06/23/2010
The Ethos of “Cool”: Robert Harrison on Jim Morrison and The Doors
The Ethos of “Cool”: Robert Harrison on Jim Morrison and The Doors “Hot is momentary. It quickly turns to ashes. But cool stays cool.” Fifty years ago, the award-winning album The Doors was released into the world – a landmark debut for what would become L.A.’s biggest band. The Doors and its lead singer Jim Morrison have […]
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[Music]
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Hello?
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[Music]
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Oh I don't know about that.
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But I know you're my favorite nephew.
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[Music]
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No way.
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[Music]
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Why don't you look at the door?
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Because I can think when the doors are on.
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If Hendrik is on I have a hard time thinking, same with a lot of other bands.
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But the doors I can think.
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Does that make any sense?
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Yeah I guess.
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So what's your favorite band?
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Thanks boys.
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Can't argue with that.
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Do you like the doors?
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Yeah.
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Not too much.
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I mean they're pretty good.
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But they're not my favorite bands.
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Fair enough.
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But this is a show about the door.
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So what would you like to hear?
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I don't know.
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Move my drive.
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You got it Alex.
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Okay.
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Bye bye.
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[Music]
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[Music]
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[Music]
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[Music]
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[Music]
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[Music]
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[Music]
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It all began with this song Moonlight Drive.
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If we believe the origin story that Ray Manziric narrates about the doors, about how he ran
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into Jim Morrison on the beach in Venice, California in the summer of 1965.
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A few weeks after the tour of the Met graduated from the UCLA Film School, here's how
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Manziric we call the moment years later.
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It was a beautiful California day in July, around one in the afternoon when who comes walking
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down the beach, but James Douglas Morrison.
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And I said, "Hey man, what have you been doing?
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I come here still here in LA."
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He said, "Nah Ray, I never even left.
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I decided just to stay for the summer."
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I said, "Well, what's going on?"
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He said, "I've been living on some rooftop writing songs."
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Songs I asked?
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Yeah, Jim said, "Just bits and pieces, you know, in my notebook."
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I said, "Well, far out.
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Come over man, sit down here and sing me a song."
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So Jim sits down on the beach and digs his hands into the sand.
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He pulls up two big handfuls of sand, lifting him up, and the sand drips out between his
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fingers, just kind of streaming down.
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He clears his throat and sings in a haunting voice.
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Let's swim to the moon.
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Let's climb through the tide, penetrate the evening, that the city sleeps to hide.
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I would like to have been an invisible observer that day on the beach.
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I would like to have heard what Manziric heard after Jim sang that song, that caused
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him as if in a flash of insight to propose to Morrison that they form a band.
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What Manziric did not hear, I'm pretty sure, was the saltery, powerful, highly expressive
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singing voice that Jim Morrison would develop a year or so later after Ray spent weeks and
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months teaching Jim how to sing, helping him to develop his range and to acquire a multidimensional
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voice.
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You get a good sense of just how plain and inhibited Jim's early vocal style was at first.
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From a few demos that were recorded not too long after that beach encounter.
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Here's a very early demo of Moonlight Drive recorded in 1965 before Robbie Krieger had even
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joined the band.
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Let's swim to the moon, let's climb through the tide, penetrate the evening, that the city
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sleeps to hide.
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I'm fond of that demo actually, there's an innocent candor about it that appeals to me,
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maybe because it's so close to the origin as it were.
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However, what was lacking in Jim's voice at that point was the extraordinary tonality and
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dynamism of his mature style.
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Here's another demo from the same period.
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I saw where's almost gone, yeah, almost gone, yeah, almost gone, we saw where's almost
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gone.
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Where will we be out when the solace gone?
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Morning found us, only unaware.
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I'm going to go to the moon, and go into our head.
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And I, it'd be swam the laughing scene when the solace gone.
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Where will we be?
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It would take about another year before we go from that to this.
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You know that it would be untrue, you know that I would be online, if I was to say
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to you, yeah, we couldn't get much higher, come over the night by fire, come over the
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night by fire, I just said tonight all over my head.
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The time you hesitate is through.
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So let's go back to that day on the beach.
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I suspect that what Ray Manzerrai heard in the lyrics of Moonlight Drive was a kind of poetry
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that corresponded to raise ideas about music's immagistic potential.
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Ray Manzerrai was a classically trained musician, as well as an accomplished filmmaker,
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and he believed that music could or should become cinematic.
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He once remarked, I quote, "Music has rhythm, harmony, melody, and lyrics.
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The vibrations get into your mind and create images."
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What he probably heard in Jim's lyrics was not cinematic music per se, but cinematic poetry.
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I mean poetry as a succession of visual images, like frames in a movie.
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Here are the lyrics of Moonlight Drive.
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Let's swim to the moon, let's climb through the tide, penetrate the evening that the city
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sleeps to hide, let's swim out tonight, love, it's our turn to try, parked beside the
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ocean on our Moonlight Drive.
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Let's swim to the moon, climb through the tide, surrender to the waiting worlds that
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lap against our side.
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Nothing left open and no time to decide, we've stepped into a river on our Moonlight Drive.
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You reach your hand to hold me, but I can't be your guide.
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Easy, I love you as I watch you glide, falling through wet forests on our Moonlight Drive.
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At their best, Morrison's lyrics create a parrotactic series of images with very little
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connective tissue between them, allowing the sequence to provide a cinematic rather
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than a narrative framework.
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I'm guessing that when he heard the lyrics of Moonlight Drive, Manzeric had a vision of
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fusing cinematic music with cinematic poetry.
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He suggests something along these lines in the quote that I read earlier when he says
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the following about his encounter with Jim on the beach in Venice.
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As Jim was singing, I could hear the chord changes and the beat.
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My fingers immediately started moving.
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I could hear weird, strange, spooky notes that I could do on the keyboards around his
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vocals.
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Then he sang a few more tunes that he'd put together, and when he was done, I said, "Why
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don't we get a rock and roll band together and make a million dollars?"
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For those who are happy merely to enjoy the music of the doors, I suppose it doesn't
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much matter how it all began, but I, for one think, and I'm speaking in general here,
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that the beginning holds sway over the entire unfolding of the story.
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And I suppose that's because I'm high to Gary enough to believe Heidegger when he writes
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in his introduction to metaphysics the following.
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The great, begins great, maintains itself only through the free recurrence of greatness
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within it, and if it is great, also ends in greatness.
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Not that Heidegger would approve of me applying that quote to the doors, but where else,
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but on entitled opinions will you get Heidegger and the doors together in one sentence.
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In any case, from a relative point of view, I think the doors actually fit that description
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They did begin great, they maintained themselves through the free recurrence of their greatness,
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and with LA woman, their last studio album, they also ended in greatness.
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Anyway, that's why I'm curious about the beginning.
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When I say the doors began that day on the beach when Ray ran into gym, that's not exactly
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true.
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I think the true beginning actually occurred weeks before when Jim Morrison decided not
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to go to New York, but to stay on in LA for the summer instead.
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He had hardly any money in his pocket and had installed himself on the roof of a deserted
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office building in Venice.
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He had made a nest for himself up there in the open air, and he had little more than
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a blanket, some candles, and his notebooks with him, and for a while he wandered around
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the beach area, among the canals and dilapidated colonnades.
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But then he began to shut out the world around him, spending all his time on the rooftop.
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For days on end, he fasted, eating only oranges, he meditated a lot, listening to strange
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voices both inside and outside of his head, and he filled his notebooks with poems, lyrics,
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drawings, dreams, and free associations.
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He was also dropping mega doses of acid, which was cheap and legal at the time.
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It was an over-the-counter drug, in fact, believe it or not.
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Those were probably the most critical weeks in Morrison's life, as he descended or ascended
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into some primordial place within himself.
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Whether it was an ascent or a descent who knows, it was probably both.
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But for a few intensely solitary weeks, he did push towards some ultimate boundary, communing
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with the spirit world, discovering psychic energies in himself, that until then had laid
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dormant as they do, in most of us without our ever accessing them.
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His hair grew longer, his body got a lot thinner, his consciousness expanded to the edges
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of the surrounding universe, so that by the time he strolled down the beach that day
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in July he was no longer that pudgy, short-haired student that Ray Manzerak knew at UCLA,
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in fact, Manzerak could hardly recognize him.
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In the middle of the month, Morrison had undergone a metamorphosis, had undergone a second birth.
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I don't think Jim Morrison will object to me in voking, on his behalf an Austrian poet
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by the name of Rayner Maria Riltke.
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Morrison, by the way, considered himself first and foremost a poet, not a singer or a rockstar,
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and Riltke was well known to him.
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So I would mention that anti-intellectualism is the one all-American vice that Morrison
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did not suffer from, thank goodness.
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But in any case, in one of his letters, Rayner Riltke writes the following, "Everything
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is gestation and then bringing forth.
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Let each impression and each germ of a feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in
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the dark.
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In the inexpressible, the unconscious beyond the reach of one's own intelligence, await
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the birth hour of a new clarity."
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That's what Morrison was doing during those weeks.
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He was incubating his future on his rooftop.
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To quote Riltke again, "The apparently uneventful and quiet moment at which our future
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enters us is so much closer to life than that other noisy and fortuitous point of time
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at which it happens to us as if from outside if we make our destiny hours beforehand.
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When on some later day it actually happens, we shall feel in our inmost selves a kin
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and near to it."
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All the noise, all the soilumeed that would surround the doors after they achieved stardom,
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began in the cosmic solitude of those nights and days that Morrison spent fasting, meditating,
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and communing with the spirit world in his high-perched nest in Venice, California.
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Now when he met Manzaric on the beach, Morrison's head was full of poems, visions, perceptions
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and quite improbably songs.
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Here's how Jim described it later.
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I was living in this abandoned office building sleeping on the roof, and all of a sudden,
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I threw away most of my notebooks that I'd been keeping since high school, and these songs
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just kept coming to me.
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It was a beautiful hot summer and I just started hearing songs.
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This kind of mythic concert that I heard, I thought I was going to be a writer or a
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sociologist, maybe right plays.
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I never went to concerts, one or two at the most.
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I saw a few things on TV, but I'd never been a part of it all.
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But I heard in my head a whole concert situation with a band and singing and an audience,
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a large audience.
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Those first five or six songs I wrote, I was just taking notes at a fantastic concert
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that was going on inside my head.
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And once I had written the songs, I had to sing them.
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We need to appreciate how unusual this was.
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We're talking here about someone who had never studied music, who had never played an
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instrument, who had never even sung before in his life.
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Yet many of the songs on the doors first two albums were already in his head, like ghosts
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waiting to become flesh.
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They were singing their first year together, as well as later, the other members of the
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doors, all of them brilliant musicians by the way.
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They would listen to Morris and sing the melodies he was hearing in his inner ear, and
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then they would figure out the notes, chords and phrasing, and give the songs their formal
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musical structure.
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So while Jim's lyrics contained an important element of cinematic poetry, even more important
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than the visual imagery, musically speaking, were the internal melodies that came with those
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lyrics.
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These melodies were the embryos of many of the doors best known songs, and many of their
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lesser known songs as well.
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For example.
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[Music]
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[Music]
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[Music]
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[Music]
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[Music]
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[Music]
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[Music]
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In addition to their cinematic and melodic content, Morris and lyrics brought with them another
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crucial musical component.
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I mean they're remarkable cadence.
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Very few people if any speak about this, but Manzerak actually alludes to this in the
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quote I referenced earlier when he says, "As Jim was singing, I could hear the chord changes
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and the beat.
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My fingers immediately started moving."
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Morris and his rhythmic intonation of his lyrics, even when he was reciting his poems
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without musical accompaniment, was remarkably peristaltic.
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And here's an example of just how cadence Jim's lyrics and his recitations of them were.
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We can invent kingdoms of our own grand purple thrones, those chairs of lust and love we
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must in beds of rust, steel doors lock in prisoner's screams and music AM rocks their dreams.
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No black men's pride to hoist the beams while mocking angel sift what seems to be a collage
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of magazine dust, scratched on foreheads of walls of trust.
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This is just jail for those who must get up in the morning and fight for such unusable
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standards while weeping maidens show off penure and pout ravings for a mad staff.
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Morris's poetry and recitation style were so melodic and so rhythmical that the surviving
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members of the doors were actually able to put his poetry to music after he died.
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Morris and one night went into the recording studio, this was not long before he died, and
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recorded his own recital of an American prayer. An American prayer was a long poem in several
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parts published in 1970 by Morris and I think it was 1970. In any case, some seven years
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after Jim's death, the other members of the band put much of that poem to music, taking
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their cues from Morris's intonation of his lyrics. And in the following track, the music
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takes its cue primarily from the cadence of the lyrics.
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Wake, shake dreams from your hair, my pretty child, my sweet one. Choose the day and choose
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the sign of your day, the day's divinity. First thing you see.
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A vast radiant beach, a cool jeweled moon, couples naked, race down by its quiet side,
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and we laugh like soft, mad children, smart in the woolly cotton brains of infancy. The music and voices
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are all around us.
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I'm putting a lot of emphasis on Morris and contributions to their music, but let's
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remember that a great band like the doors is not a collection of individuals, but an organic
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whole whose members form a single body. None of the four members of the doors was more
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important than the others. Without man's zerick, there are no doors. The same goes for guitar
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player Robbie Krieger and drummer John Densmore. All three of them are exceptional musical talents
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who added exactly the right musical flourishes to Jim's vocals and lyrics. On most of their
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albums, all of the songs are credited to the doors as a whole, which is exactly how it should be.
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All of their songs were effectively co-author. This doesn't mean that Jim Morris and
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wasn't the band's lead man. He definitely took center stage, and the other members of the
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doors who were remarkably free of from ego problems were happy to have Jim get most of the
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light and the attention. But more importantly, Morris and Sleric's literally led the
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doors music, providing its trademark themes and imagery as lyric melodies and his basic rhythms.
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| 00:25:15.320 |
I would not say that everything revolved around Morris and rather that everything
|
| 00:25:20.440 |
emanated or expanded out from his lead vocals.
|
| 00:25:23.800 |
This is the opening of their track when the music's over from their album Strange Days.
|
| 00:25:35.480 |
And you can notice how the instrumentation prepares the ground for the opening vocal salvo of the song.
|
| 00:25:45.480 |
Morris and Head one of the great screams in the history of rock. The aggressive guitar power
|
| 00:26:05.000 |
chords are a prolongation of that scream in this case. And Morris and could go from a primordial
|
| 00:26:10.920 |
scream to a tender lullaby in the same phrase, maintaining the same musical intonation in the process.
|
| 00:26:20.920 |
When the music's over, when the music's over, when the music's over, when the music's over.
|
| 00:26:42.840 |
When the music's over is a long track that allows the doors to do what they did best, namely to use
|
| 00:27:07.000 |
their instruments to surround, accentuate, and modulate Jim's vocals. You can hear Krieger weave in and around
|
| 00:27:15.480 |
the verses with his guitar. And nowadays we tend not to appreciate that much the virtues of
|
| 00:27:21.160 |
discretion and subtlety. But that's what the doors three instrumentalists were masters of
|
| 00:27:26.520 |
discretion and subtlety.
|
| 00:27:46.520 |
And when you listen to a song like this you realize that the doors were more like a
|
| 00:27:50.040 |
troubadour troupe than a rock band. The instruments serve as musical accompaniment for the poets
|
| 00:27:55.960 |
verses. That doesn't mean the music is secondary. On the contrary it means that dense more
|
| 00:28:02.200 |
Krieger and Manzeric were masters at finding just the right musical enhancements for Jim's vocal
|
| 00:28:08.040 |
lines. The three of them had a genius for establishing the right musical mood for the vocals.
|
| 00:28:14.120 |
And that was Jim Morrison's great fortune, I believe, to be in a band with three great musicians
|
| 00:28:19.960 |
who knew how to take their lead from him and create a hole that was much greater than the sum
|
| 00:28:25.960 |
of its parts. And that's why, given the troubadour character of the band, the doors came into their own
|
| 00:28:33.080 |
above all in performance situations when they were playing live. Not so much a big concert
|
| 00:28:40.120 |
situation, but in small, more intimate clubs like the whiskey of gogo on Sunset Boulevard in
|
| 00:28:45.880 |
Los Angeles where they really began to gel before recording their first album in studio. In six days
|
| 00:28:55.960 |
by the way, goes to show you how much they had come together before they even went into the studio.
|
| 00:29:02.360 |
Their first album is almost a live album.
|
| 00:29:09.960 |
[Music]
|
| 00:29:38.600 |
[Music]
|
| 00:29:44.600 |
That's Cadence.
|
| 00:29:46.600 |
[Music]
|
| 00:29:57.400 |
I got some friends inside
|
| 00:30:03.400 |
The face and the mirror won't stop
|
| 00:30:13.400 |
The girl in the window won't drop
|
| 00:30:20.360 |
A feast of friends, a live sea tribe, waiting for me outside
|
| 00:30:30.360 |
I don't know if too many bands that operate this way where they take their lead from the vocal
|
| 00:30:39.720 |
lines and engage in kind of musical poetry or a musicalization of poetry.
|
| 00:30:45.800 |
Unique combination.
|
| 00:30:47.800 |
[Music]
|
| 00:30:49.800 |
If all I say
|
| 00:30:51.800 |
Into the big sleet
|
| 00:30:57.800 |
I want you here
|
| 00:31:01.800 |
I want you here
|
| 00:31:06.760 |
The screen of the butterfly
|
| 00:31:13.800 |
[Music]
|
| 00:31:15.800 |
[Music]
|
| 00:31:17.800 |
[Music]
|
| 00:31:35.800 |
Come back, baby, back into my arm
|
| 00:31:39.800 |
[Music]
|
| 00:31:41.800 |
We're getting tired of hanging around
|
| 00:31:53.800 |
[Music]
|
| 00:31:57.800 |
Waking around with our heads to the ground
|
| 00:32:03.800 |
[Music]
|
| 00:32:13.800 |
Very near here
|
| 00:32:17.800 |
Very far
|
| 00:32:19.800 |
Very soft here
|
| 00:32:21.800 |
Very clear
|
| 00:32:23.800 |
Come today
|
| 00:32:25.800 |
Come today
|
| 00:32:27.800 |
Come today
|
| 00:32:29.800 |
That's an illusion to Saint Paul, I think
|
| 00:32:33.800 |
[Music]
|
| 00:32:37.800 |
What have they done to the earth
|
| 00:32:41.800 |
What have they done to our fair sister
|
| 00:32:45.800 |
Ravage them, lundered and returned
|
| 00:32:49.800 |
Did her stalker with knives in the side of the dawn
|
| 00:32:55.800 |
And tied her with fences and dragged her down
|
| 00:33:01.800 |
However it gentle sound
|
| 00:33:11.800 |
With your ear down to the ground
|
| 00:33:23.800 |
We want the world and we want the world and we want the world and we want it
|
| 00:33:31.800 |
Yeah
|
| 00:33:33.800 |
[Music]
|
| 00:33:35.800 |
Now
|
| 00:33:37.800 |
[Music]
|
| 00:33:39.800 |
[Music]
|
| 00:33:43.800 |
[Music]
|
| 00:33:47.800 |
[Music]
|
| 00:33:55.800 |
Hello
|
| 00:33:57.800 |
Hey, Robby, do you think some more singers of the cool sky who ever lived?
|
| 00:34:01.800 |
The coolest sky who ever lived was your grandfather, Robert Poeh, Harrison Sr.
|
| 00:34:07.800 |
After that, Marlon Brando
|
| 00:34:09.800 |
Morrison is the third coolest sky who ever lived
|
| 00:34:13.800 |
Okay, bye Alex
|
| 00:34:17.800 |
Bye
|
| 00:34:19.800 |
I've talked a lot about cool on this program before, it's indefinable yet distinctly identifiable quality
|
| 00:34:27.800 |
A lot of people who think they're cool are not cool at all because they're trying too hard
|
| 00:34:31.800 |
Making an effort, especially when you're making an effort to appear that you're not making an effort, is not cool
|
| 00:34:39.800 |
We live in an era that is not very conducive to cool, how many contemporaries can you name among
|
| 00:34:47.800 |
movie stars, musicians, politicians who are cool, hardly any
|
| 00:34:53.800 |
Obama tries to be cool, but he's no JFK
|
| 00:34:57.800 |
Angelina Jolie tries to be cool, but she's no Isabela Rossellini
|
| 00:35:03.800 |
It's very difficult if not impossible to be cool at present
|
| 00:35:07.800 |
Our age is too hot
|
| 00:35:11.800 |
Its politics are hot, its media are hot, its spotlight is hot
|
| 00:35:17.800 |
Everything is hot
|
| 00:35:19.800 |
That means that everything gets burned up quickly with no lasting power
|
| 00:35:23.800 |
Some people think Lady Gaga is hot, but even if that were true,
|
| 00:35:29.800 |
Contessa and Undato as Aladdin used to say
|
| 00:35:33.800 |
She's going to appear ridiculous before you know it because hot is momentary
|
| 00:35:39.800 |
It quickly turns to ashes, cool on the other hand stays cool
|
| 00:35:45.800 |
James Dean's cool is incorruptible, Andy Warhol is still super cool
|
| 00:35:51.800 |
In 100 years from now, the Clint Eastwood of a fistful of dollars will still chill you with his cool
|
| 00:36:01.800 |
One reason our present age is uncool is because it does not know how to withhold anything
|
| 00:36:07.800 |
The cool doesn't give away what it has to give, but holds onto it with discrimination
|
| 00:36:13.800 |
But nowadays, everything is thrown out there, lewd and loud, calling out to be seen and heard
|
| 00:36:20.800 |
in a fierce Darwinian struggle for attention
|
| 00:36:24.800 |
Cool does not crave, but our age is craven
|
| 00:36:29.800 |
Another thing about the cool is that it is not cold
|
| 00:36:35.800 |
It has a heat at its core that it keeps under wraps, that it keeps from overheating
|
| 00:36:41.800 |
Jim Morrison had a great deal of inner fire, but his cool is what prevailed and called the shots
|
| 00:36:48.800 |
Morrison was always withholding something even when he appeared to let it all hang out
|
| 00:36:53.800 |
In fact, he never let it all hang out
|
| 00:36:56.800 |
Even in his screams or his wild stage antics
|
| 00:37:01.800 |
To this day, no one can confirm that he actually exposed his penis in Miami in 1969
|
| 00:37:10.800 |
Yet another thing I would say about the cool is that it favors slowness
|
| 00:37:16.800 |
There is nothing cool about frenzy and hurry
|
| 00:37:20.800 |
I remember as a child when it would rain on us outdoors
|
| 00:37:23.800 |
The rest of us would scramble for cover, but not my father, he would keep walking slow
|
| 00:37:29.800 |
Because he belonged to a genre of American men, quite typical of his generation, who had a natural cool
|
| 00:37:35.800 |
And who simply would never run for cover, except maybe on the battlefield
|
| 00:37:40.800 |
Cool is descelerated, it is the slow gate of the fastest draw on the west as he enters a saloon
|
| 00:37:49.800 |
It is a big winged car rolling slowly down the streets of New Orleans
|
| 00:37:54.800 |
It is a Harley cruising well under the speed limit on the highways
|
| 00:37:58.800 |
It is the slow, continuous camera of David Lynch
|
| 00:38:02.800 |
As opposed to the rapid three second frames that dominate most contemporary videography
|
| 00:38:09.800 |
In this respect, the avatars of cool were the 19th century dandies and the flunners
|
| 00:38:15.800 |
But there for example, who would ample the streets of Paris slowly, while the bourgeoisie around him rushed and swarmed
|
| 00:38:24.800 |
Here too, the slowness of cool is not lymphatic, it is a deliberate withholding of speed
|
| 00:38:31.800 |
Jim Morrison was the lizard king of slowness, there was a lacerar tillion slowness to his walk, his gestures, his postures
|
| 00:38:43.800 |
He also spoke slowly
|
| 00:38:45.800 |
What about the state of America, what do you think that is going in in the year of the question?
|
| 00:38:51.800 |
I can't decide whether to try and be a citizen of the world, or to identify with a particular country
|
| 00:39:11.800 |
But I guess you really have no choice
|
| 00:39:15.800 |
I think whatever happens that America is the arena, right now, it is the center of action
|
| 00:39:33.800 |
Even if it will take a strong fluid to survive in a climate like ours, but I am sure people will do it
|
| 00:39:49.800 |
When it came to music, Jim Morrison almost always went for a heavy, peristaltic rhythm like this one
|
| 00:39:58.800 |
(music)
|
| 00:40:12.800 |
Your loss will go
|
| 00:40:16.800 |
Your loss will go
|
| 00:40:24.800 |
Your loss will go
|
| 00:40:34.800 |
Are you
|
| 00:40:36.800 |
That comes from their album Strange Days
|
| 00:40:42.800 |
And if you listen to that album all the way through, you will find very few songs of any that have anything more than a really slow, deliberate
|
| 00:40:52.800 |
But kind of rhythm like the next one
|
| 00:40:56.800 |
(music)
|
| 00:41:02.800 |
When you're alone, women seem wicked
|
| 00:41:06.800 |
When you're unwindable, streets lower even when you're down
|
| 00:41:12.800 |
When you're straight, they say "so mine"
|
| 00:41:16.800 |
And I'll get you one more from Strange Days, this is called "I can't see your face in my mind"
|
| 00:41:24.800 |
(music)
|
| 00:41:32.800 |
I can't see your face in my mind
|
| 00:41:40.800 |
(music)
|
| 00:41:44.800 |
I can't see your face in my mind
|
| 00:41:52.800 |
(music)
|
| 00:41:56.800 |
When you're alone, you will find so, in my mind
|
| 00:42:04.800 |
I can't see your face in my mind
|
| 00:42:12.800 |
(music)
|
| 00:42:20.800 |
(music)
|
| 00:42:30.800 |
(music)
|
| 00:42:36.800 |
The vast majority of the door songs are as languid as you can get
|
| 00:42:40.800 |
This, despite the fact that there's a definite energy there
|
| 00:42:44.800 |
What you never hear in Morrison's vocals is a convulsive maniac in need of an exorcism
|
| 00:42:52.800 |
Like so many of the rockers of our own era
|
| 00:42:56.800 |
Again, the age is too hot
|
| 00:42:58.800 |
And even a highly creative band like Radiohead tries way too hard to be counter-cool
|
| 00:43:04.800 |
(music)
|
| 00:43:06.800 |
One last thing I would say about "cool" is that it tends to be aligned with the object, not the subject of desire
|
| 00:43:12.800 |
The cool doesn't grasp it in tight space, but let's be drawn to it
|
| 00:43:18.800 |
Most men are more comfortable in the role of subjects rather than objects of desire
|
| 00:43:24.800 |
Yet Morrison, like his role model, Marlon Brando, was an exception at least earlier on
|
| 00:43:30.800 |
When he courted the idolatry of both Mayo and female desire
|
| 00:43:36.800 |
He eventually got fed up with it, of course, but for a while
|
| 00:43:40.800 |
He was perfectly happy to be lionized and to engender a whirlwind of desire around his person
|
| 00:43:46.800 |
(music)
|
| 00:43:48.800 |
The French philosopher Jean-Boudread writes somewhere, I don't remember where, that the subject is banal,
|
| 00:43:54.800 |
slavish and uncouth
|
| 00:43:56.800 |
While the fascination is always on the side of the object
|
| 00:44:00.800 |
Morrison knew this instinctively and cultivated a sublime self-objectification
|
| 00:44:06.800 |
That takes more than self-confidence
|
| 00:44:08.800 |
It takes cool
|
| 00:44:10.800 |
A lot of people possess the former but lack the latter
|
| 00:44:16.800 |
I've said that Morrison, who is famous for his on-stage, shame andism and anarchy, never really allowed himself to lose control of his own charades
|
| 00:44:24.800 |
He paid a great deal of lip service to Dionysus, a god of intoxication, excess and transport
|
| 00:44:32.800 |
And many people see in Morrison the ultimate devotee or latter-day incarnation of Dionysus
|
| 00:44:40.800 |
But I see things a little differently
|
| 00:44:42.800 |
I believe that Morrison's Dionysian was a form of theater and that Apollo was his true god
|
| 00:44:50.800 |
Apollo, who was the Greek god of form, music, measure, restraint and beautiful illusion
|
| 00:45:00.800 |
If we follow Frederick Nietzsche, who Morrison actually read in depth, Greek theater was all about the creative tension between Dionysus and Apollo
|
| 00:45:12.800 |
I don't want to deny that both gods had ceased hold of Jim each in his own way
|
| 00:45:17.800 |
I've already mentioned that Jim's cool prevailed over what was hot in his nature
|
| 00:45:23.800 |
And in the same vein, I would say that in the final analysis Apollo always prevailed over Dionysus
|
| 00:45:29.800 |
when it came to Jim's personality and behavior
|
| 00:45:34.800 |
That famous event in Miami, for example, when Jim got arrested for indecent exposure and public drunkenness, we know
|
| 00:45:42.800 |
that a few days before that concert Jim had gone to see Julian Beck and the Living Theater,
|
| 00:45:49.800 |
an avant-garde theater group that tried in a number of provocative ways to break down the artificial separation between spectators and spectacle
|
| 00:45:58.800 |
What Jim was trying to do that night in Miami was to engage in some living theater antics of his own on the concert stage
|
| 00:46:07.800 |
His behavior was extremely deliberate, methodical and choreographed and it was definitely premeditated
|
| 00:46:15.800 |
In other words, there was no loss of control to the contrary, just like the following where Jim is in full control of his staged histrionics
|
| 00:46:26.800 |
[Music]
|
| 00:46:33.800 |
[Music]
|
| 00:46:39.800 |
[Music]
|
| 00:46:48.800 |
[Music]
|
| 00:47:11.800 |
[Music]
|
| 00:47:18.800 |
[Music]
|
| 00:47:25.800 |
[Music]
|
| 00:47:34.800 |
[Music]
|
| 00:47:57.800 |
All right, I think you probably want to hear one more scream of Jim Morrison from the same concert, here you go
|
| 00:48:04.800 |
[Music]
|
| 00:48:17.800 |
You can hear that this porcelain of his life he was losing his voice for God, but he still helped it together
|
| 00:48:24.800 |
[Music]
|
| 00:48:45.800 |
[Music]
|
| 00:49:08.800 |
[Music]
|
| 00:49:21.800 |
It's hard to know whether Jim was actually drunk and not stumbling on his words or whether he was faking it
|
| 00:49:27.800 |
I tend to always believe that he was faking things and he knew exactly what he was doing in the
|
| 00:49:32.800 |
the stories and I here I think the most important thing to keep in mind if one wants to get a handle on Jim Morrison's extremely complex personality
|
| 00:49:40.800 |
and to think beyond the usual cliches about it is that he came from a military family. His father was an admiral in the United States Navy
|
| 00:49:50.800 |
at a very critical moment, this is in the late 60s the height of the Vietnam War and Jim was raised according to a military code of order,
|
| 00:50:00.800 |
discipline, obedience and stoical formalism, control and self-control were drilled into him at an early age. He may have revolted against father figures, but Jim inherited from his own father, George, the soldier's demeanor, character and ethic of heroism.
|
| 00:50:22.800 |
There is little doubt in my mind that Jim not only believed in heroism but set out quite deliberately to make himself one. Here is what Jim said about heroism not long before he died after he had added to his family upbringing the knowledge of Greek tragic heroes which he had learned in his literature classes at UCLA.
|
| 00:50:47.800 |
A hero is someone who rebels or seems to rebel against the facts of existence and seems to conquer them, but obviously that can only work at moments, it can't be a lasting thing, but that's not saying that people shouldn't keep trying to rebel against the facts of existence.
|
| 00:51:16.800 |
I think it's interesting how in the clip Jim links heroism to death, which is the ultimate fact of existence, Jim had a complicated attitude or relation to death, a common interpretation promoted by Oliver Stone for instance, has it that Jim was in love with death and courted it at the expense of youth, fame, love, and death.
|
| 00:51:45.800 |
It certainly does appear that way from one point of view, I don't deny it from a certain point of view Jim was in a hurry only when it came to finding a way to die.
|
| 00:51:57.800 |
It seems in retrospect that he did everything he could to rush his death, but it's also true that shortly before he died as if sensing the imminence of his own demise, he was horrified at the prospect of death.
|
| 00:52:13.800 |
In the last year of his life, when he realized that his own, sweet, generous, rebellious heroism was leading him very close to the edge, he shrank back intrepidation and started hoping that his own stage act would not get the better of him and end his life early.
|
| 00:52:32.800 |
It was too late, of course, for he had already invited death into his life narrative, yet it's significant I think that when he was asked in an interview in 1970 how he would like to die or how he thought he would die, he expressed the hope that, well, let's hear him answer that question in his own words.
|
| 00:52:53.800 |
I hope with about age 120, with a sense of humor and a nice comfortable bit, but I wouldn't want anybody around, I just want to quietly drift off.
|
| 00:53:16.800 |
But I'm still holding out for about 90.
|
| 00:53:23.800 |
I think that's okay. I think science has a chance in our lifetime to conquer death, I think it's very possible.
|
| 00:53:35.800 |
If it did, but what happened to the spirit world?
|
| 00:53:40.800 |
Well, they just have to fend for themselves.
|
| 00:53:48.800 |
Leave us boring mortals alone.
|
| 00:53:50.800 |
Yeah, that's one reason why I don't buy into the myth of Jim Morrison as the seer and the visionary and the one who deployed all possible means to break through to the other side.
|
| 00:54:01.800 |
I think that Morrison came close enough to the other side before he died to realize that there really is nothing out there or beyond here except the void or nothingness.
|
| 00:54:13.800 |
Out here on the perimeter, there are no stars.
|
| 00:54:17.800 |
I think it's systematic deregulation of the senses, as Hambo put it.
|
| 00:54:23.800 |
Let him to the realization that death really holds no enticements and heroism goes from an open courtship of death earlier in Jim's life to a tragic failure to avoid its nihilism.
|
| 00:54:42.800 |
It's above all, in Jim's late poetry at the height of the Vietnam War that we can see how conflicted Jim was over the spectacle of death on national television.
|
| 00:54:55.800 |
As the son of an admiral, having inherited an ethic of heroism, sacrifice and loyalty, Jim was bound to be racked with guilt at the sight of young men, his own age, dying in the fields, and jungles of Vietnam.
|
| 00:55:12.600 |
As a one-time military brat, Jim knew exactly how to get himself rejected for military service during his draft interviews, which he did successfully, and we don't know exactly what he told his interviewers since he never talked about it.
|
| 00:55:27.600 |
But this much is certain, Jim Morrison was a patriot as strained as that may sound, and however much it may clash with the popular conception of Morrison.
|
| 00:55:39.600 |
He suffered inwardly and quietly that others of his generation were dying for their country in an insane war while he was living high on the hog as a rock star.
|
| 00:55:51.600 |
There are countless verses in his poetry that declare his allegiance to America.
|
| 00:55:57.600 |
He drove a quintessential American car, the Mustang, and the only time he insisted that song credits be divided between him and Robbie Krieger was on the soft parade album, half of whose songs were written by Krieger.
|
| 00:56:17.600 |
Some of Krieger's songs were explicit protest songs and Jim didn't want to be associated with their lyrics, which were critical of American policy.
|
| 00:56:26.600 |
It's significant that the long poem he published in 1970 was called "An American Prayer."
|
| 00:56:33.600 |
This poem, as far as I can tell, and this is strictly my own interpretation I'm offering here, is haunted by three main themes.
|
| 00:56:41.600 |
The poem's guilt over the Vietnam War is foreboding of his own death and his final desire to opt for life over death.
|
| 00:56:50.600 |
The opening section of the poem reads, "Do you know the warm progress under the stars? Do you know we exist? We can actually hear Jim recite that in his own words."
|
| 00:57:01.600 |
Do you know the warm progress under the stars? Do you know we exist? Have you forgotten the keys to the kingdom? Have you been born yet and are you alive?
|
| 00:57:15.600 |
Let's reinvent the gods all the myths of the ages. Celebrate symbols from deep elder forests. Have you forgotten the lessons of the ancient war?
|
| 00:57:27.600 |
We need great golden populations.
|
| 00:57:32.600 |
Fathers are cackling and trees of the forest, and mothers dead in the sea.
|
| 00:57:39.600 |
You know we are being led to slaughters by placid admirals, some of the fat-slowed generals are getting obscene and young blood.
|
| 00:57:48.600 |
You know we are ruled by TV.
|
| 00:57:56.600 |
The moon is a drive like beast. The gorilla bands are rolling numbers in the next block of green vine.
|
| 00:58:03.600 |
A massing for warfare in a sunherd's meteorologist's dive.
|
| 00:58:10.600 |
A great creator of being a grandest one more hour to perform our art and perfect our lives.
|
| 00:58:18.600 |
The moths and atheists were doubly divinely done.
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| 00:58:26.600 |
We live, we die, and death not ends it.
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| 00:58:33.600 |
The prayer here is to the so-called great creator of being.
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| 00:58:38.600 |
Grant us one more hour to perform our art and perfect our lives.
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| 00:58:44.600 |
Sounds like someone praying for more time to me.
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| 00:58:47.600 |
The sort of prayer a soldier might address to his creator on the battlefields before,
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| 00:58:52.600 |
quote, "being led to slaughter by placid admirals."
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| 00:58:57.600 |
And the slow generals getting fat and obscene on young blood.
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| 00:59:03.600 |
I'm not sure who the moths and atheists are in the poem, but they don't include the praying author of these verses.
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| 00:59:10.600 |
I suspect that they're the fathers who send their sons off in those blue buses that the U.S. Armed Forces use to transport enlisted and drafted soldiers.
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| 00:59:23.600 |
The blue bus is calling us driver where you're taking us.
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| 00:59:27.600 |
I suspect that they're the ones who send the young off to die in their, quote, "rolling numbers."
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| 00:59:32.600 |
The ones who rule the TV that rules over us.
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| 00:59:37.600 |
A verse from that poem, we just heard says, "We got our final vision by clap.
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| 00:59:43.600 |
Columbus's groin," which generates America's young, quote, "got filled with green death."
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| 00:59:52.600 |
The green death of the Vietnam jungles I'm presuming.
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| 00:59:56.600 |
Where are the feasts we were promised? Where is the new wine? Jim asks in the poem later.
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This is the new wine of the new world I'm assuming. His answer? Dying on the vine.
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| 01:00:09.600 |
Later in an American prayer, he writes, "Give us a creed to believe. Give us trust in the night. Give of color.
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| 01:00:17.600 |
Hundred hues." This is the poetry of someone who does not know what to make of the fact that his brothers, namely sons of the same fathers, are dying while he, Jim Morrison lives on.
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| 01:00:29.600 |
I believe that the main reason Jim hastened his own death was in order to show the fathers, and in particular his own admiral father, that it was not a fear of death that kept him from the battlefield.
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| 01:00:41.600 |
I have a feeling he felt an urge to die alongside others of his generations, at least for a while, but to die on his own rebellious terms and not the terms of the father.
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| 01:00:54.600 |
It's quite clear in an American prayer that Jim was sickened by his television set, sickened to death by it, it filled him with anguish and doubts.
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| 01:01:04.600 |
That is why he writes, later in the poem, "Wow, I'm sick of doubt, live in the light of certain south. Cruel bindings, the servants have the power.
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| 01:01:15.600 |
Dog men and their mean women pulling poor blankets over our sailors."
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| 01:01:21.600 |
"I'm sick of dour faces staring at me from the TV tower. I want roses in my garden, bower, dig. Royal babies, rubies must now replace aborted,
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| 01:01:33.600 |
strangers in the mud, these mutants, blood meal for the plant that's plowed."
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The surviving members of the doors did a particularly beautiful job of putting this section of an American prayer to music.
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| 01:01:50.600 |
"Wow, I'm sick of doubt, live in the light of certain south. Cruel bindings, the servants have the power.
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| 01:02:00.600 |
Dog men and their mean women pulling poor blankets over our sailors. I'm sick of dour faces staring at me from the TV tower."
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| 01:02:19.600 |
"I want roses in my garden, bower, dig. Royal babies, rubies must now replace aborted, strangers in the mud."
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| 01:02:29.600 |
These mutants, blood meal for the plant is plowed.
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| 01:02:57.600 |
They are waiting to take us under the severed garden. You know how pale and wotling a pill for comes death and a strange outlet.
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| 01:03:06.600 |
I don't know, it's done by a war, like a scaring over a friendly, guesty, broad debate.
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| 01:03:14.600 |
Death makes angels of the soul and gives us wings where we had shoulders smooth as ravens claws.
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| 01:03:25.600 |
No more money, no more fans who dress, this other kingdom seems by far the best for its other jaw of the Earth's incest.
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| 01:03:33.600 |
And most of these two vegetable law. I will not go with her of feast of friends to the giant family."
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I prefer a feast of friends to the giant family, and I take that to be Jim Morrison's farewell statement.
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| 01:03:55.600 |
That he didn't really want to go into the severed garden any more than the 50,000 soldiers who never made it back alive from Vietnam wanted to go off to war.
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| 01:04:06.600 |
I like the word "giant" in the phrase "giant family" in the etymological sense of belonging to the Earth, to Gaia.
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| 01:04:15.600 |
I prefer a feast of friends to the giant family of the dead, of those who lie buried in the ground, blood meal for the plant that's plowed as he puts it.
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| 01:04:27.600 |
The obedience of those who followed orders becomes loose obedience to a vegetable law.
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| 01:04:36.600 |
Jim Morrison never got overly ardent in his prayers, but it seems to me that in those moments of extremity, which he sought out so deliberately,
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| 01:04:44.600 |
that that radical edge where life meets the absolute boundary of death, he turned to a highly personal kind of prayer.
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Let me tell you about heartache and the loss of God, he writes her. He may not have known himself whom or what he was imploring,
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but much of his later poetry is a kind of petition.
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| 01:05:04.600 |
Was there anyone or anything listening on the other side beyond the door?
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| 01:05:09.600 |
Hard to say, he could only hope, yet there's also no doubt that his hope was full of doubt.
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| 01:05:16.600 |
When I was back there in seminary school, there was a person there who put forth the proposition that you can petition the Lord with prayer.
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You cannot petition the Lord with prayer.
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| 01:05:44.600 |
You cannot petition the Lord with prayer!
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| 01:05:51.600 |
And yet here comes the petition.
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| 01:05:59.600 |
Can you give me thanks, Mary? Can you give me sanctuary? I must find a place to hide, a place for me to hide.
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I can't make it anymore. The man is at the door.
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Can you find me soft as silent? I can't make it anymore.
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The man is at the door.
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The man is at the door.
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The man is at the door.
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| 01:07:01.600 |
The man is at the door.
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| 01:07:05.600 |
That will do it for entitled opinions. This show wraps up our long 2009-2010 season.
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It's time for a summer holiday. Many thanks to Christy Wampold who has done an outstanding job as production manager this year.
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Many thanks to all of you listeners who have written in and encouraged us to continue keeping in title opinions on air.
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This is Robert Harrison, reaching you all the best.
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