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Such a great moment is happening right now. I am listening to Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks for the first time, ever. I have meant to listen to it forever, because I knew it would be great. I knew it would be so silent and simple and great and it is, like smashing Spartacus horns and cymbals silenced, relaxed, reaffirmed. Now: on top of that, two other things are layering out the scene. The first is that this unbelievable storm just started up, and my computer’s right outside my window. Wanted it to rain, needed it to rain, to flood the earth is both healthy and right. The second is that I remembered how much I enjoy the writing of Lester Bangs, as do most music obsessives of the lonesome, proud, frantic variety to which I cling so dear, to which so many fine yet nerdy people who I admire and respect and I think dabble in great things are also a part of. These are the people who on some level really make me smile. Music obsessives are also extremely in touch with emotions, and love, and really do for the most part seem to get it. The only thing they cannot forget is to put the emotion before the snobbery (i.e. the positive before the negative, the good feeling smooth inspired inclusive fascinations and ruminations before trying to make yourself look cool by making everyone else feel like so much dung). Once you’ve got your snobbery under control, you’re fine, you’re great, you’re everyone and everything, and on the plane of existence where you can just relax and be comfortable and really get into this deep long beauty that is music, and living life, and taking drugs from time to time and showing physical intimate love from time to time. Can I just say though, that shockingly, rock snobs even have the ability to mess those up? You always hear these terms they throw around. “Sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll”, “The road”, and even the new phrase of the faceless internet, which I too utilize, “coke and whores”. And it’s like, they take all those really fun things that make life worth living, and just fill them with excess. They make those activities so obvious, and disenchanted, and premeditated. It’s like pornography, really, and I hope I never get to that point. Like Buddyhead.com. Great read a lot of the time, and they sort of have their head on straight in terms of taste (total devotion to the Stooges, the Who, Gang of Four, in combination with praise for new acts like the Liars, Radiohead, and the Rapture). They even put out music on their own label, which as we all know is sort of the rock snob dream (particularly those snobs who tragically, desperately, needlessly do not themselves create music, thereby becoming part of the system they observe and comment on). Anyway, the point is, I often can’t stand their west coast abuse of everything I like about music, and their bizarre need to make it something harsh and vindictive and manipulative, all in the name of cool.
But back to Astral Weeks. God, you really need to hear this album. I may be building it up to much, and I think that if you listen to it in the wrong mood or the wrong frame of mind you might just switch it off and say, “what the bother”, and put on something easier or more, I don’t know, more definite to create a certain reaction though. But honestly, there’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, that’s the effect that I think we might be going for here. The whole point of all this exploration and rumination (great word) is to gather up the musings and draw a conclusion on what you dig and what you’re feeling and what you want to be doing and thinking and how to get there. Music’s going to do it, too: it’s just very powerful stuff at the right time in the right hands. Soundtrack for our lives, and all that. And I think there’s a certain truth and profundity to be found in discovering entire albums that do that, rather than songs. Songs are in many ways great, and last longer, and probably can better encapsulate a thought, because they’re shorter and firmer, leaner. But albums, albums somehow do it for me even more. Not just that they require patience, though that’s part of it. It’s because it’s an artist’s true and complete vision, a real sense of capturing a period in one’s life, which is always more potent than “one time this happened, then last night it happened twice”. An album is long, stretches out like a road or a dream or the night. An album is an undeniable piece of art, which blood coursing through it, and it weeps and laughs and incites the very same. You can hold it in your hands and stare at it, and know that it contains your ideas and the things that set you off, make you feel a certain way. Astral Weeks is a tangible thing, it exists, and I have the desire to tell people about it. I’ve heard stories about it. Johhny Depp has often called it the best album of all time (as have various British rock zines and critics, not the least among them Lester Bangs, hero Lester, guiding), and that he discovered it in his older brother’s room right around the same time he discovered beat poetry and marijuana, which sounds great. The record just ended. Forty-six minutes and fifty-three seconds. Those discoveries are sort of the reason I have no desire to speed up my teenage youth whatever: I’m out to savor all of this, all the moments, all the time I get to spend between the sheets with girls and between the sheets of my inky printer. I’m there, I want it, I’m sticking around, and pretty soon I’ll be somewhere else, but just let me record it, keep it there, don’t take it away from me until I’ve written it down.
More, because we don't live in rice patties:
Astral Weeks: Excerpt from Bangs' Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung. The second story, oddly enough called "Astral Weeks", is completely and utterly what I ripped off when writing this.
Allmusic.com: Astral Weeks: The somewhat more encyclopedic overview of the album and what it's about. If you like your knowledge in cubes and pixels.
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