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Jim Morrison and The Doors

Started by Janie Jones, May 03, 2021, 04:23:59 PM

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PaulTMA

I have the same warmth for this music as I did for the Postman Pat cassette I had access to at the time.

Kinda rules

PaulTMA

Felt must have been listening for Trains Above The City

itsfredtitmus

Quote from: shagatha crustie on May 08, 2021, 01:16:13 AM
It's THE WEST IS THE BEST and RIDE THE SNAKE... TO... THE LAKE that I can't abide.
Who doesn't love the serpent and lizard stuff though

itsfredtitmus

"Weird scenes inside the goldmine" he's as good as they say sometimes

Ballad of Ballard Berkley

Quote from: PaulTMA on May 07, 2021, 07:01:42 PM
Wouldn't mind seeing a rock journos stars in their eyes, Fricke could do Joey Ramone, Danny Kelly do Elvis Costello, David Quantick do GG Allin etc.

If only Stars in Their Eyes had been around in the late '70s. Young Danny Baker would've knocked it outta the park as David Essex.

Ballad of Ballard Berkley

Quote from: itsfredtitmus on May 08, 2021, 12:15:25 AM
The Seeds have one track

Yes. You've got to admire their brazen commitment to writing exactly the same song again and again. People often say that about the Ramones, but they got loads of mileage out of their self-imposed restrictions. The Seeds almost never bothered with a third chord, let alone a fourth. I admire that.

Ballad of Ballard Berkley

Quote from: shagatha crustie on May 08, 2021, 01:16:13 AM
It's THE WEST IS THE BEST and RIDE THE SNAKE... TO... THE LAKE that I can't abide.

Aww, I love all of that nonsense. Morrison had a great voice, he crooned absolute drivel with charismatic gusto.

It's quite sweet, really, when you listen to the likes of Ian Curtis and Echo out of Echo and The Bunnymen, they're so in thrall to Morrison but they could never sing like him.

Jockice


Jockice

Quote from: BeardFaceMan on May 04, 2021, 07:51:26 PM
When I in my late teens I got into an argument with a friend of a friend who was a complete cock, and also a huge fan of The Doors. During the argument he told me I wore my soul on my face and I burst out laughing because I didn't know what he meant. So I asked him, and he just kept repeating himself, mumbling "you wear your soul on your face", clearly not knowing what it meant himself, which made me laugh more. Cut to about 10 years later and I was watching The Doors film on tv and there was Val Kilmer telling someone that the wore their soul on their face. The silly billy had seen the film and just repeated that line to me because he thought it was cool, which gave me another huge laugh 10 years later, so thanks for that, Dave, you complete cock.

Then I worked with another chap who was also big into The Doors and would drone on and on about how Morrison was a poet, man. He didn't actually know that Morrison wrote poetry, he was simply talking about the songs.

So I've never really given them a proper go, because the fans I encounter usually put me off. That "People Are Strange" song is quite good, though.

It's because of meeting this sort of people in my younger days that I've never deliberately listened to The Doors. Apart from Light My Fire (ok apart from the version with the six year long keyboard bit in the middle) and People Are Strange, I don't think I can name another of their songs. I may be missing out but I don't really care.

MiddleRabbit


DukeDeMondo

Quote from: Janie Jones on May 05, 2021, 11:55:04 AM
Most biographers mention The Lizard King's intermittent BO. Those leather trousers were never cleaned and he wore no underwear. Anyway, Duke Demondo has loads of intelligent comments on the Oliver Stone film, I'm hoping we can flush him out.

Ach Jesus, Janie, that was a lovely thing to say. I dunno how intelligent they are, my thoughts on The Doors (1991), but it is right enough that I have been thinking about it a fair bit recently, for after talking with you about that book that you were reading, book all about The Doors, I thought it might be interesting to revisit it, the film, and interesting too perhaps to revisit the actual music of the actual Doors while I was at it. As a consequence, I've spent more time listening to The Doors these past few weeks than I have spent listening to The Doors at any time since I was in High School. Last I was anywhere near it, Hyacinth House was nothing but fields and maybe a bucket for the donkey.

Anyway I was curious as to what I would make of it now, The Doors (1991), now that I'm further removed from the me that I was when I last sat down to watch The Doors (1991) than was The Doors (1991) from the performance of "Light My Fire" on The Ed Sullivan Show that Oliver Stone recreates about a third of the way through.

I saw it many times in my early teens, The Doors. Saw it before I ever even knew who The Doors even were. Before Jim Morrison ever even had a name. Before he was ever anyone or anything other than the fella on the wall in the cave in The Lost Boys.

"They're only noodles, Michael."

I think the film probably did for me what the actual albums seem to have done for others, although obviously the music was a big part of the film's appeal. Generally, my memories were of a film that was tremendous fun for the first half hour or so and that was pretty compelling for the last half hour or so but that was absolute fucking foot and mouth for the whole of the time in-between. Interminable. So boring that the screen went numb at the corners. That was how I remembered it, but the stuff that I liked I liked well enough to keep me going back to it, and the stuff that I didn't like at least had music that intrigued me underneath.

Before watching it again I had come to believe that I must have been too young for it, that's all that it was. For the stuff in the middle. Too young. Probably just the right age for the stuff at the start, probably just the right age in all the wrong ways for the stuff at the end, but too young to appreciate whatever went on between those poles. That's the only explanation. There's no way that an Oliver Stone film about The Doors, released the same year as fucking JFK and only three years before Natural Born Killers, could possibly have been boring in any meaningful sense for any length of time at all, certainly not for the bulk of its running time. It was madness to think any different. An affront of a thought. It defied the shape of things and the sum of their numbers.

The Outhere Brothers used to watch it over and over when they were on tour, I remember them saying. Smash Hits or something. You know that movie The Doors? Man, we watch that movie every day. Every day, man, we watch The Doors. You know that movie, man? Man. Every day we watch that movie.

So I decided to give it another go a couple weeks back, and in making that decision I found myself reflecting upon The Doors in themselves and upon my relationship with the music that they made, and specifically the music that they made between the release of The Doors in 1967 and the release of LA Woman in 1971, and about how The Doors (1991), or perhaps a misreading of The Doors (1991), might have informed how I heard those records, and how I came to feel about them later. Thinking about that run of albums, most of which I adored at one time or another, thinking about "Alabama Song," which now, in this 2021, sounds bizarrely like The Libertines to my ears (although I suppose there is a thread or a number of threads that run from the one to the other, it's not that peculiar an association, really), thinking about "Moonlight Drive." Thinking about an afternoon waking sore and alone, half-seas over half a dozen times or more, and this set of speakers on a desk in a room in the college I was attending at the time, and I was listening to LA Woman, and the door opened and one of my tutors came tootling in from the hall, having walked on down the hall, tootling in, and he paced about for a moment with his hands linked behind his back, nodding and singing along under his breath with the words that were being sung by Jim Morrison of The Doors – for they were true, the words that Jim Morrison was singing, it was true that the girl had gotta love her man, there's no two ways about it, it was true that it was an hour ago or thereabouts that he got into town, this was the truth that he was telling, the clocks don't face that direction for nothing – and then he gave a wee sort of "pfft," my tutor, this man that I idolised and idolise still, who shaped me in ways that I'm yet to fully comprehend even now, two decades later, the man who introduced me to so many of my favourite films, so many of my favourite albums, who coloured the cut of my whistle and the pule of my head like nobody before or since, he stops for a moment and he looks at me without really looking and he says "how the hell can you sit there in a Dead Kennedys shirt listening to pretentious bloody rubbish like this?"

I looked at the DK on my chest and I looked at the cover of LA Woman and I looked at him, and I knew that there was a truth in what he was saying that was probably truer than Jim Morrison's truth, and I knew too that this truth had been hard won, that it had emerged only after many midnights spent wrestling with himself on the carpet next the hearth, that he had been sat where I was sitting at one time or another, whenever it was, and that he knew what he was talking about. He had memorised every word of every verse of every one of those songs, probably he had memorised every word of every verse of every Doors song ever written, and yet he looked curdled in himself for having ever had to hear them.

He too was a fan of the Dead Kennedys, first couple albums at least, and what he said and what I came then to believe was that you couldn't be a fan of The Doors and the Dead Kennedys both. It wasn't possible, and even if it was possible, it wasn't sustainable.

For either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve "Police Truck" and "The End."

"They're only noodles."

Whether it was in response to the sounds or to the words or to Oliver Stone's depiction of the people who produced those sounds and the person who sang those words, that "pfft" was the end of any meaningful engagement with the music of The Doors for me. Far as anyone knew. Far as anyone knew that was it, I had fucking had it up to here with these fucking toads on the roads. Yet every now and again it would happen that I would scurry off in the dead of night under cover of heavy thunder and strong rains falling, meeting with The Soft Parade, maybe, when ones was in their beds, in the dead of night.

I loved that album, The Soft Parade, loved it through everything, loved it even walking out the door. Headphones on in the back of somebody's uncle's car pretending to listen to In On The Kill Taker. I no longer thought very highly of any of the other Doors albums that there were in the world, load of droning on about Goebbels and ergot from between painted legs in borrowed stockings, but I still loved The Soft Parade, and having sat with it again for a time after talking with Janie Jones there, first time sharing its space in maybe twelve tears, I realised that I love it still.

It's a bold, banjaxed, watery-nosed, swaggering slabber of a thing, a gorgeous melange of jazz and soul and psychedelic pop and scuzzy old blues and countrypolitan shimmer and shine, far more self-deprecating than self-aggrandising or self-mythologising. More spring in its swing that sweat on its teeth. Almost all of its tracks have something to surprise or delight, although I can understand how certain listeners might hear those tracks only as preludes, notable only insofar as they lead towards that astonishing, genre-mangling title track at the end. That song, "The Soft Parade," is for me among the most exciting and excitingly fevered things that The Doors or anyone else ever recorded. I would deafen myself to LA Woman from now until Christ crawls from under the clouds if it meant that I could add an extra nine minutes to the nine minutes of "The Soft Parade" that there almost already are. The ecstatic tremor rippling through the manoeuvres of its movements, the breath-taking breadth of its scope, the multiplicity of things that thump gnashing and deranged against the walls the whole way through, headbutting the concrete, punching at the brick, rattling about the rafters. It's deranged and beautiful and wild but it's also tremendous amounts of fun, 'shrooming at the carousels, playful in a way that the climactic meanderings of some of their more celebrated records rarely are. And then there's Morrison's performance, which is fucking astonishing. Brimstone-blooded and funny and unhinged. Roaring himself hoarse over these horses and their preachers. Laughing at nothing. Most convincing Moses Poses that he ever threw, perhaps because he so seldom sounds like he's trying to convince anyone of anything, neither you nor I nor the mountains nor himself.

"He bought a little!"

"What'd he say?"

I wonder if The Doors (1991) isn't closer in spirit to The Soft Parade than it might initially have appeared? I wonder if we've all been waiting for the summer rain, yeah, when we were always meant to be looking at mah shoes?

Far as that goes, I think it's interesting that Stone's depiction of the creation of that particular album not only makes for some of the most memorable scenes in the whole film, but also marks the point at which The Doors (1991) finally shudders itself free of the fetid churn of that interminable mid-section. Interesting too in that they are perfectly pitched, those scenes, uncannily evoking the experience of actually listening to the album itself. Sometimes tragic, sometimes ridiculous, sometimes erotic, sometimes mystical, sometimes hilarious, sometimes lost, always compelling. Interesting in how they shake the film awake just in time to catch its subject toppling headlong towards the inevitable, and interesting how, in so doing, they align us with the sorts of foul-weather fans alluded to here and there throughout, those who were dazzled by the death tripping to begin with, who lost interest when that "death" began to look less like an actual death and more like a half-death borne of a drifting towards irrelevance and obsolescence, and then came scrambling back up from the depths of the shadows when it was obvious that he was actually going to kill himself after all, because that's really all they wanted, was for Jim Morrison to destroy himself properly. It's what they wanted until they got it, anyway.

The stretch that encompasses that blootered bit of swatting in the general direction of "Touch Me" and the truly mesmerising recreation of that extraordinary show in Miami  – Morrison leaning into whatever rambling, spasming emptiness it is that fills him, Robby Krieger reluctantly tripping his tits to pieces as a fucking ferocious "Five To One" foams up out of the bones of the world all around him, the shambolic and the shamanic dancing round one another with such fervour that after a while you can't even really tell them apart – and then on through unto the last of things, all of that stuff is phenomenally good, and in fact sort of redeems even the most wearying of those earlier scenes by retroactively stripping them of the suffocating portentous rumble that runs through them as they're unfolding. "Oh, that? I dunno, I was stoned. Seemed like fun at the time."

Still, whether by accident or design, that stuff, the shit and the sludge, it's still a load of fucking shit and sludge. I mean, it may just be that I don't find that particular cultural moment or cluster of moments especially interesting. From Venice Beach through Haight-Ashbury and on into Warhol's Factory, from the bleaching and the blotting and the shades down round the chins and the puffing and the toking and the flares and the lens flares to the deep reds and ersatz blacknesses creeping about corridors full of people with nothing to say but absolutely convinced of the apocalyptic significance of their every utterance, and with the insufferable gassing of Morrison and Patricia Kennealy weaving in and out of things, as if it wasn't bad enough... My whole head scales over. Some weird things should probably just be left in the goldmine.

But the Oliver Stone of the 1980s and 1990s made many films about subjects that I wouldn't say I find especially interesting as subjects in themselves, and yet those films are phenomenal, they're rich and loaded and formally dazzling and they have more ideas erupting in tandem than any one film could ever hope to contain, and for some of the time The Doors (1991) feels like it might be all of those things too, but for the rest of the time it does not, and that seems a bit weird to me. How can it be that a scene depicting nothing much more than a load of fucking sitting about on the sand is so kinetic and mesmeric and thrilling, whilst later scenes flooding over with Crazy Fucking Crazy Mad Crazy Fucking Shit are so stifling and moribund? Maybe those earlier scenes are as exciting as they are because they're about people who are excited. There's a mimetic bind between the formal qualities of the thing and the scenes being dramatized and the psychological contours of the characters within those dramas, characters high on exploration for the sake of itself, characters both intrigued and intriguing, and throughout those sequences, form and content are bleeding over other and the result is absolutely enthralling. And maybe form and content are in harmony too throughout what follows. The hubris and the emptiness and the scenes so bloated on fuck all of any consequence that they're barely fit to form a fist or swallow their spit.

Also, for a film about someone as enamoured of his Man Bits as Morrison was, and for a film with so much nudity in, it's surprisingly coy in its approach to the male body. Female body parts are spectacularised at numerous junctures, naked women fall into the frame from all available angles, but barring a couple brief shots of Jim's bum, at least one of which is played for laughs, the film is generally as wary of anything going on below his belly button as are the executives of The Ed Sullivan Show who are mocked so ruthlessly (and, to my mind, unfairly) in the scene mentioned away up above there. Some of those decisions will of course have been made for Oliver Stone by the MPAA, who have proven notoriously inconsistent when it comes to sexuality or nudity or violence or anything else, but whatever the reasons, and whether it was a conscious move or it wasn't, it does lend credence to the notion, frequently expressed, that "Free Love" was every bit as misogynistic as the structures it was supposedly opposing. Every bit as much about the objectification and ownership of female bodies, every bit as much about men who watch but who are not watched, or who are not watched in quite the same way. Even men like Jim Morrison are not watched in quite the same way.

(Saying that, the film is refreshingly non-judgemental about the nature of Jim's relationship with Pamela Courson. Neither one is exclusively bound to the other in any physical sense, both are free to explore themselves and those around them as they wish, neither one of them makes much of a deal of it for the most part [although, with depressing predictability, when one of them does make something of a deal of it, it's Pam], and neither, for the most part, does the film really make much of a deal of it.)

The relatively recent success, critically and commercially, of Straight Outta Compton (the film), another musical biopic that is in some way about misogyny and in many ways an expression of misogyny, suggests that none of that stuff would be much of an issue for audiences in 2021, but I do think the rather glib depictions of what are some truly grotesque physical and emotional abuses, abuses framed as just so many mad old Jimscapades in a never ending procession of the same, might maybe invite the narrowing of an eye or two. And there are other things about The Doors (1991) that I think would be met with some hostility today. Most obviously, I would imagine that the fetishizing of indigenous American culture, reduced to a bit of exotic buzz-chasing and a carnivalizing of otherness, would probably generate a fair amount of debate here and now, certainly more than it did at the time. I mean, some of the ways in which Johnny Cash expressed solidarity with indigenous American communities throughout the 1960s would probably cause some alarm in the current climate, and that was coming from a place of political advocacy, someone in a position of privilege aligning himself with the marginalised and dispossessed. That's some way from Morrison's broadly apolitical evocation of a very specific image of The Native American, and broadly apolitical conceptualisation of indigenous American culture as a homogenous mass as ripe for consumption as anything else.

But, again, I don't know how much of what we see is supposed to be taken at face value, how much we're supposed to read as endorsement or celebration, how much we're supposed to read as indictment, how much is supposed to scan as satirical. I think I lean towards believing that some of it, at least, is satirical. I think there are things at play in the film that have been misunderstood every bit as much as The Doors themselves came to be misunderstood in its wake. It's definitely much funnier than I remembered, and much more sceptical of both The Cult of Jim and of the milieu that he emerged from, where the air above folks' heads was all love and unity and ego death and the air beneath was selfishness, chaos, destruction and hatred. 

Is it significant that Oliver Stone opted to cast his own son as Young Jim? Is it significant that he opted to cast himself as the UCLA Professor whose class Jim walks out of early on? Are the questions that Stone's Professor O'Movie poses in response to Jim's short film directed towards the students onscreen or directed to us, over here, on the other side?

"Pretty pretentious there, Jim. Not easy to follow, you know, little incoherent? But, ah... dancing bears, Nazism, masturbation... What's next? What do you guys think?" 

"What do you guys think?"

As a teenager, I probably understood that scene as indicative of the emergence of a new mode of being and thinking and creating that could never be understood by the likes of Professor O'Movie because it was explosive and untamed and untameable, and because it defied any sense of order and because it spat in the face of the almost Lutheran valorisation of restraint, and attendant distrust of self indulgence and unfettered expression, that was characteristic of the repressive, oppressive institutions that Professor O'Movie and those like him embodied.

I wouldn't have been able to say any of that, but probably that's how it felt to me, in some way, that scene. Morrison was mocked and patronised and attacked by those in positions of authority because of the threat he posed to that authority. He was misunderstood by his peers because they had internalised the values of their parents, and so when confronted with his genius, as suggested, at least, by this peculiar, idiosyncratic piece of film art in this darkened lecture theatre, they ridiculed him for failing to grasp the things he was reaching for, rather than celebrating the fact that he was reaching.

Watching that scene again now, I think it's more nuanced. I do think "What do you guys think?" is directed at us, but I don't think that we're really expected to know how to answer, and I don't think that Oliver Stone really knows how to answer either.

I don't think the Jim Morrison of The Doors (1991) is pretentious, necessarily. I think he's just naïve. Little more than a child, really. Instinctively drawn to certain hazy sorts of spiritual ideals, compelled by particular philosophies or by their outlines, shuffling around a load of loosely defined esoterica, peering from a distance towards manifestations of vaguely occultural currents and trends, keen to transcend even if he doesn't necessarily understand what it means to transcend or what it is he's transcending. There's a sort of scatter-headed half-awake goofiness to him that I didn't really pick up on away back when. I took very seriously a lot of stuff that I now think we're probably supposed to think is a bit silly. The conversations with Pam in the early days of their courtship, for example, are not possessed of the profundity that I heard in them when I was younger. Now they recall nothing so much as that scene in Annie Hall in which Annie and Alvy, wandering the avenues and alleyways of Annie's relationship history, stumble upon a withering dialogue with Jerry, this desperately pretentious actor that she was seeing for a bit.

"Acting is like an exploration of the soul, it's very religious, uh, like a kind of liberating consciousness. It's like a visual poem. It's like when I think of dying. You know how I wanna die? I'd like to get torn apart by wild animals.

Alvy just rolling his eyes. "Heavy. Eaten by some squirrels."

Frequently, when Jim was talking, all I could hear was Jerry. "Touch my heart. With your foot."

I think the film probably gets him about right, overall. Jim. By turns ferociously intelligent and stupefyingly idiotic, gauche and wearied and magnetic and repulsive and overspilling with imagination. An attractive, talented young man barely out of his teens, drunk on himself and drunk on the scene cresting about him and drunk on drink, young man who didn't really have a chance to find himself before losing himself, bit more interested in being seen to read certain books than he is in actually reading them, flush with the rush of ideas snagging in passing, chasing his tongue as far as he can chase it, and when it outruns him he turns to the tongues of others, saying the right things at exactly the right time, when he was exactly the right age, before dying exactly the right sort of death at, again, exactly the right time. Wading through experiences he doesn't really understand or even care to understand, yet came to embody in some way for the rest of time. A cipher pointing towards a whole bunch of stuff and a whole bunch of nothing. "They're only noodles, Michael."

I would say that, probably, in the wake of The Doors (1991), Jim's poetry and prose probably took a bigger hit than did the music. I don't know how seriously it was taken before – not very, if the film is to believed – or how seriously he took it himself, but there is stuff in his published writings that is actually worth reading, especially when we remember how young he was when he was writing it. Some of the things he scratched into being are disarmingly sharp and surprisingly ahead of their time. I've always tended to find his musings on cinema pretty embarrassing, for example, but there are certain things he says about cinema and about voyeurism in "The Lords," which I read again the other day, that almost anticipate Foucault, and some of the stuff about Muybridge and about the cinema of attractions and about the perceived conflict between a cinema of sensation and a cinema of, let's say, loftier ambitions reads like a series of impressionistic, semi-coherent notes made in the margins of a thumbed-done copy of Hard Core by Linda Williams, except Hard Core by Linda Williams wasn't published until 1989, near twenty years after Jim Morrison died.

But, anyway. Fucking hell. State of this post.

TL;DR: They're only noodles, but they might be something else. I dunno. 

itsfredtitmus

Quote from: Ballad of Ballard Berkley on May 08, 2021, 05:23:29 AM
Aww, I love all of that nonsense. Morrison had a great voice, he crooned absolute drivel with charismatic gusto.
Glad someone else loves all that weird scenes goldmine lizard stuff

chveik

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyfB-Hk3FDQ

i think they really captured the essence of Jim Morrison & His Doors there

Just a heads-up to say that Oliver Stone's 'The Doors' film went on Netflix today if you get really bored and happen to want to watch it again.

Catalogue of ills

Quote from: Ballad of Ballard Berkley on May 07, 2021, 02:37:05 PM
Yeah, he's a hack. A platitude-spouting classic rock cheerleader.

The antidote to this is probably Joan Didion's essay on The Doors and Morrison in the excellent collection of her work, The White Album. Didion is well known for taking a more detached view of the late '60s, as much an observer as a participant, and this lends her work a clarity lacking elsewhere. Anyway, the beginning of that particular essay is reproduced here - from memory, most of the piece is about her and the rest of the Doors waiting a long, long time for 'Morrison' to show up to do some recording, and being in a shabby old state when he finally does (I may have completely misremembered this). I remember it being quite demystifying. It's defintely worth getting hold of, because the whole collection is top class.

I never really got The Doors, although I appreciate the otherness of them that Didion references in her intro. I don't think I ever forgave Morrison for rhyming 'fire' with 'fire'.

Ham Bap

Quote from: Catalogue of ills on May 17, 2021, 12:25:05 PM
The antidote to this is probably Joan Didion's essay on The Doors and Morrison in the excellent collection of her work, The White Album. Didion is well known for taking a more detached view of the late '60s, as much an observer as a participant, and this lends her work a clarity lacking elsewhere. Anyway, the beginning of that particular essay is reproduced here - from memory, most of the piece is about her and the rest of the Doors waiting a long, long time for 'Morrison' to show up to do some recording, and being in a shabby old state when he finally does (I may have completely misremembered this). I remember it being quite demystifying. It's defintely worth getting hold of, because the whole collection is top class.

I never really got The Doors, although I appreciate the otherness of them that Didion references in her intro. I don't think I ever forgave Morrison for rhyming 'fire' with 'fire'.

Im gonna check out that Joan Didion stuff, looks very interesting.
(Also, Robby Krieger wrote Light my Fire :)  )

markburgle

Quote from: PaulTMA on May 07, 2021, 11:56:47 PM
Nice to see a lot of non-judgemental Doors appreciation here.  They've strangely become an underrated band.  An album 'deep cut' not mentioned thusfar:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFCCvaghUnU&ab_channel=TheDoors-Topic

I got this album when I was 10 and thought he was singing the non-existent word "mistiquèted" instead of "mistic heated", but it hardly matters either way.

That was possibly my favourite track on that album, I thought he was saying the non-existent word "mysticated".

What about Doors books? Manzarek's is a total hippified, self-serving gloss but I still enjoyed it. Puts Jim on a pedestal and lets him off the hook for all his shitty behaviour by blaming it on alter ego Manzarek invents for him called "Jimbo". He paints Densmore as the band's uptight, bitter outsider, who failed Jim's posturing manliness test (reverently described as Morrison staring into new acquaintance's eyes to see if they'll hold his gaze. Densmore didn't).

Densmore's book is a great counter to that. Seemingly more down to earth and realistic about the effects of their hero worship of Jim (something he looks back on with self awareness rather than still buying into like Manzarek does/did). Says the reason he couldn't hold Jim's gaze was because his eyes were full of crazy (and also presumably bacause staring into the eyes of someone you just met is weird). The stuff at the end about the death of his schizophrenic brother is is fucking tragic.

That's how I remember them anyway. I liked Danny Sugerman's book too, even though it's more of a drug memoir. The grindingly repetitive nature his drug tales was quite effective in a cumulative way, because at the end when he finally walks away from it all you feel something of how he might've - the change comes as a relief.

McChesney Duntz

Manzarek's book deserves immortality for inspiring one of my favorite pieces of long-form snarkcrit ever:

https://web.archive.org/web/20110719183625/http://www.hermenaut.com/a132.shtml

markburgle

Quote from: McChesney Duntz on May 21, 2021, 04:47:52 PM
Manzarek's book deserves immortality for inspiring one of my favorite pieces of long-form snarkcrit ever:

https://web.archive.org/web/20110719183625/http://www.hermenaut.com/a132.shtml

Long-form? You weren't kidding. That book is definitely ripe for this sort of thing but crumbs, it goes on a bit. They're snarky about the band too so they can fuck off

McChesney Duntz

Yeah, maybe so, but it's what the book deserves (granted, that piece actually inspired me to buy the damn thing, so who's the fool?) - I can only imagine what they would have written if they knew Ray's "novel," The Poet In Exile (can you guess what - or more precisely, who - that one's about? Can ya?) was soon in the offing. But full disclosure: I happen to like the Doors a lot, and hell, I even have time for Manzarek - his contributions to the sound and feel of the Doors are undeniable, he actually seems like a thoroughly decent gent if Danny Sugerman's Wonderland Avenue is anything to go by[nb]Probably the best of all the Doors-adjacent books, though a lot of that is thanks to the fantastic Iggy stories throughout.[/nb], and he produced the first four (and, until last year, the only good) X albums, which could counterbalance a lot more cultural crimes than Raybo ever committed.

I've never been quite sure why Morrison and the Doors seem to have taken the brunt of the post-60s cultural backlash - as if Morrison was the only rock star of the era to get wasted/drunk and behave like an asshole in public, or the Doors the only combo with literary/artistic pretensions beyond their ability to make them completely signify, or the only members of their generational cohort to smugly rattle on about freedom and the breaking down of barriers and such blah blah and not recognize their rancid sexism and suchlike. No, they were far from the only ones so inclined, and, at least on the evidence at hand, probably far from the worst as well. (If I ever run across CSN or Y, at least two of those letters are getting an open-handed slap in the mouth.) I suppose it's due to the dumbass cult that sprung up with the publication of No One Here Gets Out Alive (which nullifies the good things I had to say about Sugerman's other book in the previous 'graf, may he rest in peace), wherein all the mean, ugly stupid behaviors el Jimbo exhibited were not only foregrounded but lionized, and even used as a fulcrum to elevate him to some ridiculous god-like status. And just when that started to die down, along comes Oliver Stone to put his own spin on the same near-myth. (And yet I happen to really enjoy that movie, for the same reason most of Stone's pictures up until he lost his batshit mojo in the late 90s work for me in spite of themselves - it's viscerally, kinetically committed to the point of delirium; just don't think about it for more than a few seconds or you'll turn to, um, stone.) Manzarek certainly did his part to burnish the cult of Jimbo and the whole sixties mythos, but I don't hold it against him too much - he just happened to be able to articulate that self-contained worldview more thoroughly than most; he never quite realized what a prison he helped build for himself and his peers, but few of 'em ever did, so I don't blame him for that construction since I pity him a little for his constriction.

And I can't really blame Morrison, either - not his fault that he carked it so young (well, it was, of course, but you know what I mean), and the signs are good that, if he had made it out of the bathtub, he might have sloughed off a fair amount of the kak that was already starting to encrust him by fully embracing his self-parody. I mean that as a positive - my major disagreement with the piece I linked (and Doors criticism in general) is the notion that the whole project was utterly po-faced and lacking humor. And yeah, if you go by the first couple of albums, you might be right. But I got the sense that - especially once Jim morphed from acidhead to juicer - he was bright enough to develop a sense of his own absurdity, which showed up in subtle ways on the albums and far more overtly on stage. I mean, some of his live banter - particularly post-Miami - was goddamned hilarious. So I could see him carrying on in that vein, maybe giving up music and getting Brando-fat on some secluded island somewhere, luxuriating in a certain elder-statesman mode. Or maybe he would have been the biggest AA booster on the planet. Or a Scientologist. Or a right-wing Trumpoid scud. Who can say. But he fucking popped his clogs half a century ago, almost twice as long as he was actually alive, so I forgive him his trespasses and just groove on what he accomplished. Which is to be the first teen idol with pretensions. Which is honestly a pretty fantastic thing to be. (I also have use for Duran Duran for similar reasons.) And fuck it, the music holds up. Which I could have just said in the first place and saved you the eyestrain and me the carpal tunnel. You can see why I have no problem with things that "go on a bit.' But there it is. Stronger than dirt.