Most readers will likely not have the same experience reading Astral Weeks as I did, however. I have a hard time imagining faces and locales in detail when I’m reading-having walked in or past or even having been inside the sets of these (sometimes legendary) scenes made the book come alive to me in a way that few books have. It’s an enthralling, if somewhat scattered, story-doubly captivating if you live where all the events took place.Īstral Weeks is highly accessible and, to a degree, intimate. Lyman and Morrison are the locus of a story that weaves itself in and around the Velvet Underground, LSD pioneer and former Harvard professor Timothy Leary, the ill-fated Boston Sound, LSD, Jonathan Richmond, LSD, the Boston Strangler, actor Steve McQueen (AKA “The King of Cool), LSD, the infamous flop Zabriskie Point, bank heists (both real and fictional), and a nark named Dapper O’Neil.

The book is more about musician and commune (read “cult”) leader Mel Lyman and his Family that lived atop Fort Hill in Roxbury and ran the underground paper, The Avatar. He figures heavily in the introduction and conclusion and makes periodic reappearances, but it is Boston’s countercultural history that takes the main focus. The title and tagline about Van Morrison are a false lead, however. Three years later, and he’s released his frenetic and captivating portrait of 1968 in Boston’s musical history, Morrison and all. Walsh first wrote about Van Morrison’s Boston year for Boston magazine in 2015. I would come to learn that I knew hardly anything at all. I thought I knew all I needed to about Van Morrison’s time in Boston, until I started Astral Weeks A Secret History of 1968, the new novel by Ryan H. in Cambridgeport, and playing at the now-legendary (and defunct) Boston Tea Party in the South End and the Catacombs in the Fenway.

” I read about Van’s year of 1968, which he spent playing music in poverty in Boston, living on Green St. That same summer, I discovered the music of Van Morrison and whiled away the time reading everything I could about him: I read about Morrison’s start in the band Them, and his early brush with pop success with “ Brown Eyed Girl. On the bright side, it was a job with a lot of downtime. A few years ago, I had the very exciting job of answering phones at a student loan company.

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