Morrison supposedly didn’t like the strings that were added later, but I disagree. The melodies are simple and repetitive, giving Morrison’s singing - improvisational and heartfelt - plenty room to stretch out. It is an intensely spiritual record, explicitly on the title track, implicitly on the rest. Released in 1968, “Astral Weeks” is mostly acoustic jazz/folk/rock with a first-rate band anchored by the bassist Richard Davis. So on the same day in 1990 that I was picking up Tom Waits’ “Franks Wild Years” in the used-CD bin at Tower Records, I decided to take a chance on Morrison’s “Astral Weeks.” If I had to describe him, I’d have said he was, well, OK.īut I’d heard about an album he’d made near the beginning of his career that never got played on the radio and that supposedly established him as a genius on the order of Bob Dylan or the Beatles. I wasn’t motivated to buy any of his albums. I liked some of his stuff, not all of it. As far as I was concerned, Van Morrison was just a voice on the radio.
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