in 1979, ten years after van morrison released his seminal (!) album, Astral Weeks, lester bangs wrote a very personal and illuminating review of it. understandably, bangs is completely taken with the album and refers to it as the album with the most significance as of yet in his life. i'm not really up for epic decisions right now, so i can't say the same other than its been one of my favorite albums since i discovered it the summer before senior year in high school. in the piece, instead of trying to explain the songs, bangs simply attempts to recognize the universal empathy ridden in the album that was written by the artist when he was just 22 or 23. anyway, he concludes with a juxtaposition of poets that i really enjoyed:
If I ventured in the slipstream
Between the viaducts of your dreams
Where the mobile steel rims crack
And the ditch and the backroads stop
Could you find me
Would you kiss my eyes
And lay me down
In silence easy
To be born again
- Van Morrison
My heart of silk
is filled with lights,
with lost bells,
with lilies and bees.
I will go very far,
father than those hills,
farther than the seas,
close to the stars,
to beg Christ the Lord
to give back the soul I had
of old, when I was a child,
ripened with legends,
with a feathered cap
and a wooden sword.
- Federico Garcia Lorca
'Astral Weeks' by Lester Bangs.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
i met richard davis (the bass player on astral weeks) at a party a while back and had to ask him about the making of this album. it sounds like they're all sitting around a fire in some rustic cabin, sipping port between takes. in fact, the guy said that van was so shy he wouldn't even talk to the band and that the band basically recorded all their tracks in a couple of days in new york with van nowhere to be seen.
whatever, still a great album....
anandamide.wordpress.com
Post a Comment