The final date was October 15, from 7:00 to 11:45 PM. They brought in Barry Kornfeld, but that didn’t work out. There was another session the following week, but I wasn’t available. Lew did all the communicating, and he seemed to be very happy. We couldn’t make eye contact, but we were hearing each other through headphones and playing off of each other. We cut “Cyprus Avenue”, “Madame George”, “Beside You” and “Astral Weeks” in four hours. The first session was 7:00 to 11:00 PM on September 25, 1968. He must have been smoking something, because all you could see was white smoke in there! He sang and played in the booth, we followed, and these things just… happened. JAY BERLINER: This little guy comes in and goes straight into the vocal booth. I remember Richard bent over his bass with his eyes closed, tuning into Van. Everybody got the sense of what was being said musically, even if they didn’t get what was being sung by Van. They would run through the first few minutes of a song, never the whole thing, and then do it. It was so beautiful, it was hard to take. There was nothing sacred about it, but right away it was magical.
They were all super pros, but also open souls who played from the heart. Richard Davis was a highly renowned bass player, Connie Kay drummed with the Modern Jazz Quartet, and Jay Berliner was a fine guitarist. I knew I needed people who could pick up that feeling. I don’t know what transpired between Bang Records and Van coming to Boston, but he had obviously gone through a rebirth. The lyric went straight to my soul, it was immediately clear to me that he was being born again. He sat on a stool in Ace studios and played “Astral Weeks”, and it took me 30 seconds to know. Van had signed to Warners but no producer wanted to touch him, so I went to Boston at Bob’s request to hear him. LEWIS MERENSTEIN: Van’s manager Bob Schwaid and I were friends. Considering how revered the album Astral Weeks has become, it’s amazing that it was put together in just 12 or 13 hours. And of those dates, one of them only yielded one song.
Just three dates in the studio was all it took. Astral Weeks producer Lewis Merenstein and guitarist Jay Berliner recounted the magic of those particular sessions. In 2015, Uncut magazine connected with a number of the people who helped create Van Morrison’s most memorable recordings.
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