Doors Articles & Snippets

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

CIRCUS MAGAZINE
25th Anniversary Issue – October 31, 1994

As for Jim Morrison, what can you say? He was The Man, as well know for his outrageous lifestyle as his great music with The Doors. We miss them both.

When the Lizard King died in ’71, rock lost a poet and a genius. Those who only know from the recent Oliver Stone movie should realize that Morrison was much more than just a druggie. Had he live, he probably would have gone on to become the single greatest figure in rock, but Riders on the Storm always die young.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

JIM MORRISON & THE MIDNIGHT PHOTOGRAPHER
By Gloria Stavers
Reprint to Relix Magazine Vol. 10 No. 1 February 1983

In the fall of 1967 when the Doors’ “Light My Fire” was blazing at the top of the charts, a fortuitous meeting between the ascending phenomenon Jim Morrison and rock’s force motrice. Photo-journalist Gloria Stavers, took place in her Manhattan apartment late one night. It was the beginning of an intense and intimate artistic and intellectual relationship.

Inter alia, Gloria introduced Jim to the camera as a living entity with ‘a spirit of its own.’ Gloria told him: “It’s not just a lens you look into. It’s an opening, a doorway that you pass through and when you do you many be whatever or whomever you choose to be – a lover, a killer, son, animal or knight-templier. You may seduce, terrify, amaze, mystify or cast a spell. All you have to do is dance for it and the camera will reflect your persona to the world.”<br>
“Jim was a natural – like James Dean and Marilyn Monroe,” Gloria recalls. “He took to the camera like a lover to the beloved. It was utterly fascinating to photograph him. During the sessions we circled each other like curious lions. He loved it. That first night he said to me, ‘Oh, I see – I am the snake and you are the flute.’ Exactly.”<br>
His response was immediate and electric. From the first note to the last the long midnight session vibrated with a fierce and forbidden music – music just on this side of the parallax of madness.

In the end the snake won.

Some very sensitive and intuitive performers – instinctly perceive the hidden magic of the camera and to surrender up to it some of the mysteriousness of their inner-being. Replications of such stars in these moments are piercing and unforgettable. They stay with us forever.

One night when we were in the midst of such an exotic sarabande Jim suddenly asked me, “Is it true that each time I look in there (the lens) and you shoot me you take a piece of my soul?”<br>
“Yes,” I replied. “It is an act of love.”<br>
“And I am accepting the invitation when I look in?”<br>
“Yes.”<br>
A strange sadness seemed to sweep over him. After the first few beats he said, “Then sometimes I won’t look at you. Some things I will keep secret.”<br>
And he turned away for a while, back to his private and inviolate inner-world.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

THE NEW YORK TIMES, Saturday, November 25, 1967

The Doors Seek Nirvana Vote Here

By ALFRED G. ARONOWITZ

The best definition of pop is the one that counts at the box office, but lion-maned Jim Morrison considers the Doors as something more than a hit rock ‘n’ roll group. “Think of us,” he likes to say, “as erotic politicians.”<br>Mr. Morrison is the 23-year-uld lead singer of the Doors, and the campaign for whatever it is he’s running for is directed at the same constituency as the Monkees’: Those 14-year-ols girls of America’s suburbs.
At the Hunter College Auditorium last night, he came out in a black leather jacket and skin-tight black vinyl pants. He walked languidly to the microphone, the way Marlon Brando might have if he had started out in rock ‘n’ roll.
He grabbed the microphone with both hands and put one boot on the base. He closed his eyes and tugged on the microphone. First it was too high. Then it was too low. Then he opened his mouth as if he was about to sing. Then he changed his mind and closed his mouth again.
On his face, there was the look of suffering of someone he knows he is too beautiful to ever enjoy true love. Jim Morrison is a pop star with a vision. The vision is packaged in sex. His campaign motto is “Nirvana now.”<br>There’s not too much more to say about the Doors except that they’ve had two hit singles now and both their albums, “The Doors” and “Strange Days,” are in the top five of the pop charts. At Hunter College, they filled every seat in the house.
The program started out with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, who, like the Doors, are from California but who played sweet old-time music with acoustical instruments. The Doors, of course, are electric, with a 25-year-old Ray Manzarek providing the musical genius from his command post at the organ.
Mr. Morrison writes the lyrics, and they are filled with the tension of his impatience: “Cancel my subscription to the Resurrection…. We want the world and we want it now…. Deliver me from reason, I’d rather fly….”<br>Like the drummer John Densmore and the guitarist Robby Krieger, who are both disciples of the Indian mystic Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Mr. Morrison considers himself consumed with spiritual concepts. The problem is that visions don’t have to be packaged, they shine through by themselves.
At last night’s concert, Mr. Morrison introduced some new material. “Wait until the war is over,” he sang, “and we’ll both be a little older… Make a grave for the unknown soldier…”
Mr. Krieger played a siren on his amplifier and then aimed his guitar at Mr. Morrison while Mr. Densmore rat-tat-tatted off a machine-gun staccato. At the other end of the stage, Mr. Manzarek issued a blast from his amplifier and Mr. Morrison shuddered, languidly.
Have the Doors become successful enough to start taking themselves seriously?

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

20,000 Hear Doors Give Rock Concert In a Packed Garden

By MIKE JAHN

The Doors, one of the country’s most popular rock groups and the possessor of the current hit record “Touch Me,” played before a sellout audience of 20,000 last night at Madison Square Garden.
Rock concerts in the Garden and places of similar sizes are always a dubious enterprise, and this was no exception. The The microphone system made the group-Jim Morrison, vocalist; Robbie Krieger, guitarist; Ray Manzarek, organist, and John Densmore, drums-sound like the music was being played through a broken transistor radio.
It was hard to hear the lyrics, and a large measure of the Doors’s value is based on those lyrics. To many in the audience, the performers were a speck in the distance, and this was infortunate since much of the group’s popularity is based on the onstage theatrics of Jim Morrison.
Mr. Morrison has borrowed freely from the Elvis Presley bag of sneers, grunts and moans, and has invented quite a few of his own. Last night he seemed to be using all of them.
The Doors are very conscious of the relation between rock and pure theater. They incorporate elements of pure theater in their act: stances, motions and dramatic gestures not often seen in a rock theater.
Of course, if these could have been seen, the concert might have been more effective. As it turned out, the Doors were good despite the shortcomings of the arena.
They sang their best-known songs: “Touch Me,” “When the Music’s Over,” “Back Door Man,” “Light My Fire,” “Love Me Two Times” and “Spanish Caravan.”<br>In concert and on record, the Doors successfully create hard rock entertainment and lyrical drama in a way that is purely their own. Few groups match their ability to make rock music sound eery and magical. Few lyricists can match Mr. Morrison’s ability to create effective, often terrifying, images. One of the group’s messages, that music, rock music, is the special friend of the young, was not missed by the audience.
THE NEW YORK TIMES, Saturday, January 25, 1969


DOORS PLAY PARIS REUNION SET

While visiting France recently to promote their An American Dream LP, (***should be An American Prayer), Doors Ray Manzarek, Robby Krieger and John Densmore visited Pere Lachaise cemetery to pay their respects at the grave of late lead singer Jim Morrison on what would have been his 34th birthday.

Later that night they stopped in at the Palace – Paris’ Studio 54 – where they were soon invited up on stage for an impromptu set that included “Ghost Song,” from the Prayer album, and “Light My Fire,” “Love Me Two Times” and “Close To You,” with Manzarek vocalizing. It was the first time the threesome had played live in more than five years.

According to longtime Doors confidante Danny Sugarman, the two most frequently asked questions on the group’s Gallic jaunt were “is Jim really dead?” And “when will the Doors reform?” The most frequently given answer to both, he said, was “Who knows?”
From Circus Weekly’s Back Pages January 23, 1979 edited by Kurt Loder

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

THE GAZETTE

Mr. & Mrs. John Lennon visit the Toronto Tock and Roll Revival

By HERBERT ARANOFF


Headliners of the show were the Doors, headed by Jim Morrison, who without his leather gear or more obvious sexual innuendoes, performed a rather subdued set which included Turn Out the Lights, Light My Fire and the apocalyptic The End (Father, I want to kill you/Mother, I want to ---- you”).

[ensenada]

TheWallsScreamedPoetry said:

THE GAZETTE

Mr. & Mrs. John Lennon visit the Toronto Tock and Roll Revival

By HERBERT ARANOFF

[...]
Headliners of the show were the Doors, headed by Jim Morrison, who without his leather gear or more obvious sexual innuendoes, performed a rather subdued set which included Turn Out the Lights, Light My Fire and the apocalyptic The End (Father, I want to kill you/Mother, I want to ---- you”).
[...]

its amazing that Jim's performances varied so much, from amazing on stage antics to being quite subdued. i wonder why he could become so subdued? for example i would say he is fairly subdued in the hollywood bowl concert, was it simply because he had smoked as much weed as me and my mate at the weekends? or was there other reasons?

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

He was moody I guess and if he had his 'couldn't give a fuck' head on you got an Action House but Detroit in 1970 showed that even then if he was up for it he could play all night.
The guy was so 'one off'....thats why its so silly to even think you can recreate something like that.