Post by TheWallsScreamedPoetry on Jun 21, 2011 14:53:59 GMT
The Doors: a profile of Jim Morrison
IN THREE YEARS Jim Morrison went from being a rock icon to dying a bloated alcoholic at just 27 years old. But in that time he became rock and roll's most important rebel ever, mixing poetic pretensions and belligerent good looks. As cinema audiences prepare for Oliver Stone's biopic of Morrison's short life, the unequivocal powerhouse rock of the Doors, led by his sexual vocals, is as much a symbol for the '90s as it was for the '60s generation.
Malcolm McLaren once described Johnny Rotten as, "that scruffy kid that used to hang around the shop in the King's Road with Doors albums stuffed under his arm." The fact that punk's vitriolic figurehead – the one who used to perform in his "I hate Pink Floyd" T-shirt – wasn't ashamed of that other musical phenomenon of the '60s, is testimony to the nihilistic hipness that has kept the Doors' music current long after most of their contemporaries have become forgotten fossils.
Although they emerged in the era of peace and love, and shared its openmindedness, the Doors always had an anti-hippy streak. They were more surreal than psychedelic, more anguish than acid – which is why they've since been so influential on groups like Joy Division – and Morrison used to recommend Nietzsche, hardly flowerchild reading, to anyone who would listen.
Jim Morrison never invoked teenage angst in the clumsy manner of so many rock phonies, he personified it. In his finest moments he embodied rebellion as perfectly as any cultural icon ever has, which is why every eligible pop and film star would give their eye teeth to star in his life story. In the eight years since plans for the Doors' biopic were announced, Hollywood smoothies as improbable as John Travolta and Tom Cruise have chased the lead role with a desperation that highlights Morrison's evergreen credibility.
But though his wilder excesses may paint him as a rebel without a cause, Jim often pursued rebellion in a conscious, articulate manner. "When you make peace with authority you become an authority," he wrote in the group's first biography. "I like ideas about the overthrowing of established order – I am interested in revolt, disorder, chaos, especially activity that seems to have no meaning." It may be hard to perceive as intellectual a man who went from being the musical saviour of the western world at 24, to being a bloated alcoholic lying dead in a bath in a Parisian hotel at 27, but that's exactly what Jim was.
Everyone who taught him still remembers an academic mind, far sharper than his classmates. At college he did courses on revolt and crowd psychology and handed in papers on books so obscure that one tutor had to go to the Library of Congress to check they existed. And in his reading taste, from Sophocles to French existentialists, from Nietzsche to Kerouac, Morrison provided a thousand hints and literary blueprints for the lifestyle he was to lead.
Jim's intellectual side was a crucial part of his appeal. Subsequent rock idols have emulated Morrison's drug excesses, but never in conjunction with such a sharp, probing, life-affirming mentality. He named the group after a William Blake quote in an Aldous Huxley book – "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it truly is, infinite" – and lived out his mission to break through those doors with a gusto that led biographer Danny Sugerman to remark: "Nobody made getting loaded look more romantic than Jim Morrison."
For someone with such a phenomenal appetite for illegal drugs, Jim had a strangely carefree attitude towards the police. He provoked them at every opportunity and was beaten up countless times as a result. In one of a hundred backstage incidents at concerts, Jim told a troublesome cop to suck his dick. The cop pulled out a can of mace and said, "This is your last chance to move." "No man," Jim replied, cupping his genitals with his hands, "this is your last chance to eat it." Jim got maced and, after humiliating policemen from the stage, was later beaten up and arrested.
Jim had no concept of expediency. Arrested in the desert, he taunted the redneck cops though his cell bars, calling them the ugliest motherfuckers he'd ever seen. Only the arrival of a friend with bail money saved him from a severe beating. Another time he was lucky to escape unscathed after goading a cop, "C'mon, muthafucker, chickenshit asshole, shoot me!"
The wild behaviour Jim exhibited at UCLA – like urinating between the shelves at the public library –returned with a vengeance in his later, severe alcoholic phase. He started playing matador in moving traffic, crashing cars, trashing studios and singing with any band playing in the bars he got drunk in. At a Hendrix gig he poured a table full of drinks over Janis Joplin, then leapt onstage and started hugging Jimi's legs. And when Andy Warhol gave him a gold and ivory French telephone, minutes later Jim hurled it out of the limo into a public wastebin in front of him.
Jim was never legally married, but he did wed one of his regular girlfriends, Patricia, in a Wicca ceremony (like the one rumoured to have taken place between Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn) in which souls are fused on a karmic and cosmic plane, and death, therefore, does not part the lovers. The sharing of blood involved in the ceremony so excited Jim, that he later persuaded an aristocratic German girlfriend to cut her thumb so that they could make love smeared in blood.
As a schoolboy Jim wrote numerous obscene journals, and as a major star in the last age of innocent promiscuity he got to act out all his sexual fantasies with a limitless selection of willing partners. "Butt-fucking" was a favourite, and one of the sound experiments the Doors tried on Strange Days was Jim singing while being given a blow job. The group's producer was so keen on this idea, that he offered to go out and get a prostitute to do the job, but Jim's oldest flame, Pamela, pitched in. In the event, the pair emerged satisfied from the recording booth after 20 minutes without Jim having sung a note.
Other anecdotes that shed light on Morrison's complex, turbulent personality could fill (and have) several books, but sifting through them is made difficult by the vested interests of the tellers. Biographer Danny Sugerman was the Doors' press officer and owes much of his career to the memories of his days as Morrison's confidant, while founder member Ray Manzarek (whose career Sugerman now manages) bought the rights to all the Doors music from the surviving members after Morrison's death. This means that Sugerman and Manzarek have everything to gain from promoting the Morrison myth, and their pretentious eulogizing contrasts revealingly with the more down-to-earth reminiscences of Robbie Krieger and John Densmore.
But one thing is quite clear: though Jim Morrison was the larger-than-life star and leader of the Doors, without the other three we would probably never have heard of him. Some of his lyrics could be claimed to be among the finest ever in rock music, but even at the height of his fame Jim couldn't make his extracurricular careers as poet, playwright, actor and filmmaker take off. As a foursome however, the Doors had a unique chemistry that allowed them to fuse blues and classical structures into configurations whose freshness will never be dulled by the passage of time.
Appropriately enough for someone whose career was rocket-like in both ascent and burn-out, James Douglas Morrison was born near Cape Canaveral in Florida on December 8, 1943. His father, an officer in the US navy (who later became America's youngest Rear Admiral), was periodically absent for most of Jim's youth, and the combination of the continuous changing of his mother's role and uprooting of the family left Jim confused and with a resentment of authority. A psychological report on the highly mobile naval society of the time also predicted Jim's later traits of alcoholism and his feeling of being an outsider.
At the age of four, driving along a desert road near Albuquerque with his father, Jim experienced what he later described as the most important moment of his life. They came upon an overturned truck, and saw injured and dying Pueblo Indians lying where they had been thrown on the asphalt. As they pulled away from the intersection, having helped all they could, Jim claimed on Indian died and his soul passed into his body. Years later he sang in 'Blue Sunday', "Indians scattered on dawn's highway bleeding/Ghosts crowd the child's fragile eggshell mind."
At school Jim displayed a constant need to show off and command attention. He recited fanciful tales to no-one in particular on public buses, and his college housemates felt he treated them as if he were an anthropologist and they his subjects.
Jim's enjoyment (at the age of 12) of a death-defying toboggan run, that almost killed him and his brother and sister, hinted at the fearlessness that would characterize his later behaviour. In 'American Prayer' he refers to death as an old friend, and he seemed to live much of his life on the edge.
In 1967 the radical New York magazine Village Voice said: "The Doors begin where the Rolling Stones left off." But because Jim's excessive behaviour was modeled on his perception of the ideal poet, rather than on any rock'n'roll antecedent, it is very difficult to describe his appeal without sounding pretentious. Blake's proverbs, "The road of excess leads to the place of wisdom" and "Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid courted by incapacity", dictated his lifestyle. Through intensive hallucinogenic drug abuse, Jim pushed out against the boundaries of life and his self in an attempt to live up to Nietzsche's view of Oedipus as "the type of nobleman who, despite his wisdom, is fatal to error and misery, but who nevertheless, through his extraordinary sufferings exerts a magical, healing effect on all around him which continues even after his death."
There's no evidence of serious abuse in Jim's childhood, but his relationship with his parents was odd, to say the least. In the group's first biography he claimed that both his parents were dead, he never wrote to them or visited them, and when his mother and brother once came to a Doors concert, he got friends to fob them off for four hours before skipping town without seeing them. Elektra Records – who signed the Doors for $2,500 and five per cent royalties – seemed a suitably classical allusion for rock's most Oedipal star. Morrison's live premiere of the lines "Father I want to kill you! Mother I want to fuck you!" ('The End') at LA's Whiskey A Go-Go shocked the owner so much he sacked the then house band for good.
In the summer of '67 the Doors topped the American chart with their second single 'Light My Fire', and the next four years gave them six gold albums and endless tours. Morrison practised his Freudian theories of crowd neuroses (and their availability for manipulation) so successfully that riots frequently ensued, but soon he came to despise the slavish, shamanistic relationship he had cultivated with the fans. He was no longer a threat, just an obscenity, expected to deliver freakshow antics.
In Miami in '69, in an attempt to end this situation forever, he abused the audience, told them they were there for all the wrong reasons, and then exposed himself onstage. A crusading Florida Governor seized on the incident, and the Doors couldn't get a gig for almost six months. Eventually Morrison received an eight month jail sentence, but he didn't live long enough to start serving it.
"Very few people on this planet are called to dance the shaman's dance," says Manzarek. "It takes a certain unique, slightly cracked individual...something slightly aberrant in their behaviour. But because of that aberration you also get that intoxication – and the intoxication is magnificent. But you have to live with that aberration when you're not in that state."
"He tried to stay in an ecstatic state onstage and off, but offstage John, Robbie and myself weren't there to make the rhythm and there weren't 15,000 people in front of him. He tried to keep that high going and his body wore out. He bloated out and then...he just imploded and died. It reminds me of the temptation of St Anthony in the desert – like a Bosch painting. St Anthony is in the desert being attacked by these demons – and all the images are from within his own mind. That was Morrison."
Demons definitely marred Jim's ecstasy. His alcoholism may have seemed like a tribute to Dionysius, but it was far from appealing, and his death was simply pointless. Jim was in Paris with his longtime companion Pamela, relaxing and writing new material for a future Doors project. Heroin was one of the few drugs he never did, but one day he got hold of Pamela's stash and chopped out two huge lines. He snorted them, got in the bath and the lethal cocktail of heroin and alcohol shut down his central nervous system. Pamela returned to find that the singer, philosopher and delinquent she loved had accidentally killed himself.
Because it was impossible to get an autopsy at weekends in France, and Pamela didn't see the need for one anyway, Morrison was buried virtually unseen in Père Lachaise cemetery, fueling endless rumours that he had staged the whole thing and fled to anonymity in India, Africa or even Oregon. Danny Sugerman doesn't believe a word of it. "The truth of it is that I haven't heard from him since he was in Paris. I know where the Doors' money goes, and while Jim was not materialistic, he spent money real good." No mystery figure has ever approached the Doors' estate for a cash sub.
Morrison's pointless, but hardly unexpected death, killed the Doors' career stone dead while they were still a vital musical force, and the personal, idiosyncratic magic the four players forged has ensured their eternal popularity. But Morrison's legend is almost larger than the music, because he himself was so much larger than life. A self-portrait he gave someone, in which he had painted himself as a king, reflects his position as a lord of the self-exploring generation.
Jim Morrison was one of the last truly exciting rock icons largely because everything he did was so obviously real. The complexities of his personality came alive in his deeds. He was a poet and a womanizer, tender and selfish, a visionary dreamer and a slob. Money was clearly never a motivation for him, and he promised no answers, only exciting questions. He made intellectualism sexy, and investigated the extremes of life in the last years of pop's naivety. It's no wonder that people look back on his brief reign with a hint of jealousy.
Simon Witter, Sky, 1991
IN THREE YEARS Jim Morrison went from being a rock icon to dying a bloated alcoholic at just 27 years old. But in that time he became rock and roll's most important rebel ever, mixing poetic pretensions and belligerent good looks. As cinema audiences prepare for Oliver Stone's biopic of Morrison's short life, the unequivocal powerhouse rock of the Doors, led by his sexual vocals, is as much a symbol for the '90s as it was for the '60s generation.
Malcolm McLaren once described Johnny Rotten as, "that scruffy kid that used to hang around the shop in the King's Road with Doors albums stuffed under his arm." The fact that punk's vitriolic figurehead – the one who used to perform in his "I hate Pink Floyd" T-shirt – wasn't ashamed of that other musical phenomenon of the '60s, is testimony to the nihilistic hipness that has kept the Doors' music current long after most of their contemporaries have become forgotten fossils.
Although they emerged in the era of peace and love, and shared its openmindedness, the Doors always had an anti-hippy streak. They were more surreal than psychedelic, more anguish than acid – which is why they've since been so influential on groups like Joy Division – and Morrison used to recommend Nietzsche, hardly flowerchild reading, to anyone who would listen.
Jim Morrison never invoked teenage angst in the clumsy manner of so many rock phonies, he personified it. In his finest moments he embodied rebellion as perfectly as any cultural icon ever has, which is why every eligible pop and film star would give their eye teeth to star in his life story. In the eight years since plans for the Doors' biopic were announced, Hollywood smoothies as improbable as John Travolta and Tom Cruise have chased the lead role with a desperation that highlights Morrison's evergreen credibility.
But though his wilder excesses may paint him as a rebel without a cause, Jim often pursued rebellion in a conscious, articulate manner. "When you make peace with authority you become an authority," he wrote in the group's first biography. "I like ideas about the overthrowing of established order – I am interested in revolt, disorder, chaos, especially activity that seems to have no meaning." It may be hard to perceive as intellectual a man who went from being the musical saviour of the western world at 24, to being a bloated alcoholic lying dead in a bath in a Parisian hotel at 27, but that's exactly what Jim was.
Everyone who taught him still remembers an academic mind, far sharper than his classmates. At college he did courses on revolt and crowd psychology and handed in papers on books so obscure that one tutor had to go to the Library of Congress to check they existed. And in his reading taste, from Sophocles to French existentialists, from Nietzsche to Kerouac, Morrison provided a thousand hints and literary blueprints for the lifestyle he was to lead.
Jim's intellectual side was a crucial part of his appeal. Subsequent rock idols have emulated Morrison's drug excesses, but never in conjunction with such a sharp, probing, life-affirming mentality. He named the group after a William Blake quote in an Aldous Huxley book – "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it truly is, infinite" – and lived out his mission to break through those doors with a gusto that led biographer Danny Sugerman to remark: "Nobody made getting loaded look more romantic than Jim Morrison."
For someone with such a phenomenal appetite for illegal drugs, Jim had a strangely carefree attitude towards the police. He provoked them at every opportunity and was beaten up countless times as a result. In one of a hundred backstage incidents at concerts, Jim told a troublesome cop to suck his dick. The cop pulled out a can of mace and said, "This is your last chance to move." "No man," Jim replied, cupping his genitals with his hands, "this is your last chance to eat it." Jim got maced and, after humiliating policemen from the stage, was later beaten up and arrested.
Jim had no concept of expediency. Arrested in the desert, he taunted the redneck cops though his cell bars, calling them the ugliest motherfuckers he'd ever seen. Only the arrival of a friend with bail money saved him from a severe beating. Another time he was lucky to escape unscathed after goading a cop, "C'mon, muthafucker, chickenshit asshole, shoot me!"
The wild behaviour Jim exhibited at UCLA – like urinating between the shelves at the public library –returned with a vengeance in his later, severe alcoholic phase. He started playing matador in moving traffic, crashing cars, trashing studios and singing with any band playing in the bars he got drunk in. At a Hendrix gig he poured a table full of drinks over Janis Joplin, then leapt onstage and started hugging Jimi's legs. And when Andy Warhol gave him a gold and ivory French telephone, minutes later Jim hurled it out of the limo into a public wastebin in front of him.
Jim was never legally married, but he did wed one of his regular girlfriends, Patricia, in a Wicca ceremony (like the one rumoured to have taken place between Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn) in which souls are fused on a karmic and cosmic plane, and death, therefore, does not part the lovers. The sharing of blood involved in the ceremony so excited Jim, that he later persuaded an aristocratic German girlfriend to cut her thumb so that they could make love smeared in blood.
As a schoolboy Jim wrote numerous obscene journals, and as a major star in the last age of innocent promiscuity he got to act out all his sexual fantasies with a limitless selection of willing partners. "Butt-fucking" was a favourite, and one of the sound experiments the Doors tried on Strange Days was Jim singing while being given a blow job. The group's producer was so keen on this idea, that he offered to go out and get a prostitute to do the job, but Jim's oldest flame, Pamela, pitched in. In the event, the pair emerged satisfied from the recording booth after 20 minutes without Jim having sung a note.
Other anecdotes that shed light on Morrison's complex, turbulent personality could fill (and have) several books, but sifting through them is made difficult by the vested interests of the tellers. Biographer Danny Sugerman was the Doors' press officer and owes much of his career to the memories of his days as Morrison's confidant, while founder member Ray Manzarek (whose career Sugerman now manages) bought the rights to all the Doors music from the surviving members after Morrison's death. This means that Sugerman and Manzarek have everything to gain from promoting the Morrison myth, and their pretentious eulogizing contrasts revealingly with the more down-to-earth reminiscences of Robbie Krieger and John Densmore.
But one thing is quite clear: though Jim Morrison was the larger-than-life star and leader of the Doors, without the other three we would probably never have heard of him. Some of his lyrics could be claimed to be among the finest ever in rock music, but even at the height of his fame Jim couldn't make his extracurricular careers as poet, playwright, actor and filmmaker take off. As a foursome however, the Doors had a unique chemistry that allowed them to fuse blues and classical structures into configurations whose freshness will never be dulled by the passage of time.
Appropriately enough for someone whose career was rocket-like in both ascent and burn-out, James Douglas Morrison was born near Cape Canaveral in Florida on December 8, 1943. His father, an officer in the US navy (who later became America's youngest Rear Admiral), was periodically absent for most of Jim's youth, and the combination of the continuous changing of his mother's role and uprooting of the family left Jim confused and with a resentment of authority. A psychological report on the highly mobile naval society of the time also predicted Jim's later traits of alcoholism and his feeling of being an outsider.
At the age of four, driving along a desert road near Albuquerque with his father, Jim experienced what he later described as the most important moment of his life. They came upon an overturned truck, and saw injured and dying Pueblo Indians lying where they had been thrown on the asphalt. As they pulled away from the intersection, having helped all they could, Jim claimed on Indian died and his soul passed into his body. Years later he sang in 'Blue Sunday', "Indians scattered on dawn's highway bleeding/Ghosts crowd the child's fragile eggshell mind."
At school Jim displayed a constant need to show off and command attention. He recited fanciful tales to no-one in particular on public buses, and his college housemates felt he treated them as if he were an anthropologist and they his subjects.
Jim's enjoyment (at the age of 12) of a death-defying toboggan run, that almost killed him and his brother and sister, hinted at the fearlessness that would characterize his later behaviour. In 'American Prayer' he refers to death as an old friend, and he seemed to live much of his life on the edge.
In 1967 the radical New York magazine Village Voice said: "The Doors begin where the Rolling Stones left off." But because Jim's excessive behaviour was modeled on his perception of the ideal poet, rather than on any rock'n'roll antecedent, it is very difficult to describe his appeal without sounding pretentious. Blake's proverbs, "The road of excess leads to the place of wisdom" and "Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid courted by incapacity", dictated his lifestyle. Through intensive hallucinogenic drug abuse, Jim pushed out against the boundaries of life and his self in an attempt to live up to Nietzsche's view of Oedipus as "the type of nobleman who, despite his wisdom, is fatal to error and misery, but who nevertheless, through his extraordinary sufferings exerts a magical, healing effect on all around him which continues even after his death."
There's no evidence of serious abuse in Jim's childhood, but his relationship with his parents was odd, to say the least. In the group's first biography he claimed that both his parents were dead, he never wrote to them or visited them, and when his mother and brother once came to a Doors concert, he got friends to fob them off for four hours before skipping town without seeing them. Elektra Records – who signed the Doors for $2,500 and five per cent royalties – seemed a suitably classical allusion for rock's most Oedipal star. Morrison's live premiere of the lines "Father I want to kill you! Mother I want to fuck you!" ('The End') at LA's Whiskey A Go-Go shocked the owner so much he sacked the then house band for good.
In the summer of '67 the Doors topped the American chart with their second single 'Light My Fire', and the next four years gave them six gold albums and endless tours. Morrison practised his Freudian theories of crowd neuroses (and their availability for manipulation) so successfully that riots frequently ensued, but soon he came to despise the slavish, shamanistic relationship he had cultivated with the fans. He was no longer a threat, just an obscenity, expected to deliver freakshow antics.
In Miami in '69, in an attempt to end this situation forever, he abused the audience, told them they were there for all the wrong reasons, and then exposed himself onstage. A crusading Florida Governor seized on the incident, and the Doors couldn't get a gig for almost six months. Eventually Morrison received an eight month jail sentence, but he didn't live long enough to start serving it.
"Very few people on this planet are called to dance the shaman's dance," says Manzarek. "It takes a certain unique, slightly cracked individual...something slightly aberrant in their behaviour. But because of that aberration you also get that intoxication – and the intoxication is magnificent. But you have to live with that aberration when you're not in that state."
"He tried to stay in an ecstatic state onstage and off, but offstage John, Robbie and myself weren't there to make the rhythm and there weren't 15,000 people in front of him. He tried to keep that high going and his body wore out. He bloated out and then...he just imploded and died. It reminds me of the temptation of St Anthony in the desert – like a Bosch painting. St Anthony is in the desert being attacked by these demons – and all the images are from within his own mind. That was Morrison."
Demons definitely marred Jim's ecstasy. His alcoholism may have seemed like a tribute to Dionysius, but it was far from appealing, and his death was simply pointless. Jim was in Paris with his longtime companion Pamela, relaxing and writing new material for a future Doors project. Heroin was one of the few drugs he never did, but one day he got hold of Pamela's stash and chopped out two huge lines. He snorted them, got in the bath and the lethal cocktail of heroin and alcohol shut down his central nervous system. Pamela returned to find that the singer, philosopher and delinquent she loved had accidentally killed himself.
Because it was impossible to get an autopsy at weekends in France, and Pamela didn't see the need for one anyway, Morrison was buried virtually unseen in Père Lachaise cemetery, fueling endless rumours that he had staged the whole thing and fled to anonymity in India, Africa or even Oregon. Danny Sugerman doesn't believe a word of it. "The truth of it is that I haven't heard from him since he was in Paris. I know where the Doors' money goes, and while Jim was not materialistic, he spent money real good." No mystery figure has ever approached the Doors' estate for a cash sub.
Morrison's pointless, but hardly unexpected death, killed the Doors' career stone dead while they were still a vital musical force, and the personal, idiosyncratic magic the four players forged has ensured their eternal popularity. But Morrison's legend is almost larger than the music, because he himself was so much larger than life. A self-portrait he gave someone, in which he had painted himself as a king, reflects his position as a lord of the self-exploring generation.
Jim Morrison was one of the last truly exciting rock icons largely because everything he did was so obviously real. The complexities of his personality came alive in his deeds. He was a poet and a womanizer, tender and selfish, a visionary dreamer and a slob. Money was clearly never a motivation for him, and he promised no answers, only exciting questions. He made intellectualism sexy, and investigated the extremes of life in the last years of pop's naivety. It's no wonder that people look back on his brief reign with a hint of jealousy.
Simon Witter, Sky, 1991