Post by darkstar on Jun 26, 2005 22:21:29 GMT
John Gilmore Spotlights Jim Morrison
A red-headed girl who knew Ronnie Haran came to me and said Jim Morrison wanted to talk to me. I asked what about, and she said, "The clothes James Dean was wearing when he got killed in the Porsche." Again it was James Dean, as if I toted around some talisman that could be stroked by the true devotee. Morrison was now approaching me as if to share some of the secrets all bundled up in his jumbled metaphors and poses. I couldn't get to know him — the brief jump — start occasions were too quick, too explosively engaged, though I didn't think that made much difference, as each moment of Morrison showed the whole of him.
I told him I didn't know what had happened to Dean's clothes. He'd been taken him to a hospital in Paso Robles after the accident, already dead. The body had been claimed by Dean's father and removed for transport to Indiana.
Morrison said he'd been told the clothes, torn and bloody, had not been claimed along with the other effects belonging to Dean. The clothes had been part of the investigation and when it was over, the clothes had been left behind to be destroyed. Morrison said he believed Dean's clothes were removed from the hospital by a technician, then passed to someone at Warner Brothers. From there who knows?" The same thing with the wrecked Porsche," Morrison said, alluding to its strange disappearance after being exhibited across the country. He wanted to make a film, and the clothes Dean died in were to play an important part. "There's a question about James Dean's premonitions of an early death," he said, "like he knew it would happen, and when it would happen." I said I wasn't sure that Dean had really known that. Morrison believed he had. "He tapped a source where all the answers lie," he said. "This source is an almanac, man. You turn to the page you want, and the answer is yours."
I said I'd like to see such an almanac, and he said it wasn't a matter of sight. I said, "You've looked into this yourself?"
"The way the blind man sees," he said. "You know, I won't see thirty. I'll be dead before I'll reach thirty years of age." After our meeting, he told the redhead I'd spooked him. "He says there's death looking out of your eyes," she said. " But he doesn't mean you're death, man." Morrison had said he was looking at the death in himself, as if in my eyes there were mirrors into which he saw his own death looking back at him, like it was saying, "You ain't getting away, man. I'm keeping on your ass." She said, "He wants to talk to you, but says he'll have to do it like with a screen between you and him, or he'll use a towel — you know, hold a towel over his face so no ghosts get into you and are looking back at him."
Next time I saw Morrison he was totally wasted. He'd drunk a bottle of scotch, smoked a bowl of grass and dropped enough pills to weight a shark line. But it was the Owsley acid he was after.
I had a stock in the freezer compartment of the pad in Silver Lake, and I'd been dropping acid every day for two months. I'd finished building the bike — a Harley chopper that started with a '52 rigid frame and a '54 transmission. I'd bought a brand new FLH engine and had been getting high and riding. I'd never had a bad trip on the acid. Some did. I'd even boost before coming down, and once I dropped three times past the boost just to see how high I could get.
Some nights I'd cruise the Hollywood Hills, or down to a hotdog stand, where I'd drink coffee and smoke and look at the million lights playing over the chrome and the glistening black enamel. Or ride — being a bird in the wind along Pacific Coast Highway, flying with the moon over the ocean. Three-hundred-million moons moving on the black water. Earlier rides would come through my head. Remembering Jimmy — a long time in the wind. I didn't boost on the rides because of the delay in escalation. I'd head north up the grapevine and eat a steak at the top of the hill on the way to Bakersfield. Old Highway 99 held a few dark stretches where I could open the bike and let it roll straight wide open. But sometimes, at close to a hundred miles per hour, the springer front end would start vibrating and jumping, and I'd have to slow down or go airborne. Coasting easy was the best, like Jesus Christ was right behind me on the pillion pad and I could stick out my elbows and feel His knee caps.
I'd gone as high as I could go — never sleeping, never closing my eyes unless I wanted to boogie on the pretty lights. My back had been pressed to the ceiling of how high I could get, and I'd been looking down on a world from something like a satellite, my arms and legs hanging down into infinity. It was a world not like the green earth, but like an eternal spark — like a finger painting by Michelangelo none of this in visual terms, but as sensations in the brain. I had to read them through signals, or like feeling Braille with some sixth sense.
The life of young Janis Joplin had swung from ground-zero to landing straight-up midnight in one fast season since she'd slithered onto the Monterey Pop Festival stage. In a tight silver-white body-hugging outfit, she'd stomped her foot hard on the boards the same way old Hank had done, shrieked once loud and long, and from that point on no one who knew what rock was about would ever forget who Janis was.
In her ascent, Janis kicked some holes and others climbed through, thickening the swarm of rock groups since the Beatles. In came tall, thin poet-faced Jim Morrison, with John Densmore, a drummer, and two others calling themselves the Doors. They kicked off at the London Fog, a dumping ground for groups near the Whisky on the Strip. Morrison hadn't really played his hand yet-he was still figuring out what it was. He was hanging around, staying stoned, trying to rifle together some repertoire that would hopefully grab somebody by the balls.
His gangling droop-faced charm had caught Ronnie Haran; she even housed Morrison, who had been sleeping in doorways and backseats. When the group was dumped by the London Fog, Ronnie managed to bring them to the Whiskey as an opening group-loosening up the crowd for Buffalo Springfield. It was okay when Morrison wasn't too stoned to stand on his feet.
I can still see him, eye to eye - but was he conscious? His own sack of consciousness was half full of dope, snort, and boozed to the gills. Far out. Zonksville.
Micro-poet-cum-bong-headed-showman.
He was different, all right, and it took me a little while to get a fix on this potentially super showman - a kind of daredevil Liberace of the hippie circus, minus the candelabra. The real bummer for Morrison was that he was nuts, or at least a part of him was, like some snapped-in-two electrical line, leaping and sparking and jumping wild.
The quasi-poet in him talked the "black ship of death" while he wallowed in dope and booze with a righteous gusto anyone suicide-prone might envy. He talked about blowing the lid. He said the top of the skull goes off like the lid of a Zippo lighter.
Morrison ached to be a star, a top dog. He wouldn't say it that way, but his lack of force - or heart, as Janis called it - held him and the Doors back as a kind of a hazy medallion, an out-of-focus Don Quixote. And there, despite the Three Penny Opera black ship of death baloney he battered down into his performances, he'd drag the three others in the group - and usually the audience — on a kind of fanciful, kaleidoscopic roller-ride through his own shallow head trips.
Elvis Presley said to me, "The Doors were good as a group . . . The music was pretty good, but it wasn't rock 'n' roll. It wasn't rock, and it wasn't blues. The guy on the drums — that Densmore — he was dam good. He was an artist, man. But Morrison had his own thing going, and maybe it was a product of the times and of the mind-trippin' hippie symbolism. But it wasn't rock, and it wasn't going to last."
Morrison's true pain didn't shine through the music. He wanted to suffer - "Without pain there can be no art," he said, and cranked up the watts of his life as he cranked up performance watts. The statement was clearly his own. Wrecking one's life - that was Morrison's bottom-dollar gift, and salutes are due. At wrecking lives, Jim Morrison takes the crown for his singular, outrageous effort. He went at it with a vengeance. No one could top him at laying waste a measure of talent and much opportunity. He was no Elvis, no Beatles. Here was the true sneaky-pete boy-wonder wino with an insatiable thirst for his own finale. Unable to fuse the showman, the musical talent, the good voice or the even the consciousness of an era into being the star, Morrison's top-banana persona came laced together with death. "Real death," Morrison said, "the experience of transcendence . . ." The real trick was getting out of his own skin.
Janis saw him as a kind of Hollywood loser. "A freak," she said. "He's like the guy sticking knives in himself. If you dig the scene, you go in the tent and that's what you're gettin'. You don't go to a fucking hot-dog stand for a candlelight dinner."
I gave the last of the Owsley stash to the redhead, who I suppose passed it over to Morrison, a substitute for Dean's death clothes. By then the Doors were going big time, but you couldn't pin Morrison to commercial success. He faked not giving a shit, and sang about killing his father and fucking his mother. The real part of him was too weird and strung out and desperate. Suicidal stunts and pranks — ledge walking, body throwing, jumping out of windows and waving his dick around ... all of it showier than a solitary game of Russian roulette. Jumping out of a window wasn't the way he'd go, he said. He'd seen his time in the almanac. It was a secret, he said.
The thread of his music, Morrison claimed, was an opening of consciousness in the vein of Artaud. But his closeness to Artaud was perhaps the crystallizing of an aspiring imitator via self-crucifixion. It wasn't the music that was making a dent—it was Morrison himself, not the performer or the self-styled poet, but the one who was wrecking his life. His rush of unconventionality led him into center stage for a brief strut in the spotlight.
It wasn't the fame he chased, but the idea of himself as a bullet ricocheting through his own insides, tearing away inside in high profile, breaking himself into many pieces, like blasting open a keg to let the goods blow out. He went into a variable reality in which he saw himself as a forerunner shooting through a universe daring others to follow. He had a fix on what it was Jimmy Dean had been driven by, and what Rimbaud's craziness was all about. Morrison was chasing that cement that made them who they were, and made them know the, had to smash themselves apart and let the other one out.
Al Wilson, a musician I knew from the Canned Heat group, said it was hard to imagine Janis dead - and harder to picture her smoldering down to a pile of ashes no bigger than a quart of beer. Wilson said, "She was the best there is. She had the fame you dream about when you're busting your ass to make it. The kind of fame no one forgets. You don't die — you go into history, man. She was what we dream of being . . ." Wilson shot up and died of an overdose a month after Janis was dead. Jim Morrison's almanac would ring true: he'd be dead a long time before hitting thirty. Despite the empty music and the weightless poems, Morrison rode the snake, galloping down the death trip like Lancelot with a hard-on. He plunged in under some strange circumstances in Paris — no one really surviving with evidence of exactly how he died. His corpse was supposedly found in the bathtub with blood wadding up one nostril from a big hit of heroin.
I'd looked at the monkey bones Janis had given me. They still smelled of patchouli and whatever that gardenia stuff had been. I'd think about her tongue and that black paint on her toenails. I'd sucked her saliva into my mouth — drunk of her. I liked to think of her living in my blood. Maybe it was me that was the vampire. Sometimes, at certain moments, little threads of acid sort of wiggle across some screen in my head like small strings of cells, a bunch of tiny glass compartments like the banded body of a dirt worm. There's a picture of the moon on the black ocean. There's another of a naked girl on the rocks. There's a quick picture of Jim Morrison's face — a mismatched mask sort of shifting for a place to settle, but it'll never settle. The eyes are black holes. He's the ghost of a time gone by, the true hero isolated and alone in this time capsule, like a shrunken head in a tube. Then the worm wiggles past and is gone. Burn, Jim, burn.
THE ABOVE EXCERPTS FROM:
LAID BARE: A MEMOIR OF WRECKED LIVES
AND THE HOLLYWOOD DEATH TRIP
www.johngilmore.com/Celebrities/jim_morrison-final.html
A red-headed girl who knew Ronnie Haran came to me and said Jim Morrison wanted to talk to me. I asked what about, and she said, "The clothes James Dean was wearing when he got killed in the Porsche." Again it was James Dean, as if I toted around some talisman that could be stroked by the true devotee. Morrison was now approaching me as if to share some of the secrets all bundled up in his jumbled metaphors and poses. I couldn't get to know him — the brief jump — start occasions were too quick, too explosively engaged, though I didn't think that made much difference, as each moment of Morrison showed the whole of him.
I told him I didn't know what had happened to Dean's clothes. He'd been taken him to a hospital in Paso Robles after the accident, already dead. The body had been claimed by Dean's father and removed for transport to Indiana.
Morrison said he'd been told the clothes, torn and bloody, had not been claimed along with the other effects belonging to Dean. The clothes had been part of the investigation and when it was over, the clothes had been left behind to be destroyed. Morrison said he believed Dean's clothes were removed from the hospital by a technician, then passed to someone at Warner Brothers. From there who knows?" The same thing with the wrecked Porsche," Morrison said, alluding to its strange disappearance after being exhibited across the country. He wanted to make a film, and the clothes Dean died in were to play an important part. "There's a question about James Dean's premonitions of an early death," he said, "like he knew it would happen, and when it would happen." I said I wasn't sure that Dean had really known that. Morrison believed he had. "He tapped a source where all the answers lie," he said. "This source is an almanac, man. You turn to the page you want, and the answer is yours."
I said I'd like to see such an almanac, and he said it wasn't a matter of sight. I said, "You've looked into this yourself?"
"The way the blind man sees," he said. "You know, I won't see thirty. I'll be dead before I'll reach thirty years of age." After our meeting, he told the redhead I'd spooked him. "He says there's death looking out of your eyes," she said. " But he doesn't mean you're death, man." Morrison had said he was looking at the death in himself, as if in my eyes there were mirrors into which he saw his own death looking back at him, like it was saying, "You ain't getting away, man. I'm keeping on your ass." She said, "He wants to talk to you, but says he'll have to do it like with a screen between you and him, or he'll use a towel — you know, hold a towel over his face so no ghosts get into you and are looking back at him."
Next time I saw Morrison he was totally wasted. He'd drunk a bottle of scotch, smoked a bowl of grass and dropped enough pills to weight a shark line. But it was the Owsley acid he was after.
I had a stock in the freezer compartment of the pad in Silver Lake, and I'd been dropping acid every day for two months. I'd finished building the bike — a Harley chopper that started with a '52 rigid frame and a '54 transmission. I'd bought a brand new FLH engine and had been getting high and riding. I'd never had a bad trip on the acid. Some did. I'd even boost before coming down, and once I dropped three times past the boost just to see how high I could get.
Some nights I'd cruise the Hollywood Hills, or down to a hotdog stand, where I'd drink coffee and smoke and look at the million lights playing over the chrome and the glistening black enamel. Or ride — being a bird in the wind along Pacific Coast Highway, flying with the moon over the ocean. Three-hundred-million moons moving on the black water. Earlier rides would come through my head. Remembering Jimmy — a long time in the wind. I didn't boost on the rides because of the delay in escalation. I'd head north up the grapevine and eat a steak at the top of the hill on the way to Bakersfield. Old Highway 99 held a few dark stretches where I could open the bike and let it roll straight wide open. But sometimes, at close to a hundred miles per hour, the springer front end would start vibrating and jumping, and I'd have to slow down or go airborne. Coasting easy was the best, like Jesus Christ was right behind me on the pillion pad and I could stick out my elbows and feel His knee caps.
I'd gone as high as I could go — never sleeping, never closing my eyes unless I wanted to boogie on the pretty lights. My back had been pressed to the ceiling of how high I could get, and I'd been looking down on a world from something like a satellite, my arms and legs hanging down into infinity. It was a world not like the green earth, but like an eternal spark — like a finger painting by Michelangelo none of this in visual terms, but as sensations in the brain. I had to read them through signals, or like feeling Braille with some sixth sense.
The life of young Janis Joplin had swung from ground-zero to landing straight-up midnight in one fast season since she'd slithered onto the Monterey Pop Festival stage. In a tight silver-white body-hugging outfit, she'd stomped her foot hard on the boards the same way old Hank had done, shrieked once loud and long, and from that point on no one who knew what rock was about would ever forget who Janis was.
In her ascent, Janis kicked some holes and others climbed through, thickening the swarm of rock groups since the Beatles. In came tall, thin poet-faced Jim Morrison, with John Densmore, a drummer, and two others calling themselves the Doors. They kicked off at the London Fog, a dumping ground for groups near the Whisky on the Strip. Morrison hadn't really played his hand yet-he was still figuring out what it was. He was hanging around, staying stoned, trying to rifle together some repertoire that would hopefully grab somebody by the balls.
His gangling droop-faced charm had caught Ronnie Haran; she even housed Morrison, who had been sleeping in doorways and backseats. When the group was dumped by the London Fog, Ronnie managed to bring them to the Whiskey as an opening group-loosening up the crowd for Buffalo Springfield. It was okay when Morrison wasn't too stoned to stand on his feet.
I can still see him, eye to eye - but was he conscious? His own sack of consciousness was half full of dope, snort, and boozed to the gills. Far out. Zonksville.
Micro-poet-cum-bong-headed-showman.
He was different, all right, and it took me a little while to get a fix on this potentially super showman - a kind of daredevil Liberace of the hippie circus, minus the candelabra. The real bummer for Morrison was that he was nuts, or at least a part of him was, like some snapped-in-two electrical line, leaping and sparking and jumping wild.
The quasi-poet in him talked the "black ship of death" while he wallowed in dope and booze with a righteous gusto anyone suicide-prone might envy. He talked about blowing the lid. He said the top of the skull goes off like the lid of a Zippo lighter.
Morrison ached to be a star, a top dog. He wouldn't say it that way, but his lack of force - or heart, as Janis called it - held him and the Doors back as a kind of a hazy medallion, an out-of-focus Don Quixote. And there, despite the Three Penny Opera black ship of death baloney he battered down into his performances, he'd drag the three others in the group - and usually the audience — on a kind of fanciful, kaleidoscopic roller-ride through his own shallow head trips.
Elvis Presley said to me, "The Doors were good as a group . . . The music was pretty good, but it wasn't rock 'n' roll. It wasn't rock, and it wasn't blues. The guy on the drums — that Densmore — he was dam good. He was an artist, man. But Morrison had his own thing going, and maybe it was a product of the times and of the mind-trippin' hippie symbolism. But it wasn't rock, and it wasn't going to last."
Morrison's true pain didn't shine through the music. He wanted to suffer - "Without pain there can be no art," he said, and cranked up the watts of his life as he cranked up performance watts. The statement was clearly his own. Wrecking one's life - that was Morrison's bottom-dollar gift, and salutes are due. At wrecking lives, Jim Morrison takes the crown for his singular, outrageous effort. He went at it with a vengeance. No one could top him at laying waste a measure of talent and much opportunity. He was no Elvis, no Beatles. Here was the true sneaky-pete boy-wonder wino with an insatiable thirst for his own finale. Unable to fuse the showman, the musical talent, the good voice or the even the consciousness of an era into being the star, Morrison's top-banana persona came laced together with death. "Real death," Morrison said, "the experience of transcendence . . ." The real trick was getting out of his own skin.
Janis saw him as a kind of Hollywood loser. "A freak," she said. "He's like the guy sticking knives in himself. If you dig the scene, you go in the tent and that's what you're gettin'. You don't go to a fucking hot-dog stand for a candlelight dinner."
I gave the last of the Owsley stash to the redhead, who I suppose passed it over to Morrison, a substitute for Dean's death clothes. By then the Doors were going big time, but you couldn't pin Morrison to commercial success. He faked not giving a shit, and sang about killing his father and fucking his mother. The real part of him was too weird and strung out and desperate. Suicidal stunts and pranks — ledge walking, body throwing, jumping out of windows and waving his dick around ... all of it showier than a solitary game of Russian roulette. Jumping out of a window wasn't the way he'd go, he said. He'd seen his time in the almanac. It was a secret, he said.
The thread of his music, Morrison claimed, was an opening of consciousness in the vein of Artaud. But his closeness to Artaud was perhaps the crystallizing of an aspiring imitator via self-crucifixion. It wasn't the music that was making a dent—it was Morrison himself, not the performer or the self-styled poet, but the one who was wrecking his life. His rush of unconventionality led him into center stage for a brief strut in the spotlight.
It wasn't the fame he chased, but the idea of himself as a bullet ricocheting through his own insides, tearing away inside in high profile, breaking himself into many pieces, like blasting open a keg to let the goods blow out. He went into a variable reality in which he saw himself as a forerunner shooting through a universe daring others to follow. He had a fix on what it was Jimmy Dean had been driven by, and what Rimbaud's craziness was all about. Morrison was chasing that cement that made them who they were, and made them know the, had to smash themselves apart and let the other one out.
Al Wilson, a musician I knew from the Canned Heat group, said it was hard to imagine Janis dead - and harder to picture her smoldering down to a pile of ashes no bigger than a quart of beer. Wilson said, "She was the best there is. She had the fame you dream about when you're busting your ass to make it. The kind of fame no one forgets. You don't die — you go into history, man. She was what we dream of being . . ." Wilson shot up and died of an overdose a month after Janis was dead. Jim Morrison's almanac would ring true: he'd be dead a long time before hitting thirty. Despite the empty music and the weightless poems, Morrison rode the snake, galloping down the death trip like Lancelot with a hard-on. He plunged in under some strange circumstances in Paris — no one really surviving with evidence of exactly how he died. His corpse was supposedly found in the bathtub with blood wadding up one nostril from a big hit of heroin.
I'd looked at the monkey bones Janis had given me. They still smelled of patchouli and whatever that gardenia stuff had been. I'd think about her tongue and that black paint on her toenails. I'd sucked her saliva into my mouth — drunk of her. I liked to think of her living in my blood. Maybe it was me that was the vampire. Sometimes, at certain moments, little threads of acid sort of wiggle across some screen in my head like small strings of cells, a bunch of tiny glass compartments like the banded body of a dirt worm. There's a picture of the moon on the black ocean. There's another of a naked girl on the rocks. There's a quick picture of Jim Morrison's face — a mismatched mask sort of shifting for a place to settle, but it'll never settle. The eyes are black holes. He's the ghost of a time gone by, the true hero isolated and alone in this time capsule, like a shrunken head in a tube. Then the worm wiggles past and is gone. Burn, Jim, burn.
THE ABOVE EXCERPTS FROM:
LAID BARE: A MEMOIR OF WRECKED LIVES
AND THE HOLLYWOOD DEATH TRIP
www.johngilmore.com/Celebrities/jim_morrison-final.html