An American Prayer

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

THE OPENING OF THE TRUNK

Moment of inner freedom
when the mind is opened and the
infinite universe revealed
& the soul is left to wander
dazed & confus'd searching
here & there for teachers & friends.




Track Listing

AWAKE
Ghost Song
Dawn's Highway
Newborn Awakening

TO COME OF AGE
Black Polished Chrome
Latino Chrome
Angels And Sailors
Stoned Immaculate

THE POET'S DREAMS
The Movie
Curses, Invocations

WORLD ON FIRE
American Night
Roadhouse Blues
The World On Fire
Lament
The HitchHiker

AN AMERICAN PRAYER
Hour For Magic
Freedom Exists
A Feast Of Friends
Babylon Fading (CD Bonus Track)
Bird Of Prey (CD Bonus Track)
The Ghost Song (CD Bonus Track)

An American Prayer - Jim Morrison
Released: November, 1978
US: Gold
Billboard peak: # 54


I remember when this album was first mentioned and how excited i was at the thought of Jim's poetry being put to music by the lads.
Picked it up at Stockton HMV on my way home from work on the day of its release and hardly spoke to the wife as I listened several times to it through my headphones when I got it home.
Blew me away to be perfectly honest.

Then I read Paul Rothchilds comments and it made me think about the album and the way it was made.........that debate still occupies my thoughts today twenty odd years later......

He described it as the 'rape of Jim Morrison'.
I had first read Jim's poetry in 1971 when i bought the first paperback of Lords & New Creatures......I am not a poetry buff.....I thought it was load of crap....I was only a kid 15/16....reading Jims words was boring to me.....

I liked COTL on the live album and to me (even at that young age) Jim's words came alive best when he spoke them.
The extra dimension to his words of his own voice made all the difference to me. Then in the 70s I got a copy of Rock Is Dead from my bootleg mates......one side RID session...amazing.....the other.... part of the December 8th birthday session....I later found it was actually the march 1969 session but when it first appeared it was known as the December 70 session.
Blew me away completely.....I had heard nothing like it in all the time I had been listening to rock music.

Like the Greek and Roman poets Jims voice transformed his 'boring' written poetry into an aural delight.

I was hooked.

So when the band added the music to a selection of that March session and some of the December 70 session I was champing at the bit waiting to hear it.

Ghost Song Awake........gave me goosepimples.....
Death Of My Cock ....made me cringe......
American Prayer ....blew me away...
World On Fire...Angels & Sailors...American Night.....superb.

I admit I did think adding the live Roadhouse Blues a bit of a cop out....enjoyed it...YES.... but it made no sense really....
Other than a marketing ploy to get Doors fans to buy the album....(makes sense I guess!)

The poetry was the thing for me and the way the guys integrated the music and wove a web of sound around a dead mans words amazed me.....

So I could not understand Pauls dismissal of the album.....jealousy because he was not asked to produce it......
Then I got on the net and in early 2001 started my most ambitious project with Scorpywag ....a 30 year tribute to Jim....I asked people to send me their fave poems and asked them to explain why.........
I got a tremendous response from all over the world and the issue was a stunning success.....
I was 'proud as punch' when 'Doors Live and Rare' described my efforts as 'the best tribute on the internet'.....but most importantly it had inadvertently given me an insight into Pauls strong view of American Prayer.

To ensure the words of Jim were presented on Scorpywags pages as he intended I broke out the books that I had bought because I was a Doors fan and it was expected of me to have Wilderness, American Night and L&NC....
I started to actually 'read' the poems that people had chosen for my pages and coupled with the explanations they gave for liking the poetry was amazed to find I for the first time began to 'get' Jim......took 30 odd years but at last I found the two dimensional pages did not bore me at all....in fact some of this shit was pretty damn profound.
It made me laugh and it made me cry it made me think....always a good sign......
here I was a guy from Industrial Teesside who had been a fan of the music for so long actually getting poetry....
very strange.....true I could not debate Jim's poetry as well as some of you guys...especially our poets here....but I did 'get' this shit at last.
I devoured it as I laboured to make sure every comma and space in his writing was reproduced on the pages of Scorpywag....and I liked it a lot....not all...some I find dull and lackluster but a hell of a lot of it was intense and insightful....a lot of it blew me away .... vivid, sharp and dramatic......I loved it.

And because of that I understood at last what Paul meant.
Jim recorded this because he wanted to make a poetry album pure and simple with no music in general and in particular no DOORS....

His voice taking the listener to another plane without the distraction of the rock legends......I saw his point and Pauls.
I realised I did not agree with all he said as I love the dimension the music gives Jims words but I am lucky enough to have had the untouched sessions to compare it to and I find myself leaning toward the music-less Poetry......

American Prayer with its Doors rhythms did one tremendous service to Jim as it brought his poetry for the first time to a wide mainstream audience....many hated it....but many loved it too....
American Prayer 2 would be a decent seller and there is plenty of studio stuff lying around to make it viable.....stuff we can only imagine.....1969 and 1970 saw Jim in the studio twice that we know of in 69 for several days....we don't know how much is there in the care of the Coursons ...written and recorded.....

For me a true tribute to Jim would be perhaps an album incorporating music from the lads and some of the untouched session from Jim along with some of his written work to accompany the album.....
Will we ever see it?
Was Paul right in his assessment of American Prayer......the music helps it sell but its not what Jim envisioned.....
A bit of a conundrum? What do you guys think of it all?

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

An American Prayer - Jim Morrison (1978)

Is everybody in?

Is everybody in?

Is everybody in?

The ceremony is about to begin.

WAKE UP!

There is a trip that everyone needs to take at least once in their musical life; An American Prayer, brought to you by Jim Morrison.

Whether you call him a rock and roll legend and god, or just some lucky male prostitute turned drugged and drunken manic, Jim Morrison has touched the music you listen to today.

An American Prayer is a complete head trip in a head that could be argued wasn't completely "all there" to begin with. It's a trip through the mind of the man behind The Doors. It's the trip back to when rock was young, and the world was experiencing some rather unusual and unique times.

The first time I listened to An American Prayer I didn't know what happened. I felt a little strange, a little stoned, a little wasted, and a little used.

Jim and his bizarre writing literally took me somewhere else. Somewhere very strange and very surreal.

An American Prayer is mostly a collection of Jim's poetry overlapped on some background noise and music. On this trip The Doors provide the music and various strange instruments and chords that chime in and out throughout the experience. But what this is, is a window into a mind that has been revolutionary in today's music.

Love him or hate him, Jim Morrison and The Doors were a catalyst for modern rock.

Half spoken, have sung, An American Prayer is shocking and deep. I was really thrown for a loop when Lament For My Cock came out over the speakers. Hearing about the death of one's cock and a personal eulogy for it, makes you listen to it once again and just wonder what the hell was going on.

The language and the tone of An American Prayer does not show it's age. There is only one spot in which you can tell that this is from the 1970's, and if you didn't know any better, you would think that is just some freak (well maybe he was) from the coffee shop down the road.

Jim talks about some pretty damn strange things. He goes into details about things that maybe you really didn't want to know about. One thing that is certain, is that this will keep you on your toes and your eyes wide open.

I strongly urge you to go and obtain a copy of this album as soon as you can. It's a trip that in all honestly I can not describe (even thought I just tried). Listen to what he has to say and be sure to read along. You don't have to believe any of it or agree with any of it, just flow with it and ride the waves that Jim presents for you.

I will not go

Prefer a Feast of Friends

To the Giant Family

from eSpudd Music Classic #1

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

american prayer (scream of the butterfly)
by Patti Smith

Jim Morrison
An American Prayer
(Elektra)

i
(the dream)

The man, a changeling, journeys across the radiant waste of the American west. there is a quake, a crack. he sprawls. he laughs. he sticks his prick into the jagged warp and spews his seed of trust and disgust thru the hard red vein of the desert. he does not emerge. he cannot rise. his cock is caught in the mouth of the wilderness. gestures of sound but no sound. there is to be silence before god. the tongue is plugged but the transistor is waving. beach plastic only a few feet away. song on the radio: james brown/this is a man’s world. The end/he’s lost.

But he is not silent. this time the gestures explode into music. into violence. he will not settle into a blissful jam. he is not occidental. he is the twisting remains of these united states. he desires not peace, but a piece of. he will not zip up, be good, shut up. he wants a bite, a slice of yet another life.

Tell them james how we pray screaming.

Tell them jim of the burden of mutation.

In the back of his mind, a crown of thorns spins and lands on the head of another. the ageless perfect center. the still and moving savior. in the pursuit of his own perfection the man rejects him: not the knowledge of him but the idea of him as the supreme middleman. the man is an artist. the artist is an independent businessman, one who labors with the flaw of desire. the desire to communicate one-to-one with his father.

Jim Morrison was such an artist. a member of the rude order of celestial screamers. one who would slaughter his brother to waggle tongues with his father. the absolute kiss and caress of death. the artist embraces his creator.

Ultimate incest.




ii
(should we eat this document)
A messenger appears. A cassette in plain envelope. No information. No clue as to packaging. We take it on the road. For several days we cannot even look at it. One night we’re gone. Holiday Inn. Dawn. We take it out and put it on. We put it on ’cause it serves as a gun to aim and fire more than a few true holes in the dismal machine that man still calls radio.

The reasons for resisting it were good clean reasons. The instinct to protect the vulnerability of the artist. The respect for his privacy and most of all his conceit. There’s something slightly sacrilegious about viewing an artist thru the hands of others. Like strings over Hank Williams. Like the corpse post-mortician.

But the aura of Jim Morrison is strong enough to armor his work against excessive doctoring. And despite certain flaws, An American Prayer has been pieced together delicately with obsessive devotion. Its flaws lie in the forgivable limitations of these friends and sometimes in the poet himself. For, like Sterling Hayden, he is the possessor of a strange sense of timing. Some of it is regional. The California beatnik stuff...the lusty language á la Michael McClure...the weird way L.A. people dance. But at best he is a west coast Walt Whitman. A square that communes with the gods.

In biblical times he may have appeared as Moses or Samson or his pick of mad prophets. Today the drama of his intensity seems dated. Dated in its passion and innocence, like West Side Story or The Grapes of Wrath. But he was always dated, at his most literal, even, when he was around. Bigger than life and so he was laughable. Laughed at by the court but loved by the people.

He possessed as a weapon this love and a remarkable sense of humor. Still there was some of the John Ireland about him. Not the hired killer, but nonetheless one guilty of murdering a stranger. A nigger out of step with the latest dance, who could suddenly turn and deliver a line like “we could plan a murder or start a religion.”<br>
His fatal flaw was that his most precious skin was the thin membrane that housed the blood of the poet. He pledged his allegiance, in the end, to language, to the word. And it did him in. Made an expatriot of him. As the word, like him, is obsolete in our time on our radio.

And what will be done with him, his prayer? Where does a guy like him fit in? He stood on a tradition of men who could not be bought. Men that disintegrated fast, when borrowed, like salt in the rain. Will they sandwich a section of Jim Morrison sacrificing his cock on the altar of silence between Abba and Boston? On the other side of pure AM is pure ART. And now FM, having sold out, where will they put him?

As his friends sought to piece him together so the people must preserve him. It is worth the effort to fight for the rights of our generation’s most vigorous and aggressive poet.

An American Prayer documents a fragment of the passion of Jim Morrison. It is not art as he would have it, but nothing posthumous is perfect. It is not the whole picture but the best part of the trip is intact. And like finding a roll of Diego Rivera’s under an industrial sink, it is treasure unearthed. We feel a sense of guilt but we are grateful for the glimpse. Notes toward a symphony of ritual. Last movements to reach out, to penetrate. New information. Interesting, inspiring new ammunition and that is truly something.

Enough to base a movie on. Tho I do regret that I will not be called upon to play the part of the actor out on loan.




iii
(the future looks...)

A child is a flower
His head is just floating in the
breeze.
--Jim Morrison


The artist is blessed with the curse of unceasing labor. we slip our hands beneath the birth of his work. we hide in the rushes. we build a raft. work sails away.

The artist must not be stopped. his cries are not to be censored, altered or suppressed. he serves the middle ages, the final century, the sucking cosmos. his is the irritant, a tear to slaughter, caught like a wing in the palm of the hand and stretching across the plain like a bloody western sunset.

An American Prayer resounds in the silence that surrounds the cocoon of the lord. he is sleeping. hibernating. awaiting the changeling and the elegance of his change.
Patti Smith
Creem Magazine 1979

[moses]

I have just learned from a reliable source that Jim was excited about AMP being a pocket sized book. I also learned he had sent autographed copies to President Johnson, Spiro Agnew and Queen Elizabeth.

Only Agnew had written a thank you note.

[jym]

Moses said:

Only Agnew had written a thank you note.

Betcha that was the endorsement Jim was looking for! ;D

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

The Doors
An American Prayer

Any Doors fan worth his salt can tell you the origin of the band's name - William Blake via Thomas Huxley's writing on his experiences on mushrooms. The line is from Blake's poetic masterpiece "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" : "When the doors of perception are cleansed, all will be revealed as it is - infinite!". The line is a pledge to the ultimate reality of magic and spirituality and tribal being, which persist as the natural order of things underneath the clutter of the physical and material trappings of our culture.

The poem itself is a brilliant amoralist response to society's never-relenting moral bondage. It glorifies the wondrous energy of the dark side& brings to us another perspective to living as it presents us with the "Proverbs of Hell" - of which the most famous is "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom".

"grant us one more hour to perform our art and perfect our lives"

This, of course, has been one of the essential proverbs of most underground and bohemian scenes. The Doors' own exploration of it is perhaps best found in the very first song of their very first album - "Break on Through" . A song for the wild-hearted seeker. A song for those trying to peek over the edge to see on through to the other side - and on other side to see the world as it really is - nameless and infinite. "Break on Through" justifies the Blake-Doors spiritual lineage, but Blake never really represents the Doors musically. It's only in Jim Morrison's "An American Prayer" that Blake's ideals are reborn as a personal spiritual journey into the American night. Here that the bohemian mystical tradition connects to the struggling bohemians of the here and now.

Jim Morrison recorded a collection of his poetry on his 27 birthday. He died 7 months after (beware the
tragic age of 27 - Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison, Kubain, etc.). After his death, the rest of the Doors, now a band without much of a soul, added a musical backdrop to the poetry and released An American Prayer as a post-mortem tribute to the poet behind the rock star.

"let me tell about heartache and the loss of god wondering, wondering in hopeless nights, out in the perimeter there are no stars,
out here we is stoned - immaculate."

An American Prayer can be heard as a passionate statement of living, as an ideal of a particular type of masculine aesthetic, or as a deeply personal spiritual exploration. It shifts from tender vulnerability to raw selfish lusting to honest artistic expression to lonely spiritual longings to the testing of limitations, to a love of excess, to a never-ending curiosity about living, to the essence of masculinity. Sex, death and spirituality are the staples - dark sensual explorations where sex and death walk hand in hand towards the light of enlightenment. Along with these are existential queries and the call for a mythological rebirth - for new ideals, new heroes, new gods for the tribe with which to rekindle its flame and find its inner Dionysus somewhere beneath its prescription clothes.

This is a male spiritual essence of rock n' roll's Dionysian aspirations and therefore an underground and bohemian classic. It demands that its listeners disregard all limitations on both freedom and inner depth. There isn't really another album like it. It's an album for seekers - for those who try to walk the path of excess alone, searching for their own palace of wisdom.

This is an album that takes a lot of listening to really get, but once you got it, it's there for good. Jim's voice gives the poetry - pretty solid on its own - the level of real personality and sincerity that written poetry perhaps never achieves. The music the Doors lay down behind the lyrics manages to achieve an actual balance with the voice, greatly embellishing it, yet resisting the temptation to overtake it. Instead, the lyrics coast down the wilderness of a lone American highway stretching itself into the distant desert sunset.

"Now I'll tell you this...
No eternal rewards will
forgive us now
For wasting the dawn"

by: Shlomo Sher
underground music review 2004

[sparky]

No more money no more fancy dress, this other kingdom seems by far the best.


I really really love an american prayer at the moment, first thing before i go to work i put it on and wen im going to sleep i listen to it too. im breathing an american prayer at the moment!!

[ensenada]

my faves after a night out on the lash! drifts me off nicely.

[sparky]

i like to put it on wen im writing too, it really inspires me.

[ensenada]

yeh me too!

[ensenada]

Moment of inner freedom
when the mind is opened and the
infinite universe revealed
& the soul is left to wander
dazed & confus'd searching
here & there for teachers & friends

very apt!

[eressie]

I love this album. Even if it was not what Jim had in mind for his poems, he is probably quite pleased with how it turned out anyway and thanks to this album, many more people get to know his poems. I love his voice, it is enchanted, I can listen to him for hours and hours. To hear him read his own poems makes me see them in a different light from when I read them myself in his books, it get so much deeper. There are a few passages that even make me cry everytime I hear them. The music is good and fits well to the words. They did a great job putting together this album.

[ensenada]

i think my fave part of AAP is the poems around this point - "death makes angels of us all and gives us wings where we had shoulders smooth as ravens claws. no more money no more fancy dress, this other kindom seems by far the best, until its other jaw reveals incest.......etc etc... prefer a feast of friends to the giant family" i wil be reading this as a tribute in july! ;D

[ensenada]

one of my fave parts of an american prayer:

[glow=red,2,300]Do you know how pale & wanton thrillful
Comes death on a stranger hour
Unannounced, unplanned for


Like a scaring over-friendly guest you've
Brought to bed


Death makes angels of us all
& gives us wings
Where we had shoulders
Smooth as raven's claws


No more money, no more fancy dress
This other kingdom seems by far the best
Until its other jaw reveals incest
& loose obedience to a vegetable law


I will not go
Prefer a feast of friends
To the giant family


[/glow]

[eressie]

Ensenada said:

one of my fave parts of an american prayer:

[glow=red,2,300]Do you know how pale & wanton thrillful
Comes death on a stranger hour
Unannounced, unplanned for


Like a scaring over-friendly guest you've
Brought to bed


Death makes angels of us all
& gives us wings
Where we had shoulders
Smooth as raven's claws


No more money, no more fancy dress
This other kingdom seems by far the best
Until its other jaw reveals incest
& loose obedience to a vegetable law


I will not go
Prefer a feast of friends
To the giant family


[/glow]

Damn..sometimes I wish I was not so bloody sensitive... and I should remember not to listen to An American Prayer after a few glasses of wine...

[jym]

Why what happens?

[eressie]

Well, I am very sensitive, emotional and passionate and after 2 glasses of wine I get so deep into the lyrics and the voice, the music and just about everything and it is all so beautiful and I just can´t take it and... oh my, oh my...

[jym]

Oh my....

[ensenada]

Eressie said:

Well, I am very sensitive, emotional and passionate and after 2 glasses of wine I get so deep into the lyrics and the voice, the music and just about everything and it is all so beautiful and I just can´t take it and... oh my, oh my...

you sound pretty much like me!

[eressie]

Hehe...well, that is the effect Morrison has on me when it comes to his poetry. The Doors music in general makes me react in many other ways, it´s just An American Prayer that makes me like a soft, nervous wreck.