FEATURE:
Strange Days: The Doors of Perception
Jim Morrison at Eighty: A ‘Complicated’ Legacy
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EVEN if I cannot count myself…
IN THIS PHOTO: Jim Morrison in the late-1960s/PHOTO CREDIT: © Estate of Edmund Teske/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
as a huge fan of The Doors, I recognise their importance and what they gave to music. Their debut album, The Doors, arrived in 1967. Released in a classic year for music, we got this sensational and historic album from the U.S. band. Containing the tracks Break On Through (To the Other Side), Alabama Song (Whisky Bar), Light My Fire and The End, many argue that The Doors did not reach these heights again. Their sixth studio album, 1971’s L.A. Woman, is quite close in terms of quality - as it has Love Her Madly, L.A. Woman and Rider on the Storm on it. That was the band’s final album before their lead Jim Morrison died at the age of twenty-seven. 8th December would have been his eightieth birthday. I am going to, rather than discuss the band’s music and legacy, talk about their frontperson. I know others will write features about Morrison closer to his eightieth, as he is often considered one of the best Rock singers and most iconic leads ever. Charismatic, controversial and primal, he was part-poet, part-artist. An almost mythical figure whose distinct voice and music has endured generations and sounds like nothing else, there is still no clear reason as to how he died in Paris in 1971. Even if some celebrate Jim Morrison’s sexuality and music, there is a more ‘complicated’ side. I had putting that word in inverted commas or quotation marks. This is the word most people use, although it does sounds quite vague and unserious. When it comes to Jim Morrison, there is a lot to celebrate – yet he definitely had a darker side and controversial nature that makes him a hard figure to completely embrace or excuse.
PHOTO CREDIT: Michael Montfort
It is clear that he had a trouble past. In terms of his later years, there was definitely some questionable and controversial moments. During a gig on 1st March, 1969 in Miami, Morrison attempted to spark a riot in the audience by screaming, "You wanna see my cock?!". On 20th September, 1970, Morrison was convicted of indecent exposure and profanity. He remained free on a $50,000 bond. The band’s drummer John Densmore (whose book, The Doors Unhinged: Jim Morrison's Legacy Goes on Trial, is a must-own) spoke with The Guardian. Fuelled maybe by ego, drink, drugs and this perception of what a poet and Rock god should be, Densmoire spoke about the late Jim Morrison and the destructive, abusive side of The Doors’ lead:
“It took the Doors’ drummer, John Densmore, three years to visit the grave of his bandmate Jim Morrison after he was found dead in a Paris bathtub in 1971. He didn’t even go to the funeral. “Did I hate Jim?” Densmore pauses, although he is not obviously alarmed by the question. “No. I hated his self-destruction … He was a kamikaze who went out at 27 – what can I say?”
Quite a lot, it transpires. Morrison was a man who was spectacularly good at being a rock star – a lithe figure in leather trousers, prophesying about death, sex and magic on some of the biggest hits of the 1960s – Light My Fire, Break on Through and Hello, I Love You. But he was catastrophically bad at the rest of life. Like many alcoholics, he could be reckless, selfish and mercurial. “The Dionysian madman,” Densmore has called him – a “psychopath”, a “lunatic” and “the voice that struck terror in me”. He had lobbied to get Morrison off the road before his death, and even quit the band at one point. “Some people wanted to keep shovelling coal in the engine and I was like: ‘Wait a minute. So what if we have one less album? Maybe he’ll live?’” Why did he carry on? “Because I wasn’t mature enough to say that at the time. I wasn’t trying to enable him. It was another era. I used to answer the question: ‘If Jim was around today, would he be clean and sober?’ with a ‘no’. Kamikaze drunk. Now I’ve changed my mind. Of course he would be sober. Why wouldn’t he be? He was smart.”
Densmore, 75, is a defiant survivor of the music scene he helped build. This, perhaps, is why, in the decades since Morrison’s death, he has become not only one of the great chroniclers of the Doors, but the fiercest protector of Morrison’s legacy. To anyone who has read Densmore’s 1990 memoir – a book he says was “written in blood” – this may come as a surprise; later the book would form the basis for Oliver Stone’s (dreadful) Doors biopic. “It took me years to forgive Jim,” Densmore says. “And now I miss him so much for his artistry.”
Next month, a documentary about another of his bandmates, the keyboardist Ray Manzarek, who died in 2013, will be released. Manzarek’s relationship with Densmore was not smooth either. From the early 2000s, they were embroiled in a vicious six-year legal battle in which Densmore tried to stop Manzarek and the band’s guitarist, Robby Krieger, from touring under the Doors name as well as selling the band’s music for use on a Cadillac commercial. “I know. I sued my bandmates – am I CRAZY?!” he yells. People certainly thought he was. It is not usual to spend years in court trying to stop yourself from earning millions of dollars to prove a point about the value of artistic integrity over the pursuit of money. “What can I say? Jim’s ghost is behind me all the time,” Densmore says. “My knees were shaking pretty strong when they upped the offer of $5m (£3.8m) to $15m. But my head was saying: Break on Through for a gas-guzzling SUV? No!”.
Densmore’s writing about Morrison often reads as if it were done by someone who has survived an abusive relationship, such was the terror he felt around Morrison towards the end. “On the outside, Jim seemed normal,” he wrote. “But he had an aggressiveness toward life and women.” One such incident was early in their friendship when he went to pick Morrison up from a woman’s house and found him brandishing a knife at her while holding her hand behind her back. At the time, Densmore did nothing because he was worried that if anyone found out about Morrison, the band – and his own career – would be over. What does he make of this now? “I was really young,” he says. “I couldn’t figure out whether they were lovers, friends or enemies. I just felt like I needed to get out of there.” Would he have acted differently if it happened today? “Yeah, I would say: ‘What the fuck are you guys doing? Please take it down a few notches here”.
There are definitely multiple sides to Jim Morrison. There was this wild and rebellious nature that meant he was heralded and highlighted by the media. That romantic notion of someone who was a free spirit and poet. Maybe fitting into the idea of what Rock artist should be in the 1960s and 1970s, there was a toxicity that could not be tolerated today. One of the good things about modern Rock is that we have largely got rid of the darker and seedier side of that culture. Even if Jim Morrison is considered by many as a genius and one of the most important artists of his generation, how is he seen now? CLASH wrote a feature in 2021 that assessed his legacy and complicated image:
“Morrison is talked about as a Jekyll and Hyde figure, with drugs and alcohol blamed for turning him into a monster. Yet time has morphed this description into something cool, using mythologised tales of his dual-souls and bad trips to blur over the stories of the underage relationships, violence towards girlfriends and fans, and even attempted murders.
If Jim Morrison was alive today, modern cancel culture would have a field day. The Blinders’ bassist Charlie articulated this perfectly, talking of his own difficulty confronting the realities of his idols; “if we knew of the abusive behaviour first then we wouldn’t perhaps give them the time that we do. We have a duty to therefore tackle our perceptions of somebody when we acquire knowledge of their behaviour but this can be very difficult to do.” This especially seems to be the case when it comes to looking back; we’re reluctant to get into a conversation about what the realities of our favourite 60s icons’ dark sides really looks like, because it simply looks a lot like abuse.
It’s such a slippery slope. When we start talking about Morrison, we have to start talking about other rock icons and their haram of baby groupies, some allegedly as young as 13. We have to start talking about Lennon’s domestic violence, Elvis Presley and Priscilla’s age gap, and the long list of other problematic details in the lives of our heroes. It’s hard to talk about one without feeling as though we’re risking an entire era of artists as the voice of cancel culture demands we wipe our Spotify library and burn our vinyl.
But we know we could never cancel the classics. Being the figureheads of an era full of events and stories that have been passed down like folklore, icons like Morrison, Bowie, and Lennon are far too engrained into culture to ever be untangled. Yet, although the argument that we should separate the art from the artist might be problematic when we talk about living performers, allowing people to escape accountability and repercussions for their actions, it may be a necessary thing for historic figures.
While their art remains relevant, the separation is necessary if only to remind us that these people existed in a very different time. It’s a fact, not an excuse, to say that the free love era of the 60s didn’t consider these things in the way we do now; assault – very sadly – was barely a word to be recognised in the lexicon. While it’s important to recognise abuse both historical and modern, resisting the insistence to judge the actions of 50 years ago by today’s standards may be the only way we can hold onto our favourite albums.
The argument of blissful ignorance feels like a necessary evil for Bowie and The Beatles. But when it comes to Jim Morrison, it feels like a different story. While other icons have become villains through a modern lens, Morrison was always an abusive figure constantly being let off because of his bad boy act.
The Doors’ drummer John Densmore has spoken a lot about Morrison’s aggression towards women, famously not visiting Morrison’s grave for three years after his death and calling him a “psychopath” who Densmore was terrified of after he walked in on Morrison holding a knife to a groupie. Even at the time, Jim Morrison was known as violent, abusive towards women, and generally destructive, but we erase these stories, along with all others against our favourite 60s icons, to keep our romanticised image of what a rock star should be in-tact.
So what do they need to be to qualify? How quickly does our image of the perfect star as wild and exciting slip into a green card for drug-fuelled chaos and violence? In an industry that’s still so male-dominated, and when men like Morrison are still largely idolised, discussing their abuses and removing the veneer of romance that surrounds them is essential for preventing their toxic behaviours creeping into 2021 under the façade of rock ‘n’ roll.
When we hold up the romanticised image of people like Morrison as perfect icons that represent what music should be, we run the risk of leaving abuse and violence as part of the parcel of stardom, like an accepted symptom of being ground-breaking.
It almost feels like we’re seeing the dangers of this play out in real time currently as more allegations come out against Marilyn Manson. In light of this, Manson’s love for The Doors and obsession with Jim Morrison (and even more violent 60s figures like Charles Manson) starts to raise an eyebrow or two. Similar to Morrison, tales of Marilyn Manson’s dark antics have always been brushed off as wild, allowed to become part of his appeal of fans – except now seeing the violent realities of this, and how the public ego-boost may have enabled his abuse, means that a lot of his behaviours start to look like red flags that were consistently ignored and shrugged off as some form of expected rock ‘n’ roll chaos”.
I am going to end with positives and ‘the other side’ of Jim Morrison. In 2020, Grace Marie Burton wrote for The Burr Magazine. She dissected the conflicted legacy of Jim Morrison. In 2023, he still remains someone who is mythologised and romanticised. Not that his dark and abusive side should be ignored, though it is clear that there Morrison was troubled throughout his short life:
“In the rock canon, there aren’t many bands like The Doors. Simultaneously underground and mainstream at the same time, they’ve certainly left their mark in the rock genre and numerous sub-genres, like punk and gothic rock for example. However, I’m still conflicted about my opinions on them as I love parts of them yet l0athe other aspects surrounding the legacy of The Doors.
The Doors started in 1965 after singer Jim Morrison ran into his former college buddy, Ray Manzarek on the beach in Venice, CA. Even before they ever released any singles or albums, they were pegged as the rebellious poets of the L.A. scene. They were fascinating yet magical and oh so mysterious. Most of this was tied to Morrison, as he was seen as prettier, sexier, dangerous and more clever than any other rockstar before and during his time. The band was also extremely eclectic with their influences and references. The whole of the band was obsessed with poetry and philosophy, particularly Aldous Huxley, William Blake, Arthur Rimbaud and many others. Morrison would also pick up performance elements from the experimental Living Theater novel by Julian Beck.
Their musical influences were also diverse and all over the place. Drummer John Densmore had a flair for Bossa Nova, which influenced songs like “Break on through (to the other side).” Guitarist Robby Krieger has classical guitar training, which can be found in the flamenco solo and backing on “Spanish Caravan.” Manzarek, whose organ made up for the band’s lack of a bass player, is probably the signature of The Doors sound. At times darkly hypnotic, like a midnight carnival ride and at other times funky yet warm, like something from a Ray Charles b-side or soft and brooding, like a Motown torch single.
Critics at the time lauded this experimentation and darkly brooding subject matter Morrison surrounded himself in. They also often wrote about Doors albums like they were collections of poetry. Take this review of the first doors album from Crawdaddy! in 1967 by Paul Williams:
The Doors’ legacy is where the divisions, including my own, bubble to the surface. The true span of the legacy of The Doors doesn’t truly show up until the ‘80s and ‘90s when teenagers brought back both the ‘50s and ‘60s and made them cool and interesting again. Writer and boozehound Lester Bangs reflected on the legacy of both the group and Morrison in 1980, a decade after he torched their album “Morrison Hotel” for Rolling Stone.
PHOTO CREDIT: Joel Brodsky
This isn’t exclusive to The Doors and the youth of the ‘80s and ‘90s either; we can see this occurring today with our modern youth and their obsession with the culture of the ‘90s. However, The Doors and Morrison, mostly due to his death obsession and early demise, had been launched into this idea of what the movements of the ‘60s and ’70s were supposed to mean. The ‘60s were supposed to be this giant decade where everything changed and the youth revolted, questioned authority and revolutionized the American idea of just about everything. However, what got lost in the shuffle when the youth of the ‘80s and ‘90s rediscovered the ‘60s was that most of those revolutionary figures either died due to their own excess, assassination, or had become cogs in the money-making machine once the counterculture had been adopted as a way to make money.
Morrison was an example of that, however, due to his rebellious actions and mystic aura and tendencies, he’s become a symbol rather than a person. The myth of Morrison is summed up with the title of the Rolling Stone article from 1981, following the release of a popular Morrison biography “No One Here Gets out Alive”: “He’s Hot, He’s Sexy and He’s Dead.” Even alive, those were the appeals of Morrison’s persona, the classic gothic mixture of attraction, sexual rawness and how that allures to death.
The issue that I see is while that is true of Jim Morrison, that was mostly his press or performing image; behind the scenes, he was a drunk bad poet who was a serial cheater and drug addict. He’s not the only one who’s like this, even from the ‘60s, but he’s been deified and for that I point the blame to director Oliver Stone and his 1991 film about the band, “The Doors”.
There is no doubt that Jim Morrison was a distinct and incredible writer. A poet and songwriter whose work was explored in this feature, he has also inspired so many artists who followed. Everyone from Iggy Pop, Patti Smith and Ian McCullough of Echo and The Bunnymen are inspired by Jim Morrison. Whether it is his spirit and recklessness, the poetry and words or his particular vocal delivery and style, it is important to recognise the positives and impactful nature of Morrison. He turns eighty on 8th December. There will be new perspectives and interpretations about his work and legacy. I want to bring in some of Richard Jonathan’s words about Jim Morrison as a poet. It is a fascinating take and spotlight of a fascinating-if-controversial figure:
“Jim’s poetry has a strong cinematic dimension. Andrzej Zulawski (a Polish filmmaker whose first film, The Third Part of the Night, was released in the year of Jim’s death), was a filmmaker whose films, especially Chamanka (She-Shaman) and Possession, are perfect expressions of Jim’s ethics and aesthetics (for the true artist, the two are always intimately entwined). Zulawski’s films enact the trance Jim sought as a means to transcendence, they embody Jim’s conception of cinema: ‘Film is the closest approximation in art that we have to the actual flow of consciousness, in both dream life and the actual perception of the world’ (interview). The most consistent cinematic equivalents of Jim’s poetry, then, are the films of Zulawski. Indeed, ‘The End’ and ‘When the Music’s Over’ can be seen as aesthetic precursors of Chamanka and Possession.
In Jim’s poetry a mythical dimension often attaches to words, giving them—like phosphorus exposed to oxygen—a particular glow. The butterfly in ‘the scream of the butterfly’ suffices unto itself, but attached to the insect—for listeners with attuned antennae—is its mythical dimension as ‘the soul freed from its covering of flesh’. In ‘The End’ the snake is clearly mythical: great god of darkness; symbol of both soul and libido; storehouse of potential underlying the palpable world. Night, as we have already seen, is an emblem of ‘the other side’; the word recurs in many songs. In ‘Moonlight Drive’, the moon is awash in mythical associations, giving access to the ‘strait gate’ which opens upon release and light, a short cut to the luminous centre of being and oneness. And what about in ‘Wild Child’? Who is that ‘ancient lunatic [who] reigns in the trees of the night’? A witch, a black moon, a decrepit madman?
IN THIS PHOTO: Jim Morrison between Whisky and the Word in the NYC Subway/PHOTO CREDIT: Paul Ferrara
What gives ‘The End’ its ‘haunting authority’? What—besides the brilliance of the music—makes it so powerful? It is, I would argue, the fact that it reaches deep down into a mythical, primitive psychology and then evokes cinematically what the poet found there. In a 1968 interview with the Los Angeles Free Press, Jim said: ‘I used to have this magic formula to break into the subconscious. I would lay there and say over and over “Fuck the mother, kill the father. Fuck the mother, kill the father”. You can really get into your head just repeating that slogan over and over. Just saying it can be the thing’. Now, ‘the connection with the psychologically primitive characterizes the prophetic writer’, says Frye (p. 54). Jim would agree, and would be quick to make it clear that, to the extent that he is working in a mythological dimension, the ‘prophetic’ is not about foretelling the future, but rather about highlighting the fact that history is a series of repetitions. Thus, just as in film where every image on the screen is in the present tense, not matter where it is situated in the narrative sequence, so in ‘The End’ the ‘stranger’s hand in a desperate land’, the ‘Roman wilderness of pain’, the ‘snake’ and the ‘blue bus’, the killer who ‘walked on down the hall’, are all immediately present to us, even as they resonate through past and future centuries. This is a particular quality of Jim’s poetic genius, and this is what I characterize as the prophetic dimension in his poetry”.
In 2021, The Collected Works of Jim Morrison: Poetry, Journals, Transcripts, and Lyrics, was published. The varied and prophetic writings of The Doors’ lead was celebrated in the new anthology. The Financial Times ran a feature in anticipation of the release. Whereas some saw Morrison as this drugged, drunk and hellraising idol, others celebrated his poetic and sensitive side. A reason I wanted to write this feature is to get inside a Rock figure we do not really see today. Almost a classic poet in terms of their personality, work and legacy. How do we view Jim Morrison today in terms of his importance and music? It is a question that many have been asking for years now:
Jim Morrison’s reputation as a hell-raising, leather-clad Lizard King means he is primarily celebrated in pop folklore as a beer-swilling frontman, an “erotic politician” who filled rock stadiums with indecent howls and dark wit. Yet the late Doors singer, who was found dead at 27 in a Paris bathtub nearly 50 years ago, was first and foremost a poet, according to Robby Krieger, the band’s jazz-channelling guitarist.
The still-awestruck 75-year-old describes Morrison as “a genius. He was the only guy I met at that age who was so preoccupied with death and philosophy. No one else was even close to thinking like he was thinking.
“Jim was always a poet. When I wrote ‘Light My Fire’, Jim added the line ‘try to set the night on fire’. We found out recently he had actually written that line in a poetry notebook from way back, when he was just a child.”
Created in collaboration with Morrison’s estate, a new, nearly 600-page anthology, The Collected Works of Jim Morrison, honours Morrison’s own plans to publish a book containing all his writings, including poems, screenplays and lyrics — from “The Pony Express”, a poem Morrison wrote when he was in the fifth grade, to sombre reflections from his final days in Paris. There he seems to have made peace with the concept of mortality, prophetically writing: “Naked we come and bruised we go / nude pastry for the slow soft worms below.”
The singer’s sister, Anne Morrison Chewning, says it was quickly apparent that her brother was different from other kids while they were growing up in a military family that moved house almost every six months. “While his friends were playing with toys, Jim was reading Rimbaud, Camus and Genet,” she recalls. “When he graduated, he asked my parents for the complete works of Nietzsche as his gift. He liked to go into Washington DC and wander the streets alone, purely so he could observe people.”
Anne was living in London in 1966 when their mother, Clara, sent over a copy of The Doors’ debut album. Anne was pleasantly surprised to find out about the new career of her older brother, who by that point had disconnected himself from his family. “I always thought Jim would end up as a penniless beatnik poet,” she says. “It felt like the music really was an accidental thing. He wasn’t reaching out to be a musician or singer. It just sort of happened by serendipity.”
This is echoed by his close friend Frank Lisciandro, a fellow film student at UCLA and an editor of the new anthology. He sorted through dozens of notepads and scraps of poetry that Morrison left behind. On December 8 1970, Lisciandro was invited by a heavily bearded Morrison to a studio on his final birthday to watch him record some of his favourite poems (the audiobook of the anthology features these recordings). “Jim was friends with [the Beat generation poet] Michael McClure and loved the way the Beat poets approached language. He wanted to publicise his poetry through the rock stage and turn it into theatre,” Lisciandro says. “It was important we printed his song lyrics alongside his poetry as Jim didn’t really see a distinction.
“He was a very discreet and quiet person. Not at all a braggart. I remember one day he came into The Doors’ office and quietly handed me a book of poems he had just self-published. I thought I was a smart person, but after I read those poems I realised I didn’t know anything about the world.”
“The idea of the world becoming more computerised definitely troubled Jim because he was such a free spirit. He just went wherever the energy pushed him. He would leave a Doors session, walk up to the highway, stick his finger out and hitch a ride. Jim was a hitchhiker in his mind, too, catching rides to the next thought or experience.”
Whatever the future holds in Morrison’s afterlife, Lisciandro is convinced Morrison the poet will keep growing in stature. “I just want people to study his writing, because it has a lot to say about our world. Jim the poet will live on, that is my only hope”.
On 8th December, the world marks Jim Morrison’s eightieth birthday. Undoubtably a hugely important figure in Rock history, there is this constant and ongoing exploration of his legacy and image. A terrific writer and performer, there is also the abusive, dangerous and darker side of The Doors’ leader. With books, volumes and documentaries out there that concern Jim Morrison, one can come to their own conclusions regarding his legacy and truth. It is clear there are different and dark sides to one of the most compelling figures…
IN music history.