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Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968

Ryan H. Walsh (Goodreads Author)

3.67 · Rating details · 838 ratings · 161 reviews

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

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 Scorse ...more

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Hardcover, 368 pages

Published March 6th 2018 by Penguin Press

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Mar 31, 2018 Faith rated it it was ok

Shelves: audio, overdrive, publisher, dnf

I don't know for whom this book is intended. The title is clearly designed to lure fans of Van Morrison, and the lure worked on me. However, there is actually very little about Morrison and his work in this book. Instead there is a lot of random information about people and events in Boston around the same time that Morrison was there. There are gangsters, a folk music cult, happenings, psychedelic public television, a bank robbery and LSD. I couldn't have cared less about any of it and abandone ...more

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Mar 30, 2018 Andrea rated it really liked it

I did not expect it to be so beautifully written.

Background: I graduated HS in the summer of 1968 in a town nearby to Boston and hid in my room and lived thru my radio. I visualized a lot of this since I could not get to Boston then.

The story is really more about Boston popular culture in 1968 than about Van Morrison.

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Jul 02, 2018 Jennifer Ozawa rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: sixties, 5-stars, 2018, pop-culture, kindle, nonfiction, rock-n-roll, true-crime, northeast

I found this book utterly riveting. I had no idea about the Lyman compound or any of the bands profiled here. The best nonfiction books feel like stories, and this one did.

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Apr 05, 2018 Jack Saltzberg rated it it was amazing

What do The Jim Kweskin Jug Band, The Velvet Underground, Van Morrison, the Mob, The Bosstown sound, and an LSD based cult have in common? They were all active in Boston in 1968.
I, like many others, read this because I thought it was going to be about the making of the album Astral Weeks. While it is touches on Van preparing to make that album, it is really about the underground scene in Boston. While that year in San Francisco has been extensively written about, this is kind of an untold story ...more

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Sep 10, 2018 Annie rated it it was ok

Shelves: let-s-get-high, microhistories

Guys, my phone's notes that were recording my thoughts on this book (read on a long train ride several weeks ago, I've been lazy about reviews) got accidentally deleted. So this will be a real short review.

Basically, it was adequate for what it was, but ultimately the people written about are a bunch of sociopathic wankers and I'm not altogether interested in their lives (I only read this because it's set in Boston, where I live, and I've seen a lot of excited reviews about it). The musicians an ...more

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Jan 20, 2018 Christine rated it liked it

Shelves: first-reads

I received a free copy of this book from Goodreads Giveaways.

There were so many interesting stories and back stories in this book, that it either needed to be longer or to shorten its scope. The Fort Hill Community alone could have taken up the entire book, as could Van Morrison and his time in Boston. Trying to mash them together, though in time period they really were in sync, does them both a disservice. Then you throw in everything else that was happening at around the same time--Dylan goes ...more

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Apr 08, 2018 Whitney rated it really liked it

Shelves: non-fiction, i-own

This book talked about a LOT of things I love. I did want to hear a little more about the general population and their experience of Boston in 1968 in contrast to the hippies and cult members and musicians he talks about here. The chapter on movies and the Boston strangler was my favorite because of that bigger picture stuff.

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Jul 24, 2018 Barbara rated it liked it

Shelves: 2018-reads, non-fiction, on-my-shelves, boston

I got this book because I am an epic fan of the album Astral Weeks, and Van Morrison. I didn't know that it was almost entirely a history of Boston, a city I know and love in 1968. If I knew Morrison lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts at some point, I'd forgotten. So what is there not to love about this book - plenty.

As other reviewers have noted, this is not a book about Astral Weeks, and Morrison. The first chapter and the final chapter do focus on the man and the album, and throughout the book ...more

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Apr 29, 2018 Martin rated it liked it

I enjoyed the book but the title is a misnomer. It is a collection of chapters on the various counterculture happenings in Boston in 1968. It spends a lot more time on the Mel Lyman cult than it does on Astral Weeks but it is never less than interesting.

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Mar 09, 2018 Matt rated it liked it

Shelves: contemporary, biography, historyonics-american, musique

My friend just wrote this one up: http://artsfuse.org/168480/book-music...

And so did I, for The Baffler (!!!): https://thebaffler.com/latest/lost-in... ...more

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Mar 03, 2019 Jennifer rated it really liked it

I give this a 4 only because the writing, at times, was a bit "uneven". What a fascinating book! Right here in my back yard such WILD things were happening 51 years ago! From great "hippie" music (Bosstown Sound, WBCN), to a burgeoning study of the supernatural, to an "upscale" cult in Roxbury that STILL exists and warranted a cover story in Rolling Stone in the day, to, of course, Van Morrison's "oeuvre" as referenced in the title and conceived and recorded right in Cambridge. Let's see, what a ...more

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Sep 27, 2019 Marti rated it really liked it

Shelves: scenes, music

If I ever heard Van Morrison's Astral Weeks album, I am not aware of it; being more of a fan of the Them period. However, I was motivated to buy this book because I lived in Boston in 1968. Even though I was six, the weirdness of the place came through loud and clear.

Turns out Van Morrison's brief sojourn in Boston dovetailed with a lot of strange happenings at the time, most notably that many of the musicians who played with him were part of this Manson-esque "family" living in Roxboro called " ...more

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Sep 04, 2019 Bob Schnell rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: outsiders-freaks-and-charlatans, music-scenes

A cursory glance at the jacket of "Astral Weeks" by Ryan H. Walsh might lead you to believe that it is centered around Van Morrison's time in Boston. While that is partly true, you don't have to be a fan of Van Morrison to enjoy the book. The author did extensive research to pull together all of the disparate elements of Boston underground society that combined to make 1968 memorable. From the Velvet Underground's residency at the Boston Tea Party to the Harvard LSD experiments and the commune a ...more

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Jul 27, 2018 Darcia Helle rated it liked it

Shelves: culture-sociology, review-copies, nonfiction, music

This book is weird, interesting, disjointed, and probably not what you expect.

First, if you're a Van Morrison fan and you're expecting this book to center around him and the 'Astral Weeks' album, you'll be disappointed. What we have is a hodgepodge of stuff going on in the Boston area during the year Van Morrison lived in Cambridge. The author attempts to tie Van Morrison's presence and the album into everything else, or maybe the other way around, but it doesn't work. Van Morrison and the maki This book is weird, interesting, disjointed, and probably not what you expect.

First, if you're a Van Morrison fan and you're expecting this book to center around him and the 'Astral Weeks' album, you'll be disappointed. What we have is a hodgepodge of stuff going on in the Boston area during the year Van Morrison lived in Cambridge. The author attempts to tie Van Morrison's presence and the album into everything else, or maybe the other way around, but it doesn't work. Van Morrison and the making of the album is actually a small part of this book, in part because his time in Cambridge was mostly irrelevant to the songs. You'll find almost all this content in the opening and closing sections, with tidbits and conjecture sprinkled now and then throughout the rest of the book.

What this book really amounts to is an overview of everything that was happening in and around Boston in 1968. It feels like Walsh took a series of articles he'd written, grasped for a common thread that would get attention, and then crammed it all together.

The major focus is actually on Mel Lyman, a musician who claimed to be God, and the small Fort Hill cult he organized. Even that aspect, however, is told in a haphazard way, in bits and pieces throughout, with no coherence to the storytelling method.

Other topics touched on include music groups that either came from or wound up in Boston in 1968, including quite a bit about The Velvet Underground; true crime stories such as The Boston Strangler; movies and producers, including The Thomas Crown Affair; the Harvard Psilocybin Project, MK-Ultra experiments, Leary, Richard Alpert, and Andrew Weil; and a section about the Bridgewater State Prison for the Criminally Insane and a documentary made there (which was actually filmed in 1966.) The book is only 304 pages without the end notes, so that's a whole lot of content jammed into a short space.

I found much of the content interesting because I grew up south of Boston, in the town of Bridgewater, not far from the prison. I was only 6 in 1968, so I don't remember any of this from personal experience, but the shadow of it all remained throughout my childhood. If you have no interest in the area, then I'm not sure this book will hold much appeal at all.

*The publisher provided me with a review copy, via Amazon Vine, in exchange for my honest review.* ...more

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Apr 30, 2018 John Spiller rated it really liked it

Before purchasing "Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968" by Ryan Walsh, you need to know a few things. (Don't worry, there's no spoilers.) First, it is not one of those book length explorations of the making of a classic rock album in the style of the 33 1/3 Series. Yes, Walsh explores how Van Morrison came to record "Astral Weeks," but it more of a point of departure than the crux. Second, this is not a book length exploration of a given year, a la Jon Savage's "1966". I didn't keep count, bu Before purchasing "Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968" by Ryan Walsh, you need to know a few things. (Don't worry, there's no spoilers.) First, it is not one of those book length explorations of the making of a classic rock album in the style of the 33 1/3 Series. Yes, Walsh explores how Van Morrison came to record "Astral Weeks," but it more of a point of departure than the crux. Second, this is not a book length exploration of a given year, a la Jon Savage's "1966". I didn't keep count, but it seemed that Walsh spent more time before or after 1968 than he did in the titular year in question. Third, "Astral Weeks" jump cuts and free associates in a way that will likely annoy folks looking for a fairly linear chronicle.

Putting aside the doubly misleading book title and the somewhat discursive narrative, is "Astral Weeks" worth reading? I enjoyed it, but I tend to be indulgent of these hippy-dippy Aquarian-age cultural histories. Perhaps a more accurate book title would have been "Mondo Boston," as Walsh spends most of the book documenting the various weirdos and weird scenes in Boston in the late 1960's. The malign center of the book is musician and cult leader Mel Lyman. Lyman was a banjo and harmonica player in the Jim Kweskin Jug Band whose weird charisma and messianic tendencies led to the formation of the Fort Hill Community, a more upscale and successful variant on the Manson Family. For me at least, Walsh's extended treatment of Lyman and the Fort Hill Community were the highlights of the book and easily eclipsed the sections discussing surly ol' Van Morrison. One hopes that Walsh would take a stab at the definitive account of the secretive -- and surprisingly still extant -- Fort Hill Community.

Walsh covers a lot of territory, which leads to cursory and perfunctory treatment of stories that probably warranted more space. I frequently had the sense that Walsh was giving us the outtakes from bigger stories (Boston Strangler, Leary/Alpert, the Velvet Underground, Jonathan Richman) that had been covered more extensively by others.

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Apr 07, 2018 Jason Rabin rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Not just a deep dive into the Boston origins of Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, but a mosaic of the music and cultural scene surrounding them--centered in 1968, with flashbacks, flash forwards and on-theme digressions. As a participant in the local music scene who wasn't yet born in 1968 but very much lives in its aftermath, I can say that my understanding has been greatly expanded by this colorful, insightful and well-researched piece of rock journalism. The word "Astral" itself has new rippling s ...more

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Apr 12, 2018 Glenn rated it liked it

Shelves: nonfiction

This is a (too?) detailed account of events that occurred in Boston/Cambridge in 1968. A chapter is devoted to each of: the end of the folk scene, Van Morrison's band, the groundbreaking TV show "What's Happening Mr. Silver?", the opening of the Boston Tea Party, the start of WBCN, the James Brown concert the night after MLK was killed, the "Spiritualist" movement in Boston, and more. Many many chapters concern Mel Lyman's Fort Hill Community and the "Avatar" newspaper. Finally, there's a chapte ...more

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Mar 18, 2018 Tad Richards rated it really liked it

You might expect a book that takes Van Morrison’s legendary album title for its own, and suggests that it will be about Morrison’s time in Boston creating this breakthrough music, to actually be about that.
The bad news is that if that’s what the book is supposed to be about, it does get a little lost in digressions.
The very good news is that the digressions—Boston’s counterculture in the year of Counterculture ascendant—are far more interesting than a linear book about Van Morrison and the ma ...more

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Mar 20, 2020 Paige Morse rated it it was amazing

This book was so interesting to me as a college student. It takes a specific album, then zooms out to contextualize the time and place surrounding it. Interwoven into the story of Astral Weeks are fascinating stories that happened in Boston in 1968. As a Massachusetts native, I found these stories incredibly interesting. I’d recommend the book to classic rock fans, history fans, Boston natives, and college students interested in cultural history. As an American Studies major at college, I would ...more

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Jul 04, 2018 Jerome rated it liked it

Shelves: nonfiction

Primarily enjoyable for its evocation of a time and place, dominated by the cult-like Fort Hill Community in Boston, the hallucinogenic 60's of Timothy Leary, and to a lesser extent, the recording of Van Morrison's Astral Weeks. The writing style is well-paced and the interviews with Peter Wolf and Lewis Merenstein are illuminating regarding the year Van Morrison spent playing in Boston and recording this album. There are interesting coincidences and appearances by other celebrities or artists w ...more

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Feb 22, 2019 Joe rated it it was ok

Didn’t care for the book that much. Save yourself the time and just read Lester Bangs’ transcendental review of Astral Weeks:

Van Morrison's Astral Weeks was released ten years, almost to the day, before this was written. It was particularly important to me because the fall of 1968 was such a terrible time: I was a physical and mental wreck, nerves shredded and ghosts and spiders looming and squatting across the mind. My social contacts had dwindled to almost none; the presence of other people ma ...more

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Jun 10, 2020 Doug Birkitt rated it really liked it

i thoroughly enjoyed this book. so many cool interweaving stories in boston circa 68. highly recommend. also, an excellent companion read is Love Goes To Buildings on Fire.

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Apr 20, 2018 Eric rated it really liked it

Originally a smaller piece on Van Morrison & his time in Boston during the summer of 1968 leading to his recording in the fall, in New York City, the landmark record album of the title. Those stories are fantastic & thrilling to read, evoking a Boston & Cambridge from another world. Many stretches make for riveting reading, including Walsh's odd encounter with local legend Peter Wolf, Van's old chum from the time, and the tales of other area band members. Unfortunately, to expand the article int ...more

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May 29, 2018 Rebecca rated it liked it

Shelves: biographies, music, celebrities, 2018, boston, history

Other reviewers have already said much of what I agree with. I was lured in by the title, expecting more about Van Morrison than what I got. Reading the Epilogue I realized that the author original wrote a shorter piece and then expanded it to a full book. Also the writer had a whole team of college student workers helping with the research. The bibliography and the list of interviews is long. The book is more about Mel Lyman I think than it is about Van Morrison.

That being said I was born just ...more

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Jun 23, 2018 Matt Fitz rated it really liked it

Born in 1968, I only discovered Van Morrison in my late teens in the 80s and felt like my parents' generation did me a disservice. That's what lured me to this book about 1968. Interesting look at not only Van Morrison, but the whole Boston music and scene, marketed as the "Bosstown Sound, which promoted the blend of psychedelic and folk rock scene. T. My disappointment with this book was it's lack of clarity and focus. It seemed more like a series of loosely connected articles about just how di ...more

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Mar 21, 2018 Jay Gabler rated it liked it

Not for the casual fan of Van the Man, but people who love Astral Weeks (the album) or follow the Boston music scene will appreciate this detailed history. I reviewed Astral Weeks (the book) for The Current. ...more

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Jan 05, 2019 Tom Killeen rated it it was amazing

This book is incredible. As a music fan and lover of history,this combines the two for one magnificent ride through the year of 1968, See how Van Morrison,Peter Wolf,Velvet Underground,Timothy Leary all converge in Boston,while the world is boiling with rage and new discoveries.Highly recommend! Ryan Walsh has worked his ass off and the end result is a gem.

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Feb 06, 2019 Paul Wilner rated it it was ok

He’s done a lot of research but this doesn’t work. The only great (or good) Boston musicians are the J Geils band. Van crashed there for awhile and wrote a great album, but he’s an Irishman. The Velvets played the Tea Party a lot but they’re a New York band, always and forever. Mel Lyman was a dangerous asshole and his followers were foolish dupes. Hard pass, unfortunately.

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Aug 07, 2020 Peter rated it really liked it

Shelves: american-writers, cultural-history, history, 2010s, 20th-century, boston, 1945-1979, music, counterculture

Van Morrison’s second solo album, “Astral Weeks,” seems to come out of nowhere. Those accustomed to the overplay of “Brown Eyed Girl” on oldies radio and assuming that’s what Morrison is all about — even if they like that version — are in for a surprise if they turn on “Astral Weeks.” Better essayists than me, most notably rock critic legend Lester Bangs, have already expanded at length on the album’s musical qualities, with a lot of words like “transcendent” thrown around. It really is worth yo Van Morrison’s second solo album, “Astral Weeks,” seems to come out of nowhere. Those accustomed to the overplay of “Brown Eyed Girl” on oldies radio and assuming that’s what Morrison is all about — even if they like that version — are in for a surprise if they turn on “Astral Weeks.” Better essayists than me, most notably rock critic legend Lester Bangs, have already expanded at length on the album’s musical qualities, with a lot of words like “transcendent” thrown around. It really is worth your while to give it a listen.

One of the things that provokes discussion about the album is the contrast between the art and the artist. It’s not that anyone’s surprised that Van Morrison could create something like that on a talent level- from his early work with Them, everyone knew Morrison had talent. The contrast is between the emotional range of the album and that presented by Van Morrison the person, and much of his subsequent work. In short, “Astral Weeks” is a deeply felt, empathetic piece of work, and Van Morrison was and is… a piece of work. He himself has spent the last fifty years insisting “Astral Weeks” isn’t representative of his work or personal in any way. He’s something of a sour old man and always was, even when he was making brilliant music in his early twenties. This wasn’t rock and roll grandiosity, great talent and great failings (and great stories); he was just a low-grade, petty prick to everyone around him. You don’t need to believe great souls make great art but… the going theory seems to be that Morrison got in touch with something around the time he made “Astral Weeks.” Some of the magic lasted into subsequent albums, but it was mostly gone with a few years, and he never touched anything like it again, and it burnt something out of him.

Musician and music journalist Ryan Walsh puts forward the novel idea that there could be a Boston connection to that “something” Morrison touched in this book. It’s notionally about the album, but really it’s an attempt to summon a gestalt. Boston isn’t commonly thought of as one of the epicenters of “the sixties” as a phenomenon, but Walsh makes the argument here that maybe it should?

There’s a few different strains of narrative he follows and tries to string together. Van Morrison was indeed in Boston in 1968, Cambridge more precisely, trying to get out of a bad record contract, playing gigs, and writing the material that would go into “Astral Weeks.” He was attracted in part by the Cambridge folk revival scene, which was in collapse by then and an erstwhile member of which, Mel Lyman, was setting up a folk-music-labor-and-sex cult in Roxbury, the Fort Hill Community (or Lyman Family). This all sort of came together around the creation of the Family-backed Boston Tea Party, a concert venue which became a favorite for the Velvet Underground among others. There was a lot of psychedelic stuff going on, from Timothy Leary’s early experiments at Harvard to trippy public tv on WGBH to the countercultural press — like the Fort Hill Community’s magazine “Avatar” — pushing the envelope and getting in free speech fights. There was also the more earth-bound concerns of the time, and Walsh retells the story of how the Boston mayor’s office got James Brown to play a special concert to help keep the kids occupied and not rioting after the MLK assassination.

A reader expecting solely a deep dive into Van Morrison’s world and process might be disappointed by how much of the book isn’t really about him, but Walsh does get the goods in terms of tracking down his collaborators. He also paints a vivid picture of Boston’s music scene at the time, when record company people tried and crashingly failed to promote a “Boston Sound” as a geographical counterpoint to a San Francisco seen as fading out. He gets seemingly every old Boston rock hand talking. One person Walsh doesn’t talk to is Morrison himself. I have it on reasonably good information from a friend of the author that Walsh didn’t even bother to try, knowing that “Van the Man” has driven numerous other rock journalists, like his biographer Clinton Heylin, to distraction and hostility with his evasions and crabbiness.

How successfully does Walsh summon his Boston 1968 gestalt? Does it get across the emotional overtones he wants it to? He’s reasonably successful, I’d say. You don’t get quite the sense of cosmic connection out of the coincidences and crossed paths Walsh documents that you do out of “Astral Weeks,” but it’s harder to do that kind of thing with prose nonfiction. I’m not sure I buy the notion of “Astral Weeks” as a “Boston album.” Yes, Morrison developed the songs in Boston. But he recorded them in New York, with the vital backup of New York jazz session musicians. More importantly, the songs themselves reflect Morrison’s youth in Belfast. “Astral Weeks” has been called the last culturally significant portrait of Belfast before the Troubles. But this, thankfully, is not a thesis heavy book. Mostly, you just sort of take in the gestalt, and Walsh’s efforts to reconstruct it. ****’
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Oct 31, 2018 Ollie rated it it was amazing

There are many questions floating around in my head after reading Astral Weeks. Near the top are “Should I finally put in the time with Van Morisson’s Astral Weeks” and “How did I miss all this!”.

Astral Weeks is more than just history, it deserves to be studied. And really, you shouldn’t complain because Ryan Walsh did all the hard work for you. In this deceptively dense book, Walsh focuses on a particular location at a particular time: Boston in 1968. What could possibly be occurring there that There are many questions floating around in my head after reading Astral Weeks. Near the top are “Should I finally put in the time with Van Morisson’s Astral Weeks” and “How did I miss all this!”.

Astral Weeks is more than just history, it deserves to be studied. And really, you shouldn’t complain because Ryan Walsh did all the hard work for you. In this deceptively dense book, Walsh focuses on a particular location at a particular time: Boston in 1968. What could possibly be occurring there that would interest any music fan? Well for one, a religious cult was being formed, one that has remained alive after 50 years and that surprisingly few people have heard about. Also, Van Morisson was walking the streets of this city trying to reinvent himself and assembling a crew of local musicians to help make it happen. The electric foundation for one of the most celebrated acoustic albums of all time was being laid in Cambridge on Green Street. Also, the Velvet Underground was frequently playing the Boston Tea Party in what they called their favorite venue. Also, a subversive new talk show called What’s Happening, Mr Silver was blowing minds. Also, Boston was deeply invested in creating a new Bosstown sound that was as comically overblown as grunge. Also, James Brown was getting ready to play his first concert since the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr and the whole city was expecting riots.

Through it all I keep thinking to myself, “Wait… really!?”

I’m not a music expert but I’m no piece of shit either. I’m serious about my music and consume it partly for joy and partly for educational purposes. And I had no idea about any of these things. Its not like I’d heard about it but never looked into it, even. This all comes as news to me.
As I mentioned earlier, Walsh has managed to do the heavy lifting for us, in a job that took years, and might just be thankless. But it takes Walsh’s dedication and skill to tell such an intriguing story. And intriguing it is. He’s left no stone uncovered and gets the perspective of all the important players in the narrative (like Jonathan Richman and Peter Wolf) to give us an insider’s account of what happened. Throughout Astral Weeks, Walsh manages to highlight these events in Boston and tell you just enough backstory to put it into perspective. His writing is lucid, attractive, and flows beautifully and it becomes clear after the first chapter that he’s a journalist worth putting your faith in.

Astral Weeks is required reading for anyone even daring to call themselves a music fan. And if you’re a Boston resident, it’s absolutely essential.
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