that recording from the Catacombs, Peter?”

  Wolf stares at me, trying to remember. “Not for . . . a very, very, very long time.”

  Neither of us says anything.

  “We’d have to bake the tapes,” Wolf finally adds.

  When a reel of magnetic tape has been left alone for decades, deterioration occurs in a way that if you simply played the tapes again it might sound fine, but you’d be forever destroying the recording as you went, with layers of the reel shedding off as it passes through the machine. One solution to prevent this outcome is to place the reels in an oven and bake them before playback. I have a vision of the both of us donning aprons and putting the legendary recordings inside Wolf’s stove right then and there. That, of course, doesn’t happen. He mentions a specialist up in Maine who could do the transfer properly.

  I excuse myself to use the bathroom. When I return he’s staring at something on the bookshelf. “Here they are,” he says, pointing to a spot that had been right behind my head the entire time. It’s surreal to finally lay eyes on something you’ve been imagining for so long, to see what it looks like rather than what your imagination insisted it would be. Here are two slender tape boxes, faded and worn, tiny labels affixed to both with Wolf’s notations in faded ink. “VAN MORRISON TRIO—THE CATACOMBS—1968.”

  “Would you ever let me hear these?”

  “Sure,” Wolf says. “If we got them transferred, sure.”

  When I close my notebook, he becomes visibly more relaxed. He sits down in front of his table of stereo equipment and cues something up. I hear the hiss of an unmastered recording and a riff played on an acoustic guitar. After five seconds, Wolf hits pause, raises his eyebrows, and asks, “What is it?”

  I know the riff, but after having seen what I consider the Holy Grail of musical artifacts I’m absolutely useless. Wolf hits play, revealing a demo recording of Morrison’s song “Domino.” He shows me old postcards Van sent from Fairfax, California, then recites a poem called “The Cold Heart of the Stone,” about their time together in 1968. What I had interpreted as rock diva behavior with the day’s earlier delays had actually been Wolf taking the time to prepare a proper presentation of his Morrison-related memories.*

  Wolf walks me to his building’s front door, and we end up talking for another thirty minutes. He tells me about seeing Woody Guthrie as a child, and how he was in the audience the night Bob Dylan recited the poem “Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie.” As we chat, a steady stream of older, well-dressed partygoers exit the building, headed home. Just as another pack walks by, I swear I hear one of them say, “Van the Man.” I must be imagining things; I decide not to bring it up. Wolf continues with his story for a moment longer, then pauses and points outside. “Did that guy just say ‘Van the Man’?” I nod. “That’s really weird,” Wolf says, a mischievous smile on his face.

  * * *

  • • •

  SOMEWHERE, in the middle of that night I spent in Wolf’s apartment, he told me a story about one of the times Van Morrison came back to town. He wouldn’t clarify the date or give me any additional context. All he told me was this:

  It’s late at night. Van Morrison is exhausted after his concert in Boston, but there’s one thing he still wants to do while he’s here. He gets into a car with Wolf and picks a destination. Wolf drives down Mass. Ave., heading into Cambridge. Nothing looks like it did in 1968, but then again, neither do the two men in the car. They turn onto a series of side streets. As they approach the address, Wolf slows down to a crawl, because neither of them has been here in a long, long time, and it looks barely familiar. Just past the intersection of Bay and Green streets, Wolf points out the window, to the left, where Van and Janet—his Planet, cosmic partner, entire world—lived in 1968. Morrison sits there for a moment, gazing into the past. And then, without a word, they drive off.

  TWO

  God’s Underground Newspaper

  WHILE VAN MORRISON toiled in Cambridge trying to jump-start his career, another musician in Boston was preparing to do the opposite. The signs had been clear for the last few years, but now in 1968 Jim Kweskin was truly ready to walk away from his life in music. By anyone’s measure, the Jim Kweskin Jug Band was on the rise, enjoying the kind of industry breaks that Van Morrison was hoping for. The band was signed to Warner Brothers’ imprint Reprise and shared a manager with Bob Dylan, the formidable Albert Grossman. They had their audiences warmed up by legends like Janis Joplin and appeared on The Tonight Show, where they flummoxed Johnny Carson by passing him a kazoo while they played. They were influential, too; the unfortunately named Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions—the precursor to the Grateful Dead, featuring Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir—straight-up cribbed set lists and song arrangements directly from the Jim Kweskin Jug Band. In 1961, Bob Dylan listed Kweskin as one of his favorite singers. When rock historian Ed Ward compiled a list of the most influential artists of the decade, he included Kweskin alongside the Beatles and the Stones. “It’s not like we were Elvis Presley or anything,” band member Geoff Muldaur later explained, “but we got to do almost anything we wanted to do.”

  Kweskin’s good-time music was inspired by an early-twentieth-century fad in which bands deployed household items like combs, washboards, and, of course, jugs to fashion a goofy, jubilant sound. The grim realities of the Great Depression put an end to the genre’s popularity, but in the late fifties, young musicians introduced to the anachronistic genre by Harry Smith’s influential Anthology of American Folk Music revived it. Kweskin embraced the sound as his own while at Boston University. He was a tall, talented, happy-go-lucky guy with a Woody Guthrie obsession and an oversized mustache to match his irreverent personality. He might have remained that way too, if his original banjo player, Bob Siggins, didn’t quit the band in 1963.

  In what has to be one of the less common reasons for leaving a band, Siggins was headed to BU to get his PhD in molecular neurophysiology; the Kweskin crew needed a quick replacement. That replacement was named Mel Lyman.

  “When Mel joined the Jug Band he needed a job, and I needed a banjo player,” Kweskin explains. Rolling Stone reported that the job was in fact a legal requisite after Lyman was arrested for marijuana in Tallahassee, Florida—that is, a steady, paid music gig that would keep Lyman out of trouble. Kweskin was happy to employ the man, who was a multi-instrumentalist and a genuine musical talent. “Mel was a far better harmonica player than banjo player,” Kweskin says, “but he didn’t even let us know that he played harmonica at first.”

  Lyman’s personal influence over Kweskin emerged around the same time he discovered Lyman’s hidden harmonica expertise, at a local show in 1964 when the usual blower, David Simon, didn’t show up. Kweskin thought, “Oh my God. That’s the most beautiful harmonica playing I’ve ever heard in my life.” Little miracles followed Lyman around daily. “He never made a telephone call when the line was busy, he never called anybody and they weren’t home,” Kweskin said. “And you’d say it was a coincidence, maybe [if it happened] once or twice. But it happened every day.”

  From that point on, Lyman felt the freedom to behave strangely onstage. He regularly refused to perform if he wasn’t in the mood, and soon Kweskin embraced the sam
e spirit. “Sometimes you have to create an embarrassing or painful or angry situation just so that everybody’s in the same place at the same time,” Kweskin later remarked about the intent of these bizarre concert confrontations.

  In 1964, the Jim Kweskin Jug Band comprised Kweskin on guitar, Lyman on harmonica, Bill Keith on banjo, Geoff Muldaur on mandolin, guitar, and vocals, Maria D’Amato on vocals and tambourine, and Fritz Richmond on jug. They open Festival!, Murray Lerner’s 1967 documentary about the early-sixties installments of the Newport Folk Festival—a sign of the Jug Band’s dominance, given that the slate also included Johnny Cash, Son House, Mississippi John Hurt, and Bob Dylan. Festival! contains some of the only available footage of Lyman. The Jug Band performs about a minute of the lovelorn “Hannah” before the cameraman calls cut. “Are you telling me you cut in the middle of that song?” Kweskin angrily inquires. “If we had really been blowing,” Lyman interjects, “he couldn’t have helped but listen.” The decision to cut meant the band had failed, according to Mel. Here, he comes off as a bright young man who has developed his own philosophy about life and art.

  While Kweskin may have been the front man, the Festival! footage makes it blazingly clear who commanded the attention of the room when the music stopped. After the band playfully gangs up on Lerner, Lyman goes on an earnest rant: “We’re trying to take our perception, our understanding of the truth and put it in a form, so you can hear it sensually, with your ears, just like a painter takes what he knows of the truth and puts it on a canvas so the people can dig it in a sensual way with their eyes. Our thing happens to be an ear-thing, that’s all.” Lyman pauses, smiles. Lerner cuts to the title card. The movie starts.

  A folk music virtuoso, Lyman was also present at the birth of the America psychedelic revolution. In the early sixties, he had followed his girlfriend, Judy Silver, a Kansas native, from New York City to Waltham, Massachusetts, where they lived with some of her Brandeis University friends. One town over, in Newton, professors Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert had begun expanding their Harvard Psilocybin Project—in which they administered psychoactive chemicals to graduate students on a large scale—to include off-campus, unofficial research conducted in their respective homes. Their quiet, suburban houses quickly became a test site for the prominent commune they would soon establish in Millbrook, New York. Artists, writers, and musicians crashed at Leary’s 47 Homer Street place and Alpert’s home on 23 Kenwood. The intake of psychedelics was Olympian, trading sexual partners commonplace, and the residents’ children ran around unsupervised. No one can recall exactly how Mel Lyman found his way to Richard Alpert’s house, but he soon became a fixture, grinding up morning glory seeds when the LSD ran out, and performing “This Land Is Your Land” for wide-eyed mental cosmonauts by candlelight.