Post by tzinana on Jul 25, 2005 3:36:08 GMT
"For Groupies Only . . . And Sensitive Souls"
By Jon Pareles
The New York Times
March 24, 1991
Jim Morrison didn't need a big, silly movie like "The
Doors" to keep his big, silly mystique alive. Almost
within minutes after his charismatic, sloppy,
unstable, sometimes buffoonish, sometimes inspired
self died in Paris in 1971, his legend sprang up:
Morrison the rock shaman, the Dionysian stud, the
tortured poet, the death-haunted genius dead at 27,
still young enough to be a poster pinup. With Oliver
Stone's version of the Doors story now carpet-bombing
the media, the Morrison mystique threatens to grow
from a cult obsession to an epidemic.
Despite the final Doors albums, which are best
remembered through their hit singles, Morrison didn't
live long enough to be remembered as a self-parody.
(Imagine him now, graying and portentous, touring
arenas in the 1990's with the umpteenth Doors reunion,
showing video clips of the glory days.) Even now, his
image -- perhaps the Christlike pose on the cover of
"The Best of the Doors," perhaps the shadowy head shot
from the Doors' first album -- is an icon for rock
that looks beyond petty thrills to dare the mysteries
of sex and death, solitude and revelation.
In his legend, Morrison is an old-fashioned romantic
hero, contemplating his own mortality under perfect
curly tresses, seeking the palace of wisdom via the
road of excess. His resonant baritone (along with the
eerie tone of Ray Manzarek's keyboards) has been
imitated by rockers from David Bowie to Billy Idol to
Joy Division to R.E.M. to INXS; it's stylistic
shorthand for the Profound.
The Morrison legend survives not because he was so
very profound, but because he made a brilliant show of
profundity and because he had a great band; one false
note and lines like "I'm going but I need a little
time/ I promised I would drown myself in mystic heated
wine" would seem ludicrous instead of spooky. As the
1960's recede, Morrison has also become a symbol of an
era of possibilities and bravado (especially when it
came to sex and drugs), a symbol that grows more
poignant now, when nothing seems safe. He knew that a
world without limits would include terror as well as
ecstasy, but he dived into it anyway.
Among other late-1960's legends, Jimi Hendrix's legacy
has turned out to be a musical one, as guitarists
plunder and squander his innovations; Janis Joplin has
joined her models among hard-living blueswomen as a
cautionary object lesson. But the Morrison legend
--further from the racial and class complexities of
the blues, closer to Hollywood and the glamour of
decadence -- bequeathed something every black-clad
teenager can appreciate and appropriate: attitude. It
was a gloomy but sexy, literary but virile attitude;
high school poets everywhere could be grateful that
someone had finally dressed poetic aspirations in
tight leather pants.
The Morrison legend is renewed every time another
sensitive soul discovers "The End" on the Doors' 1967
debut album. As Robby Krieger's guitar ripples out a
California raga, Morrison recites, "Father . . . yes,
son? . . . I want to kill you . . . Mother . . . I
want to ooh-whoa-OH-BAY-BAYYYYYY!" The Oedipus complex
becomes a rock-and-roll hook.
With the Doors backing him, their
jazz-blues-pop-raga-rock transforming ambiguous rhymes
into oracular lyrics, Morrison took rock to places it
hadn't gone before, at least not consciously. Most of
those places were on the undergraduate liberal-arts
syllabus: the Psychology 101 cribbings in "The End,"
the Existentialist Philosophy musings of "People Are
Strange," the Introduction to Anthropology discussions
of shamanism, plus dabblings in Surrealist Poetry and
Avant-Garde Drama and Comparative Mythology.
For decades, college professors had startled
innumerable students out of their high-school
certainties with such glimpses of the irrational, the
elusive mysteries of Eros and Thanatos. The professors
showed the younger generation that they hadn't
invented craziness all by themselves, and revealed
that the chaos and fear and vertigo they felt on the
verge of adulthood were not theirs alone. The Doors
did the same, but in a form that was simpler,
catchier, more vivid and danceable, too, a long way
from polysyllabic, dusty old tomes by Freud or Frazer.
Morrison didn't crib everything. His obsession with
lizards and snakes was his own, and his come-ons were
pure rock-and-roll. But he was a visionary, in part,
because he admired the visionaries of earlier eras.
Pop performers from Frank Sinatra to Little Richard
had aroused Dionysian frenzy; Morrison, however, knew
who Dionysius was.
And what endears him to each new wave of Morrison
worshipers is that, because of and despite what he
knew, Morrison apparently wanted to be Dionysius,
tempting self-destruction for the ecstasy of the
moment and refusing to acknowledge limits. "I wasn't
kidding," he intones at the end of "Not to Touch the
Earth." "I can do anything." In all the important
ways, the cult insists, he wasn't kidding, wasn't
posing, wasn't synthesizing a show-business image; he
was the real thing, the shaman-martyr he promised to
be, and his death proves it. Hence the fascination
that attends every tell-all biography; his excesses
are documented, and someone really did have all those
wild times.
Morrison was often out of control; the inspiration
that sustained the first three Doors albums drowned
afterward in drugs, alcohol and fame. But after the
two decades of recessions and shrinking ambitions that
followed the 1960's -- decades in which discipline and
temperance have been rehabilitated as virtues, while
risk-taking subsides -- Morrison seems ever more
remote and more daring. In the current age of control,
he is the archetype of going all the way. He would
have liked that.
By Jon Pareles
The New York Times
March 24, 1991
Jim Morrison didn't need a big, silly movie like "The
Doors" to keep his big, silly mystique alive. Almost
within minutes after his charismatic, sloppy,
unstable, sometimes buffoonish, sometimes inspired
self died in Paris in 1971, his legend sprang up:
Morrison the rock shaman, the Dionysian stud, the
tortured poet, the death-haunted genius dead at 27,
still young enough to be a poster pinup. With Oliver
Stone's version of the Doors story now carpet-bombing
the media, the Morrison mystique threatens to grow
from a cult obsession to an epidemic.
Despite the final Doors albums, which are best
remembered through their hit singles, Morrison didn't
live long enough to be remembered as a self-parody.
(Imagine him now, graying and portentous, touring
arenas in the 1990's with the umpteenth Doors reunion,
showing video clips of the glory days.) Even now, his
image -- perhaps the Christlike pose on the cover of
"The Best of the Doors," perhaps the shadowy head shot
from the Doors' first album -- is an icon for rock
that looks beyond petty thrills to dare the mysteries
of sex and death, solitude and revelation.
In his legend, Morrison is an old-fashioned romantic
hero, contemplating his own mortality under perfect
curly tresses, seeking the palace of wisdom via the
road of excess. His resonant baritone (along with the
eerie tone of Ray Manzarek's keyboards) has been
imitated by rockers from David Bowie to Billy Idol to
Joy Division to R.E.M. to INXS; it's stylistic
shorthand for the Profound.
The Morrison legend survives not because he was so
very profound, but because he made a brilliant show of
profundity and because he had a great band; one false
note and lines like "I'm going but I need a little
time/ I promised I would drown myself in mystic heated
wine" would seem ludicrous instead of spooky. As the
1960's recede, Morrison has also become a symbol of an
era of possibilities and bravado (especially when it
came to sex and drugs), a symbol that grows more
poignant now, when nothing seems safe. He knew that a
world without limits would include terror as well as
ecstasy, but he dived into it anyway.
Among other late-1960's legends, Jimi Hendrix's legacy
has turned out to be a musical one, as guitarists
plunder and squander his innovations; Janis Joplin has
joined her models among hard-living blueswomen as a
cautionary object lesson. But the Morrison legend
--further from the racial and class complexities of
the blues, closer to Hollywood and the glamour of
decadence -- bequeathed something every black-clad
teenager can appreciate and appropriate: attitude. It
was a gloomy but sexy, literary but virile attitude;
high school poets everywhere could be grateful that
someone had finally dressed poetic aspirations in
tight leather pants.
The Morrison legend is renewed every time another
sensitive soul discovers "The End" on the Doors' 1967
debut album. As Robby Krieger's guitar ripples out a
California raga, Morrison recites, "Father . . . yes,
son? . . . I want to kill you . . . Mother . . . I
want to ooh-whoa-OH-BAY-BAYYYYYY!" The Oedipus complex
becomes a rock-and-roll hook.
With the Doors backing him, their
jazz-blues-pop-raga-rock transforming ambiguous rhymes
into oracular lyrics, Morrison took rock to places it
hadn't gone before, at least not consciously. Most of
those places were on the undergraduate liberal-arts
syllabus: the Psychology 101 cribbings in "The End,"
the Existentialist Philosophy musings of "People Are
Strange," the Introduction to Anthropology discussions
of shamanism, plus dabblings in Surrealist Poetry and
Avant-Garde Drama and Comparative Mythology.
For decades, college professors had startled
innumerable students out of their high-school
certainties with such glimpses of the irrational, the
elusive mysteries of Eros and Thanatos. The professors
showed the younger generation that they hadn't
invented craziness all by themselves, and revealed
that the chaos and fear and vertigo they felt on the
verge of adulthood were not theirs alone. The Doors
did the same, but in a form that was simpler,
catchier, more vivid and danceable, too, a long way
from polysyllabic, dusty old tomes by Freud or Frazer.
Morrison didn't crib everything. His obsession with
lizards and snakes was his own, and his come-ons were
pure rock-and-roll. But he was a visionary, in part,
because he admired the visionaries of earlier eras.
Pop performers from Frank Sinatra to Little Richard
had aroused Dionysian frenzy; Morrison, however, knew
who Dionysius was.
And what endears him to each new wave of Morrison
worshipers is that, because of and despite what he
knew, Morrison apparently wanted to be Dionysius,
tempting self-destruction for the ecstasy of the
moment and refusing to acknowledge limits. "I wasn't
kidding," he intones at the end of "Not to Touch the
Earth." "I can do anything." In all the important
ways, the cult insists, he wasn't kidding, wasn't
posing, wasn't synthesizing a show-business image; he
was the real thing, the shaman-martyr he promised to
be, and his death proves it. Hence the fascination
that attends every tell-all biography; his excesses
are documented, and someone really did have all those
wild times.
Morrison was often out of control; the inspiration
that sustained the first three Doors albums drowned
afterward in drugs, alcohol and fame. But after the
two decades of recessions and shrinking ambitions that
followed the 1960's -- decades in which discipline and
temperance have been rehabilitated as virtues, while
risk-taking subsides -- Morrison seems ever more
remote and more daring. In the current age of control,
he is the archetype of going all the way. He would
have liked that.