Jim Morrison: Artist or Fool?

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

The actor Dennis Hopper who died last year summed up his career with this honest but rather sad assessment:

“In my mind, I was an artist and writer. The reality was that I was just a drunk and a drug addict. It wasn’t helping me create. In fact, it hindered me. It stopped me from getting jobs. I dealt with the rejection by taking more drink and drugs.”

Considering the problems The Doors had throughout their career especially the latter part of it do you think this can be applied to our band in general and and their lead singer in particular.
Did the excess impede the artistic output of The Doors?
Was Jim Morrison just under the illusion that he was in any way a potentially great writer?

The 60s saw many a great acts/artists sucumb to the excess of the time many like The Doors we revere.
But are we right to do so?
As with Hopper the Doors career ended with a sad whimper rather than on any high note two years on from the death of their focal point.

So there you go
Jim Morrison: Artist or Fool?
The Doors: Legends or something less?

Is it time to give a 21st century reassessment of the lead singers contribution to the arts?
And what would that reassessment entail?

So in that timeless fashion....what do you think?

This thread covers two seperate areas so I have put it in both Jim and The Doors forums for discussion seperately so discuss Jim HERE and The Doors via the link below.

The Doors: Legends or something less?

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

With July 3rd fast approaching I wonder if it's worth getting a heads up on the event and seeing if anyone has anything to contribute to the deabte about the worth of Jim as an 'artist' rather than an 'icon'

This is a point of view I shared with yahoo Groups back in January 2005. Anyone got any views on the subject

Jim Morrison the true artist

I think a lot of us (me included) tend to lose sight of that sometimes. Jim would have preffered to sing in total
darkness (he said on several occasions that he would like the stage to be immerssed in exactly that) and cared nothing for the trappings of fame and fortune...xept for his car (which he was always losing)....
The epitomal artist of the 60s nobody had his integrity when it came to his art.
Driven by demons perhaps but commited to what he had chosen to do and devasted when he found himself unable to do it....trapped as a rock God instead of a poet.
We can but wonder what went though his mind when he realised he was a 'caught in a prison of his own device' victim of his pretty boy image and his power and charisma on stage.

Who knows if The Doors had taken a year off in 1969 whether Jim could have conquered drink produced a poetry album and found his way with the group again.
R$ay (Manzo) began to rear his head around this time as Ray was seduced by the fame and fortune that day on the beach had given him.
Record companies wanted product and Ray wanted more and more glory.
John claims to have seen Jim was destroying himself but Ray just wanted to keep on trucking.....Robby seems to have taken whatever side the person he was talking to held.
Nowadays Jim could have checked into a retreat for a few months but then the full glare of the rock public wanted more and more insanity from The Doors......
They had seen what was done in Miami and wanted more spectaculars.....You can sometimes hear on the bootlegs from 69/70 Jims frustration coming through.....
I would venture if any song became a reason to hate being a Door to him it was Light My Fire....the very reason for his success...

on Backstage & Dangerous as Rothchild tries to coerce the band into recording versions of the songs they did the night before to insert onto the projected live album from the Aquarius Theatre Jim (having none of Pauls games) sings 'you can take that lyric and you can stick it up your ass' my belief is he is reffereing to LMF...

The very image he had conciously cultivated was his downfall and an artist to the end he retreated to Paris......
What happened next we can never really know......I am not a supporter of the OD theory and have always believed Jim just had a heart failure due to the life he led and the neglect to his body he always chose.
But depression is an odd thing and its possible Jim Morrison may well have saw as the only way out a pile of white powder on the table in rue Beautriellis.....
Be sad if that was the case....even sadder than heart failure.....but all of us that were fans around that time were as much to blame as Ray ever was....
if you had asked me in 1969 (age 13) if I thought The Doors should have taken a year off I would have
said hell no and they should get thier asses over to England ASAP....
We always want too much from our artistic icons and are never really happy until they end up dead or insane and then we go 'whoops' and move on to the next one.....
Jim in death was to be remembered as a true artist...courting controversy revulsion and love in equal measure as any true artist should. In life seen by many as a buffoon but death may make angels of us all but it made a legend out of Jim Morrison.....

be nice if he actually knew that:)

One wonders how Ray and his 'new' Doors for a 21st century will be remembered as they have no burning fire inside that sad bundle of pointlessness....

Jim was NOT 'The Doors' but he was the heart and soul of 'The Doors' and a true artist till his last breath......I think we should all remember that from time to time.....

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

1. Shine On You Crazy Diamond

Not very glamorous and previously unreported was the encounter with Doors fan Steve Rosenberg, a 16 year old medical student, and Jim Morrison. Steve, now a obstetrician in LA, was doing advanced placement research at Miami’s Cedars of Lebanon hospital was a regular visitor in August of 1970 to the trial of James Douglas Morrison.
“ As the crowds died away I finally got the chance to talk to him a little bit.” Says Steve today 30 years on.
“ I talked to him about poetry-Rimbaud- and what kind of music he was listening to-
Surprisingly, Pink Floyd.

At one point during a lunch break he asked what I was doing, and I told him this medical research thing. He asked if there was a Burger King around there and I said ‘Yeah I’m going back to the hospital, I can give you a ride’. Instead of dropping him off I joined him for lunch.
He had two Cheese Whoppers and a malted.”
MOJO – what did he look like?
“ He was fat. Fat and bearded. Looked like he did on ‘American Prayer’ and a little bit spacey.
Not like warm and friendly but cool, never an asshole. I had to draw him out, and I think he was more engaged because I had a brain. I was the only one there everyday of the trial so he actually saw I had an interest in stuff. And he liked my mothers car ( a ’63 Newport Chrysler, no less.). he thought it was cool.
I vaguely remember him liking the air conditioner- ‘Cool air conditioning, it really blows a lot of air’.
Then I dropped him off back there”

FROM MOJO THE MUSIC MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER 2001.

2. Through A Lens Darkly!!

3. Henry Diltz Remembers Jim Morrison

“People ask me about Morrison”. What was he like man?
“I always say he really was a poet- he had a poets attitude. The word I use is ‘bemused’.
He always had a kind of bemused little smile on his face whenever he would talk to people. Especially the day we went to do the ‘Morrison Hotel’ cover.”
Henry was not only a photographer but also a member of ‘The Modern Folk Quartet’ and remembers Morrison well.
“I would see him around town. We played the ‘Whisky’ around the same time they did. So I saw him first as a fellow musician before I ever became a photographer.
He was always very friendly. I’d see him in stores around town with his girlfriend, and he’d say ‘Hey, man, how you doing?’
It was a 60’s thing, outgoing, small talk. Never standoffish or anything. But I would say he was a quiet guy. He was introspective. Definitely.”
Morrison’s legal wrangles were very rarely spoken of so Henry can’t recall whether the ‘Morrison Hotel’ shoot took place before or after Miami.
( it was in fact after- MOJO)
Instead, he recalls an intelligent man who simply enjoyed life.
“We went down to Skid Row to have a drink’ Henry recalls of the album shoot which showcased the band behind the front window of decrepit ‘Morrison Hotel’ at 1246 South Hope Street in the seedy side of downtown LA.
“And we ended up in the old ‘Hard Rock Café’ which had been there since the 30’s, so it didn’t mean rock ‘n’ roll.
We were all in a Volkswagen van, saw that, and said in one voice- ‘Oh man, we’ve got to stop in there’. We spent about an hour, having a couple of beers and talking to the old guys. Jim loved to hear them talk about their lives. When we were through, Jim said ‘C’mon lets go into a couple of other bars.’
We’d sit at a table, buy some guy a drink and let him talk. Jim didn’t say much himself. He’d sit there and just nod and have that little smile on his face, like he was drinking in stuff, observing life and people.

And for all the talk of the ‘Lizard King’ image, it is interesting to note that that the one time shirtless Morrison allowed Diltz to shoot to his hearts content without offering direction.
“It never seemed a big deal to him. I just shot a Rap Group who were very concerned about every stance and how they looked; they really wanted to throw shapes in a very certain way, very controlling. Jim wasn’t at all like that. Very natural. We spent a day walking around Venice Beach taking pictures, and he was right there—into it but quiet. Very accessible.

From “Dead Cat Bounce” MOJO magazine September 2001.



3. Not To Touch The Earth

“I met Jim Morrison for the first time in the winter 1968. He was more alive and afire than I would ever see him, and I was a moonstruck groupie. It was a recording session for ‘Waiting For The Sun’, their third album. I was with a writer from the New York Times who was interviewing Jim Morrison.
Jim was coming out of the studio “to get a bite to eat” with Pamela, his lady. His hand shaking mine was firm, enthusiastic, running a current of controlled power. My writer friend and I went inside and sat with the others waiting for Jim to reappear.
Soon we were watching him from inside the tracking room while he sang ‘Not To Touch The Earth’ on the other side of the soundproof glass. Most of the time his rich urgent voice was unheard as engineers and Paul Rothchild frittered and fettered down the instrumental track. Along with Ray Manzarek’s searing organ and the sinister chords of Robby Krieger’s guitar, we watched Morrison dance and sweat, the stallion muscularity contracting inside the glove tight leather jeans, while he wailed and belted out ‘nothin’ left to do but run, run, run, let’s run…..’

That night, his face shaped pleasure, his eyes held light, interest, intensity. His mouth moved in motions of pleased surprise. He was all there. He argued, criticized, consented, refused, laughed, and suggested. Pamela in a green velvet coat, waist long red hair, jerking her delicate jaw from side to side, followed his movements with her heavy lashed urchin eyes, providing cigarettes, chain smoking.
When he came into the tracking room, his body radiated heat. He seemed to glow in the dark with a red-hot aura. His presence was abristle with electricity, and he was in total charge of that massive voltage.

“Jim Morrison Ten Years Gone”
Lizze James remembers an erudite Jim Morrison during the ‘Waiting For The Sun’ Session in LA, winter 1968.
From Creem’s ‘10 Year Commemorative Issue’ Summer 1981.


4. But now we must descend, for there is another side to this vision!!

The gap between Morrison and the other Doors is vast in the studio, where the enforced cohesion of live performance is missing. On their own they are methodic musicians. Densmore drums in precise, sharp strokes. Krieger’s guitar undulates like a belly dancer-sinuous but sober. And at the organ Manzarek is cultivated and crisp with his shaggy head atop a pair of plywood shoulders, he looks like a hip undertaker.
Jim walks into the studio and accosts a vacant mike. He writhes in languid agony, jubilant at the excuse to move in his new jacket. But Rothchild keeps the vocal mike dead, to assure maximum concentration on the problem at hand. From behind the glass partition Jim looks like a silent movie of himself, speeded up for laughs. The musicians barely bother to notice. When he is drinking, they work around him. Only Ray is solicitous enough to smile. The others tolerate him as a pungent but necessary prop.
“I’m the square of the Western hemisphere,” he says, returning to his wine. “man… whenever somebody’d say something groovy….. it’d blow my mind. Now I’m learnin’ ..You like people? I hate ‘em….screw ‘em…I don’t need ‘em…..Oh! I need ‘em….to grow potatoes”.
He teeters around the tiny room, digging his boots into the carpet. Between belches, he gazes at each of us smirking as if he has found something vaguely amusing behind our eyes.
But the séance is interrupted when Paul Rothchild summons him.
While Jim squats behind the control panel, a roughly recorded dub on his ‘Celebration Of The Lizard’ comes over the speakers.
Gently, almost apologetically, Ray tells him the thing doesn’t work. Too diffuse, too mangy. Jim’s face sinks beneath his scaly collar. Right then you can sense that ‘celebration’ will never appear on record- certainly not on the new Doors album.
There will be 11 driving songs and snatches of poetry, read aloud the way they do at the 92nd St. Y. But no Lizard King. No monarch crowned with love beads and holding the phallic sceptre in his hand.
“hey, bring your notebook over to my house tomorrow morning, okay” Rothchild offers in consolation.
“Yeah” Jim answers with the look of a dog who’s just been told he’s missed his walk. “Sure”. Defeated the Lizard king seeks refuge within his scales. He disappears for ten minutes and returns with a bottle of brandy. Thus fortified he closets himself inside an anteroom used to record isolated vocals, fits himself with earphones, and begins his game.
‘Five to one…One in five
No one here…. Gets out alive’

Everyone in the room tries to bury Jim’s presence in conversation but his voice intrudes, bigger and blacker than life, over the speaker. Each trace of sound is magnified so we can hear him guzzling and belching away. Suddenly he emerges from his Formica cell, inflicting his back upon a wall as though he were being impaled. He is sweat-drunk, but still coherent, and he mutters so everyone can hear.
“if I had an axe …man, I’d kill everybody…’xept …uh…my friends”
Sagittarius the hunter stalks us with his glance. We sit frozen waiting for him to spring. “Ah- I hafta get one o’ them Mexical wedding shirts” he sighs with brandied bleariness. Robby’s girl Donna, takes him on: “ I don’t know if they come in your size”
“I’m a medium with a large neck” he slurs.
“we’ll have to get you measured then”
“Uh-uh… I don’t like to be measured” his eyes glow with sleep and swagger.
“Oh Jim” Donna says “we’re not gonna measure all of you…just your shoulders”

Richard Goldstein meets ‘Jimbo’ during the ‘Waiting For The Sun’ Sessions’68
From the ‘Waiting For The Sun’ music booklet 1969.

5. Jim’s Secret Blues Session. David Anderle

“One night Jim called me up and said ‘I want to do a blues record’. That’s all he kept talking about. So I got hold of John Haeny and without Jac and Rothchild and the others Doors knowing about it, we went in a couple of nights after hours and did this tape. Just Jim, playing piano, on which he was very bad, sketching some things.
The sessions were fun and great and the hanging out was great.
Some of the most fun times I’ve had in the studio.
When we finished, which was not real late, we went back to his house, and he walked in and said to Pam ‘Hi, honey’, and gave her a big hug and a kiss.
He went upstairs and Pam said ‘I just wish it could always be like this. He’s doing what he wants musically, and he’s with people who aren’t putting pressure on him.’

From Follow The Music

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Taking into account the events of the last decade is this the fate of Jim Morrison?
To be remembered only for the sensation rather than the erudition.
Crazy Jim on a T Shirt?
The failure of the film WYS along with the failure of the Bright Midnight project which was conceived to show a different Jim Morrison leaves the artist with the same old baggage he had in the 20th century.
What could have been a critical re-evaluation of the artist and the band for the new century was soured by lies, argument, greed and weakness on the part of those who profit most from Jim the Artist.
Is Morrison now doomed to forever be the cock flashing maniac who destroyed his band and consigned his band mates to a life of poverty unable to work and having to live off the meager pickings The Doors Legacy left them!
(of course i am being sarcastic here)

Now Morrison is seen as a meal ticket to many rather than an artist and even many Doors fans have signed up to the When You're Strange vision of Jim Morrison rather then look for something different.

Can the 'artist' survive into the new century or will he forever be regarded as the 'fool'?

You are supposed to be Doors fans so what have you got to say or will the silent majority simply allow the memory of the artist to fade in favour of the T Shirt?