Love at first sight, according to Jim Morrison. That’s very romantic and great to sing songs about, even though in real life love at first sight is nothing better than entrapment. I won’t drag you down on this holiday with my cynical train of thought. I’ve already explained enough in the past about my views on romance. It’s a crock. I’ll just say there’s a gap between expectation and reality. The lessons we learn listening to songs can and will let us down. Now if someone of Jim Morrison’s type came along, all that would go out the window, that’s a given. We’re all looking for a romantic hero to project our fantasies upon. Therein lies the danger. But, you know what, never mind, just enjoy your Christmas and don’t dwell on it.
According to legend (which is what I like to say when I don’t know the source of my information) Jim Morrison had told Pamela Courson that this song was about her. When Morrison died she slipped a photograph of herself inside his coffin, so he could remember her in the afterlife. She needn’t have worried, for she herself would die only a few years later. I’m not entirely sure whether that’s true or not, but it puts an even sadder spin on an already sad story. Morrison’s death was sordid enough, and what happened to Pamela afterwards even more so. It seems she completely lost the will to live, gave in entirely to heroin addiction, and allegedly resorted to prostitution to support her lifestyle. She did, shortly before her death, officially inherit Morrison’s entire fortune. If she had pulled herself together and cleaned up, she would have been wealthy for life. But either she didn’t have the strength to quit or she simply didn’t want to. It is known that before her death, she often spoke of going to see Jim and looking forward to being reunited. Perhaps her overdose was not so accidental.
I went through a very serious Doors phase when I was, oh, in high school somewhere. Seventeen years old or roundabouts. At that age it’s the normal thing to cycle through brief, overwhelming obsessions. I also had a big T.Rex phase and a short moment when all I listened to was David Bowie’s Outside. It was probably about a year, I don’t recall exactly which one, when all I listened to was all of The Doors’ albums. It was definitely one of those years when I wasn’t technically going to school and had a lot of free time for listening to a lot of albums, and reading a lot of books and possibly having a Jim Morrison scrapbook. Inevitably, as I got older, I had less time for being obsessed with things. Although I still did, and still do occasionally, I don’t have the freetime, the pocket money or the emotional wherewithal to live, eat and breathe one particular thing. It’s a matter of growing up, having real responsibilities in life, and having more important things to invest your feelings in than dead rock stars. (Like live rock stars and men who don’t love you back.) But all of those things don’t mean that I don’t still love The Doors. I still love The Doors, and listen to them a lot (they’re my sixth favorite band, according to the numbers on my Last.fm) and possibly spend more time that I should looking at pictures of Jim Morrison in the privacy of my own internet. The point I’m trying to make, besides oversharing, is that I still like everything I liked when I was in high school, almost just as much. I don’t understand and pity people who feel ashamed of what they liked when they were younger. You could say that young teens have terrible taste and then grow up and develop better taste. But that’s not true. You don’t have terrible taste because you’re too young to know better – you have terrible taste because you’re a stupid idiot, and that’s something that afflicts you for life. What’s happening, as I see it, is those people who have terrible taste as teens grow up, see that whatever it was they were into is no longer the In-Thing, look around to see what the In-Thing currently is, and pretend to like that instead. Those people are called ‘hipsters’. They think they get it, but they don’t. Music isn’t an In or an Out thing. It’s not a commodity, regardless of what the big record labels would like you to think. It isn’t fashion. Music is a relationship, between you, the listener, and the artist, be he dead or alive. The artist has taken the time and effort to put his thoughts and feelings into the world, in the hope of connecting with other people, of making them feel something. Music is a shared experience, even a friendship, however one-sided. My relationship with Jim Morrison will never end. Your relationship with whatever music you loved when you were young shouldn’t have to end either, even if it was something terrible. Even if it was Limp Bizkit, you still had a relationship, and I bet that deep down inside, you really really miss them.
Creepy from anyone but Jim Morrison, right? Like if any normal guy had that for a pickup line, we’d run away screaming. But make it fucking Jim Morrison and it’s everyone’s wet dream. Yeah, I’d say this one is a little bit on the creeper side, which is a side Morrison frequently would walk on, but nobody really minded or noticed how creepy he could be, because dammit he’s so sexy and glamorous. The guy sang about killing his father and fucking his mother, and girls just swooned. Who said the double standard for beautiful vs. non-beautiful people was just for women? Good looking guys get away with murder. Or at least singing about it with impudence. Add to that the fact that many women are actively attracted to guys who are pricks, and you’ve got the good-looking pricks gliding through life like all the lights are green. Like Jimbo here, who could be an epic dickhead and got away with it scott free. Until, you know, he ran out of green lights.
A song that comes in many incarnations. Though originally Van Morrison’s baby, Gloria has escaped from him and his recordings of it are far from the most renowned. I’ll admit I’m not much of a fan of Van Morrison; in his solo career he’s too often wasted his vocal gifts on mawkish, subpar material. But in the early days with Them, he approximated American blues more convincingly than anyone in swinging England with the possible exception of Eric Burdon. Gloria was only a minor hit, but it caught on for being catchy and easy to play. Them’s version was a driving, bluesy showcase for their frontman’s vocals, but it was the three-chord simplicity of the tune itself that made every aspiring garage rocker to jump all over it. It’s become a staple of guitar-101 setlists. The list of cover versions is far stretching and includes guitarists ranging in mastery from Jimi Hendrix to Bill Murray.
The original was, like many a pop song, an ode to a hot chick, though the lyrics were the least important item on the menu. That shortcoming has lead to some inspired ad-libbing. The Doors made Gloria a concert staple, and the live recording became a hit for them. Jim Morrison’s rendition is a lascivious fantasy about a naughty schoolgirl. Morrison was known for interrupting otherwise concise songs with hazy rants about mystical ancient snakes, but there’s nothing mystical about the verses he inserted into Gloria. It’s probably the most erotically charged moment of his, or anyone’s, oeuvre. It’s downright dirty, and not a little bit creepy for making it clear that little Gloria is a schoolgirl whose parents aren’t home.
Songs by men about lusting for young girls are rock music’s bread and butter. So many men have sang about screwing Gloria that the song had soon picked up the misogynistic tang of a gang-bang video. Man, that Gloria must be a real slut! Clearly, Gloria needed rescuing from mindless iterations by all-male garage bands, and Patti Smith was the one to do it. Smith took a classic example what I’ll call a ‘male-gaze song’, chucked everything but the chorus, wrote new words and made it the most definitive rendition of Gloria. She started with the now iconic line “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine”, asserting her own rebellious view before launching boldly into the famous chorus – “Make her mine, make her mine!” It was a ballsy rewrite. Smith took the traditional hungry, lewd male-gaze perspective and made it her own. She wants Gloria too, but for her own reasons. She made it mean more than just desire, though her version is as sexy as anyone’s. It’s a post-gendered howl of empowerment, breaking free of the confines of both religious dogma and boring parties, asserting her responsibly for her own actions, her own desires. Smith took a song that would almost be sexist if it weren’t so dumb, turned it inside out and came back with an anthem I would call feminist if it weren’t so universal.
When Jim Morrison wrote “Five to one, baby, one in five, no one here gets out alive” he was referring (according to legend) to his generation outnumbering the preceding one. He was talking about the young taking over the establishment. Though he didn’t specify what exactly was going to happen, it sounds like he was hoping for a revolution, a sea change of some kind. The young he was talking about were, of course, the baby boom generation who did indeed take over the establishment. Whether that changing of the guards has been a sour disappointment, beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, or a compromise somewhere between the two, I don’t know. I’m not that old. I do wonder what Morrison, had he survived the cursed 27, would think of what the ‘don’t trust anyone over 30′ young guns have grown into.
That Jim Morrison, there he goes being all literary again. End of the Night it built around a tiny snippet of William Blake’s Auguries of Innocence, a very long poem which would make less ballsy aspiring serious poets than Morrison quake in their boots. Of course, Morrison wasn’t the first or last to draw on Blake for inspiration. For a man who died in 1827, William Blake is quite the big man on campus in twentieth century pop culture. It might be that Blake’s poems are so appealing in the millennial age simply because they’re easy to read. Not for him florid vocabulary words and stiff framing devices. So much great poetry and literature from the 17- and 18-hundreds has become inaccessible to modern readers because the language is just so filigreed. We (and I include myself) have become too lazy to decipher anything not made of short, declarative sentences, and as for the more complex of poetic meters, fuhgeddaboutit. I’ll admit I really don’t enjoy poetry very much. It’s too hard to read and requires too much thinking. Maybe I’m a stupid, internet-weaned philistine, but poetry on a printed page seems, I dunno, half naked somehow. It’s missing its music. Reading poetry is difficult because aside from absorbing the words themselves it’s necessary to sound it out in your head and try to get a feel of the rhythm of it, which is diabolically hard for someone who has no natural sense of rhythm. (Though, for the record, I don’t like free verse either.) What’s the point of reading a song without music? Anyway, I like reading William Blake because his verses are simple and declarative, and I can usually understand what he’s on about. And also I like his paintings. And his philosophical/spiritual message, such as I understand it, is nice too. He’s on about being kind to animals and children, right? Blake’s religious thoughts were the inspiration, in fact, for Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, a treatise on good, evil, spiritual autonomy, free will, religious and political persecution and the role of God, disguised as a series of young adult fantasy novels. Interesting how a thinker who was largely forgotten about for generations suddenly finds himself posthumously simpatico with the Zeitgeist centuries after his time. If a homage from a drunk man in leather pants leads rock fans to start reading Blake’s poetry, or even go so far as to think about his ideas, then that’s all the proof we need that literary references do have a place in pop music, and Jim Morrison will have done the job of door opening he’d set out to do.
Depending on your preconceived opinion, The Doors’ Oedipal epic The End is either proof positive of Jim Morrison’s hefty intellectual clout, or conversely, his more-literate-than-thou posturing. Jim’s intellectual clout can’t be denied; he had a genius I.Q., read voraciously and could hold forth for hours on poetry, mythology and philosophy. The nagging question is whether or not references to Sophocles have any place in pop music, especially delivered by a drunk man in leather britches. By some reckonings, the Morrison lifestyle of extreme imbibing, endless fucking and all-around reckless, jerky behavior was an in its own way noble attempt to live life as an Übermensch above and beyond the normal societal constraints of right and wrong. Morrison seemed to have internalized the ideas of Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Huxley, the Greeks, the Native Americans, and many others who I myself have only a vague understanding of. What emerged was a kind of hybrid philosophy, with Jim as the lizard shaman who would achieve new levels of enlightenment by fearlessly living outside the boundaries most normal people like to impose on themselves. Which mostly involved being irresponsibly drunk and stoned for most of his adult life. There’s also a hint of Christ complex in his endeavor to somehow, through his own chemical self-immolation, help guide his fans to a higher level of consciousness. (And I’m not extrapolating – by all accounts, this was his stated mission.) All of which is both heroic, and such ambitious hubris as to be either ridiculous or even more heroic again. How much he succeeded is the question. No doubt The Doors turned a lot of people on, changed a lot of lives and did indeed open a lot of minds to new heights of experience. To my eyes, Morrison spectacularly succeeded in becoming the martyred prophet he wanted to be. What I wonder is, if he had been less Dionysian and more Apollonian in his approach – that is, less drunk all the time – how different would his legacy be? Without the psychedelic fuel burning in his brain he would certainly been less the magnetic, mercurial performer who played shows as pagan rites. On the other hand, perhaps with a clearer head he would have come up a coherent philosophy of his own. If he had detoxed and lived, he would probably have busied himself writing books, developing his ideas and maturing as a poet. He so longed to be respected as a poet and intellectual, but in dying cemented his eternal status as merely a sexy dead rock star. Perhaps in an alternate universe there’s a happily sexagenarian James Douglas Morrison, thinker and man of letters, whose flashy early years in leather pants were merely a prelude to his real work.
The Soft Parade may have suffered for being made in troubled times. Jim Morrison was too busy with his ongoing suicide mission to show up to work most of the time, and showed up in various states of oblivion when he did. He wasn’t delivering the songwriting genius as he should have either – this nugget sounds a bit phoned-in, by usual Doors standards, though by non-Doors standards it’s still a notch and whiskey bottle above the rest of the crowd. It’s perfectly logical that the rest of the band, stuck in the studio with no Morrison in sight, would experiment with exotic new things like orchestral arrangements and English horn solos. I think knowing the creation story behind it makes the album more interesting.
I love it when I find YouTube videos of songs with Spanish subtitles. So helpful. Though maybe it was no necesito this time, because just maybe this isn’t James Douglas Morrison’s most shining moment of poesy. I think I recall the Doors having more problems with Jim that usual during recording The Soft Parade. The others wanted to experiment with more complicated production, bring in a horn section, and generally deviate from the true and tried formula. But seeing as he was frequently absent and too inebriated to function when he did turn up, he was overruled. As Jim wasn’t writing much either, Robby Krieger took up some of the slack, writing a higher percent of the songs than ever before. (This being one of his.) Jim wasn’t too thrilled with the lyrical quality, but he was too soused to do much about it. Still, even at the bottom of the stack a Doors album is a worthy cause.
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