Van Morrison - Astral Weeks to Astral Weeks Live At The Hollywood Bowl

Do you remember the first time you heard Van Morrison's Astral Weeks? Did you lie back in the darkness, hearing Van Morrison play jazz, with horns and flutes; vibes and strings; bluesy folk vocals with acoustic guitars and bass? It was something else - not rock, not pop - it was music that made you listen to the poetry in the lyrics, and feel the real emotion in Morrison's singing. It had a powerful effect on me and changed the rhythms running in my head and the music that I played. My friends and I were listening to bands like Cream, the Beatles, the Grass Roots, Sly And The Family Stone, starting to veer away from the mainstream music, but this album was very, very different. We didn't know what a song cycle was, but we liked it. The LP came out in 1968 - before Moondance (1970) and His Band And Street Choir (1970) made him a big star with hits like Moondance and Domino putting him on the pop charts. We knew him for Gloria (with Them) and Brown Eyed Girl, but when we first experienced Astral Weeks, it was magic and poetry and cosmic all rolled into one. The album has been a critical success and consistently been on the various Greatest Albums Of All Time lists since it came out, although it never charted a hit. One of the songs from the album, Madam George, is included in The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame's list of 500 Songs That Shaped Rock & Roll.

Could you find me / Would you kiss my eyes
And lay me down / In silence easy
To be born again (Astral Weeks, 1968)

Forty years later, in 2008, Van has recorded a live version of Astral Weeks at the Hollywood Bowl, to be born again, extending the beauty and mystery of the original by adding his decades of experience with love and life to the youthful passions that were so much the heart of 1968 recording. It's still a song cycle, but he's added new songs and re-ordered the original set to give us a new view of a classic work. I'll leave it to the technical reviewers to give you a breakdown the list of musicians and songs, with just the comment that Jay Berliner plays lead guitar with Van on the live recording, just as he did on the original. The vibes, flutes and strings still jam behind the vocals and guitar, looser than the first album, but I think that's what the four decades of living with the music have allowed Morrison to bring to the live concert. Listening to the live concert sent me back to the roots of 1968's version - kicking in some of the passion of the time, bringing back the memories of what I was listening to back then and the impact the music had and has on me. It's well worth the trip - check it out for yourself.

The original Astral Weeks was Morrison's first album for Warner Brothers Records, this latest is on his own label, Listen To The Lion. Released in February of 2009, on CD, DVD and vinyl LP, the recording has done pretty well on the Amazon charts #6 for Live Albums, #237 in Music.