The Moondance essays - Track 1 Side 1 - And It Stoned Me

Here's where this all started.

Then the rain let up and the sun came up
And we were gettin' dry
Almost let a pick-up truck nearly pass us by

--And It Stoned Me

The above lyric has driven me crazy since I first heard it. How do you ALMOST let a pick-up truck NEARLY pass you by?

But if Van needed an extra few syllables, then dammit he was gonna have them. He didn't give a fiddler's fart how he was gonna mess with my head. And Van was gonna mess with my head plenty. Had ALREADY messed with my head with his previous record Astral Weeks, which sounded like nothing I'd ever heard before. I realized that I didn't need to spend money to get stoned. I could listen to Astral Weeks and feel stoned. And it seemed to come out of nowhere. One minute he was the Brown Eyed Girl guy, and the next he was venturing "into the slipstream, between the the viaducts of your dreams", playing these long, jazzy songs about as far from "making love in the green grass behind the stadium with you" as one could get.