Tuesday, May 21, 2013  Spring Solace  It is difficult for me to
imagine springtime anymore without Van Morrison's brilliant
album Astral Weeks coming to mind. (I am listening to it right
now. I recommend you do the same.) It was released in November
1968, the same month Richard Nixon was elected President after
one of the most devastating calendar years in American history:
war in Vietnam, social unrest, race riots, assassinations, and
only the promise of Nixon to keep the ship afloat. Even Morrison
couldn't escape the tumult completely—he had had to alter the
lyrics and title of the song he had written the year before
about an interracial relationship, "Brown Skinned Girl" to
something more socially acceptable. But the success of that
single paved the way for the Astral Weeks recording sessions,
where at the close of that terrible year he somehow produced an
album of pure idyll, one of those rare works of art in which the
unadulterated joy of its final expression arises so organically
from its own craftsmans