We had visions in the desert. It is like William Blake; he would see visions like Blake did, angels in trees, he would see these, and so would I. And Jim showed me that this is what a poet does. A poet sees visions and records them. He said that there were more poets in Comanches than there were in bookstores. The Comanches took the cactus, too. We were like the Indians who lived in this way for thousands of years, before the Christians and as long as the Jews.
- Nico
Jim Morrison was so out of control that it scared people. It scared me close to imaginary death, and I loved it. – Pamela Des Barres
For some years before his death this January David Crosby was a regular fixture on Twitter, generously engaging his fans and passing on his judgements – that’s a well-rolled joint, that’s a nice cover of my song, nuclear power will never be safe, JFK was the victim of a government conspiracy.1 The same unreconstructed old counterculture hippie to the end, Crosby hated Trump of course, but held two people in especially low esteem. One was “that dog breath asshat Kanye”, who, Crosby averred, was most definitely neither a gentleman nor an artist:
And the other was Jim Morrison, with whom Crosby was rumoured to have had a punch up back in the day.
I own a copy of Crosby’s If I Could Only Remember My Name, which was his interesting attempt to take rock in an unusual jazz-tinged direction, before cocaine scattered his brain cells. There’s also something great about his late Byrds songs “Draft Morning” and “Dolphin’s Smile’, and I’ve mentioned his collaboration with Jefferson Airplane, “Wooden Ships” before as an example of US rock’s Posadist trip circa 1970.
But almost all the music of the massively popular CSN(Y) is fearful dreck, far less than the sum of its parts, cashing in on the players’ names and Still’s short-lived talent, then just chugging on over albums each less inspired than the last. And Crosby’s comeback, a series of high-quality albums respected by people who love good musicianship, never really pulled me in. It showed good taste that he wanted to sound like Steely Dan, but what I really love about the Dan isn’t the distracting chops of their musicians, nor the excessive polish of their production, but the slyness in their not-so-great voices and the air of moral danger in their lyrics. We may be only a block from the university jazz club, but turn the next corner and you’ll be in Elmore Leonard territory.
This mood is created by a knowing use of obscure cultural references and recherche slang (“I never knew her/ she was a roller skater”) that no-one could recreate, especially not Crosby, who had the right experience to draw on, but sketched instead moral lessons that implied he was above all that, as no doubt he wished he was. Usually when I watch a documentary about some artist I’m not sure of – say, GG Allin or Michael Jackson – I come away with more respect for their art at least, but this wasn’t the case with the Crosby doco Remember My Name which really did its subject no favours. The most abject scene was when Crosby, Stills and Nash, amid another of their endless pointless squabbles, sang “Silent Night” for the Obamas’ Christmas thing, and deliberately sabotaged each other’s harmonies before an inwardly aghast, if outwardly unflappable, Michelle and Barack. This supremely self-indulgent gesture made their old Civil Rights era folkie schtick seem as phoney as Trump wanted Obama’s birth certificate to be. Why were they even there? The money, or their egos? I couldn’t watch it without being over the whole idea of the ‘60’s. Except for one man.
James Douglas Morrison was often, by all accounts, very much the drunken asshole that Cosby said he was; over a relatively few years terminal alcoholism, its causes and mechanisms inexplicable, its prospects for cure or mitigation unlikely in an age before “rehabilitation” and “accountability” became household bores, interacted badly with the perversity and appreciation for cruelty that had made his art great, as fan Pamela Des Barres describes:
“Anyway, we were nice to him (I still harbored a secret adoration), but he was in one of those infamous moods. - again, and very drunk, too.
He reached across the table, yelled 'Get it on!' Then he grabbed Miss Lucy's beer and hurled it in her face. She got pretty upset and told him he wasn't very nice. He said, 'I know', in a sad sorrowful voice, like he couldn't help it. Like that disturbed, disorderly persona he had told me about… had finally taken over. Right before he crawled over to the stage and climbed on with The Ohio Express he slapped me hard across the face for no reason. It was like he was trying to feel something.”
But he was also the person who suggested to Nico that she was perfectly capable of writing her own songs. And he did something to the art of rock that helped lift it out of the hands of the music business, that resisted the tyranny of professionalism and teased the audience’s expectations, that wasted money and disrespected its power over the artist; something only a man prepared to destroy himself in the process could have achieved. And this is tied in with Crosby’s appreciation of him as a poser, for Morrison adopted a pose that took him to the limits of self-parody and beyond; he saw what was needed and found the courage to be it, and no doubt the alcohol helped.
But the story really starts with Ray Manzarek. Crosby is right about his playing, in a way – it was the predictable, limited-palate aspect of the Doors sound, and I used to wish it was different in some way – less unimaginatively bluesy, with a fuller sound like a Farfisa or Hammond, plus a real bass, would have supplied - but the Doors still achieved all they did, and really that sound was the least of their problems. Reading Manzarek’s book brought it all into perspective; like Crosby, he never changed his counter-culture colours, in his case hipster-Buddhist yellow, and his early love of the blues provided the glue that held the band together – neither Krieger nor Densmore could stay consistent from one song to the next and nor would we want them to, their free-ranging musical imaginings accompany Morrison’s imagery on its wild flights, someone has to ground the whole thing. It was Manzarek’s steadiness that allowed The Doors to crystalize around the germ of Morrison’s acapella crooning of “Moonlight Drive” that day on Venice beach, and create that eerie, slightly threatening noir sound of their first album, being as it was their live set at the Whisky a Go Go. It’s when Manzarek takes a back seat to the chamber orchestra on The Soft Parade that The Doors fall apart and their diversity becomes mere eclecticism and indecisiveness. So (of course) The Soft Parade was the Doors’ album that Mark E Smith, a performer every bit as perverse in his own way as Morrison, preferred. Here’s Smith showing Andy Gill his record collection in 1990:
Another surprise is The Doors' The Soft Parade, the album most commonly considered their worst by die-hard Doors fans.
"Exactly," he says with a glint of Smithy perversity. "That's why I picked it! I've heard that people don't like it, but I think it's great. It's splendid, their best one. There's these old blokes with trombones on it, quasi-jazz parodies, and that country and western track. And ‘The Soft Parade’, the track itself, is great. You didn't get a lot of his poems in full, usually; he had to cut them down. He cut down ‘The End’, and that ‘Lizard King’ one. It's got a good clean sound, too. There's strings and all sorts on it. It's very tasteful, the way they use it. I'm not that into all their other stuff – it was a bit too over-dramatic for me."
I’d say the album’s still a wee bit shit, that encyclopedic title track, the best part of the trip, aside, but then The Doors could be shit, become a joke, embarrass their fans, and still be great, and it was that over-dramatic aspect of The Doors that was revolutionary, and allowed them, and those who came after them, much freedom. It’s almost irrelevant to judge The Doors by the music they made. They were always struggling towards other forms, forms that didn’t exist yet and that couldn’t be created by their particular ways of playing, and one of these is metal. Which would have been the perfect setting for Morrison’s growls and screams, his proto-goth death-haunted lyrics. You can hear The Doors reaching towards metal on songs like “Wild Child” or “Five To One”, but the bass synth hasn’t been invented yet, Krieger’s guitar is too light and airy, Manzarek’s filigrees too hokey, Densmore too skillful a latin jazz player for them to bring the new thing into being. The closest they get, and it’s close enough, is in one of their great long-form song-poems, “When The Music’s Over”. The chord change is much the same folky blues vamp (Em-A7-Em7-A7) with basic changes that Jefferson Airplane used a lot around this time, but that lack of swing Crosby deplored brings a mounting, euphoric sense of menace, which the band bring to climax again and again, with fresh musical colouring for each new section. There’s a wild double-tracked guitar solo which is the most exciting thing Krieger ever laid down, where sustained whammy bar pitch-shifting plays against itself, the “scream of the butterfly”, and Densmore’s stuttered snare outbursts amongst Morrison’s ecological threnody:
What have we done to the Earth?
What have we done to our fair sister?
Ravaged and plundered and ripped her and bit her
Stuck her with knives in the side of the dawn
Tied her with fences
And dragged her down
Poetry that reminds me of Susan Griffin’s eco-feminist classic Woman and Nature (1978). Morrison’s self-conscious ideal of rock performance was as Dionysian catharsis, the Dionysian cult was one of the matriarchal mystery religions I mentioned last week, and “When The Music’s Over” is one of his chthonic mystery songs. Turning, on a good night, a Doors performance into a ceremony. “The Ceremony Of The Lizard” only exists complete in its version on “Absolutely Live”, although an excerpt, “Not To Touch The Earth”, is the highlight of Waiting For The Sun (1968), otherwise an attempt at a varied collection of pop songs – hamstrung by that aforementioned lack of swing and a contender against The Soft Parade (1969) for the band’s poorest LP showing.
It's only on Morrison Hotel (1970) that The Doors will finally swing fully into a pop song, “Queen Of The Highway”, and make a satisfying rock record, of short songs that still manages to capture Morrison’s weirdness.2 The Doors hadn’t had an official bass player since Jenny Sullivan played with the original Rick and The Ravens line up (she can be heard here on the demo for “Moonlight Drive”), and the bassists on the early albums were restricted to doubling up Manzarek’s bass keyboard parts, but when the band and their guest players gel on these later albums their sound can take off.
The other night I heard “LA Woman” on the radio, and locked onto its electro-mechanical effects and motoric beat without recognising the band till Morrison’s voice came in - I thought I was hearing something recorded recently. Manzarek’s experiments with electronic sound, as on “Spanish Caravan”, deserve more respect and “LA Woman”, a noir song based around freeway culture and the automobiles that are the true lords of LA, starts with a rattle like a hybrid or electric car kicking into life. The Doors were ahead of their time in a way that few successful bands are; if their music and lyrics often fall to pieces under critical examination, those pieces have been easy and attractive for future generations of artists to pick up and make their own. Iggy Pop, the other great rock archetype inspired by Morrison, borrowed the lyric to “The Passenger”, his most successful song, almost verbatim from Jim’s poem The Lords in 1977, added the title of a 1975 Antonioni film, one also obsessed with cars, and set it over guitarist Rick Gardiner’s bouncing, cyclic chord change, an inspired creative process that seems one of the easiest in rock history.
There are no vocal harmonies on The Doors’ songs – harmony building is an Apollonian business (it’s only natural for a priest of Apollo like Crosby to look down on a sacrifice of Dionysus like Morrison). Inspired by the confrontational, interactive performances of The Living Theatre, but also drunk off his face again, Morrison took a Doors performance in Miami about as far as it could go and was arrested for indecent exposure. He was up against Florida’s innately over-the-top conservatism, in the person of former TV star and bandleader Jackie Gleason.
“In the ensuing outrage, several other nearby Doors concerts were canceled. On March 23, the Orange Bowl became the scene of a Rally for Decency, organized by local high school students. Some 30,000 teenagers and adults gathered for performances and speeches on virtue by Jackie Gleason, Anita Bryant and the Lettermen. (President Richard M. Nixon later wrote a letter to the rally’s organizers saying they had shown “admirable initiative.”)”3
As well as being cancelled by promoters, The Doors became targets for the establishment’s fear of the counterculture, and Morrison was thereafter harassed by the endless legal process and the real-enough threat of imprisonment.
A few years ago, someone asked on Quora, “What were the US equivalents of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and Bowie?” A pointless question, well worth thinking about.
Most people said the Beach Boys for the Beatles, but I’d say Bob Dylan, who was the US exemplar of the social and artistic change the Beatles represented. For Bowie, I’d say Hendrix, a similarly inventive man who did for race what Bowie did for sexuality. The Rolling Stones were harder to place, and many people suggested obvious but weak pairings like Aerosmith, but the answer has to be The Doors, a popular blues-based group who represented the threat to the Establishment convincingly enough in the 1960’s that an effort was made to destroy them. An effort which, as in the case of Brian Jones, turned out to be simply not necessary.
After Morrison’s mysterious if not so surprising death in Paris at the age of 27 The Doors recorded a couple of albums without him and made several efforts to replace him; Kevin Coyne and Graham Brazier were among those who auditioned, Manzarek took Iggy Pop under his wing briefly, and the band performed with Marilyn Manson in 2012. They did some of their best work backing Val Kilmer on the soundtrack of Oliver Stone’s biopic The Doors, and backing Jim again on An American Prayer, an LP put together from Jim’s taped poetry and new Doors arrangements in 1978 (if Jim had lived to 1978 instead of dying in 1971 it’s unlikely The Doors would have done anything better than An American Prayer ).
Bring me almost any interesting artist since, and I’ll show you the Doors relic, the sliver of Jim’s bone, the spot of his dried blood, the scrap of leather, the wizened peyote button, the scale from a lizard’s shed skin that’s hidden somewhere in their art.
Conspiracy theory as activism, and an unyielding opposition to nuclear power stations on mainly symbolic grounds, are the two enduring contributions of the 60’s counterculture towards today’s “cancellation of the future”.
Morrison Hotel revisits and redeems themes from Waiting For The Sun as well as its concept, e.g. “Peace Frog” is an improved “Five To One”, and there is even a song on Morrison Hotel called “Waiting For The Sun”.
A comic genius known affectionately as “The Great One”, Gleason is best known for playing bus driver Ralph Kramden in the TV comedy show The Honeymooners (1951-1957), the prototype for two-couple, four-hander comedies from The Flintstones to Heil Honey I’m Home, as well as Minnesota Fats in The Hustler (1961) and Sheriff Buford T. Justice in the Smokey And The Bandit films. Gleason was also a composer and conductor (though his claim to both these titles is seriously disputed) who recorded numerous albums of easy listening music in the 1950’s and 60’s. He was fascinated with the paranormal, and Richard Nixon discussed the evidence for UFOs with him. Rodney Dangerfield, in his 2004 memoir It's Not Easy Being Me: A Lifetime of No Respect But Plenty of Sex and Drugs, described Gleason buying marijuana in the 1940’s, but Jim Morrison’s consumption of booze, hash and acid made him a paranormal phenomenon too far for Gleason.
i'm a big fan of the title track from "soft parade" too, that + "wild child" are reason enough to own that album although most of the rest is pretty room-temperature & "touch me" is diabolical (so of course it's 1 of their most often broadcast numbers)
anyway for whatever reason that & the 1st album are the only ones i still have altho at 1 time or another i owned all of em (studio albs & "absolutely live" but not "american prayer" or any of the numerous posthumously issued live albums) - shoulda kept at least "strange days" & "l.a. woman" i suppose
proto heavy metal doors song - "l'america"
i dunno man, he was no sky saxon