![]() Van, a singer/songwriter from East Belfast and his band, Them, attracted the attention of Bang Records in New York where Van, barely out of his teens, recorded his songs, “Brown-Eyed Girl” and “Gloria,” two hits that set of the phenomena of Celtic Rock and garage bands. And, there’s something else: Boston was the birthplace of a record, ignored when released, but now considered one of the greatest in music, always on the list of All Time Top 10 Record Albums, the “sacred text of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” “the mystical document,” Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks. The book goes on tangents, both amusing and scary, featuring Timothy Leary, Mel Lyman’s commune, the Boston Strangler, astral projection, Viet Nam, Harvard, Ram Das, a bank robbery and LSD all over the place. Walsh argues that Boston, usually associated with prudery, academia, and beans, had, in 1968, just as much sex, drugs and Rock n’ Roll as anywhere else during that fevered year. Author Ryan Walsh takes Van’s frantic story of “another time, another place” and folds it into the radical zeitgeist of Boston Cambridge in Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968. In 1968, Van Morrison was on the lam from the mob and hiding in Boston. ![]() ![]() The birth, re-birth, and enduring legacy of Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks.
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