The Doors Part 1

For my friends, this is an old old topic of discussion. They've heard me talk about The Doors for over 10 years, but amazingly my blog has been up and running for a month or so now, with virtually no mention of them, aside from the two videos permanently fixed to the bottom of the page (and even those videos have no convential lead singer in them).

For those of you who don't know me in the real world, and have also been living in the crack of a hermit's ass, a hermit who has burrowed down really deep into some rocks in a cave on a distant planet on the other side of the universe since 1965, 15 years before I was even born, The Doors are a band. A music band. A psychadelic music band. Arguably the most famous psychadelic music band ever to exist on the face of this planet (The Beatles weren't psychadelic in the strictest sense - She Loves You proves it, so shut it you filthy scousers - and stop robbin' mi' mates - 30 miles from Liverpool is nowhere near far enough away for me - City Of Culture? Bollocks. City of thievery more like - the only good things to ever come out of that city were ironically The Beatles, and then John moved to New York - ha ha, The Zutons [oh how we'd love to suck on Abbey's sax!] and of course our erstwhile friend the M62).

At the core of The Doors was a young man named Jim Morrison. He was, and remains, one of Western culture's most misunderstood idols. In an age of celebrity and shallow recognitions of even shallowier people, Morrison the image has come to almost eclipse the real person who layed underneath all that.

If you want to get a handle on a poet who has variously been described as the last beatnik on one extreme to a sixth form standard writer on the other (surely a sign of something good is when it is loved and loathed in equal measure), then of course I would recommend listening to his music - the music of Jim Morrison, Ray Manzarek, Robby Krieger and John Densmore. But also, Morrison produced several books of poetry. These writings are: 'The Lords & The New Creatures', 'An American Prayer', 'Wilderness: The Lost Writings Of Jim Morrison' and 'The American Night: The Writings Of Jim Morrison.'

Morrison's poetry is unusual. As a very late Beat poet, he had the benefit (and the burden) of a large body of work by other greats such as Ginsberg and McClure to reference against, and to compare with. But he managed in my opinion to strike upon new ground with his words, which for me, are still some of those most capable of creating true mental imagery that is uniquely dark, and foreboding upon the picture an individual has within his soul of the outside world.

I'm not saying at any point that I wholly agree with Morrison's interpretation of reality. These are different times, and frankly less positive ones, but even then, his vision is sometimes darker than my optimism can withstand. For instance:

"Fear the Lords who are secret among us.
The Lords are w/in us.
Born of sloth & cowardice."

...

"The artists of Hell
set up easels in parks,
the terrible landscape,
where citizens find anxious pleasure,
preyed upon by savage bands of youths."1

With words and visions as dark as these small samplings, I think we can see where The Doors want us to hear. It is against this backdrop that we can see where the darkness of The Doors is really coming from. The thing is, Morrison carried this darkness, this intellectually based, but nevertheless instinctive 'shadowed' outlook of his world, with him, throughout his life. It seems to stem in part from a military upbringing (The Doors' lead singer's father was the man who pretty much started the Vietnam War in a strictly military sense), an upbringing of travelling from town to town across an America that for him didn't consist of the America us other people see - the New Yorks, the L.A.'s, and the Chicago's. Jim represents a triumph of middle America in the 50's and 60's in a way. He lived in the Hicksvilles, the middle of nowhere towns, villages, forts and the like, that we don't really see in our cosy tourist minds when we envision the USA.

Out of this, the imagery of the great plains, the broke communities and suchlike comes a great big chunk of Morrison's vision, but also, his formative years as a student in Florida and L.A provide an equal contribution to that vision. This combination of isolation and being the great 'outsider' in his childhood, and then the excesses of his early youth before fame, the prostitution he witnessed and allegedly embraced on occasions, the time spent with hobos, homeless folks, the general 'down and outs' of American society; this is a potent combination for any young person to absorb, and I suspect if Morrison hadn't been picked up by the academic and musical community in California, then he was as likely to be a murderer as opposed to a musican and poet. I think the line between beauty and horror is a fine one and Jim Morrison straddled it with the grace that a young tightrope walker demonstrates at the fairground.

The Doors. Jim Morrison. To most people, those two names are as interchangeable as the morning star and the evening star. But there was far more to The Doors than Jim Morrison alone (by his own admission as well as mine). To understand The Doors, one has to understand more than Jim Morrison - as if that alone were easily possible! The other 3 Doors are in many ways excellent examples in their time with the band of typically middle class American boys with a shared vision that stretched beyond the football field and fucking the cheerleaders behind the water coolers.