Post by darkstar on Jan 3, 2005 0:42:24 GMT
Best Goddamn L.A. King: Jim Morrison
by Richard Meltzer
L.A. Weekly - October 17-23, 2003
Can’t say I agree with Lester Bangs’ quaint notion that there ain’t NO SALVATION without rock and uh roll, and I’d bet my boots Jim Morrison didn’t either, but for whatever the bloody hell it might be worth, I would hafto insist on Jimbo — hands fucking down — as the goddamn King of Rock and Roll.
Hey — I couldn’t really tell you whether rock-roll has ever needed anything as ridiculous as a king, or if kings themselves especially need rock and roll, or if monarchy metaphors (of whatever flavor or stripe) have more than the dumbest, most gratuitous application to things rock, but if there ever was an approximate or actual king of the whole damn silly thing — its high-water mark in flesh — it was, really really folks!, none other ’n Jim.
It wurn’t Elvis, for inst. In ’56 Elvis saved my life, or at least my 11-year-old ass — and the collective asses of MANY — but listen, kids, Jim’s was a wilder, krazier, and quantitatively BIGGER leap beyond the state o’ things muse-ical ’tween January and July of ’67, say — when rock as a whole was at pretty much ITS high-water point — than Elvis’ had been re: the cultural tide pool of Perry Como, Julius LaRosa, “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?”<br>
What, uh — you weren’t born yet? Think maybe I’m shittin’ ya? Overreaching? Well I was there, OK? Actually I was in New York ... but let me see if I can show & tell you where I get this bullshit from.
When the Doors’ first album came out, I was writing for the first of the rock mags — first serious one, let’s say — Crawdaddy. This was back when there were no more than 11 or 12 decent bands in the world, so when the alb floated in on a cloud of major hype, it was like Oboy, maybe now we got us a 12th or 13th. On first listen we were not impressed. It seemed kinda pretentious, eh?, and a tad too forcibly arch, ’specially the “killer awoke before dawn” hoohah in “The End,” but when we got invited to their opening night at this plush clip joint called Ondine, up under the 59th Street Bridge, we figured fuggit — what’s to lose? Wasn’t much in the way of “live rock” in New York in those days; we were way behind L.A. and S.F. Oh, we had Murray the K. package shows and Long Island bars w/ a gaggle of bar bands, but in Manhattan proper there were probably 30 times as many jazz clubs as rock clubs.
So me and three colleagues from Crawdad subwayed up there and bingo — we were blown the fuck away. Material that on record had seemed wooden and stage-set now had the existential oompah of a scream. Simulations of arch played out in real time as truly and compellingly arch. What transpired on stage had this aura of DELIRIOUS BOMBAST the likes of which I hadn’t witnessed in even wrestling or monster pics (it certainly had no precursor in rock, which today people imagine as the fount of all bombast). It was as madly bracing as a cocktail of vodka and, I dunno, napalm.
It would be some weeks before Jim got his first leathers — he wore jeans and a striped surfer shirt — but his flirtation with the slithery dark trappings of what, danger?, menace? was already in high gear. Leaping straight in the air, he banged his head HARD on the sloped ceiling — definitely not choreographed — collapsing in a very impressive heap.
When the first set was done (there would be four that night, and every night, basically, for the next couple months — bar band servitude at its finest), we looked at each other and muttered: “Is this the greatest thing ever, or is this the greatest thing ever?” We fumbled for reference points — ’twas the Dawn of Rock Crit, see, and we were all still hopelessly verbal — and wondered aloud where the fuck and what the fuck whatever-this-was — i.e., who/what Jim was — had “come out of.” The Stones? Nope. The blues? He did “Back Door Man,” sure, but no way. Brecht-Weill ... ditto. The Fugs? Ha ha — in a funny way, close — but again, no.
Even the fact, subsequently “revealed,” that the guy had read (absorbed) (et for breakfast) his share of Artaud — closer still — would have EXPLAINED very little. Sitting in this stupid upscale club (to which I would return to sit or stand 30-40 times) (it was also the dawn of rock-crit freeload), it felt as if he’d come out of nowhere, or out of primal Freudian ooze or, I dunno — ’cause I still don’t know.
The prime PHENOMENON, tho, the glaring brazen sense-accessible MEAT of the act, was beyond debate, beyond interpretation — beyond irony, f’r chrissakes. What we had here, diggit, was a froth-bubble cauldron of libidinal whoopee — The Sexual — the whole fucking fuckthing in extremis — what rock-roll had always been supposedly, and archetypally, “about”— raised to a flash point, a thunder point, of got to! got to! gimme! gimme!: hell sex and heaven sex ... passion sex and teen sex and infantile playpen sex ... romantic sex and filth sex ... grope sex and come sex, pain sex and plain sex ... night sex and midafternoon sex ... dry-land sex and marine sex ... bedroom sex and gutter sex and mud-water swamp sex ... totally insane sex and wholesome fun-fun-fun sex ... acid sex and gin sex and sterno sex and puke sex ... garter belt and gam sex and farting belching piss-down-your-leg sex ... sex to die for and sex that equals death ... sex magical and tragical and ultra-mundane ... sex with lepers, sex with gods ... infinite sex and nothing sex ... sex before time ticked and after the end of the world. Believe it ...
It was all from a thoroughly male p.o.v. (natch) — kings are of course MEN — but there was nothing premeditatedly daunting about it, or even un-premed, nothing exclusive or exclusionary, a flaunting of what the king might have that we-all did not. (This wurn’t no Mick Jagger bulltickey.) If anything, it was generously, bountifully inclusionary and empowering: the musical evocation of the audience’s OWN dick ... of EVERYDICK, as it were. Empowering, yes! — just as later on punk would be empowering.
If you’re reading this and thinking, well, dicks don’t need additional encouragement — they do to dance, y’know. And ’fore you judge such-all as smacking, prima facie, of The Arrogance of Penis, please bear in mind that this here, at its socially un-redeeming wurst — ’scuse me — worst, was a benign penile arrogance, one that Jim had already limit-lined and tempered with HUMILITY (“The snake was pale gold & shrunken”— an impotence line, people!) and JOCULARITY (“Love Me Two Times,” anyone?). Hey — there ain’t ever been a FUNNIER bozo in rock-roll than (that’s correct) Jim ... verrry funny guy!!
Speaking of punk, and of dancing dicks, it could be argued, e-z, that without Jim you don’t get Iggy, and without Iggy you don’t get any number of hell-and-gone fuckaloonies. Or going down another line, Ian Curtis, and through him Kurt Cobain. Or Patti Smith, who didn’t even have a dick, and if we’re name-dropping her, gee, might as well talk about pottery, ’scuse-a me, POETRY.
ALL CONSIDERATION of high-booty poetry, of quasi-serious verse per se, wrought by members in good standing of the rock-roll tribe BEGINS WITH (couldn’t ya guess?) JIM. Tho it’s possible he never wrote a single “poem” worth its weight in eel spit, he was (take my wd. on this — no quotes — I’m running outta space) a True Rimbaud ... uhh ... The Real Wm. Blake ... bluh blah ... literal Father of Poetry (Rock Div.).
You won’t take my word? Okay — try THIS on for size:
“When the music is your special friend/ Dance on fire as it intends/ Music is your only friend/ Un ..... til the end,” et cet. Lyric not poesy, but greater (sez me) than all the works of Ginsberg, Coleridge, or Sara Teasdale.
And you won’t find ANYWHERE a hotter, hepper voyeur song (or peeper poem) than “My Eyes Have Seen You.”<br>
But if he hadn’t died — young — we would prob’ly not be sitting here twiddling our merry thumbs, immersed in edifying thoughts upon the grandeur that was Jim. A living J.D. Morrison would’ve recorded manymanyMANY bad albs, albs worse, far worse, than the heinous, horrible Soft Parade (for ex.) ... credential-corroding sonic doodoo ... and we might now think of him, if we thought of him at all, like we think of Joe Cocker, let’s say, or Darryl Strawberry.
Midrange former hot-shit, but no king cigar.
’Cause just as with Lester, an early murphy was a mandatory career move ... no everlasting glory without THAT.
I believe.
Could be wrong.
Source: www.laweekly.com/ink/printme_bola.php?eid=47926
by Richard Meltzer
L.A. Weekly - October 17-23, 2003
Can’t say I agree with Lester Bangs’ quaint notion that there ain’t NO SALVATION without rock and uh roll, and I’d bet my boots Jim Morrison didn’t either, but for whatever the bloody hell it might be worth, I would hafto insist on Jimbo — hands fucking down — as the goddamn King of Rock and Roll.
Hey — I couldn’t really tell you whether rock-roll has ever needed anything as ridiculous as a king, or if kings themselves especially need rock and roll, or if monarchy metaphors (of whatever flavor or stripe) have more than the dumbest, most gratuitous application to things rock, but if there ever was an approximate or actual king of the whole damn silly thing — its high-water mark in flesh — it was, really really folks!, none other ’n Jim.
It wurn’t Elvis, for inst. In ’56 Elvis saved my life, or at least my 11-year-old ass — and the collective asses of MANY — but listen, kids, Jim’s was a wilder, krazier, and quantitatively BIGGER leap beyond the state o’ things muse-ical ’tween January and July of ’67, say — when rock as a whole was at pretty much ITS high-water point — than Elvis’ had been re: the cultural tide pool of Perry Como, Julius LaRosa, “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?”<br>
What, uh — you weren’t born yet? Think maybe I’m shittin’ ya? Overreaching? Well I was there, OK? Actually I was in New York ... but let me see if I can show & tell you where I get this bullshit from.
When the Doors’ first album came out, I was writing for the first of the rock mags — first serious one, let’s say — Crawdaddy. This was back when there were no more than 11 or 12 decent bands in the world, so when the alb floated in on a cloud of major hype, it was like Oboy, maybe now we got us a 12th or 13th. On first listen we were not impressed. It seemed kinda pretentious, eh?, and a tad too forcibly arch, ’specially the “killer awoke before dawn” hoohah in “The End,” but when we got invited to their opening night at this plush clip joint called Ondine, up under the 59th Street Bridge, we figured fuggit — what’s to lose? Wasn’t much in the way of “live rock” in New York in those days; we were way behind L.A. and S.F. Oh, we had Murray the K. package shows and Long Island bars w/ a gaggle of bar bands, but in Manhattan proper there were probably 30 times as many jazz clubs as rock clubs.
So me and three colleagues from Crawdad subwayed up there and bingo — we were blown the fuck away. Material that on record had seemed wooden and stage-set now had the existential oompah of a scream. Simulations of arch played out in real time as truly and compellingly arch. What transpired on stage had this aura of DELIRIOUS BOMBAST the likes of which I hadn’t witnessed in even wrestling or monster pics (it certainly had no precursor in rock, which today people imagine as the fount of all bombast). It was as madly bracing as a cocktail of vodka and, I dunno, napalm.
It would be some weeks before Jim got his first leathers — he wore jeans and a striped surfer shirt — but his flirtation with the slithery dark trappings of what, danger?, menace? was already in high gear. Leaping straight in the air, he banged his head HARD on the sloped ceiling — definitely not choreographed — collapsing in a very impressive heap.
When the first set was done (there would be four that night, and every night, basically, for the next couple months — bar band servitude at its finest), we looked at each other and muttered: “Is this the greatest thing ever, or is this the greatest thing ever?” We fumbled for reference points — ’twas the Dawn of Rock Crit, see, and we were all still hopelessly verbal — and wondered aloud where the fuck and what the fuck whatever-this-was — i.e., who/what Jim was — had “come out of.” The Stones? Nope. The blues? He did “Back Door Man,” sure, but no way. Brecht-Weill ... ditto. The Fugs? Ha ha — in a funny way, close — but again, no.
Even the fact, subsequently “revealed,” that the guy had read (absorbed) (et for breakfast) his share of Artaud — closer still — would have EXPLAINED very little. Sitting in this stupid upscale club (to which I would return to sit or stand 30-40 times) (it was also the dawn of rock-crit freeload), it felt as if he’d come out of nowhere, or out of primal Freudian ooze or, I dunno — ’cause I still don’t know.
The prime PHENOMENON, tho, the glaring brazen sense-accessible MEAT of the act, was beyond debate, beyond interpretation — beyond irony, f’r chrissakes. What we had here, diggit, was a froth-bubble cauldron of libidinal whoopee — The Sexual — the whole fucking fuckthing in extremis — what rock-roll had always been supposedly, and archetypally, “about”— raised to a flash point, a thunder point, of got to! got to! gimme! gimme!: hell sex and heaven sex ... passion sex and teen sex and infantile playpen sex ... romantic sex and filth sex ... grope sex and come sex, pain sex and plain sex ... night sex and midafternoon sex ... dry-land sex and marine sex ... bedroom sex and gutter sex and mud-water swamp sex ... totally insane sex and wholesome fun-fun-fun sex ... acid sex and gin sex and sterno sex and puke sex ... garter belt and gam sex and farting belching piss-down-your-leg sex ... sex to die for and sex that equals death ... sex magical and tragical and ultra-mundane ... sex with lepers, sex with gods ... infinite sex and nothing sex ... sex before time ticked and after the end of the world. Believe it ...
It was all from a thoroughly male p.o.v. (natch) — kings are of course MEN — but there was nothing premeditatedly daunting about it, or even un-premed, nothing exclusive or exclusionary, a flaunting of what the king might have that we-all did not. (This wurn’t no Mick Jagger bulltickey.) If anything, it was generously, bountifully inclusionary and empowering: the musical evocation of the audience’s OWN dick ... of EVERYDICK, as it were. Empowering, yes! — just as later on punk would be empowering.
If you’re reading this and thinking, well, dicks don’t need additional encouragement — they do to dance, y’know. And ’fore you judge such-all as smacking, prima facie, of The Arrogance of Penis, please bear in mind that this here, at its socially un-redeeming wurst — ’scuse me — worst, was a benign penile arrogance, one that Jim had already limit-lined and tempered with HUMILITY (“The snake was pale gold & shrunken”— an impotence line, people!) and JOCULARITY (“Love Me Two Times,” anyone?). Hey — there ain’t ever been a FUNNIER bozo in rock-roll than (that’s correct) Jim ... verrry funny guy!!
Speaking of punk, and of dancing dicks, it could be argued, e-z, that without Jim you don’t get Iggy, and without Iggy you don’t get any number of hell-and-gone fuckaloonies. Or going down another line, Ian Curtis, and through him Kurt Cobain. Or Patti Smith, who didn’t even have a dick, and if we’re name-dropping her, gee, might as well talk about pottery, ’scuse-a me, POETRY.
ALL CONSIDERATION of high-booty poetry, of quasi-serious verse per se, wrought by members in good standing of the rock-roll tribe BEGINS WITH (couldn’t ya guess?) JIM. Tho it’s possible he never wrote a single “poem” worth its weight in eel spit, he was (take my wd. on this — no quotes — I’m running outta space) a True Rimbaud ... uhh ... The Real Wm. Blake ... bluh blah ... literal Father of Poetry (Rock Div.).
You won’t take my word? Okay — try THIS on for size:
“When the music is your special friend/ Dance on fire as it intends/ Music is your only friend/ Un ..... til the end,” et cet. Lyric not poesy, but greater (sez me) than all the works of Ginsberg, Coleridge, or Sara Teasdale.
And you won’t find ANYWHERE a hotter, hepper voyeur song (or peeper poem) than “My Eyes Have Seen You.”<br>
But if he hadn’t died — young — we would prob’ly not be sitting here twiddling our merry thumbs, immersed in edifying thoughts upon the grandeur that was Jim. A living J.D. Morrison would’ve recorded manymanyMANY bad albs, albs worse, far worse, than the heinous, horrible Soft Parade (for ex.) ... credential-corroding sonic doodoo ... and we might now think of him, if we thought of him at all, like we think of Joe Cocker, let’s say, or Darryl Strawberry.
Midrange former hot-shit, but no king cigar.
’Cause just as with Lester, an early murphy was a mandatory career move ... no everlasting glory without THAT.
I believe.
Could be wrong.
Source: www.laweekly.com/ink/printme_bola.php?eid=47926