Post by TheWallsScreamedPoetry on Jun 21, 2011 14:43:45 GMT
The End Is Always Near: Dread, Drunkenness and The Doors, Pt. 1
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF the Doors should not be underestimated; it has been too often already. When you consider that they represented, in the positivist context through whose belly they thrust their violence and dread, when you look around you at half time in the ‘70s and listen closely to the bands and singers that've captured the imagination in the years since Morrison first scowled and took a brief break from the Whisky's stage to hang his young ancient's head out the back door and puke up cheap booze in the alley (and all the time they thought he was on acid 24 hours a day!)... it becomes inescapable fact that, with Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground on the other coast, Jim Morrison was the father of ‘70s Rock 'n' Roll.
Consider. Alice Cooper. Iggy. Even Bryan Ferry. Glitter and attendant sleaze. Especially attendant sleaze. What the Doors and the Velvet Underground were saying in 1966–7 was "Look where all of this bliss is leading us, can't you see? That we're blind and damned by our own recklessness? That we're going to end up at each other's throats? Or, worse, alone with a finality that's crushing." The Stones were dirty but The Doors were dread; the difference is crucial, because dread is the great fact of the ‘70s, and the Stones didn't learn it until it was almost too late. For them and us.
History. So hard to trace when the myths proliferate like a nest of serpents in a swamp. For any true star the legend has gotta be bigger than the reality– in fact, the smart money nowadays is on the idol who preserves himself humbly in the shadow of his looming larger-than-life, protecting, disguising, decoy legend. Preserve thyself shall be the whole of the law, from here on out. And Jim Morrison had a lot to do with that, because Jim Morrison sacrificed himself alive and screaming, flesh and mind, to a graven image of himself that for all his brilliance he was just dumb enough to believe in. Shattered boy with the innards of an old man, victim of himself, his own legend, lies so luminous he swallowed them whole and drowned the poem in poison, narcissist that he was.
All history is fiction, said William Burroughs, but none more so than rock history. They're still passing the Morrison stories around, doubtless embroidering a tad more each recounting, until nothing is left but the countless survivors who try to sing like him, preserve long enough to sell themselves with a little bit of the old magic. While the records gather dust, locked in their time, and the other Doors, bereft of any available approximation of the true and necessary captain, fade away in loser bands without identity, without vision.
Vision. What made the Doors magic in the first place. What separates the greats from the journeymen – The Band, the Doors, Velvets, Hendrix, even the Stooges and MC5 – all had a vision. A vision of America, of the human condition. Which is why all the Aerosmiths in the world will never quite cut it, not in that league. Vision: Jim Morrison started living the legend at UCLA, where he was studying film looking to build chops to make his own, a serious student taking technical classes. Never a dilettante, as he proved most firmly in the finale of his own lived movie too murky and staggeringly erratic for celluloid. Lifestyle is art statement, decided enough mid-’60s brats to make that delusion a full-blown movement. So Morrison wandered out of the classroom and drifted dazedly out to the beach, metaphors of transience reverberating back and forth between reality and the haze of myth, depending on which is more convenient and/or lurid. He read a lot, which is possibly the single most dangerous thing any intelligent person with a modicum of recklessness can do: those old croaks like Artaud and Burroughs leave any aspirant a lot to live up to. Money only buys time, but literature corrupts absolutely.
Facts: Jim Morrison was born on December 8, 1943, in Melbourne, Florida. He came from a long line of military careers, and part of his self-hype with the Doors was that both parents were dead. I think Bob Dylan said the same thing once. Odd that a generation so tormented by a state of psychic fatherlessness should be so eager for a stab at parricide, even if only in their fantasies. But then again, the whole trip was fantasy, fantasy rendered death and taxes obsolete along with everything else inconvenient; that's why the fact of death was so very blunt and doubly harsh. We put death in our bodies every day and remained convinced we would live forever, in Utopia yet. Death. Death. Morrison saw death a little earlier than the rest of his peers, a lot earlier than his audience. Perhaps they saw their own death in him, and learned fear; that may have been the ultimate, perhaps only, significance of his life.
Naturally all this came out of L.A.. San Francisco was even more convinced that we would all live forever in one merged mass of ecstasy. New York was a million miles away, a death town in fact and legend, and even New York demanded the Velvet Underground to raise the bannered spectre of death and keep it like a flag of shrouds before their eyes, not to forget, because to forget is to slip, and in the universe the Doors and Velvets mapped out (it had been there a billion years, uncharted and disclaimed, like a New World owned lock stock and buffalo by a Satan, just sitting on his haunches with a rusty smile, waiting six thousand years for some damn fool Columbus to come and get his licks.)
L.A. was the last outpost of the New World, a place where New York hustlers went to cool out a while the natives paid death its taxes and never thought twice because it was all so easy on the installment plan. Death in the smog and death in department stores, layaway, death in subdivisions and TV eyes glassy and furtive in the threatening presence of "normal" human contact. The collective suburban solitude of a million wasted kids living off the folks till you turn forty and riddled by anomie since 14 when you don't even know the meaning of the word. Just the feeling. Doors audience, later co-opted by Black Sabbath, Alice, Bowie, even Lou Reed. Death in the deserts and on the highways where Manson picked up hitchhikers, affable brothers and sisters on their way to the Bay or back down or East or anywhere, easy pickings he had his minions practice on till they were ready for big game, beautiful people, history. In their minds it might just as well as have never happened, when you let acid have the helm and take the long view aeons in either direction what possible difference could this or any puny event on one day in the twilight of the 1960s make, we really don't understand what all the fuss was about. And when Charlie's girls went gunning for rock stars, it could never have been the Doors, whose saturation radio blare 'Light My Fire' may well have driven them on even one raw inch of flesh further; they were after Hollywood, which looked old and dead already even though it was populated by young decadents itself, and if rock flesh had fallen helter skelter it would have been the Beach Boys, a token drummer at least, symbolic also of a closed era we all wanted to snuff one way or another then, make double damn sure you never hear surf music again. We were all outward bound and somebody had to go. If tribes is gonna be our conceit then ritual sacrifices are imperative and fitting, just part of the Festival of Life.
Venice. Beach culture, bums, blonde tanned goddesses with hair to their tight little bikini'd asses, and everybody's high, the old beatniks and resident characters are getting more pussy than they can ever remember. The surfers are jacking off and trying to get turned on. The kids are alright tonight, and the night goes on forever. Summer 1965 and momentum is just beginning to build, the Yardbirds are on the radio for the first time, in California Van Morrison's Them have a near–hit with 'Baby Please Don't Go' and a solid smash with 'Gloria'. The national anthem is '(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction', when ironically everybody out here in this sun is getting more than they ever did before. Everything opening up, acid rising like a wave that only an elite has ridden in so far, but it's beginning to be all around if you only look in the right faces. Morrison later claimed that during this period he ate it constantly, "like candy". Who cares if it's true or not. One day he ran into Manzarek, passing acquaintance from UCLA film school days, classically trained musician who grew up to look today like a schoolteacher. But down then back on the beach they squatted in the middle of the sand and Morrison sang him 'Moonlight Drive'.
"When he sang those lines 'Let's swim to the moon/Let's climb through the tide/Penetrate the evening that the city sleeps to hide'," Manzarek said much later, "I said that's it...It seemed as though, if we got a group together, we could make a million dollars."
Note the emphasis. The Doors as concept was put together by those two on that beach that day; then Manzarek went out and got a guitarist and drummer who could follow orders. All three were Maharishi TM devotees. Imagine Morrison trundling up to some TM center with a handkerchief, two flowers, and a couple of pieces of fruit for the Maharishi. TM blissters don't write songs like 'The End'.
The Doors paid what dues mattered at one crumby Strip club and then the Whisky, where Morrison took off on his poetic-improvisational swirlflight and sailed aloft and hungry until Jac Holzman walked in one night and decided this exhibitionistic debauch was just the ticket to give his slightly fading folkie record company a stake in the electric politics everybody saw building. It was an opportunist's market, ripe for carpetbaggers and revivified hustlers who'd had enough sun. Columbia wanted the band too, but Holzman was charming and the band was young and that's how Elektra suddenly came to represent, for about two and a half years, some indefinable magic even tied up in their logo, a label with some mystic class whose groups you bought on sight. The Doors made that company – their first album refused to stop selling till the whole era was done and buried and three inches of rain fallen on the cemetery plot washing away the flowers and graffiti and eventually the memory of the man and all that he and it were about...because a rock 'n' roll record ain't like Artaud and Burroughs, you may learn too late, it’s ephemeral detritus and even its potential to corrupt is only seasonal, a fad, locked in time gone by and receding steadily with no brakes ever possible or hope beyond that in the car where the kid screamed all the way down forever after blasting off that cliff in Rebel Without A Cause but he was no chicken and if only for that frozen moment he certainly wasn't playing then.
'The End'. Their first recording session's claim to history, it freaked out producer Paul Rothchild, who waxed metaphysical with Morrison over the Oedipal drama. It also freaked out the owner of the Whisky, who threw Morrison out of his club. It wasn't exactly Johnny Rivers. The first time I heard it I thought it was a joke. Later, in Berkeley smoking dope with proto-hippies at the height of the Haight, we were hunkered down by the radio as every night when suddenly the deejay yanked it off halfway through the song. "That's enough of that," he said. Maybe so. Last time I heard it, it was in my car with a friend reminiscing and we sang it out loud, and we laughed again. Thinking about the good old days, when dread was new and spangled with magic. Now it's just a sidewalk, a nameless depression following you around like a scroungy dog you don't want for a shadow, sadness and disappointment so diffused we can never name our demons, only wait out the familiar unromantic demeaned desolation and hope for a new charge to come not from rock or any renaissance but somewhere in our gut. To rescue us from the widow's weeds and shabby grubby terminal hippie uniforms we live inside like walking dirtclods, from the flattened spirit which we once needed Morrison and Morrisons to tell us could exist at all.
And of course that is playing right into the dead hands with which he still manipulates us by manipulating our romantic ideas about him. He was a drunk. Period. Talented, like many drunks. Ambitious, like plenty young drunks: dreaming movies that never materialized, writing sophomoric poetry that his stardom would get into hard covers, and what there was of it sparse, reaching more than revelatory almost ever, page. But the music. By the second album it became apparent to quick listeners that the Doors were limited, that Morrison's vision, if we ever took it seriously in the first place, was usually morbid in the most obvious possible way, and thus cheap, and that the whole nightmare could translate into the parody it ultimately became so easily that, well...but when he shot and hit it straight and deep and full force.
People are strange when you're a stranger
Faces look ugly when you're alone
Women seem wicked when you're unwanted
Strange days have dragged us down
Gazing on a city under television skies
And it's all over for the unknown soldier
Baby I'll be back in just a little while, I gotta go for a ride with these guys in this car...
I woke up this morning and I got myself a beer
The future's uncertain and the end is always near
Never saw a woman
So alone
You knew he felt the chill and lived it and that was perhaps the a saddest part, that he recognized his own clown within too late to turn the tide, so like a true asshole and ultimate relic of his time he picked up the Lizard King cartoon and wore it like a bib to keep the drunkdrool from rolling down to stain his shirt and burn a hole through to his heart, absurd, absurd, as the tales proliferated and Jim Morrison, who symbolized the ultimate possibilities and terrors seething at the farthest shores of sexual adventure to an a entire generation, just got drunker and fat and fatter and pretty soon the word was out all down the line and high school kids were scornful of the Doors. I saw it happen, smirking cynically because my money had been on the Velvets the whole time, but the Velvets were too sleazy and too soon and too inept to snatch a whole generation by the balls and twist 'em, and having been twisted nobody is likely to forget or forgive soon so by the time Waiting For the Sun was released the Doors' stock had dropped to a level just this side of bubblegum even as they still skirted skid row... what did a suburban teenage highschool punk with a customized car with stereo tape deck and fresh unfucked girlfriend just waiting with ripe young tits hardly even squeezed yet, by what unfathomable stretch of whose methedrine-ragged imagination did this kid know from or give a flying fuck in the rain about skid row? But that was where Morrison wanted to be, down there with the rest of the derelicts: Artaud, Baudelaire, Bodenheim, Burroughs, Kerouac, Jarry, Genet, Charlie Parker, Lenny Bruce, Rimbaud, O'Neill, Faulkner, Bukowski who will survive us all, Neal Cassady who didn't, plus all the rest who never wrote a book or played a song or ever had a thought that any rube picked up on and declared profound because the sum total of their lives was mindless destruction and destruction only and THAT was life Style As Art and nothing else. The real scene is to go down fast and don't fuck around with self-deceit. The audience, if you're lucky enough to have one, can eat deceit. And jive as well, all the lubricious oblique or point-blank ridicule and hostility you can puke out. And they did. Eat it.
"Kids, I've got a special surprise for you tonight...[laughter] No, not that, not that..."
Dead cat in a top hat
Suckin' on a young man's brain
Dead cats
Dead rats
Thinks he's an aristocrat
That's crap
I said crap
Some of his best poetry was crap. Like that. A joke and he knew it, so he played it, but it was way too late to play it any way for him to win. Just keep on running. Most rock writers are failed rock musicians; Morrison was a music maker who among other insoluble problems (he willed them insoluble) was a failed and thus supremely frustrated literary figure. One of several attributes he shared, and still shares, with Lou Reed. Would he laugh if he knew that there would always be a sucker like Dotson Rader, a certified literary figure, books under his belt and still drunk every night and even more self-wounding, to come along and share the Morrison obsession with illiterates and acid-lobotomies. There certifiably came a point at which the Lizard King and not art became Morrison's career. But why, why persist in such absurdity, in the certain knowledge that it was so absurd? What perversity. Genet is straight – a logical, diabolically sensible artist who maintained a balance between professional deviance and his art that sustained him into middle age. Even Burroughs is still going strong. Every surviving professional degenerate you can name worked just as hard at it as the dead: Bruce, Bird, Morrison, others...so what crucial factor was it that drew some strange line of demarcation that declared immutably that this one would succeed in cutting himself down and that one would hang on and even achieve a kind of triumph, recidivism or at least celebrity and lots of young ass. Makes you want to punch an old fool like Ginsberg in the mouth. Or maybe it's just that the dead were stronger-willed, they had a fiercer drive to die, and you can mark a sissy or coward by his survival.
Was this what Morrison finally meant when he used to tell interviewers that he was interested in anything to do with chaos, disorder, actions without apparent meaning or motivation? A kind of integrity to self in telling the world, "Look, I just want to die and that's it, there's no reason, please don't bother digging for all the psychological crap, leave society out of it too while you're being honest with both of us, and understand if for only this one moment that I just want to die as quickly as possible for nothing at all. And if my life or anyone's is supposed to have some kind of meaning, and that's another question I'd like to ask is who said that it did in the first place?, but if it is, then let it be that, and put it on my tombstone: ‘He died for no reason at all. A simple, pure, elemental wish.’ Only nature taking its course."
As the Doors' audience took them less seriously with each new record (and Morrison more than anyone else encouraged them to: "PETITION THE LORD WITH PRAYER", screamed like that, is pure conscious intentional burlesque; not to mention all those sappy love songs aimed at 14 year old girls), he became more reckless when he took the stage. Or maybe just more drunk. There is a point in incipient or even confirmed alcoholism at which the drunk finds himself unable to deal with the torments which he picked up the bottle to flee, no matter how much he drinks they boil before his eyes and roll down like tears of tar to scald his flesh and congeal, leaving a curdled sadness and unbearable anguish, he drinks more and more and more until he falls into playpen death, scaled down and frothing with fitful frightening dreams, and when he wakes he drinks again and again on and on and months maybe years go by but there is a point, there comes a point at which the pressure reaches, finally, proportions unbearable under any circumstances or sedatives, no palliative ever invented for this psychic epilepsy, and so he must explode, in some manner, according to his imagination and the various limitations of circumstance: money, friends, set and setting, will there or won't there be a lover or friend or somebody anybody there to catch him if he falls into the deepest ditch yet, and does he want them there if he does, because really there's no recourse, no salve, no balm, no love, no connection of any kind except the clash within the flesh as splintered, nerves flail whiplashing each other, sparks exploding as they do piercing the liver like slivers of glass shot from guns, tearing the gut to shreds, whole human depository for that is what it has become, shaking like a bag of garbage hurled out a porthole into the maw of a hurricane, and worst of all the brain, mind, self, fully, totally conscious and mortified, terrified, humiliated in some final manner, short-circuited by self-loathing and quaking fear of all outside of self, but conscious, awake and aware the whole time, no matter how much you drink, and what you ultimately know at that hideous moment is that no matter what happens after this, even if you survive (and of course you will survive, because it is necessary that you suffer more), even if by some absurdly far-fetched devise you manage to recuperate and "redeem" yourself, "clean up," if you go straight and devote the rest of your life to selfless Ghandi-like humanism, or if you still think you can be saved by love, the love of another for yourself or the love you wish that you could feel for another or the love that it is your most ludicrous conceit to think you can feel for someone else, if you come out of it and "make something" of the rest of your life to the perfect satisfaction of everyone else around you, ah, he pulled out after all – even given any kind of "salvation" conceivable, you know in your guts and your ashen brain and your heart like an old punctured deflated tire lying by the side of the road for dogs to piss on, you know for certain that you will never be whole again.
So, in the midst of this tornado, careening through days and nights commingled and splattered in memory like blood from corpses tumbling out of a multiply fatal accident, as your rage runs free and rampant in its own wild glee, a drooling idiot orgy of infantilism unpent and not funny, not now and not in the retelling and not ever, just ugly, as ugly as anything human can be; in the eye of the hubbub, a certain steely calm demon fortressed deep in your marrow and orchestrating this whole riot, he takes stock of the calamity thus far and makes a cold, firm, logical decision of exactly how best to deal with the panic and its repercussions. He decides and you act. And you will never get to him, because you put him there like a cancer and once he gets his hooks in you there's no reversal possible. So he consults his notes and signals and decides upon the precise nature of your real explosion, the payoff for which the preceding carnage was merely a necessary set-up, a ragged play staged in the ganglia and all along the nerve network out to the very tips of burning wire, unbearable conditions and soul, body and mind in dire extremis, but only preparation, because only now is it time and permissible to ACT.
Maybe you kill someone (seldom yourself; too soon). Maybe your get into or cause an automobile accident. Maybe you pick a fight and get the shit kicked out of you or bully and crush someone or something physically weaker: I have seen sixty-year-old men torment dogs for hours on end...but then that may have been mere boredom. The main thing is you want to destroy. Records. Furniture. Windows. Cars. Possessions of every/any kind. And then on to bigger game. Insects. Animals. Humans. And finally yourself.
Or maybe you're too cowardly even to smash up your living room. There are some people who are perfectly capable of sitting in a chair they would just as soon break, and it never occurs to them to break it, because their only release is hurting another human with words. Or actions, not necessarily physical. Not necessarily at all. So vicious there's no way they could ever know you may, finally, be hurting yourself more. Because guilt is either a fact in front or a potential you cultivate until it becomes solid fact. And then, of course, the guiltier you feel, and there is never enough, your capacity is as boundless as the thirst when you wake up with a hangover – but know that the guiltier you feel, the greater your rage, in perfect mathematical proportions multiplying and feeding each upon itself and then each other, paroxysms of agonized random violence escalating until you either kill yourself or are forcibly curbed by someone or something outside: relatives, friends who wish they weren't, the police, walls and sidewalks and asphalt that rush up, or a blind stumble in front of an oncoming car...but no, that's too easy. Eric Emerson was that kind of coward...
And the easiest way out of all, at least at first, is exhibitionism. Making scenes in bars. Loud, boisterous, creating unpleasantness in every corner of whatever room you happen to have landed in with obnoxious, obscene, aggressive behavior. Instigating fights between others. Causing scenes and then stepping back, enjoying the chaos. But that's at first. Inevitably, of course, you're drawn into the vortex of the trouble you started, and sooner or later you end up as bloody and pointlessly wracked as the rest, fighting for your life in a war you started just to give yourself some diversion. It can begin all kinds of ways: driving down the street in cars, shouting obscenities out the window at passing women. Infantile stuff, silly, adolescent, but indicative. Symptomatic and ominous. Start like that, write it off as rowdy, and as the binges roil by you come a little more unhinged every day, until the day you end up sticking your dick at her instead of your mouth. Or flying into psychopathic rage and attacking a total stranger for no reason in public. That is when you know that you're not just "loose" any more, farthest thing from it in fact; you're not looking for fun, or even kicks–you're looking for damage. The deeper the better. The best, obviously, the kind that can never be fixed, healed, rectified. The immutable act. An assertion of the self at last, in no matter how twisted, diseased, squalid a form. I did this. Guilty. What's next?
Believe me, it has absolutely nothing to do with the noble philosophical diagrams of social theoreticians. Even Stalin knew he was a sicko. A strict destructionist, with the integrity of action, all of which exists in a universe totally separate from that inhabited by the scientists of nihilism and revolution, the bland bespectacled intellects who write the books and find deft rationalizations for what some of us do in the name of nothing but our own impotent rage and clawing terror. The Ralph J. Gleasons who would tell you that Lenny was one big walking Heart just dripping humanism and compassion like sweat off a boiler-stoker. And anyone who would tell you that Jim Morrison's own public self-humiliations were anything but willful pathology, a rebel without a cause and nothing romantic about it either.
Lester Bangs, unpublished, 1975
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF the Doors should not be underestimated; it has been too often already. When you consider that they represented, in the positivist context through whose belly they thrust their violence and dread, when you look around you at half time in the ‘70s and listen closely to the bands and singers that've captured the imagination in the years since Morrison first scowled and took a brief break from the Whisky's stage to hang his young ancient's head out the back door and puke up cheap booze in the alley (and all the time they thought he was on acid 24 hours a day!)... it becomes inescapable fact that, with Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground on the other coast, Jim Morrison was the father of ‘70s Rock 'n' Roll.
Consider. Alice Cooper. Iggy. Even Bryan Ferry. Glitter and attendant sleaze. Especially attendant sleaze. What the Doors and the Velvet Underground were saying in 1966–7 was "Look where all of this bliss is leading us, can't you see? That we're blind and damned by our own recklessness? That we're going to end up at each other's throats? Or, worse, alone with a finality that's crushing." The Stones were dirty but The Doors were dread; the difference is crucial, because dread is the great fact of the ‘70s, and the Stones didn't learn it until it was almost too late. For them and us.
History. So hard to trace when the myths proliferate like a nest of serpents in a swamp. For any true star the legend has gotta be bigger than the reality– in fact, the smart money nowadays is on the idol who preserves himself humbly in the shadow of his looming larger-than-life, protecting, disguising, decoy legend. Preserve thyself shall be the whole of the law, from here on out. And Jim Morrison had a lot to do with that, because Jim Morrison sacrificed himself alive and screaming, flesh and mind, to a graven image of himself that for all his brilliance he was just dumb enough to believe in. Shattered boy with the innards of an old man, victim of himself, his own legend, lies so luminous he swallowed them whole and drowned the poem in poison, narcissist that he was.
All history is fiction, said William Burroughs, but none more so than rock history. They're still passing the Morrison stories around, doubtless embroidering a tad more each recounting, until nothing is left but the countless survivors who try to sing like him, preserve long enough to sell themselves with a little bit of the old magic. While the records gather dust, locked in their time, and the other Doors, bereft of any available approximation of the true and necessary captain, fade away in loser bands without identity, without vision.
Vision. What made the Doors magic in the first place. What separates the greats from the journeymen – The Band, the Doors, Velvets, Hendrix, even the Stooges and MC5 – all had a vision. A vision of America, of the human condition. Which is why all the Aerosmiths in the world will never quite cut it, not in that league. Vision: Jim Morrison started living the legend at UCLA, where he was studying film looking to build chops to make his own, a serious student taking technical classes. Never a dilettante, as he proved most firmly in the finale of his own lived movie too murky and staggeringly erratic for celluloid. Lifestyle is art statement, decided enough mid-’60s brats to make that delusion a full-blown movement. So Morrison wandered out of the classroom and drifted dazedly out to the beach, metaphors of transience reverberating back and forth between reality and the haze of myth, depending on which is more convenient and/or lurid. He read a lot, which is possibly the single most dangerous thing any intelligent person with a modicum of recklessness can do: those old croaks like Artaud and Burroughs leave any aspirant a lot to live up to. Money only buys time, but literature corrupts absolutely.
Facts: Jim Morrison was born on December 8, 1943, in Melbourne, Florida. He came from a long line of military careers, and part of his self-hype with the Doors was that both parents were dead. I think Bob Dylan said the same thing once. Odd that a generation so tormented by a state of psychic fatherlessness should be so eager for a stab at parricide, even if only in their fantasies. But then again, the whole trip was fantasy, fantasy rendered death and taxes obsolete along with everything else inconvenient; that's why the fact of death was so very blunt and doubly harsh. We put death in our bodies every day and remained convinced we would live forever, in Utopia yet. Death. Death. Morrison saw death a little earlier than the rest of his peers, a lot earlier than his audience. Perhaps they saw their own death in him, and learned fear; that may have been the ultimate, perhaps only, significance of his life.
Naturally all this came out of L.A.. San Francisco was even more convinced that we would all live forever in one merged mass of ecstasy. New York was a million miles away, a death town in fact and legend, and even New York demanded the Velvet Underground to raise the bannered spectre of death and keep it like a flag of shrouds before their eyes, not to forget, because to forget is to slip, and in the universe the Doors and Velvets mapped out (it had been there a billion years, uncharted and disclaimed, like a New World owned lock stock and buffalo by a Satan, just sitting on his haunches with a rusty smile, waiting six thousand years for some damn fool Columbus to come and get his licks.)
L.A. was the last outpost of the New World, a place where New York hustlers went to cool out a while the natives paid death its taxes and never thought twice because it was all so easy on the installment plan. Death in the smog and death in department stores, layaway, death in subdivisions and TV eyes glassy and furtive in the threatening presence of "normal" human contact. The collective suburban solitude of a million wasted kids living off the folks till you turn forty and riddled by anomie since 14 when you don't even know the meaning of the word. Just the feeling. Doors audience, later co-opted by Black Sabbath, Alice, Bowie, even Lou Reed. Death in the deserts and on the highways where Manson picked up hitchhikers, affable brothers and sisters on their way to the Bay or back down or East or anywhere, easy pickings he had his minions practice on till they were ready for big game, beautiful people, history. In their minds it might just as well as have never happened, when you let acid have the helm and take the long view aeons in either direction what possible difference could this or any puny event on one day in the twilight of the 1960s make, we really don't understand what all the fuss was about. And when Charlie's girls went gunning for rock stars, it could never have been the Doors, whose saturation radio blare 'Light My Fire' may well have driven them on even one raw inch of flesh further; they were after Hollywood, which looked old and dead already even though it was populated by young decadents itself, and if rock flesh had fallen helter skelter it would have been the Beach Boys, a token drummer at least, symbolic also of a closed era we all wanted to snuff one way or another then, make double damn sure you never hear surf music again. We were all outward bound and somebody had to go. If tribes is gonna be our conceit then ritual sacrifices are imperative and fitting, just part of the Festival of Life.
Venice. Beach culture, bums, blonde tanned goddesses with hair to their tight little bikini'd asses, and everybody's high, the old beatniks and resident characters are getting more pussy than they can ever remember. The surfers are jacking off and trying to get turned on. The kids are alright tonight, and the night goes on forever. Summer 1965 and momentum is just beginning to build, the Yardbirds are on the radio for the first time, in California Van Morrison's Them have a near–hit with 'Baby Please Don't Go' and a solid smash with 'Gloria'. The national anthem is '(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction', when ironically everybody out here in this sun is getting more than they ever did before. Everything opening up, acid rising like a wave that only an elite has ridden in so far, but it's beginning to be all around if you only look in the right faces. Morrison later claimed that during this period he ate it constantly, "like candy". Who cares if it's true or not. One day he ran into Manzarek, passing acquaintance from UCLA film school days, classically trained musician who grew up to look today like a schoolteacher. But down then back on the beach they squatted in the middle of the sand and Morrison sang him 'Moonlight Drive'.
"When he sang those lines 'Let's swim to the moon/Let's climb through the tide/Penetrate the evening that the city sleeps to hide'," Manzarek said much later, "I said that's it...It seemed as though, if we got a group together, we could make a million dollars."
Note the emphasis. The Doors as concept was put together by those two on that beach that day; then Manzarek went out and got a guitarist and drummer who could follow orders. All three were Maharishi TM devotees. Imagine Morrison trundling up to some TM center with a handkerchief, two flowers, and a couple of pieces of fruit for the Maharishi. TM blissters don't write songs like 'The End'.
The Doors paid what dues mattered at one crumby Strip club and then the Whisky, where Morrison took off on his poetic-improvisational swirlflight and sailed aloft and hungry until Jac Holzman walked in one night and decided this exhibitionistic debauch was just the ticket to give his slightly fading folkie record company a stake in the electric politics everybody saw building. It was an opportunist's market, ripe for carpetbaggers and revivified hustlers who'd had enough sun. Columbia wanted the band too, but Holzman was charming and the band was young and that's how Elektra suddenly came to represent, for about two and a half years, some indefinable magic even tied up in their logo, a label with some mystic class whose groups you bought on sight. The Doors made that company – their first album refused to stop selling till the whole era was done and buried and three inches of rain fallen on the cemetery plot washing away the flowers and graffiti and eventually the memory of the man and all that he and it were about...because a rock 'n' roll record ain't like Artaud and Burroughs, you may learn too late, it’s ephemeral detritus and even its potential to corrupt is only seasonal, a fad, locked in time gone by and receding steadily with no brakes ever possible or hope beyond that in the car where the kid screamed all the way down forever after blasting off that cliff in Rebel Without A Cause but he was no chicken and if only for that frozen moment he certainly wasn't playing then.
'The End'. Their first recording session's claim to history, it freaked out producer Paul Rothchild, who waxed metaphysical with Morrison over the Oedipal drama. It also freaked out the owner of the Whisky, who threw Morrison out of his club. It wasn't exactly Johnny Rivers. The first time I heard it I thought it was a joke. Later, in Berkeley smoking dope with proto-hippies at the height of the Haight, we were hunkered down by the radio as every night when suddenly the deejay yanked it off halfway through the song. "That's enough of that," he said. Maybe so. Last time I heard it, it was in my car with a friend reminiscing and we sang it out loud, and we laughed again. Thinking about the good old days, when dread was new and spangled with magic. Now it's just a sidewalk, a nameless depression following you around like a scroungy dog you don't want for a shadow, sadness and disappointment so diffused we can never name our demons, only wait out the familiar unromantic demeaned desolation and hope for a new charge to come not from rock or any renaissance but somewhere in our gut. To rescue us from the widow's weeds and shabby grubby terminal hippie uniforms we live inside like walking dirtclods, from the flattened spirit which we once needed Morrison and Morrisons to tell us could exist at all.
And of course that is playing right into the dead hands with which he still manipulates us by manipulating our romantic ideas about him. He was a drunk. Period. Talented, like many drunks. Ambitious, like plenty young drunks: dreaming movies that never materialized, writing sophomoric poetry that his stardom would get into hard covers, and what there was of it sparse, reaching more than revelatory almost ever, page. But the music. By the second album it became apparent to quick listeners that the Doors were limited, that Morrison's vision, if we ever took it seriously in the first place, was usually morbid in the most obvious possible way, and thus cheap, and that the whole nightmare could translate into the parody it ultimately became so easily that, well...but when he shot and hit it straight and deep and full force.
People are strange when you're a stranger
Faces look ugly when you're alone
Women seem wicked when you're unwanted
Strange days have dragged us down
Gazing on a city under television skies
And it's all over for the unknown soldier
Baby I'll be back in just a little while, I gotta go for a ride with these guys in this car...
I woke up this morning and I got myself a beer
The future's uncertain and the end is always near
Never saw a woman
So alone
You knew he felt the chill and lived it and that was perhaps the a saddest part, that he recognized his own clown within too late to turn the tide, so like a true asshole and ultimate relic of his time he picked up the Lizard King cartoon and wore it like a bib to keep the drunkdrool from rolling down to stain his shirt and burn a hole through to his heart, absurd, absurd, as the tales proliferated and Jim Morrison, who symbolized the ultimate possibilities and terrors seething at the farthest shores of sexual adventure to an a entire generation, just got drunker and fat and fatter and pretty soon the word was out all down the line and high school kids were scornful of the Doors. I saw it happen, smirking cynically because my money had been on the Velvets the whole time, but the Velvets were too sleazy and too soon and too inept to snatch a whole generation by the balls and twist 'em, and having been twisted nobody is likely to forget or forgive soon so by the time Waiting For the Sun was released the Doors' stock had dropped to a level just this side of bubblegum even as they still skirted skid row... what did a suburban teenage highschool punk with a customized car with stereo tape deck and fresh unfucked girlfriend just waiting with ripe young tits hardly even squeezed yet, by what unfathomable stretch of whose methedrine-ragged imagination did this kid know from or give a flying fuck in the rain about skid row? But that was where Morrison wanted to be, down there with the rest of the derelicts: Artaud, Baudelaire, Bodenheim, Burroughs, Kerouac, Jarry, Genet, Charlie Parker, Lenny Bruce, Rimbaud, O'Neill, Faulkner, Bukowski who will survive us all, Neal Cassady who didn't, plus all the rest who never wrote a book or played a song or ever had a thought that any rube picked up on and declared profound because the sum total of their lives was mindless destruction and destruction only and THAT was life Style As Art and nothing else. The real scene is to go down fast and don't fuck around with self-deceit. The audience, if you're lucky enough to have one, can eat deceit. And jive as well, all the lubricious oblique or point-blank ridicule and hostility you can puke out. And they did. Eat it.
"Kids, I've got a special surprise for you tonight...[laughter] No, not that, not that..."
Dead cat in a top hat
Suckin' on a young man's brain
Dead cats
Dead rats
Thinks he's an aristocrat
That's crap
I said crap
Some of his best poetry was crap. Like that. A joke and he knew it, so he played it, but it was way too late to play it any way for him to win. Just keep on running. Most rock writers are failed rock musicians; Morrison was a music maker who among other insoluble problems (he willed them insoluble) was a failed and thus supremely frustrated literary figure. One of several attributes he shared, and still shares, with Lou Reed. Would he laugh if he knew that there would always be a sucker like Dotson Rader, a certified literary figure, books under his belt and still drunk every night and even more self-wounding, to come along and share the Morrison obsession with illiterates and acid-lobotomies. There certifiably came a point at which the Lizard King and not art became Morrison's career. But why, why persist in such absurdity, in the certain knowledge that it was so absurd? What perversity. Genet is straight – a logical, diabolically sensible artist who maintained a balance between professional deviance and his art that sustained him into middle age. Even Burroughs is still going strong. Every surviving professional degenerate you can name worked just as hard at it as the dead: Bruce, Bird, Morrison, others...so what crucial factor was it that drew some strange line of demarcation that declared immutably that this one would succeed in cutting himself down and that one would hang on and even achieve a kind of triumph, recidivism or at least celebrity and lots of young ass. Makes you want to punch an old fool like Ginsberg in the mouth. Or maybe it's just that the dead were stronger-willed, they had a fiercer drive to die, and you can mark a sissy or coward by his survival.
Was this what Morrison finally meant when he used to tell interviewers that he was interested in anything to do with chaos, disorder, actions without apparent meaning or motivation? A kind of integrity to self in telling the world, "Look, I just want to die and that's it, there's no reason, please don't bother digging for all the psychological crap, leave society out of it too while you're being honest with both of us, and understand if for only this one moment that I just want to die as quickly as possible for nothing at all. And if my life or anyone's is supposed to have some kind of meaning, and that's another question I'd like to ask is who said that it did in the first place?, but if it is, then let it be that, and put it on my tombstone: ‘He died for no reason at all. A simple, pure, elemental wish.’ Only nature taking its course."
As the Doors' audience took them less seriously with each new record (and Morrison more than anyone else encouraged them to: "PETITION THE LORD WITH PRAYER", screamed like that, is pure conscious intentional burlesque; not to mention all those sappy love songs aimed at 14 year old girls), he became more reckless when he took the stage. Or maybe just more drunk. There is a point in incipient or even confirmed alcoholism at which the drunk finds himself unable to deal with the torments which he picked up the bottle to flee, no matter how much he drinks they boil before his eyes and roll down like tears of tar to scald his flesh and congeal, leaving a curdled sadness and unbearable anguish, he drinks more and more and more until he falls into playpen death, scaled down and frothing with fitful frightening dreams, and when he wakes he drinks again and again on and on and months maybe years go by but there is a point, there comes a point at which the pressure reaches, finally, proportions unbearable under any circumstances or sedatives, no palliative ever invented for this psychic epilepsy, and so he must explode, in some manner, according to his imagination and the various limitations of circumstance: money, friends, set and setting, will there or won't there be a lover or friend or somebody anybody there to catch him if he falls into the deepest ditch yet, and does he want them there if he does, because really there's no recourse, no salve, no balm, no love, no connection of any kind except the clash within the flesh as splintered, nerves flail whiplashing each other, sparks exploding as they do piercing the liver like slivers of glass shot from guns, tearing the gut to shreds, whole human depository for that is what it has become, shaking like a bag of garbage hurled out a porthole into the maw of a hurricane, and worst of all the brain, mind, self, fully, totally conscious and mortified, terrified, humiliated in some final manner, short-circuited by self-loathing and quaking fear of all outside of self, but conscious, awake and aware the whole time, no matter how much you drink, and what you ultimately know at that hideous moment is that no matter what happens after this, even if you survive (and of course you will survive, because it is necessary that you suffer more), even if by some absurdly far-fetched devise you manage to recuperate and "redeem" yourself, "clean up," if you go straight and devote the rest of your life to selfless Ghandi-like humanism, or if you still think you can be saved by love, the love of another for yourself or the love you wish that you could feel for another or the love that it is your most ludicrous conceit to think you can feel for someone else, if you come out of it and "make something" of the rest of your life to the perfect satisfaction of everyone else around you, ah, he pulled out after all – even given any kind of "salvation" conceivable, you know in your guts and your ashen brain and your heart like an old punctured deflated tire lying by the side of the road for dogs to piss on, you know for certain that you will never be whole again.
So, in the midst of this tornado, careening through days and nights commingled and splattered in memory like blood from corpses tumbling out of a multiply fatal accident, as your rage runs free and rampant in its own wild glee, a drooling idiot orgy of infantilism unpent and not funny, not now and not in the retelling and not ever, just ugly, as ugly as anything human can be; in the eye of the hubbub, a certain steely calm demon fortressed deep in your marrow and orchestrating this whole riot, he takes stock of the calamity thus far and makes a cold, firm, logical decision of exactly how best to deal with the panic and its repercussions. He decides and you act. And you will never get to him, because you put him there like a cancer and once he gets his hooks in you there's no reversal possible. So he consults his notes and signals and decides upon the precise nature of your real explosion, the payoff for which the preceding carnage was merely a necessary set-up, a ragged play staged in the ganglia and all along the nerve network out to the very tips of burning wire, unbearable conditions and soul, body and mind in dire extremis, but only preparation, because only now is it time and permissible to ACT.
Maybe you kill someone (seldom yourself; too soon). Maybe your get into or cause an automobile accident. Maybe you pick a fight and get the shit kicked out of you or bully and crush someone or something physically weaker: I have seen sixty-year-old men torment dogs for hours on end...but then that may have been mere boredom. The main thing is you want to destroy. Records. Furniture. Windows. Cars. Possessions of every/any kind. And then on to bigger game. Insects. Animals. Humans. And finally yourself.
Or maybe you're too cowardly even to smash up your living room. There are some people who are perfectly capable of sitting in a chair they would just as soon break, and it never occurs to them to break it, because their only release is hurting another human with words. Or actions, not necessarily physical. Not necessarily at all. So vicious there's no way they could ever know you may, finally, be hurting yourself more. Because guilt is either a fact in front or a potential you cultivate until it becomes solid fact. And then, of course, the guiltier you feel, and there is never enough, your capacity is as boundless as the thirst when you wake up with a hangover – but know that the guiltier you feel, the greater your rage, in perfect mathematical proportions multiplying and feeding each upon itself and then each other, paroxysms of agonized random violence escalating until you either kill yourself or are forcibly curbed by someone or something outside: relatives, friends who wish they weren't, the police, walls and sidewalks and asphalt that rush up, or a blind stumble in front of an oncoming car...but no, that's too easy. Eric Emerson was that kind of coward...
And the easiest way out of all, at least at first, is exhibitionism. Making scenes in bars. Loud, boisterous, creating unpleasantness in every corner of whatever room you happen to have landed in with obnoxious, obscene, aggressive behavior. Instigating fights between others. Causing scenes and then stepping back, enjoying the chaos. But that's at first. Inevitably, of course, you're drawn into the vortex of the trouble you started, and sooner or later you end up as bloody and pointlessly wracked as the rest, fighting for your life in a war you started just to give yourself some diversion. It can begin all kinds of ways: driving down the street in cars, shouting obscenities out the window at passing women. Infantile stuff, silly, adolescent, but indicative. Symptomatic and ominous. Start like that, write it off as rowdy, and as the binges roil by you come a little more unhinged every day, until the day you end up sticking your dick at her instead of your mouth. Or flying into psychopathic rage and attacking a total stranger for no reason in public. That is when you know that you're not just "loose" any more, farthest thing from it in fact; you're not looking for fun, or even kicks–you're looking for damage. The deeper the better. The best, obviously, the kind that can never be fixed, healed, rectified. The immutable act. An assertion of the self at last, in no matter how twisted, diseased, squalid a form. I did this. Guilty. What's next?
Believe me, it has absolutely nothing to do with the noble philosophical diagrams of social theoreticians. Even Stalin knew he was a sicko. A strict destructionist, with the integrity of action, all of which exists in a universe totally separate from that inhabited by the scientists of nihilism and revolution, the bland bespectacled intellects who write the books and find deft rationalizations for what some of us do in the name of nothing but our own impotent rage and clawing terror. The Ralph J. Gleasons who would tell you that Lenny was one big walking Heart just dripping humanism and compassion like sweat off a boiler-stoker. And anyone who would tell you that Jim Morrison's own public self-humiliations were anything but willful pathology, a rebel without a cause and nothing romantic about it either.
Lester Bangs, unpublished, 1975