Lyman died in 1978, but his death was kept secret until the mid-eighties. Commune members were also expected, among other duties, to distribute the provocative biweekly underground newspaper Avatar. Members who had trouble following the rules might be given an LSD trip, guided by Lyman himself, or subjected to a rigged astrological reading. Lyman controlled every aspect of life in Fort Hill.
As Walsh notes, the Fort Hill Community “attracted followers of a pedigree far more impressive than that of your run-of-the-mill sixties commune,” including Jessie Benton, the daughter of Thomas Hart Benton Mark Frechette, the star of Michelangelo Antonioni’s film “Zabriskie Point” Paul Williams, the founder of the music magazine Crawdaddy two children of the novelist Kay Boyle and Owen deLong, a former speechwriter for Robert Kennedy. Morrison has called the sessions that produced the album “uncanny,” adding that “it was like an alchemical kind of situation.” A decade later, Lester Bangs called the album “a mystical document” and “a beacon, a light on the far shores of the murk.” Bruce Springsteen said that it gave him “a sense of the divine.” The critic Greil Marcus equated the album to Bob Beamon’s record-shattering long-jump performance at the Mexico City Olympics, a singular achievement that was “way outside of history.”īoston was home to the other major figure in Walsh’s book, Mel Lyman, a musician who reinvented himself as the messianic leader of a commune in the Fort Hill area of Roxbury, where he and his followers, known as the Lyman “Family,” commandeered an entire neighborhood of houses. Many of the songs were captured on the first or second take.
In November, 1968, the irascible songwriter from Belfast released a jazz-influenced acoustic song cycle that featured minimal percussion, an upright bass, flute, harpsichord, vibraphone, strings, and stream-of-consciousness lyrics about being transported to “another time” and “another place.” The album was recorded in three sessions, with the string arrangements overdubbed later. Van Morrison’s “Astral Weeks” has always seemed like a fluke.
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