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Post by TheWallsScreamedPoetry on Jan 14, 2005 13:12:21 GMT
Doors drummer Densmore, who had a love-hate relationship with lead singer Morrison, sympathetically chronicles the self-destructive Lizard King's rise and fall. ``Densmore's detailed account . . . is often narrated in a glib style'' but remains ``indispensable for fans of one of rock music's most flamboyant and controversial groups,'' Publisher's Weekly
Cool excerpt from the book "Is that you, Ray?" I asked, hearing someone come into the stall next door to me. ''Yup,'' he responded in that deep, ponderous voice. I could tell by the white buck shoes. We were sitting on toilets in the basement of Madison Square Garden. ''Having your preconcert shit?'' I joked. "Yup." Ray laughed. We could hear the crowd upstairs starting to stamp their feet. "Boom-boom-BOOM-BOOM . . . Doors-Doors-DOORS...Jim-JIM-JIM!'' ''Time to go,'' Ray and I said simultaneously.
Jim seemed in pretty good spirits. If his state of mind was in that delicate balance where he had a buzz, but not too much, my confidence was strong enough to reduce my preperformance nerves to small butterflies. I've always thought that if you aren't a little nervous, then you aren't risking enough.
We came out to the center boxing ring and twenty-four thousand people gave us the biggest roar I had ever heard. It was the ultimate in mass affection. How could this he topped? And the stage was still dark! Since there wasn't any curtain, we chose to be led our with flashlights and were tuning up in the dark-and they were already going crazy!
Ray lit a stick of incense that was preset on the organ, an idea we copped from Indian music. It had evolved into a ritual that signaled we were leaving the outside world behind, and the smell put us in a collective mood to play.
I started the beat to "Break On Through" in the dark, which drew more response, then after a few bars, when Ray and Robby came in with their respective organ and guitar lines, the lights came up. The combination of powerful electric instruments crashing in over primitive drums with simultaneous stage lights blasting in out of total blackness was very effective, an electronic coming of Christ. Or the Anti-Christ, to be more precise.
Then came Jim's voice, the voice of total belligerence, spouting out an improvised poem about "FAT CATS, DEAD RATS, suckin' on a soldier's sperm. CRAP-THAT'S CRAP!"
We settled down into the song's groove and built it up to its abrupt climax.
"Back Door Man" was next, not giving the audience a moment to breathe. The guitar started it, then Jim let out one of his bloodcurdling screams. No one could scream like Jim.
"Whiskey Bar" followed as a change of pace. The lights were meticulously programmed to the mood of each song by Chip Monck, our new lighting designer. For "Whiskey Bar," Chip would bathe the band in blue light while giving Jim a yellow halo.
We argued in front of everybody about which song to play fourth. Harvey Brooks, our bass player, doubled over in laughter at the audience's response to our unprofessionalism. They loved It.
"You guys could take a crap onstage and they'd eat it up," Harvey whispered in my ear. "Incredible!" I was acutely tuned to not letting the ball drop for the audience, hut by this point in our career we could do no wrong.
Jim, as usual, wanted to play "Little Red Rooster"; Robby was amenable to anything; Ray and I pushed for an original. We finally agreed on "Unknown Soldier." The execution section in the middle was terrifying. I would start the military drumming with Jim vocalizing "Hup-two-three-four;" Robby would go to his amp and turn a knob that made a siren sound.
"COMPANNYYY HALT!! Preessenntt ARMS." Robby would aim his guitar at Jim like it was a gun; Ray 'would hold a fist in the air with one hand and pick up the top of his amplifier with the other, dropping it on cue. The sound blasted out like a gunshot.
This was the usual routine, but I could tell Jim was very concentrated tonight. When he got "shot," he slammed himself to the floor like never before. I stood up from my seat and looked down at him over the drums. He didn't move. Maybe he banged his head on the edge of the drum riser or on one of Robby's guitar pedals? He seemed unconscious and was all tangled up in the mike cord, a stillborn baby who'd just arrived with umbilical webs. Panic was setting in when finally, after a few long seconds, he started moving one of his legs. The shaman was returning from his seizure. All of a sudden, out of the PA, in slurred speech, came "make a grave for the unknown soldier, nestled in your hollow shoulder." Jim had the mike at his lips. I quickly sat down to play the accompanying cymbal splashes. We finished the song as usual, with Jim jumping up and ending the war lyrically. I thought to myself, The song really has evolved into a miniplay. The audience was so stunned it didn't know whether to keep quiet or applaud. I liked that response.
It was time for our anthem, "Light My Fire." As usual, the opening drum crack organ tiff brought the house to its feet. We had played this number probably a thousand times already, but I always looked forward to it. The solo section in the middle allowed for long instrumental improvisation, which made it new each time. With improvisation there is danger. The chords we used were similar to Coltrane's version of "My Favorite Things," only stretched out and in 4/4.
Jazz.
I enjoyed spurring Ray and Robby on in their solos. It somehow evolved that I played the cue, two bars of fortissimo eighth notes on the snare, to signal the end of each of their solos. When Ray and I locked into a groove, it was unbounded joy. Robby floated on top, and Ray and I were the rhythm section, the bottom. At this particular gig, we were one.
When it was good, you wanted the groove to go on forever. Don't change to another set of chord progressions, don't go to the next section of the song; just stay right there and ride.
After twenty years, trips around the world, and two marriages, this is still one of the moments I miss the most.
Jim had to hang out sometimes for up to fifteen minutes waiting for us to finish. He loved to play his maraca, though, and dance like an American Indian. He would lift one leg and jump around in a circle as if he were at a campfire. This wasn't no James Brown dance imitation. Sometimes he would be so loose with his movements, I got inspiration for what l was playing from watching him. I drummed harder when Jim, Ray, or Robby were "into it." The groove got so deep, the mud splattered a third of the way up our pant legs.
Those inspired moments made me think that Jim's boyhood story about the American Indian shaman who possessed him in the desert was true. He said that when he was four years old, he and his parents were driving through New Mexico and passed a serious car accident. Jim said later that he felt the soul of the old Indian who was lying on the side of the road leap into him. A leap of faith if there ever was one.
At times like this it seemed that Jim was our puppet and we could take him, 'with our music, in any direction we wanted. He probably felt like he was doing the same to us, although he knew that music could hypnotize. And he allowed it to happen to himself, which one has to do in hypnotism.
He surrendered so totally some nights that we released the sorcerer inside him. We were caught in a ritual. Control seemed to be exchanged among the four of us until the ceremony was completed-three Apollos balanced by one intense Dionysus.
The last verse and chorus of "Light My Fire" was usually very strong, and the instrumental tag at the end left everyone sort of hanging. But they loved that song!
I had to take a deep breath and gather all my strength to play our last number. No wonder. "The End" was Jim's voyage into pain and death."
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Post by TheWallsScreamedPoetry on Jan 14, 2005 13:14:22 GMT
I love this book....John tells the story with a lot of emotion and passion and we get to learn a lot of things we did not know before..... An excellent read from a guy who actually lived it...
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Post by TheWallsScreamedPoetry on Jan 14, 2005 16:26:52 GMT
John Densmore's Letter To Jim Morrison
In one of the many letters John Densmore wrote to the Post-Jim Morrison (this one written 12 years after his death), in Los Angeles in 1983, he writes the following:
“ . . . . . As the typical flower child, your aggression made me uncomfortable too. Was I the sensitive male the poet Robert Bly warns about who brought forth my feminine consciousness in the sixties but failed to expedite those new values with positive male energy? I think the seventies were a result of this. In the early eighties we saw aggression become popular again and the Doors’ resurgence began. We were new wave and punk before our time. These musicians have been gobbled up into different bands and fed to the great god of merchandising. What’s left of the genuine revolutionary punk bands has eroded into narcissism, and they are dying out, as you died taking the dark male energy of Dionysus, Greek god of wine, too literally. The positive side of your dark nature was to eradicate the bullshit.
Reflecting on this today, I realize that you know that Western man’s quest for a better job, a house, and car was a subsitute for his real quest: something sacred. That’s why you weren’t interested in material things. You also knowe that the church was dead, that its symbols and rituals no longer had meaning for us, so you challenged the proselytizing of money-hungry preachers and lonely “sinners” in “PETTITIONING THE LORD WITH PRAYER.” (“You cannot petition the Lord with prayer.”)
Now I’m going to preach to you for a second.
What you missed was that the need for the sacred must be transformed to an inner cathedral. Our songs contacted the Dionysian side of spiritual life through music, but “the God of Wine cheers and warms men’s hearts; it also makes them drunk,” according to Edith Hamilton’s book on mythology, a book I know you were aware of. I’ll refresh your memory some more. She goes on:
The Greeks were a people who saw facts very clearly. They could not shut their eyes to the ugly and degrading side of wine drinking and see only the delightful side. They knew Dionysus was man’s benefactor and he was man’s destroyer.
The momentary sense of exultant power wine-drinking can give was only a sign to show that they had within them more than they knew; they cou8ld themselves become divine.
Maybe you are a god! Down here you are a media god. Back in the sixties I thought if our songs lasted ten years, the would be something. Well, we’re going on twenty and there’s no end in sight.
I wish we’d learned a little more about each other. Then maybe we would have been closer and ultimately wouldn’t have traveled down such different paths. Or would we have? I’m trying to find out, even now. You certainly have made a mark. You’ve influenced me a lot, I’ve even been reading a little Nietzsche! A quote of his comes to mind, “A man’s ancestors have paid the price of what he is.”<br>
You definitely are in me. And so I want to say thank you. And good-bye."
Taken from John Densmore’s Book, Riders on the Storm,
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Post by peter on Jan 26, 2005 19:07:22 GMT
a good book like ray`s light my fire one to read
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Post by darkstar on Jan 27, 2005 22:28:43 GMT
Exquisite Corpse - A Journal Of Letters and Life Cyber Issue 11 - Spring/Summer 2002
Ride the Highway West, Baby by Dana Wilde
John Densmore. Riders on the Storm: My Life with Jim Morrison and the Doors. Delta, NY.
During a few strange days this summer, I was reading Richard Bernstein's Ultimate Journey and John Densmore's Riders on the Storm at the same time. Honestly speaking it did not seem unusual that both books were on my living room table together. They're both autobiographies, after all, both about "journeys." Of sorts. Ultimate Journey tells the story of Bernstein's 1998 trip on planes, trains and automobiles across China and India along the route traveled by the seventh-century Chinese monk Xuanzang (spelled in Ultimate Journey, old-style, as "Hsuan Tsang"). This is interesting material because Xuanzang is a pivotal figure in Chinese Buddhism and the spiritual life of China. He spent seventeen years journeying to the West to bring the scriptures from India, and then coordinated their translation into Chinese, a launching-point in Chinese religious history. His journey is legendary in China, and a twentieth-century tracing of it could be, well, enlightening.
Densmore, of course, tells the story of his ride on Jim Morrison's whirlwind from Venice Beach to Paris, a curiosity at least and either a cautionary or an inspirational tale, depending on your social or spiritual politics. Ultimate Journey is much more polished than Riders on the Storm. Bernstein, a New York Times journalist and longtime foreign correspondent, understands how English grammar, diction and descriptive details work in ways that John Densmore, forever to be known as The Doors' drummer, was still learning when he wrote Riders in the late years of the Reagan-Bush cultural revolution. Bernstein has a much cleaner sense of rhetorical structure than Densmore, who really needed a better editor.
A better editor - although they both had fascinating material, which is why they were on my table together. Bernstein conveys historical facts with deftness, and there are a few superb descriptive moments in Ultimate Journey. His interweaving of details of Xuanzang's journey with his perceptions and impressions of China, Pakistan and India along the way is fluid, sometimes lucid. Densmore, too, interweaves rhetorical voices - journal entries addressed directly to the dead Jim Morrison, loose philosophical reflection, scenic and narrative retellings of legendary Doors events - that bump against each other like rock musicians experimenting with jazz.
Holding both books up at arm's length, you might imagine a finely woven, elegantly hued tapestry of China alongside a home-stitched psychedelic hanging from the American '60s. And rhetorically, that's what you get. But as Densmore says of the last Doors album, "We went for the feeling. Fuck the mistakes."
And there, the men separate from the boys. The picture we get of Jim Morrison in all accounts is a tragic figure who self-destructed. His drive to open "the doors of perception" - as we're reminded by other biographers like Danny Sugerman and Gerry Hopkins, Ray Manzarek, David Dalton, and the eminent literary critic Wallace Fowlie - paralleled the drive of Arthur Rimbaud, the bad boy and visionary of French Symbolist poetry. Neither Rimbaud nor Morrison was a fluke or a fake. Morrison had expansive intentions and the creative powers and personal integrity to make a credible effort to break real psychic ground. Late twentieth-century Western culture, however, offered too many possibilities for cultivating Rimbaud's method of deranging the senses, and Morrison's unbelievable physical and psychic toughness got, predictably, overwhelmed.
Ray Manzarek, Robby Krieger and John Densmore watched it happen, and in fact participated in the "disorder, chaos and activity that has no meaning" that Morrison saw as elements of the way to spiritual breakthrough. Densmore's book explores - in an authentic sense of that word - the path he followed with Morrison. But the interest of Riders on the Storm lies not in the abundance of Doors anecdotes, but in Densmore's confrontation of the rough landscape of his own psyche.
The picture we get of Densmore in other accounts, like Sugerman and Hopkins' No One Here Gets Out Alive and Manzarek's almost unreadable Light My Fire, is of a cranky but enthusiastic soul constantly irritated by Jim Morrison's disruptiveness. In Riders, Densmore meets these aspects of himself head-on by talking directly and openly to the departed Morrison, and whether you believe in an afterlife or not, Densmore's words feel like sincere expressions of anger and love. These are the self-made regions of hell and heaven which cannot actually be evaded, and Densmore doesn't want to. He talks openly of his own naivete in the late '60s and '70s, of his varying struggles, using transcendental meditation, acting lessons, writing, marriage, and music, to find some sort of truth or at least navigable inner landscape for himself. It is not a polished written performance by the standards of our effete postmodern academic literati, but fuck the mistakes, it goes for the feeling and finds it in all its ungainly turbulence and uncertainty. To me, John Densmore's book was fascinating reading. www.corpse.org/issue_11/critiques/wilde.html
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Post by TheWallsScreamedPoetry on Feb 19, 2005 9:45:25 GMT
Excerpt from RIDERS ON THE STORM
New York, January 21st,I969 - The day before Madison Square Garden
It would be our first really big concert in New York. Sal Bonafette, our manager, had described our career as a big wave about to break. But there was a fatal flaw: Our singer was nuts. Sal had an idea: Because of Jim's increasing intake of alcohol, Sal's partner, Ash (who seemed more and more like a lush), should challenge Jim to a drinking contest the night before the concert. That way, he'd be completely burned out on booze and be too weak to do it again and in great shape for the performance the next night! What a concept! I was willing to try anything.
We all went to Max's Kansas City, and then to Steve Paul's The Scene on West 46th Street and Eighth Avenue. Jim was well on his way.
"Hey, John," Jim said, slurring at me, "Spencer Dryden from the Airplane says here that you're his favorite drummer."
"Let me see that," I responded, as Jim threw a paperback book on our table. Jim always had a book in tow, a literary security blanket that couldn't be taken away, like the friends Jim lost as his military family moved from base to base. This time it was Ralph Gleason's new one on rock music. He was a writer for Rolling Stone up in San Francisco and used to be a jazz critic for Downbeat magazine, a rag I pored over in the early sixties.
I thought back to when I saw Spencer out of the corner of my eye in Amsterdam when we played without Jim. This was a great compliment from a peer. I handed the book back to Jim as he headed for the stage.
Tiny Tim was "Tiptoeing Through the Tulips," when Jim arrived at the edge of the spotlight. Groveling around on his knees, fooling with the mike stand, it looked as if Jim were giving Tiny Tim head as Tim laughed nervously in his high voice. Tiny Tim told Jim that there is "nothing in the world like motherly love." Tiny was thirty-five and still lived with his mother. Considering that Jim had told the press that his parents were deceased (which they were not), it started out as a pretty funny scene.
Then it turned sour. Ash tried to get Jim off the stage, which he couldn't do, so a fight broke out. It was time for my exit. As I got to the door, I glanced back over my shoulder and saw the managers, Jim, and several other people rolling over tables.
It was a long walk, but I decided to hoof it back to the hotel in hopes that it would cool me out from worrying about the next night, our biggest and possibly most important gig yet. Walking up Eighth to 57th and across to the Manger Windsor Hotel on Sixth, I prayed all the way for Jim's sobriety.
The next morning I ran into Robby in the hotel's coffee shop.
"Jim called me last night at four a.m.!" Robby exclaimed while sipping fresh orange juice. "You know what he said? I was half asleep, mind you, and he said, 'This is God calling, and we've decided to kick you right out of the universe!' "
"What a card!"
"Yeah . . . I hope he's in good shape for tonight."
"Me too." After getting up from the counter, we left the hotel. I thought to myself how great it was to have an ally in the band. Robby and I never talked about it, but I sensed that he felt the same.
"Is that you, Ray?" I asked, hearing someone come into the stall next door to me.
"Yup," he responded in that deep, ponderous voice. I could tell by the white buck shoes. We were sitting on toilets in the basement of Madison Square Garden.
"Having your preconcert shit?" I joked.
"Yup." Ray laughed. We could hear the crowd upstairs starting to stamp their feet.
"Boom-boom-BOOM-BOOM . . . Doors-Doors-DOORS . . . Jim-JIM-JIM!"
"Time to go," Ray and I said simultaneously.
Jim seemed in pretty good spirits. If his state of mind was in that delicate balance where he had a buzz, but not too much, my confidence was strong enough to reduce my pre-performance nerves to small butterflies. I've always thought that if you aren't a little nervous, then you aren't risking enough.
We came out to the center boxing ring and twenty-four thousand people gave us the biggest roar I had ever heard. It was the ultimate in mass affection. How could this be topped? And the stage was still dark! Since there wasn't any curtain, we chose to be led out with flashlights and were tuning up in the dark - and they were already going crazy!
Ray lit a stick of incense that was preset on the organ, an idea we copped from Indian music. It had evolved into a ritual that signaled we were leaving the outside world behind, and the smell put us in a collective mood to play.
I started the beat to "Break On Through" in the dark, which drew more response, then after a few bars, when Ray and Robby came in with their respective organ and guitar lines, the lights came up. The combination of powerful electric instruments crashing in over primitive drums with simultaneous stage lights blasting in out of total blackness was very effective, an electronic coming of Christ. Or the Anti-Christ, to be more precise.
Then came Jim's voice, the voice of total belligerence, spouting out an improvised poem about "FAT CATS, DEAD RATS, suckin' on a soldier's sperm. CRAP - THAT'S CRAP!"
We settled down into the song's groove and built it up to its abrupt climax.
"Back Door Man" was next, not giving the audience a moment to breathe. The guitar started it, then Jim let out one of his bloodcurdling screams. No one could scream like Jim.
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Post by TheWallsScreamedPoetry on Feb 19, 2005 9:46:01 GMT
"Whiskey Bar" followed as a change of pace. The lights were meticulously programmed to the mood of each song by Chip Monck, our new lighting designer. For "Whiskey Bar," Chip would bathe the band in blue light while giving Jim a yellow halo.
We argued in front of everybody about which song to play fourth. Harvey Brooks, our bass player, doubled over in laughter at the audience's response to our unprofessionalism. They loved it.
"You guys could take a crap onstage and they'd eat it up," Harvey whispered in my ear. "Incredible!" I was acutely tuned to not letting the ball drop for the audience, but by this point in our career we could do no wrong.
Jim, as usual, wanted to play "Little Red Rooster;" Robby was amenable to anything; Ray and I pushed for an original. We finally agreed on "Unknown Soldier." The execution section in the middle was terrifying. I would start the military drumming with Jim vocalizing "Hup two-three-four;" Robby would go to his amp and turn a knob that made a siren sound.
"COMPANNYYY HALT!! Preessenntt ARMS."
Robby would aim his guitar at Jim like it was a gun; Ray would hold a fist in the air with one hand and pick up the top of his amplifier with the other, dropping it on cue. The sound blasted out like a gunshot.
This was the usual routine, but I could tell Jim was very concentrated tonight. When he got "shot," he slammed himself to the floor like never before. I stood up from my seat and looked down at him over the drums. He didn't move. Maybe he banged his head on the edge of the drum riser or on one of Robby's guitar pedals? He seemed unconscious and was all tangled up in the mike cord, a stillborn baby who'd just arrived with umbilical webs. Panic was setting in when finally, after a few long seconds, he started moving one of his legs. The shaman was returning from his seizure. All of a sudden, out of the PA, in slurred speech, came "make a grave for the unknown soldier, nestled in your hollow shoulder." Jim had the mike at his lips. I quickly sat d own to play the accompanying cymbal splashes. We finished the song as usual, with Jim jumping up and ending the war lyrically. I thought to myself, the song really has evolved into a miniplay. The audience was so stunned it didn't know whether to keep quiet or applaud. I liked that response. It was time for our anthem, "Light My Fire." As usual, the opening drum crack organ riff brought the house to its feet. We had played this number probably a thousand times already, but I always looked forward to it. The solo section in the middle allowed for long instrumental improvisation, which made it new each time. With improvisation there is danger. The chords we used were similar to Coltrane's version of "My Favorite Things," only stretched out and in 4/4.
Jazz.
I enjoyed spurring Ray and Robby on in their solos. It somehow evolved that I played the cue, two bars of fortissimo eighth notes on the snare, to signal the end of each of their solos. When Ray and I locked into a groove, it was unbounded joy. Robby floated on top, and Ray and I were the rhythm section, the bottom. At this particular gig, we were one.
When it was good, you wanted the groove to go on forever. Don't change to another set of chord progressions, don't go to the next section of the song; just stay right there and ride.
After twenty years, trips around the world, and two marriages, this is still one of the moments I miss the most.
Jim had to hang out sometimes for up to fifteen minutes waiting for us to finish. He loved to play his maraca, though, and dance like an American Indian. He would lift one leg and jump around in a circle as if he were at a campfire. This wasn't no James Brown dance imitation. Sometimes he would be so loose with his movements, I got inspiration for what I was playing from watching him. I drummed harder when Jim, Ray, or Robby were "into it." The groove got so deep, the mud splattered a third of the way up our pant legs.
Those inspired moments made me think that Jim's boyhood story about the American Indian shaman who possessed him in the desert was true. He said that when he was four years old, he and his parents were driving through New Mexico and passed a serious car accident. Jim said later that he felt the soul of the old Indian who was lying on the side of the road leap into him. A leap of faith if there ever was one.
At times like this it seemed that Jim was our puppet and we could take him, with our music, in any direction we wanted. He probably felt like he was doing the same to us, although he knew that music could hypnotize. And he allowed it to happen to himself, which one has to do in hypnotism. He surrendered so totally some nights that we released the sorcerer inside him. We were caught in a ritual. Control seemed to be exchanged among the four of us until the ceremony was completed - three Apollos balanced by one intense Dionysus.
The last verse and chorus of "Light My Fire" was usually very strong, and the instrumental tag at the end left everyone sort of hanging. But they loved that song!
I had to take a deep breath and gather all my strength to play our last number. No wonder. "The End" was Jim's voyage into pain and death.
From Riders On The Storm....by John Densmore
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Post by TheWallsScreamedPoetry on Mar 17, 2005 15:55:24 GMT
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Post by eressie on Mar 17, 2005 17:48:42 GMT
I have just read this book, finnished it today...I love it, it is very well written and very emotional at times. It also cleared up a few things that I was not sure about reading in other books.
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Post by jimbo on Mar 17, 2005 21:28:36 GMT
I still haven't picked this book up yet, birthday's soon, I can use some of the cash to make the purchase
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Post by jym on Mar 17, 2005 22:21:13 GMT
Shit! Missed the choice of too whiney for me.
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Post by TheWallsScreamedPoetry on Mar 22, 2005 15:19:11 GMT
Been listening to a couple of Radio Station interviews John did to promote ROTS and pleased to see that 'Ghost writers' never were part of his book....He explained how he was approached by agents who wanted to get Ghost writers involved to make a few bucks but John preffered to write it himself and learn the writing craft... "it took me forever but it was all mine".... Well done Mr D..... We see sports stars who wite an auto biog and never even read was was written for them and its truly pitiful but JD wanted to excorcise the demons inside and writing was his best therapy...... I always will think it a bit whiney but at least its HIS whine not some asshole from a publishing house.....
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Post by jym on Mar 22, 2005 15:57:53 GMT
I always will think it a bit whiney but at least its HIS whine not some asshole from a publishing house..... Hey, hey there, I may have to try an earn a living.
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Post by TheWallsScreamedPoetry on Mar 22, 2005 17:31:05 GMT
Hey, hey there, I may have to try an earn a living. Is that some kind of admission that you 'wrote' Ray's Light My Fire? That may explaina a lot....
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Post by jym on Mar 22, 2005 19:07:27 GMT
Is that some kind of admission that you 'wrote' Ray's Light My Fire? That may explaina a lot.... Is it? I don't want to take "credit" for that. Do I?
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Post by othercircles on Jul 15, 2005 2:28:41 GMT
I just read it a week or two ago and I don't know what this "whining" is everyones talking about.
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Post by TheWallsScreamedPoetry on Jul 15, 2005 12:05:11 GMT
I just read it a week or two ago and I don't know what this "whining" is everyones talking about. I guess the whiney bit comes from comparing it to Ray's book (which is wrong but nontheless people do it....I did!) which is more upbeat. John's book is more honest than Rays as Ray dealt with his grief by retreating into lah lah land whereas John just told his story brutally honest. I love both books and respect both guys for telling thier story...thier way. Arguably the two best Doors books on the market!
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Post by ensenada on Jul 15, 2005 15:02:54 GMT
i enjoyed the book, didnt find it whiney..but i guess if comparing with ray's light my fire it is a bit. i.e. john's whinging at jim's antics etc but he has some good humour in it and its good to know how john got involved into music and into the band...
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Post by theholysha66 on Jul 15, 2005 15:26:21 GMT
definately ...one of the best if not the best ......
an emotional an passionate man ....when the end finally came upon The Doors ..it took john considerable time to get over it ....blaming Jim for a lot of it .....
The opening pages ...when he explains the remaining Doors and their partners went to Pere Lachaise in 1983 (Johns first time), is mind blowing .....his feelings, the emotions etc ......it gave me goosebumps ..
The 70's were tough for John ...i dont think he actually dealt with things as well as Ray and Robbie ....his personal life had a lot to do with this too .....
Johns book is descriptive ....he doesnt glorify anything, he tells it the way it was .....and thats whats appealing ...
5 star rating ..in my opinion
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Post by othercircles on Jul 15, 2005 21:22:29 GMT
I think John and Ray were both pretty patient with Jim. If he had broken a bunch of my records I'd have slapped him silly.
I also like that John acknowledges the existance of Other Circles and Full Circle. And talked about some of the feelings they had deciding to move forward. Where as Ray books goes something like..... Jim dies.. the end.
Johns flashes back and forth into the 70's and 80's to relivant events in his life. It's really much better written and more creative then Rays.
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