There was no killing spree, only a free sheet called Avatar and a music venue called the Boston Tea Party. Lyman locked troublemakers in the basement and reprogrammed them with ‘guided’ LSD trips, but he never went the full Charles Manson. Roxbury, now a gentrified inner suburb, was so decayed that Mel Lyman’s acid-addled followers were able to buy up a whole street. Beacon Street, once a Jamesian parade of redbrick townhouses and now expensively dull, was a student ghetto. Researching this book, Walsh found himself inhabiting ‘an upside-down, hallucinogenic version of the metropolis’ he knows. In 1968, the whole of Boston seems to have been ankle-deep in LSD. The record labels were chasing psychedelic rock - heavy metal was slouching towards Donington - but Morrison was writing jazzy acoustic songs: ‘I’m nothing but a stranger in this world/Got a home on high.’Ĭambridge is now a placid university town and hi-tech hub. Morrison had split from Them and scored a solo hit with ‘Brown Eyed Girl,’ but he had visa troubles as well as business problems. Morrison’s contract passed to Carmine ‘Wassel’ DeNoia, an associate of the Genovese crime family. In December 1967, Morrison’s producer, the Mob-friendly Bert Berns, had died of a heart attack. The circumstances were that Morrison and his girlfriend Janet Planet had decamped from New York following contractual difficulties involving the breaking of an acoustic guitar over Morrison’s head and the peppering of his hotel room door with bullets. That time was 1968, the place Cambridge, Boston’s university town. Sensibly, Morrison explains that Astral Weeks was written by a different person living, as its title song says, ‘In another time/ In another place.’ You’d be especially irritated by people asking how you wrote Astral Weeks. You’d be grumpy if your job obliged you to consort with thieves, liars and drummers who can’t keep time. In my experience, he’s perfectly reasonable. The music business abounds with stories about Morrison being grumpy. ‘And this is good old Boston/, The home of the bean and the cod,’ John Collins Bossidy quipped in 1910, ‘Where the Lowells talk to the Cabots/, And the Cabots talk only to God.’ Also home, in 1968, to Mel Lyman, a folk musician turned LSD guru who believed he was God, and to Van Morrison.

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