![]() ![]() Walsh, who describes the summer evening as having taken on a funeral-like feeling after Dylan’s heavy-electric shenanigans, focuses on a skinny mouth-harp player named Mel Lyman. Walsh starts his book where so many sixties stories begin: The 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where Bob Dylan plugged in and the folk purists tuned out. ![]() Record companies looking for the next Liverpool or San Francisco had found a new place - some called it the “Bosstown” sound. By the time the 22-year-old Morrison arrived in nearby Cambridge with his wife, the folkies had ceded ground to the freaks. Though the album was recorded in New York, its roots are in Boston, a city home to a flourishing folk-music scene in the early 1960s. For Rolling Stone, Greil Marcus wrote that the music was not rock and roll in any ordinary or hyphenated sense: “What might seem arty at first proves to be a new place to go, a new kind of music to hear.” None of all that would have prepared anyone for Astral Weeks, a jazzy, free-flowing song cycle of cryptic lyrics, jasmine-scented notions and acoustic-orchestral situations. In 1967, as a solo artist, he scored big with the single Brown Eyed Girl. In the mid-1960s, while with the Irish band Them, he had hits with Bert Berns’s Here Comes the Night, Big Joe Williams’s Baby Please Don’t Go and his own garage-rock classic, Gloria. Speaking of context, Astral Weeks was the second solo album by Morrison, a now-legendary hot-tempered Belfast-born soulster with mercurial inspirations and a crabby disposition. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |