Post by darkstar3 on Feb 10, 2011 17:21:53 GMT
NEW YORK MAGAZINE
September 5 1968
The Shaman As Superstar
By Richard Goldstein
“The Shaman…he was a man who would intoxicate himself. See, he was probably already, an…uh…unusual individual. And, he would put himself into a trance by dancing, whirling around, drinking, taking drugs – however. Then, he would go on a mental travel and…uh…describe his journey to the rest of the tribe.
He comes to meet you in superstar fatigues: a slept-in pullover, and the inevitable leather pants. A lumpy hat covers most of his mane. You mutter “groovy” at each other in greeting, and split for the beach. His most recent song comes on the radio. You both laugh as he turns up the volume, and fiddles with the bass controls. It’s a perfect afternoon, so he picks up his girl. She says, “Your hat makes you look like a Rembrandt, Jim,” and he whispers, “Oh, wow,” riding the image as thought it were a breaking wave.
The official interview takes place in a sequestered inlet at the Garden of Realization, an ashram Hollywood style. You sit not far from an urn certified to contain Mahatma Gandhi’s ashes. Music is piped in from speakers at the top of a stucco arch with cupolas sprayed gold.
Amid a burst of strings from the hidden speakers, you ask a trial question. Jim answers in a slithering baritone. “I dunno…I haven’t thought about it.” The garden supplies Muzak hosannas.
“When you started, did you anticipate your image?”
“Nahhh. It just sort of happened…unconsciously.”
“How did you prepare yourself for stardom?”
“Uh…about the only thing I did was…I stopped getting haircuts.”
“How has your behavior changed on stage changed?”
“See, it used to be…I’d stand still and sing. Now, I…uh…exaggerate a little bit.”
His voice drops an octave at the sight of a tape recorder, and the surrogate audience it represents. He gives a cautious mischievous interview, contemplating each question as though it were a hangnail, and answering with just a trace of smile in the corners of his quotation marks. But he gets his scene across.
“I’m beginning to think it’s easier to scare people than to make them laugh.
“I wonder why people like to believe I’m high all the time. I guess…maybe they think someone else can take their trip for them.
“A game is a closed field…a ring of death with…uh…sex at the center. Performing is the only game I’ve got, so…I guess it’s my life.”
His statement, like his songs, is an unpunctuated puzzle. You connect the dots between images, and become involved.
“I’m a word man,” he exults. In discussing his craft, he sputters with esthetic energy.
“See, there’s a theory about the nature of tragedy, that Aristotle didn’t mean catharsis for the audience, but a purgation of emotions for the actors themselves. The audience is just a witness to the event taking place on stage.”
He suggests you read Nietzsche on the nature of tragedy to understand where he is really at. His eyes glow as he launches into a discussion of the Apollonian-Dionysian struggle for control of the life force. No need to guess which side he’s on.
“See, singing has all the things I like,” he explains. “It’s involved with writing and with music. There’s a lot of acting. And it has this one other thing…a physical element…a sense of the immediate. When I sing, I create characters.”
“What kind of characters?”
“Oh…hundreds. Hundreds of em.”
“I like to think he just arrived – you know, came out of nowhere.” A Fan
The Doors, however are an inner theatre of cruelty. Their musical dramas have made fear and trembling part of the rock lexicon. These days every band worth its psychedelic salt has a local lunatic singing lead. But The Doors have already transcended their own image. Now, they are in search of total sensual contact with an audience. They may yet appear at a future concert in masks.
As Ray Manzarek explains: “We want our music to short circuit the conscious mind and allow the subconscious to flow free.”
That goal is a realization of all that was implicit in Elvis Presley’s sacred wiggle. But if Elvis was an unquestioning participant in his own hysteria, The Doors celebrate their myth as a creative accomplishment. Playing sorcerer is Jim’s thing – not a job, or a hobby, or even one of those terribly necessary rituals we sanctify with the name Role. Jim calls it “play”:
The Lizard King slithers down Sunset Strip in a genuine snakeskin jacket and leather tights. Bands of teenyboppers flutter about like neon butterflies, but he is oblivious to their scene. He moves past ticky-tacoramas and used head shops, into the open arms of recording studio B, where his true subjects wait.
He greets us with a grin out of This Spake Zarathustra, and we realize instantly that Jimis loaded. Juiced. Stoned – the old way. Booze. No one is surprised; Jim is black Irish to the breath. He deposits a half empty quart bottle of wine on top of the control panel and downs the remnants of somebody’s beer.
“Hafta’ break it in,” he mutters, caressing the sleeves of his jacket. It sits green and scaly on his shoulders, and crinkles like tinfoil whenever he moves.
“It’s – very Tennessee Williams, Jim.”
Grunt. He turns to producer Paul Rothchild with a spacious grin that says, “I’m here, so you can start.” But Rothchild makes little clicking noises with his tongue. He is absorbed in a musical problem, and he offers only a perfunctory nod to the tipsy titan at his side.
Behind a glass partition three musical Doors hunch over their instruments, intent on a rhythm line that refuses to render itself whole. 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 sharp, precise 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. 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 to smile. The others tolerate him as a pungent but necessary prop.
He teeters about the tiny room, digging his boots into the carpeting. Between belches, he gazes at each of us, smirking as though he has found something vaguely amusing behind our eyes. But the séance is interrupted when Rothchild summons him. While Jim squats behind the control panel, a roughly recorded dub of his “Celebration of the Lizard” comes over the loud 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 “The Celebration of the Lizard” will never appear on record – certainly not on the Doors new album. There will be eleven driving songs, and snatches of poetry, read aloud the way they do it at the Ninety-Second Street Y. But no Lizard King. No monarch, crowned with love beads, and holding the phallic scepter in his hand.
“Hey, bring your notebook to my house tomorrow morning, okay?” Rothchild offers.
“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 the anteroom used to record isolated vocals. He turns the lights out, fits himself with earphones, and begins his game.
Crescendos of breath between syllables. His song is half threat, and half plea:
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 loudspeakers. 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 the 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…’cept…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 Mexican wedding shirts,” he sighs with brandied breathiness.
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.”
“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, we’re not going to measure all of you. Just your shoulders.”
END.
September 5 1968
The Shaman As Superstar
By Richard Goldstein
“The Shaman…he was a man who would intoxicate himself. See, he was probably already, an…uh…unusual individual. And, he would put himself into a trance by dancing, whirling around, drinking, taking drugs – however. Then, he would go on a mental travel and…uh…describe his journey to the rest of the tribe.
He comes to meet you in superstar fatigues: a slept-in pullover, and the inevitable leather pants. A lumpy hat covers most of his mane. You mutter “groovy” at each other in greeting, and split for the beach. His most recent song comes on the radio. You both laugh as he turns up the volume, and fiddles with the bass controls. It’s a perfect afternoon, so he picks up his girl. She says, “Your hat makes you look like a Rembrandt, Jim,” and he whispers, “Oh, wow,” riding the image as thought it were a breaking wave.
The official interview takes place in a sequestered inlet at the Garden of Realization, an ashram Hollywood style. You sit not far from an urn certified to contain Mahatma Gandhi’s ashes. Music is piped in from speakers at the top of a stucco arch with cupolas sprayed gold.
Amid a burst of strings from the hidden speakers, you ask a trial question. Jim answers in a slithering baritone. “I dunno…I haven’t thought about it.” The garden supplies Muzak hosannas.
“When you started, did you anticipate your image?”
“Nahhh. It just sort of happened…unconsciously.”
“How did you prepare yourself for stardom?”
“Uh…about the only thing I did was…I stopped getting haircuts.”
“How has your behavior changed on stage changed?”
“See, it used to be…I’d stand still and sing. Now, I…uh…exaggerate a little bit.”
His voice drops an octave at the sight of a tape recorder, and the surrogate audience it represents. He gives a cautious mischievous interview, contemplating each question as though it were a hangnail, and answering with just a trace of smile in the corners of his quotation marks. But he gets his scene across.
“I’m beginning to think it’s easier to scare people than to make them laugh.
“I wonder why people like to believe I’m high all the time. I guess…maybe they think someone else can take their trip for them.
“A game is a closed field…a ring of death with…uh…sex at the center. Performing is the only game I’ve got, so…I guess it’s my life.”
His statement, like his songs, is an unpunctuated puzzle. You connect the dots between images, and become involved.
“I’m a word man,” he exults. In discussing his craft, he sputters with esthetic energy.
“See, there’s a theory about the nature of tragedy, that Aristotle didn’t mean catharsis for the audience, but a purgation of emotions for the actors themselves. The audience is just a witness to the event taking place on stage.”
He suggests you read Nietzsche on the nature of tragedy to understand where he is really at. His eyes glow as he launches into a discussion of the Apollonian-Dionysian struggle for control of the life force. No need to guess which side he’s on.
“See, singing has all the things I like,” he explains. “It’s involved with writing and with music. There’s a lot of acting. And it has this one other thing…a physical element…a sense of the immediate. When I sing, I create characters.”
“What kind of characters?”
“Oh…hundreds. Hundreds of em.”
“I like to think he just arrived – you know, came out of nowhere.” A Fan
The Doors, however are an inner theatre of cruelty. Their musical dramas have made fear and trembling part of the rock lexicon. These days every band worth its psychedelic salt has a local lunatic singing lead. But The Doors have already transcended their own image. Now, they are in search of total sensual contact with an audience. They may yet appear at a future concert in masks.
As Ray Manzarek explains: “We want our music to short circuit the conscious mind and allow the subconscious to flow free.”
That goal is a realization of all that was implicit in Elvis Presley’s sacred wiggle. But if Elvis was an unquestioning participant in his own hysteria, The Doors celebrate their myth as a creative accomplishment. Playing sorcerer is Jim’s thing – not a job, or a hobby, or even one of those terribly necessary rituals we sanctify with the name Role. Jim calls it “play”:
The Lizard King slithers down Sunset Strip in a genuine snakeskin jacket and leather tights. Bands of teenyboppers flutter about like neon butterflies, but he is oblivious to their scene. He moves past ticky-tacoramas and used head shops, into the open arms of recording studio B, where his true subjects wait.
He greets us with a grin out of This Spake Zarathustra, and we realize instantly that Jimis loaded. Juiced. Stoned – the old way. Booze. No one is surprised; Jim is black Irish to the breath. He deposits a half empty quart bottle of wine on top of the control panel and downs the remnants of somebody’s beer.
“Hafta’ break it in,” he mutters, caressing the sleeves of his jacket. It sits green and scaly on his shoulders, and crinkles like tinfoil whenever he moves.
“It’s – very Tennessee Williams, Jim.”
Grunt. He turns to producer Paul Rothchild with a spacious grin that says, “I’m here, so you can start.” But Rothchild makes little clicking noises with his tongue. He is absorbed in a musical problem, and he offers only a perfunctory nod to the tipsy titan at his side.
Behind a glass partition three musical Doors hunch over their instruments, intent on a rhythm line that refuses to render itself whole. 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 sharp, precise 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. 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 to smile. The others tolerate him as a pungent but necessary prop.
He teeters about the tiny room, digging his boots into the carpeting. Between belches, he gazes at each of us, smirking as though he has found something vaguely amusing behind our eyes. But the séance is interrupted when Rothchild summons him. While Jim squats behind the control panel, a roughly recorded dub of his “Celebration of the Lizard” comes over the loud 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 “The Celebration of the Lizard” will never appear on record – certainly not on the Doors new album. There will be eleven driving songs, and snatches of poetry, read aloud the way they do it at the Ninety-Second Street Y. But no Lizard King. No monarch, crowned with love beads, and holding the phallic scepter in his hand.
“Hey, bring your notebook to my house tomorrow morning, okay?” Rothchild offers.
“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 the anteroom used to record isolated vocals. He turns the lights out, fits himself with earphones, and begins his game.
Crescendos of breath between syllables. His song is half threat, and half plea:
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 loudspeakers. 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 the 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…’cept…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 Mexican wedding shirts,” he sighs with brandied breathiness.
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.”
“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, we’re not going to measure all of you. Just your shoulders.”
END.
