![]() ![]() Walsh begins with the not-so-secret culture-shifting decision by Bob Dylan to electrify his backup band and crank out a high-decibel version of “Like a Rolling Stone” at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Both events, although unrelated, had a transmutative effect on a flower-power generation searching for “peace and love” and alternative lifestyles. ![]() The first is the founding of Mel Lyman’s Fort Hill Community, variously identified as a commune, cult or family and the other is Van Morrison’s mystic stream-of-consciousness song cycle Astral Weeks recorded while the Irish blues rocker was hiding out in Beantown. Walsh focuses on two narrative threads, one societal and the other musical, that evolved in parallel. Walsh’s Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968 is an engrossing aide-mémoire, a jumbled catchall of social upheavals and artistic convergences that occurred in Boston half a century ago. But if your memory is less than eidetic, Ryan H. Most of us who lived through those times recall what went down, even if we did inhale. The stoner who said “If you remember the ’60s, you weren’t really there” got it wrong. ![]()
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