Jims Green Songbook & Paris Journal

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

It's a very interesting look into the mind of Morrison.
We have no way of course of knowing what order he wrote down these pages but we can be confident that they are from his European sojourn because of the title he gave to this notebook.

There are pages of this notebook that seem as if they are attempts to construct poems and others which simply ramble aimlessly as in the John Doe from Seven fasion I alluded to earlier.
Some of the work is pretty banal as if he was sitting there drunk pouring his frustrations onto his journal.

It is certainly not publishable.

But it is interesting because of the timescale it was written in and the location.
We have no idea at all which were the last poems of Jim Morrison although some have been sold as that.

He could have missed a couple of pages and returned later and flitted between notebooks depending on his whim.
The page numbers mean nothing in relation to timescale but we can be reasonably certain this was written after he left the US so therefore after he left The Doors.

So we can say it is a glimpse into the mind of Morrison just before his death between April and July 1971.

What we can glean from this is highly debatable.
He does sound bitter and dissillusioned but that's just my view.
Sometimes he sounds optimistic but could this have been a result of depression?
It would have been considering the couple of years he had just lived through.

We will never know of course and can only opine.
Yours is as good as mine.
Anyone got any insights into any of this feel free to share them.
I am not a poetry person so am hardly one to analyse poetry

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

These are the last two pages of the handwritten stuff. The rest of the book is transcribed at the beginning of this thread.
These last couple of pages are very much rambling apart from one seeming attempt to be poetic.

Page #140 is interesting.
Could that be a reference to his leaving of The Doors previously or to his relationship with the band.
We do know he wrote a letter to Bob Greene in which he asked for a copy of the Doors new contract. 'if it ever got completed.'
This was done just before he left for Europe and contained the very controversial amendment drawn up with no other purpose in mind but to prevent Morrison calling any new band he was part of The Doors. I can't believe after the loyalty he showed them over the years that Paris Journal does not reflect Morrison's mood with regards the way he left the band and their reaction.



#140

allow it to fester
like a boil
time will tell all

once the face completes
itself, o god

Curses & Invocations

Weird bait-headed mongrels
I keep expecting one of you / to rise
large buxom obese queens
garden hogs & cunt / veterans
quaint cabbage saints
'shit hoarders' & individualist
drag strip officials
Tight lipped losers
& lust full fuck salesmen
my militant dandies
all strange order of monsters
hot on the trail of the / wood vine
we welcome you to our
procession

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

This last page is really disturbed rambling from Morrison.
Of course he had several notebooks he was writing in and I am sure would have intended to edit them into some sort of usable form. The raw verse/ramble does not make for easy reading.
I am sure we have all seen enough movies to be able to conclude that this was written under circumstances where alcohol and melancholia were involved.
Jim throughout this volume seems to pour out his anger and bitterness on some of the pages.
As with his other book that was purloined from him after his death we see a lot of this as well as attempts to produce actual poetry and songs.
It muct have been a difficult situation for Jim Morrison these last months of his life. Pam was a heroin addict and he was a drunk. They were in a city where they knew few people and did not speak the language. Add to that their worries about money which we know from the Bob Greene letter and his situation as an ex member of The Doors.

Bob Greene letter

Fascinating stuff all this but any meaning we fans assign to it can only be conjecture.

#141



Meditation and fasting by day
At night go down to Boogie-land

They are dead

we exist

mondo. Let's get silly behind the
ape scream

"she's obviously of an inferior
mental order."

I am the guide to the Labyrinth

The sun sucks snakes
Into it's eye
what do the dead do
when they die

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

#93



The grave of Marie Laveau famous New Orleans hairdresser and Voodoo Priestess.
We know Jim visited New Orleans with Frank Lisciandro and it is likely he would be fascinated by legends like Marie Laveau.
Perhaps he was cursed by this knowledge and destined to end his performing career in the same place.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

#98


What message to me?
A quality of ignorance or
self deception may be necessary
to the poet's survival.

This is a most interesting piece of prose.
It's meaning can be taken many ways but considering the circumstances of the last few months of Morrison's life it may be an acknowledgement that he needed to get away from The Doors and their duplicity as well as the lifestyle of a rock icon.
We will never know but Morrison's writings are littered with clues to his demeanour when it came to being a Door.
1968 must have affected him deeply and from afar as a fan he never seemed the same person after that.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

From The Jim Morrison Scrapbook pages from Paris Journal.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

#151 and #152 are not included in the version I have.





Again we get a sense of Jim's mood...'I have drunk the drug of forgetfulness'......'money beats soul'.....

#152 has been interpreted as somehow Jim's last writing but as we see from some of the pages here there is absolutely not a shred of evidence this was written later than anything else in this journal or for that matter any other Journal he had in Paris.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

#82



Strangely enough this is one of the most important and fascinating pages of the Paris Journal.

Bit odd you may think as it's blank apart from a title.

But this offers reasonably conclusive proof that Morrison moved between notebooks and would leave a page blank and come back at a later date.

By interpolating this we can conclude that dating Jim's notebook poems is difficult if not impossible.
The selling of Jim's 'last poems' by unscrupulous types a nonsense as it is not possible to know.
Jim did not date stuff and we can see from this page he intended to come back later as he deliberately placed a title on this page.
Of course he may well have forgotten and continued this An American Prayer somewhere else.
We know a poem of this title did indeed appear.

He would come back to pages and cross stuff out so from that it can be concluded he would likely add stuff too.

A page like this is gold as it shows how disorganised Jim was with his writing.

Of course there may have been times when he was well organised in his writings.
We don't know as we have so little to go on.
But from this we can see that the possibility exists that Jim Morrison's 'last' poetry will never be known.
It may well have been something in this notebook but then again it could have been from one of the Fascination Box notebooks.
A puzzle we will never find an answer too.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

#88 & 89




Here are a couple of interesting pages.
No one can have any idea what Morrison intended here.
Did he plan to expand these lines later?
Was Amsterdam Windows a poem he planned then discarded?
Or was this just directionless word doodling from Morrison?
We will never know the answers unless these lines turn up somewhere else in a more finished form.
But again a good example of how disorganised Morrison seemed to be with regard his notebooks.
And also another confirmation that nobody can ever be sure what were the last works of Jim Morrison.
Like many things about Morrison it's a mystery.
And that's fine by me!

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

This is a really fascinating photo.

Taken from an auction site selling Jim's Paris Journal.
It shows that the Paris Journal we Doors fans have come to know and reproduced here is in fact NOT the Paris Journal.

This is the Paris Journal.



Comparing the bound pages to the pages of this book clearly contradicts all that we know about the Paris Journal.

The cover we know of is exactly the same as above other than a bit of marker pen on the left hand side. The writing is EXACTLY the same.
We even now know the type of notebook Jim used and it is not what we thought was the Paris Journal.
The pages of the bound copy seem to have come from some kind of ledger with numbered pages.
The real Paris Journal is a Royal Composition book #101 30 with completely different margins to that which we formerly believed to be the Paris Journal.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Jim Morrison – 1971 “Paris Journal” Manuscript / Notebook (The Doors)

This is one of the most extraordinary artifacts we've ever offered--Jim Morrison's original Paris Journal manuscript, written by the Doors singer in a composition notebook, in Paris, shortly before his death in July 1971.

Paris Journal is published in full in The American Night: The Writings of Jim Morrison Volume II (Vintage Books, 1990.)
The American Night notes "The entire notebook consists of one angry, reflective and defiant poem.
As there are only three places in the notebook where words or phrases appear to be crossed out, this appears to be a clean and finished draft. (Morrison) wrote the title "Paris Journal" on the front of the notebook's black cover…These are among the last lines he wrote."

Paris Journal was part of the legendary 127 Fascination box, the archive of Jim Morrison manuscripts saved after Morrison's death by his common-law wife, Pamela Courson.
After Courson's death in 1974, the manuscripts went missing, and were rediscovered 1986 in Northern California, in a strongbox labeled "127 Fascination".
Courson had given them to a paramour in the Bay Area for safe keeping; and while he'd returned some of her possessions to her family, he'd kept the 127 Fascination manuscripts.

When the manuscripts resurfaced, attempts were made to publish them, but the Morrison and Courson families objected and a legal settlement was eventually hammered out.
After the settlement, Paris Journal was sold, and has been in a private collection until now.
Scans of the Paris Journal were made available for the Jim Morrison Archives.

(Note: The 1986 copyright date was added by the individuals who discovered the 127 Fascination box, prior to the legal settlement with the Morrison and Courson estates.)

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Thanks to my friend Helen for discovering this.
Here is that poem.
It can clearly be seen that the pages are completely different to our Paris Journal here.
They correspond more to pages seen at auctions and those reprinted in the Jim Morrison Scrapbook.
That's what I like about Jim.
Even dead he can be a coplete bloody nuisance

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Another very angry and rambling poem like the pages in our own Paris Journal.

Still makes me believe that Jim was very disillusioned when he got to Europe and was possibly suffering from a depressive illness.

a lot of the poetry reproduced here as Paris Journal is bitter and angry and sometimes rambling drivel.

We cannot know when this was written anymore than the other stuff so have no real idea whether this was among the last poetry he wrote.
hell he could have written this on the plane to Europe.

Just because it has Paris Journal for a title does not mean it was conceived in Paris.
Still a fascinating find and a great addition to the mystery of Jim's writings in Europe and Paris during his last months.

I have just been reminded that Jim went to Paris in 1970 as well so this could easily have been written then.
We just don't know and we never will as the only two people who knew this are dead.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

The Poem appears in the book Lost Writings 2: American Night. #195