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The book also takes a close look at Mel Lyman, the musician-turned-cult-leader who headed a group called the Fort Hill Community in Roxbury and published the underground counterculture newspaper Avatar. His shaggy-dog tales range from the groundbreaking rock club Boston Tea Party - where the Velvet Underground played 43 times between 19, a period during which the New York-associated band only actually played its hometown thrice - to Tufts University professor David Silver's mind-bending weekly television program on WGBH, to the origins of WBCN's experiment with taking a break from classical music for a few hours of free-form rock programming in the middle of the night. It contains the most information ever compiled about the background of "Astral Weeks," Walsh says, but along the way the author re-creates a geography of mostly-forgotten cultural landmarks. The book goes far beyond "Astral Weeks," placing Morrison's time in Cambridge, from January through early September of 1968, in the vivid context of Boston's counterculture of the time. Readers shouldn't expect a simple guide to the album. "Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968" by Ryan Walsh. Walsh discusses his book in conversation with Carly Carioli, former editor-in-chief of Boston Magazine and of the Boston Phoenix, in an event at Brookline Booksmith on Tuesday, March 6. The resulting work, " Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968," hits bookshelves this week. He did a deep dive and produced an eye-opening article on the topic that was published by Boston Magazine in 2015, which landed him a book deal with Penguin Press. I felt a weird duty to figure it out," Walsh says. "The fact that these locales were listed on the back - I thought, this place must have meant something to him.

Like many fans of "Astral Weeks," local musician and marketer Ryan Walsh wondered about this for years. But his Cambridge/Boston period remained an under-explained footnote in his biography, an anomaly without context. In the years following the album's November 1968 release, the vague tidbit that the songwriter had lived in Cambridge for a while became received wisdom among fans of the deeply affecting, deeply mysterious piece of work, by many accounts Morrison's masterpiece. But what the heck did they have to do with this album, a deeply meditative exercise in memory and nostalgia that was recorded in New York City and teems with references to Belfast? It always seemed safe enough to assume Morrison had written these words. Knew you had the blues, saw you coming from across the river. I saw you coming from Cambridgeport with my poetry and jazz,

When I got back it was like a dream come true I saw you coming from the Cape, way from Hyannis Port all the way, But on the back cover of Van Morrison's much-cherished album "Astral Weeks," there is an unexplained bit of verse that links the work to a different place altogether. Its song lyrics are dotted with references to the artist's native Ireland.