He’s out in the sun, he’s playing those songs, and they’re very melancholy. “It’s sort of a shining memory, I’d guess you’d say. These days, when he looks back, what Sheldon remembers best from that summer is Morrison sitting in the yard of his parents’ house in Cambridge, playing those songs from Astral Weeks. His hunch had been correct: When Morrison left to record Astral Weeks in New York, he didn’t take Sheldon with him. That audition of sorts at Ace was the last moment Sheldon was involved in the recording.

The song Van Morrison played that day, the one that so unhinged the producer, was called “Astral Weeks,” and it would become the title track on the album that would redefine Morrison’s career. Sheldon remembers the producer telling Morrison, “I think you’re a genius, and I want you to make a record for Warner Brothers.” It was clear to Sheldon that Merenstein wasn’t talking to any of the other band members. “I knew he was being reborn…I knew I wanted to work with him at that moment.” Thirty seconds in, “my whole being was vibrating,” Merenstein said in 2008.

At the time it was one of the few professional studios in Boston, the place where the original “Charlie on the MTA” had been recorded. So that’s when we started playing songs like ‘Madame George.’”Īfter a few weeks, the trio went to meet a producer named Lewis Merenstein at Ace Recording Studios, across from Boston Common. Tom played a standup bass, me on the acoustic guitar. So he got rid of the drummer and rehearsed with just me and Tom. He would tie up the family phone, carrying on epic arguments over the royalties for “Brown Eyed Girl.” “My parents would come in for breakfast on Sunday,” Sheldon recalls, “and it would be a bunch of people they didn’t know.” One day, Sheldon says, “Van came over to the house in Cambridge and he said that he had a dream and in the dream there were no more electric instruments. Morrison quickly became a constant presence in the Sheldon household. Joe, do you want to play drums?’ This is the kind of level that things were happening at then.” We drove by Berklee and saw this guy on the sidewalk. I remember going out in a car with Tom and Van. “There was a gig at the Boston Tea Party,” Sheldon says, “but we had no drummer. And Boston wasn’t rolling out any red carpets upon his arrival. Morrison was riding the success of his first single, “Brown Eyed Girl,” but he hadn’t yet become a household name.

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