Post by TheWallsScreamedPoetry on Jan 8, 2005 17:46:57 GMT
Jim Morrison: Ten Years Gone
I met Jim Morrison for the first time in the winter of 1968. He as more alive and afire than I would ever see him, and I was a moonstruck groupie. It was a recording session for Waiting For The Sun, their third album. I was with a writer who was interviewing Morrison for the New York Times.
Jim was coming out of the studio "to get a bite to eat" with Pamela, his lady. His hand shaking mine was firm, enthusiastic, running a current of controlled power. My writer friend and I went inside and sat with he others, waiting for Jim to reappear.
Soon we were watching him from inside the tracking room while he sang Not To Touch The Earth on the other side of the soundproof glass. Most of the time his rich, urgent voice was unheard, while engineers and producer Paul Rothchild frittered and fettered down the instrumental track. Along with Ray Manzarek's searing organ and the sinister chords of Robby Krieger's guitar, we watched Morrison dance and sweat, the stallion muscularity contracting inside the glove-tight black leather jeans, while he wailed and belted out, "Nothin' left to do but run, run, let's run…."
That night, his face shaped pleasure - his eyes held light, interest, intensity. His mouth moved in motions of pleased surprise. He was all there. He argued, criticized, consented, refused, laughed, suggested. Pamela in a green velvet coat, waist long red hair, jerking her delicate jaw from side to side, followed his movements with her heavy-lashed urchin eyes, providing cigarettes, chain-smoking.
When he came into the tracking room, his body radiated heat. He seemed to glow in the dark, with a hot red aura. His presence was abristle with electricity, and he was in total charge of that massive voltage.
The last time I saw Morrison was in April of 1970 - almost fifteen months before he would slip on through to the other side, out of the lonely back door of Parisian hotel bathtub.
That April day, the 14th, he had just got in from Phoenix, where he had contended with an obscenity and disorderly conduct rap - the result of some clowning with a stewardess on board a flight to Phoenix several months before. He called and said he had "gotten out of it." We went to a house high in the windings of King Canyon, a house chilled and dust-veiled from a long absence of human presence.
In the front room, shriveled oranges like mummified heads filled a bowl, books lay split open on their spines, and dust made the print faint, greyed the picture of the Greek deity Themis, and beneath the book, a shiny rectangle of dustless wood. I replaced it carefully.
Moldy bread lay in the kitchen; on an empty refriderator, a lone, unopened bottle of cognac. In the bedroom, a wine glass by the bed had evaporated to a ruby drop at the bottom from a thin red line close to the rim. The sheets on the tousled bed smelled of coldness and mildew. Ivy reached its tentacles across the doorsills on the porches and across windowpanes as if seeking entry, stretching instinctively to take over the forgotten citadel. On the mirror in the bathroom, a message in red lipstick began, "You bastard…"
He moved more slowly that day, as though he carried an onerous weight with every motion, and this, maybe, was what made him look heavier. His eyes were duller, and he was tired, cruel and stubborn, inflicting pain with dumb frustration, barely hoping to shatter the blind boundaries and plastic facades that shut him out from all women he had ever known that were at that moment incarnated into this one puzzling woman.
His tenderness and brutality shoved each other aside, ursurping his mood by turns, battling through the motions of a lost cause, a defeated was against the pretenses that make people unreal.
Fifteen months later he gave up entirely and formally, conceding in body what he had granted in spirit, victory to the forces of decay and duplicity. The people close to him buried him quietly and private. They refused to allow an autopsy. An exhumation was prevented despite rumors of mysterious, deadly drugs, which continued to flourish and swarm pestily among the L.A. fringe circuit for years afterward.
If they had examined his dead body, I think surely what they would have found was that the cause of Jim Morrison's death was simple despair.
That April afternoon up in King's Canyon, he said, "I rely on images of violence, which bring the shock of pain, to penetrate the barriers people erect and defend, not simple defenses; the phony facades people live behind. Blocking their perceptions from coming in, and blocking their feelings from coming out. There are two ways I try to shatter those facades, or at least make a hole where something can get in, to let the trapped feelings out – one way is violence, pain. The other is eroticism."
At one point, taking the stand of "erotic politician" to the ultimate, Miami was Morrison's attempt to fuse the erotic with the violently shocking, taking up the bloody cloth from Lenny Bruce and straining it beyond its proprietary limits.
It was not the extradition tangle, the legal battle with police, lawyers, judges, that delivered the mortal wound and drained his spirit, so much as the failure of his revolutionist call to rise up and overthrow the shackles. Although detractors said that he lost control and "blew it" at that fatal Miami concert, it was neither accidental nor a mistake. He felt this, but few would share his view. Badly timed, maybe; not carefully calculated, granted – but it was the logical culmination of everything he was trying to say in words that seemed to go unheard.
To the city fathers, what was "indecent" exposure and "obscene" was at the same time, and more accurately, an overwhelming insurrection of instinctual, primal invocation, the animal-language, body-language pleas to the "television-children fed, the unborn living, living dead" to recognize their true nature, the reality of blood, nerves and feeling life.
He screamed, "WAKE UP!" a hundred times, in a hundred ways and verbatim - and few eyes had flickered. There was only one thing left to try, and he tried it, and it only served to show him how obstinately society would cling to it's shackles, protect its blinders, and publish those who unlock the doors if its cells.
"It my poetry aims to achieve anything," he told me, that April night, "it's to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel."
What destroyed him was their refusal to set themselves free.
Miami and the early months of '69 were some kind of turning point for him. When I saw him in September of that year, he was beginning to recover a mild current of the charge which had galvanized his work on those first three albums. Soft Parade had appeared that summer, and it was distinguished by a paucity of Morrison's dynamite presence and raw nerve lyrics; in style and content, it was a striking departure from its three predecessors.
But Morrison's energies were opening channels through fields less pop. His poetry, privately printed, handsomely bound, was making its way from hand to hand by that fall, 1969. The following spring, 1970, those poems were published in one volume called The New Creatures* by Simon and Schuster. Also, that was the season of creating Morrison Hotel, and Jim's deep interest in the blues had dug in and was filling him with renewed hopes and plans. He talked excitedly about the possibility of presenting a TV special on the history of the blues.
He indicated that he was setting his sights on a new audience, somewhat more canny than the ones who screeched for Light My Fire in big concert halls. He suspected strongly that if he could not shudder the masses with his vision, he might be able to reach a chosen few.
I met Jim Morrison for the first time in the winter of 1968. He as more alive and afire than I would ever see him, and I was a moonstruck groupie. It was a recording session for Waiting For The Sun, their third album. I was with a writer who was interviewing Morrison for the New York Times.
Jim was coming out of the studio "to get a bite to eat" with Pamela, his lady. His hand shaking mine was firm, enthusiastic, running a current of controlled power. My writer friend and I went inside and sat with he others, waiting for Jim to reappear.
Soon we were watching him from inside the tracking room while he sang Not To Touch The Earth on the other side of the soundproof glass. Most of the time his rich, urgent voice was unheard, while engineers and producer Paul Rothchild frittered and fettered down the instrumental track. Along with Ray Manzarek's searing organ and the sinister chords of Robby Krieger's guitar, we watched Morrison dance and sweat, the stallion muscularity contracting inside the glove-tight black leather jeans, while he wailed and belted out, "Nothin' left to do but run, run, let's run…."
That night, his face shaped pleasure - his eyes held light, interest, intensity. His mouth moved in motions of pleased surprise. He was all there. He argued, criticized, consented, refused, laughed, suggested. Pamela in a green velvet coat, waist long red hair, jerking her delicate jaw from side to side, followed his movements with her heavy-lashed urchin eyes, providing cigarettes, chain-smoking.
When he came into the tracking room, his body radiated heat. He seemed to glow in the dark, with a hot red aura. His presence was abristle with electricity, and he was in total charge of that massive voltage.
The last time I saw Morrison was in April of 1970 - almost fifteen months before he would slip on through to the other side, out of the lonely back door of Parisian hotel bathtub.
That April day, the 14th, he had just got in from Phoenix, where he had contended with an obscenity and disorderly conduct rap - the result of some clowning with a stewardess on board a flight to Phoenix several months before. He called and said he had "gotten out of it." We went to a house high in the windings of King Canyon, a house chilled and dust-veiled from a long absence of human presence.
In the front room, shriveled oranges like mummified heads filled a bowl, books lay split open on their spines, and dust made the print faint, greyed the picture of the Greek deity Themis, and beneath the book, a shiny rectangle of dustless wood. I replaced it carefully.
Moldy bread lay in the kitchen; on an empty refriderator, a lone, unopened bottle of cognac. In the bedroom, a wine glass by the bed had evaporated to a ruby drop at the bottom from a thin red line close to the rim. The sheets on the tousled bed smelled of coldness and mildew. Ivy reached its tentacles across the doorsills on the porches and across windowpanes as if seeking entry, stretching instinctively to take over the forgotten citadel. On the mirror in the bathroom, a message in red lipstick began, "You bastard…"
He moved more slowly that day, as though he carried an onerous weight with every motion, and this, maybe, was what made him look heavier. His eyes were duller, and he was tired, cruel and stubborn, inflicting pain with dumb frustration, barely hoping to shatter the blind boundaries and plastic facades that shut him out from all women he had ever known that were at that moment incarnated into this one puzzling woman.
His tenderness and brutality shoved each other aside, ursurping his mood by turns, battling through the motions of a lost cause, a defeated was against the pretenses that make people unreal.
Fifteen months later he gave up entirely and formally, conceding in body what he had granted in spirit, victory to the forces of decay and duplicity. The people close to him buried him quietly and private. They refused to allow an autopsy. An exhumation was prevented despite rumors of mysterious, deadly drugs, which continued to flourish and swarm pestily among the L.A. fringe circuit for years afterward.
If they had examined his dead body, I think surely what they would have found was that the cause of Jim Morrison's death was simple despair.
That April afternoon up in King's Canyon, he said, "I rely on images of violence, which bring the shock of pain, to penetrate the barriers people erect and defend, not simple defenses; the phony facades people live behind. Blocking their perceptions from coming in, and blocking their feelings from coming out. There are two ways I try to shatter those facades, or at least make a hole where something can get in, to let the trapped feelings out – one way is violence, pain. The other is eroticism."
At one point, taking the stand of "erotic politician" to the ultimate, Miami was Morrison's attempt to fuse the erotic with the violently shocking, taking up the bloody cloth from Lenny Bruce and straining it beyond its proprietary limits.
It was not the extradition tangle, the legal battle with police, lawyers, judges, that delivered the mortal wound and drained his spirit, so much as the failure of his revolutionist call to rise up and overthrow the shackles. Although detractors said that he lost control and "blew it" at that fatal Miami concert, it was neither accidental nor a mistake. He felt this, but few would share his view. Badly timed, maybe; not carefully calculated, granted – but it was the logical culmination of everything he was trying to say in words that seemed to go unheard.
To the city fathers, what was "indecent" exposure and "obscene" was at the same time, and more accurately, an overwhelming insurrection of instinctual, primal invocation, the animal-language, body-language pleas to the "television-children fed, the unborn living, living dead" to recognize their true nature, the reality of blood, nerves and feeling life.
He screamed, "WAKE UP!" a hundred times, in a hundred ways and verbatim - and few eyes had flickered. There was only one thing left to try, and he tried it, and it only served to show him how obstinately society would cling to it's shackles, protect its blinders, and publish those who unlock the doors if its cells.
"It my poetry aims to achieve anything," he told me, that April night, "it's to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel."
What destroyed him was their refusal to set themselves free.
Miami and the early months of '69 were some kind of turning point for him. When I saw him in September of that year, he was beginning to recover a mild current of the charge which had galvanized his work on those first three albums. Soft Parade had appeared that summer, and it was distinguished by a paucity of Morrison's dynamite presence and raw nerve lyrics; in style and content, it was a striking departure from its three predecessors.
But Morrison's energies were opening channels through fields less pop. His poetry, privately printed, handsomely bound, was making its way from hand to hand by that fall, 1969. The following spring, 1970, those poems were published in one volume called The New Creatures* by Simon and Schuster. Also, that was the season of creating Morrison Hotel, and Jim's deep interest in the blues had dug in and was filling him with renewed hopes and plans. He talked excitedly about the possibility of presenting a TV special on the history of the blues.
He indicated that he was setting his sights on a new audience, somewhat more canny than the ones who screeched for Light My Fire in big concert halls. He suspected strongly that if he could not shudder the masses with his vision, he might be able to reach a chosen few.