Post by TheWallsScreamedPoetry on Mar 18, 2011 10:57:28 GMT
Pure poetry: why Jim Morrison's way with words still lights my fire
The Doors' poet-prophet rock idol drew unlikely inspiration from the literary likes of William Blake and Bertolt Brecht
"If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern."
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
The joy of journalism is that you can stay adolescent forever.
I am writing today about one of my teenage idols.
In case anyone misunderstands my age, though, I should add that just as nowadays I tend to rove the archive of art history, when I was in my teens, in the 1980s, I was fascinated by the music of the 1960s.
A Welsh swot who had never taken a drug, I dug deep into the history of late 60s psychedelic vision, starting when I was maybe 11 or 12 with a Pink Floyd obsession.
When I had cooled on the heart of the sun, I set the controls for California and became obsessed instead by the Doors.
As it happens, the Doors poet-prophet Jim Morrison is in the news this week.
The New York Times reports that Florida may be about to posthumously pardon the "Lizard King" for his conviction on charges of alleged indecent exposure during a concert. Apparently they hope it will ease the pain of his family.
Are his family really in agonies about that long-ago conviction?
I would have thought they would be more upset about his death in Paris at 27.
"We look back on him with great delight," said his father, famously a US navy admiral, in 1996.
When I first heard the Doors it seemed incredible to me that a pop group had taken its name from William Blake's image of "the doors of perception" in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, recorded Brecht and Weill's Alabama Song, and dramatised the Oedipus complex in The End:
"Father, I want to kill you.
Mother, I want to … Aeeariiaargh …!"
You have to hear that in Morrison's "crystal ship" of a voice. Discovering the Doors long after Jim Morrison's death and long before the internet, there was a deep mystery about them – you would find shards of information in music encyclopedias, come across the odd newspaper or magazine article, and once, amazingly, ITV reshowed a documentary from 1968 of the Doors live at London's Roundhouse, juxtaposed with scenes of student revolution.
Long afterwards, I visited Jim Morrison's grave at Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.
It was a desolate moment, because it was slightly disgusting.
All these flowers and tokens and graffiti messages had been left there while the tombs of Oscar Wilde and other heroes seemed, at that moment, forgotten.
It was the moment I fell out of love with popular culture.
But, this week I experienced James Turrell's hallucinatory art at the Gagosian gallery and the words came back, in that voice. Break on through – Break on through – Break on through to the other side
Jonathan Jones Thursday 18 November 2010
The Guardian Art's Correspondent.
The Doors' poet-prophet rock idol drew unlikely inspiration from the literary likes of William Blake and Bertolt Brecht
"If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern."
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
The joy of journalism is that you can stay adolescent forever.
I am writing today about one of my teenage idols.
In case anyone misunderstands my age, though, I should add that just as nowadays I tend to rove the archive of art history, when I was in my teens, in the 1980s, I was fascinated by the music of the 1960s.
A Welsh swot who had never taken a drug, I dug deep into the history of late 60s psychedelic vision, starting when I was maybe 11 or 12 with a Pink Floyd obsession.
When I had cooled on the heart of the sun, I set the controls for California and became obsessed instead by the Doors.
As it happens, the Doors poet-prophet Jim Morrison is in the news this week.
The New York Times reports that Florida may be about to posthumously pardon the "Lizard King" for his conviction on charges of alleged indecent exposure during a concert. Apparently they hope it will ease the pain of his family.
Are his family really in agonies about that long-ago conviction?
I would have thought they would be more upset about his death in Paris at 27.
"We look back on him with great delight," said his father, famously a US navy admiral, in 1996.
When I first heard the Doors it seemed incredible to me that a pop group had taken its name from William Blake's image of "the doors of perception" in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, recorded Brecht and Weill's Alabama Song, and dramatised the Oedipus complex in The End:
"Father, I want to kill you.
Mother, I want to … Aeeariiaargh …!"
You have to hear that in Morrison's "crystal ship" of a voice. Discovering the Doors long after Jim Morrison's death and long before the internet, there was a deep mystery about them – you would find shards of information in music encyclopedias, come across the odd newspaper or magazine article, and once, amazingly, ITV reshowed a documentary from 1968 of the Doors live at London's Roundhouse, juxtaposed with scenes of student revolution.
Long afterwards, I visited Jim Morrison's grave at Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.
It was a desolate moment, because it was slightly disgusting.
All these flowers and tokens and graffiti messages had been left there while the tombs of Oscar Wilde and other heroes seemed, at that moment, forgotten.
It was the moment I fell out of love with popular culture.
But, this week I experienced James Turrell's hallucinatory art at the Gagosian gallery and the words came back, in that voice. Break on through – Break on through – Break on through to the other side
Jonathan Jones Thursday 18 November 2010
The Guardian Art's Correspondent.
