Post by darkstar on Jan 2, 2005 0:30:39 GMT
JIM MORRISON: RIDING OUT THE FINAL STORM
By Eric Van Lustbader
Circus
January 31, 1981
And so it came to pass that the Erlking met the Changeling and touched him. And the Changeling turned to dust.
London lay flickering like a tiny jewel in the soft summer fog. The humid twilight rushed in, blotting out the death of the sun. A violent squall was forming over the Channel. Sheets of water, lividly lit by blue and white lightning, brushed and then drenched the Dover cliffs.
A man on the rum all his life, Morrison fled L.A. at the completion of the last album. L.A. Woman (Elektra), and entered Paris alone, tired, and afraid.
Flashback: Madison Square Garden’s Felt Forum. The house lights dimmed, the Doors were announced, and a peculiar and moved from the shadowed corners, lacing the room with an emotional current. “Hullo,” said Jim. And the Doors began to play.
“Five to one, baby, one in five,” he sang. Grabbing the mike a whiplike motion, he began to stamp around the stage, approaching the audience, “No one here gets out alive/you get yours baby/I’ll get mine/Gonna make it, baby, if we try.” He extorted them, clawing with fingers and voice: “The old get old and the young get stronger/May take a week and it many take longer/They got the guns but we got the numbers/Gonna win. Yeah, we’re takin over!” (Five To One)
Morrison was a reviled figure: hated by the press; never taken seriously by critics who felt themselves lost amid his cinematic imagery. He had dressed himself in funeral leather, dropped his pants, shouted obscenities, and was guilty only of believing a myth he had created. And after all, that’s something almost all rock stars are guilty of.
Yet of all the self-created myths in the rock world, Morrison could be forgiven for believing his, precisely because his image, and with it, the success and power of the Doors, depended on his being a myth. For as long as he lived, Morrison was less the rock star and more the Lizard King, intoning: “Is everybody in? The ceremony is about to begin.” He was the misunderstood poet, living with in the constrictive confines of the rock medium. Critics judged the Doors solely on their (the critics’) limited musical terms (they were an American band who neither played the blues nor accepted the West Coast Sound that Rolling Stone revered); friends listened to what the Doors were saying, because to deny them that courtesy was to negate the purpose of the band entirely.
When Morrison sang, “No one here gets out alive,” he wasn’t talking about the theatre, he meant life itself. That was his rationale for revolution, one of the topics that obsessed him and that runs throughout most of his songs; No one’s getting out alive, so we might as well do what we can to change it and ourselves: “I’ll tell you this, no eternal reward will forgive us for wasting the dawn!”
Flashback: Strange Days. Morrison was a man who knew people. He wrote about what they were really like, and much of it wasn’t pretty or pleasant; “people are strange.” Yet he wrote with an impossible kind of romanticism that was supremely gentle: Listening to Strange Days is like watching Fellini’s Satyricon. Morrison’s words are so cinematic that each song begins to form pictures in the mind. More than any other American songwriter – lyricist, if you will – he had this quality. Like the film, Strange Days builds its story line (of people trying desperately to reach each other through the choking haze of drugs and artificial masks) through the images and characters in a series of vignettes. And the whole becomes more and more visible the deeper one gets into the film and/or the album. Because Strange Days has been set up that way. The more impersonal, scene setting “Strange Days” begins the LP, with Ray Manzarek’s creeping, descending organ leading to “Strange days have found us/Strange Days have tracked us down/They’re going to destroy/Our casual joys.” Here’s Morrison’s world then, where dark, nameless forces are at work destroying lives’ where Robby Krieger’s guitar echoes frightening off the constricting alleyways that make up this world.
“Love Me Two Times” follows “You’re Lost Little Girl,” as if sex were the only solution the persona of the song could think of to help the girl, but of course that isn’t the answer” “Love me two time, girl/one for tomorrow, one just for today/Love me two times/ I’m going away.”<br>
“Unhappy Girl” serves as a prelude to the second part of the album, which deals with the effects of drugs on people. The beginning physical nightmare of the drug in “Horse Latitudes” gives way to the euphoric feeling of “Moonlight Drive”: Let’s swim to the moon, uh huh/Let’s climb through the tide/Surrender to the waiting world/That laps against our sides.”<br>
But beginning on side two, the world begins to change drastically on the inside. “People are strange when you’re a stranger/Faces look ugly when your alone/Women seem wicked when your unwanted/Streets are uneven when you’re down/When your strange/Faces come out of the rain/When you’re strange/No one remembers your name.” When your strung out and looking for your connection, you’ve no eyes for women and no matter how many people you’re with, you remain alone, no one wants to know you.
The completely depersonalized “My Eyes Have Seen You,” which represents the gradual letting go of reality in favor of the drugged vision sweeping over the “television skies” of the city, lead directly to the very personal “I Can’t See Your Face In My Mind.” There two songs are a reprise of the duality theme stated in “Strange Days” and “People Are Strange,” moving from the diffuse to the specific. And the album ends: When the music’s over turn out the light/The music is your special friend until the end.”<br>
By Eric Van Lustbader
Circus
January 31, 1981
And so it came to pass that the Erlking met the Changeling and touched him. And the Changeling turned to dust.
London lay flickering like a tiny jewel in the soft summer fog. The humid twilight rushed in, blotting out the death of the sun. A violent squall was forming over the Channel. Sheets of water, lividly lit by blue and white lightning, brushed and then drenched the Dover cliffs.
A man on the rum all his life, Morrison fled L.A. at the completion of the last album. L.A. Woman (Elektra), and entered Paris alone, tired, and afraid.
Flashback: Madison Square Garden’s Felt Forum. The house lights dimmed, the Doors were announced, and a peculiar and moved from the shadowed corners, lacing the room with an emotional current. “Hullo,” said Jim. And the Doors began to play.
“Five to one, baby, one in five,” he sang. Grabbing the mike a whiplike motion, he began to stamp around the stage, approaching the audience, “No one here gets out alive/you get yours baby/I’ll get mine/Gonna make it, baby, if we try.” He extorted them, clawing with fingers and voice: “The old get old and the young get stronger/May take a week and it many take longer/They got the guns but we got the numbers/Gonna win. Yeah, we’re takin over!” (Five To One)
Morrison was a reviled figure: hated by the press; never taken seriously by critics who felt themselves lost amid his cinematic imagery. He had dressed himself in funeral leather, dropped his pants, shouted obscenities, and was guilty only of believing a myth he had created. And after all, that’s something almost all rock stars are guilty of.
Yet of all the self-created myths in the rock world, Morrison could be forgiven for believing his, precisely because his image, and with it, the success and power of the Doors, depended on his being a myth. For as long as he lived, Morrison was less the rock star and more the Lizard King, intoning: “Is everybody in? The ceremony is about to begin.” He was the misunderstood poet, living with in the constrictive confines of the rock medium. Critics judged the Doors solely on their (the critics’) limited musical terms (they were an American band who neither played the blues nor accepted the West Coast Sound that Rolling Stone revered); friends listened to what the Doors were saying, because to deny them that courtesy was to negate the purpose of the band entirely.
When Morrison sang, “No one here gets out alive,” he wasn’t talking about the theatre, he meant life itself. That was his rationale for revolution, one of the topics that obsessed him and that runs throughout most of his songs; No one’s getting out alive, so we might as well do what we can to change it and ourselves: “I’ll tell you this, no eternal reward will forgive us for wasting the dawn!”
Flashback: Strange Days. Morrison was a man who knew people. He wrote about what they were really like, and much of it wasn’t pretty or pleasant; “people are strange.” Yet he wrote with an impossible kind of romanticism that was supremely gentle: Listening to Strange Days is like watching Fellini’s Satyricon. Morrison’s words are so cinematic that each song begins to form pictures in the mind. More than any other American songwriter – lyricist, if you will – he had this quality. Like the film, Strange Days builds its story line (of people trying desperately to reach each other through the choking haze of drugs and artificial masks) through the images and characters in a series of vignettes. And the whole becomes more and more visible the deeper one gets into the film and/or the album. Because Strange Days has been set up that way. The more impersonal, scene setting “Strange Days” begins the LP, with Ray Manzarek’s creeping, descending organ leading to “Strange days have found us/Strange Days have tracked us down/They’re going to destroy/Our casual joys.” Here’s Morrison’s world then, where dark, nameless forces are at work destroying lives’ where Robby Krieger’s guitar echoes frightening off the constricting alleyways that make up this world.
“Love Me Two Times” follows “You’re Lost Little Girl,” as if sex were the only solution the persona of the song could think of to help the girl, but of course that isn’t the answer” “Love me two time, girl/one for tomorrow, one just for today/Love me two times/ I’m going away.”<br>
“Unhappy Girl” serves as a prelude to the second part of the album, which deals with the effects of drugs on people. The beginning physical nightmare of the drug in “Horse Latitudes” gives way to the euphoric feeling of “Moonlight Drive”: Let’s swim to the moon, uh huh/Let’s climb through the tide/Surrender to the waiting world/That laps against our sides.”<br>
But beginning on side two, the world begins to change drastically on the inside. “People are strange when you’re a stranger/Faces look ugly when your alone/Women seem wicked when your unwanted/Streets are uneven when you’re down/When your strange/Faces come out of the rain/When you’re strange/No one remembers your name.” When your strung out and looking for your connection, you’ve no eyes for women and no matter how many people you’re with, you remain alone, no one wants to know you.
The completely depersonalized “My Eyes Have Seen You,” which represents the gradual letting go of reality in favor of the drugged vision sweeping over the “television skies” of the city, lead directly to the very personal “I Can’t See Your Face In My Mind.” There two songs are a reprise of the duality theme stated in “Strange Days” and “People Are Strange,” moving from the diffuse to the specific. And the album ends: When the music’s over turn out the light/The music is your special friend until the end.”<br>