“INSTANT CLASSIC”
- The Boston Globe
End-Of-Year Best-Of Lists
The Best Books of 2018 - The Guardian
Janet Maslin’s Top Critic Picks 2018 - New York Times
Best Music Books of 2018 - Pitchfork
Top Music Books of 2018 - Uncut Magazine
Best Music Books of 2018, #2 - Billboard
Best Music Books of the Year, #3 - Mojo Magazine
The Best Books of the Year - Popmatters
Best Books of the Year - The Independent
Best Music Books of 2018 - Minneapolis City Pages
Best Things of 2018 - Chicago Reader
Best Books of the Year - Amazon
Luna’s Dean Wareham: Favorite Things of 2018 - Brooklyn Vegan
The 25 Best Books of 2018 - Counterpunch
Top 20 Rock Books of 2018 - #1, Richie Unterberger
Best Books of the Year 2018 - Best Classic Bands
The Best Music Books of 2018 - Vinyl Me Please
Lauded as one of the greatest albums in the rock ’n’ roll canon, Astral Weeks feels less like rock, more like a benediction, a song cycle of rebirth. Martin Scorsese claims the first fifteen minutes of Taxi Driver are based on it. Philip Seymour Hoffman quoted it in his Oscar acceptance speech. Elvis Costello called it “the most adventurous record made in the rock medium”; part of the late Jeff Buckley’s own myth is tied with his choice to cover “The Way Young Lovers Do.” The critic Lester Bangs claimed it contained “the quality of a beacon.” Joni Mitchell was so taken aback by the album that she badgered one of Van’s guitarists for information about him before finally meeting him: “What is he actually like?”
About The Book
A mind-expanding dive into a lost chapter of 1968, featuring the famous and forgotten: Van Morrison, folkie-turned-cult-leader Mel Lyman, Timothy Leary, James Brown, and many more
Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks is an iconic rock album shrouded in legend, a masterpiece that has touched generations of listeners and influenced everyone from Bruce Springsteen to Martin Scorsese. In his first book, acclaimed musician and journalist Ryan H. Walsh unearths the album’s fascinating backstory–along with the untold secrets of the time and place that birthed it: Boston 1968.
On the 50th anniversary of that tumultuous year, Walsh’s book follows a criss-crossing cast of musicians and visionaries, artists and hippie entrepreneurs, from a young Tufts English professor who walks into a job as a host for TV’s wildest show (one episode required two sets, each tuned to a different channel) to the mystically inclined owner of radio station WBCN, who believed he was the reincarnation of a scientist from Atlantis. Most penetratingly powerful of all is Mel Lyman, the folk-music star who decided he was God, then controlled the lives of his many followers via acid, astrology, and an underground newspaper called Avatar.
A mesmerizing group of boldface names pops to life in Astral Weeks: James Brown quells tensions the night after Martin Luther King, Jr. is assassinated; the real-life crimes of the Boston Strangler come to the movie screen via Tony Curtis; Howard Zinn testifies for Avatar in the courtroom. From life-changing concerts and chilling crimes, to acid experiments and film shoots, Astral Weeks is the secret, wild history of a unique time and place.
- Get The Book.
- Read Ryan H. Walsh's original 2015 Boston Magazine article about Van Morrison's Astral Sojourn.