Behind the Masterpiece: Van Morrison's <i>Astral Weeks</i> at 50
Editor’s Note: This is part of The Atlantic’s ongoing series looking back at 1968. All past articles and reader correspondence are collected here. New material will be added to that page through the end of 2018.
If I ventured in the slipstream
Between the viaducts of your dream
Where immobile steel rims crack
And the ditch in the back roads stop
Could you find me?
Would you kiss-a my eyes?
To lay me down
In silence easy
To be born again
So begins Astral Weeks, the sublime, eight-song album released in 1968 with little fanfare, though it endures 50 years later as Van Morrison’s very finest achievement.
Why does it strike so many as almost perfect?
, insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend,” the legendary rock critic Lester Bangs wrote on the 10thanniversary of its release. “It is a precious and terrible gift, born of a terrible truth, because what they see is both infinitely beautiful and terminally horrifying: the unlimited human ability to create or destroy, according to whim … one moment’s knowledge of the
