Post by TheWallsScreamedPoetry on Feb 13, 2005 10:18:15 GMT
Asbolutely Dead: How the Jim Morrison Industry lives on
"Well, we’re all in the cosmic movie, you know that! That means the day you die, you gotta watch your whole life recurring eternally forever, in Cinemascope, 3-D. So you better have some good incidents happenin’ in there… and a fitting climax!"
— Jim Morrison, introducing ‘Been Down So Long’ at Cobo Arena, Detroit Michigan, May 8, 1970
PREMATURE ROCK deaths are old hat now. The highway is strewn with martyrs - bloated or gangling, gormless or tormented, they’re all the same these days. Back in July 1971, snuffing it was still a bold career move for a pop star. And in the case of Jim Morrison, definitely a smart one.
Little did Jimbo know just how assiduously the Morrison myth would be worked by the Doors PR machine - how he would swiftly become the martyred poster-deity for beat poetics and black leather. To the gloomy teenagers who mooch about Père Lachaise, he is rock’s very own James Dean: a sex’n’drugs’n’rocknroll Che Guevara.
Would he have scoffed at this? Probably. He was admirably unsentimental about "the rock revolution", as the song 'Rock Is Dead' (on 1997’s Box Set) made loud and clear. But like James Dean he had an insatiable need to be taken more seriously than most pop stars deserve to be.
Fortunately for him, Ray Manzarek and Danny Sugerman and Oliver Stone have been on hand to complete his metamorphosis from beatnik wannabe to messiah of the pop apocalypse. "With Sugerman as the religious zealot and Manzarek as St. Paul," John Densmore observed acidly in his own version of the Doors story, Riders On The Storm, "the crusading has worked." Hey, don’t bite the dead hand that feeds ya, John!
Bright Midnight: Live in America, the latest Doors product from the Morrison Myth Preservation Society, is a sampler of performances from 1969/1970 designed "to give fans a taste of what is to come on Bright Midnight Records" (Sugerman). Notwithstanding the fact that his voice has evolved from the cool "psychedelic Sinatra" croon of 1967 to a drunkenly phlegmy yowl ("Show me the way to the next whisky bar," indeed), the album shores up the usual myths of Jim the Shaman. And versions of ‘Break On Through’, ‘Back Door Man’, ‘Roadhouse Blues’ et al add precious little to what we already know of in-concert Doors from Absolutely Live, Alive She Cried and the "Live in New York" CD on Box Set.
Only on the great L.A. Woman, recorded in late 1970 after the last of these shows, do we again feel Morrison’s tussle between the downward pull of debauchery and the Blakean urge to break on through, or what novelist Tom Robbins in a 1967 review called "an electrifying combination of an angel in grace and a dog in heat". But by then it was too late, and the black-hole lure of oblivion proved too strong.
Not long after L.A. Woman’s release in spring ’71, Jimbo took his boho American-in-Paris fantasies to their logical conclusion and transported his sleazy Santa Monica Boulevard world all the way over the Atlantic. Some time after "bright midnight" on July 3, he died au bain douche in his Paris apartment (though only his paramour Pamela Courson ever saw his dead body, giving rise to predictable and endless conjecture as to whether he still wanders the earth).
"This is no Oliver Stone movie, or reverential memorabilia trip," claimed A&R consultant Bruce Harris in the liner notes to Box Set. Well, it wasn’t and it was. Bright Midnight, too, remains in thrall to a revisionist idea of a Jim Morrison who never existed. The music’s over, and we still haven’t turned out the lights.
The Rev. Al Friston, Rock's Backpages, June 2001
"Well, we’re all in the cosmic movie, you know that! That means the day you die, you gotta watch your whole life recurring eternally forever, in Cinemascope, 3-D. So you better have some good incidents happenin’ in there… and a fitting climax!"
— Jim Morrison, introducing ‘Been Down So Long’ at Cobo Arena, Detroit Michigan, May 8, 1970
PREMATURE ROCK deaths are old hat now. The highway is strewn with martyrs - bloated or gangling, gormless or tormented, they’re all the same these days. Back in July 1971, snuffing it was still a bold career move for a pop star. And in the case of Jim Morrison, definitely a smart one.
Little did Jimbo know just how assiduously the Morrison myth would be worked by the Doors PR machine - how he would swiftly become the martyred poster-deity for beat poetics and black leather. To the gloomy teenagers who mooch about Père Lachaise, he is rock’s very own James Dean: a sex’n’drugs’n’rocknroll Che Guevara.
Would he have scoffed at this? Probably. He was admirably unsentimental about "the rock revolution", as the song 'Rock Is Dead' (on 1997’s Box Set) made loud and clear. But like James Dean he had an insatiable need to be taken more seriously than most pop stars deserve to be.
Fortunately for him, Ray Manzarek and Danny Sugerman and Oliver Stone have been on hand to complete his metamorphosis from beatnik wannabe to messiah of the pop apocalypse. "With Sugerman as the religious zealot and Manzarek as St. Paul," John Densmore observed acidly in his own version of the Doors story, Riders On The Storm, "the crusading has worked." Hey, don’t bite the dead hand that feeds ya, John!
Bright Midnight: Live in America, the latest Doors product from the Morrison Myth Preservation Society, is a sampler of performances from 1969/1970 designed "to give fans a taste of what is to come on Bright Midnight Records" (Sugerman). Notwithstanding the fact that his voice has evolved from the cool "psychedelic Sinatra" croon of 1967 to a drunkenly phlegmy yowl ("Show me the way to the next whisky bar," indeed), the album shores up the usual myths of Jim the Shaman. And versions of ‘Break On Through’, ‘Back Door Man’, ‘Roadhouse Blues’ et al add precious little to what we already know of in-concert Doors from Absolutely Live, Alive She Cried and the "Live in New York" CD on Box Set.
Only on the great L.A. Woman, recorded in late 1970 after the last of these shows, do we again feel Morrison’s tussle between the downward pull of debauchery and the Blakean urge to break on through, or what novelist Tom Robbins in a 1967 review called "an electrifying combination of an angel in grace and a dog in heat". But by then it was too late, and the black-hole lure of oblivion proved too strong.
Not long after L.A. Woman’s release in spring ’71, Jimbo took his boho American-in-Paris fantasies to their logical conclusion and transported his sleazy Santa Monica Boulevard world all the way over the Atlantic. Some time after "bright midnight" on July 3, he died au bain douche in his Paris apartment (though only his paramour Pamela Courson ever saw his dead body, giving rise to predictable and endless conjecture as to whether he still wanders the earth).
"This is no Oliver Stone movie, or reverential memorabilia trip," claimed A&R consultant Bruce Harris in the liner notes to Box Set. Well, it wasn’t and it was. Bright Midnight, too, remains in thrall to a revisionist idea of a Jim Morrison who never existed. The music’s over, and we still haven’t turned out the lights.
The Rev. Al Friston, Rock's Backpages, June 2001