The End Is Always Near

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

The End Is Always Near: Dread, Drunkenness and The Doors, Part 1



A rare unpublished article from Lester Bangs circa 1975

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF the Doors should not be underestimated; it has been too often already. When you consider that they represented, in the positivist context through whose belly they thrust their violence and dread, when you look around you at half time in the ‘70s and listen closely to the bands and singers that've captured the imagination in the years since Morrison first scowled and took a brief break from the Whisky's stage to hang his young ancient's head out the back door and puke up cheap booze in the alley (and all the time they thought he was on acid 24 hours a day!)... it becomes inescapable fact that, with Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground on the other coast, Jim Morrison was the father of ‘70s Rock 'n' Roll.
Consider. Alice Cooper. Iggy. Even Bryan Ferry. Glitter and attendant sleaze. Especially attendant sleaze. What the Doors and the Velvet Underground were saying in 1966-7 was "Look where all of this bliss is leading us, can't you see? That we're blind and damned by our own recklessness? That we're going to end up at each other's throats? Or, worse, alone with a finality that's crushing." The Stones were dirty but The Doors were dread; the difference is crucial, because dread is the great fact of the ‘70s, and the Stones didn't learn it until it was almost too late. For them and us.
History. So hard to trace when the myths proliferate like a nest of serpents in a swamp. For any true star the legend has gotta be bigger than the reality– in fact, the smart money nowadays is on the idol who preserves himself humbly in the shadow of his looming larger-than-life, protecting, disguising, decoy legend. Preserve thyself shall be the whole of the law, from here on out. And Jim Morrison had a lot to do with that, because Jim Morrison sacrificed himself alive and screaming, flesh and mind, to a graven image of himself that for all his brilliance he was just dumb enough to believe in. Shattered boy with the innards of an old man, victim of himself, his own legend, lies so luminous he swallowed them whole and drowned the poem in poison, narcissist that he was.
All history is fiction, said William Burroughs, but none more so than rock history. They're still passing the Morrison stories around, doubtless embroidering a tad more each recounting, until nothing is left but the countless survivors who try to sing like him, preserve long enough to sell themselves with a little bit of the old magic. While the records gather dust, locked in their time, and the other Doors, bereft of any available approximation of the true and necessary captain, fade away in loser bands without identity, without vision.
Vision. What made the Doors magic in the first place. What separates the greats from the journeymen – The Band, the Doors, Velvets, Hendrix, even the Stooges and MC5 – all had a vision. A vision of America, of the human condition. Which is why all the Aerosmiths in the world will never quite cut it, not in that league. Vision: Jim Morrison started living the legend at UCLA, where he was studying film looking to build chops to make his own, a serious student taking technical classes. Never a dilettante, as he proved most firmly in the finale of his own lived movie too murky and staggeringly erratic for celluloid. Lifestyle is art statement, decided enough mid-’60s brats to make that delusion a full-blown movement. So Morrison wandered out of the classroom and drifted dazedly out to the beach, metaphors of transience reverberating back and forth between reality and the haze of myth, depending on which is more convenient and/or lurid. He read a lot, which is possibly the single most dangerous thing any intelligent person with a modicum of recklessness can do: those old croaks like Artaud and Burroughs leave any aspirant a lot to live up to. Money only buys time, but literature corrupts absolutely.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Facts: Jim Morrison was born on December 8, 1943, in Melbourne, Florida. He came from a long line of military careers, and part of his self-hype with the Doors was that both parents were dead. I think Bob Dylan said the same thing once. Odd that a generation so tormented by a state of psychic fatherlessness should be so eager for a stab at parricide, even if only in their fantasies. But then again, the whole trip was fantasy, fantasy rendered death and taxes obsolete along with everything else inconvenient; that's why the fact of death was so very blunt and doubly harsh. We put death in our bodies every day and remained convinced we would live forever, in Utopia yet. Death. Death. Morrison saw death a little earlier than the rest of his peers, a lot earlier than his audience. Perhaps they saw their own death in him, and learned fear; that may have been the ultimate, perhaps only, significance of his life.
Naturally all this came out of L.A.. San Francisco was even more convinced that we would all live forever in one merged mass of ecstasy. New York was a million miles away, a death town in fact and legend, and even New York demanded the Velvet Underground to raise the bannered spectre of death and keep it like a flag of shrouds before their eyes, not to forget, because to forget is to slip, and in the universe the Doors and Velvets mapped out (it had been there a billion years, uncharted and disclaimed, like a New World owned lock stock and buffalo by a Satan, just sitting on his haunches with a rusty smile, waiting six thousand years for some damn fool Columbus to come and get his licks.)
L.A. was the last outpost of the New World, a place where New York hustlers went to cool out a while the natives paid death its taxes and never thought twice because it was all so easy on the installment plan. Death in the smog and death in department stores, layaway, death in subdivisions and TV eyes glassy and furtive in the threatening presence of "normal" human contact. The collective suburban solitude of a million wasted kids living off the folks till you turn forty and riddled by anomie since 14 when you don't even know the meaning of the word. Just the feeling. Doors audience, later co-opted by Black Sabbath, Alice, Bowie, even Lou Reed. Death in the deserts and on the highways where Manson picked up hitchhikers, affable brothers and sisters on their way to the Bay or back down or East or anywhere, easy pickings he had his minions practice on till they were ready for big game, beautiful people, history. In their minds it might just as well as have never happened, when you let acid have the helm and take the long view aeons in either direction what possible difference could this or any puny event on one day in the twilight of the 1960s make, we really don't understand what all the fuss was about.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

And when Charlie's girls went gunning for rock stars, it could never have been the Doors, whose saturation radio blare 'Light My Fire' may well have driven them on even one raw inch of flesh further; they were after Hollywood, which looked old and dead already even though it was populated by young decadents itself, and if rock flesh had fallen helter skelter it would have been the Beach Boys, a token drummer at least, symbolic also of a closed era we all wanted to snuff one way or another then, make double damn sure you never hear surf music again. We were all outward bound and somebody had to go. If tribes is gonna be our conceit then ritual sacrifices are imperative and fitting, just part of the Festival of Life.
Venice. Beach culture, bums, blonde tanned goddesses with hair to their tight little bikini'd asses, and everybody's high, the old beatniks and resident characters are getting more pussy than they can ever remember. The surfers are jacking off and trying to get turned on. The kids are alright tonight, and the night goes on forever. Summer 1965 and momentum is just beginning to build, the Yardbirds are on the radio for the first time, in California Van Morrison's Them have a near–hit with 'Baby Please Don't Go' and a solid smash with 'Gloria'. The national anthem is '(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction', when ironically everybody out here in this sun is getting more than they ever did before. Everything opening up, acid rising like a wave that only an elite has ridden in so far, but it's beginning to be all around if you only look in the right faces. Morrison later claimed that during this period he ate it constantly, "like candy". Who cares if it's true or not. One day he ran into Manzarek, passing acquaintance from UCLA film school days, classically trained musician who grew up to look today like a schoolteacher. But down then back on the beach they squatted in the middle of the sand and Morrison sang him 'Moonlight Drive'.
"When he sang those lines 'Let's swim to the moon/Let's climb through the tide/Penetrate the evening that the city sleeps to hide'," Manzarek said much later, "I said that's it...It seemed as though, if we got a group together, we could make a million dollars."
Note the emphasis. The Doors as concept was put together by those two on that beach that day; then Manzarek went out and got a guitarist and drummer who could follow orders. All three were Maharishi TM devotees. Imagine Morrison trundling up to some TM center with a handkerchief, two flowers, and a couple of pieces of fruit for the Maharishi. TM blissters don't write songs like 'The End'.
The Doors paid what dues mattered at one crumby Strip club and then the Whisky, where Morrison took off on his poetic-improvisational swirlflight and sailed aloft and hungry until Jac Holzman walked in one night and decided this exhibitionistic debauch was just the ticket to give his slightly fading folkie record company a stake in the electric politics everybody saw building. It was an opportunist's market, ripe for carpetbaggers and revivified hustlers who'd had enough sun. Columbia wanted the band too, but Holzman was charming and the band was young and that's how Elektra suddenly came to represent, for about two and a half years, some indefinable magic even tied up in their logo, a label with some mystic class whose groups you bought on sight. The Doors made that company – their first album refused to stop selling till the whole era was done and buried and three inches of rain fallen on the cemetery plot washing away the flowers and graffiti and eventually the memory of the man and all that he and it were about...because a rock 'n' roll record ain't like Artaud and Burroughs, you may learn too late, it’s ephemeral detritus and even its potential to corrupt is only seasonal, a fad, locked in time gone by and receding steadily with no brakes ever possible or hope beyond that in the car where the kid screamed all the way down forever after blasting off that cliff in Rebel Without A Cause but he was no chicken and if only for that frozen moment he certainly wasn't playing then.
'The End'. Their first recording session's claim to history, it freaked out producer Paul Rothchild, who waxed metaphysical with Morrison over the Oedipal drama. It also freaked out the owner of the Whisky, who threw Morrison out of his club. It wasn't exactly Johnny Rivers. The first time I heard it I thought it was a joke. Later, in Berkeley smoking dope with proto-hippies at the height of the Haight, we were hunkered down by the radio as every night when suddenly the deejay yanked it off halfway through the song. "That's enough of that," he said. Maybe so. Last time I heard it, it was in my car with a friend reminiscing and we sang it out loud, and we laughed again. Thinking about the good old days, when dread was new and spangled with magic. Now it's just a sidewalk, a nameless depression following you around like a scroungy dog you don't want for a shadow, sadness and disappointment so diffused we can never name our demons, only wait out the familiar unromantic demeaned desolation and hope for a new charge to come not from rock or any renaissance but somewhere in our gut. To rescue us from the widow's weeds and shabby grubby terminal hippie uniforms we live inside like walking dirtclods, from the flattened spirit which we once needed Morrison and Morrisons to tell us could exist at all.
And of course that is playing right into the dead hands with which he still manipulates us by manipulating our romantic ideas about him. He was a drunk. Period. Talented, like many drunks. Ambitious, like plenty young drunks: dreaming movies that never materialized, writing sophomoric poetry that his stardom would get into hard covers, and what there was of it sparse, reaching more than revelatory almost ever, page. But the music. By the second album it became apparent to quick listeners that the Doors were limited, that Morrison's vision, if we ever took it seriously in the first place, was usually morbid in the most obvious possible way, and thus cheap, and that the whole nightmare could translate into the parody it ultimately became so easily that, well...but when he shot and hit it straight and deep and full force.
People are strange when you're a stranger
Faces look ugly when you're alone
Women seem wicked when you're unwanted
Strange days have dragged us down
Gazing on a city under television skies
And it's all over for the unknown soldier
Baby I'll be back in just a little while, I gotta go for a ride with these guys in this car...
I woke up this morning and I got myself a beer
The future's uncertain and the end is always near
Never saw a woman
So alone
You knew he felt the chill and lived it and that was perhaps the a saddest part, that he recognized his own clown within too late to turn the tide, so like a true asshole and ultimate relic of his time he picked up the Lizard King cartoon and wore it like a bib to keep the drunkdrool from rolling down to stain his shirt and burn a hole through to his heart, absurd, absurd, as the tales proliferated and Jim Morrison, who symbolized the ultimate possibilities and terrors seething at the farthest shores of sexual adventure to an a entire generation, just got drunker and fat and fatter and pretty soon the word was out all down the line and high school kids were scornful of the Doors.
I saw it happen, smirking cynically because my money had been on the Velvets the whole time, but the Velvets were too sleazy and too soon and too inept to snatch a whole generation by the balls and twist 'em, and having been twisted nobody is likely to forget or forgive soon so by the time Waiting For the Sun was released the Doors' stock had dropped to a level just this side of bubblegum even as they still skirted skid row... what did a suburban teenage highschool punk with a customized car with stereo tape deck and fresh unfucked girlfriend just waiting with ripe young tits hardly even squeezed yet, by what unfathomable stretch of whose methedrine-ragged imagination did this kid know from or give a flying fuck in the rain about skid row?
But that was where Morrison wanted to be, down there with the rest of the derelicts: Artaud, Baudelaire, Bodenheim, Burroughs, Kerouac, Jarry, Genet, Charlie Parker, Lenny Bruce, Rimbaud, O'Neill, Faulkner, Bukowski who will survive us all, Neal Cassady who didn't, plus all the rest who never wrote a book or played a song or ever had a thought that any rube picked up on and declared profound because the sum total of their lives was mindless destruction and destruction only and THAT was life Style As Art and nothing else. The real scene is to go down fast and don't fuck around with self-deceit. The audience, if you're lucky enough to have one, can eat deceit. And jive as well, all the lubricious oblique or point-blank ridicule and hostility you can puke out.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

And they did. Eat it.
"Kids, I've got a special surprise for you tonight...[laughter] No, not that, not that..."
Dead cat in a top hat
Suckin' on a young man's brain
Dead cats
Dead rats
Thinks he's an aristocrat
That's crap
I said crap
Some of his best poetry was crap. Like that. A joke and he knew it, so he played it, but it was way too late to play it any way for him to win. Just keep on running. Most rock writers are failed rock musicians; Morrison was a music maker who among other insoluble problems (he willed them insoluble) was a failed and thus supremely frustrated literary figure. One of several attributes he shared, and still shares, with Lou Reed. Would he laugh if he knew that there would always be a sucker like Dotson Rader, a certified literary figure, books under his belt and still drunk every night and even more self-wounding, to come along and share the Morrison obsession with illiterates and acid-lobotomies. There certifiably came a point at which the Lizard King and not art became Morrison's career. But why, why persist in such absurdity, in the certain knowledge that it was so absurd? What perversity. Genet is straight – a logical, diabolically sensible artist who maintained a balance between professional deviance and his art that sustained him into middle age. Even Burroughs is still going strong. Every surviving professional degenerate you can name worked just as hard at it as the dead: Bruce, Bird, Morrison, others...so what crucial factor was it that drew some strange line of demarcation that declared immutably that this one would succeed in cutting himself down and that one would hang on and even achieve a kind of triumph, recidivism or at least celebrity and lots of young ass. Makes you want to punch an old fool like Ginsberg in the mouth. Or maybe it's just that the dead were stronger-willed, they had a fiercer drive to die, and you can mark a sissy or coward by his survival.
Was this what Morrison finally meant when he used to tell interviewers that he was interested in anything to do with chaos, disorder, actions without apparent meaning or motivation? A kind of integrity to self in telling the world, "Look, I just want to die and that's it, there's no reason, please don't bother digging for all the psychological crap, leave society out of it too while you're being honest with both of us, and understand if for only this one moment that I just want to die as quickly as possible for nothing at all. And if my life or anyone's is supposed to have some kind of meaning, and that's another question I'd like to ask is who said that it did in the first place?, but if it is, then let it be that, and put it on my tombstone: ‘He died for no reason at all. A simple, pure, elemental wish.’ Only nature taking its course."
As the Doors' audience took them less seriously with each new record (and Morrison more than anyone else encouraged them to: "PETITION THE LORD WITH PRAYER", screamed like that, is pure conscious intentional burlesque; not to mention all those sappy love songs aimed at 14 year old girls), he became more reckless when he took the stage. Or maybe just more drunk. There is a point in incipient or even confirmed alcoholism at which the drunk finds himself unable to deal with the torments which he picked up the bottle to flee, no matter how much he drinks they boil before his eyes and roll down like tears of tar to scald his flesh and congeal, leaving a curdled sadness and unbearable anguish, he drinks more and more and more until he falls into playpen death, scaled down and frothing with fitful frightening dreams, and when he wakes he drinks again and again on and on and months maybe years go by but there is a point, there comes a point at which the pressure reaches, finally, proportions unbearable under any circumstances or sedatives, no palliative ever invented for this psychic epilepsy, and so he must explode, in some manner, according to his imagination and the various limitations of circumstance: money, friends, set and setting, will there or won't there be a lover or friend or somebody anybody there to catch him if he falls into the deepest ditch yet, and does he want them there if he does, because really there's no recourse, no salve, no balm, no love, no connection of any kind except the clash within the flesh as splintered, nerves flail whiplashing each other, sparks exploding as they do piercing the liver like slivers of glass shot from guns, tearing the gut to shreds, whole human depository for that is what it has become, shaking like a bag of garbage hurled out a porthole into the maw of a hurricane, and worst of all the brain, mind, self, fully, totally conscious and mortified, terrified, humiliated in some final manner, short-circuited by self-loathing and quaking fear of all outside of self, but conscious, awake and aware the whole time, no matter how much you drink, and what you ultimately know at that hideous moment is that no matter what happens after this, even if you survive (and of course you will survive, because it is necessary that you suffer more), even if by some absurdly far-fetched devise you manage to recuperate and "redeem" yourself, "clean up," if you go straight and devote the rest of your life to selfless Ghandi-like humanism, or if you still think you can be saved by love, the love of another for yourself or the love you wish that you could feel for another or the love that it is your most ludicrous conceit to think you can feel for someone else, if you come out of it and "make something" of the rest of your life to the perfect satisfaction of everyone else around you, ah, he pulled out after all – even given any kind of "salvation" conceivable, you know in your guts and your ashen brain and your heart like an old punctured deflated tire lying by the side of the road for dogs to piss on, you know for certain that you will never be whole again.
So, in the midst of this tornado, careening through days and nights commingled and splattered in memory like blood from corpses tumbling out of a multiply fatal accident, as your rage runs free and rampant in its own wild glee, a drooling idiot orgy of infantilism unpent and not funny, not now and not in the retelling and not ever, just ugly, as ugly as anything human can be; in the eye of the hubbub, a certain steely calm demon fortressed deep in your marrow and orchestrating this whole riot, he takes stock of the calamity thus far and makes a cold, firm, logical decision of exactly how best to deal with the panic and its repercussions. He decides and you act. And you will never get to him, because you put him there like a cancer and once he gets his hooks in you there's no reversal possible. So he consults his notes and signals and decides upon the precise nature of your real explosion, the payoff for which the preceding carnage was merely a necessary set-up, a ragged play staged in the ganglia and all along the nerve network out to the very tips of burning wire, unbearable conditions and soul, body and mind in dire extremis, but only preparation, because only now is it time and permissible to ACT.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Maybe you kill someone (seldom yourself; too soon). Maybe your get into or cause an automobile accident. Maybe you pick a fight and get the shit kicked out of you or bully and crush someone or something physically weaker: I have seen sixty-year-old men torment dogs for hours on end...but then that may have been mere boredom. The main thing is you want to destroy. Records. Furniture. Windows. Cars. Possessions of every/any kind. And then on to bigger game. Insects. Animals. Humans. And finally yourself.
Or maybe you're too cowardly even to smash up your living room. There are some people who are perfectly capable of sitting in a chair they would just as soon break, and it never occurs to them to break it, because their only release is hurting another human with words. Or actions, not necessarily physical. Not necessarily at all. So vicious there's no way they could ever know you may, finally, be hurting yourself more. Because guilt is either a fact in front or a potential you cultivate until it becomes solid fact. And then, of course, the guiltier you feel, and there is never enough, your capacity is as boundless as the thirst when you wake up with a hangover – but know that the guiltier you feel, the greater your rage, in perfect mathematical proportions multiplying and feeding each upon itself and then each other, paroxysms of agonized random violence escalating until you either kill yourself or are forcibly curbed by someone or something outside: relatives, friends who wish they weren't, the police, walls and sidewalks and asphalt that rush up, or a blind stumble in front of an oncoming car...but no, that's too easy. Eric Emerson was that kind of coward...
And the easiest way out of all, at least at first, is exhibitionism. Making scenes in bars. Loud, boisterous, creating unpleasantness in every corner of whatever room you happen to have landed in with obnoxious, obscene, aggressive behavior. Instigating fights between others. Causing scenes and then stepping back, enjoying the chaos. But that's at first. Inevitably, of course, you're drawn into the vortex of the trouble you started, and sooner or later you end up as bloody and pointlessly wracked as the rest, fighting for your life in a war you started just to give yourself some diversion. It can begin all kinds of ways: driving down the street in cars, shouting obscenities out the window at passing women. Infantile stuff, silly, adolescent, but indicative. Symptomatic and ominous. Start like that, write it off as rowdy, and as the binges roil by you come a little more unhinged every day, until the day you end up sticking your dick at her instead of your mouth. Or flying into psychopathic rage and attacking a total stranger for no reason in public. That is when you know that you're not just "loose" any more, farthest thing from it in fact; you're not looking for fun, or even kicks–you're looking for damage. The deeper the better. The best, obviously, the kind that can never be fixed, healed, rectified. The immutable act. An assertion of the self at last, in no matter how twisted, diseased, squalid a form. I did this. Guilty. What's next?
Believe me, it has absolutely nothing to do with the noble philosophical diagrams of social theoreticians. Even Stalin knew he was a sicko. A strict destructionist, with the integrity of action, all of which exists in a universe totally separate from that inhabited by the scientists of nihilism and revolution, the bland bespectacled intellects who write the books and find deft rationalizations for what some of us do in the name of nothing but our own impotent rage and clawing terror. The Ralph J. Gleasons who would tell you that Lenny was one big walking Heart just dripping humanism and compassion like sweat off a boiler-stoker. And anyone who would tell you that Jim Morrison's own public self-humiliations were anything but willful pathology, a rebel without a cause and nothing romantic about it either.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

The End Is Always Near: Dread, Drunkenness and The Doors, Part. 2

HE BEGAN, like all drunks who have arrived at this stage of the movie, to get in trouble. Havoc on planes, arrested in airports. Pulling a John Lennon before the Beatle progressed to that nadir, pushing his way onto the stage of the Troubadour and raving drunkenly until arrested. Onstage, at a Doors concert this time, in New Haven, telling the crowd how he and a girl were Maced by police in the dressing room.
Who cares at this point whether it was actually true or not. If it wasn't he wanted it to be and if it was he was glad. Stage suddenly covered with police, another arrest, the alcoholic cycle this time turning him through a whole martyr routine, posing like Christ nailed up as they a carried him out. The whole thing stupid. But not as stupid as Miami. The famous Miami cock-flashing incident. January 1969. Drunk beyond capacity for anything but self-abnegation on the ugliest level the drunk can think of. A song broken down in the middle, the lead singer too fucked up to even make a pretense of professionalism, performance, anything. Silence as the whole auditorium slips into suspended animation, stoptime, maybe a few scattered boos, everybody waiting for the Lizard King to do something crazy. That's what we came here and paid good money for. A little vicarious insanity, to carry home and nurse, tuck under the pillow you dream on. Now, 1975, half the audience is ready to see if they can outdo him. An act like that would have absolutely no meaning on the stage today. The other night I saw the Tubes, costume changes, blackouts and all, and a kid next to me outdid them all the way. He's 13 years old and works emptying bedpans in a mental institution; he and some others destroyed my house once. It was a good party. But we're watching the Tubes go through the motions of being outrageous and he's screaming in my ear "I wanna fuck a porpoise, it'd be so fuckin' slick" Then he's screaming at the Tubes:
"FUCK A HORSE! FUCK A HORSE! FUCK A HORSE!" The lead guitarist couldn't handle it. In true Vegas tradition, he exasperatedly said: "Will somebody please deal with this person." One guy tried to, but we dissuaded him easily because so much of the rest of the crowd was in such an incredible uproar it really didn't matter. And they weren't in that state because the Tubes were such consummate riot-fusers. They were waiting, they used the Tubes as an excuse to explode. Same at any concert. The only group I ever saw who could actually outdo their audience at being subhuman was the Stooges. The night Iggy pulled a girl bodily up out of the audience, threw her down on the stage, yanked her panties to her knees and started eating her pussy right there stage center. The time Iggy wound up in the middle of a heaving sea of bodies, suddenly announced, "Hey, somebody's sucking my cock!" And then: "You might as well forget it, you can't make me come." Later in the dressing room the person who honored him thus showed up and Iggy was mortified to discover that it was not a female, as he had for some unaccountable reason supposed, but a drag queen. He slugged the poor guy.
Or the night the Stooges played to a crowd of bikers in a particularly rough bar in Michigan and the vibes were at an all-time hostility threshold and Iggy finally stopped a song in the middle and said "All right, you wanna hear ‘Louie Louie’, we'll play ‘Louie Louie’." So they did a 45 minute version of 'Louie Louie' with new lyrics improvised on the spot: "You can suck my ass/ You biker faggot sissies/ I wish I was back in East L.A...." Some guy in the house kept heckling him and finally Iggy said, "Listen, motherfucker, if you say one more fucking word to me I'm comin' down there and kick your ass!" The guy told him to get fucked and made another rather uncharitable comment pertaining to Iggy's gender identification. So the Star leaped off the Stage, pushed through the crowd till he found his heckler, who beat the shit out of him. They had to take the Ig back to his hotel room after that, call a doctor, the show was over. I went into the dressing room and the owner of the club was offering to punch out anybody in the band who would take him on. A great night.
By standards like that, Morrison screaming drunkenly "YOU WANNA SEE MY COCK" and then zipping down and waving his poor flaccid peter in the air for a couple of still moments before the Pigs moved in to cart him off to the drunk tank yet again...well, even if he did stand trial on charges of exhibitionism, public obscenity, etc., it really wasn't much after all, was it? Not even the Lantz Rentzel of rock – all the girls in that audience were old enough to want it. A definitive non-event. Outrage on the approximate level of R. Meltzer pissing in the fountain at the party held for the Rolling Stones at the end of their '72 tour. And all that did was get Meltzer cut off Atlantic's mailing list, and give the gossips in NYC something to talk about for a couple of days. Yet, curiously enough, this pathetic, petty act was the beginning of the end for Morrison and the Doors. Jeez, times sure change fast.
But maybe we're missing the point. Maybe the public reaction, or any reaction outside Morrison's own self, was irrelevant. Yes. Maybe the reason why there could never be a way up from that point for him (and, by association, his band) was that the real turbulence was all inside that body and mind, in those hands that pulled it out, probably trembling. Did he cry as they carted him off to jail? What else was there left to do? No booze in the pokey. Really, the whole thing's a joke. But we knew that when we stepped in the door. It's just that the punchline's so grotesquely unfunny. As Dotson Rader has speculated, something must have broke in Morrison that day, and it must have had something to do with what people think of, or have thought of, as manhood. (What they think now is increasingly difficult to decipher.) Rader contends Morrison unmanned himself that day, an act of symbolic castration and advertisement of terminal impotence to the world.
Like saying, After this, you'll know better than to expect anything from me. I admit it's an extreme way of dealing with the fear that when the Lizard King got any one of limitless available conquests into the sack, he might not be able to perform. But extremism was the whole ethic of the Morrison/Doors trip, if it ever had any ethic at all. It's a common secret that most of our heroes, legends and shamans are psychic cripples, anyway, and the crippled part usually is, or has something to do with, the sexual function. Lou and Iggy have both publicly bragged, years after Morrison's exhibitionist episode, that they couldn't get it up. Both sounded proud of it, too; with Lou it's a simple case of distaste for sex, or at least enormous preference for drugs, of sorts and in quantity sufficient to render anybody neutered; Iggy told me on more than one occasion that he didn't like to get laid, would rather jack off, or not even that, and in fact that the reason Raw Power was such a good album was because he didn't get laid for two years. Something to do with displacement of energy or some such line, you know the old Buck Turgidson jazz.
But Morrison, in the old-line macho-stud tradition of which Dotson Rader is the eloquent death rattle, had, or felt he had, an image to maintain. Lizard King. It's truly a shame that he didn't live to see the rise of glitter and the spectacle of coast-to-coast fops in love with their own images in the mirror, boys with not a hair out of place who fuck neither male nor female nor beast. I know some, you know some, everybody knows at least one. Sign of the times. Poor Jim, a victim of his own most devoutly desired chaos. And on top of everything else died too soon to see it, all of it, turn as absurd as he'd been in his most pathetic burlesques.
Artistically, the Doors' stock hit an all-time low with The Soft Parade, released not long after the weenie-waving incident, which may help explain the album's utter limpness. Relying more and more on brass, strings, and anything else they could bring in, they had not only failed to live up to their original promise – they had farted in the faces of everybody who ever believed in them. It was a stupid album, stupid as any of the solo Lou Reed and maybe worse, sappy love ballads alternating with muddled imagery and pathetic attempts at macho raunch by the L.K. When Morrison Hotel came out a year later, Greil Marcus, then my editor at Rolling Stone, told me he was afraid to listen to it. I ended up reviewing it, liking it, giving it more than it deserved really, because somewhere down the line I had decided that I liked Morrison's clowning, that it was far easier to identify with a drunken fool than some Lizard King. Just like Lou. January 1971 Elektra released 13, a sort of Greatest Hits compilation that I rave-reviewed, since it contained most of the classics from 'Back Door Man' to 'Land Ho' and very little of the dross that even an drunken idiocy buff couldn't sit through. Yet somehow the Doors had become a dead issue. Somehow? Jesus Christ, how can anyone have followed all this and not see that he went about it systematically? At a certain point he realized the absurdity of his entire mystique. At another point he decided to see just how far he could go in terms of making a spectacle of himself before he was either laughed out of the business or locked up. And, finally, there had to be a point where he decided to die. I am certain of it. Because one of Jim Morrison's great torments was that, no matter what he'd done or accomplished musically, or what anybody said, he had failed at his perennial and utmost aspiration: to he taken seriously as an artist, creating a body of work of enduring significance.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

If that sounds corny, it's only because the truth often is and so are most peoples' largest dreams and frustrations. And besides it's not corny at all – we've all become such Philistines and professional cynics that we automatically sneer when somebody begins talking about how they would like to know some genuine aesthetic achievement. Because, just like we decided in the ‘60s that the whole world was wide open for the taking and we wanted it NOW, we, if there is any sort of "we" at all, have made an equally collective and unanimous decision in the ‘70s that nothing really matters, that anything pretending to be good art by any traditional definition is automatically shit (because, we reason if we're inclined to intellectualize it at all, all traditional artist modes have been milked dry), so therefore the only thing left is kicks, sleaze, degradation and whatever further shocks we can squeeze out of ourselves, until every perversion and brutality has been exhausted and rerun to terminal boredom and there is truly nothing left to do, nothing at all to dream of or wish for or aspire to, nothing period.
Which, obviously, looks like a pretty safe place to be. If you don't care about anything, don't expect anything, don't want anything, it seems like it should be pretty hard for you to experience disappointment or hurt. Of course, it doesn't work out that way, but it looks good on paper. Just like the ‘60s. Entertainment now is being beat over the head with baseball bats every fifteen minutes, with the time between narrowing steadily as we all get number. When I saw Jaws, I walked out at the end and said, Well, if it's come to this, then fuck it, I want Auschwitz, call it Jews and have nothing but solid atrocities for two or three hours, with none of this bullshit plot and characterization padding in between. A month or two later I got my chance to fulfill that wish, when they released a movie called Ilse, She Wolf of the S.S., which featured, among other things, a guy getting his dick sliced off by a razor blade, closeups of maggots digging into days-old dead flesh, as well as protracted scenes involving every type of sadism and brutality the creators could come up with. Fortunately or unfortunately, I had just found out that snuff films existed when Ilse hit Detroit, and was so grossed out and disturbed that I passed on a film that I would have jumped at the chance to see two weeks previous. What all this has to do with Morrison is that it's probably just as well that things turned out as they did, maybe he died on time, because otherwise he would have had to grow old watching all this happen and sinking daily in the mire of the certitude of his own obsolescence. Plus which he knew he could never have made it as the kind of "serious" poet-as-artist he wished to be.
What kind of fool would go to Paris in hopes of finding literary stimulation and a revitalization of creative energies on some new and different level? The French are the deadest, glummest bunch on the face of the earth. Who did he think he was going to run into there, Hemingway? Fitzgerald? Apollinaire, maybe? Celine died in 1961, of natural causes and lifelong vitriol. Artaud long dead, Genet still alive but who cares? All he's good for is feebly wandering around Grant Park ogling cops' baskets and writing ad copy for the Youth Revolution Morrison had already seen draining itself for Esquire. Or chumming up with the Black Panthers, No, no, all the truly cool people that were legends to Morrison were dead, or just old jerks like Genet, Burroughs, not worth the time or trouble and what would they have to say to him anyway? "You have inspired the young people greatly, they will build a new world a because you sang of fucking your mother"? No. There was nothing left to do but die himself.
I remember hearing about it. I was in San Francisco, hanging out, getting drunk, getting started on my own career and so-called legend. I'd listened to L.A. Woman with a certain eagerness, found a failed attempt at a rock-blues album and getting back to the roots and all that further impotence, all except for the title cut, which remains one of the all-time Doors classics, Morrison's ultimate evocation of L.A., which maybe really did finish his work, in which case he certainly knew it, so the next move and the actual end (and how strange and unreal it sounds to say that now, "the actual end" – as if the endless commemoration of death in plastic cartoons made the fact, the real thing, a feelingless anticlimax) were no more accidental than all the rest of it. You explode a little bit and get kicked out of the Whisky. Explode a little more and sell a million albums. Push it just slightly past that and wind up in jail. One more small step and you've got your cock out in front of the eyes of the world. Explode as a matter of course, nightly, daily, out of habit, carelessly, pointlessly, unconsciously, like breathing. And finally explode all the way, the course completed, all loose plot ends sewed up, like walking out of a movie, climbing into the backseat of the car and dozing off peaceful as a senile paralytic in a geriatric home. Only this time you don't wake up. But two questions: under such circumstances, wouldn't it, after a while, become almost impossible to isolate the factors that make one explosion sell a million albums and another land you in jail or on your ass in the alley, so how could any sane person distinguish one event from the other? and, similarly, if you really didn't wake up this time, would you, given your state of consciousness for the past five years, know the difference?
All I know is that death is a bit of a prankster with victim and onlooker alike. When I heard about Hendrix, I emitted a cynical laugh; it meant nothing to me, because I really didn't feel any obsession for either him or his music and it was new fun being cynical and jaded in August 1970.
When Janis Joplin died a month or so later, I was truly upset, saddened, troubled. I thought about it all day, went home that night with a six-pack of East Side beer (cheap lousy L.A. brand) and had a bad, depressed drunk, gloomily reading the latest issue of Rolling Stone. I also remember that tied in with my depression over Janis' death was the fact that Fun House had been panned mercilessly, even ridiculed, treated like some failed novelty album, in that new Stone. And here's the rub: I never gave a shit about Janis Joplin or her music. Somehow there was the heavy sense that she was one of life's born victims, a tragic/pathetic figure, plus her death following so quickly on the heels of Hendrix's raised questions, perhaps the first serious questions, questions that the Doors for all their lurid phantasmagorias had never been able to raise, about the true nature of the rock youth culture. But when Morrison died, a guy whose work I not only liked a lot but identified with as a personality and an alkie, the death that should seemingly have hit me most personally, I felt nothing at all. I wasn't surprised. I wasn't shocked. I just said, "Oh. Wow, that's really too bad." And not because I was jaded either.
Now, four years later, I'm stuck sitting around waiting for Lou and Iggy to kick off. I know it's bound to happen before either one reaches 40. And I'm truly, truly curious to see just exactly how I will feel on those two occasions.
Lester Bangs, unpublished, 1975