Walsh unearths the album's fascinating backstory-along with the untold secrets of the time and place that birthed it: Boston 1968. In his first book, acclaimed musician and journalist Ryan H. 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. Van Morrison is important to the larger story Walsh wants to tell about questers and malcontents in the Boston area, but really only as one signpost of the confusion of the moment - a miserable young man (a 'stranger in this world' is what the narrator calls himself on Astral Weeks’s first song) struggling to find his own voice amid the cacophony.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 It is a mistake, though, to imagine that Walsh intends for all of these smaller set pieces to add up to some master tale of 'How Astral Weeks Came to Be.' This book works, rather, as a sort of decentered collective biography. In this book, Walsh facilitates a long overdue reading of Morrison and his early work in the appropriate hardscrabble context.
Walsh does a strong job of dramatizing the interpersonal tensions informing the album’s creation, adding grit and depth to a story often transmitted with a more facile investment in the notion of individual genius.
In Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968, Ryan eat the work as a social text, an LP that can be 'read' as a legible part of a career, a cultural moment, a scene, a product of an industry with recognizable protocols.
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