05/29/2013
A Monologue on The Doors (Dedicated to Ray Manzarek)
Ray Manzarek (born Raymond Daniel Manczarek, Jr.; February 12, 1939– May 20, 2013) was an American musician, singer, producer, film director, and author, best known as a founding member and keyboardist of The Doors from 1965 to 1973. He was a co-founding member of Nite City from 1977 to 1978, and of Manzarek–Krieger from 2001 […]
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♪ Take the highway to the end, of the night ♪
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♪ And of the night, out of the night ♪
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♪ And of the night, oh, oh, oh ♪
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♪ And we have got shiny to have bright midnight ♪
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♪ And of the night, and of the night ♪
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♪ And of the night ♪
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This is Dylan Montanari for Robert Harrison
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and entitled opinions.
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As many of you know, Ray Manzarek died last week
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in Germany on May 20th, at the age of 74,
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after struggling with cancer for many years.
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Manzarek co-founded the doors of Jim Morrison
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after a chance encounter in 1965 along Venice Beach.
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His innovative and unmistakable keyboard and organ playing
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was a crucial element of the doors revolutionary sound
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as the doors drummer John Densmore said
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after Manzarek's passing, quote,
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"There was no keyboard player on the planet,
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more appropriate to support Jim Morrison's words."
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Manzarek was in the doors from 1965 to 1973,
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sharing vocal duties with Robbie Krieger
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after Morrison's death.
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He remained a very active musician and producer
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for the next several decades,
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and head for the past decade or so,
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resurrected the spirit of the doors,
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performing their songs with a rotating cast of vocalists.
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In light of Manzarek's passing,
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entitled opinions would like to re-broadcast Robert Harrison's
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monologue on the doors and dedicate it to Ray.
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We'll be back next week with a new episode,
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but in the meanwhile, I give you Robert Harrison
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on the doors dedicated to Ray Manzarek.
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♪ Friends of the earth ♪
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♪ Round of land ♪
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♪ I've got one Jim, squeaked me line ♪
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♪ I've got one Jim, squeaked me line ♪
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♪ I want to be endless by ♪
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So let's go back to that day on the beach. I suspect that what Ray Manzeric heard in the lyrics of Moonlight
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Drive was a kind of poetry that corresponded to Ray's ideas about music's
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"imigestic potential." Ray Manzeric was a classically trained musician as well as an accomplished
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filmmaker and he believed that music could or should become cinematic. He once remarked,
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"Music has rhythm, harmony, melody, and lyrics. 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. I mean
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poetry has a succession of visual images like frames in a movie. Here are the lyrics of Moonlight
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Drive. Let's swim to the moon, let's climb through the tide, penetrate the evening that
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the city sleeps to hide, let's swim out tonight love, it's our turn to try, parked beside
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the ocean on our Moonlight Drive. Let's swim to the moon, climb through the tide, surrender
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to the waiting worlds that lap against our side, nothing left open and no time to decide.
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We've stepped into a river on our Moonlight Drive. You reach your hand to hold me, but I can't
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be your guide. Easy, I love you as I watch you glide, falling through wet forests on our
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Moonlight Drive. 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. I'm guessing that when he heard the lyrics of Moonlight Drive,
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Manserik had a vision of fusing cinematic music with cinematic poetry. He suggests something
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along these lines in the quote that I read earlier when he says the following about his
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encounter with Jim on the beach in Venice. As Jim was singing, I could hear the chord changes
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and the beat. My fingers immediately started moving. I could hear weird, strange, spooky notes
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but I could do on the keyboards around his vocals. Then he sang a few more tunes that he'd put together
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and when he was done, I said, "Why 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, that
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the beginning holds sway over the entire unfolding of the story. And I suppose that's because
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I'm hide a Gary enough to believe Heidegger when he writes in his introduction to metaphysics,
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the following. The great begins great, maintains itself only through the free recurrence
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of greatness within it, and if it is great, also ends in greatness. Not that Heidegger
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would approve of me applying that quote to the doors, but where else but on entitled opinions
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will you get Heidegger and the doors together in one sentence? In any case, from a relative
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point of view, I think the doors actually fit that description. They did begin great. They
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maintained themselves through the free recurrence of their greatness, and with LA woman,
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their last studio album, they also ended in greatness. Anyway, that's why I'm curious about
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the beginning. When I say the doors began that day on the beach when Ray ran into Jim, that's
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not exactly true. I think the true beginning actually occurred weeks before when Jim Morrison
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decided not to go to New York, but to stay on in LA for the summer instead. He had
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hardly any money in his pocket and had installed himself on the roof of a deserted office
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building in Venice. He had made a nest for himself up there in the open air. And he had
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little more than a blanket, some candles and his notebooks with him. And for a while, he
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wandered around the beach area among the canals and dilapidated colonnades. But then he began
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to shut out the world around him, spending all his time on the rooftop. And for days
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on end, he fasted, eating only oranges. He meditated a lot, listening to strange voices
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both inside and outside of his head. And he filled his notebooks with poems, lyrics, drawings,
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dreams and free associations. He was also dropping mega doses of acid, which was cheap and
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legal at the time. It was an over the counter drug, in fact, believe it or not. Those were
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probably the most critical weeks in Morrison's life as he descended or ascended into
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some primordial place within himself. Whether it was an ascent or a decent who knows,
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it was probably both. But for a few intensely solitary weeks, he did push towards some ultimate
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boundary, communing with the spirit world, discovering psychic energies in himself, that
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until then had laid 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 in
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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. In little over a month, Morrison had undergone
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a metamorphosis, had undergone a second birth.
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Now, I don't think Jim Morrison will object to me in voking on his behalf an Austrian
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poet by the name of Rainer Maria Rilke. Morrison, by the way, considered himself first and
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foremost a poet, not a singer or a rock star, and Rilke was well known to him. Also,
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I would mention that anti-intellectualism is the one all-American vice that Morrison did
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not suffer from. Thank goodness. But in any case, in one of his letters, Rainer Rilke
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writes the following, "Everything is gestation and then bringing forth, let each impression
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and each germ of a feeling come to completion wholly in itself in the dark, in the
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inexpressible, the unconscious beyond the reach of one's own intelligence, await the birth
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hour of a new clarity." That's what Morrison was doing during those weeks. He was incubating
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his future on his rooftop. To quote Rilke again, "The apparently uneventful and quiet
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moment at which our future enters us is so much closer to life than that other noisy and
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fortuitous point of time at which it happens to us as if from outside if we make our destiny
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hours beforehand when on some later date actually happens we shall feel in our inmost
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selves akin and near to it." All the noise, all the soil yumir that would surround the
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doors after they achieved stardom began in the cosmic solitude of those nights and days
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that Morrison spent fasting, meditating and communing with the spirit world in his high
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perched nest in Venice, California. Now, when he met Manzaric on the beach, Morrison's
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head was full of poems, visions, perceptions and quite improbably songs. Here's how Jim described
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it later. 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. 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 sociologist
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maybe write plays. I never went to concerts, one or two at the most. I saw a few things
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on TV but I'd never been a part of it all. But I heard in my head a whole concert situation
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with a band and singing and an audience, a large audience. Those first five or six songs I
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wrote, I was just taking notes at a fantastic concert 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. We're talking here about someone who had never
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studied music, who had never played an instrument, who had never even sung before in his
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life. Yet many of the songs on the doors first two albums were already in his head, like
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ghosts waiting to become flesh. During their first year together, as well as later, the
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other members of the doors, all of them brilliant musicians by the way, they would listen
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to Morris and sing the melodies he was hearing in his inner ear and then they would figure
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out the notes, chords and phrasing and give the songs their formal 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. These melodies were the embryos of many of the doors best known songs and many
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of their lesser known songs as well. For example,
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"The Great People of the United States" for the song, "The Great People of the United States" for the song, "The Great People of the United States" for the song, "The Great People of the United States" for the song.
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In addition to their cinematic and melodic content, Morris and Slerix brought with
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another crucial musical component. I mean, they're remarkable cadence. Very few people, if
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any, speak about this, but Manzerak actually alludes to this in the quote I referenced earlier
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when he says, "As Jim was singing, I could hear the chord changes and the beat. My fingers
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immediately started moving." Morris and his rhythmic intonation of his lyrics, even when he was
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reciting his poems without musical accompaniment, was remarkably peristaltic, and here's an example
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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 embeds of rust, steel doors lock in prisoner's screams and yuzak 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. This is just jail for those who
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must get up in the morning and fight for such unusable standards while weeping maiden
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show off penure and pout ravings for a mad staff.
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Once this 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. Morris
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and one night went into the recording studio, this was not long before he died, and recorded
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his own recital of an American prayer. An American prayer was a long poem in several parts
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published in 1970 by Morris and I think it was 1970. In any case, some seven years after
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Jim's death the other members of the band put much of that poem to music taking their
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cues from Morris's intonation of his lyrics and in the following track the music takes
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his cue primarily from the cadence of the lyrics.
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A vast radiant beach and a cool jeweled one. Couples naked, raced down by its quiet
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side and we laugh like soft, mad children, smart in the woolly cotton brains of infancy. The
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music and voices 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 Zurich there are no doors. The same goes for
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guitar player Robbie Krieger and drummer John Densmore. All three of them are exceptional
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musical talents who added exactly the right musical flourishes to Jim's vocals and
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lyrics. On most of their albums all of the songs are credited to the doors as a whole which
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is exactly how it should be. All of their songs were effectively co-author. Now this
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doesn't mean that Jim Morris and wasn't the band's lead man he definitely took center
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stage and the other members of the doors who were remarkably free of from ego problems
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were happy to have Jim get most of the light and the attention. But more importantly, Morris
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and his lyrics literally led the doors music providing a trademark themes and imagery as lyric
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melodies and his basic rhythms. I would not say that everything revolved around Morris
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and rather that everything emanated or expanded out from his lead vocals. This is the opening
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of their track when the music's over from their album Strange Days and you can notice how
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the instrumentation prepares the ground for the opening vocal salible of the song.
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Morris and had one of the great screams in the history of rock. The aggressive guitar
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power chords are a prolongation of that scream in this case. And Morris and could go from
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a primordial scream to a tender lullaby in the same phrase maintaining the same musical
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intonation in the process.
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[Music]
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[Music]
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[Music]
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[Music]
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When the music's over is a long track that allows the doors to do what they did best, namely
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to use their instruments to surround, accentuate, and modulate Jim's vocals. You can hear
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the chorus. So, this is a very great song. And there's a lot of songs that I've been doing. And,
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I've got a lot of songs that I've got to do with the melody. And, and I've got to do with the melody. And,
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and subtlety. And, when you listen to a song like this, you realize that the doors were
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more like a troubadour, a troupe than a rock band. The instruments serve as musical accompaniment
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for the poets' verses. That doesn't mean the music is secondary. On the contrary, it means
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that dense more, creaker, and menseric were masters at finding just the right musical enhancements
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for Jim's vocal lines. The three of them had a genius for establishing the right musical
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mood for the vocals. And, that was Jim Morris and his great fortune, I believe, to be
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in a band with three great musicians who knew how to take their lead from him and create
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a whole that was much greater than the sum of its parts. And, that's why, given the troubadour
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| 00:31:20.560 |
character of the band, the doors came into their own above all in performance situations
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| 00:31:27.040 |
when they were playing live. Not so much a big concert situation, but in small, more intimate
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| 00:31:33.000 |
clubs like the whiskey of Gogo on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles where they really began
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| 00:31:41.200 |
to gel before recording their first album in studio. In six days, by the way, goes to show
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| 00:31:47.920 |
you how much they had come together before they even went into the studio. Their first
|
| 00:31:53.440 |
album is almost a live album.
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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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[music]
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[music]
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That's Cadence.
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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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[music]
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I don't know if too many bands that operate this way where they take their lead from the vocal
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| 00:33:30.240 |
lines and engage in a kind of musical poetry or a musicalization of poetry.
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| 00:33:36.240 |
It's a unique combination.
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| 00:33:46.240 |
[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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[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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[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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[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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I'll get you one more from strange days. This is called, I can't see your face in my mind.
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| 00:44:14.240 |
[music]
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| 00:44:24.240 |
I can't see your face in my mind.
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| 00:44:32.240 |
[music]
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I can't see your face in my mind.
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| 00:44:42.240 |
[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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The vast majority of the door songs are as language as you can get.
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| 00:45:32.240 |
This, despite the fact that there's a definite energy there,
|
| 00:45:36.240 |
what you never hear in Morrison's vocals, is a convulsive maniac in need of an
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| 00:45:42.240 |
exorcism, like so many of the rockers of our own era. Again, the age is too hot, and even a highly creative
|
| 00:45:51.120 |
band like Radiohead tries way too hard to be counter-cool.
|
| 00:45:56.720 |
One last thing I would say about "cool" is that it tends to be aligned with the object,
|
| 00:46:01.520 |
not the subject of desire. The cool doesn't grasp that in tight-spence,
|
| 00:46:07.040 |
but let's things be drawn to it. Most men are more comfortable in the
|
| 00:46:12.000 |
role of subjects rather than objects of desire. Yet Morrison, like his role model,
|
| 00:46:18.240 |
Marlon Brando, was an exception at least earlier on when he courted the idolatry of both
|
| 00:46:24.560 |
male and female desire. He eventually got fed up with it, of course, but for a while,
|
| 00:46:30.640 |
he was perfectly happy to be lionized and to engender a whirlwind of desire around his person.
|
| 00:46:36.880 |
[music]
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| 00:46:38.880 |
The French philosopher Jean-Boudread writes somewhere I don't remember where that the subject is
|
| 00:46:44.320 |
but now, slavish and uncouth, while the fascination is always on the side of the object.
|
| 00:46:50.480 |
Morrison knew this instinctively and cultivated a sublime self-objectification.
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| 00:46:56.560 |
That takes more than self-confidence. It takes cool. A lot of people possess the former,
|
| 00:47:02.960 |
but lack the latter. I've said that Morrison, who is famous for his on-stage,
|
| 00:47:09.520 |
shamanism, and anarchy, never really allowed himself to lose control of his own charades.
|
| 00:47:14.400 |
He paid a great deal of lip service to Dionysus, the god of intoxication,
|
| 00:47:20.320 |
excess, and transport, and many people see in Morrison the ultimate devotee or Latter-day incarnation
|
| 00:47:29.040 |
of Dionysus. But I see things a little differently. I believe that Morrison's
|
| 00:47:34.560 |
Dionysism was a form of theater and that Apollo was his true god, Apollo who was the Greek god of
|
| 00:47:43.600 |
form, music, measure, restraint, and beautiful illusion.
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| 00:47:50.320 |
If we follow Frederick Nietzsche, who Morrison actually read in depth, Greek theater was all about
|
| 00:47:58.960 |
the creative tension between Dionysus and Apollo. I don't want to deny that both gods had
|
| 00:48:05.280 |
seized hold of Jim each in his own way. I've already mentioned that Jim's cool prevailed over
|
| 00:48:11.920 |
what was hot in his nature, and in the same vein, I would say that in the final analysis,
|
| 00:48:17.600 |
Apollo always prevailed over Dionysus when it came to Jim's personality and behavior.
|
| 00:48:25.760 |
That famous event in Miami, for example, when Jim got arrested for indecent exposure and public
|
| 00:48:31.360 |
drunkenness, we know that a few days before that concert, Jim had gone to see Julian Beck and
|
| 00:48:38.640 |
the Living Theater, an avant garde theater group that tried in a number of provocative ways to break
|
| 00:48:45.520 |
down the artificial separation between spectators and spectacle. What Jim was trying to do that
|
| 00:48:51.920 |
night in Miami was to engage in some living theater antics of his own on the concert stage.
|
| 00:48:57.760 |
His behavior was extremely deliberate, methodical, and choreographed, and it was definitely
|
| 00:49:05.040 |
premeditated. In other words, there was no loss of control to the contrary,
|
| 00:49:10.080 |
just like the following where Jim is in full control of his staged histrionics.
|
| 00:49:16.800 |
[Singing]
|
| 00:49:18.800 |
[Singing]
|
| 00:49:20.800 |
[Singing]
|
| 00:49:22.800 |
[Singing]
|
| 00:49:24.800 |
[Singing]
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| 00:49:26.800 |
[Singing]
|
| 00:49:28.800 |
♪ We are all right ♪
|
| 00:49:33.800 |
♪ Oh darling ♪
|
| 00:49:44.840 |
♪ We are all good times ♪
|
| 00:49:58.280 |
♪ Everybody feel right ♪
|
| 00:50:03.280 |
♪ Well I feel all right myself, oh yeah ♪
|
| 00:50:08.280 |
♪ Well I feel pretty good, yeah ♪
|
| 00:50:14.960 |
♪ Yeah I feel all right now, baby ♪
|
| 00:50:26.360 |
♪ Oh and why not ♪
|
| 00:50:30.040 |
♪ Why shouldn't I feel good ♪
|
| 00:50:35.040 |
♪ Oh all right ♪
|
| 00:50:40.040 |
♪ Oh baby ♪
|
| 00:50:46.640 |
All right I think you probably wanna hear
|
| 00:50:50.560 |
one more scream of Jim Morrison
|
| 00:50:52.520 |
from the same concert, here you go.
|
| 00:50:54.360 |
♪ Yeah ♪
|
| 00:50:56.360 |
(screaming)
|
| 00:50:59.360 |
(upbeat music)
|
| 00:51:01.940 |
You can hear that this tortilla never saw
|
| 00:51:10.840 |
if he was losing his voice before God,
|
| 00:51:12.640 |
but he still helped it together.
|
| 00:51:14.640 |
(upbeat music)
|
| 00:51:17.220 |
(upbeat music)
|
| 00:51:19.800 |
(upbeat music)
|
| 00:51:30.720 |
♪ Fucking a wild on a road ♪
|
| 00:51:38.340 |
♪ You're ain't a bone to wheel ♪
|
| 00:51:43.340 |
♪ I keep your wild on a road ♪
|
| 00:51:45.900 |
♪ You're ain't a bone to wheel ♪
|
| 00:51:50.900 |
♪ Yeah we're gonna get a road high ♪
|
| 00:51:53.700 |
♪ Goin' to hell a Rio ♪
|
| 00:51:56.940 |
♪ I'll get done ♪
|
| 00:51:59.940 |
(upbeat music)
|
| 00:52:02.520 |
♪ Yeah I got a road out the guy's gone by the low ♪
|
| 00:52:13.220 |
It's hard to know whether Jim was actually drunk
|
| 00:52:15.300 |
and not stumbling on his words
|
| 00:52:17.460 |
or whether he was faking it.
|
| 00:52:18.420 |
I tend to always believe that he was faking things
|
| 00:52:20.580 |
and he knew exactly what he was doing in the street.
|
| 00:52:24.060 |
And here I think the most important thing to keep in mind
|
| 00:52:27.340 |
if one wants to get a handle on Jim Morrison's
|
| 00:52:29.460 |
extremely complex personality,
|
| 00:52:32.380 |
and to think beyond the usual cliches about it
|
| 00:52:34.860 |
is that he came from a military family.
|
| 00:52:38.060 |
His father was an admiral in the United States Navy,
|
| 00:52:41.780 |
at a very critical moment.
|
| 00:52:43.660 |
This is in the late 60s, the height of the Vietnam War,
|
| 00:52:46.660 |
and Jim was raised according to a military code
|
| 00:52:50.900 |
of order, discipline, obedience, and stoical formalism.
|
| 00:52:55.900 |
Control and self-control were drilled into him
|
| 00:53:01.860 |
at an early age.
|
| 00:53:03.340 |
He may have revolted against father figures,
|
| 00:53:05.420 |
but Jim inherited from his own father, George,
|
| 00:53:09.020 |
the soldier's demeanor, character, and ethic of heroism.
|
| 00:53:14.020 |
There is little doubt in my mind that Jim not only believed
|
| 00:53:18.220 |
in heroism, but set out quite deliberately
|
| 00:53:21.220 |
to make himself one.
|
| 00:53:23.380 |
Here is what Jim said about heroism,
|
| 00:53:25.940 |
not long before he died, after he had added
|
| 00:53:30.260 |
to his family upbringing the knowledge of Greek tragic heroes
|
| 00:53:34.620 |
which he had learned in his literature classes at UCLA.
|
| 00:53:38.700 |
- A hero is someone who rebelled or seems to rebel
|
| 00:53:44.660 |
against the facts of existence
|
| 00:53:47.340 |
and seems to conquer them.
|
| 00:53:50.660 |
But obviously that can only work at moments,
|
| 00:53:57.700 |
it can be a lasting thing,
|
| 00:53:59.980 |
but that's not saying that people shouldn't
|
| 00:54:04.900 |
keep trying to rebel against the facts of existence.
|
| 00:54:08.900 |
Someday we might conquer death.
|
| 00:54:13.900 |
- I think it's interesting how in the clip Jim links
|
| 00:54:18.060 |
heroism to death, which is the ultimate fact of existence.
|
| 00:54:22.220 |
Jim had a complicated attitude or relation to death,
|
| 00:54:26.420 |
a common interpretation promoted by Oliver Stone, for instance,
|
| 00:54:30.780 |
has it that Jim was in love with death and courted it
|
| 00:54:34.540 |
at the expense of youth, fame, love, money.
|
| 00:54:38.340 |
It certainly does appear that way from one point of view,
|
| 00:54:41.500 |
I don't deny it, from a certain point of view,
|
| 00:54:44.260 |
Jim was in a hurry only when it came to finding a way to die.
|
| 00:54:48.260 |
It seems in retrospect that he did everything he could
|
| 00:54:52.260 |
to rush his death, but it's also true
|
| 00:54:55.700 |
that shortly before he died, as if sensing the imminence
|
| 00:54:59.660 |
of his own demise, he was horrified at the prospect of death.
|
| 00:55:04.660 |
In the last year of his life, when he realized
|
| 00:55:07.980 |
that his own, sui-generous, rebellious heroism
|
| 00:55:11.100 |
was leading him very close to the edge,
|
| 00:55:13.820 |
he shanked back intrepidation and started hoping
|
| 00:55:17.900 |
that his own stage act would not get the better of him
|
| 00:55:21.180 |
and end his life early.
|
| 00:55:23.020 |
It was too late, of course, for he had already invited
|
| 00:55:26.740 |
death into his life narrative.
|
| 00:55:29.260 |
Yet it's significant, I think, that when he was asked
|
| 00:55:32.260 |
in an interview in 1970, how he would like to die
|
| 00:55:36.100 |
or how he thought he would die, he expressed the hope
|
| 00:55:39.180 |
that, well, let's hear him answer that question
|
| 00:55:43.060 |
in his own words.
|
| 00:55:44.620 |
- That'd be easy to do.
|
| 00:55:46.620 |
- Oh, look at the modern class.
|
| 00:55:49.260 |
(laughing)
|
| 00:55:50.940 |
I hope at about age 120,
|
| 00:55:55.420 |
with a sense of humor and a nice, comfortable bed.
|
| 00:56:00.420 |
No, I wouldn't mind anybody around,
|
| 00:56:04.860 |
I just wanted quietly drift off.
|
| 00:56:07.260 |
- It's zero.
|
| 00:56:08.740 |
- But I'm, which one?
|
| 00:56:10.580 |
But I'm still holding out for--
|
| 00:56:12.140 |
- Yeah, about a hundred, about 90.
|
| 00:56:14.460 |
- I think, that's okay, you can put your hands down there.
|
| 00:56:17.820 |
- I think science has a chance in our lifetime
|
| 00:56:21.300 |
to conquer death, I think it's very possible.
|
| 00:56:26.100 |
And if it did, but what happened to this bad world?
|
| 00:56:30.100 |
- Well, they just have to fend for themselves.
|
| 00:56:34.620 |
(laughing)
|
| 00:56:36.860 |
Leave us for immortals on.
|
| 00:56:41.860 |
- Yeah, that's one reason why I don't buy into the myth
|
| 00:56:44.260 |
of Jim Morrison as the seer and the visionary
|
| 00:56:47.100 |
and the one who deployed all possible means
|
| 00:56:49.980 |
to break through to the other side.
|
| 00:56:52.740 |
I think that Morrison came close enough to the other side
|
| 00:56:55.420 |
before he died to realize that there really is nothing out there
|
| 00:56:59.820 |
or beyond here except the void or nothingness.
|
| 00:57:05.140 |
Out here on the perimeter, there are no stars.
|
| 00:57:08.820 |
I think it's systematic deregulation of the senses,
|
| 00:57:12.020 |
as Hambo put it,
|
| 00:57:13.380 |
led him to the realization that death really holds
|
| 00:57:18.820 |
no enticements and heroism goes from an open courtship
|
| 00:57:23.820 |
of death earlier in Jim's life to a tragic failure
|
| 00:57:29.980 |
to avoid its nihilism.
|
| 00:57:31.780 |
It's above all, in Jim's late poetry at the height
|
| 00:57:37.180 |
of the Vietnam War that we can see how conflicted
|
| 00:57:40.540 |
Jim was over the spectacle of death
|
| 00:57:43.180 |
on national television.
|
| 00:57:46.300 |
As the son of an admiral, having inherited an ethic
|
| 00:57:49.980 |
of heroism, sacrifice and loyalty,
|
| 00:57:53.220 |
Jim was bound to be racked with guilt at the sight
|
| 00:57:56.260 |
of young men, his own age, dying in the fields
|
| 00:58:00.500 |
and jungles of Vietnam.
|
| 00:58:02.120 |
As a one-time military brat, Jim knew exactly
|
| 00:58:06.540 |
how to get himself rejected for military service
|
| 00:58:09.980 |
during his draft interviews, which he did successfully.
|
| 00:58:13.940 |
And we don't know exactly what he told his interviewers
|
| 00:58:16.660 |
since he never talked about it.
|
| 00:58:18.420 |
But this much is certain, Jim Morrison was a patriot
|
| 00:58:22.260 |
as strange as that may sound,
|
| 00:58:25.180 |
and however much it may clash
|
| 00:58:27.660 |
with the popular conception of Morrison.
|
| 00:58:29.660 |
He suffered inwardly and quietly
|
| 00:58:33.660 |
that others of his generation were dying for their country
|
| 00:58:37.260 |
in an insane war while he was living high on the hog
|
| 00:58:40.820 |
as a rock star.
|
| 00:58:43.260 |
There are countless verses in his poetry
|
| 00:58:45.220 |
that declare his allegiance to America.
|
| 00:58:48.300 |
He drove a quintessential American car, the Mustang,
|
| 00:58:53.220 |
and the only time, the only time he insisted that song credits
|
| 00:58:58.220 |
be divided between him and Robbie Krieger
|
| 00:59:02.060 |
was on the soft parade album,
|
| 00:59:04.340 |
half of whose songs were written by Krieger.
|
| 00:59:07.180 |
Some of Krieger's songs were explicit protest songs
|
| 00:59:11.140 |
and Jim didn't want to be associated with their lyrics,
|
| 00:59:14.860 |
which were critical of American policy.
|
| 00:59:17.300 |
It's significant that the long poem he published in 1970
|
| 00:59:20.620 |
was called "An American Prayer."
|
| 00:59:23.020 |
This poem, as far as I can tell,
|
| 00:59:26.420 |
and this is strictly my own interpretation I'm offering here,
|
| 00:59:28.900 |
is haunted by three main themes.
|
| 00:59:31.820 |
Jim's guilt over the Vietnam War,
|
| 00:59:34.380 |
his foreboding of his own death,
|
| 00:59:37.020 |
and his final desire to opt for life over death.
|
| 00:59:41.140 |
The opening section of the poem reads,
|
| 00:59:43.740 |
"Do you know the warm progress under the stars?
|
| 00:59:46.540 |
Do you know we exist?
|
| 00:59:48.580 |
We can actually hear Jim recite that in his own words."
|
| 00:59:52.540 |
Do you know the warm progress under the stars?
|
| 00:59:55.220 |
Do you know we exist?
|
| 00:59:57.500 |
Have you forgotten the keys to the kingdom?
|
| 01:00:00.340 |
Have you been born yet and are you alive?"
|
| 01:00:02.980 |
Let's reinvent the gods, all the myths of the ages.
|
| 01:00:09.940 |
The gods celebrate symbols from deep elder forests.
|
| 01:00:14.740 |
Have you forgotten the lessons of the ancient war?
|
| 01:00:18.740 |
We need great golden populations.
|
| 01:00:22.140 |
Fathers are cackling and trees of the forest,
|
| 01:00:27.020 |
and mothers dead in the sea.
|
| 01:00:29.540 |
You know we are being led to slaughters
|
| 01:00:33.340 |
by placid admirals,
|
| 01:00:34.900 |
and that fat, slow generals are getting obscene and young blood.
|
| 01:00:40.340 |
Do you know we are ruled by TV?
|
| 01:00:42.740 |
The moon is a dry blood beast.
|
| 01:00:50.340 |
The gorilla bands are rolling numbers
|
| 01:00:52.540 |
and an ex-block of green and vine.
|
| 01:00:54.940 |
A massive for warfare,
|
| 01:00:56.740 |
innocent herdsmen have not just died.
|
| 01:00:59.140 |
Oh great creator of being a grandest one more hour
|
| 01:01:04.540 |
to perform our art and perfect our lives.
|
| 01:01:07.740 |
The prayer here is to the so-called great creator of being.
|
| 01:01:29.340 |
Grant us one more hour to perform our art and perfect our lives.
|
| 01:01:35.340 |
Sounds like someone praying for more time to me,
|
| 01:01:38.340 |
the sort of prayer a soldier might address to his creator
|
| 01:01:41.340 |
on the battlefields before,
|
| 01:01:43.540 |
quote, "being led to slaughter by placid admirals"
|
| 01:01:48.540 |
and the slow generals getting fat and obscene on young blood.
|
| 01:01:54.740 |
I'm not sure who the moths and atheists are in the poem,
|
| 01:01:57.620 |
but they don't include the praying author of these verses.
|
| 01:02:01.660 |
I suspect that they're the fathers
|
| 01:02:03.740 |
who send their sons off in those blue buses
|
| 01:02:07.140 |
that the U.S. Armed Forces use to transport enlisted
|
| 01:02:11.540 |
and drafted soldiers.
|
| 01:02:14.340 |
The blue bus is calling us driver where you're taking us.
|
| 01:02:18.340 |
I suspect that they're the ones who send the young off to die
|
| 01:02:21.140 |
in their, quote, "rolling numbers,"
|
| 01:02:23.740 |
the ones who rule the TV that rules over us.
|
| 01:02:28.540 |
A verse from that poem we just heard says,
|
| 01:02:30.740 |
"We got our final vision by clap, Columbus's groin,"
|
| 01:02:37.140 |
which generates America's young,
|
| 01:02:40.140 |
quote, "got filled with green death,"
|
| 01:02:43.540 |
"the green death of the Vietnam jungles I'm presuming."
|
| 01:02:47.940 |
Where are the feasts we were promised?
|
| 01:02:49.740 |
Where is the new wine?
|
| 01:02:51.340 |
Jim asks in the poem later.
|
| 01:02:54.940 |
This is the new wine of the new world I'm assuming.
|
| 01:02:57.940 |
His answer, dying on the vine.
|
| 01:03:01.140 |
Later in an American prayer, he writes,
|
| 01:03:04.340 |
"Give us a creed to believe, give us trust in the night,
|
| 01:03:07.540 |
give of color, hundred hues."
|
| 01:03:10.940 |
This is the poetry of someone who does not know what to make
|
| 01:03:13.140 |
of the fact that his brothers,
|
| 01:03:15.140 |
namely sons of the same fathers, are dying
|
| 01:03:17.940 |
while he, Jim Morrison, lives on.
|
| 01:03:20.540 |
I believe that the main reason Jim hastened his own death
|
| 01:03:23.540 |
was in order to show the fathers,
|
| 01:03:25.540 |
and in particular his own admiral father
|
| 01:03:27.340 |
that it was not a fear of death that kept him from the battlefield.
|
| 01:03:32.340 |
I have a feeling he felt an urge to die alongside others
|
| 01:03:35.940 |
of his generations, at least for a while,
|
| 01:03:39.140 |
but to die on his own rebellious terms
|
| 01:03:42.740 |
and not the terms of the father.
|
| 01:03:45.940 |
It's quite clear in an American prayer
|
| 01:03:48.140 |
that Jim was sickened by his television set,
|
| 01:03:51.340 |
sickened to death by it, it filled him with anguish and doubts.
|
| 01:03:55.540 |
That is why he writes, later in the poem,
|
| 01:03:58.540 |
"Wow, I'm sick of doubt, live in the light of certain south.
|
| 01:04:02.940 |
Cruel bindings, the servants have the power.
|
| 01:04:06.340 |
Dog men and their mean women pulling poor blankets over our sailors."
|
| 01:04:13.140 |
"I'm sick of dour faces staring at me from the TV tower.
|
| 01:04:17.540 |
I want roses in my garden, Bower Dig."
|
| 01:04:20.740 |
Royal babies, rubies must now replace aborted strangers in the mud,
|
| 01:04:26.740 |
these mutants, blood meal for the plant that's plowed.
|
| 01:04:31.740 |
The surviving members of the doors
|
| 01:04:33.540 |
did a particularly beautiful job of putting this section
|
| 01:04:35.740 |
of an American prayer to music.
|
| 01:04:37.740 |
"Wow, I'm sick of doubt, live in the light of certain south.
|
| 01:04:47.140 |
Cruel bindings, the servants have been sick of the people.
|
| 01:04:50.540 |
They're sick of dour faces staring at me from the TV tower."
|
| 01:04:51.540 |
"I want roses in my garden, Bower Dig."
|
| 01:04:55.540 |
Royal babies, rubies must now replace aborted strangers in the mud.
|
| 01:05:01.540 |
"I'm sick of dour faces staring at me from the TV tower."
|
| 01:05:06.540 |
"I want roses in my garden, Bower Dig."
|
| 01:05:10.540 |
Royal babies, rubies must now replace aborted strangers in the mud.
|
| 01:05:17.540 |
These mutants, blood meal for the plant that's plowed.
|
| 01:05:21.540 |
These mutants, blood meal for the plant that's plowed.
|
| 01:05:47.540 |
They are waiting to take us under the severed garden.
|
| 01:05:51.540 |
You know how pale and wanneth hillfork comes death and a strange outlet.
|
| 01:05:56.540 |
I don't know if it's done by a poor man.
|
| 01:05:59.540 |
Just scaring over friendly guests he brought to bed.
|
| 01:06:04.540 |
Death makes angels of the saw and gives us wings where we had shoulders smooth as ravens claws.
|
| 01:06:15.540 |
No more money in the United States address, other kingdoms seems by father-classing through a
|
| 01:06:21.540 |
other jar of veals incest and loose obedience to a vegetable law.
|
| 01:06:28.540 |
I will not go, but for a feast of friends to the giant family.
|
| 01:06:35.540 |
"I will not go, I prefer a feast of friends to the giant family, and I take that to be Jim Morrison's
|
| 01:06:44.540 |
farewell statement that he didn't really want to go into the severed garden any more than the
|
| 01:06:51.540 |
50,000 soldiers who never made it back alive from Vietnam wanted to go off to war."
|
| 01:06:57.540 |
I like the word "giant" in the phrase "giant family" in the etymological sense of belonging to the earth,
|
| 01:07:04.540 |
to Gaia.
|
| 01:07:06.540 |
I prefer a feast of friends to the giant family of the dead, of those who lie buried in the ground.
|
| 01:07:13.540 |
Blood meal for the plant that's plowed as he puts it.
|
| 01:07:18.540 |
"The obedience of those who followed orders becomes loose obedience to a vegetable law."
|
| 01:07:26.540 |
Jim Morrison never got overly ardent in his prayers, but it seems to me that in those moments of extremity,
|
| 01:07:32.540 |
which he sought out so deliberately, at that radical edge where life meets the absolute boundary of death,
|
| 01:07:40.540 |
he turned to a highly personal kind of prayer.
|
| 01:07:44.540 |
Let me tell you about heartache and the loss of God, he writes her.
|
| 01:07:47.540 |
"He may not have known himself whom or what he was imploring, but much of his later poetry is a kind of petition."
|
| 01:07:55.540 |
Was there anyone or anything listening on the other side beyond the door?
|
| 01:08:00.540 |
Hard to say, he could only hope, yet there's also no doubt that his hope was full of doubt.
|
| 01:08:07.540 |
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.
|
| 01:08:22.540 |
"You cannot petition the Lord with prayer. You cannot petition the Lord with prayer!"
|
| 01:08:41.540 |
And yet here comes the petition.
|
| 01:08:51.540 |
"Can you give me saying to weary, I must find the place to hide, a place for me to hide."
|
| 01:09:08.540 |
"Can you find me soft to silence, I can't make it anymore?"
|
| 01:09:15.540 |
"The man is at the door."
|
| 01:09:19.540 |
"Can you find me soft to silence, I can't make it anymore?"
|
| 01:09:31.540 |
"The man is at the door."
|
| 01:09:38.540 |
"Spark a monk, but lush, if any, but a little kiss he can."
|
| 01:09:45.540 |
"This is the best part of the trip, this is the trip, the best part."
|
| 01:09:52.540 |
"I really like what he's saying."
|
| 01:09:55.540 |
"That'll do it for entitled opinions. This show wraps up our long 2009-2010 season.
|
| 01:10:02.540 |
It's time for a summer holiday. Many thanks to Christy Wampold who has done an outstanding job as production manager this year.
|
| 01:10:09.540 |
Many thanks to all of you listeners who have written in and encouraged us to continue keeping entitled opinions on air.
|
| 01:10:15.540 |
This is Robert Harrison, reaching you all the best.
|
| 01:10:20.540 |
"I'm so successful, you'll all hear a story. Everything must be this way."
|
| 01:10:49.540 |
"Shandler Street, where people play."
|
| 01:10:54.540 |
"Welcome to the soft parade. All our lives be sweat and say.
|
| 01:11:03.540 |
They'll give for a shower grade. Must be something else to say."
|
| 01:11:13.540 |
"So long to defend his place. Everything must be this way."
|
| 01:11:22.540 |
"Everything must be this way."
|
| 01:11:27.540 |
"The soft parade is the best part."
|
| 01:11:52.540 |
"The soft parade has now begun."
|
| 01:12:00.540 |
"Listen to the engines, hold them."
|
| 01:12:05.540 |
"People out to have some fun."
|
| 01:12:09.540 |
"Come to arm my left."
|
| 01:12:12.540 |
"Lap it on my right."
|
| 01:12:16.540 |
"Yeah, over here, all the chill dress."
|
| 01:12:23.540 |
"Cuz it beats around the neck."
|