Post by TheWallsScreamedPoetry on Sept 22, 2007 9:23:27 GMT
Jim Morrison: The Trickster by Pete Bowman
“It will be apparent that it is difficult to discern which properties each thing possesses in reality” (Democritus, 8th century B.C.)
To those who do not know me I sing in a Doors tribute band called ‘The Unknown Soldiers.’
We hail from the west, western Canada to be exact, from one of the most beautiful cites in the world, Vancouver.
We have successfully been performing the Doors
for a little over a year and are growing strong with each new show.
I’ve decided to focus my tribute to the ‘Old King Snake’ by trying to convey to you what it is like to jump into the voice of Jim Morrison.
We usually do a two-hour set in a night covering every area of the Doors’ musical legacy. We do it all from the sizzling summer of love to the funky blues of L.A. woman. What I have recognized in my experience is that each song has it’s own emotional texture that requires me to investigate what Jim might have been feeling as he recorded these monumental songs.
To better understand what Jim feelings may have been feeling when he recorded his fine vocal intentions I have broken his vocal performances into to three main emotional textures:
Firstly, there is young Jim, the young lion, who is taking a moonlight drive in to the unknown waters. He has a smouldering energy, a fire to be exact, undeniable to those lucky enough to hear him live at the Whiskey A-Go-Go.
This fire could burn an impression in the coldest of souls.
His youthful energy is somewhat innocent, naive, manic, love sick, romantically insane, yet fiercely independent with a passion of western freedom that only a warm Pacific sunset can explain.
The Second Jim is the Lizard King. He is the leather-clad demon. A shaman, menacing, sexual, dark, bad boy, not the type you bring home to mama.
He is an all around wild child. He is poetically charged, electrified, erotic politician, initiating us into an under world where most fear to tread. His energy and voice has mature. His command of the stage and overwhelming charisma has sharpen his snake tongue into a deadly weapon, cutting the binding ribbons of the authority loose, setting the ship of fools free, sailing off to far mysterious lands. He is begging us to follow him to the gate, entering the city of his birth. He is warning us about the snake on the side of the road and the dangers of the mansion on the hill.
The Third Jim is the ‘been there-done that-meet ya at the crossroads’ kind of blues man. He has a voluptuous soul that could accommodate a thousand mortal bodies. He is the whiskey drinking wise man. A roadhouse jiving,
mojo-rising, keep on rising, killer on the road. He is a seasoned poet, a tribal elder, a burnt out rock star needing space to be with his muse.
In the Parisian night he is creating the next chapter in his life by manifesting his dreams into poetic reality. His voice is rough, with bluesy wails, crying pleas, howling like the midnight moon, while the cars hiss by his window.
From these three emotional textures come a cross-section, an X-ray, a psychic CAT scan of Jim Morrison’s fears, dreams, wishes and desires.
It is an all-encompassing detailed map of his inner world.
They form the colour of his experiences, shining bright from the canvas of his personal chaos. By understanding the differences of these three emotional textures it allows me to sink into each song watery depth, exploring the songs greater intensity, hunting for the golden treasure that lays hidden on his physic ocean floor.
When performing live, these emotional textures afford me the ability to channel into the right mood, adjusting accordingly and delivering the song in its purest light. Mind you these are only my interpretation of the songs.
Some might disagree on a direction that I take, but rest a sure I really feel as though Morrison’s words are broadcasting directly through my soul, into my bones, out of my vocal cords, into the world beyond.
Not to scare ya or nothing but in Voodoo they call it ‘riding’.
What is riding you ask!?! It is when a spirit or muse chooses a candidate, honouring them to handle the ceremonies, subjugating them to act as the master of the ceremonies. This ‘riding’ entails not the possession of the candidate, where a sprit possesses the subject directly, but rather the sprit is riding the subject much like a warrior on a horse.
The candidate is put into a trance through the use of a musical vehicle such as drums, rattles, droning guitars, and other various hypnotic instruments. A shamanic trance is similar but with less elaborate musical composition, some would say even primitive. In my case the vehicle for inducing this trance is the Doors music.
In the right environment under prime circumstances, I will sometimes open my eyes in the mists of a show and be completely disoriented on my whereabouts.
It will seem as though time has disappeared and the venue has been transported back in time to the origin of the original music’s creation.
I can picture the sights and sounds and sometimes even the smells of the past.
It is one of those strange mysterious occurrences that cannot be easily explained but only personally experienced.
The prime circumstance to induce this trance like state is: low lights, good sound, candles burning, audience participating, the bands tightness, and a little whisky now and again.
If one of these elements is missing chances are there will be no trance.
Have you ever tried to read under a big bright neon light, buzzing away with a mechanical soul, no life, and just overwhelming bright light?
I find it hard at the best of times.
When the light is glowing, warm, and mysterious even the dullest books can compete for my attention.
There is magic to that kind of light.
Environment and the setting of a room is truly every thing to a performer.
As a singer/performer I’m trying to perfect my performance without the environmental needing to be ideal.
By studying these emotional textures found in Jim’s vocal performances I can insure that I will inject myself into these trances wherever the environment, and under any circumstances.
I have heard of some actors practicing this very method; I believe it’s called method acting.
The goal is to put your self into the characters persona in order to get their perspective to better understand all the aspects of their lives.
Once this is mastered the actor can have a good idea how that character will react under certain circumstances, thus creating a more believable performance, one could say ‘less contrived more alive’.
I believe that studying the emotional textures of Jim’s performances has allowed me the ability to understand a little bit more about Jim Morrison himself.
Now the big question is what do I think Morrison was like as a person?
Obviously I cannot answer that question from a perspective of actually meeting him,
I wasn’t even a sparkle in my mother’s eye when Jim was out making musical history.
I can however tell you from a perspective of someone that has to inundate his emotional texture in order to make a performance of his words and voice believable.
Perhaps this gives me a slight, and I mean slight, advantage over someone who passively enjoys the Doors music.
In general, Morrison is most famous for being the bacchanalian reveller.
He is the uncontrollable Dionysian, drinking till dawn, pulling dangerous stunts without regards to his or anyone else’s safety.
He was testing the limits of the social boundaries by breaking all the rules and trying on all the taboos. Oliver Stone’s movie, ‘The Doors’ and Jerry Hopkins’s book, ‘No One Here Gets Out Alive,’ certainly paints a complete portrait of this self-destructive side of Jim Morrison personality.
Could this be the characteristic that allowed Jim Morrison such a generous portion of artistic feats? I think not, surely there must have been other trait in his personality that allowed him the ability to produce so much artistic work in such a short period of time.
What is missing element you ask?
Through all the articles and books and movies out they’re on Jim Morrison,
the one thing that that intrigues me the most, remaining hidden as a side note,
is his amazing sense of humour.
Some would say his sense of humour was sardonic.
It seems that he had a passion of pushing people buttons to reveal what made a person tick. His antics could be described as mischievous, instigating, even down right devilish.
I believe these techniques of trickery were employed to cause a person to lose their guard therefore causing the person to be more ‘real’.
By challenging a person’s reality, shocking their personal foundation, cracking their protective social shell, Morrison was attempting to help reveal the true individual inside each one of us.
Morrison defiantly possessed the sprit of the trickster. The trickster in the Native American religion has a duty to create an illusion in order to make people think.
Without illusion in life, life can become very boring and drab. It seems fitting that the word ‘Glamour’ is an old welsh word meaning illusion.
Jim illustrated this ‘changeling’ quality readily throughout his career.
The three emotional textures that Jim manifested in his vocal performances are a fine example of his ability to create illusion.
It seem as though he could literal shed his skin like a snake, manifesting into a new individual. Was he playing with reality, changing peoples perception in the universal mind, and setting people free?
Only time will tell but certainly one cannot argue the fact that he has influence a number of us to question our boundaries and perhaps explore our hidden sides.
This lesson teaches us that we too can adapt to the ever-present changing life by adopting a metamorphic ideology.
Like Darwin said ‘animals that adapt better, survive better’.
When we try on a new mask that hangs on the ancient gallery wall we are indeed challenging ourselves to destroy what we think we are, going blindly to the edge of the cliff, where life’s uncertainties fall willingly into the abyss the unknown.
Jim Morrison’s ability to test these deep waters,
trial blazing for others, indicates that he must of possesses a great sense of humour, a dark one a.
This sense of humour allowed him to see many different aspect of life that would normally pass
one by if they have an overly rigid outlook on life.
Humour is the ability to not hang on to things to tightly, to let it go, and observe the absurd.
This sense of humour would allow him to do things that were considered huge taboos in his time where social conservatism still had a strangle hold on much of the population.
The Doors were literally created seven years after the docile, Ma and Pa, do ya want cookies with your milk, leave it to Beaver mentality.
Can you picture donning a pair of leather pants with lanky long hair, walking around with a menacing yet rebellious smile into the conservative America public arena?
Sure the youthful counter culture was picking up the pace with love beads, tie die, and sandals, but old Jimbo did it in a style that only a trickster could pull off. In my opinion I believe that Jim Morrison was one of the best jester of all time, a wise fool of the highest degree.
A WISE FOOL you ask?
Yes a wise fool. A wise fool in arcane knowledge is said to be the wisest of all.
In the Taro deck the Fool card: depicting
a young man, blindfolded, his worldly possession on his back, an animal nipping
at his heels, walking off a cliff, is the only card that can be placed anywhere in the deck and still be in the right chronological order.
It is the zero, the hub of the wheel of fortune, the end and the beginning at the same time. This fool card can trace its roots to the medieval royal courts.
The fool or jester in the royal court was the only one that could honestly tell the truth, with out suffering social rejection or physical punishment.
If the king disagreed with a jester, he would simple say, ‘oh well, what does he know he just a fool’. But if any body else in the king’s court was as candid their heads would roll by dawn.
It is the wise fools in our society that teach us our limits, showing us where the social boundaries are and in daring us to cross over these lines, challenging reality, making society grow as a whole.
My hats off to Jim the trickster, may he always be a part of our life and make us think of the unthinkable. Doing the undoable, and push the limit not from a standpoint of knocking down the walls with force but wearing the mask that challenges society the best. PB.
Pete Bowman from Vancouver, Canada is the singer with Canadian Doors Tribute Band The Unknown Soldiers and wrote this for Scorpywag 2005 Summer 40 Year Tribute Issue
“It will be apparent that it is difficult to discern which properties each thing possesses in reality” (Democritus, 8th century B.C.)
To those who do not know me I sing in a Doors tribute band called ‘The Unknown Soldiers.’
We hail from the west, western Canada to be exact, from one of the most beautiful cites in the world, Vancouver.
We have successfully been performing the Doors
for a little over a year and are growing strong with each new show.
I’ve decided to focus my tribute to the ‘Old King Snake’ by trying to convey to you what it is like to jump into the voice of Jim Morrison.
We usually do a two-hour set in a night covering every area of the Doors’ musical legacy. We do it all from the sizzling summer of love to the funky blues of L.A. woman. What I have recognized in my experience is that each song has it’s own emotional texture that requires me to investigate what Jim might have been feeling as he recorded these monumental songs.
To better understand what Jim feelings may have been feeling when he recorded his fine vocal intentions I have broken his vocal performances into to three main emotional textures:
Firstly, there is young Jim, the young lion, who is taking a moonlight drive in to the unknown waters. He has a smouldering energy, a fire to be exact, undeniable to those lucky enough to hear him live at the Whiskey A-Go-Go.
This fire could burn an impression in the coldest of souls.
His youthful energy is somewhat innocent, naive, manic, love sick, romantically insane, yet fiercely independent with a passion of western freedom that only a warm Pacific sunset can explain.
The Second Jim is the Lizard King. He is the leather-clad demon. A shaman, menacing, sexual, dark, bad boy, not the type you bring home to mama.
He is an all around wild child. He is poetically charged, electrified, erotic politician, initiating us into an under world where most fear to tread. His energy and voice has mature. His command of the stage and overwhelming charisma has sharpen his snake tongue into a deadly weapon, cutting the binding ribbons of the authority loose, setting the ship of fools free, sailing off to far mysterious lands. He is begging us to follow him to the gate, entering the city of his birth. He is warning us about the snake on the side of the road and the dangers of the mansion on the hill.
The Third Jim is the ‘been there-done that-meet ya at the crossroads’ kind of blues man. He has a voluptuous soul that could accommodate a thousand mortal bodies. He is the whiskey drinking wise man. A roadhouse jiving,
mojo-rising, keep on rising, killer on the road. He is a seasoned poet, a tribal elder, a burnt out rock star needing space to be with his muse.
In the Parisian night he is creating the next chapter in his life by manifesting his dreams into poetic reality. His voice is rough, with bluesy wails, crying pleas, howling like the midnight moon, while the cars hiss by his window.
From these three emotional textures come a cross-section, an X-ray, a psychic CAT scan of Jim Morrison’s fears, dreams, wishes and desires.
It is an all-encompassing detailed map of his inner world.
They form the colour of his experiences, shining bright from the canvas of his personal chaos. By understanding the differences of these three emotional textures it allows me to sink into each song watery depth, exploring the songs greater intensity, hunting for the golden treasure that lays hidden on his physic ocean floor.
When performing live, these emotional textures afford me the ability to channel into the right mood, adjusting accordingly and delivering the song in its purest light. Mind you these are only my interpretation of the songs.
Some might disagree on a direction that I take, but rest a sure I really feel as though Morrison’s words are broadcasting directly through my soul, into my bones, out of my vocal cords, into the world beyond.
Not to scare ya or nothing but in Voodoo they call it ‘riding’.
What is riding you ask!?! It is when a spirit or muse chooses a candidate, honouring them to handle the ceremonies, subjugating them to act as the master of the ceremonies. This ‘riding’ entails not the possession of the candidate, where a sprit possesses the subject directly, but rather the sprit is riding the subject much like a warrior on a horse.
The candidate is put into a trance through the use of a musical vehicle such as drums, rattles, droning guitars, and other various hypnotic instruments. A shamanic trance is similar but with less elaborate musical composition, some would say even primitive. In my case the vehicle for inducing this trance is the Doors music.
In the right environment under prime circumstances, I will sometimes open my eyes in the mists of a show and be completely disoriented on my whereabouts.
It will seem as though time has disappeared and the venue has been transported back in time to the origin of the original music’s creation.
I can picture the sights and sounds and sometimes even the smells of the past.
It is one of those strange mysterious occurrences that cannot be easily explained but only personally experienced.
The prime circumstance to induce this trance like state is: low lights, good sound, candles burning, audience participating, the bands tightness, and a little whisky now and again.
If one of these elements is missing chances are there will be no trance.
Have you ever tried to read under a big bright neon light, buzzing away with a mechanical soul, no life, and just overwhelming bright light?
I find it hard at the best of times.
When the light is glowing, warm, and mysterious even the dullest books can compete for my attention.
There is magic to that kind of light.
Environment and the setting of a room is truly every thing to a performer.
As a singer/performer I’m trying to perfect my performance without the environmental needing to be ideal.
By studying these emotional textures found in Jim’s vocal performances I can insure that I will inject myself into these trances wherever the environment, and under any circumstances.
I have heard of some actors practicing this very method; I believe it’s called method acting.
The goal is to put your self into the characters persona in order to get their perspective to better understand all the aspects of their lives.
Once this is mastered the actor can have a good idea how that character will react under certain circumstances, thus creating a more believable performance, one could say ‘less contrived more alive’.
I believe that studying the emotional textures of Jim’s performances has allowed me the ability to understand a little bit more about Jim Morrison himself.
Now the big question is what do I think Morrison was like as a person?
Obviously I cannot answer that question from a perspective of actually meeting him,
I wasn’t even a sparkle in my mother’s eye when Jim was out making musical history.
I can however tell you from a perspective of someone that has to inundate his emotional texture in order to make a performance of his words and voice believable.
Perhaps this gives me a slight, and I mean slight, advantage over someone who passively enjoys the Doors music.
In general, Morrison is most famous for being the bacchanalian reveller.
He is the uncontrollable Dionysian, drinking till dawn, pulling dangerous stunts without regards to his or anyone else’s safety.
He was testing the limits of the social boundaries by breaking all the rules and trying on all the taboos. Oliver Stone’s movie, ‘The Doors’ and Jerry Hopkins’s book, ‘No One Here Gets Out Alive,’ certainly paints a complete portrait of this self-destructive side of Jim Morrison personality.
Could this be the characteristic that allowed Jim Morrison such a generous portion of artistic feats? I think not, surely there must have been other trait in his personality that allowed him the ability to produce so much artistic work in such a short period of time.
What is missing element you ask?
Through all the articles and books and movies out they’re on Jim Morrison,
the one thing that that intrigues me the most, remaining hidden as a side note,
is his amazing sense of humour.
Some would say his sense of humour was sardonic.
It seems that he had a passion of pushing people buttons to reveal what made a person tick. His antics could be described as mischievous, instigating, even down right devilish.
I believe these techniques of trickery were employed to cause a person to lose their guard therefore causing the person to be more ‘real’.
By challenging a person’s reality, shocking their personal foundation, cracking their protective social shell, Morrison was attempting to help reveal the true individual inside each one of us.
Morrison defiantly possessed the sprit of the trickster. The trickster in the Native American religion has a duty to create an illusion in order to make people think.
Without illusion in life, life can become very boring and drab. It seems fitting that the word ‘Glamour’ is an old welsh word meaning illusion.
Jim illustrated this ‘changeling’ quality readily throughout his career.
The three emotional textures that Jim manifested in his vocal performances are a fine example of his ability to create illusion.
It seem as though he could literal shed his skin like a snake, manifesting into a new individual. Was he playing with reality, changing peoples perception in the universal mind, and setting people free?
Only time will tell but certainly one cannot argue the fact that he has influence a number of us to question our boundaries and perhaps explore our hidden sides.
This lesson teaches us that we too can adapt to the ever-present changing life by adopting a metamorphic ideology.
Like Darwin said ‘animals that adapt better, survive better’.
When we try on a new mask that hangs on the ancient gallery wall we are indeed challenging ourselves to destroy what we think we are, going blindly to the edge of the cliff, where life’s uncertainties fall willingly into the abyss the unknown.
Jim Morrison’s ability to test these deep waters,
trial blazing for others, indicates that he must of possesses a great sense of humour, a dark one a.
This sense of humour allowed him to see many different aspect of life that would normally pass
one by if they have an overly rigid outlook on life.
Humour is the ability to not hang on to things to tightly, to let it go, and observe the absurd.
This sense of humour would allow him to do things that were considered huge taboos in his time where social conservatism still had a strangle hold on much of the population.
The Doors were literally created seven years after the docile, Ma and Pa, do ya want cookies with your milk, leave it to Beaver mentality.
Can you picture donning a pair of leather pants with lanky long hair, walking around with a menacing yet rebellious smile into the conservative America public arena?
Sure the youthful counter culture was picking up the pace with love beads, tie die, and sandals, but old Jimbo did it in a style that only a trickster could pull off. In my opinion I believe that Jim Morrison was one of the best jester of all time, a wise fool of the highest degree.
A WISE FOOL you ask?
Yes a wise fool. A wise fool in arcane knowledge is said to be the wisest of all.
In the Taro deck the Fool card: depicting
a young man, blindfolded, his worldly possession on his back, an animal nipping
at his heels, walking off a cliff, is the only card that can be placed anywhere in the deck and still be in the right chronological order.
It is the zero, the hub of the wheel of fortune, the end and the beginning at the same time. This fool card can trace its roots to the medieval royal courts.
The fool or jester in the royal court was the only one that could honestly tell the truth, with out suffering social rejection or physical punishment.
If the king disagreed with a jester, he would simple say, ‘oh well, what does he know he just a fool’. But if any body else in the king’s court was as candid their heads would roll by dawn.
It is the wise fools in our society that teach us our limits, showing us where the social boundaries are and in daring us to cross over these lines, challenging reality, making society grow as a whole.
My hats off to Jim the trickster, may he always be a part of our life and make us think of the unthinkable. Doing the undoable, and push the limit not from a standpoint of knocking down the walls with force but wearing the mask that challenges society the best. PB.
Pete Bowman from Vancouver, Canada is the singer with Canadian Doors Tribute Band The Unknown Soldiers and wrote this for Scorpywag 2005 Summer 40 Year Tribute Issue