In documenting the milieu out of which the album came, Walsh...argues for Boston as an underappreciated hub of late-sixties radicalism, artistic invention, and social experimentation. The result is a complex, inquisitive, and satisfying book that illuminates and explicates the origins of Astral Weeks without diminishing the album’s otherworldly aura.

In Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968, Ryan Walsh...treat[s] the work as a social text, an LP that can be 'read' as a legible part of a career, a cultural moment, a scene, a product of an industry with recognizable protocols ... Walsh does a strong job of dramatizing the interpersonal tensions informing the album’s creation, adding grit and depth to a story often transmitted with a more facile investment in the notion of individual genius ... In this book, Walsh facilitates a long overdue reading of Morrison and his early work in the appropriate hardscrabble context ... It is a mistake, though, to imagine that Walsh intends for all of these smaller set pieces to add up to some master tale of 'How Astral Weeks Came to Be.' This book works, rather, as a sort of decentered collective biography. Van Morrison is important to the larger story Walsh wants to tell about questers and malcontents in the Boston area, but really only as one signpost of the confusion of the moment — a miserable young man (a 'stranger in this world' is what the narrator calls himself on Astral Weeks’s first song) struggling to find his own voice amid the cacophony.

Astral Weeks was recorded in New York City, but it was 'planned, shaped and rehearsed in Boston and Cambridge ... This fact has been a secret kept in plain view.' What exactly this secret yields is a question that the book never quite answers ... the book reads...as the record of an obsession, with the surfeit of granular detail, the loose anecdotal structure and the numerous cul-de-sacs that implies. This is not to say that Walsh’s book lacks charm. It opens with a fresh angle on one of the stalest scenes in music history ... The mini-histories embedded throughout are often entertaining ... Given that it was 1968, it’s a yearbook with some momentous pages. But there’s a reason people don’t read yearbooks start to finish.

Ryan H. Walsh's new book Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968 unearths the time and place behind the music. Morrison has always refused to explain the mysteries of Astral Weeks – as ornery as ever, the Celtic bard doesn't give his secrets away. But no matter how well you know him or his music, Astral Weeks is a book full of discoveries. In this fantastic chronicle, Van falls into a Boston underground scene full of outlandish characters ... the city is the real star of Walsh's tale – a town overflowing with students, music freaks, crackpot artists and aspiring messiahs.

The secret history unspools like an endless bar yarn, an almost-impossible tale in which obscure and famous figures are tethered in conspiracy and coincidence. Walsh’s voice is casual, his prose accessible, and his humor occasionally eviscerating. We follow the author as he hunts for witnesses who can explain a heretofore unexamined and mysterious time in Morrison’s career ... Walsh’s story continually connects seemingly disparate events, creating a Day-Glo Venn diagram of ’60s countercultural history ... Walsh unearths a lot of revelatory rock lore, but ultimately the story functions as a map of how organic culture worked in that place and time, the weird kids and their weird ideas that eventually codified into industries and institutions ... Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968 is another right-on-time reminder of how crucial participation is in keeping art and music alive.

Mr. Walsh, a writer and musician, takes the thread of a promising idea — that Van Morrison wrote the backbone of Astral Weeks while hiding out in radical Boston — and spins pure dross. The book’s main problem is structural. It’s two or three reasonably entertaining chapters of original reporting about Mr. Morrison sandwiched around recycled newspaper stories about Boston’s counterculture ... Without the singer’s cooperation, Mr. Walsh tries to piece together Mr. Morrison’s Boston sojourn through interviews with his ex-wife and several local musicians. Their secondhand recollections, however, are a poor substitute for the musician’s personal insight.

Astral Weeks focuses on popular culture and politics in Boston. The city, Walsh claims, was ground zero for the folk music revival and the hallucinogenic revolution. And Boston became 'the epicenter for Vietnam War resistance.' These claims may be a bit exaggerated. However, Astral Weeks demonstrates that a whole lotta shakin’ was going on in Boston ... Walsh’s compelling narrative...focuses on only one aspect of American culture. In December, Walsh notes, in a brief conclusion, the Apollo 8 astronauts glimpsed 'the mysterious dark side' of the moon and viewed Earth 'as a whole planet.' The year 1968 is best viewed in this way as well, with Walsh’s cast of characters only part of a larger, more complex story.

Like Robert Gordon’s It Came From Memphis, Walsh’s book re-creates a time and place that attracted an impressive array of characters, some of whom (like Rowan, or the DJ and rock star Peter Wolf) went on to achieve big things, and others (like the cult leader Mel Lyman) who effectively fell off the face of the earth ... Walsh digs himself all the way down a rabbit hole of epic, site-specific peculiarity, from the ill-fated 'Bosstown Sound' record industry marketing campaign to Tony Curtis playing the Boston Strangler ... 'The mystery grows,' as the album’s producer, Lewis Merenstein, told the author, 'because it’s all a spiritual quest that is essentially unknowable.'

Musician and journalist Walsh writes with the enthusiasm of a fan and the precision and depth of an expert. A first-rate book about a piece of music and the time in which it was created.

Walsh delivers plenty of information and offers some insightful stories about this time—particularly about the making of Morrison’s masterpiece—and occasionally draws some interesting associations ... Unfortunately, the narrative parts fail to fully cohere. Unlike Will Hermes’ Love Goes to Buildings on Fire (2011), which fully captured the changing cultural landscape of a thriving city (New York), no clear image ever quite emerges and nothing solid develops from all these coincidences.

Drawing on hundreds of interviews with musicians and on archival research, Walsh faithfully explores 'the Bosstown Sound'—Boston’s own short-lived contribution to the psychedelic sounds of the late 1960s—and chronicles the lives of Boston bands such as Beacon Street Union, Orpheus, and Ultimate Spinach (in which future Steely Dan member Jeff 'Skunk' Baxter played) ... Walsh can be an entertaining narrator, but he fails to weave his narrative threads into a seamless chronicle of rock-and-roll history.