Yesterday was a good day for Van Morrison completists.

Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks is one of the most important and most special albums of the 1960s. The album was recorded in New York in September/October 1968 and released a few weeks later. Morrison composed the music in Boston during the summer of 1968, and a series of gigs at a venue called the Catacombs, located at at 1120 Boylston Street in the Fenway, proved pivotal to the process.

One of the gigs during that run at the Catacombs was recorded, but the tapes have never been heard by the public.

Until yesterday, that is.

The Catacombs tapes document a show from August 1968. A Boston musician and writer named Ryan Walsh has spent years trying to find them; for obvious reasons the tapes became known as “the Catacombs tapes.” Peter Wolf told Walsh that he had the Catacombs tapes in his possession but had not listened to them for years. He added that a person would have to “bake the tapes” before they could be played; that is, a specialist Wolf knew in Maine would have to literally bake the tapes in an oven, a process that would enable the tapes to withstand playback without disintegrating or being shredded.

Walsh made the Catacombs tapes a pivotal part of a book on Morrison he released earlier this year called Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968. As Walsh pertinently asks in his book, “What did the Astral Weeks songs sound like before producer Lewis Merenstein’s jazz ringers got hold of them?”

Good question.

Yesterday Walsh posted a remarkable series of tweets discussing the decision by Morrison to release the Catacombs tapes on iTunes UK for the likely purpose of retaining copyright to them. Here is that tweetstorm:
 

This is totally bananas.

Today, @vanmorrison unceremoniously released the ‘68 “Catacombs Tapes” as a live album on iTunes UK. This is the legendary recording I spend the whole #AstralWeeks1968 book trying to track down & hear…and, uh, now YOU can too! https://apple.co/2ASrhOL

1) The most sensical interpretation of the terrible cover art & UK-digital-only distribution is that this release is a “copyright dump,” i.e. its main function is to preserve Morrison’s copyright of the recording (otherwise, come January, it would become public domain).

2) Tom and John (the Boston musicians who appear on this recording) let me know they signed releases for Van’s lawyer this fall, so we suspected some kind of release was imminent. I guess we just thought, oh you know, maybe you’d design a nice cover and/or CREDIT Tom & John!

3) To hear this you will need someone in the UK to buy it for you, which is insane, I understand. I’d also imagine these files will be on…all kinds of sites now that they’ve been officially released.

4) This is the exact recording I heard and played for Tom and John except that the audio has been further cleaned and boosted, AND there’s one extra song (“Sit Down Funny Face”), but, yes, this is Peter Wolf’s recording.

5) Tom Kielbania (bass) is over the moon about this release. This is the only audio proof he had anything to do with any of this (and settles the debate about whether he indeed wrote the bassline for ‘Cyprus Avenue’ (and other AW songs) as he has long claimed)...

6)...as well as demonstrating that the Boston trio really did develop the acoustic, pastoral sound of Astral Weeks in the weeks before they were replaced by jazz musicians in New York. You’ll agree when you listen, I’m sure.

7) I still can’t tell you who slid me a copy.

8) The digital liner notes don’t mention the venue name, the other musicians, or even that it was Wolf who recorded it. They left the cool tape-unspooling noises in there instead of fading songs out, which was the right choice.

9) The poster for the concert here, courtesy of the David Bieber Archives (would have made a nice album cover, right?). Here’s Eric Kraft’s review of these concerts for Boston After Dark as well—>
 

 
10) Maybe the ownership of Astral Weeks is set to change-over to Van and he’s planning on a better release of this material as part of a box set package? Or maybe not. This whole thing is VERY Van Morrison.

11) The lone, surviving Astral Weeks studio outtake, “Train” remains unreleased still, of course. This is the song in which Van sings about Cambridge, MA like its the most mystical place you ever did encounter. It’s very cool.

12) “Train” IS on this live bootleg, but gets cut off before the verses about Massachusetts.

13) I truly am so happy you all get to hear this now. I didn’t mind getting pestered about it, but I did start to worry when ppl started asking Marissa about the tapes.

14) Now all we need is a death certificate for Mel Lyman.

 
As Walsh points out, people who do not live in the U.K. will have to wait until they hit “all kinds of sites now that they’ve been officially released.”

This picture, of (L to R) songwriter Jeff Barry, Bang Records founder Bert Berns, Van Morrison, Janet Rigsbee, and Bang Records employee Carmine “Wassel” DeNoia on a boat on the Hudson River in New York City in 1967, which I encountered during research for this article, is rapidly ascending my list of favorite things in the world.
 

 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
The ‘revenge recordings’: How Van Morrison got out of a shitty contract

 
Altamont wasn’t the only hippie rock festival that started with a groovy idea and ended up impacted in the poop chute of the Aquarian Age. 1970’s New York Pop Festival was intended to be three days of fun and music. The result was about as much fun as a weekend with Squeaky Fromme at the Spahn Ranch.

The producers of the festival, appropriately named Brave New World, had put together a truly impressive roster of bands with headliners like Jimi Hendrix, Joe Cocker, Ravi Shankar and Van Morrison. But they immediately ran into problems when The Black Panthers, White Panthers, Young Lords and a dozen-plus activist groups wanted in on the action. The feeling among many in the radical community was that rock festivals had made millions of dollars off the counter culture and it was now time for some payback. Among the demands being made was 10,000 free tickets and $100,000 in bail money for an incarcerated Black Panther. There were other causes, other concerns, other demands. Despite attempts by Brave New World to find some common ground the whole thing turned into a fiasco. But the festival did go on. Though there were some musical no shows that angered an already tense audience, including 30,000 who got in free when fences were kicked to the ground. The most notable absence was Sly and the Family Stone. Sly lived up to his name and was smart enough to pull out when no money was forthcoming.

Bert Tenzer’s Free is a film of the New York Pop Festival that combines documentary footage with scripted sequences. For instance, DJ Murray The K adds some goofy commentary even though he was nowhere near Randall’s Island at the time. The film was released in 1974 and made little impression. Tenzer even went so far as booking the film with unknown bands performing in the cinema. No one cared. Tenzer then re-edited Free and released it as The Day The Music Died in 1976. Doing what he could to try to recoup his investment, Tenzer added clips of Marvin Gaye, The Beatles, The Doors and more, none of whom were actually at the festival. Archival footage of Angela Davis, The Vietnam War, Richard Nixon and Malcolm X was also tossed in to the mix to give the film some political and sociological context. Still no hit.

Despite its boxoffice failure, The Day The Music Died has a lot going for it, capturing a period of time when doing the right thing often ended up a casualty of good intentions gone bad, a time when revolution often spun out of control because of a failure to see the bigger picture. By 1970 the idealism and hope of the Summer Of Love was replaced by cynicism, weariness and the realization that even the purest of Owsley’s acid wasn’t enough to flush the toxins out of the collective consciousness that had accrued over thousands of years of bad karma. The flower children had gone to seed and our heroes were dropping like flies. Mission aborted. We needed to re-group and think things out. We needed to get real.  “You say you got a real solution / Well, you know / We’d all love to see the plan.”

The Day The Music Died echoes the chaos that erupts when the mistrust between political groups, anarchists and street gangs grows unmanageable. The bottom line is capitalism and revolution is a volatile combination, both determined to destroy the other. The ideas that radical movements should get a free ride on the artistic and cultural products of others isn’t revolutionary, it’s parasitic.  As long as artists expect to be paid (as they should) it might be a good idea for political movements to throw their own fucking festivals. Power to the people means all the people, not just the ones that get the Panthers’ seal of approval. I remember when the movie Woodstock opened in Berkeley in 1970 and hippies were picketing outside of the theater where it was being screened.  Warner Brothers was banking millions off the counter culture and the longhairs were pissed. Even back then I thought the protest was silly… and I had hair down to the crack of my fucking ass. I didn’t go to the movie. Altamont had left a bad taste in my mouth and I had an Aquarian Age size hangover.

Towering over all the bullshit that happens in the The Day The Music Died is Jimi Hendrix who started a revolution without dogma, without arrogance and without rules. But he did have a plan and it was called music. There’s an argument to be made that rock and roll did more to positively change the world than any political movement, radical or otherwise. I may be wrong, but it’s an argument worth having. Whatever the case, I ain’t interested in any revolution that doesn’t include a sense of humor and monster guitar licks.

Watch in HD mode. It ain’t great but it looks a bit better.
 

Van Morrison and Jim Morrison, no relation

The “revenge recordings” of Van Morrison provide a fascinating test case of the limits of authenticity in pop music—how inauthentic and desultory can a gifted musician’s performance be and still retain musical value, if such it does?

The two years after the release of “Brown Eyed Girl” in June 1967 was a heady period for Van Morrison. He suddenly had a smash hit on his hands, reaching #10 on the Billboard Hot 100, his scorned New York record producer Bert Berns died, and he jumped from Berns’ Bang Records to Warner Brothers, for whofm he would record and release his masterpiece, Astral Weeks. After the death of Berns on December 30, 1967, Morrison found himself in a contract dispute with Berns’ widow Ilene; among other things, Morrison was barred from performing on stage or recording in the New York area. Morrison was already annoyed because he had had no say in the release of Blowin’ your Mind! in September 1967 and had only found out about it when a friend called to say that he had purchased it in a store.

As part of the process of switching from Bang to Warner Bros., Morrison had to deliver an album to Bang, and he did so in a single session (almost certainly), although nobody seems to have documented what date that session was. They appear on a compilation with the year 1967 named in the title (New York Sessions ‘67), and his biographer Clinton Heylin asserts that they were recorded in 1969. Given that Astral Weeks was released in late 1968, I find it exceedingly likely that the songs were recorded in early to mid-1968 at the latest. 

These tracks have made the rounds before—it was WFMU that brought them to my attention, way back in 2005. The titles make for an amusing read: “Ring Worm,” “Chickee Coo,” “You Say France and I Whistle,” “The Big Royalty Check,” and “Want a Danish?” certainly don’t sound like usual album fare. The longest of the songs clocks in at 1:36, and the shortest at at tidy 53 seconds. The whole thing—consisting of 31 songs—lasts just 35 minutes, and it would take a foolhardy gambler indeed to wager that the recording session took even five minutes longer than that.

You can feel the heat of Morrison’s contempt for the poppy fare he’d been pressured to produce for Berns—the first few songs directly reference “Twist and Shout,” with titles like “Shake and Roll” and “Stomp and Scream,” and a later one, “La Mambo,” is some kind of debased version of “La Bamba.” (Of course, at the same time, this could also signify some unconscious adoration or respect for the some of the foundational recordings of rock and roll.) Lyrically, there’s frequent mention of two phrases “funky Broadway” and “Sock it to me, baby,” although there are others as well. Several songs go in for some abuse of a random fellow named “George,” including “Here Comes Dumb George,” “Dum Dum George,” “Hold On George,” and “Goodbye George.” Me, I’d rather get to know the eponymous female of “Shake It Mable.” “Blow in Your Nose” is obviously a cutting reference to his first album for Berns, Blowin’ your Mind!—as is, I suppose, “Nose in Your Blow.”

Clinton Heylin in Can You Feel the Silence?: Van Morrison: A New Biography points out that “Thirty Two” contains a pretty withering condemnation of Berns’ production style:
 

[Morrison] would later parody what he viewed as Berns’s tendency to over-produce in one of the ‘revenge’ songs recorded to get out of the Bang contract … mockingly chanting, ‘Yeah, we’ll get a guitar … we’ll get three guitars / No!, No!!, we’ll get four guitars / and we’ll get Herbie Lovelle to play drums / and we’ll do the sha-, sha-la-la bit.’

 
The lyrics to “Dum Dum George” are pretty direct as well:
 

This here’s the story about dumb, dumb George,
Who came up to Boston one sunny afternoon.
He drove up from New York City,
And he was freaky,
And he wanted to record me,
And I said, “George, you’re dumb.”
And he said, “I know. Why do you think I make so much money?
I wanna do a record that’ll make number one.”
Dumb, dumb.

 
It has been asserted that these tracks, variously called the “revenge songs” or the “contractual obligation album” are “devoid of any substance or originality or artistic merit,” but that’s very far from clear to me. Clearly Morrison felt that they were worthless, there’s little disputing that. And they obviously show very little variation. But in terms of sheer musical merit, they’re not bad at all—they’re funny, which is always a blessing, and Morrison’s urgent guitar strumming and rich voice are highly pleasurable to listen to. Morrison’s anger also makes for an interesting listen. Of course, we get almost none of Morrison’s vocal range and he sounds utterly bored by the songs, which matters. I still think they make fairly good tracks to put on at a party.

These tracks have appeared on a few different compilations, including the aforementioned New York Sessions ‘67, The Complete Bang Sessions, and the aptly titled Payin’ Dues.

Here they all are, on YouTube:
 
“Twist and Shake”

 
If you want to listen to the other 30 tracks, you’ll have to click through…...

 
Van Morrison’s classic 1974 live album It’s Too Late To Stop Now is generally considered to be one of the greatest concert recordings of all time. For it, he was backed by probably the best band he had ever, or would ever, assemble, the eleven-piece Caledonia Soul Orchestra, which included strings and a horn section. The group was a finely tuned rhythm and blues machine, able to stop and start on a dime.

It’s Too Late To Stop Now was recorded during concerts at The Troubadour in Los Angeles, California (May 24–27, 1973), the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium (June 29, 1973) and at The Rainbow Theatre (July 23–24, 1973) in London. If ever there was a tour to see Van Morrison, it would have been this one. He’s got an almost James Brown-like swagger and confidence as a performer here. It’s positively joyful, beatific even. The album contains epic workouts of “Saint Dominic’s Preview,” “Caravan,” “Listen To The Lion” and “Cyprus Avenue” along with covers of songs made famous by Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Sonny Boy Williamson and Muddy Waters. The entire set seems heavily influenced by Bobby “Blue” Bland.

The Rainbow show was taped by the BBC. The following year, after the album came out in February—lavishly packaged in a triptych fold-out cover—the concert was simulcast on BBC 2 television and on Radio 2 in FM stereo for “stereo TV” on May 27th, 1974.

And here it is. If you are a Van Morrison fan and you haven’t seen this before, well, prepare to be astonished…
 

 
Obviously, Van Morrison’s Moondance is one of the very greatest albums of the classic rock era. The long-player’s beatific meditation on the mind-blowing beauty of nature, spirituality and love makes it something that people have a very personal relationship with, and associate with a time, or a place, or both, in their lives when they were first exposed to the album. (The first time I heard Moondance was floating down a creek on an inflated inner tube in West Virginia as the sun was rising. I had dropped a bunch of blotter acid with some teenage friends and one of them had a battery-powered jam box with “It Stoned Me” queued up and timed for just the right golden moment to come through the trees before hitting play and giving us exactly the sort of epiphany (“Oh the water, oh the water…”) Morrison wanted his listeners to have. We’d been playing stuff like Nina Hagen, Killing Joke and PiL all night, so this was an immediate show stopper for our post-punk primed ears. It was an… auspicious introduction to his music and I’ve been a Van Morrison fan ever since.)

It’s useful to consider Moondance as a perfect work of art. It’s unassailable. In the classic rock canon. Beyond anyone’s opinion. One for the ages. And as I was saying above, you can project a lot onto it emotionally (like you can with, say, Blood on the Tracks), so it’s very dear to a lot of people’s hearts. I think of Moondance like Leaves of Grass, except that Walt Whitman went about refining his transcendental masterpiece, literally, for four decades (up to the time he was on his deathbed) while Morrison laid his down in a matter of days when he was just 24 years old and left it to be mixed by someone else.

I’ve read that Van Morrison was pissed off to find that Warner Brothers Records were planning to release a box set of a newly remastered Moondance with outtakes from the 1970 sessions (including a 5.1 HD DTS surround mix of the album on Blu-ray) and had denounced it on his website before removing the post. Morrison apparently feels that he’s given the world a great work of art and he’d like to keep its integrity intact. Who could blame him?

He needn’t have worried. My own Moondance “phase” happened decades ago. I’ve always loved it, but admittedly I hadn’t played the album for well over a decade. When I got this box set—and it’s fantastic when this happens, when you have a new entry point reviving interest in something you used to listen to a lot—I couldn’t stop playing it. I played it on repeat for for days on end (to the point of divorce threats!) The 5.1 mix, done by one of the recordings original engineers, Elliot Scheiner, is simply magnificent and to hear this music envelope you and swirl around you is a sort of musical paradise for audiophile rock snob like yours truly. It was almost like hearing Moondance for the first time. Every fan of this album should hear it this way.

Worth pointing out that WEA did right by Moondance on a technical level—unlike with many label’s 5.1 releases, they went with the far superior HD DTS option on a Blu-ray disc instead of a regular DVD with lossy surround. (As someone who is genuinely motivated to actually spend money on physical releases of 5.1 products, the Blu-ray vs. DVD issue is how I weigh if I am going to plunk down the cash or not. The difference is profound, making the Moondance Deluxe Edition a good value for the money, whereas I’d rate The Band’s new Live at the Academy Of Music 1971 box—with just a lossy DVD—as a “pass.”)

Below, Van Morrison & The Caledonia Soul Orchestra perform “Moondance” live at the Rainbow Theatre in London, 1973:
 

Harry Muskee of Cuby And The Blizzards with Van Morrison
 
In March of 1967, after leaving Them, Morrison toured the Netherlands with Dutch group Cuby And The Blizzards as his backup band.

Here they are doing “Mystic Eyes” in a video clip that I wish were longer.

Update: Dangerous Minds reader Knickerbocker noted that the audio portion of the video is taken from the original 1965 release of “Mystic Eyes” by Them. Good ears, Knickerbocker.