AA SOTD - 8/8/2022; The Iceman Cometh
Pre: hot shower (boo)
Brush: Stirling 26mm synthetic pro handle
Razor: Merkur Progress
Blade: Astra (2)
Lather: B&M Arctique (omnibus)
Post: B&M Arctique AS
Post: Nivea cooling balm
#UNCHALLENGED
I had to be out the door this morning not later than a certain set time. So, this was a speed shave. 2 quick passes after a rapid lather. Still BBS. I remain the Iceman.
#SIDETRACKED (u/Teufelskraft)
I will never forget the first time I heard Astral Weeks. I was hunkered down in a room at the library in college; full bunker-mode writing a paper mid-winter. My phone shuffled through songs as I outlined my work, but nothing was helping me to study very much. Then Astral Weeks started playing. Within three minutes I found the entire album online and I don't think I did another second of work until I finished listening to the entire thing.
The production story of this album is incredible:
"So what magic happened during those three recording sessions on West Fifty-second Street? At Merenstein’s insistence, most of the band Morrison had been touring with that summer were not invited to the studio. Instead, the producer gathered an élite group of session musicians, featuring the bassist Richard Davis, who had performed with Sarah Vaughan and Oscar Peterson, and the guitarist Jay Berliner, who had recorded with Harry Belafonte and Charles Mingus. Perhaps intimidated by the company he was in, Morrison skulked to the vocal booth and kept his interactions with the musicians to a minimum. Davis recalls that Morrison strummed his songs once or twice for them and then let them improvise their parts as the tapes rolled. It hardly seems like a recipe for success, but it was very much in keeping with the unstructured and unorthodox temper of the time. Merenstein and the musicians were thrilled with the results, but Morrison, ever the contrarian, had a different opinion. “They ruined it,” he said later. “They added strings. I didn’t want the strings. And they sent it to me, it was all changed. That’s not ‘Astral Weeks’.”
For the rest of us, though, it very much is."
- Jon Michaud, The Miracle of Van Morrison's "Astral Weeks", Mar. 7, 2018, The New Yorker.