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Another Rock and Roll Post
Going to see the Doors For the 21st Century last week sparked a chain reaction of thoughts that have culminated in this post. I'm sure that for most of you it will be at best, of only passing interest. For some of you perhaps it will be more interesting, if you like me, ever took a rock star like Jim to your heart. If you too understand what it is like to idolise someone through the ages, regardless of death, regardless of musical fashion and regardless of the rumour mill that has ground away since that death. Perhaps this is not just for Jim fans, but for all of us who lost a hero too young, too suddenly and too mysteriously. This, I suppose, is for us.
Since finishing my dissertation in May, I've barely listened to the Doors, not because I decided I didn't like them anymore but because I simply could not think about them anymore, could not listen anymore. This was the Summer of the Zeppelin for me and this may partly be because I needed to fill the Doors shaped void with something else.
And yet... on most mornings last week I crossed the river Wear listening to my beloved Doors. First Waiting For the Sun which induced wide smiles during 'Love Street' and then Morrison Hotel which inspired genuine laughter as my true favourite Doors song 'Peace Frog' came on. It was one of the first Doors songs I took to my heart, you know. I was cheerful and quirky in class because that same Doors shaped void in my heart had been filled once more (Led Zeppelin quickly gained their own space in my heart, you see) and I felt so much the better for it. Time had elapsed after the four-day, ten thousand word marathon and I needed my LA boys back. On the train home to see the Doors (minus Jim and John, of course) I listened to The Soft Parade, which a lot of people hate but I love- the Doors with an orchestra is for me, the sound of California to me, the sound of driving up the California coast.
So many thoughts filled my head that I was forced to scribble some down just to get them out of my brain. I started thinking about why I liked this man and his band, the many things said about them and why even after the dissertation that dragged me to the precipice of insanity, I still love them. They are fairly unrelated points that occurred to me as each new song began.
Firstly, while listening to 'Touch Me', I realised that there is something childishly charming about a man who gets up on a stage and instead of singing "touch me babe, can't you see that I am not afraid" sings "fuck me babe, come on and give me some head" as so memorably portrayed in that hack biopic The Doors. It is at once both oddly, adolescently charming and sad. Sad to see a man so desperate to be a poet reduced to such basic, obvious obscenity by drinking, drugs and the pressure to be the mad, shocking Lizard King.
Whenever I would talk to one of the American Studies professors about Jim, he never ever called him Jim Morrison, only ever the Lizard King. Even when he called me over in Furness bar to speak to one of the people who marked it, he called him the Lizard King. This always mildly irritated me, but I was never quite sure why- I thought perhaps I just didn't like the way Jonathan seemed to be trying so hard to be cool and appear knowledgeable. Now this may well be a part of it, but it's hardly important- certainly no more irritating than the people who only refer to his death in a bath. I realised that it was not a middle-aged man's attempt at cool that annoyed me, but rather than he had his own narrow idea of who Jim was and nothing else- to this man and to millions of others, Jim is merely a bare-chested pretty boy with long hair who swore and stuff. This is what got to me because I know Jim Morrison was more than just the fucking Lizard King, more than just the Young Lion who did silly things on stage. So to hear Ian 'Not Jim' Astbury say during 'Not To Touch The Earth' the following:
"James Douglas Morrison was the Lizard King!
He did everything!
I was incensed and not just because it didn't fit the music. The moronic fans at Wembley who cheered every time Astbury did something Jimlike, be it shamanic dancing or slumping over the mike, they only wanted the Lizard King so I found myself glad that Jim wasn't there- it's no different to the morons in 67-71 shouting only for the ease of 'Light My Fire'. The Doors once wanted to challenge audiences, but thirty five years later it seems they didn't achieve much. And I'm sure Jim would disagree here, but anyone who needs to smoke copious amounts of marijuana during such a concert merely lacks imagination and the ability to open up their minds themselves.
This led me to another thought: there is now something oddly unrebellious about the kids who use Jim to rebel. It's not that he has become particularly acceptable (unless it's become so to expose oneself on stage and sing as Oedipus about mother-fucking) but it's just the sadly typical way in which the kids embrace him: the bloody Lizard King again, his shirtless cruciform photo and that shameful cemetery graffiti. Not to mention the "Jim was a poet man!" I hate to burst your bubble, but Jim Morrison was at best a mediocre poet when he died. He was a poet like Lennon & McCartney, Robert Plant and Mick Jagger were poets. He was the kind of guy who could make words sing out and who could transform simple lyrics into rock and roll beauty. This is not the same as poetry- try taking the music away from some of the best rock songs and see for yourself. He was not a poet like Yeats or Keats or Byron or Rossetti or Rimbaud. I have no doubt that Jim would've become a great poet- those lyrics are proof of that, but as a real poet, Jim just tried too hard. He tried too hard to be poetic, too hard to be shocking. There are some truly sublime moments in his lyrics but they are too often followed by moments of nonsense and pretension. Jim did not live to fulfil his massive potential and so died a rock star instead of the poet he longed to be. Deify Jim if you must, but accept that the man was not perfect and created some real shite in his time. He had some wonderful ideas but did not live to see them through.
Another thing that has been bugging me is the idea that bearded, slightly overweight (this has been exaggerated over time in my opinion) Jim was ugly. Damaged and hurt beyond the telling of it? Absolutely. Ugly? Not on your life- it takes more than a bit of a beer gut and a shaggy beard to make a man as beautiful as Jim ugly. Say he became a boorish drunk, but please don't condemn him for no longer conforming to the standards of beauty he'd once epitomised and you demanded of him. If you disagree with me, look harder. When you're not looking at his chest or pout or those bloody trousers, notice instead his eyes. Dark, deep and unutterably sad. Yes, in those Paris pictures he looked washed out, much older than 27 and a million light years away from the Young Lion, but he looks almost happy and there is a glimmer of hope in that face. That this didn't pan out, well, that's the tragic part of the drama.
That said, I don't think Jim Morrison ever intended to die. I don't think he was a heroin addict- it was, as has been widely reported, the one drug he wouldn't touch and his girlfriend Pamela had to hide her addiction from him. I have read many things by many people and I choose to believe, like Patricia Kennealy, that Jim returned home the night he died, saw Pamela's heroin and mistook it for cocaine (let's face it, he probably returned home drunk or in some way the worse for wear) and took a noseful. It killed him. The cover-up of his death was not for Jim, it was for Pamela, this is what I believe. I will never believe that Jim intended to die. I will never believe that Jim wanted to die and certainly not the way he did. He said himself that he wanted to be there when he died (you only die once, right?) and so didn't want to die of an overdose or suchlike. That my sometimes death-fixated hero was even robbed of the death he wanted is as sad as his death itself.
Somewhere along the line (1967, I think) we forgot that Jim Morrison was a real, live, human being with thoughts, feelings and the capacity to hurt and be hurt. We seem to have forgotten this in our rush to make him what we want him to be, something I know I've been guilty of too. Perhaps it's that the more you know him, the more you realise you don't know him at all. So next time you go to dismiss Jim Morrison as the fat drunk dead in a bath or the scowling Adonis or a bad poet, think twice, think longer as to who he might really have been. Don't expect an easy answer, but please for his sake, have a go.
One last thought that I scrawled in my shorthand notebook after listening to Morrison Hotel on the way last week:
Morrison's deep, rough/smooth voice reverberates in my chest where my heart had previously been. I am reminded absolutely of why I fell in love with him long ago, why I pushed myself to the edge of insanity to write about him. I am reminded of what Jim had been before he was offered up as a human sacrifice to the often greedy gods of rock and rolls, before he became the poster child of teen rebels without a cause. And I saw that it was good.
Since finishing my dissertation in May, I've barely listened to the Doors, not because I decided I didn't like them anymore but because I simply could not think about them anymore, could not listen anymore. This was the Summer of the Zeppelin for me and this may partly be because I needed to fill the Doors shaped void with something else.
And yet... on most mornings last week I crossed the river Wear listening to my beloved Doors. First Waiting For the Sun which induced wide smiles during 'Love Street' and then Morrison Hotel which inspired genuine laughter as my true favourite Doors song 'Peace Frog' came on. It was one of the first Doors songs I took to my heart, you know. I was cheerful and quirky in class because that same Doors shaped void in my heart had been filled once more (Led Zeppelin quickly gained their own space in my heart, you see) and I felt so much the better for it. Time had elapsed after the four-day, ten thousand word marathon and I needed my LA boys back. On the train home to see the Doors (minus Jim and John, of course) I listened to The Soft Parade, which a lot of people hate but I love- the Doors with an orchestra is for me, the sound of California to me, the sound of driving up the California coast.
So many thoughts filled my head that I was forced to scribble some down just to get them out of my brain. I started thinking about why I liked this man and his band, the many things said about them and why even after the dissertation that dragged me to the precipice of insanity, I still love them. They are fairly unrelated points that occurred to me as each new song began.
Firstly, while listening to 'Touch Me', I realised that there is something childishly charming about a man who gets up on a stage and instead of singing "touch me babe, can't you see that I am not afraid" sings "fuck me babe, come on and give me some head" as so memorably portrayed in that hack biopic The Doors. It is at once both oddly, adolescently charming and sad. Sad to see a man so desperate to be a poet reduced to such basic, obvious obscenity by drinking, drugs and the pressure to be the mad, shocking Lizard King.
Whenever I would talk to one of the American Studies professors about Jim, he never ever called him Jim Morrison, only ever the Lizard King. Even when he called me over in Furness bar to speak to one of the people who marked it, he called him the Lizard King. This always mildly irritated me, but I was never quite sure why- I thought perhaps I just didn't like the way Jonathan seemed to be trying so hard to be cool and appear knowledgeable. Now this may well be a part of it, but it's hardly important- certainly no more irritating than the people who only refer to his death in a bath. I realised that it was not a middle-aged man's attempt at cool that annoyed me, but rather than he had his own narrow idea of who Jim was and nothing else- to this man and to millions of others, Jim is merely a bare-chested pretty boy with long hair who swore and stuff. This is what got to me because I know Jim Morrison was more than just the fucking Lizard King, more than just the Young Lion who did silly things on stage. So to hear Ian 'Not Jim' Astbury say during 'Not To Touch The Earth' the following:
"James Douglas Morrison was the Lizard King!
He did everything!
I was incensed and not just because it didn't fit the music. The moronic fans at Wembley who cheered every time Astbury did something Jimlike, be it shamanic dancing or slumping over the mike, they only wanted the Lizard King so I found myself glad that Jim wasn't there- it's no different to the morons in 67-71 shouting only for the ease of 'Light My Fire'. The Doors once wanted to challenge audiences, but thirty five years later it seems they didn't achieve much. And I'm sure Jim would disagree here, but anyone who needs to smoke copious amounts of marijuana during such a concert merely lacks imagination and the ability to open up their minds themselves.
This led me to another thought: there is now something oddly unrebellious about the kids who use Jim to rebel. It's not that he has become particularly acceptable (unless it's become so to expose oneself on stage and sing as Oedipus about mother-fucking) but it's just the sadly typical way in which the kids embrace him: the bloody Lizard King again, his shirtless cruciform photo and that shameful cemetery graffiti. Not to mention the "Jim was a poet man!" I hate to burst your bubble, but Jim Morrison was at best a mediocre poet when he died. He was a poet like Lennon & McCartney, Robert Plant and Mick Jagger were poets. He was the kind of guy who could make words sing out and who could transform simple lyrics into rock and roll beauty. This is not the same as poetry- try taking the music away from some of the best rock songs and see for yourself. He was not a poet like Yeats or Keats or Byron or Rossetti or Rimbaud. I have no doubt that Jim would've become a great poet- those lyrics are proof of that, but as a real poet, Jim just tried too hard. He tried too hard to be poetic, too hard to be shocking. There are some truly sublime moments in his lyrics but they are too often followed by moments of nonsense and pretension. Jim did not live to fulfil his massive potential and so died a rock star instead of the poet he longed to be. Deify Jim if you must, but accept that the man was not perfect and created some real shite in his time. He had some wonderful ideas but did not live to see them through.
Another thing that has been bugging me is the idea that bearded, slightly overweight (this has been exaggerated over time in my opinion) Jim was ugly. Damaged and hurt beyond the telling of it? Absolutely. Ugly? Not on your life- it takes more than a bit of a beer gut and a shaggy beard to make a man as beautiful as Jim ugly. Say he became a boorish drunk, but please don't condemn him for no longer conforming to the standards of beauty he'd once epitomised and you demanded of him. If you disagree with me, look harder. When you're not looking at his chest or pout or those bloody trousers, notice instead his eyes. Dark, deep and unutterably sad. Yes, in those Paris pictures he looked washed out, much older than 27 and a million light years away from the Young Lion, but he looks almost happy and there is a glimmer of hope in that face. That this didn't pan out, well, that's the tragic part of the drama.
That said, I don't think Jim Morrison ever intended to die. I don't think he was a heroin addict- it was, as has been widely reported, the one drug he wouldn't touch and his girlfriend Pamela had to hide her addiction from him. I have read many things by many people and I choose to believe, like Patricia Kennealy, that Jim returned home the night he died, saw Pamela's heroin and mistook it for cocaine (let's face it, he probably returned home drunk or in some way the worse for wear) and took a noseful. It killed him. The cover-up of his death was not for Jim, it was for Pamela, this is what I believe. I will never believe that Jim intended to die. I will never believe that Jim wanted to die and certainly not the way he did. He said himself that he wanted to be there when he died (you only die once, right?) and so didn't want to die of an overdose or suchlike. That my sometimes death-fixated hero was even robbed of the death he wanted is as sad as his death itself.
Somewhere along the line (1967, I think) we forgot that Jim Morrison was a real, live, human being with thoughts, feelings and the capacity to hurt and be hurt. We seem to have forgotten this in our rush to make him what we want him to be, something I know I've been guilty of too. Perhaps it's that the more you know him, the more you realise you don't know him at all. So next time you go to dismiss Jim Morrison as the fat drunk dead in a bath or the scowling Adonis or a bad poet, think twice, think longer as to who he might really have been. Don't expect an easy answer, but please for his sake, have a go.
One last thought that I scrawled in my shorthand notebook after listening to Morrison Hotel on the way last week:
Morrison's deep, rough/smooth voice reverberates in my chest where my heart had previously been. I am reminded absolutely of why I fell in love with him long ago, why I pushed myself to the edge of insanity to write about him. I am reminded of what Jim had been before he was offered up as a human sacrifice to the often greedy gods of rock and rolls, before he became the poster child of teen rebels without a cause. And I saw that it was good.
no subject
no subject
Jim was truly original
Yes, and thank god for that! I don't think the world would cope well with more than one, no matter what me or Ian Astbury would like.