Post by TheWallsScreamedPoetry on Feb 8, 2005 17:07:30 GMT
THE LIZARD KING LIVES
The Doors Pay A Dramatic Tribute To Jim Morrison
The world – at least that part of it which remembers the Doors – knows the late Jim Morrison primarily as a rock and roll singer. As the band’s charismatic singing shaman, James Douglas Morrison (who died on July 3, 1971 of a heart attack) was and remains a mysterious neo-reptilian figure with a mesmeric charm of a coiled snake and a lyrical X-ray vision which appeared to see into and beyond the psycho-sexual impulses of his audience.
Those closet to Morrison, the surviving Doors themselves – Ray Manzarek, Robby Krieger, and John Densmore – knew him better. They saw him for something deeper and less commercially tangible. Long before he first sang the lyrics of Moonlight Drive to Manzarek in September 1965, Jim Morrison was a poet and it was his dark sensual, volatile way with words that set the Doors apart as startling, even disturbing wheat amongst the psychedelic chaff of the Acid Age.
And it is as a linguistic magician that Jim Morrison is remembered on An American Prayer (Elektra). The remarkable product of three and a half years work by the Doors, producer John Haeny, and Morrison confidante Frank Lisciandro, An American Prayer is an aural documentary comprised of Morrison verse and stream-of-consciousness stories framed by music written and performed by Manzarek (keyboards), Krieger (guitar), and Densmore (drums) with the aid of a few sessioneers. Though not officially credited to the Doors as a group (the album title reads An American Prayer, Jim Morrison, Music by the Doors), this album according to Doors spokesman Danny Sugarman, is a Doors record in every sense of the word.
“I see this record as the nectar, the essence of the Doors,” he says. Sugarman should know. As both fan and critic, he has stayed a close companion of the group from the beginning and currently manages the solo Manzarek. “They put the focus on Jim for this record. You see, Jim would always assume the focus of a Doors record or show rather than take it. But Ray, John and Robby really did this out of a love for the man and the man’s work. The guys who made this record are the biggest Morrison fans in the world.”<br>
That attitude characterizes the conceptual and technical care with which An American Prayer was scripted and recorded. An impressive lesson in dramatic segues, the album is a collection of studio poetry readings, poetry that comprises the unpublished book of poems set to follow Morrison’s first published works, The Lords and The New Creatures. For example, the records stunning finale, An American Prayer dates back o 1968 (when Jim printed it in a limited edition of 500 for friends) but was recorded December 8, 1970, his 27th birthday. Like the other works here, it abounds with vivid sexual and violent imagery further colored by the juxtaposition of pulsating rhythm tracks by the Doors, snippets of songs like Peace Frog and Riders On The Storm, and an exhilarating live version of Roadhouse Blues. The total collage is so astonishingly true to the spirit of Morrison that the Doors are not doing interviews for this record. They rightly believe it speaks for itself.
Sugarman explains that sessions were eerie enough. “When they were doing the music, it wasn’t much different from he way they worked with Jim. I don’t think anyone even thought of Jim as dead. It was more of a feeling of someone not quiet at home, kinda gloomy but kinda hopeful.”<br>
In compiling this material, the Doors listened to everything Morrison recorded on his own – tape recorded tales of an auto accident from his childhood, a blues tune, a phone call, poetry by the reel load. Once everything had been transcribed, they started scripting and in the first nine months, the 40 minute script underwent nearly 50 dramatic changes. The result is, in Sugarman’s words, “really magical. They’re even awed.”<br>
Jim Morrison was certainly an awesome figure. As a young rebellious graduate of UCLA in cinematography, Morrison’s eschewed his family’s history as military careerists (his father was a rear admiral), applying for his poetic license by adopting the lifestyle of a romantic wanderer until he accepted Manzarek’s invitation to join a group that, with the eventual addition of Krieger and Densmore, became the Doors.
No matter that Columbia rejected the first Doors LP because it was too poetic. On stage, Morrison was the Lizard King, enacting Oedipal drama (The End), while enticing young nubiles to tear at his leather drawers. The sensual excitement was as attractive to males for its clenched fist intensity as it was to females for its moody machismo.
Jim Ladd – a disk jockey and host of the syndicated “Innerview” at KMET FM in Los Angeles – is a long time Doors aficionado. He still feels that fury, and his personal enthusiasm for An American Prayer could set an example of radio stations to timid to play the album. With the support of KMET program director Sam Bellamy and music director Jock Snyder, Ladd approached the station management with a plan to play the record uninterrupted and unedited at midnight, long after young impressionable ears had gone to bed. The FCC’s attitude about words like fuck and cunt was in Ladd’s words, “insurmountable,” so he’s doing it with the insertion of bleeps over the legally objectionable material – a partial victory.
“How long,” he asks, “have we been going on about free speech? I don’t want to say “cunt” on the air, but in this context I think it should be played. You don’t take risks for risk’s sake. But if something like this comes along, it’s my job to get it played.”<br>
Sugarman is both impressed and amused by Ladd’s efforts. “Jim hasn’t stopped making trouble yet,” he says in an oblique reference to Morrison’s notorious busts and the resultant ban on the Doors in many cities. But Ladd’s zeal, he continues, is typical of the reaction he’s getting from writers, DJs and Elektra staffers on An American Prayer. Not only are they stunned by its dramatic momentum, but they are hearing and, in their mind’s eye, seeing a Jim Morrison they never knew.
“Someone asked me the other day,” relates Sugarman with a smile, “Why did it take so long for something like this to come out? I was feeling in a smart assed mood, but I meant it when I replied, “We wanted to wait ‘til you were ready.”<br> By David Fricke: Circus Weekly, January 23, 1979
Thanks to Sara Darkstar
The Doors Pay A Dramatic Tribute To Jim Morrison
The world – at least that part of it which remembers the Doors – knows the late Jim Morrison primarily as a rock and roll singer. As the band’s charismatic singing shaman, James Douglas Morrison (who died on July 3, 1971 of a heart attack) was and remains a mysterious neo-reptilian figure with a mesmeric charm of a coiled snake and a lyrical X-ray vision which appeared to see into and beyond the psycho-sexual impulses of his audience.
Those closet to Morrison, the surviving Doors themselves – Ray Manzarek, Robby Krieger, and John Densmore – knew him better. They saw him for something deeper and less commercially tangible. Long before he first sang the lyrics of Moonlight Drive to Manzarek in September 1965, Jim Morrison was a poet and it was his dark sensual, volatile way with words that set the Doors apart as startling, even disturbing wheat amongst the psychedelic chaff of the Acid Age.
And it is as a linguistic magician that Jim Morrison is remembered on An American Prayer (Elektra). The remarkable product of three and a half years work by the Doors, producer John Haeny, and Morrison confidante Frank Lisciandro, An American Prayer is an aural documentary comprised of Morrison verse and stream-of-consciousness stories framed by music written and performed by Manzarek (keyboards), Krieger (guitar), and Densmore (drums) with the aid of a few sessioneers. Though not officially credited to the Doors as a group (the album title reads An American Prayer, Jim Morrison, Music by the Doors), this album according to Doors spokesman Danny Sugarman, is a Doors record in every sense of the word.
“I see this record as the nectar, the essence of the Doors,” he says. Sugarman should know. As both fan and critic, he has stayed a close companion of the group from the beginning and currently manages the solo Manzarek. “They put the focus on Jim for this record. You see, Jim would always assume the focus of a Doors record or show rather than take it. But Ray, John and Robby really did this out of a love for the man and the man’s work. The guys who made this record are the biggest Morrison fans in the world.”<br>
That attitude characterizes the conceptual and technical care with which An American Prayer was scripted and recorded. An impressive lesson in dramatic segues, the album is a collection of studio poetry readings, poetry that comprises the unpublished book of poems set to follow Morrison’s first published works, The Lords and The New Creatures. For example, the records stunning finale, An American Prayer dates back o 1968 (when Jim printed it in a limited edition of 500 for friends) but was recorded December 8, 1970, his 27th birthday. Like the other works here, it abounds with vivid sexual and violent imagery further colored by the juxtaposition of pulsating rhythm tracks by the Doors, snippets of songs like Peace Frog and Riders On The Storm, and an exhilarating live version of Roadhouse Blues. The total collage is so astonishingly true to the spirit of Morrison that the Doors are not doing interviews for this record. They rightly believe it speaks for itself.
Sugarman explains that sessions were eerie enough. “When they were doing the music, it wasn’t much different from he way they worked with Jim. I don’t think anyone even thought of Jim as dead. It was more of a feeling of someone not quiet at home, kinda gloomy but kinda hopeful.”<br>
In compiling this material, the Doors listened to everything Morrison recorded on his own – tape recorded tales of an auto accident from his childhood, a blues tune, a phone call, poetry by the reel load. Once everything had been transcribed, they started scripting and in the first nine months, the 40 minute script underwent nearly 50 dramatic changes. The result is, in Sugarman’s words, “really magical. They’re even awed.”<br>
Jim Morrison was certainly an awesome figure. As a young rebellious graduate of UCLA in cinematography, Morrison’s eschewed his family’s history as military careerists (his father was a rear admiral), applying for his poetic license by adopting the lifestyle of a romantic wanderer until he accepted Manzarek’s invitation to join a group that, with the eventual addition of Krieger and Densmore, became the Doors.
No matter that Columbia rejected the first Doors LP because it was too poetic. On stage, Morrison was the Lizard King, enacting Oedipal drama (The End), while enticing young nubiles to tear at his leather drawers. The sensual excitement was as attractive to males for its clenched fist intensity as it was to females for its moody machismo.
Jim Ladd – a disk jockey and host of the syndicated “Innerview” at KMET FM in Los Angeles – is a long time Doors aficionado. He still feels that fury, and his personal enthusiasm for An American Prayer could set an example of radio stations to timid to play the album. With the support of KMET program director Sam Bellamy and music director Jock Snyder, Ladd approached the station management with a plan to play the record uninterrupted and unedited at midnight, long after young impressionable ears had gone to bed. The FCC’s attitude about words like fuck and cunt was in Ladd’s words, “insurmountable,” so he’s doing it with the insertion of bleeps over the legally objectionable material – a partial victory.
“How long,” he asks, “have we been going on about free speech? I don’t want to say “cunt” on the air, but in this context I think it should be played. You don’t take risks for risk’s sake. But if something like this comes along, it’s my job to get it played.”<br>
Sugarman is both impressed and amused by Ladd’s efforts. “Jim hasn’t stopped making trouble yet,” he says in an oblique reference to Morrison’s notorious busts and the resultant ban on the Doors in many cities. But Ladd’s zeal, he continues, is typical of the reaction he’s getting from writers, DJs and Elektra staffers on An American Prayer. Not only are they stunned by its dramatic momentum, but they are hearing and, in their mind’s eye, seeing a Jim Morrison they never knew.
“Someone asked me the other day,” relates Sugarman with a smile, “Why did it take so long for something like this to come out? I was feeling in a smart assed mood, but I meant it when I replied, “We wanted to wait ‘til you were ready.”<br> By David Fricke: Circus Weekly, January 23, 1979
Thanks to Sara Darkstar