Lester Bangs’s characteristically gonzo-Romantic 1979 essay on Astral Weeks is the locus classicus in this tradition, with its description of the healing powers of this “mystical document.” Dave Marsh, too, wrote ecstatically about Astral Weeks when he was a practicing critic, even making reference to it in 1978 in his review of Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town as one of the few records that “changes fundamentally” how we hear rock music. Two generations of rock critics and fans have enshrined Astral Weeks as a sui generis work of wonder and borderline madness.
It has a reputation as something of a sacred text of Rock and Roll Mystery, a journey into the mystic that has scores of devoted fans, but virtually no artistic heirs. IF ROCK HAS a canon, Van Morrison’s 1968 LP Astral Weeks contributes its gnostic gospels - a marginal, weird, eruptive text, full of leads for songs never sung, sermons never preached.
