“I was looking for stories and people that interested me,” Walsh says. He started with Mel Lyman, the charismatic leader of the Fort Hill Community, a commune of sorts whose members still reside in a cluster of buildings near the Gothic-style tower in Roxbury known as the Cochituate Standpipe. It was decided that a whole book about Morrison’s brief tenure in Boston would be, in Walsh’s words, “thin soup,” but perhaps he could craft a narrative with multiple, intersecting stories about other forgotten people and places that composed the city’s flourishing counterculture at the time. I didn’t know if there was a book there, but I wanted to talk to him.”
“You could tell he was writing this story because it meant something to him.
“The way Ryan told the story, the way he’d reported it out, yielded so many great characters,” says Park. Singer Elvis Costello has called it “the most adventurous record made in the rock medium.” But the backstory - why Morrison and his girlfriend Janet Planet moved to Massachusetts and what the singer did while he was here - had never been adequately explained. Critics agree that the LP, with its dreamy acoustic arrangements and seemingly stream-of-consciousness lyrics, ranks among the greatest ever. Walsh, who’s 39, has always felt an intense connection to “Astral Weeks,” and he’s not alone. “I already liked her, but I thought, ‘Wow, this is a good sign,’” says Walsh, sitting at the kitchen table in the couple’s apartment in Jamaica Plain. Walsh is also married to singer Marissa Nadler, who, not insignificantly, put “Astral Weeks” on the turntable at the end of their first date in 2010. By day, he’s the marketing manager for ArtsEmerson, and by night the frontman for Hallelujah the Hills, an indie rock band that takes its name from the 1963 cult comedy directed by Adolfas Mekas. Walsh, who grew up in Dedham and graduated from Boston University, is not a journalist.
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