I know you're dyin

Van Morrison - 'Slim Slow Slider' (Astral Weeks - 1968)

If you are looking for an origin point for ‘Slim Slow Slider’, the final track on Van Morrison’s second solo album Astral Weeks, you need only go back a year to his first album, Blowin’ Your Mind. His debut, predictably, starts with the hit single ‘Brown Eyed Girl’, but half of the first side of that record is taken up with the song ‘T.B. Sheets’. It runs for nine minutes, and it isn’t hard to see it as a dry run for both ‘Slim Slow Slider’ and ‘Madame George’. The song is a story about a young woman dying of tuberculosis; it is a visceral and almost Dickensian tale where the smell of disease and, eventually, death emanates from the storytelling.

‘Slim Slow Slider’ is a different proposition, though, ‘T.B. Sheets’ is a tale of pain and grief, with the narrator singing about his loved one’s demise mournfully and helplessly. There is certainly a proportion of blame on Astral Weeks’ closing protagonist for her self-destruction.

Van Morrison himself has said that the song is about

About someone who is caught up in a big city like London or maybe is on dope, I’m not sure.

So although we don’t have it fully confirmed by the artist himself, it does seem fair to say that the song is about a woman dying from heroin abuse, becoming slim and slowly sliding into death. Van Morrison knows she’s dying, and she knows it too. With all the focus on rebirths on the album, such as the title track having a chorus saying as much, it is fitting that an album with a loose song cycle finishes with such an ending and references to winter as well as being the only song on the album which isn’t backed up by any string overdubs. We also have a callback to the white horses¹ on ‘Cyprus Avenue’

One of the curious side notes of this song is the reference to Ladbroke Grove; at the time, it was considered as a UK equivalent of Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, one of the key locales for the 1960s counterculture revolution, with an association with recreational drug use which ties the location to the song’s drug use theme. By 1995 Pulp’s ‘I Spy’ has Jarvis Cocker singing of Ladbroke Grove looks turning him on; it was a byword for West London affluence, even more so now with house prices averaging £1.7m, almost six times the UK’s average over the last twelve months. Here though, it is another nod to the drug abuse that our subject is struggling with.

‘Slim Slow Slider’ was not just the final song on the album and the ending of the second side², but the last song recorded. It was recorded in New York in mid-October, merely six weeks before the album was released, during the third session, which also saw 'The Way Young Lovers Do', 'Sweet Thing' and 'Ballerina' completed. According to bassist Richard Davis, this session was said to have a very late-night feel in which they actively searched for a closing track.

Flute and Saxophone player John Payne recalls;

I don't think we'd ever done [it] live. [Morrison] had a book full of songs ... I don't know why he decided to do it ... And we were first doing it with the drums, with Richard Davis and Connie Kay and the guitar player and the vibe player and me and Van — all of us were playing. Then I started playing soprano sax on the thing, and Lew said, “OK, I wanna try it again. Start again. And I want just the bass, the soprano sax, and Van.'"

Payne says the take had an extended coda cut from the album version. Some have suggested that four or five minutes of a jazzy instrumental outro were removed. Still, an expanded edition in 2015 only added a minute and a half of noodling at the end, and I agree with producer Lewis Merenstein that it adds very little. This is because the song already had a superior ending.

It finishes with an abrupt ending to the lyrics and the music. We have a final recognition from Morrison that;

Every time I see you, I just don’t know what to do."

before a trilling of the flute, a slap on the back of the guitar and we are away.

1. and potentially another reference to heroin.

2. The credits have side one as ‘In The Beginning’ and side two as ‘Afterwards’, which pushes the song cycle narrative.