Jim Morrison 40 Years Gone

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

40 years ago this summer.


Jim Morrison died pretty much 40 years to the day The Doors were conceived on a sunny Venice Beach day.

This was originally a 35 year thread but I updated it to a 40 year one.
What?.... if anything... does this milestone mean....to you personally....to music in general....?


It's weird how back in 1971 when I discovered Morrison was dead I was a bit annoyed as I had planned to see The Doors with him in any future Brit tours they did........I had no knowledge of how fed up he was with being a rock star and how he was pissed at the guys cos they sold him out to Buick.......I did not know that he had in effect left the band and would not likely return.
For me aged 15 The Doors would have continued with Jim and made albums and toured......It was also weird that when The Doors came to Newcastle on May 10th 1972 and I could have easily gone to the gig as a bus company was running a bus to the show I did not go.....something I regret today as I know guys who were not Doors fans who went and enjoyed the show but something about going seemed wrong somehow......even today I cannot explain why I did not go to that gig......I was not in mourning for Jim or anything daft like that and I enjoyed the post Jim Doors albums but something was wrong something was not quite right...obviously I know better now......but back then I was justa kid and I did not shed a tear for Jim Morrison.....not until July 4th 2002 when I visited his grave again after making my first ever visit the day before on July 3rd....
unlike that day I was not in the company of my friends and had opted to wander the cemetery alone that morning and found myself on my own at his grave around 10 that morning and sat for a while and have to admit was overcome a bit by the enormity of what I had held as so important for so many years.....30 years I'd waited to get there and if not for Snakey I might not have made it......I was glad I did as I met so many lovely friends and it was good to finally get to meet this dude and say thanks for everything.....even if he could not answer back.......35 years on I know a lot more than I did then and much of it simply confirms what I 'knew' back in 1971......the poetry side was not always my bag and it took me 30 years to finally appreciate the written words but I got there in the end......
feel free to share any thoughts whatsoever on Jim and his music and words......place your fave poetry here and if you can.... share what it means to you.......this thread celebrates 35 years of a mortal man who could be an arce when he wanted but was not that bad a human being really he was a great artist and performer and a sometimes great poet. But for me I remember him because in the words of Ray Manzarek....Jim Morrison was 'real'....he was no fake......thats what i like most....he had honesty and integrity and belief in his art.....his words and music survive because of the legend that was his death but the integrity behind them sometimes gets forgotten......I argue with folks all the time as many of you know but thats because I learned to speak with passion from reading about Jim Morrison.......for me there is no grey area about this.......I am no fair weather Doors fan....I actually 'believe'..........and I am too old to be anything but the contemptuous gobshite I am and I owe it to one guy....James Douglas Morrison.........I remember when I lived in Croydon........there was a record shop on Drummond Street called 101 Records that I used to visit every week......on the wall 10 yards from the door someone had scrawled 'Jim & Pam Live'.......I never walked down Drummond Street without checking to see that it was still there.....in the three and a half years I lived in Croydon...that was always on the wall near 101 records.......it meant a lot to see that.....years later I found myself for the first time in my life standing up in front of a bunch of people and reading Jim Morrison's words .......a scary but uplifting experience I intend to repeat in July at Stuart & Nicks 2nd Tribute In Motion.......its hard to put into words what all this shit means to me.....I know many here think me a gobshite and thats fair enough as I can be a pain in the ass when I wanna be but there is something magical in music to me that has been inside me since I was able to stand up and of all the wonders music has meant to me The Doors stand up there alone as something to hold dear!
I love The Doors and I love the friends I have gathered around me on this little thin raft of ours and I look forward to saying thanks to the dude that makes it all possible....
35 years gone......we don't forget mate....and I do hope we never do!cheers dude

Morning found us calmly unaware
Noon burned gold into our hair
At night, we swam the laughin' sea
When summer's gone
Where will we be

[jym]

Nice tribute Alex.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

"I was living in this abandoned office building, sleeping on the roof. And all of a sudden I threw away most of my notebooks that I'd been keeping since high school and these songs just kept coming to me. It was a beautiful hot summer and I just started hearing songs. . . I heard a whole concert situation, with a band and singing and an audience, a large audience. Those first five or six songs I wrote, I was just taking notes at a fantastic rock concert that was going on inside my head. And once I had written the songs, I had to sing them." - Jim Morrison


Jim's view from Dennis Jacob's rooftop.....

"But the man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less cocksure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable Mystery which it tries, forever vainly to comprehend." -
Last paragraph of Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception.

"His charisma was such that your ordinary upholder of the established order could be infuriated merely by the sight of Morrison strolling down the street - innocent to all outward appearances but . . .well there was that invisible something about him that silently suggested revolution, disorder, chaos."
Bob Gover who was arrested with Morrison om Monday January 29th 1968 at the The Pussy Cat A Go Go in Las Vegas after Jim taunts a security guard in the parking lot by pretending to smoke a joint. Guards rush Morrison and Gover (author of The $100 Misunderstanding) and a journalist from the New York Times and beat them. When Las Vegas police arrive, they arrest Morrison and charge him with vagrancy, public drunkenness, and failure to possess sufficient identification, also taking in Gover.
Gover later writes an article entitled "A Hell of a Way to Peddle Poems" detailing the event.

[pep]

Good Stuff Alex

[ensenada]

thanks for your insight alex....a really good tribute.....

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

A nice satellite photo of what all the fuss is actually about.....

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Why Remember Jim by Michael White

This question I could use pages and pages on. I read NHGOA in 1981. In October of that year I was 18 going on 19 and grew a full beard. Not trimming it at all until I couldn't stand it.
By February I looked like a young version of the guys on the cough drop box. I also wrote my first poems then.
I wanted to be cool and smart and eloquent like Jim.
I wanted to be a real poet.
I continued this form of imitation for a long time.
I have had a couple pairs of leather pants.
I briefly tried to sing with a band. I was in LA for the first time in ‘83 and went straight to The Alta Cienga Motel for a look around.

For me I wanted to be like what I thought Jim was.
Free thinking and free spirited and most of all cool.
I kept an interest in Jim thru the years but really didn't know the real Jim. Then I got my first home computer and found lots of books on Jim and the band. I found out Jim wasn't so much of the tuff guy ass kicker but the ass thinker.
I found out Jim wasn't the arrogant fool many thought of him.
I found out Jim was truly sensitive and intelligent.
I found out Jim was very well read. And set out once again to emulate him.
In five years I not only read every single Doors book I could get but began to voraciously read the great writers that inspired Jim.
Via the computer and mails I have contacted and corresponded with many people who really knew Jim.
I had a continued interest in Jim and continued to write poetry and short stories. Some about Jim himself and trips I took to places he once was. I was learning the art of expression thru poetry and finding it a vent for issues I had in my life, both good and bad. I began to realize that Jim himself was an amalgam of the things he had read and seen, learned in school.
Gradually Jim's influence became part of the amalgam that I consider myself to be.
I feel Jim is to be remembered best as a poet who had a day job in a rock and roll band. I continue to try and emulate Jim in certain areas.
Now not thru clothing or dress but thru what I see to be Jim's best traits. What single trait of Jim's beside his word-smithing do I envy today might you ask?
I think his knowingness of the temporal world and his lack of wants as far as material goods was.
Fancy cars and houses? Nope, not Jim. I think somewhere in there real artists must remain true to their art. Not their cheque-books. When asked if he was rich? Jim said 'Well there's lots of great restaurants and I can go to any of them and order whatever I want...'
That was Jim's idea of being rich and it's mine also.
Slowly I began to realize all my possessions owned me instead of me owning them.
And while I’m not down to a bag of clothes, a couple cameras and many boxes of books, I, AM on it! So in a way I am still trying to emulate Jim. Not by being my own version of him but by becoming my own version of me. MW.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

"When I was in formative bands in the 60's I played a lot of Doors tunes and obviously it was Jim that was the face of the band.
He brought something new to lead vocalists, his stage presence, his voice, his lyrics. I remember very well making my own handmade posters for my local band in upstate New York saying something like ………….
"Tonight! The Lost and Found at the Holiday!
Bring your Twentieth Century Fox!"
A friend of mine who was working for Crawdaddy Magazine was visiting and saw the poster and was floored that anyone in this small college town had not only heard of The Doors but was into them. (this would be '66?)
{I bet if you can get your hands on some old Crawdaddy Magazines you'd get tons of interesting info from that era}".

Eric Bloom lead singer and legendary ‘stun’ guitarist from equally legendary New York band ‘The Blue Öyster Cult’ shares a thought on the band with Scorpywag for the 60th Birthday Jim issue.


Eric at Jim's grave in Pere Lachaise during The Blue Öyster Cult’s first European tour November 1975. Thank's to Eric for letting me use his photo.

"When I first met Jim Morrison he had his mind on publishing a book of poetry and was surprised when I told him that big corporate publishers did not do poetry. My guess is that if he were alive today, he'd have found ways to get his poetry to the public and (his other ambition) he'd be directing films and continuing to cause fear and loathing in the hearts of cops and Republicans wherever he went."
Robert Gover writer and friend of Jim Morrison shares a thought on Jim with Scorpywag for the 60th Birthday Jim issue.

[gizmo]

great reading mate