He also had to buy that contract back from mobsters for $20,000 in order to he make the jump to Warner Bros. The short version of the story is that Morrison didn’t want to work with his then-current label, so to get out of his contract he recorded an album full of unreleasable nonsense songs. The story behind Astral Weeks, Van Morrison’s landmark album, is fraught with bad decisions, angry record executives, and the mafia.
