I'm Christopher Lighten, this is Open Source.

The making of Van Morrison's Astral Weeks album is the story of a mystical document from the realm of the miraculous.

And I was talking my way and jumped the head just first.

And I will drink the clear, clean wine of fallen plants right through.

Then Morrison was an impatient young Irishman on the loose in Boston in Cambridge 50 years ago.

He had the full catalog of Irish tenors and black American blues singers in his head, John McCormick, to Lead Belly.

Then suddenly, in March 1968, he was live in a studio, not with a rock band at all, but with jazz session men who knew one another, but not their leader.

Morrison had no tunes or harmonies written down, no instructions for his players.

But then Cloud came along, said the recording engineer, and we all hopped on, and we landed when it was done.

This is a cult classic, art being born or made when nobody knew quite what was happening.

The story is wonderfully retold and booked form with a Boston accent by the writer Ryan Walsh.

Many others have felt pieces of it.

Astral Weeks literally took decades to become legendary. It's the ultimate slow burn.

I don't know what the heck it is, I don't know how to categorize what you can say about it.

You know, something happened that was bigger than every musician individually and even as a group.

I mean, no wonder it just seemed quite like Cloud on.

Astral Weeks in so far as it could be pinned down as a record about people stunned by life, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend.

And then the Van Morrison tape.

I mean, that comes from our imagination is what they tell us, and that's what I think.

Whatever our imagination comes from, then that's where it comes from.

But I mean, Carl Young said that it came from the collective unconscious and I'll buy that.

Edna O'Brien, a great lady of Irish fiction, says that Van Morrison's rugged, confrontational ghostly voice in Astral Weeks speaks to me enduringly of love.

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