We were raw, exposed, each of us with our own little handful of trauma.
We each had wide eyes and a penchant for feeling things so intensely we didn’t always know how to manage ourselves. I was living on the second floor of a lovely, dingy house with two other girls. At that time my thoughts were about as mystical and vague as Van’s seemed to be: I liked to think that the record could show me how to live, how to be in the world.
I was in college when I started listening to Astral Weeks. Walsh’s new book, Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968, he “planned, shaped and rehearsed” the songs that became the record Astral Weeks, which is my favorite record in the entire world. Before the night was over, he’d picked up an acoustic guitar and smashed it down over Morrison’s head.įor reasons not entirely unrelated, Morrison soon fled New York for Boston where, according to Ryan H. Van was short-tempered and drunk, and Wassel was Wassel. One night, Wassel went to see Van Morrison at his hotel. “I throw open the window, pick him up, flip him, shake him out by the ankles. “So here’s this disc jockey,” he said in 2001. When bribery failed, he used other means. When Van Morrison’s producer died abruptly of a heart attack at the end of 1967, Morrison’s contact at Bang Records became Carmine “Wassel” DeNoia, a “low level” mobster later convicted of bribing radio DJs to play certain records more heavily than others.
