Brad Childers
Nearly thirty-three years ago, in
the middle of a season in which rock & roll was seeking to define itself as
the binding force of a new youth community, the Doors became the house band for
an American apocalypse that wasn't even yet upon us. Indeed, the Los Angeles-
based quartet's stunning and rousing debut LP, "The Doors" flew in
the face of rock's emerging positivist ethos and in effect helped form the
basis for a schism that still persists in popular music. The members Bobby,
Ray, John, and Jim were about to embark on a journey that would reflect
America’s musical history for years to come. While groups like The Beatles or
the many bands emerging from the Bay Area were earnestly touting a fusion of
music, drugs and idealism that they hoped would reform and redeem a troubled
age, the Doors had fashioned an album that looked at prospects of hedonism and
violence, of revolt and chaos, and embraced those prospects unflinchingly.
Clearly, the Doors, and in particular the group's thin, darkly handsome lead
singer, Jim Morrison, understood a truth about their age that many other pop
artists did not: namely, that these were dangerous times, and dangerous not
only because youth culture was under fire for breaking away from established conventions
and aspirations. On some level, Morrison realized that the danger was also
internal- that the "love generation" was hardly without its own dark
impulses. In fact, Morrison seemed to understand that any generation so intent
on giving itself permission to go as far as it could was also giving itself a
license for destruction, and he seemed to gain both delight and affirmation
from that understanding.
Consequently, in those moments in the Doors' experimental, Oedipal miniopera
"The End", when Morrison sang about wanting to kill his father and
fuck his mother, he managed to take a somewhat silly notion of outrage and make
it sound convincing, even somehow justified.
Now, a generation later- at a time when, at home, anti-drug and anti- obscenity
sentiment has reached a fever pitch and when, abroad, the Doors' music is once
again among the favored choices of young Americans fighting in a war- Jim
Morrison seems more heroic to many pop fans then ever before. A film like
Oliver Stone's "The Doors" can even make it seem that the band, in a
dark way, has won its argument with cultural history. But back in the late
1960s, it seemed rather different. To many observers, it appeared that the
group had pretty much shot its vision on it's first album. By the Doors' second
LP, "Strange Days", the music had lost much of its edginess- the
sense of rapacity, of persistent momentum, that had made the previous album
seem so undeniable- and in contrast to the atmosphere of aggression and dread
that Morrison's earlier lyrics had made palpable, the new songs tended too
often to melodrama (Strange Days), or to flat-out pretension (Horse Latitudes).
It was as if a musical vision that only a few months earlier had seemed
shockingly original and urgent had turned merely morbid, even parodic.
In addition, Morrison himself was already deeply immersed in the pattern of
drug and alcohol abuse and public misbehavior that would eventually prove so
ruinous to him, his band, his friends and his family. Some of this behavior, of
course, was simply expected of the new breed of rock hero: In the context of
the late 1960s and it's generational schisms, pop stars often made a point of
flaunting their drug use or of flouting mainstream or authoritarian morality.
Sometimes this impudence was merely showy or naive, though on certain other
occasions- such as the December 1967 incident in which Morrison was arrested
after publicly castigating police officers for their backstage brutality at a
new Haven concert- these gestures of defiance helped embolden the rock
audience's emerging political sensibility. More often than not Morrison's
unruliness wasn't so much a display of counter-cultural bravado as it was a
sign of the singer's own raging hubris and out-of-control dissipation.
In other words, something far darker than artistic or political ambition fueled
Jim Morrison's appetite for disruption, and in March 1969, at an infamous
concert in Miami, this sad truth came across with disastrous results. The Doors
had been scheduled to perform at 10:00 p.m. but had been delayed for nearly an
hour due to a dispute with the show's promoters. By the time the group arrived
onstage, Morrison was already inebriated, and he continued to hold up the
performance while he solicited the audience for more to drink. A quarter-hour
later, after the music had started, Morrison halted songs midway and wandered
about the stage, berating the audience to commit revolution and to love him. At
one point, he pulled on the front of his weather-worn leather pants and
threatened to produce his penis for the crowd's perusal. Oddly enough, though
more than twenty years have passed, and more than 10,000 people, including band
members and police officers onstage, witnessed Morrison's performance, it has
never been clearly determined whether Morrison actually succeeded in exposing
himself that night. Finally, toward the end of the show, Morrison hounded
audience members into swarming onstage with him, and the concert ended in an
easy version of the chaos that the singer had long professed to aspire to.
At the time, the event seemed more embarrassing than outrageous, but within
days the Miami Herald and some politically minded city and legal officials had
inflated the pitiable debacle into a serious affront to Miami and the nation's
moral welfare; in addition, Morrison himself was sized up as the foul
embodiment of youth's supreme indecency. The Doors nationwide concert schedule
ground to an immediate halt, and in effect the band's touring days were
finished. Interestingly, amid all the hoopla that would follow- the public
debate, the shameful trial for obscenity- almost nobody saw Morrison's gesture
for what it truly was: the act of a man who had lost faith in his art and his
relation to the world around him. On that fateful evening in Miami, Jim
Morrison no longer knew what his audience wanted from him, or what he wanted
from himself for that matter, and so he offered his most obvious totem of love
and pride, as if it were the true source of his worth. The Doors lead singer,
who only two years before had been one of rock's smartest, scariest and sexiest
heroes, was now a heart-rending alcoholic and clownish jerk. He needed help; he
did not merit cheap veneration, and he certainly did not deserve the horrid,
moralistic brand of jail-house punishment that the state of Florida hoped to
impose on him.
Of course, Morrison never received, or at least never accepted the help that
might have saved him. By 1970 the Doors were a show- business enterprise with
contracts and debts, and these obligations had been severely deepened by
Morrison's Miami antics. As a result, the band would produce five albums over
the next two years, including two of the group's most satisfying studio
efforts, "Morrison Hotel" and "L.A. Woman", surprisingly
authoritative, blues-steeped works that showed Morrison settling into a new,
lusty and dark-humored vocal style and lyrical sensibility. But if Morrison had
finally grown comfortable with the idea of rock & roll for it's own sake,
he also realized that he no longer had much of consequence to say in that
medium.
In March 1971, Morrison took a leave of absence from the Doors, and with his
common-law wife, Pamela Courson, moved to Paris, ostensibly to distance himself
from the physical and spiritual rigors of rock & roll and to regenerate his
vocation as a modern poet. Perhaps in time he might have come to a
compassionate understanding of what he and his generation had experienced in
the last few years, as the idealism of the 1960s had finally given way to a
deflating sense of fear and futility. Certainly there were glimmers in
Morrison's last few interviews that he had begun to acquire some valuable
insight about the reasons for and sources of his, and his culture's, bouts of
excess. As it turned out, Morrison simply continued to drink in a desolating
way, and according to some witnesses, he sometimes lapsed into depression over
his inability to reinvoke his poetic muse, taking instead to writing suicide
notes.
Finally, at five in the morning on July 4th, 1971, Pamela Courson found
Morrison slumped in the bathtub of their Paris flat, a sweet, still grin on his
face. At first, Courson thought he was playing a game with her. On this dark
morning, though, Morrison was playing no game. His skin was cold to his wife's
touch. Jim Morrison had died of heart failure at the age of twenty-seven,
smiling into the face of a slow- coming abyss that, long before, he had decided
was the most beautiful and comforting certainty of his life.
Sources:
The Doors Homepage. “ The Doors:
Biography”
logged
on may 3rd, 2003 @ 11:38 am
Gilmore,
Mikal. “The Legacy of the Doors” Rolling Stone Magazine.
April,
1st 1991. pp 59-60