Though the cover art suggests a Vegas lounge act image better suited to Neil Diamond, Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl is the real deal. While the 40-plus years have aged Morrison quite a bit, his heartfelt performance suggests a man still very much caught up in the emotion and inward exploration of the original piece.
“I believe I’ve transcended,” Morrison sings in repetition at the end of the titular album opener, delving back into the Caledonia mysticism he has largely forsaken on recent releases. Until his performances at Los Angeles’ Hollywood Bowl last November, Astral Weeks, Morrison’s most critically revered album, was an album the artist rarely explored in concert.
Not unlike his similarly elusive contemporary Bob Dylan, Morrison prefers to look forward rather than tread back through what once was. His concerts tend to touch on a few of the greatest hits, but it seems like a necessary concession more than anything else.
For whatever reason, though, the opportunity (financial, artistic or both) to re-examine Astral Weeks must have proved too much. Of course, the majesty and mystery of the album could never be fully matched or replicated. But Astral Weeks Live succeeds in straying just far enough from the perfectly imperfect blueprint Morrison first laid down.
And, damn – is it impressive.
With original Astral Weeks guitarist Jay Berliner in tow, Morrison and his stunning backing band (a dozen strong) keep the improvisational spirit alive, stretching and filling in the beautiful open spaces on all the songs. The notes not played on the studio version are just as important as the ones played, but the soloing jives with the loose atmosphere.
The violin soars and the piano glides on “Sweet Thing” (“And you shall take me strongly/ Into your loving arms again/ I will not remember/ That I ever felt the pain,” Morrison sings) as the whole band threatens to lift off into Morrison’s celestial paradise. As with the studio album, the musicianship on Astral Weeks Live is beyond reproach.
Not just any group of studio/touring musicians could have nailed the nuances in the songs: It’s clear Morrison went beyond hiring the best that money could offer. He took a producer credit on the live album and ensured there would be no overdubs or any other post-production tampering. What we hear is crisp, clean and uncompromised.
If the live performances do sacrifice anything in translation, it’s at a purely thematic level. Despite sounding absolutely lovely on Astral Weeks Live, “Cyprus Avenue” and “Madame George” certainly lose a great deal of the sorrow and longing embedded in the originals. The two album linchpins were both lushly imagined tales of impossible desire and inner-suffering. As performed in front of the crowd at the Hollywood Bowl, these complicated emotions don’t really come across.
And it’s not something Morrison should be faulted for. Astral Weeks was, in a way, an elegiac celebration of these intense human emotions. But when Morrison sings, “Well, I’m caught way up on Cyprus Avenue/ And I’m conquered in a car seat/ Not a thing that I can do,” on the live “Cyprus Avenue,” the celebration is the song and the album from which it comes, not the raw feelings of unrequited love the singer expressed 40 years ago.
Time and exposure have not dulled the tension in the original album, so the tonal shift on the live album feels completely appropriate. Like Arthur Lee’s live revisiting of his classic Forever Changes, and, to a lesser extent, Brian Wilson’s stab at Pet Sounds, Astral Weeks Live asks to be evaluated on its own merits.
It dares to take a staggering, revered piece of art – an album famed rock critic Lester Bangs described three decades ago as a “beacon … proof that there was something left to express artistically besides nihilism and destruction” – and play around with it for our amusement.
There’s a lot of danger in going back to an album so clearly born out of an artist’s youth. But as a wiser, older (and more sober) performer, Morrison does one better than mere reflection: He has fun.
Whether he’s exaggerating his obsession with verbal repetition (“The love that loves to love the love that loves to love the love”) on “Madame George” or growling out a line in “Ballerina” (“The light the light the light … is on the left side of your head”), to the audience’s enjoyment, Morrison completely sells his emboldened vision of Astral Weeks.
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RATING: 4.5 out of 5 stars
