Nearly twenty-five 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. 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 **** 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.
Rolling Stone Magazine
April 4, 1991
The article here is provided strictly for
informational purposes and educational reasons. All rights reserved and are not for
monetary gain of any form.
|
