Astral Weeks

by Ryan H. Walsh

  * If Williams sounds familiar, it’s because he was also a follower of Mel Lyman. The editor’s eventual rejection of and escape from the Fort Hill Community is the first thing described in David Felton’s 1971 exposé.

  * Lost bassist Walter Powers even auditioned to be a member of Van Morrison’s band, losing the spot to Berklee’s Tom Kielbania.

  * Clive Davis was fired and legally fined $10,000, but given no prison time. DeNoia was convicted in 1976.

  * A self-declared “enemy of modernism,” Benton was criticized for the ethnic stereotypes in some of his murals in the 1930s, and was fired in 1941 from his teaching position at the Kansas City Art Institute for homophobic remarks.

  * In Vibrations, a local Crawdaddy knockoff, Richman published a rambling love letter to the group titled “New York Art and the Velvet Underground,” complete with a hand-drawn graph whose y-axis spans “Death” to “God,” and which charts VU’s progress against groups like the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix. Only the Beatles beat the Velvets in the upward crest toward godhead.

  * For decades, it seemed that Warhol might have taken Riepen’s advice and skipped loading film into the camera, as no movie starring the Velvet Underground and a sold-out Boston Tea Party audience was ever released. Riepen vaguely remembers Warhol intending to use the footage for a larger project called American Revolution. Then, in 2009, the Andy Warhol Museum located the film canisters in its archives. The thirty-three-minute, 16mm The Velvet Underground in Boston is disjointed, full of illogical cuts and zooms, and the band sounds muffled. Still, it’s one of the only two pieces of film of the Velvet Underground during their original run performing live with sync-sound, and the only one in color.

  * This jibed with Richman’s description of the band’s live act. “Your eyes would go from one person to the other and you’d say, ‘Who’s making that particular sound?’” Richman recalled in a 2013 radio interview. “You’d hear this harmonic tone in the background. No one was betraying it by their facial expression, they were all just blandly playing their instrument. But there’s this fifth ghost tone coming from somewhere. All these strange ghost tones.”

  * In 1976, Peter Laughner paired the two together in his Creem review of the first Modern Lovers album. “Jonathan Richman is nothing if not a Lou Reed protégé,” he wrote. “[A]pparently when the Velvets were sequestered in Boston’s student ghetto in late ’68, Jonathan found his guru in Lou. At least it wasn’t Mel Lyman.” It’s possible that Reed and Lyman met; according to the Fort Hill Community, the Velvet Underground sometimes spent the night in a Fort Ave. Terrace house after a Tea Party show. On one such occassion, when Nico simply helped herself to someone’s bed, the German singer was bluntly instructed to find somewhere else to catch some sleep. Personnel from the band and a Fort Hill Community member had certainly crossed paths at least once before; Faith Gude and VU’s whip dancer Gerard Malanga had a brief affair in the early sixties. Malanga even wrote a poem about the unlikely free-speech champion, entitled, simply, “Faith Franckenstein.”

  * Both Reed and Richman would write about insects from the Bailey perspective, Reed with “Ocean” in late ’68 or early ’69 (“Insects are evil thoughts, thought of by selfish men / It nearly drives me crazy”) and Richman in ’76 with “Hey There Little Insect,” with the childlike request (“Don’t scare me so / Don’t land on me, and bite me, no”).

  * Morrison would later cryptically remark to a journalist that during his Boston residency he visited an astrologer who passed along information that had stuck with him, even years later.

  * “An honest-to-goodness chick playing percussion—do you believe it?” MIT’s The Tech asked incredulously. Conversely, in late 1967, the Boston Herald Traveler ran a positive profile of Maureen Tucker with the headline “SHE GAVE UP COMPUTERS TO PLAY DRUMS IN BAND.” “A regular 9-to-5 job was too confining,” Tucker told reporter Laura White. “I felt mentally as well as physically captured by machines.” At one VU Tea Party show in 1968, Tucker opened their set alone with a fifteen-minute drum solo. “She just commanded the stage,” commented one witness. “She was really quite an impressive display.”

  * On the edge of Harvard Square, 4 University Road was a magnet for scenesters. Peter Wolf, Avatar writer Charles Giuliano, and Astral Weeks flutist John Payne all lived there. After a series of murders at the complex in the sixties—including one of the Boston Strangler deaths—it became known as “The Murder Building.” Hood was found dead in the same apartment in 1982; the case was never solved.

  * The same year, in an issue of Film Culture, there’s a listing for a “full evening show [of] . . . light, images, voice, human presence” available to be booked, created by Mel Lyman and Jonas Mekas.

  * Avatar writer Charles Giuliano, who appears in the Rolling Stone piece under the pseudonym Harry Bikes, speaks about a private film screening he attended on Fort Hill one night in 1968. “I can remember one of the movies that I saw there was of a woman that was pregnant. Mel fed her a hallucinogen and filmed her. And I look at this and, I mean, here she is pregnant and she’s high and hallucinating. And you can see the expression on her face was anything but comfortable. What gives you the right to inflict that onto a woman in that condition? I mean that is beyond abuse.”

  * Faith Gude, one of the most influential women in the Fort Hill Community, had spotted Mark while selling Avatars; she was so bowled over by his good looks that she put an issue of the paper into his hands.

  * It later provided the backdrop to some of the Tatooine scenes in Star Wars and the cover of U2’s The Joshua Tree.

  * Halprin had been cast after Antonioni watched Jack O’Connell’s Revolution, a documentary about Haight-Ashbury. She appears at the end: nude, nineteen, and beautiful.

  * A final theory appeared fourteen years later. In a 1987 issue of Filmkultúra, director Dezso Magyar recounted that he and Frechette wanted to adapt a part of Crime and Punishment “because we felt that America was like a Dostoyevsky-type world.” Every other day, the actor would call from Boston, saying he almost had the necessary funds. “One day he called me and said that he would bring the five million dollars the next day. Great! I was watching TV in the evening when it was announced that . . . Mark Frechette attempted to rob a bank at gunpoint . . . and was arrested.” It’s true that Frechette wanted to adapt Crime and Punishment, but it’s hard to believe that he imagined that much money could be waiting for him inside a small Roxbury bank—not to mention the fact that this was the same branch where the FHC kept its own savings.

  * In the next issue of The Real Paper, Klein published a letter from an ex–community member. “Non-material?” asked the critical letter. “Why does Mel travel in a Cadillac limousine with TV, telephone and bar? Why does he own a $15,000 camper and have several wives; not to mention all the stereo equipment, television, swimming pools, and estates in California? Money is tight on the Hill—even for food—but that’s because of overexpansion and poor management.”

  * Don Law recalled that when a long line started to form for a show at the Psychedelic Supermarket, Papadopoulos would actually take a ladder outside the venue, climb up to the marquee, and raise the posted price of admission to the audible groans of the gathered audience.

  * While “Moulty” was released by the Barbarians and landed the group back on the Billboard charts, it turned out Victor’s backing band for the recording was the Band—as in The Band, who were smack dab in the middle of their turn backing Bob Dylan. The rest of the Barbarians were embarrassed by the single and the band broke up the next year.

  * Another key figure disputes one of Sheldon’s vivid memories. Producer Lewis Merenstein denies ever calling Van Morrison a genius, at the Ace audition or elsewhere. Sheldon insists he heard it, but is there a chance it actually came from the mouth of Richard, the manager, or the Bang Records emissary?

  * It wasn’t all a horror show. One of the earliest subjects was Latvian-born
painter Hyman Bloom, an important artist in the Boston Expressionism movement. Bloom may have been the first artist anywhere to experiment with LSD’s effect on creativity, and undoubtedly the first to do so in the United States. He was asked to draw two portraits of Rinkel, one at the beginning of the trip and another at the peak of the experience. The result was beautifully abstract. “[He] lost himself making dots and dashes,” Rinkel told the Globe, which reproduced the drawings in the paper in 1965.

  * One test subject, Theodore Kaczynski, later became infamous as the Unabomber, sending a series of deadly bombs over a period of seventeen years. The FBI forensic psychiatrist who examined Kaczynski reported that the young student began having nightmares and concocting revenge fantasies around the time of Murray’s experiment, and even worried about the possibility of mind control. (Despite rumors that Murray gave his subjects LSD, there is no evidence of this, and Kaczynski denied it.)

  * The Science publication launched Weil’s writing career, but it seems he may have been publishing in other publications at the same time—under a pseudonym. According to editor Wayne Hansen, a short-lived Avatar column, “The Illuminated Pharmacologist,” was Weil’s work under an assumed name. Sure enough, consulting the issues in question, there are two lengthy pieces written by one “William Andrews,” with a tone and content nearly identical to Weil’s other writing at the time; the bio even describes him as a “fourth-year medical student in psychopharmacology living in Boston.”

  Weil remembers Avatar and the Fort Hill Community, but “does not recall” writing for the underground paper. Instead, he says, he wrote a critical piece on the community for The Harvard Crimson. Attempts to locate that particular article were unsuccessful, but Weil described it as such: “I was over there a couple times and talked to people. But, you know, I was very peripherally involved and I saw a little bit. It really was a cult around Mel Lyman. I’m not sure I knew quite what to make of it.”

  * Conner also erroneously announced his own death on two occasions as a conceptual art prank—bringing to mind Felton’s conjecture that Lyman might have later faked his own death, to live out his days anonymously abroad.

  * Around the time that Payne and his relative Robert Lowell overlapped at McLean, the famous poet himself had a God-tinged revelation; Timothy Leary had turned Lowell on to acid a few years earlier. “Now I know what Blake and St. John of the Cross were talking about,” Lowell told Leary. “This experience is what I was seeking when I became a Catholic.”

  * Fifty years on, listeners still parse the identity of Madame George. It seems straightforward enough: We see her “in the corner, playing dominoes in drag,” and most fans consider the titular figure of Astral Weeks’ centerpiece to be a drag queen. “[W]ith the promises of the forbidden, of drink and cigarettes, drugs and music, sex and fantasy,” Greil Marcus writes, the titular character “gathers young boys around herself to stave off a killing burden of loneliness.” Lester Bangs puts Morrison in the picture, saying that his depiction of “a lovelorn drag queen” is sung “with such intense empathy that when the singer hurts him, we do too.” (Incredibly, Morrison himself denies that the character is a drag queen.) What does it mean that “George” is Van’s actual first name? Or that it often sounds like he’s singing “Madame Joy”—which was the song’s original title? Perhaps the best way to contemplate all this is with a Ram Dass saying in mind: “Treat everyone you meet like God in drag.”

  * One of the more cryptic lines in “Astral Weeks” has the singer “talkin’ to Huddie Ledbetter / Showin’ pictures on the wall.” In the late sixties, Morrison kept a framed portrait of his musical hero Leadbelly, né Huddie Ledbetter. Sometime after Astral Weeks came out, feeling burdened by the image, he was about to throw it out. “At that moment I was fiddling around with the radio—I wanted to hear some music—and I tuned in this station and ‘Rock Island Line’ by Leadbelly came on,” he said in a 1978 interview. “So I just turned around, man, and very quietly put the picture back on the wall.”

  * Up on Fort Hill, there could be a chicken-or-egg quality to the assessment of someone’s actual personality and the one suggested by their astrological sign. When Faith Gude caught wind that new Family member Daria Halprin wished she could change her sign, the Zabriskie Point star was needled about it in a recorded conversation, finally replying, “Because I won’t have to work at anything . . . because I could just be a fantastic person.” During Astral Weeks flute player John Payne’s one visit to the Fort Hill Community in 1969, an initial misreading of his sign triggered a temporary royal treatment. “It felt great. I was enthusiastic, going ‘yeah, Capricorn!’ Then someone rushed over and said that December 16 wasn’t a Capricorn, it was a Sagittarius.” The room totally deflated and the excitement brewing around Payne vanished instantly.

  * “Aerosmith was a kind of ragamuffin Boston street-kid group who was managed by an alcoholic Irish manager,” Weil says. “They came in and did a demo. I liked it a lot. They didn’t have the money to do a deal and they didn’t really know what they were doing. I offered them a deal: I would arrange for them to have a producer and I would give them the studio time in exchange for a percentage of the album.” Weil brought in Adrian Barber, a “madman English rock-and-roller psychedelic character” who had produced Loaded with the Velvet Underground three years prior. Though Aerosmith’s 1973 self-titled debut was initially a flop, the single “Dream On” hit #6 upon its 1976 reissue. Unlike Lou Reed, Steven Tyler didn’t have much use for Alice Bailey, but he was fond of another occultist, Aleister Crowley. “I’ve practiced Crowley Magick so I know it works,” Tyler wrote in his memoir. “I’m not saying that every girl I slept with came at the same time or that I asked her to pray for the same thing I was praying for; namely that Aerosmith would become the greatest American band.”

  * In June 1967, a Mothers for Adequate Welfare demonstration turned into a weekend of riots and violent clashes with the police, injuring dozens. Forty-four people were arrested, including Tom Atkins.

  * The only dip in the Common’s population growth that summer was due to a rampant rumor that an asteroid named Icarus was going to destroy the Earth’s population mid-June and only two locations would be spared: Tibet and Colorado. No one knows how the rumor started, but American hippies flocked to Colorado en masse. At an observatory in Cambridge, employees fielded frantic calls about Icarus. “The space kooks really came out of the wood work,” a spokesman for the observatory told the Globe. Some MIT students dreamed up a contingency plan involving “nine nuclear-tipped Saturn rockets, borrowed from the U.S. Moon program.” Icarus missed Earth by four million miles.

  * This talk didn’t seem to make much difference; to wit, the eighteen-year-old daughter of a Harvard Law School professor arrived with some friends on Fort Hill a year later, in 1969. That daughter, Eve Chayes, would become pregnant by Mel Lyman shortly after moving there, subsequently taking on his last name, though their marriage ceremony at the time was not of the legal sort.

  * Though Mungo got along with Mel Lyman, he resisted attempts to get him to join Fort Hill. Meanwhile, issues of Avatar were finding their way to servicemen in Vietnam, some of whom sent letters back. “There are a lot of people who don’t want to be here,” one such letter explains. “But what should we do? Drop out? Then every little pissy-ass country going will want to test this country and its ideals which allow people like you and me to say what we want, when we want.”

  * “I certainly don’t pretend all races are the same,” Lyman told Rolling Stone. “Ever since I was a kid I’ve had trouble with Jews. But I also believe a man of any nationality can rise above that nationality, can put that nationality to use . . . I like to talk in topical languages ’cause people can get into it. Like I might say something like, ‘all niggers are stupid,’ you know? Just to wake people up, get them involved.” When pressed on any of his controversial statements—including similar homophobic remarks—Lyman would dodge the charge by claim
ing that their ability to shake people into the present moment justified the slurs as a means to an end.

  * Michael Kindman recalled the saga of #4 going like so: “During the negotiation process, Mel had a dream one night about fighting with Lena, the landlady. In the dream he was hitting Lena on the head; awake the next day, he interpreted this as an instruction to damage the roof of the house, so it would lose its value and she would be more ready to sell.”

  * Some attributed Lyman’s messianic turn to his relationship with Jessie, who took on a similar role her mother had played in protecting her husband Thomas Hart Benton’s time and talents. Ex–Jug Band member Maria Muldaur summed it up: “Mel had many old ladies in his life, but it was when she was with him that it really started being the ‘inner circle’ and the ‘outer peons,’ and you couldn’t get in to see Mel, and things got more and more mysterious. . . .”