“I’m sorry, Tom, I really am,” Morrison said, in an unusual show of emotion.
Although Warner Brothers would pay the Boston musicians to attend the recording sessions in New York, Morrison soon delivered terrible news about who would be backing him up on Astral Weeks.īefore the first note was committed to tape, Payne and Kielbania knew they wouldn’t be on the record. By the time that producer Lewis Merenstein arrived in Boston to audition the singer at Ace Recording Studio, Morrison had banished all electric instruments from the band, and dropped down to a trio with Kielbania on upright bass and a young Harvard drop-out on flute named John Payne. Berklee student Tom Kielbania was the one constant in the three lineups of Boston musicians that Van went through that spring and summer. Morrison quickly immersed himself in Boston’s local music scene, hunting for musicians who could develop new material with him and perform live in the hopes of scoring a new recording contract. In early 1968, after Van Morrison’s escaped both New York City and the Bang Records associate who had recently smashed a guitar over the singer’s head, the Belfast singer found himself the holder of a lease of an apartment on Green Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where his career and immediate future seemed uncertain at best, and on the brink of disaster at worst. And that is the scene we have chosen to excerpt today.
I’d be hard pressed to pick a favorite moment from the story, but it’s not unfair to say that the story takes a significant turn when we get to September 25, 1968, the day the recording sessions began. The story behind the album is every bit as unique and strange as the music itself.
For the last three three years I’ve been digging into the history of Van Morrison’s classic LP Astral Weeks for my debut book Astral Weeks: A Secret History Of 1968, which is out now via Penguin Press.
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