#astralweeks1968

"I got a home on high

in another world

in another world

I'm a stranger..." 

- John Lee Hooker, "Don’t Turn Me From Your Door”

Now that I’ve finished touring my first book, Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968, I wanted to drop this breadcrumb trail I followed for awhile, trying to trace the inspiration and timeframe of authorship for the title track, “Astral Weeks.” The Hooker song linked above was either recorded in the 1950′s or early 60′s--it’s hard to tell, the album it came out on contained recordings from 1953 and 1961 (anyone know for sure?). You don’t need me to tell you that some of the lyrics of “Don’t Turn Me From Your Door” are near identical to those found at the end of “Astral Weeks.” These lines are evocative of several hymns that certainly pre-date Hooker’s composition, like “Wayfaring Stranger” and “I Am A Pligrim,” absolutely, but the similarity between the precise phrasing and order of the lyrics here and at the end of “Astral Weeks” is unmistakable. 

This is not an instance where I’m building a case for plagiarism, or even complaining about a to-this-point uncredited homage. What I’d like to do here is present a speculative timeline for how and when these Hooker lyrics ended up in a Van Morrison song. Now, Morrison had certainly already been a fan of John Lee Hooker’s before moving to Boston--he told Happy Traum in 1970 about hearing his records growing up in Belfast and had possibly even seen him live already as well--but in May of 1968, Morrison sees Hooker live and hangs out with him afterwards, right around the same time when I believe he was composing the song “Astral Weeks.” On May 25th, 1968, Morrison watched his new friend Peter Wolf, and his band The Hallucinations, open for Hooker at the Boston Tea Party. 

After the show, Tea Party manager Steve Nelson walked backstage to find Wolf and Van were drunkenly pumping Hooker for stories and asked, “Does anyone need a ride home?”

“While I manned the wheel, the three of them sat together on the back bench seat of the Tea Party’s VW bus and carried on an animated conversation,” Nelson recalled. “Here you had a white kid from the Bronx who was a lover and interpreter of blues and R&B, an Irishman who grew up listening to that same music on records his father brought back from the States, and out of Mississippi and Detroit, one of the true creators of electric blues and boogie.” 

Nelson knew the conversation was important, but for the life of him, he could barely make out a single word. “At the time Peter was known for his ‘Woofa Goofa’ fast-talking hipster patter. Van had a brogue so thick and slurred that even Irish Bostonians could barely make out what he was saying. John Lee spoke softly in a deep Southern drawl, with a stutter.”

Nelson kept his eyes on the road while his ears strained to hear what the trio were going on about as he drove the VW across the bridge to Cambridge. “They understood each other perfectly. It was like a U.N. of the blues, without translators.”

Is it possible that Hooker performed “Don’t Turn Me From Your Door” that night at the Tea Party? Is it possible that the song’s end-refrain captured Morrison’s imagination to the point where it leaked into one of his own new compositions? Morrison had every reason to feel like a stranger at that time; he was quite literally one that moment in Boston with his career on the rocks and his future uncertain. We also know that the confirmed first time Morrison performs “Astral Weeks” is in August of 1968, auditioning for Lewis Merenstein at Ace Recording Studio. The proximity of the Hooker concert and this audition fits a timeline that lends credibility to this idea. 

For a band that sang about scoring drugs and sadomasochism, Velvet Underground shows in Boston were remarkably peaceful affairs unless you count the damage being done to the audience's ears. Peaceful was how you could broadly describe every engagement they had in Boston save for one night in December of 1968 when they were paired with a touring band from Detroit named MC5. As with VU's first show at The Boston Tea Party in May of 1967, in December of 1968 the band arrived with something to prove—this time, the fact that they were still compelling without founding member John Cale on stage with them. Doug Yule had been peforming with VU for a little under three months when they arrived back in the city where they found him. Steve Nelson, no longer a Tea Party employee but still a huge fan of the Velvets, curiously awaited to hear what the band sounded like without Cale. “I thought it was really interesting,” Nelson said, “that the first song they performed was 'Heroin,' which of course John Cale's electric viola was such a critical piece of, and yet they opened with it. They were sort of like saying, 'We're still the Velvet Underground, take this, go fuck yourself.' It was great. Crowd still loved it. Doug Yule brought a different thing to it than John Cale did, but I think he brought something very important, in terms of more musicality.”

The MC5 had something to prove as well, namely that their political activist persona was not just a put-on or a hook for journalists. “We had various partnerships around the country with other radical groups,” MC5's guitarist Wayne Kramer explained to me over the phone. “In the Boston area, there was a group variously called the International Werewolf Conspiracy or the Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers. They were rough and tough guys. They got involved in an altercation with some service men. Some people were hurt, and there was a trial pending. They asked us if we would help them lay some money for their attorneys. This was a kind of thing we did as a matter of course.”

An “altercation” is a mild way to put it. In truth, Ben Morea of the Up Against The Wall Motherfuckers had been charged with attempted murder. On July 24th, 1968, The Boston Globe reported, “Boston city officials have alerted police to the presence on Boston Common of a rabble-rousing group who, they say, have come here from New York city to use the tense conditions between police and the hippie community as an opportunity to create further disturbances.” The Motherfuckers from New York had encouraged the Boston Common hippies to ignore the city's new midnight park curfew, and on Tuesday July 23rd at 3AM, when two recovering soldiers from Vietnam wandered by the group, all hell broke loose. Edward McGilly and Alfred Crowley, an airman and a marine respectively, were both stabbed in front of Arlington Church. Ben Morea was charged and held for the stabbings.

In 2006, Ben Morea recalled the events differently. As he told interviewer lain McIntyre in 2006, “While I was in New York we heard that young freaks, we never called ourselves hippies, were being harassed by this group of vigilantes in Boston. It was pretty bad and a few kids had been hospitalised so I suggested to some Family members that we should go there and look into it. We went up and stayed with the street kids and freaks and sure enough they were attacked while we were there. The attackers were repelled and I was charged by the police.” It did not help Morea that an average handbill for his group might contain the harrowing image of a skeleton with accompanying text such as:

“To survive in Amerika as a total human being is revolutionary...The INTERNATIONAL WEREWOLF CONSPIRACY is the Hip Revolutionary Community in Action. Insanely hungry for the chance to discover how to live, and rabid for the blood and guts of the honkies and the pigs...WEREWOLVES OF THE WORLD JOIN THE FEAST”

“I was in jail for about two weeks before I raised ball,” Morea recalled, “I didn't get a lot of support for my case as the political community couldn't have cared less about the hippies.” But MC5 cared. Morea reached out to the band via Wayne Kramer. “They also asked us if they could make this appeal after we played in Boston, and we said of course,” Kramer said. “These are the kinds of things we did often, all over the world.”

“I seem to remember we shared a dressing room with The Velvet Underground and they all kind of stayed to themselves in the corner,” Kramer recalled. “We were loud and boisterous young men sowing our oats, and if you weren’t with us, it was easy for you to figure out you should stay out of the kitchen.” MC5 lit up the stage with their intense theatrics, as they had done the previous two nights, to great effect on Saturday December 14th, 1968. Kramer already knew the stage was made of concrete by night #3, but he couldn't resist employing his signature stage move of leaping off his amplifier and landing on his knees. “My knees puffed up like cantaloupes,” Kramer said. “That was probably one of the last times I did that. In the heat of the show, you don’t feel it. But when I got off and went to change pants and looked at my knees I said, 'Holy shit, Wayne stop this!'”

“We played really hard and we really wanted to do well. Then Ben [Morea] and a couple of his guys got up and they went in to a militant criticism of the police, the political structure, and the club itself. They tied it all together,” Kramer told me punctuated by a burst of laughter. Audience member Rob Norris recalled that the Motherfuckers' speech culminated with a call to “tear down the hall because it was not large enough to hold their energies.” Morea apparently specifically called out club manager Don Law as part of the problem. Backstage, Charlie Daniels, aka The Master Blaster, MC of the evening stood next to Law who was contemplating cutting the power to the stage. “I said, 'No, let em talk and when they're done, I'll say a few words,'” Daniels recalled. When the militant group exited the stage, running through the audience to exit the venue, Master Blaster walked out in front of a very confused audience and said, “You know, this is the only place like this here in Boston where people can come and see this type of music. The MC5 are getting paid to play here. If bands played for free we wouldn't have to charge. We could riot today but then we'll have no place to come to next week.”

Doug Yule recalled, “It was really unsettling because we were standing on the edge of a riot waiting to see if it was going to happen.” If anyone was still considering heeding Morea and co's words, Lou Reed's introductory statement at the top of The Velvet Underground's set dismantled any lingering thoughts of riot. “I'd just like to make one thing clear. We have nothing to do with what went on earlier and in fact we consider it very stupid. This our favorite place to play in the whole country and we would hate to see anyone even try to destroy it!” Reed's words were followed by a massive applause.

“Lou Reed hated us, apparently,” Kramer said. “Everything we were was like the complete opposite of them. They didn’t play all that well. Their rhythm section wasn’t that strong. Their music wasn’t that strong. They kind of took a passive-aggressive stance. We knew how to play, we knew how to dance, and we knew how to sing. We had something positive that we were trying to get across. We were probably everything that they weren’t.”

Kramer recalled a bandmate telling him that Reed even asked all the MC5 fans to leave before VU started their set. “And at that point, I was probably chasing some young woman, on my way to the after party. I could have cared less what he said. He is entitled to his opinion, it was his face and he can do whatever the hell he wants to do. We definitely did not connect there as allies or comrades.”

Don Law didn't walk away with a high opinion of the band either. MC5 were permanently banned from The Boston Tea Party, and as Don Law rose to prominence as a concert promoter, that grudge closed some important doors for the band. Kramer surmises that perhaps the Motherfuckers/Werewolf contingent raised a few dollars that night, but nothing too substantial. In the end, narrowly, Ben Morea was acquitted of the two stabbings in front of Arlington Church. “The foreman told me that it was all down to one juror. On the first vote it was 11 to 1 in favour of convicting me, but one guy managed to convince the others that there was enough doubt to let me go. I don't know who he was, but I owe that one guy my liberty.”

In the coming weeks, things only got more intense for MC5. The day after Christmas in 1968, the band was booked at Bill Graham's Fillmore East in New York where most of the tickets had been given away for free on various radio programs. A label representative at Elektra was spooked by an anonymous call threatening to burn the venue to the ground if a percentage of the tickets didn't go directly to “the community,” so many of the exact troublemakers they were worried about ended up being admitted to the concert. As the show began, there were hundreds of people still trying to get inside the venue. Graham, worried about going over-capacity tried to seal the front door but was whipped in the face with a chain. As MC5 finished their set, the stage was attacked by a portion of the audience, smashing their equipment and instruments. Outside, the sight of the revolutionary rock band climbing into a limousine didn't sit well with the hyped-up crowd either, and the band were pulled out of the vehicle, pushed around, and pelted with their own records.

Even after being generously assisted by the band in Boston, the events in New York soured Ben Morea on the MC5 for good. “They projected themselves as a 'revolutionary' rock group...then they ran out symbolically getting into a limousine, going to a restaurant no one in our community has ever been in. The whole image of that was rather obnoxious.” After MC5's disastrous night in Boston, local writer Jon Landau, the man who had trashed the “Boston Sound” in Rolling Stone Magazine, made the leap from page to studio, producing their 1970 album, Back in the USA.

The poster for the weekend of shows had been created by former Tea Party manager Steve Nelson who drew the band in the style of stick figures as a child might render them. In light of the events of what transpired, the innocence on display is amusing, but also correctly contrasted the Velvet Underground against the antics of MC5. “I was going against the grain of what their image was,” Nelson showed the poster to Lou Reed who asked, “How'd you know that's who we really are?'”

By mid-1968, bassist Walter Powers happily watched his old band mates from The Lost find some traction in the trenches of the “Boston Sound” frenzy and figured there must be room for him in there as well. He soon joined a new, local psychedelic rock group called Listening, fronted by Michael Tschudin, the Harvard graduate who had been in The Street Choir with harmonica player Peter Ivers, who himself would later go on to compose the music for the “In Heaven” song in David Lynch’s Eraserhead.* Listening released one record on Vanguard Records in late 1968 which is notable for its complicated psych-jams and the striking front cover showing the band performing live at the outdoor venue on the Charles River Esplanade known as The Hatch Shell (Green Day caused a riot at the same locale in 1994).

Not convinced that Listening was going anywhere special, Powers was still showing up to auditions for other rock outfits. One afternoon in the spring of 1968, Powers drove out to a basement audition at a house in Weston, a suburb right outside the city. The word was that a guy named Van Morrison was auditioning bass and guitar players all day long. “There was an old-fashioned wheelchair in the basement, and I took a seat in it when I got there,” Powers said. “I had my bass in my lap. When Van arrived, we, all of us, joined in jamming on a blues progression. Each of us was given a chance to show what he brought.” When it was Powers' turn to jam, he instinctively stood up, rising out of the wheelchair and visibly shocking Morrison. “Van had a ‘He walks?!’ look on his face,” Powers recalls. After the tryout, he explained to Morrison that the empty wheelchair had just been there when he arrived. Powers did not get the job as bassist of the Van Morrison Controversy. Listening would have to do for him for now (though he’d soon find himself in a post-Lou-Reed version of the Velvet Underground just a few years later).

Listening has one of the stranger footnotes in the entire Boston Sound saga in the fact that frontman Michael Tschudin has since made a truly bizarre claim about his secret life during the years he fronted the band. “I hear that Michael lives in South Florida,” Listening guitarist Peter Mallick told an interviewer in 2011, “and claims to have been a Special Ops Green Beret in Vietnam, during the time he was doing drugs and playing rock-n-roll in Boston.”

Mallick is only slightly incorrect. Tschudin claims to have been a Navy Seal, not a Green Beret. The former psych-frontman was first exposed as a phony Navy Seal in 1987 by, strangely enough, G.Gordon Liddy—attorney and overseer of the burglary in Nixon's Watergate scandal—but Tschudin continued to tell the story in the ensuing decades. “When Michael Tschudin sits down at the Moeller organ at the First Evangelical Lutheran Church in West Palm Beach,” a 2006 Palm Beach Post profile begins, “his days as a Navy SEAL in the jungles and paddies of Vietnam recede.”

"I can show you this certificate to prove I was in, but I can't show you any photos or any other documentation,” Tschudin told the reporter. “If I told you, I'd have to kill you." Tschudin's fabrications are still a topic that upsets actual Navy Seals who devote a section of a Special Operations message board to exposing fakes just like this. They're responsible for calling attention to the 2006 profile which revealed the former rocker’s continued Seal claims, despite the nineteen year old revelation by G.Gordon Liddy that he most certainly was not.  

The December 21, 1968 review of Listening’s debut in Billboard appeared next to a record that was described as a “poetic land of folk-blues and country soul.”

The above text is a section that was cut from Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968.

This is a difficult read; I applaud Guinevere Turner for having the bravery to publish it. She was born on Fort Hill in 1968, born into the Mel Lyman family.

I'm excited to share that I'm going overseas with #AstralWeeks1968 for the 50th anniversary of the release of the LP.

-MON 11/26- London, England @IrishLitSoc @ Bloomsbury Hotel @ 7:30pm

-TUE 11/27 - Brussels, Belgium @ABconcerts @ AB Salon @7:30pm