As Walsh pertinently asks in his book, “What did the Astral Weeks songs sound like before producer Lewis Merenstein’s jazz ringers got hold of them?” Walsh made the Catacombs tapes a pivotal part of a book on Morrison he released earlier this year called Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968. He added that a person would have to “bake the tapes” before they could be played that is, a specialist Wolf knew in Maine would have to literally bake the tapes in an oven, a process that would enable the tapes to withstand playback without disintegrating or being shredded. A Boston musician and writer named Ryan Walsh has spent years trying to find them for obvious reasons the tapes became known as “the Catacombs tapes.” Peter Wolf told Walsh that he had the Catacombs tapes in his possession but had not listened to them for years. The Catacombs tapes document a show from August 1968. One of the gigs during that run at the Catacombs was recorded, but the tapes have never been heard by the public. Morrison composed the music in Boston during the summer of 1968, and a series of gigs at a venue called the Catacombs, located at at 1120 Boylston Street in the Fenway, proved pivotal to the process. The album was recorded in New York in September/October 1968 and released a few weeks later. Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks is one of the most important and most special albums of the 1960s. Yesterday was a good day for Van Morrison completists.
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