Astral Weeks

by Ryan H. Walsh

  * “Mike Bloomfield visited the hill while they were building the wall,” I’m told during my tour of the Fort Ave. Terrace houses, “and he pitched in and helped them out.” Staring at the symbolic and functional construction, it boggles the mind to think that the guitarist from Bob Dylan’s infamous Newport concert, the man who appears on the recording of “Like a Rolling Stone,” helped lay the bricks.

  * Even outside of the controversial, expanding Lyman coverage in Avatar, Charles Giuliano noted how difficult it was to keep their readers happy. “The Resistance wants us to be a radical paper, the artists want us to be lewd and lascivious, the musicians want us to put down the Boston Sound, while others think we should talk more about drugs.”

  * Ed Beardsley would have to settle for the role he did finally land: In 1971 he was cast in a made-for-public-television movie starring David Silver and directed by Fred Barzyk entitled America Inc. America Inc. is an odd, ahead-of-its-time meta-movie that combines scripted scenarios and documentary footage and, perhaps most surprisingly, is constructed as a way to show what happened to popular Boston TV host David Silver after What’s Happening, Mr. Silver? was canceled. Even director Fred Barzyk appears on camera early on, shocked to see just how “dropped out” Silver has become since their collaboration on the show together. Silver leaves his wife, Karen, and embarks on a road trip with Ed Beardsley to find himself and discover the country. The soundtrack is provided by, you guessed it, Mel Lyman; a new song, “River,” has since emerged on a bootleg release entitled Birth. Over the end credits, as if the music selection had been made last minute, or an argument had arisen over it, you hear Fred Barzyk overdub an announcement: “Theme music courtesy of the Lyman Family.”

  * Around this time, the Lyman Family made its first appearance in a book, though the names were all changed. Henry Gross’s 1968 The Flower People took readers on a tour of hippie/commune America. For the Fort Hill section, Mel Lyman is renamed . . . David Lynch. “It is a paramountly happy tribe, with David Lynch its godlike guiding chief, smaller family subdivisions within it, and single individuals in unaffiliated abundance.” Seven years later, the mother of FHC’s Faith Gude, Kay Boyle, published The Underground Woman (1975), a novel in which Lyman Family members also appear under new names. The leader is “Pete the Redeemer,” who “would be acknowledged the greatest folk singer since Woody Guthrie, and his albums would outsell even Dylan’s.”

  * A memory from Philp’s Emerson College girlfriend, Elayne Kesller, suggests that, although their collaboration was brief, Philp and Morrison had struck up some kind of friendly rapport; for instance, the night Martin Luther King was assassinated, she remembers being at Van Morrison’s Green Street apartment with Rick and watching TV coverage of the riots while they all sat on Morrison’s bed in shock.

  * The date refers to Van Morrison’s three-night stand at the Ark, a new club on Lansdowne Street meant to compete with the Boston Tea Party. Fort Hill Community member John Kostick had created a gigantic version of one of his Buckminster Fuller–inspired metal star sculptures to hang from the ceiling inside the Ark. (Smaller versions were churned out in Kostick’s Roxbury workshop and sold by FHC members; decades later, a Kostick star appeared on an MIT professor’s desk in the film Good Will Hunting.) In May 1969, underneath a giant, spinning Kostick star, Van Morrison performed Astral Weeks in its entirety during one if not all three of these concerts, something he wouldn’t do again until 2008 at the Hollywood Bowl. Kielbania was still on bass at this point, with John Platania on guitar, Bob Mason on drums, and flutist/saxophonist Graham Blackburn; Philp and Astral Weeks alum John Payne appeared as special guests. Confirmed audience members include Jonathan Richman and Peter Wolf. Soon after this show, most of the Astral Weeks songs would be excised from Morrison’s set list, rarely or never to be performed for another forty years.

  * Precisely one week before the first Astral Weeks session, Jay Berliner recorded guitar for a band called the Astral Projection who were cutting an album titled The Astral Scene. Surprisingly, the record is not psychedelic in any musical sense, but rather a brand of blandly sunny pop, with titles and lyrics that occasionally evoke New Age beliefs. The singer concludes the final track by singing, “Was it just a dream? The Astral Scene!” Between this forgettable Astral record and Astral Weeks, the industrious Berliner also recorded jingles for Eastern Airlines and a few songs with Dionne Warwick.

  * On the No Guru song “Tir Na Nog”—a reference to an Irish myth about a land that delivers everlasting youth—Morrison again sings about someone kissing his eyes, as he does on “Astral Weeks”: “Could you find me? Would you kiss-a my eyes?” The words suggest some kind of previously arranged secret code, a way for two lovers to recognize each other in the next life.

  * When I played the extended mix of the song for John Payne, he sat with his head in his hands for twenty seconds, before solemnly telling me, “That’s not what happened.” It was the first time he had heard the cut section since recording it in 1968. In Payne’s memory, there were four or five additional minutes of “Slim Slow Slider,” working up into an abstract jazz freestyle. “This is very disappointing,” he said. “Maybe it doesn’t exist.”

  * Richard Herbruck is an actual person, whose name is still listed on the Fort Ave. Terrace mailbox. After arriving at the commune from Ohio in the late sixties, the real Herbruck was given an astrological name, and Lyman began borrowing his legal name to book airline flights and, for some reason, to produce Jim Kweskin’s 1971 album America for Reprise. Herbruck resembled Lyman, apparently, as did several other FHC members. Lyman used these look-alikes to keep visitors guessing whether they’d met the real man or not.

  * Sophie would eventually move to her husband’s new community. In 2006, their son, Obray, mentioned on a message board that she had been married to Jim Kweskin for twenty years. In 1985, Sophie told the Boston Herald that Mel “never just ‘took off.’ He made sure we were taken care of, he wrote and called, and when he could, he sent money. We weren’t abandoned.”

  * In another journal entry, from 1966, he curiously writes, “I’m soon lost in a sea of color and all that astral jazz.”