Post by TheWallsScreamedPoetry on Jun 22, 2011 8:03:06 GMT
The Doors: The Morrison Legacy
JIM MORRISON'S body may lie a-moulderin' in his grave but his soul goes marching on.
When Elektra organised radio playbacks before open ticket audiences in America recently to launch the release of the posthumous An American Prayer, they were more than gratified by the response. In New York, 16,000 people applied for 3,500 seats, sat through the record enthralled and demanded another spin. And another.
In Philadelphia, they held a seance with a qualified medium in attendance. The Lizard King wasn't around, but a black cat skulked out from behind a curtain, flashed its tail and split out the window. Another transmigration is, successfully completed.
In London, Ray Manzarek, Robbie Krieger and John Densmore, the remaining disbanded Doors, looked far from ethereal when I met them at their hotel. The years have settled with dignity.
Manzarek is the spokesman, as always, in Jim's absence. A tall man impeccably dressed with every hair in place, Manzarek calls the interview shots. Understandably, the last survivors of Los Angeles' premier revolution band do not suffer fools gladly.
"It really was too bad, the papers always calling Jim the prophet of acid rock or orgasmic rock. That and the continual harrassment by the narco squad wore us all down in the end."
Inevitably, to talk with The Doors now is to exhume a selection of memories, some that cut too close. After Morrison's demise, Krieger, Densmore and Manzarek released two further albums, Other Voices and Full Circle, then played out their last gig together at the Imperial College. Apart, they failed to capture the public imagination – hardly surprising given the nature of their previous incarnation.
Manzarek applied his talents with the greatest success; a vague interest in Egyptology was nurtured by a visit to the King Tut exhibition in the British Museum and an album, The Golden Scarab. An aural crash course in the legends of sun worship, Heliopolis and the legend of Nefertiti was the result.
The critics refused to accept that a Door could achieve anything of merit in the absence of Morrison and panned it mercilessly. Needless to say, it's a bargain bin regular and a fine, amusing, relaxing piece of nonsense.
"Yeah, I've always been taken with sun worship, ever since I lay out on the beach at Venice one day high on acid, infused by the power of the huge orange disc.
"It's true that we seldom get recognised for our musical contributions even when Jim was alive. Session musicians used to say, 'That playing on 'L. A. Woman' or 'Riders On The Storm', now that was special,' but generally it was assumed that we were submerged behind an image."
Krieger maintains that they released Other Voices too soon after their singer's death in Paris. "Together we had a balance. As we strayed farther apart there was nothing to bind us together, we lacked out focal point. Before, it was sufficient for us to be in The Doors. Y'know if Jim had sung 'Tightrope Ride' it would have been a hit. There were good songs on those final albums."
They aren't anxious to dwell on the past either. An American Prayer is the first post-Morrison material to get an airing.
Densmore says that if they'd wanted to exploit the past they could have done so with guaranteed results in 1972. Consider how the genius of Jimi Hendrix has been bastardised and prostituted for greed, and you'll appreciate that these three are not mercenary.
"We tried to get back to the purity of The Doors, an uncluttered sound without technical sensationalism. There was no attempt to play like we used to – instead it was like recording with Jim, music to fit the mood of the words, to amplify a train of thought, just like any Doors album.
"Every time we finished a piece we'd know he would have loved it. A psychic told us that now this record is completed, his soul is accomplished, he's free to move to another plane."
The material for American Prayer was originally recorded with engineer John Haeny in an Elektra studio late at night. Haeny seemed sympathetic to Morrison the poet, and when the author died he kept the master tape, suspecting the worst. It was Krieger who remembered the tapes and contacted Haeny with the idea of working up a record, as a suitable time had elapsed and the other musicians were free from commitments.
Densmore was – and still is – part of an acting workshop in Los Angeles; Manzarek's spell with Nite City had left him in a production seat, and Krieger was having no luck as a solo artist on Blue Note. His Robbie Krieger And Friends album was disastrous, he knows that.
This project was something all could be proud of. Rather than indulging a morbid sentiment for a dead figure, they managed to shape a unique achievement, a coherent rock poetry experience which sets Morrison's muse in its traditional, crystal-cut settings.
"We imposed the structure because there was no definite organisation. Jim went into the studio actually to make an album – he would have finished it himself after Paris. We used logical categories to reveal his life. We had no model to fall back on, so we used a film format."
Morrison, Manzarek and production coordinator Frank Lisciandro had all attended UCLA's film school in the '60s. Lisciandro was a long-time buddy of the singer's. Together they'd prowl down Sunset Boulevard and hang out on the Strip preparing footage for class, and from here arose the beginnings of Morrison's pet project A Feast Of Friends – pointing the camera at passing soft parades, the blocks of cars on Sunset and Vine that continued to fascinate Morrison.
The car was symbol of escape.
Lisciandro says: "It was, still is, the American escape. It's a Californian phenomenon, a view of getting out by using available progress.
"Jim had a universal voice, which is why he made a great poet – probably the finest young American poet of his generation – but he was adamant that he was that American."
A recent American survey fed names into a computer in order to come up with a new John Doe. The name the computer chose was James C. Morrison. Mr Average American.
IN REALITY, Morrison was. far from average. The son of a well-heeled admiral from Florida, he spent his childhood travelling the hot south, New Mexico, Texas and California. An American Prayer includes a fragment of a Morrison/Lisciandro conversation detailing the poet's major childhood memory, the dead Indians on the side of the highway who enter vinyl immortality on Morrison Hotel/Hard Rock Café. (Incidentally, these two landmarks, both mission houses for hobos and the financially deprived victims of the Promised Land, burnt down after Morrison's death.)
But another success in the recorded format lies in the integration of Morrison's poetic reading of 'The WASP (Texas Radio And The Big Beat)', the single greatest interpretation of what it was like to discover rock and roll, the Devil's Music, for the children of flower power.
Manzarek takes up the line: "The biggest radio station in the South was in Texas, XERB, the Wolfman Jack station. That broadcast right up to Chicago where I lived – because there were no laws on radio power in Texas, it had to be the biggest. Before Wolfman came on the air, all we'd had was Connie Francis. Now here was someone playing the dirty low notes of R&B, Muddy Waters to Buddy Holly. The Wolfman had the minor notes, the backbeat."
Morrison associated rock and roll with the message of Dionysus and opposed it to the Appollonian rigour of the Eisenhower/Nixon regimes. Like Hunter S. Thompson, Morrison maintained a bitter hatred of everything Nixon stood for, pre-Watergate.
Manzarek believes that they lost the battle.
"We won the fight for appearance, but not power. Now the greed is upon the land. In LA, everyone talks of a quick killing, real estate, me, me, me. There is no united front, no universal spirit. Viet Nam was an easy focus to distract the people – we had to band against an insidious enemy. Now the enemy is death, and people ward against it with prosperity.
"In his poetry and the songs Jim always came to terms with death, welcomed it like an old friend. He never needed possessions to protect him."
MORRISON ON the road took nothing except a duffle bag, a shirt and reading material. He absorbed magazine junk, anything from Hit Parade to Police Gazette. A voracious reader and a considerable intellect (though he's been denounced since as a mumbling, incoherent drunk), Morrison lived out the life of the intellectual on the road. His favourite authors were Kerouac, Blake, Jung and the mystic poets. The first time he read Nietzsche's Birth Of Tragedy, it's said that he stayed awake for 72 hours, certain that he'd found the confirmation of his own voice at last.
Lisciandro, a quiet, pleasant man not given to bullshit or Californian psychobabble, remarks: "People have borrowed his style but not his universal thought."
I'd like to mention Patti Smith, Iggy Pop and Alice Cooper, but the words stick in my throat.
Lisciandro laughs off the Melody Maker review of An American Prayer, but I didn't think it was very funny. The only stumbling block between assimilation of Morrison the poet and Morrison the rock singer is the insensitivity of the listener. Frankly, the aim of the record was not to come up with another "Electric Rimbaud", so Geoffrey Cannon can hive off back to the Radio Times where he belongs, editing letters about The Archers.
The film maker Sam Fuller remarked that Morrison had the rare power to "elevate an audience, to unify the spectator's ego". True, Krieger puts it differently.
"He was like the roadman, the shaman in the peyote ritual doing this strange Indian dance, hopping around waving one maracca. Our job was to produce music for the trance, a hypnotic rhythm...afterwards the audience would leave having heard 'Celebration Of Ths Lizard', and there was no applause – the effect was cathartic."
IN MANY WAYS The Doors' career closed at precisely the right time. L.A. Woman was as close to total mastery of the rock style as their debut. Morrison had gone to Paris to re-charge. The Doors" contract with Elektra was over, as were the '60s.
Steve McQueen had approached Morrison with a film script based on the life of a rock star which the singer had read and approved. Not for nothing did Nic Roeg place a strategic picture of Jim on Turner's bathroom wall in Performance. In the words of the immortal Harry Flowers, "That boy's a performer, it's his whole life,"
How Morrison would have coped with his performance in the '70s is a matter for conjecture. My guess is that he was close to retiring from live rock shows. He already sounds worldweary on Absolutely Live, the warts and all masterpiece which provides the bridge to this current album.
An American Prayer isn't family entertainment exactly – some of the language offends corrupted minds, but that hasn't prevented it outselling Elektra's wildest expectations. This way to Far Arden, Morrison's enigmatic English garden paradise, the tracing back to Gaelic beginning.
And this way for the best seats. Lisciandro calls the record a movie. Manzarek says, "Relax, set aside an hour, light a joint, pour a beer, turn down the lights." Good advice.
Right now The Doors are considering collecting the last rites for another live record. They won't put it out unless it's good, rest assured. Rumour has it that they might reform with Iggy fronting. On this I pass in disgust; others salivate.
It's best to let the legend rest now. Eventually Morrison might gather his friends together on the slim raft...Whatever, here you have a classic example of selflessness – the principal actor won't be earning a dime. So come on, people, respect those who delight and inspire you. This writer thinks that Jim Morrison was the only rock and roll artist who ever touched on vision.
Give the singer some.
Max Bell, NME, 23 December 1978
JIM MORRISON'S body may lie a-moulderin' in his grave but his soul goes marching on.
When Elektra organised radio playbacks before open ticket audiences in America recently to launch the release of the posthumous An American Prayer, they were more than gratified by the response. In New York, 16,000 people applied for 3,500 seats, sat through the record enthralled and demanded another spin. And another.
In Philadelphia, they held a seance with a qualified medium in attendance. The Lizard King wasn't around, but a black cat skulked out from behind a curtain, flashed its tail and split out the window. Another transmigration is, successfully completed.
In London, Ray Manzarek, Robbie Krieger and John Densmore, the remaining disbanded Doors, looked far from ethereal when I met them at their hotel. The years have settled with dignity.
Manzarek is the spokesman, as always, in Jim's absence. A tall man impeccably dressed with every hair in place, Manzarek calls the interview shots. Understandably, the last survivors of Los Angeles' premier revolution band do not suffer fools gladly.
"It really was too bad, the papers always calling Jim the prophet of acid rock or orgasmic rock. That and the continual harrassment by the narco squad wore us all down in the end."
Inevitably, to talk with The Doors now is to exhume a selection of memories, some that cut too close. After Morrison's demise, Krieger, Densmore and Manzarek released two further albums, Other Voices and Full Circle, then played out their last gig together at the Imperial College. Apart, they failed to capture the public imagination – hardly surprising given the nature of their previous incarnation.
Manzarek applied his talents with the greatest success; a vague interest in Egyptology was nurtured by a visit to the King Tut exhibition in the British Museum and an album, The Golden Scarab. An aural crash course in the legends of sun worship, Heliopolis and the legend of Nefertiti was the result.
The critics refused to accept that a Door could achieve anything of merit in the absence of Morrison and panned it mercilessly. Needless to say, it's a bargain bin regular and a fine, amusing, relaxing piece of nonsense.
"Yeah, I've always been taken with sun worship, ever since I lay out on the beach at Venice one day high on acid, infused by the power of the huge orange disc.
"It's true that we seldom get recognised for our musical contributions even when Jim was alive. Session musicians used to say, 'That playing on 'L. A. Woman' or 'Riders On The Storm', now that was special,' but generally it was assumed that we were submerged behind an image."
Krieger maintains that they released Other Voices too soon after their singer's death in Paris. "Together we had a balance. As we strayed farther apart there was nothing to bind us together, we lacked out focal point. Before, it was sufficient for us to be in The Doors. Y'know if Jim had sung 'Tightrope Ride' it would have been a hit. There were good songs on those final albums."
They aren't anxious to dwell on the past either. An American Prayer is the first post-Morrison material to get an airing.
Densmore says that if they'd wanted to exploit the past they could have done so with guaranteed results in 1972. Consider how the genius of Jimi Hendrix has been bastardised and prostituted for greed, and you'll appreciate that these three are not mercenary.
"We tried to get back to the purity of The Doors, an uncluttered sound without technical sensationalism. There was no attempt to play like we used to – instead it was like recording with Jim, music to fit the mood of the words, to amplify a train of thought, just like any Doors album.
"Every time we finished a piece we'd know he would have loved it. A psychic told us that now this record is completed, his soul is accomplished, he's free to move to another plane."
The material for American Prayer was originally recorded with engineer John Haeny in an Elektra studio late at night. Haeny seemed sympathetic to Morrison the poet, and when the author died he kept the master tape, suspecting the worst. It was Krieger who remembered the tapes and contacted Haeny with the idea of working up a record, as a suitable time had elapsed and the other musicians were free from commitments.
Densmore was – and still is – part of an acting workshop in Los Angeles; Manzarek's spell with Nite City had left him in a production seat, and Krieger was having no luck as a solo artist on Blue Note. His Robbie Krieger And Friends album was disastrous, he knows that.
This project was something all could be proud of. Rather than indulging a morbid sentiment for a dead figure, they managed to shape a unique achievement, a coherent rock poetry experience which sets Morrison's muse in its traditional, crystal-cut settings.
"We imposed the structure because there was no definite organisation. Jim went into the studio actually to make an album – he would have finished it himself after Paris. We used logical categories to reveal his life. We had no model to fall back on, so we used a film format."
Morrison, Manzarek and production coordinator Frank Lisciandro had all attended UCLA's film school in the '60s. Lisciandro was a long-time buddy of the singer's. Together they'd prowl down Sunset Boulevard and hang out on the Strip preparing footage for class, and from here arose the beginnings of Morrison's pet project A Feast Of Friends – pointing the camera at passing soft parades, the blocks of cars on Sunset and Vine that continued to fascinate Morrison.
The car was symbol of escape.
Lisciandro says: "It was, still is, the American escape. It's a Californian phenomenon, a view of getting out by using available progress.
"Jim had a universal voice, which is why he made a great poet – probably the finest young American poet of his generation – but he was adamant that he was that American."
A recent American survey fed names into a computer in order to come up with a new John Doe. The name the computer chose was James C. Morrison. Mr Average American.
IN REALITY, Morrison was. far from average. The son of a well-heeled admiral from Florida, he spent his childhood travelling the hot south, New Mexico, Texas and California. An American Prayer includes a fragment of a Morrison/Lisciandro conversation detailing the poet's major childhood memory, the dead Indians on the side of the highway who enter vinyl immortality on Morrison Hotel/Hard Rock Café. (Incidentally, these two landmarks, both mission houses for hobos and the financially deprived victims of the Promised Land, burnt down after Morrison's death.)
But another success in the recorded format lies in the integration of Morrison's poetic reading of 'The WASP (Texas Radio And The Big Beat)', the single greatest interpretation of what it was like to discover rock and roll, the Devil's Music, for the children of flower power.
Manzarek takes up the line: "The biggest radio station in the South was in Texas, XERB, the Wolfman Jack station. That broadcast right up to Chicago where I lived – because there were no laws on radio power in Texas, it had to be the biggest. Before Wolfman came on the air, all we'd had was Connie Francis. Now here was someone playing the dirty low notes of R&B, Muddy Waters to Buddy Holly. The Wolfman had the minor notes, the backbeat."
Morrison associated rock and roll with the message of Dionysus and opposed it to the Appollonian rigour of the Eisenhower/Nixon regimes. Like Hunter S. Thompson, Morrison maintained a bitter hatred of everything Nixon stood for, pre-Watergate.
Manzarek believes that they lost the battle.
"We won the fight for appearance, but not power. Now the greed is upon the land. In LA, everyone talks of a quick killing, real estate, me, me, me. There is no united front, no universal spirit. Viet Nam was an easy focus to distract the people – we had to band against an insidious enemy. Now the enemy is death, and people ward against it with prosperity.
"In his poetry and the songs Jim always came to terms with death, welcomed it like an old friend. He never needed possessions to protect him."
MORRISON ON the road took nothing except a duffle bag, a shirt and reading material. He absorbed magazine junk, anything from Hit Parade to Police Gazette. A voracious reader and a considerable intellect (though he's been denounced since as a mumbling, incoherent drunk), Morrison lived out the life of the intellectual on the road. His favourite authors were Kerouac, Blake, Jung and the mystic poets. The first time he read Nietzsche's Birth Of Tragedy, it's said that he stayed awake for 72 hours, certain that he'd found the confirmation of his own voice at last.
Lisciandro, a quiet, pleasant man not given to bullshit or Californian psychobabble, remarks: "People have borrowed his style but not his universal thought."
I'd like to mention Patti Smith, Iggy Pop and Alice Cooper, but the words stick in my throat.
Lisciandro laughs off the Melody Maker review of An American Prayer, but I didn't think it was very funny. The only stumbling block between assimilation of Morrison the poet and Morrison the rock singer is the insensitivity of the listener. Frankly, the aim of the record was not to come up with another "Electric Rimbaud", so Geoffrey Cannon can hive off back to the Radio Times where he belongs, editing letters about The Archers.
The film maker Sam Fuller remarked that Morrison had the rare power to "elevate an audience, to unify the spectator's ego". True, Krieger puts it differently.
"He was like the roadman, the shaman in the peyote ritual doing this strange Indian dance, hopping around waving one maracca. Our job was to produce music for the trance, a hypnotic rhythm...afterwards the audience would leave having heard 'Celebration Of Ths Lizard', and there was no applause – the effect was cathartic."
IN MANY WAYS The Doors' career closed at precisely the right time. L.A. Woman was as close to total mastery of the rock style as their debut. Morrison had gone to Paris to re-charge. The Doors" contract with Elektra was over, as were the '60s.
Steve McQueen had approached Morrison with a film script based on the life of a rock star which the singer had read and approved. Not for nothing did Nic Roeg place a strategic picture of Jim on Turner's bathroom wall in Performance. In the words of the immortal Harry Flowers, "That boy's a performer, it's his whole life,"
How Morrison would have coped with his performance in the '70s is a matter for conjecture. My guess is that he was close to retiring from live rock shows. He already sounds worldweary on Absolutely Live, the warts and all masterpiece which provides the bridge to this current album.
An American Prayer isn't family entertainment exactly – some of the language offends corrupted minds, but that hasn't prevented it outselling Elektra's wildest expectations. This way to Far Arden, Morrison's enigmatic English garden paradise, the tracing back to Gaelic beginning.
And this way for the best seats. Lisciandro calls the record a movie. Manzarek says, "Relax, set aside an hour, light a joint, pour a beer, turn down the lights." Good advice.
Right now The Doors are considering collecting the last rites for another live record. They won't put it out unless it's good, rest assured. Rumour has it that they might reform with Iggy fronting. On this I pass in disgust; others salivate.
It's best to let the legend rest now. Eventually Morrison might gather his friends together on the slim raft...Whatever, here you have a classic example of selflessness – the principal actor won't be earning a dime. So come on, people, respect those who delight and inspire you. This writer thinks that Jim Morrison was the only rock and roll artist who ever touched on vision.
Give the singer some.
Max Bell, NME, 23 December 1978