"I wanted to do it around the singing, and it had to be kind of jazzy, because that's the way I'm singing it," Morrison told NPR in 2009. Still, years later, Morrison maintained that he wasn't necessarily trying to make a jazz-rock fusion album. If they had set up to make this holy album that we'd be talking about 50 years later, they would probably have practiced for weeks and rolled out the red carpet - and it probably would have failed." There's an element of accident, or happenstance, to this. "I think so much of it is just this beautiful train wreck of so many different people working on it with no rehearsals. "He just showed them the compositions, and then they all just spat out those beautiful songs."
They were confused by him, (wondering), 'Who is this guy?'" Walsh said. "Van barely even said hello to these guys. He met his band on the first day of recording. (The album’s percussionist, Warren Smith, recently talked to Rolling Stone as well.On producer Lewis Merenstein's insistence, a (begrudging) Morrison took the unusual step of hiring a group of jazz musicians such as Connie Kay of the Modern Jazz Quartet and bassist Richard Davis. Musician John Payne, who played flute and some saxophone on the album, also calls in to the show explain what making it was actually like.
Geils Band’s Peter Wolf to Morrison’s childhood out-of-body experiences to the editing of his then-girlfriend Janet Planet to the general madness of Boston in 1968. On our Rolling Stone Music Now podcast, Walsh broke down the unlikely backstory of one of the greatest albums ever made – with influences ranging from the J. Walsh’s excellent recent book Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968 reveals, Morrison actually conceived the album in - of all places - Boston, Massachusetts, where he was essentially hiding out after leaving behind the record deal that yielded “Brown Eyed Girl” the previous year. If the mystic wanderings of Van Morrison’s 1968 masterpiece Astral Weeks have any geographic setting at all, it’s their creator’s native Belfast, and, of course, the viaducts of his dreams.
0 kommentar(er)
