“I did not endorse this, it is unauthorised and it has happened behind my back,” the artist wrote. When Rhino announced, in 2013, that it would issue a “Deluxe Edition” re-release of Van Morrison’s Moondance album, Morrison published this scathing protest on his website. It’s not hard to read between the lines of what Woolard was trying to get at. “So far, artist relations have come between making that a reality,” Steve Woolard from Rhino Records said, somewhat diplomaticaly, in an email back in December of 2014. But only one person I spoke to had an actual answer to my question. Others had vested interests in hearing the sessions’ outtakes. Many of the people I spoke to were pleased it had been left untouched.
Elvis Costello called it ‘the most adventurous record made in the rock medium.’ Legendary music critic Lester Bangs declared it the most significant record in his life, a ‘mystical document.”Īnd yet, Astral Weeks has gone decades without a significant update. Philip Seymour Hoffman quoted it in his Oscar acceptance speech. Martin Scorsese claims the first 15 minutes of Taxi Driver are based on it. One question I tried to ask everyone was, “Why hasn’t the album ever been remastered and re-released in an expanded edition?” After all, reissues of classic albums-usually accompanied by outtakes and demo versions-are one of the last sure things in the old, decrepit part of the record industry that involves people buying music.Īstral Weeks is regarded, as I wrote in April, “ as one of the best albums in the rock ’n’ roll canon.
In the course of my reporting, I attempted to track down everyone who was involved with the album’s creation-and reached almost everyone, except the reclusive Van himself-to tell the story of the wild circumstances that led Morrison to compose its songs in an apartment on Green Street in Central Square.
Astral Weeks Cover by John Keogh on FlickrĮarlier this year, I wrote about the Boston and Cambridge roots of Van Morrison’s psych-rock masterpiece, Astral Weeks.
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