Introduction
He's been dead for decades, but he's still causing trouble.
Jim Morrison was a mesmeric figure in the American sixties, a rebel poet and godhead in snakeskin and leather. He lived fast, died young, and left a less-than-exquisite corpse in Paris while hiding out from the law. In his prime the writers and critics went nuts trying to do his weird mojo some measure of justice. (One called him "an angel in grace and a dog in heat.") Jim was the greatest American rock star of his era, and one of its most publicized celebrities, butmore than three decades laterhis life and works have yet to yield all their secrets and enigmas.
Jim Morrison tried to set the night on fire. As lead singer of the Doors, he was an acid evangelist on a suicide mission to deprogram his generation from what he saw as a prisonlike conformity to social and sexual norms. He was a seer, an adept, a bard, a drunk, a bisexual omnivore. Jim styled his band "erotic politicians," and relentlessly urged his huge audienceat the height of the dangerous sixtiesto break on through the doors of perception, to free themselves from robotic familial conditioning, to seek a higher, more aware consciousness. Doors concertsthrobbing with war-dance rhythms and superheated intimacywere as close to the experience of shamanic ritual as the rock audience ever got. The Doors captured the unrest and the menace that hung in the air of the late sixties like tear gas, and they did it with hypnotic cool.
Between 1965 and 1971 Jim Morrison wrote a hundred songs, recorded seven platinum albums, wrote and published four editions of poems, made three films, recorded his poetry, wrote screenplays, and filled dozens of notebooks with verse and notations. He played more than two hundred concerts with the Doors. He established himself as a sex icon and the major American rock star of the sixties. He violated all of puritan America's sexual taboos andin a frenetic burst of political energy even threatened the vindictive Nixon administration with his blatant invitations to protest and revolt.
Jim Morrison, as it turns out, was much more important than anyone realized at the time. Critically dismissed as a has-been Bozo/Dionysius before his death, Morrison's poetic visions have stayed on the radio for more than thirty years, and on into the new century. They have become the classic texts of classic rock, reaching out to generations beyond the one that first understood the deepest meanings, the organic unity, and the transcendent qualities of his greatest work.
Jim Morrison was the last incarnation of that quintessential late- romantic figure, the demonically aroused poet shaking with rage at his world and his contemporaries; a prophet with terrible eyes and rigid features, clad in black leather. He was arguably the major poet to emerge from the turmoil of the legendary American sixties. Decades later, Jim Morrison has materialized as the true avatar of his age. His words are burned into the brains of three American generationsthe emergency telegram of "Break On Through," the visionary cadences of "L.A. Woman," and the mysterious whispered verses of "Riders on the Storm." His voice echoes on classic-rock stations from coast to coast. His image haunts dorm walls everywhere, emblazoned: JIM MORRISON/AMERICAN POET / 19431971. The Doors' album sales, as of this writing, are over fifty million units, and climbing.
Today, more than thirty years after Jim Morrison died, important new revelations are emerging concerning his tumultuous life, his tragic death, and his enduring legend. And the questions about him still linger. Who was he really? Why did he destroy himself? Why was he failed by everyone who knew him?
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It wasn't all great, being a rock god in the sixties. The tours were primitive and disorganized. The groupies were pretty, but they gave you herpes and the clap. The drugs and alcohol turned you into an imbecile. Your old lady slept around while you were on tour. The critics hated you when you got huge, and suddenly the press that had built you up into a deity began to tear you down. The Doors at their best were about as good as rock music ever got. At their worst, they were one of the most pretentious bands on the planet. But no one had a clearer grasp of the complexities and ironies of the age than Jim Morrison.
Living the times as he did, in full senses-deregulated consciousness, Jim understood the American sixties for what they were: an era of new religious visions, spiritual crisis, political unrest, race riots, assassinationsas well as a rare opportunity for change and reform. The decade's promises were never fulfilled, but some of its goalssuch as integration, civil rights, the "global village," and the bringing of East and West into closer harmonyare clearly still in process. Jim Morrison hitchhiked along this psychic landscape like a killer on the road, and the Doors' music still has the uncanny power to poison every new class of ninth graders with its dark messages and raw power. What thirteen-year-old today can play "People Are Strange" and not hear it as a postcard of comfort from beyond the grave? How many dead rock stars have an annual riot at their tomb?
In one of his unpublished spiral notebooks, sometime in 1968, Jim penned his credo in blue ink: "I contend an abiding sense of irony over all I do."
Jim Morrison's famous "Lizard King" persona was a joke, but it was a serious joke, a cosmic put-on. Jim's serial evocation of the American desert and its reptilian underworld was part of his existential drive to include in the experience of life the omnipresence of impending death. In another notebook entry he wrote: "Thinking of death as the climactic point of one's life."
John Densmore, the Doors' drummer, who was often frightened and bewildered by Jim Morrison's behavior, later observed that all the other California bands of the sixties preached the raising of consciousness toward a state of enlightenment. But the Doors' message, he wrote, had been all about "endarkenment."
No rock singer ever sounded more like he meant it than Jim Morrison. No one else could have released a subversive, antimilitarist song like "The Unknown Soldier," with its hellacious screams of violence and despair, amid the brutality of the Vietnam War. Alone of his generation, Jim's power depended not just on the surge of his poetry with the blinding charisma of his amplified performances, but also on the sheer, cussed rebel energy it took to stand up to society and challenge its hypocritical, constipated moral values in a time of dangerous upheaval.
Alone of the sixties rock stars, Jim Morrison didn't see his mission as a show. "For me, it was never an act, those so-called performances," he said. "It was a life-and-death thingan attempt to communicate, to involve many people at once in a private world of thought."
Jim Morrison took the inherent dread of the American sixties and made it even crazier, more desperate. Then he made it into a joke, and Jim's volatile essence was a rocket destined to burn out. Drugs would destroy the bravest and craziest of the rock stars. "Revelation would turn into delusion." When his spiritual drive was exhausted, sapped by addiction, dementia, and legal battles, Jim's body followed soon after. Jim Morrison's tragic death at twenty-seven in 1971 was the last in the sequence of rock extinctions that began with Jim's hero Brian Jones (at twenty-seven) in 1969, and continued with Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix (both also at twenty-seven) in 1970. The rock movement never recovered. The surviving heroes would carry on, new ones were born (and also would die), but the midnight hour had passed when Jim Morrison flamed out. Those whom the gods love die young.
The theater is dark and smoky. Outside, police sirens scream as the cops teargas the kids who can't get in. Suddenly a white-hot light pierces the gloom and a jellied scream rips open an abyss of despair and fury. The Doors are in town tonight, and Jim Morrison is acting out his epic pathos, the lead singer as an illuminating angel from hell.
Looking beyond the lip of the stage, he sees a dark jumble of chaos and disorder as the convulsive young mob of teenagers pulses violently before him. The energy the band is putting out may be awesome, but it is nothing in comparison to what is happening down in the audience, where the chaos is not an act, and often gets much crazier than it does onstage. Jim Morrison's experience of the concert was the inverse of the audience's, as he witnessed nightly scenes of mass rapture, anxiety, lust, fear, and joy. Jim learned early on that the real energy in the room belongs to the audience. It's this knowledge that compelled him to document these Bosch-like fantasias for posterity in his film, Feast of Friends.
There is something awful, deeply moving, and terribly human in the tragical history of Jim Morrison. On the surface, it's a story of how the excess of fame and unlimited freedom ruined a young American poet. Looking closer, it becomes clear that Jim Morrison's early fury and mania gradually evolved into a kind of artistic maturity, one that was more keenly experienced and aggressively lovelyand prophetically fatal. This book seeks to replace the myths and the lies that have overwhelmed the legend of Jim Morrison with new reporting and a reconsideration of both the known facts and the wild, unsubstantiated rumors. The portrait that emerges in the end reveals a damaged, fiercely loving, compassionate man who overcame his self-destruction through a body of darkly beautiful work that echoes down to us today, with its romantic glamour and spiritual power intact. Mr. Mojostill rising.
Is everybody in?
The ceremony is about to begin.