Appreciation/Copyright © 1971, 2006 by Jim O’Donnell
Friends saw him as Gentleman Jim. Fans considered him Calamity Jim. Few will ever think of him as Sweet Baby James, that is, unless you buy his assertion that "Death makes angels of us all."
He was a pedantic bookworm turned Sixteen Magazine idol. He could wax austere and quote William Blake, then take to a stage, be the Lizard King, and do anything.
He sang millions into rock 'n' roll ecstasy. Yet he spent so many days lost in a gothic wilderness of pain that his reputation was one of a guy whose idea of Home Sweet Home was a bar on Santa Monica Boulevard.
He should have been a living legend in his time, but died at age 27, way before his time. And the actual day of his death was observed as unceremoniously as that of an Unknown Soldier.
Leading many more lives than one, he was rock music's Changeling: loner poet, teen idol, film student, stage madman.
But most of all, James Douglas Morrison was like no lead singer I have ever seen—or probably ever will see again.
He'd swagger to his microphone stage center, cup it with his hands, position his right foot at the mike's base, and scream—just like you always imagined a buried-alive body would.
No one had to throw a noose around his neck to suggest that at that moment he was exploring the depths for death, emotionally deep-sea fishing on the other side. His only stage "prop" was a raging soul. And the eyes were so lizard-icy, they didn't need glitter to seem unworldly stars.
Jim Morrison was one of those singers who lived the kind of anguish that most other singers can only perform. He turned lead-singing for a rock band into an exercise in doomsday theatrics, a herpetological freak show, an anti-war, anti-law, anti-bore protest.
They didn't make the audience he couldn't panic. If such a word is possible in what is, after all, just an entertainment, I would say that Jim Morrison was a "genius" at lead-singing.
No singer before or since has had such a gift for embodying and dramatizing the search for self. He ate up every deep, dark aggression in the room, and sent it back in the emotional colors of his art. He was a natural. All Jim Morrison did for stardom, claimed Jim Morrison, was stop getting haircuts.
In retrospect, he wasn't just another zephyr in the broken winds of rock history, but the regal python in the rock pantheon. He was the pantheon's stewed-up celebrant. His shows weren't listened to, they were venerated.
His recorded songs and shrieks and moans serve today as a passionate posse through which we may recapture a sense of our times. Just as they used to sprinkle sand in the Roman Coliseum to absorb the blood of animals and gladiators, so Jim Morrison often seemed to be sprinkling his shrieks to cushion and absorb his rage—and, by artistic extension, our rage.
In the best-known photo of this gladiator, cops are dragging him off a New Haven stage—a giant blow-up of which someone hung in his recording company's offices.
Yet, despite all of this, or rather because of it, we'll never look into his eyes again. And just as bad, his memory is in the main underrated.
|
I think that is because he could never be understood: Jim Morrison was the sum of parts that were all contradictory. "Without contraries," William Blake once wrote, "is no progression."
These contraries—at the root of that oft-analyzed "mystery" he engendered with his presence and in his music—sometimes attracted you and sometimes revolted you. Sometimes they even did both at once. Talk about magnetism!
Consider that the guy who signed the Doors to Elektra Records, Jack Holzman, didn't like the group's music when he first heard it. But for some reason he kept coming back for another listen, gradually becoming entranced with it.
Or consider that while Jim Morrison was the unquestionable master during a Doors show, the tension afterward, offstage, was known to make him bite his nails to the point of drawing blood.
Or that while recording that stunning piece of rock drama, "The End," in a studio lit by a single candle next to him, Morrison suddenly stopped everything and shouted: "DOES ANYBODY UNDERSTAND WHAT I'M DOING?"
That was 1967, and the Doors' first album. By the time he left for a rest in Paris seven albums later, in early 1971, his relationship with the rest of the band had sunk to the point where they were practicing without him.
Shortly after Hendrix had died in September, 1970, and Joplin had died a month later, Jim Morrison said to some friends: "You're drinking with Number Three."
His mind may have finally been considering the notion that he needed to slow down, but his body had already broken its speed limit.
Minutes before dawn, Saturday, July 3, 1971, the singer-poet woke up in his Paris apartment coughing up blood. He got up, ran himself a bath, and when it seemed he had been in the tub a long time, his wife Pam checked on him. She found rock ‘n’ roll's greatest celebrant dead in the prime of his life.
The world found out about it on July 9 with the report that Jim Morrison had died of "natural causes," a heart attack, and that he had been buried two days before in the Poet's Corner of Paris's Pere Lachaise cemetery—near the grave of Oscar Wilde.
But, as long as records and the globe spin on, the spirit of Jim Morrison will never be buried.
And there will never be a rock 'n' roll singer as wild.
***
CD: The Doors, Strange Days. Elektra, 1967.
Book: Jerry Hopkins, The Lizard King: The Essential Jim Morrison. Plexus Press, 2005.
Websites: http://www.doors.com
http://www.waiting-for-the-sun.com
http://www.jimmorrisonbiography.com
|
