Saturday Night's Alright For Lester Bangs Cover Fighting.

AVariationOnAnOld
ThemeVille


First, Mr. Bangs' inside-out symbiotic trapezoidal tom-tom lede on the original:

Van Morrison's Astral Weeks was released ten years, almost to the day, before this was written. It was particularly important to me because the fall of 1968 was such a terrible time: I was a physical and mental wreck, nerves shredded and ghosts and spiders looming and squatting across the mind. My social contacts had dwindled to almost none; the presence of other people made me nervous and paranoid. I spent endless days and nights sunk in an armchair in my bedroom, reading magazines, watching TV, listening to records, staring into space. I had no idea how to improve the situation and probably wouldn't have done anything about it if I had.

Astral Weeks would be the subject of this piece - i.e., the rock record with the most significance in my life so far - no matter how I'd been feeling when it came out. But in the condition I was in, it assumed at the time the quality of a beacon, a light on the far shores of the murk; what's more, it was proof that there was something left to express artistically besides nihilism and destruction. (My other big record of the day was White Light/White Heat.) It sounded like the man who made Astral Weeks was in terrible pain, pain most of Van Morrison's previous works had only suggested; but like the later albums by the Velvet Underground, there was a redemptive element in the blackness, ultimate compassion for the suffering of others, and a swath of pure beauty and mystical awe that cut right through the heart of the work...


Next, the cover:

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Astral Weeks is NOT the tune I was mentioning last night...Like Mr. Hansard, I play it straight up in A.
If you'd like little more on the late, great Mr. Bangs I could never, ever recommend Maria Bustillos' piece in the New Yorker from awhile back enough. You can find it....Here.


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