The 2015 re-release of Astral Weeks speaks to Merenstein’s interpretation. The original album fades out with “Slim Slow Slider” at around the three-minute mark, but on the extended version, the chaotic riffing gives way to just Morrison and Payne, a hymn for voice and flute. A song that once documented the loss of a lover, possibly to heroin, now ends in a vision of the divine, as Morrison sings “Glory be to Him” over and over.
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THE VIBRANT FOLK SCENE WAS DYING. The 1967 opening of the Boston Tea Party had, almost overnight, rendered Club 47 in Cambridge old-fashioned. In 1968, inspired by Mel Lyman’s intense appearance on What’s Happening, Mr. Silver?, his old bandmate Jim Kweskin exhibited increasingly strange behavior onstage. “The last few months were the dumbest,” said mandolin player Geoff Muldaur. Someone in the audience would request a song, and Kweskin would try to have a conversation instead of just performing. “The disbanding of Jim Kweskin’s Jug Band was the most obvious sign that the Cambridge/Boston musical community was breaking up,” wrote Eric Von Schmidt in his memoir of the era.
The Fort Hill Community, of which Kweskin was now a part, wanted to keep Club 47 alive. They threw a benefit concert on March 24, 1968, but instead of music, they played tapes of Lyman talking. The audience felt tricked. When Avatar editor John Wilton showed up, he saw that “total insanity had erupted, beginning with Eben [Given] breaking up furniture and ending with a free for all on stage.” A huge brawl ensued. People sobbed uncontrollably. It was Mel Lyman’s birthday.
It should come as no surprise that this benefit concert did not save Club 47, which closed a month later. Kweskin released a solo album that year titled What Ever Happened to Those Good Old Days at Club 47? Broadside, once the folkie’s bible, now covered the Bosstown Sound. LSD was illegal, and the folk scene had given up the ghost.
What kind of God would allow these things to happen?
NINE
The Noises That Roar in the Space Between the Worlds
“THE DETAILS ARE GRISLY, the people are lunatic, but the results are magnetic,” The New York Times wrote about one of the strangest novels to appear in 1968—or any year. The book was Russell H. Greenan’s It Happened in Boston?, the very punctuation a provocation. The lucid but deeply unhinged narrator is a painter of genius, working in the meticulous style of Da Vinci and other Renaissance masters. Outraged by the death of his friend Littleboy, and the destruction of his canvases—not to mention the cruelly transient nature of all things—Alfred Omega (as he’s sometimes called) demands some face-to-face time with his Creator. But how to summon the Almighty? “I haunted the public library and the book shops on Huntington Avenue, ever in quest of new fodder,” he explains. “How I hunted! Sundays found me in churches, and Saturdays in mosques and temples. I joined societies, attended lectures, subscribed to periodicals.” Omega studies horoscopes, tarot, and Ouija boards before finally locating the instructions he’s seeking in a bookstore on Columbus Avenue: a tome containing “various formulas for communicating with the other world.” First, he merely summons an angel. Then, slipping cyanide into sugar bowls at diners, he murders seven Bostonians. As the book draws to a close, Omega’s human sacrifices seem to lead to his desired meeting with God—or is it all a fever dream?
Eleven novels followed It Happened in Boston?, but Greenan, who is in his nineties and living in Providence, admits that his debut had “a kind of psychometaphysical aura” that set it apart from the rest. Greenan lived in Boston off and on for a number of years, beginning in 1950; he ran two antique shops, and loved the European charm of its cobblestone streets. But despite his taste for the past and proclivity for the arcane, he had no idea that the city had been a hotbed of occultism in the previous century. Indeed, it’s uncanny that no one who was writing about or working with occult practices in Boston in the late sixties—neither Greenan, nor Lou Reed, nor the Fort Hill Community, nor Jonathan Richman—realized Boston once used to be the place from which to reach the astral plane.
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AMERICAN SPIRITUALISM—the belief that the living could communicate with the dead—can be traced to the central New York town of Hydesville, where in 1848, the two young Fox sisters heard—and somehow produced—knocking sounds, which they said came from souls in the afterlife. Spiritualism grew into a quasi religion that was embraced in cities like New York and Chicago, but none did so as fervently as Boston. Starting in 1857, at the corner of Province and Boswell streets, the movement opened the offices of its most popular newspaper, Banner of Light, just as Beacon Hill became home to a number of well-known mediums like Fanny Conant and the Berry Sisters. “That city is really the Mecca of the spiritualistic faith,” the Fort Wayne Weekly Gazette said of Boston in 1895. “In no other city are there so many mediums, such a multiplication of circles and congregations.”
The first great Spiritualist church in America—dubbed “the Great Spook Temple” by the press—opened in 1884 at the corner of Exeter and Newbury streets. A half mile away at 53 Berkeley Street stood Parker Memorial Hall, opened fourteen years earlier as a tribute to Reverend Theodore Parker, who predicted that Spiritualism would become “the religion of America.” Nearly a century later, this popular spot for Spiritualist lectures and séances housed both the Boston Tea Party and the Fort Hill Community’s Film-Makers’ Cinematheque.
For those who required visual proof, Boston was also the origin of Spirit Photography, which appeared to capture the specter of the deceased, looming behind a living person. Engraver William Mumler, who claimed to stumble upon the phenomenon in 1861, eventually converted his Washington Street engraving workshop into a full-time “Spirit Photography” studio. A few years later, local entrepreneur G. W. Cottrell began mass-producing his “Boston Planchettes,” selling them for a dollar a pop out of a stationery store on Cornhill Street. Carved from black walnut with three caster wheels, these tools were the first such devices in the country, designed to fill a blank piece of paper with messages from the beyond. (Later, Ouija boards came with their own variation.)
The city being such a magnet for Spiritualism, it was only a matter of time before one of the accidental founders of the movement showed up. In 1872, Margaret Fox set up a séance studio on Washington Street, where, shockingly, one of her first visitors was Mary Todd Lincoln, the assassinated president’s widow. For ten days, she made frequent visits to Fox’s parlor, attempting to contact her husband on the other side via group séances. According to coverage of the rituals in The New York Times, “the spirit of her lamented husband appeared and, by unmistakeable manifestations, revealed to all present the identity of Mrs. Lincoln.”
Trying to make sense of all this was the American Society for Psychical Research, headquartered in the cozy alley known as Boylston Place, a few doors down from the studio where Van Morrison would audition “Astral Weeks” some eighty years later. Inside, like a real-life X-Files department, respected psychologists including Harvard’s William James explored the validity of the claims of Spiritualism and such phenomena as hypnosis and precognition.
It happened in Boston? Indeed.
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BY 1968, all but the most dedicated historians of the occult had largely forgotten Boston’s strange spirit history. But T. Mitchell Hastings, owner of a classical music radio station on Newbury Street, still took careful stock of such matters.
Hastings, a 1933 Harvard graduate, was an unusually close friend of the “Sleeping Prophet” Edgar Cayce, who made predictions and detailed subjects’ past lives while in a trance state. The Sleeping Prophet’s celebrity is hard to imagine today: Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and Woodrow Wilson all sought his counsel. As Mitch Horowitz notes in Occult America, words like reincarnation, meditation, past lives, and psychic became household terms through Cayce’s influence. Hastings’s parents were wealthy Spiritualist Manhattanites, who had introduced their son to
Cayce during sessions held at their home in the early 1930s. Cayce predicted their son would find success in a field dependent on “electrical energy.”
In February 1934, Hastings took Cayce for a ride in his Pontiac, all the way to Arizona, where, in the presence of a certain crystal formation, they experienced a revelation that supposedly heightened their powers of clairvoyance. Already worried about what people thought of him, Hastings kept this mystic vacation a closely guarded secret. But after his 1954 invention of an FM transistor that could function inside a moving car, he didn’t care who knew of his eccentricities. (One Cayce biographer claims that Hastings’s FM invention was a direct by-product of the Sleeping Prophet’s “trance counsel.”)
In the late 1950s, Hastings formed the General Broadcasting Network as a “Golden Chain” of East Coast FM stations all dedicated to classical music: WNCN New York City, WHCN Hartford, WXCN Providence, WRCN Long Island, and WBCN Boston. “[Hastings] lived in another world; he could have been an extraterrestrial,” program director Ron Della Chiesa recalled. “But he also believed in the power of classical music to awaken the spirit and mind.” Poor business decisions had broken apart Hastings’s “Golden Chain”; by the late sixties only WBCN remained in his collection of FM radio stations. In 1968, when his radio empire seemed to be just about finished, Hastings met a man who would turn everything around: Ray Riepen, Kansas City lawyer and owner of the Boston Tea Party. Riepen was interested in playing some weird music on WBCN very late at night.
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RAY RIEPEN’S DAILY drives from his rock club to his apartment might as well have been victory laps. Almost by accident, he had turned the Boston Tea Party into a resounding success, both with the music fans who bought tickets and with the journalists covering the scene, including Riepen’s every move. The logical next step? A radio station that would play the same acts that performed at the Tea Party. Riepen pulled station earnings reports for the area, looked at the bottom of the list, and walked right over to WBCN. T. Mitchell Hastings had already filed for bankruptcy once, and was on the brink of filing again. Before his death in 1945, Edgar Cayce had predicted that the lost city of Atlantis would rise again in 1968. Cayce had also convinced Hastings that he’d been an Atlantean scientist in a previous life, which is all to say: The station owner had planned for a weird twelve months. So when Riepen asked to commandeer the airwaves between midnight and six for rock ’n’ roll (“Your audience goes to bed at 8:30, so what’s the harm?”), Hastings said yes.
For the second time, Riepen’s entry into a new Boston business venture was facilitated by someone with mystical beliefs. Between Hastings and the Fort Hill Community, everywhere he turned in Boston, it seemed that if there wasn’t some kind of corruption or miles of red tape to wade through, there was an astrology chart or a story about a psychic encounter.
For his new venture, Riepen embarked on a fact-finding mission at Boston area college radio stations. He wanted amateurs. At Tufts’ WTBS, he startled Joe Rogers, a local kid who broadcasted at night under the moniker Mississippi Harold Wilson. “I went over while he was on the air,” Riepen says. “There weren’t any locks on the door or anything, so I let myself in.” Rogers was spooked by “a guy in a three-piece suit and very severe-looking glasses just standing in the doorway.”
Like the team-building montage in a heist movie, Riepen stomped all over town, rounding up amateur DJs. Peter Wolf received a similar visit, though Riepen first hit him up for money, to see if he’d invest in the station.
“Ten thousand dollars?” Wolf was aghast. “Ray, I don’t have ten dollars.”
“Well, listen, you’ve got ten thousand records!” Riepen countered. So why not be a DJ?
Joe Rogers didn’t expect anything to come out of his late-night encounter, but six weeks later, on March 15, 1968, he was summoned to appear at 171 Newbury Street at ten p.m. to start work—the very first broadcast of WBCN’s new late-night format. Rogers hiked up four flights into a claustrophobic cluster of rooms. He could barely speak that first night on air—thanks, in a roundabout way, to Mel Lyman. Muriel, a friend of the DJ’s, had recently gone to Fort Hill, interested in contributing art to Avatar. Lyman gave her a private LSD session and proceeded to pantomime his own crucifixion for her. “It flipped her out,” Rogers said, and she spent some time at McLean Hospital to recover. The day of Rogers’s first shift, Muriel noted how tense he looked and offered him one of the downers that she had been given at McLean to process the residual stress from her run-in with Mel. The DJ took it, then dropped to the floor, barely able to stay awake. He walked glacially toward the turntable and placed a Frank Zappa LP down. His nerves and the meds sparked a comically odd demeanor. “Go do your goddamned radio show!” Riepen yelled from the other room. “Don’t fuck it up!”
Leading with “Nasal Retentive Calliope Music”—two minutes of collaged sound effects, percussion crashes, high-pitched laughter, and record-skipping noises—must have made it sound like demons were tearing apart the station, even to people who had tuned in specifically to hear something different. Cream’s “I Feel Free” returned things to the realm of melody. Riepen knew a good hook when he saw one, so he followed the spirit of the Tea Party’s successful name and dreamed up WBCN’s slogan: The American Revolution. “Ugly Radio Is Dead,” the ads read, and the desired audience knew exactly what that meant: loud DJs, obnoxious cadences, insipid jingles, the same bubblegum pop played every hour. “Once people hear the music we play,” Riepen told the Globe, “they’ll find it difficult to go back to the Top Forty.”
For two hours that first night, Joe Rogers made odd bedfellows on the air—spinning Jim Kweskin’s Jug Band after Canned Heat, say—but he barely spoke between songs. When he did, the words came out slowly. Rogers somehow stayed awake, then tossed to Peter Wolf. The Hallucinations front man had walked from his place in Cambridge carrying a crate of vinyl; his knowledge of musical history would be unmatched among the original WBCN DJs. His cohost gave his wild on-air persona the name Woofa Goofa. Wolf was one of the few Boston “freaks” that Riepen actually developed a friendship with. “Because of my relationship with Ray, I was given carte blanche,” Wolf explained. This freedom included playing obscure blues musicians and a band from Belfast called Them.
It must have seemed like a sign from above when hard-on-his-luck Van Morrison, recently transplanted to Cambridge, started hearing himself on WBCN. When the mysterious DJ started asking for mail, Morrison knew what to do. In the spring of 1968—after Peter Wolf and Van Morrison finally met in person at the Boston Tea Party—Morrison began hanging out with Wolf during his overnight shifts at WBCN.
Over the years, many Morrison songs invest radios with an almost religious power. In “Brown Eyed Girl,” his lone solo hit at the time, the singer ventures into the unknown—an “old mine”—armed only with a transistor radio. Later, in songs like “Wavelength” (1978) and “In the Days Before Rock ’n’ Roll” (1990), the radio’s a conduit for the sublime or divine. On the rave-up “Caravan,” the singer constantly turns the volume dial to be able to access “the soul” of the song. In the concert film The Last Waltz, he’s in convulsions as he directs the Band to “turn it up,” as though playing the musicians like the radio in the song.*
That summer in Boston, Morrison occasionally performed his harrowing song “T.B. Sheets.” Bassist Tom Kielbania got the backstory straight from the man himself. In high school, the singer knew a girl who was dying of tuberculosis. “He went to see her because he felt really bad, but he got upset because all she wanted to do was listen to music on the radio.” On the 1966 recording, the singer offers to turn on the radio for her, if she wants to hear some tunes. Three decades later, Morrison would dismiss any autobiographical content as “absolutely absurd.” The song, he said, was “complete and utter fiction.” But Kielbania disagrees. He thinks he’s located Van’s Rosebud. “It’s why he sings about radios a lot.” It has to do
with this girl and her obsession with the radio.
Van’s awe at the power of radio calls to mind some of the earliest public reactions to the invention. Early listeners thought it worked via telepathy, or could be used to contact the dead. One reporter put it this way: “You are fascinated, though a trifle awestruck to realize that you are listening to sounds that, surely, were never intended to be heard by a human being.” In 1922 The New York Times declared that it “brought to the ears of us Earth dwellers the noises that roar in the space between the worlds.” For some, it did seem awfully close to the promises of spiritualism: Through use of a device, whether it be a Ouija board or a radio, messages from elsewhere seemed to drift in through the window.
In later years, Morrison would even describe his songwriting process as akin to tuning in a specific frequency on the radio, as if making music were about searching for the right melody and lyrics already existing in the ether. Sometimes the songs would come to Van while zoning out in front of a rolling tape recorder, but sometimes they even arrived in his sleep. While briefly living with the singer in New York in the fall of 1968, Tom Kielbania was woken up at three a.m. An idea had taken Van out of his sleep, and he wanted to capture it. He ordered the bleary-eyed Kielbania to grab his bass. “He starts singing this song about an electric radio,” Kielbania says. “He dreamt it that night and we played it a couple of times so he could get it in his head.”
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