“If I told you, I'd have to kill you."
By mid-1968, bassist Walter Powers happily watched his old band mates from The Lost find some traction in the trenches of the “Boston Sound” frenzy and figured there must be room for him in there as well. He soon joined a new, local psychedelic rock group called Listening, fronted by Michael Tschudin, the Harvard graduate who had been in The Street Choir with harmonica player Peter Ivers, who himself would later go on to compose the music for the “In Heaven” song in David Lynch’s Eraserhead.* Listening released one record on Vanguard Records in late 1968 which is notable for its complicated psych-jams and the striking front cover showing the band performing live at the outdoor venue on the Charles River Esplanade known as The Hatch Shell (Green Day caused a riot at the same locale in 1994).
Not convinced that Listening was going anywhere special, Powers was still showing up to auditions for other rock outfits. One afternoon in the spring of 1968, Powers drove out to a basement audition at a house in Weston, a suburb right outside the city. The word was that a guy named Van Morrison was auditioning bass and guitar players all day long. “There was an old-fashioned wheelchair in the basement, and I took a seat in it when I got there,” Powers said. “I had my bass in my lap. When Van arrived, we, all of us, joined in jamming on a blues progression. Each of us was given a chance to show what he brought.” When it was Powers' turn to jam, he instinctively stood up, rising out of the wheelchair and visibly shocking Morrison. “Van had a ‘He walks?!’ look on his face,” Powers recalls. After the tryout, he explained to Morrison that the empty wheelchair had just been there when he arrived. Powers did not get the job as bassist of the Van Morrison Controversy. Listening would have to do for him for now (though he’d soon find himself in a post-Lou-Reed version of the Velvet Underground just a few years later).
Listening has one of the stranger footnotes in the entire Boston Sound saga in the fact that frontman Michael Tschudin has since made a truly bizarre claim about his secret life during the years he fronted the band. “I hear that Michael lives in South Florida,” Listening guitarist Peter Mallick told an interviewer in 2011, “and claims to have been a Special Ops Green Beret in Vietnam, during the time he was doing drugs and playing rock-n-roll in Boston.”
Mallick is only slightly incorrect. Tschudin claims to have been a Navy Seal, not a Green Beret. The former psych-frontman was first exposed as a phony Navy Seal in 1987 by, strangely enough, G.Gordon Liddy—attorney and overseer of the burglary in Nixon's Watergate scandal—but Tschudin continued to tell the story in the ensuing decades. “When Michael Tschudin sits down at the Moeller organ at the First Evangelical Lutheran Church in West Palm Beach,” a 2006 Palm Beach Post profile begins, “his days as a Navy SEAL in the jungles and paddies of Vietnam recede.”
"I can show you this certificate to prove I was in, but I can't show you any photos or any other documentation,” Tschudin told the reporter. “If I told you, I'd have to kill you." Tschudin's fabrications are still a topic that upsets actual Navy Seals who devote a section of a Special Operations message board to exposing fakes just like this. They're responsible for calling attention to the 2006 profile which revealed the former rocker’s continued Seal claims, despite the nineteen year old revelation by G.Gordon Liddy that he most certainly was not.
The December 21, 1968 review of Listening’s debut in Billboard appeared next to a record that was described as a “poetic land of folk-blues and country soul.”
The above text is a section that was cut from Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968.
* “In Heaven” would later famously be covered by another Boston band named The Pixies. Later in 1968, Peter Ivers ended up in the office of Larry Cohn—head of Epic Records—with Jim Kweskin and Mel Lyman trying to obtain a recording contract. During the height of The Bosstown Sound mania, just saying you were from Boston was enough to get yourself considered for a meeting at a major label, but being accompanied by the well-established musician Jim Kweskin sealed the deal. Larry Cohn kept meeting with Ivers, and soon the Harvard graduate had a recording contract with Epic. Knight of the Blue Communion, his debut, arrived in 1969. Ivers was found dead in his L.A. apartment in 1983; the murder has never been solved.
