Post by darkstar3 on Jan 14, 2011 17:18:32 GMT
American Song Writer Magazine
By Evan Schlansky
November 1st, 2006
THE DOORS: Sex, Death and Poetry
Bob Dylan was the first rocker ever to be accused of being a poet. Dylan passed the buck, electing Smokey Robinson as “America’s greatest living poet.” When Pink’s teacher catches him writing lyrics in the classroom in Pink Floyd’s The Wall, he dickishly asks, “What have we here, laddie? Mysterious scribblings? A secret code? No! Poems, no less! Poems, everybody! The laddie reckons himself a poet!”
Jim Morrison was rock ‘n’ roll’s first self-declared poet. The words he wrote, whether you love them or hate them, have forgotten them or live by them, would go on to rewrite pop music history forever. “There are things known,” said Morrison, “and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors."
Now listen to this…I’ll tell you about Texas radio
and the big beat soft driven, slow and mad like some new language reaching your hand with the cold, sudden fury of a divine messenger
Let me tell you about heartache and the loss of god
wandering, wandering in hopeless night
Out here in the perimeter there are no stars
Out here we is stoned
Immaculate
Back in the ’60s the rules of rock were changing. The drugs were kicking in-and with Dylan as leader of the lyrical revolution-setting a heady example. Everyone was free to express themselves in their own way; The Beatles sang of tangerine trees and marmalade skies, the Stones expressed their sexual frustration, the Band went back to the land and The Who wrote rock operas. Jim Morrison set poems to music.
Put aside, for the moment, your preconceptions of Morrison the man-his ghosts, his neuroses, his Oedipal conflicts and drug addictions, his moral relativism, his beard and belly routine, his drunken wiener flaunting and his mojo rising-and realize this:
Morrison was a poet, as sure as Jack Kerouac was a poet. They weren’t always great ones, and yet frequently, they were. Kerouac had a musical scheme mapped out for his poems, a technique he patterned after “the blues,” using choruses and stanzas to frame his ideas. Morrison understood that music can deliver mere words to mystical places. He looked into the same void as the Beat poets, peered into the same mirrors as the Greek poets and paid little mind to the conventions of the geek poets. Where others lyricists drew from blues, folk and Tin Pan Alley traditions, Morrison combined a fascination with Nietzsche, Rimbaud, William Blake, shamanism, American Indians and a dual obsession with sex and death-the beginning and end points of human existence.
Here’s Morrison in his own words: “Our work, our performing, is a striving for a metamorphosis. Right now, we’re more interested in the dark side of life, the evil thing, the night time. But through our music, we’re striving, trying to break through to a cleaner, freer realm. Our music and personalities as seen in performance are still in a state of chaos and disorder, with maybe an element of purity just showing. Lately, when we’ve appeared in concert, it’s started to merge.”
And this: “I offer images. I conjure memories of freedom that can still be reached.” From Morrison’s posthumous collection of poetry, Wilderness: “I’m kind of hooked to the game of art and literature; my heroes are artists and writers…I wrote a few poems, of course…real poetry doesn’t say anything, it just ticks off the possibilities-opens all doors. You can walk through any one that suits you…and that’s why poetry appeals to me so much-because it’s so eternal. As long as there are people, they can remember words and combinations of words. Nothing else can survive a holocaust but poetry and songs. No one can remember an entire novel, but so long as there are human beings, songs and poetry can continue. If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it’s to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.”
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
As the Morrison myth goes, when Jim was four-years-old, he and his family were driving through the New Mexico desert at dawn. There along the roadside, they came upon a scene that would haunt him for the remainder of his life.
Indians scattered on dawn’s highway bleeding
Ghosts crowd the child’s fragile eggshell mind
A family of Native Americans had been in a terrible accident, and men, women and children lay dying in the sun. Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek believes that at this moment, Jim was possessed-albeit benign-by the spirit of a dead Indian. Morrison would adhere to this perception.
As a child, Morrison was a good student and was well-liked among his classmates. The son of a Navy Admiral, however, he was constantly being uprooted. Combined with his adult life as a traveling musician, the constant upheaval led him to identify strongly with the role of the wanderer and seeker. As a teenager, he devoted himself to reading books of poets and philosophers. In 1964, When he was 20-years-old, his emerging interest in film led him to enroll in UCLA. There Jim met film student and fellow dope smoker Ray Manzarek. During one encounter, Jim told Ray he was heading to New York to check out the scene. The next time Manzarek saw Jim, he asked him how New York had been. Jim replied that he had never left California, but instead had been laying low, taking acid and writing songs. This was the first Manzarek had heard of Morrison’s interest in songwriting. He hadn’t even known that Jim could sing. “Let’s hear one,” he persisted. Morrison sang the words to “Moonlight Drive,” Manzarek’s mind began to race with keyboard parts, and a partnership was born. “I was just completely enamored with his words,” Manzarek would later tell interviewer Jim Ladd. (Ladd’s interviews with the remaining band members were later released by The Doors on the CD set <i>No One Here Gets Out Alive</i>.) “Terrific lyrics.”
It wasn’t just Manzarek who saw potential in Jim’s writing. “I joined the band because I wanted to drum to Jim’s poetry,” wrote John Densmore. “I thought it would be far out.” Guitarist Robby Krieger, calling in to discuss The Doors’ 40th Anniversary with <i>American Songwriter</i>, echoes that sentiment. “I just went, ‘Wow, these are great songs.’ He was obviously a great writer, which is really why I joined the band.” There was also the undeniable appeal of Jim’s voice-sensuous, sensual, masculine, commanding, wasted. “The way he sang and the way he interpreted melodies and phrasing was unlike anybody I’ve ever known. If he wasn’t so lazy, I’m sure he could have picked up any instrument and been pretty good at it.”
Krieger’s first impression of his future band mate turned out to be a little misleading. “I thought he was just a pretty normal guy, you know? About a week after that, I realized he wasn’t just a normal guy,” he says, laughing. “He started doing some crazy stuff and getting into trouble and getting my brother into jail and stuff like that.”
In the end, the Doors decided against adding a bass player because the music felt more ethereal without one. “I think the fewer instruments you have, the easier it is to keep things fresh,” observes Krieger, “because you don’t have to worry about too many guys hitting the same note at the same time. It’s very easy to go off and have the other guys follow you, if it’s only two other guys.”
Besides having a poet as a lead singer, there were several other unique factors to The Doors’ sound. Krieger bears the distinction of being the first rock guitarist to employ the bottleneck slide. (Of course, it wouldn’t take long for his contemporaries to catch on.)
The first song the band ever jammed on-stoned out of their gourds in Manzarek’s basement-was “Moonlight Drive.” Each member felt instantly transported, as if they were making music for the first time. The song that would ultimately provide their big break, however, didn’t come from Morrison’s notebook.
“Jim said that maybe we don’t have enough songs, you know…you all should try to write some too,” Krieger remembers. “So I went home and the first one I did was ‘Light My Fire.’” It wasn’t addressed to anyone in particular. “I tried not to think of specific people or things when I was writing. I figured Jim’s stuff was very universal and could be about anything, so I tried to emulate that.” Besides a few instrumentals he barely remembers, it was Krieger’s first real song and his debut as a lyricist. “You know that it would be untrue/You know that I would be a liar/If I was to say to you/Girl we couldn’t get much…higher.” A little awkward, maybe, but it would do. Coming from Jim’s mouth, though, those words became incendiary.
By the summer of 1966, The Doors had built up their repertoire and were ready for the stage. They landed a gig as the house band at L.A.’s infamous Whisky-a-Go-Go. It was there that Morrison, high on acid, would sink into a trance while singing “The End,” intoning these famous words: “Father, I want to kill you. Mother, I want to…” You know the rest. (or think you do-Morrison never actually completed the sentence.)
These lines got them fired, but a record contract with Elektra Records would soon put them in the national spotlight. With tracks like “Break on Through,” “Light My Fire,” “The Crystal Ship” and “The End,” their debut album, The Doors, was a remarkable achievement.
The Doors were naturally inspired by the music they heard on the radio, but only to a point. “Sgt. Peppers, obviously-that was a big shocker,” says Krieger. “And Hendrix’s album. But you know what, we weren’t really listening to a lot of that stuff. We had a lot of old blues records, classical stuff. We were into all different kinds of things…old Brecht, Kurt Weill, German opera…we wanted to be our own thing. There was nothing really that came along that made us say, ‘Oh, we’ve gotta do something like that.’ As for Morrison, he wasn’t too enamored with any particular songwriters. I think he liked some of the Stones stuff and some of The Beatles stuff. He liked Van Morrison a lot, and The Animals. But there wasn’t a whole lot that he was crazy about. He was more into his own thing.”
The Doors formed a tight unit from the beginning, splitting all their publishing royalties equally. When the band was introduced on stage as “Jim Morrison and The Doors” early on, Jim made the MC introduce them again-as “The Doors.”
While “Light My Fire” was a hit at radio, it was their legendary stage show that was gaining them the most notoriety. In concert Morrison would routinely whip the crowd into a Dionysian frenzy. (He even invented stage-diving). While the singer ingested freely before a performance, the others held back. “With The Doors, each song has a lot of things that you have to do right, otherwise you’ll look stupid,” Krieger points out. “So it’s not easy. The couple of times I’ve played on acid, it kind of blew my high,” he says, laughing.
Still, the band liked to take trips too; the music led them there. With Manzarek pumping the bass on his organ with one hand while tickling the astral plane with the other, Krieger made his guitar weep and moan. Densmore would take wild, impressionistic drum fills, and everyone would hang on Morrison’s next move.
Densmore explained to Jim Ladd how, for Jim, his onstage rants and Lizard King persona were no “act.” “Morrison was one of the few performers I knew that really believed what he was saying,” he recalls. “He lived that life. He wasn’t just up there doing his trip and then going home to watch TV and have a beer and laugh at it all…all the way to the bank. He lived that life that he lived out on stage all the time.”
“At concerts he’d sing for four hours if they’d let him have the stage that long,” poet Michael McClure, a friend of Morrison’s, recalled in a 1971 interview. “He was the same way at your house or at a bar; he’d sing to entertain you or himself.”
The band returned to the studio in 1967 to record their second album, Strange Days. It was another solid burst of creativity from the band. Strange Days featured another epic closing number to rival “The End,” “When The Music’s Over.” “What have they done to the Earth,” Morrison sang. “What have they done to our fair sister?”
Morrison maintained close contact with his muse in the studio. According to McClure, “Jim was always making up songs in the studio. The musicians would be taking a break, and Jim would grab the mike and sing spontaneously, making up the words as he went along.”
“He always had a notebook on him and a pencil,” remembers Krieger. “Unfortunately, a lot of that stuff he would just throw away. I wish I had every notebook he ever had. There must be tons of good stuff in there, I’m sure. The stuff he cared about, he kept. But there’s a lot of great stuff that went away.”
For most of the band’s career, lyrics came to Jim in torrents. “It was almost like someone was telling him what to write down,” says Krieger. “But then there were also times when it was like pulling teeth for him. Sometimes he’d been looking in his poetry book and have to come up with an idea so he’d work from that. But for the first couple albums, he said that he had some great pot [chuckles]. I don’t know where he got it, but he would smoke that stuff just listen to this voice…and he would write down the words.” As divine as his inspirations seemed, Morrison wasn’t adverse to revision. “He’d be changing stuff right up to point where it was recorded.” Says Krieger. “Nothing was ever written in stone.”
Like their California peers Jefferson Airplane and The Grateful Dead, The Doors advocated the use of love and drugs. But, due to the complexity of Morrison’s character, they had much more to say on the subject. “We were never really protagonists of the flower movement,” Krieger told Ladd. “In fact, we were the complete opposite. Because what was happening with that trip was, all these hippies were [talking about] love and peace and everything’s great, but really that was only half of the side of the coin. And we were providing the other half of that coin. There always has to be a balance.” Fittingly, when they wrote the song they jokingly titled “Peace Frog,” the lyrics were primarily about “blood in the streets.”
In July of 1968, the band released their third album, Waiting for the Sun. It featured the all-time classic “Five to One,” later sampled by rapper Jay-Z for a classic of another era. (Krieger prefers Snoop Dog’s “Riders on the Storm” remake, but he’s lukewarm on both.) Waiting for the Sun’s lead track and hit single was the raucous “Hello, I Love You.” Contrary to Internet rumors, The Kinks never sued The Doors for royalties over the song’s noticeable similarity to “All Day and All of the Night.”
With 1969’s Soft Parade, The Doors sound continued to evolve, as did Jim’s lyrics. The eight-minute title track fused some of his most evocative word play with shape-shifting grooves. “I tell you this,” he barked, “no eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn.” The album found the band employing horns and strings, most notably on the Sinatra-esque “Touch Me,” written by Krieger.
“The chorus I kinda stole from a Joan Baez song,” he freely admits. Say what? “I’m gonna love you ’til the heavens…’til the heavens…something about the rain,” Krieger says, laughing. “I forget what the name of her song was. But I used to really be into Joan Baez in her folk music days, so I would borrow some stuff from her from time to time.” The lyrics may have been partially recycled, but the tune was Krieger’s own. “Jim would always sing his own version of my melodies, but on that particular one, he stuck pretty much to what I wanted.”
The band scored a minor hit with “Runnin’ Blue,” featuring a charming vocal intro by Krieger, reminiscent of another famous ’60s folksinger. Any resemblance, however, was strictly coincidental. “Dylan was definitely an influence on me, but you know, the thing I liked least about him was his voice!” says Krieger. “I really didn’t try to emulate his voice, but I guess that’s how it sounded. People always say that… ‘Hey, you sound just like Bob Dylan.’ Not because I tried to. Two Jewish guys named Bobby, I guess.”
The self-destructive streak that ran in Jim Morrison was pushing him down the “the road of excess” at high speeds. He now favored copious amounts of alcohol over the use of psychedelics. During one concert in Miami in the summer of ‘69, he famously exposed himself on stage-allegedly-and was arrested for obscenity. Or so the legend goes; the band maintains that Morrison never actually displayed his manhood.
Krieger believes L.A. Woman, the band’s final album, marked a turning point, and that “Riders on the Storm” was perhaps the best thing they had ever done. But the fabricated indecent exposure incident had derailed the band’s career. Concert promoters shunned them and Top 40 radio wouldn’t play their records anymore, no matter how sweet “Love Me Two Times” was in retrospect.
In the meantime, Jim had become fed up with the trappings of stardom. He had recently holed up in the studio to record himself reciting his poems without the help of his band members. He yearned to be accepted for what he saw himself to be-a writer and a poet, communing with words. “Why do I drink?” he wrote. “So I can write poetry.”
But his debauched image stood in the way of him being taken seriously. Part of the problem was, to be considered a poet, most people assume you have to write in flowery language or express big ideas. For many, singing “the blue bus is calling us,” or chanting “sun, sun, sun, moon, moon, moon,” didn’t cut it. Titles like “Lament for the Death of My Cock” didn’t help.
“A wild and crazy rock and roller kind of guy is not the exact image most people have of a serious poet,” says Krieger. “I think that bugs people sometimes. But I think if they would just read his poetry, on the page, they would realize that he was a real poet and probably one of the best American poets that we’ve ever put out.”
McClure, who became close with Morrison in the last years of his life, concurred. “It’s perfectly obvious in reading his book (The Lords and the New Creatures, a collection of early Morrison poetry) that Jim already had his own style and that he was already his own person. As to his potential for growth-well, he started out so good that I don’t know how much better he could’ve gotten. He started off like a heavyweight.”
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Did you have a good world when you died?
Enough to base a movie on?
James Douglas Morrison died in Paris on July 3, 1971 at the age of 27. He had fled to Paris to seek solitude and write poetry. He had finally worn himself out on rock and roll. The music of freedom had turned into his biggest trap.
Alice Cooper, who hung out with The Doors in L.A. as a teenager, theorized to Jim Ladd about people who are unsatisfied on this plane of existence and long to be somewhere else. “Look at the things he wrote. It was so obvious in his lyrics that he was going to be going out pretty soon.” Manzarek adds, “He wasn’t 27; he was 77 when he died. He lived life to the fullest.”
He was buried in an ancient Parisian cemetery-Pere Lachaise-alongside Balzac, Moliere, Wilde and other literary greats whom Jim had long admired. Or perhaps, as The Doors seem to want us to believe, he’s living in Africa. “Maybe I’m charmed by the romantic idea that he’s still alive,” Manzarek told Ladd in 1979. “But I have to say, if there’s anybody who’d do it, he’d do it. He’s the only guy I’ve ever known in my life that I could think of that would do something like that.”
The Doors would pay him the ultimate tribute with 1979’s American Prayer, a collection of Morrison’s previously recorded poems set to newly created music. Manzarek remembers, as the band gathered together trying to decide whether or not to go ahead with the project, a bird flew into the room. The bird is a mythological symbol for the soul. Jim Morrison was in the building. They decided to proceed.
“What they did was what they did from the first time they played together,” Doors manager Bill Siddons told Ladd. “They took Jim’s poetry…to that extra level so everybody can experience it…The Doors as the three musicians were Jim’s vehicle for reaching people. He would have never accomplished what [he] did without him. And vice versa.”
* * * * * * * * * * *
“He wasn’t done,” Patti Smith told a reporter in 1977. “He was just on the threshold of being a really great poet. Now, Hendrix-he was so out there with such furious physical energy, he just died. Morrison was much sadder. He was also desperate. Rock ‘n’ roll was so new then. It was so heavy. There was no precedent for Jim Morrison. It’s a lot different for me. I’ve profited from the fact that he came first.”
Would there have been a Patti Smith without Jim Morrison? Or an Iggy Pop? Could punk rock itself have existed without him? Or heavy metal, without his dark energies?
His influence can be found in the artful musings of Jane’s Addiction, Modest Mouse, the Afghan Whigs and Marilyn Manson. Eddie Vedder and Julian Casablancas are musical descendents. Bono assimilated his rock star poses.
His visions helped pave the way for the lyrical abstractions of Frank Black and Jeff Tweedy, who published a book of poems of his own (as did Jewel, but lets not go there). Morrison’s unique darkness led to the whole dark side of rock and also opened the door for obscenity. Without the balance he provided, rock and roll would be lame. Today, many of our greatest poets are rappers.
“I think that one reason The Doors are still going today is because pretty much every album we did…there’s no junk on there, you know?” says Krieger. “Whereas most groups come out and they might have one or two good songs on an album, and the rest of it is junk. But, if I do say so myself, there’s none of that stuff on any Doors album.”
For many, discovering The Doors’ music is a right of passage, like reading Catcher in the Rye. When do Morrison’s words resonate more than when you’re young and seeing the ugly side of societal norms for the very first time? “Trade in your hours for a handful of dimes/Gonna make it in our prime…”
And besides, who writes more poetry than teenagers? The Doors’ music still sets the mood for a million make-out sessions and keggers in the woods-a reason for the youth of America to continue their ritualistic debauchery. They’re the sound of awakening in a million adolescents around the world, the doors of perception slowly swinging open to the lysergic swirl of “Spanish Caravan” or “The Crystal Ship.”
Maybe Morrison’s biggest contribution to the lyrical world, unveiled during the ’60s’ potent mix of love, drugs, war, flower power and police power colliding, was that he saw in rock music a connection to the thing everyone wants most want out of life-to feel alive, as much of the time as possible.
…City at night! Woo! C’mon! Get together, one more time. We want the world and we want it-now. Break on through to the other side. Ride the Snake…
For all the controversy they caused, or because of it, The Doors can take their place as one of the most influential bands currently canonized in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. For the music and its fans, the doors they unlocked will remain forever open.
www.americansongwriter.com/2006/11/the-doors-sex-death-and-poetry/
By Evan Schlansky
November 1st, 2006
THE DOORS: Sex, Death and Poetry
Bob Dylan was the first rocker ever to be accused of being a poet. Dylan passed the buck, electing Smokey Robinson as “America’s greatest living poet.” When Pink’s teacher catches him writing lyrics in the classroom in Pink Floyd’s The Wall, he dickishly asks, “What have we here, laddie? Mysterious scribblings? A secret code? No! Poems, no less! Poems, everybody! The laddie reckons himself a poet!”
Jim Morrison was rock ‘n’ roll’s first self-declared poet. The words he wrote, whether you love them or hate them, have forgotten them or live by them, would go on to rewrite pop music history forever. “There are things known,” said Morrison, “and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors."
Now listen to this…I’ll tell you about Texas radio
and the big beat soft driven, slow and mad like some new language reaching your hand with the cold, sudden fury of a divine messenger
Let me tell you about heartache and the loss of god
wandering, wandering in hopeless night
Out here in the perimeter there are no stars
Out here we is stoned
Immaculate
Back in the ’60s the rules of rock were changing. The drugs were kicking in-and with Dylan as leader of the lyrical revolution-setting a heady example. Everyone was free to express themselves in their own way; The Beatles sang of tangerine trees and marmalade skies, the Stones expressed their sexual frustration, the Band went back to the land and The Who wrote rock operas. Jim Morrison set poems to music.
Put aside, for the moment, your preconceptions of Morrison the man-his ghosts, his neuroses, his Oedipal conflicts and drug addictions, his moral relativism, his beard and belly routine, his drunken wiener flaunting and his mojo rising-and realize this:
Morrison was a poet, as sure as Jack Kerouac was a poet. They weren’t always great ones, and yet frequently, they were. Kerouac had a musical scheme mapped out for his poems, a technique he patterned after “the blues,” using choruses and stanzas to frame his ideas. Morrison understood that music can deliver mere words to mystical places. He looked into the same void as the Beat poets, peered into the same mirrors as the Greek poets and paid little mind to the conventions of the geek poets. Where others lyricists drew from blues, folk and Tin Pan Alley traditions, Morrison combined a fascination with Nietzsche, Rimbaud, William Blake, shamanism, American Indians and a dual obsession with sex and death-the beginning and end points of human existence.
Here’s Morrison in his own words: “Our work, our performing, is a striving for a metamorphosis. Right now, we’re more interested in the dark side of life, the evil thing, the night time. But through our music, we’re striving, trying to break through to a cleaner, freer realm. Our music and personalities as seen in performance are still in a state of chaos and disorder, with maybe an element of purity just showing. Lately, when we’ve appeared in concert, it’s started to merge.”
And this: “I offer images. I conjure memories of freedom that can still be reached.” From Morrison’s posthumous collection of poetry, Wilderness: “I’m kind of hooked to the game of art and literature; my heroes are artists and writers…I wrote a few poems, of course…real poetry doesn’t say anything, it just ticks off the possibilities-opens all doors. You can walk through any one that suits you…and that’s why poetry appeals to me so much-because it’s so eternal. As long as there are people, they can remember words and combinations of words. Nothing else can survive a holocaust but poetry and songs. No one can remember an entire novel, but so long as there are human beings, songs and poetry can continue. If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it’s to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.”
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
As the Morrison myth goes, when Jim was four-years-old, he and his family were driving through the New Mexico desert at dawn. There along the roadside, they came upon a scene that would haunt him for the remainder of his life.
Indians scattered on dawn’s highway bleeding
Ghosts crowd the child’s fragile eggshell mind
A family of Native Americans had been in a terrible accident, and men, women and children lay dying in the sun. Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek believes that at this moment, Jim was possessed-albeit benign-by the spirit of a dead Indian. Morrison would adhere to this perception.
As a child, Morrison was a good student and was well-liked among his classmates. The son of a Navy Admiral, however, he was constantly being uprooted. Combined with his adult life as a traveling musician, the constant upheaval led him to identify strongly with the role of the wanderer and seeker. As a teenager, he devoted himself to reading books of poets and philosophers. In 1964, When he was 20-years-old, his emerging interest in film led him to enroll in UCLA. There Jim met film student and fellow dope smoker Ray Manzarek. During one encounter, Jim told Ray he was heading to New York to check out the scene. The next time Manzarek saw Jim, he asked him how New York had been. Jim replied that he had never left California, but instead had been laying low, taking acid and writing songs. This was the first Manzarek had heard of Morrison’s interest in songwriting. He hadn’t even known that Jim could sing. “Let’s hear one,” he persisted. Morrison sang the words to “Moonlight Drive,” Manzarek’s mind began to race with keyboard parts, and a partnership was born. “I was just completely enamored with his words,” Manzarek would later tell interviewer Jim Ladd. (Ladd’s interviews with the remaining band members were later released by The Doors on the CD set <i>No One Here Gets Out Alive</i>.) “Terrific lyrics.”
It wasn’t just Manzarek who saw potential in Jim’s writing. “I joined the band because I wanted to drum to Jim’s poetry,” wrote John Densmore. “I thought it would be far out.” Guitarist Robby Krieger, calling in to discuss The Doors’ 40th Anniversary with <i>American Songwriter</i>, echoes that sentiment. “I just went, ‘Wow, these are great songs.’ He was obviously a great writer, which is really why I joined the band.” There was also the undeniable appeal of Jim’s voice-sensuous, sensual, masculine, commanding, wasted. “The way he sang and the way he interpreted melodies and phrasing was unlike anybody I’ve ever known. If he wasn’t so lazy, I’m sure he could have picked up any instrument and been pretty good at it.”
Krieger’s first impression of his future band mate turned out to be a little misleading. “I thought he was just a pretty normal guy, you know? About a week after that, I realized he wasn’t just a normal guy,” he says, laughing. “He started doing some crazy stuff and getting into trouble and getting my brother into jail and stuff like that.”
In the end, the Doors decided against adding a bass player because the music felt more ethereal without one. “I think the fewer instruments you have, the easier it is to keep things fresh,” observes Krieger, “because you don’t have to worry about too many guys hitting the same note at the same time. It’s very easy to go off and have the other guys follow you, if it’s only two other guys.”
Besides having a poet as a lead singer, there were several other unique factors to The Doors’ sound. Krieger bears the distinction of being the first rock guitarist to employ the bottleneck slide. (Of course, it wouldn’t take long for his contemporaries to catch on.)
The first song the band ever jammed on-stoned out of their gourds in Manzarek’s basement-was “Moonlight Drive.” Each member felt instantly transported, as if they were making music for the first time. The song that would ultimately provide their big break, however, didn’t come from Morrison’s notebook.
“Jim said that maybe we don’t have enough songs, you know…you all should try to write some too,” Krieger remembers. “So I went home and the first one I did was ‘Light My Fire.’” It wasn’t addressed to anyone in particular. “I tried not to think of specific people or things when I was writing. I figured Jim’s stuff was very universal and could be about anything, so I tried to emulate that.” Besides a few instrumentals he barely remembers, it was Krieger’s first real song and his debut as a lyricist. “You know that it would be untrue/You know that I would be a liar/If I was to say to you/Girl we couldn’t get much…higher.” A little awkward, maybe, but it would do. Coming from Jim’s mouth, though, those words became incendiary.
By the summer of 1966, The Doors had built up their repertoire and were ready for the stage. They landed a gig as the house band at L.A.’s infamous Whisky-a-Go-Go. It was there that Morrison, high on acid, would sink into a trance while singing “The End,” intoning these famous words: “Father, I want to kill you. Mother, I want to…” You know the rest. (or think you do-Morrison never actually completed the sentence.)
These lines got them fired, but a record contract with Elektra Records would soon put them in the national spotlight. With tracks like “Break on Through,” “Light My Fire,” “The Crystal Ship” and “The End,” their debut album, The Doors, was a remarkable achievement.
The Doors were naturally inspired by the music they heard on the radio, but only to a point. “Sgt. Peppers, obviously-that was a big shocker,” says Krieger. “And Hendrix’s album. But you know what, we weren’t really listening to a lot of that stuff. We had a lot of old blues records, classical stuff. We were into all different kinds of things…old Brecht, Kurt Weill, German opera…we wanted to be our own thing. There was nothing really that came along that made us say, ‘Oh, we’ve gotta do something like that.’ As for Morrison, he wasn’t too enamored with any particular songwriters. I think he liked some of the Stones stuff and some of The Beatles stuff. He liked Van Morrison a lot, and The Animals. But there wasn’t a whole lot that he was crazy about. He was more into his own thing.”
The Doors formed a tight unit from the beginning, splitting all their publishing royalties equally. When the band was introduced on stage as “Jim Morrison and The Doors” early on, Jim made the MC introduce them again-as “The Doors.”
While “Light My Fire” was a hit at radio, it was their legendary stage show that was gaining them the most notoriety. In concert Morrison would routinely whip the crowd into a Dionysian frenzy. (He even invented stage-diving). While the singer ingested freely before a performance, the others held back. “With The Doors, each song has a lot of things that you have to do right, otherwise you’ll look stupid,” Krieger points out. “So it’s not easy. The couple of times I’ve played on acid, it kind of blew my high,” he says, laughing.
Still, the band liked to take trips too; the music led them there. With Manzarek pumping the bass on his organ with one hand while tickling the astral plane with the other, Krieger made his guitar weep and moan. Densmore would take wild, impressionistic drum fills, and everyone would hang on Morrison’s next move.
Densmore explained to Jim Ladd how, for Jim, his onstage rants and Lizard King persona were no “act.” “Morrison was one of the few performers I knew that really believed what he was saying,” he recalls. “He lived that life. He wasn’t just up there doing his trip and then going home to watch TV and have a beer and laugh at it all…all the way to the bank. He lived that life that he lived out on stage all the time.”
“At concerts he’d sing for four hours if they’d let him have the stage that long,” poet Michael McClure, a friend of Morrison’s, recalled in a 1971 interview. “He was the same way at your house or at a bar; he’d sing to entertain you or himself.”
The band returned to the studio in 1967 to record their second album, Strange Days. It was another solid burst of creativity from the band. Strange Days featured another epic closing number to rival “The End,” “When The Music’s Over.” “What have they done to the Earth,” Morrison sang. “What have they done to our fair sister?”
Morrison maintained close contact with his muse in the studio. According to McClure, “Jim was always making up songs in the studio. The musicians would be taking a break, and Jim would grab the mike and sing spontaneously, making up the words as he went along.”
“He always had a notebook on him and a pencil,” remembers Krieger. “Unfortunately, a lot of that stuff he would just throw away. I wish I had every notebook he ever had. There must be tons of good stuff in there, I’m sure. The stuff he cared about, he kept. But there’s a lot of great stuff that went away.”
For most of the band’s career, lyrics came to Jim in torrents. “It was almost like someone was telling him what to write down,” says Krieger. “But then there were also times when it was like pulling teeth for him. Sometimes he’d been looking in his poetry book and have to come up with an idea so he’d work from that. But for the first couple albums, he said that he had some great pot [chuckles]. I don’t know where he got it, but he would smoke that stuff just listen to this voice…and he would write down the words.” As divine as his inspirations seemed, Morrison wasn’t adverse to revision. “He’d be changing stuff right up to point where it was recorded.” Says Krieger. “Nothing was ever written in stone.”
Like their California peers Jefferson Airplane and The Grateful Dead, The Doors advocated the use of love and drugs. But, due to the complexity of Morrison’s character, they had much more to say on the subject. “We were never really protagonists of the flower movement,” Krieger told Ladd. “In fact, we were the complete opposite. Because what was happening with that trip was, all these hippies were [talking about] love and peace and everything’s great, but really that was only half of the side of the coin. And we were providing the other half of that coin. There always has to be a balance.” Fittingly, when they wrote the song they jokingly titled “Peace Frog,” the lyrics were primarily about “blood in the streets.”
In July of 1968, the band released their third album, Waiting for the Sun. It featured the all-time classic “Five to One,” later sampled by rapper Jay-Z for a classic of another era. (Krieger prefers Snoop Dog’s “Riders on the Storm” remake, but he’s lukewarm on both.) Waiting for the Sun’s lead track and hit single was the raucous “Hello, I Love You.” Contrary to Internet rumors, The Kinks never sued The Doors for royalties over the song’s noticeable similarity to “All Day and All of the Night.”
With 1969’s Soft Parade, The Doors sound continued to evolve, as did Jim’s lyrics. The eight-minute title track fused some of his most evocative word play with shape-shifting grooves. “I tell you this,” he barked, “no eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn.” The album found the band employing horns and strings, most notably on the Sinatra-esque “Touch Me,” written by Krieger.
“The chorus I kinda stole from a Joan Baez song,” he freely admits. Say what? “I’m gonna love you ’til the heavens…’til the heavens…something about the rain,” Krieger says, laughing. “I forget what the name of her song was. But I used to really be into Joan Baez in her folk music days, so I would borrow some stuff from her from time to time.” The lyrics may have been partially recycled, but the tune was Krieger’s own. “Jim would always sing his own version of my melodies, but on that particular one, he stuck pretty much to what I wanted.”
The band scored a minor hit with “Runnin’ Blue,” featuring a charming vocal intro by Krieger, reminiscent of another famous ’60s folksinger. Any resemblance, however, was strictly coincidental. “Dylan was definitely an influence on me, but you know, the thing I liked least about him was his voice!” says Krieger. “I really didn’t try to emulate his voice, but I guess that’s how it sounded. People always say that… ‘Hey, you sound just like Bob Dylan.’ Not because I tried to. Two Jewish guys named Bobby, I guess.”
The self-destructive streak that ran in Jim Morrison was pushing him down the “the road of excess” at high speeds. He now favored copious amounts of alcohol over the use of psychedelics. During one concert in Miami in the summer of ‘69, he famously exposed himself on stage-allegedly-and was arrested for obscenity. Or so the legend goes; the band maintains that Morrison never actually displayed his manhood.
Krieger believes L.A. Woman, the band’s final album, marked a turning point, and that “Riders on the Storm” was perhaps the best thing they had ever done. But the fabricated indecent exposure incident had derailed the band’s career. Concert promoters shunned them and Top 40 radio wouldn’t play their records anymore, no matter how sweet “Love Me Two Times” was in retrospect.
In the meantime, Jim had become fed up with the trappings of stardom. He had recently holed up in the studio to record himself reciting his poems without the help of his band members. He yearned to be accepted for what he saw himself to be-a writer and a poet, communing with words. “Why do I drink?” he wrote. “So I can write poetry.”
But his debauched image stood in the way of him being taken seriously. Part of the problem was, to be considered a poet, most people assume you have to write in flowery language or express big ideas. For many, singing “the blue bus is calling us,” or chanting “sun, sun, sun, moon, moon, moon,” didn’t cut it. Titles like “Lament for the Death of My Cock” didn’t help.
“A wild and crazy rock and roller kind of guy is not the exact image most people have of a serious poet,” says Krieger. “I think that bugs people sometimes. But I think if they would just read his poetry, on the page, they would realize that he was a real poet and probably one of the best American poets that we’ve ever put out.”
McClure, who became close with Morrison in the last years of his life, concurred. “It’s perfectly obvious in reading his book (The Lords and the New Creatures, a collection of early Morrison poetry) that Jim already had his own style and that he was already his own person. As to his potential for growth-well, he started out so good that I don’t know how much better he could’ve gotten. He started off like a heavyweight.”
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Did you have a good world when you died?
Enough to base a movie on?
James Douglas Morrison died in Paris on July 3, 1971 at the age of 27. He had fled to Paris to seek solitude and write poetry. He had finally worn himself out on rock and roll. The music of freedom had turned into his biggest trap.
Alice Cooper, who hung out with The Doors in L.A. as a teenager, theorized to Jim Ladd about people who are unsatisfied on this plane of existence and long to be somewhere else. “Look at the things he wrote. It was so obvious in his lyrics that he was going to be going out pretty soon.” Manzarek adds, “He wasn’t 27; he was 77 when he died. He lived life to the fullest.”
He was buried in an ancient Parisian cemetery-Pere Lachaise-alongside Balzac, Moliere, Wilde and other literary greats whom Jim had long admired. Or perhaps, as The Doors seem to want us to believe, he’s living in Africa. “Maybe I’m charmed by the romantic idea that he’s still alive,” Manzarek told Ladd in 1979. “But I have to say, if there’s anybody who’d do it, he’d do it. He’s the only guy I’ve ever known in my life that I could think of that would do something like that.”
The Doors would pay him the ultimate tribute with 1979’s American Prayer, a collection of Morrison’s previously recorded poems set to newly created music. Manzarek remembers, as the band gathered together trying to decide whether or not to go ahead with the project, a bird flew into the room. The bird is a mythological symbol for the soul. Jim Morrison was in the building. They decided to proceed.
“What they did was what they did from the first time they played together,” Doors manager Bill Siddons told Ladd. “They took Jim’s poetry…to that extra level so everybody can experience it…The Doors as the three musicians were Jim’s vehicle for reaching people. He would have never accomplished what [he] did without him. And vice versa.”
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“He wasn’t done,” Patti Smith told a reporter in 1977. “He was just on the threshold of being a really great poet. Now, Hendrix-he was so out there with such furious physical energy, he just died. Morrison was much sadder. He was also desperate. Rock ‘n’ roll was so new then. It was so heavy. There was no precedent for Jim Morrison. It’s a lot different for me. I’ve profited from the fact that he came first.”
Would there have been a Patti Smith without Jim Morrison? Or an Iggy Pop? Could punk rock itself have existed without him? Or heavy metal, without his dark energies?
His influence can be found in the artful musings of Jane’s Addiction, Modest Mouse, the Afghan Whigs and Marilyn Manson. Eddie Vedder and Julian Casablancas are musical descendents. Bono assimilated his rock star poses.
His visions helped pave the way for the lyrical abstractions of Frank Black and Jeff Tweedy, who published a book of poems of his own (as did Jewel, but lets not go there). Morrison’s unique darkness led to the whole dark side of rock and also opened the door for obscenity. Without the balance he provided, rock and roll would be lame. Today, many of our greatest poets are rappers.
“I think that one reason The Doors are still going today is because pretty much every album we did…there’s no junk on there, you know?” says Krieger. “Whereas most groups come out and they might have one or two good songs on an album, and the rest of it is junk. But, if I do say so myself, there’s none of that stuff on any Doors album.”
For many, discovering The Doors’ music is a right of passage, like reading Catcher in the Rye. When do Morrison’s words resonate more than when you’re young and seeing the ugly side of societal norms for the very first time? “Trade in your hours for a handful of dimes/Gonna make it in our prime…”
And besides, who writes more poetry than teenagers? The Doors’ music still sets the mood for a million make-out sessions and keggers in the woods-a reason for the youth of America to continue their ritualistic debauchery. They’re the sound of awakening in a million adolescents around the world, the doors of perception slowly swinging open to the lysergic swirl of “Spanish Caravan” or “The Crystal Ship.”
Maybe Morrison’s biggest contribution to the lyrical world, unveiled during the ’60s’ potent mix of love, drugs, war, flower power and police power colliding, was that he saw in rock music a connection to the thing everyone wants most want out of life-to feel alive, as much of the time as possible.
…City at night! Woo! C’mon! Get together, one more time. We want the world and we want it-now. Break on through to the other side. Ride the Snake…
For all the controversy they caused, or because of it, The Doors can take their place as one of the most influential bands currently canonized in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. For the music and its fans, the doors they unlocked will remain forever open.
www.americansongwriter.com/2006/11/the-doors-sex-death-and-poetry/