Ryan H. Walsh, _Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968_

IF YOU HAVE not, you should read Quest for Corvo by A.J.A. Symons, even if you are not much interested in either its author (a relatively minor man of letters from interwar Britain) or his subject (a deeply eccentric late Victorian novelist, Frederick Rolfe, pen name "Baron Corvo"), because the book's method creates its own interest. Rather than research Rolfe and write an ordinary birth-to-death biography, Symons begins the book with his discovery of one of Rolfe's novels, then narrates his own deepening and widening research into who Rolfe was and what became of him. The book gradually evokes a whole moment, a peculiar English sub-culture of the 1890s. It's the Citizen Kane of biographies.

Walsh's book has a comparable approach, which is why you should not think of it, quite, as a book about the brilliant Van Morrison album from which it derives its title. Walsh writes of his introduction to it by the woman he later married, an dog his learning that the album was mostly written while Morrison was living in Boston in 1968, trying to stay clear of the organized crime elements in and around his American label, Bang Records. Walsh hears rumors that recordings exist of early versions of the album's songs, as performed around Boston and Cambridge by Van and a small group of local musicians, and he sets out to track them down.

This search branches out, though, into the whole counter-cultural underground of Boston and Cambridge circa 1965-68. Presumably, this is a mapping of the cultural context from which Morrison's album emerged, but it quickly becomes fascinating for its own sake. We encounter Timothy Leary, a ground-breaking local public television show, the Velvet Underground (who played a club called the Boston Tea Party much more often than they played any venue in New York), the Velvets' diehard young local fan Jonathan Richman, James Brown's role in preventing a riot breaking out on the night of MLK's assassination...and, especially, Mel Lyman.

Lyman was a member of Jim Kweskin's Jug Band, the missing link between the folk revival and hippiedom, and also a self-appointed guru who led a commune with cult-ish overtones. The commune put out a remarkable underground paper--Avatar--but became increasingly self-absorbed and defensive. This story winds up getting perhaps a few thousand more words in the text than Van Morrison does, but that's hardly a fault. It uncannily evokes the atmosphere of a certain part of the United States during the late sixties.

Walsh does nonetheless illuminate Astral Weeks, though. He did not interview Van Morrison--perhaps not much of a disadvantage, seeing as Van the Man says something different about the album every time he talks about it--but he did interview Janet Planet (Morrison's life-partner at that time), producer Lewis Merenstein (who picked all the session musicians), the musicians with whom Morrison developed the songs in Boston, and a few of the session men themselves. The heart of the album's mystery is not laid bare--it never will be, I imagine--but its incandescence is heightened a little by what Walsh discovers, and that is an accomplishment.

Insofar as the book is advancing the thesis that something going on in Boston around 1968 determined the shape of Astral Weeks, I would have to say the case is not entirely made. For all the intriguing connections Walsh brings out--that Lou Reed was a reader of Alice Bailey's Treatise on White Magic, for example--the threads are too loose and various to be pulled together into a fabric. That hardly matters, though. A book as smart, as passionate, as observant, as tellingly written as this one does not have to prove anything to be worth reading.