ASTRAL WEEKS

Richard Davis plays the first note. Just the bass, solo, walking in before the voice arrives. Then Morrison enters — low, almost spoken, not quite singing yet — with a grammatical fragment that never resolves: "If I ventured in the slipstream." The sentence doesn't finish. It isn't supposed to. Astral Weeks is a record of thresholds, not destinations, and it announces that from its first bar.

The circumstances that produced this record in 1968 are worth understanding because they are partly why the record sounds the way it does. Morrison had arrived in the United States from Belfast in late 1967, carrying the wreckage of a contract with Bang Records — one of the most exploitative agreements in the history of popular music, signed at twenty-one with Bert Berns, who owned him entirely. When Berns died of a heart attack in December 1967, Morrison was partially free, but the legal residue kept him effectively invisible for much of 1968. He relocated to Boston, played small clubs in New England, and wrote songs in a register he had never used before: childhood memory, Celtic mysticism, specific Belfast geography rendered hallucinatory by distance. The world in 1968 was burning — King in April, Kennedy in June, Chicago in August, the first civil rights marches in Northern Ireland being broken up by police. Morrison was writing about a tree on Cyprus Avenue and the sound of rain on Hyndford Street.

Producer Lewis Merenstein, whose background was in jazz, understood immediately that these songs required musicians who knew how to listen rather than play. He hired Richard Davis on bass — who had recorded with Eric Dolphy, Andrew Hill and Charles Mingus — Connie Kay on drums, the Modern Jazz Quartet's heartbeat for fifteen years, Jay Berliner on acoustic guitar, Warren Smith on vibraphone and percussion. None of them knew the songs before the sessions. There were no rehearsals, no chord charts, no arrangements discussed in advance. Morrison played and they followed. By some accounts he recorded facing the wall, turned away from the other musicians. Two sessions, Century Sound Studios, New York. September and October 1968. The record was done.

Warner Bros. released it in November 1968 with minimal promotion and visible uncertainty about what it was. It peaked at 126 in the American charts and disappeared. The contemporary critical reception was largely silence — the music press of 1968 had no framework for it, and the rock criticism that was developing around Rolling Stone was built to process something louder and more obviously political. Lester Bangs found the record years later and wrote about it in Stranded (1979), the essay that returned it to public consciousness: he called it one of the few genuine states of grace ever recorded in rock music. That sentence was accurate and it has been quoted ever since.

The eight songs on Astral Weeks divide into two sides that Morrison titled, in the original liner notes, "In the Beginning" and "Afterwards." Side one opens with the title track's suspended grammar and moves through Beside You — where the word "very" appears so many times it loses and then regains its meaning — to Sweet Thing, the most immediately beautiful song on the record, its pastoral waterside imagery carried by Jay Berliner's fingerpicking. Cyprus Avenue closes side one with obsessive repetition — "fourteen times," the phrase "to be born again," the specific geography of East Belfast transformed into something between love song and psychosis. Morrison grew up near Cyprus Avenue. The houses were large, the residents Protestant and prosperous. He rode the bus past it as a child. The song is about desire and class and the particular Belfast strangeness of a divided geography, and it is also about something Morrison doesn't name.

Side two begins gently and ends in nearly nothing. Madame George is the record's centre of gravity: nine minutes forty seconds of music orbiting an ambiguous Belfast figure — a transvestite, possibly, or an opium dealer, or both, or a composite of people Morrison knew — with Davis's bass providing the harmonic foundation across a structure that doesn't resolve in any conventional sense. The song ends by repeating Morrison's name for the character until it becomes a sound rather than a word. Ballerina follows as a kind of respite. Then Slim Slow Slider closes the record in fifty-six seconds of barely there music — a voice nearly gone, a distant saxophone, the record ending before it ends. It is the bravest thing on an already brave record.

On the question of which pressing to find: the original US Warner Bros. (WS 1768, 1968, green label with WB shield logo) is the document. Val Valentin's mastering is warm and slightly compressed in the mid frequencies — not an audiophile pressing in the technical sense, but honest to how the record was made. Clean VG+ copies surface on Discogs between €60 and €180; stamper variation is audible and worth researching before buying. The 1991 Mobile Fidelity half-speed master (MFSL 1-163) was the audiophile reference for twenty years: quieter surface, better-defined bass, more open soundstage. Still findable between €40 and €80. The Analogue Productions 45rpm pressing (CAPJ 1768) is the current definitive version: double LP at 45rpm, mastered by Kevin Gray, with a dynamic range and low-frequency definition that allows Davis's bass to occupy physical space in the room. Not cheap — €60 to €90 — but for this record it is the correct choice. The 2015 Warner/Rhino edition adds bonus material at an accessible price if the sessions interest you as a document.

Lester Bangs wrote that Astral Weeks sounded like the last record ever made. He meant it as a compliment, and it was one. The record came out of a very specific convergence — a twenty-three-year-old from East Belfast, a jazz bassist who had played with Dolphy, a studio in New York, two sessions in the autumn of 1968 — that has not and cannot recur. Morrison made Moondance two years later and it is a great record. He never made Astral Weeks again. Start with Madame George, if you can get that far without stopping at Cyprus Avenue.