A half-second clip of a woman in a red dress, staring off into the distance. A Jim Kweskin song plays as the inkblots return. A child announces the title of the show, then looks confused. Cut to a circular logo bouncing across the screen. Silver?, a show that “transformed home televisions into portals for a psychedelic fever dream,” Walsh wrote, “uninterrupted by commercials or common sense.” As he described one episode:Ī swarm of inkblots. Richard Alpert had returned from a sojourn to India as the spiritual teacher Ram Dass.Īnd on local television, WGBH had given over its airwaves twice a week to an experimental program called What’s Happening, Mr.
Timothy Leary had earlier embarked on his LSD experiments through the Harvard Psilocybin Project, and Boston remained a hotbed of attempts at psychedelic enlightenment. Noam Chomsky of MIT and Howard Zinn of Boston University were outspoken participants in the movement against the Vietnam War. Recommended: What Mueller's Most Conspicuous Silence Suggests And yet, greater Boston was not insignificant. The zeitgeist was arguably shaped most that year by events in San Francisco, Chicago, Memphis, and Washington, D.C. Other acts broke up or decided to try their luck in New York City or on the West Coast. One local favorite, the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, wasn’t the same once Mel Lyman quit and dedicated himself to leading an eccentric hippie commune. “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 miracle of life, with its inevitable concomitant, a vertiginous glimpse of the capacity to be hurt, and the capacity to inflict that hurt.”īoston was attractive in part because of its famous folk music scene, though that turned out to be a shadow of its former self by the time Morrison moved into his Cambridge apartment. “Astral Weeks, 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 10th anniversary of its release. Why does it strike so many as almost perfect? 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.
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