Is it July 3rd 1971? Or is it 50 years to the day of Jim’s death? July 3rd 2021!
Is everybody in ? ………… Is everybody in ? ………….. The Morrison autopsy is about to begin.
Back in the day, things were different. It was still all about being cool of course, but ‘cool’ was different back then.
Music was still cool … drugs and drink were still cool … But ‘cool’ itself was different, or seems so now to my ageing, out of touch eyes. It was more of a … white thing back then … unless your name happened to be Hendrix of course. He was so cool, that he transcended everything. But this isn’t about him.
Back then, black cool was different to white cool and race and colour was even more raw. The Vietnam war raged on spawning untold horrors, stereotypes abounded and thrived unmolested and excess, at least for the beautiful people, was mandatory.
But the coolest of them all by far, was one James Douglas Morrison … Jim.
He had it all. The brain, the talent, the look … and the death wish.
This long haired rebel son of a US navy Admiral, this, could have been, all American boy, took the music world by storm from the mid nineteen sixties until his untimely, but predictable demise on 3rd July 1971 in a bath tub in Paris.
His band (yes, it ended up, Ziggy-like, as HIS band, of course) The Doors, were not your average pretentious set of young idealistic white dreamers and peacocks. This lot actually had a collective intelligence to die for. But young James had something else besides, that his fellow band members, just lacked … Jim had sex appeal.
His moody, nihilistic, Byronesque persona played right in to exactly what every young girl wanted in a man, in a hero … in a God ! He was the James Dean for this new, angry generation who really were going to change the world for the better. Of course they were.
Those long, unkempt, raven-coloured locks which fell, chaotically onto the unprepared shoulders of this new Rock-Deity, framed a countenance which exuded defiance, menace and delicious vulnerability in equal measure, depending on what you wanted from him of course. All brought to a steaming crescendo by those eyes … those dark, seemingly wise orbs that could fix you or dismiss you as he saw fit.
And on stage, his majesty only ever grew more splendid. It was from this pedestal that he worked his Shaman-like magick in lyrical form. The domain of The Lizard King.
Or at least, it was until the grinding drudgery of the tools of his trade, began to take a toll on even his heavenly visage. The drink, the drugs, the women, all the trappings of what it was to be a rock legend, finally began to break on through to the other side of Jim.
Predictably, his increasingly bizarre, or selfish (take your pick) behaviour, gradually eroded the brotherhood of the band and 1971, marked the end for this fractious mixture of two personalities, Jim’s … and the rest of the band.
The double album, Weird Scenes Inside The Goldmine, is a strange, heady mix of sometimes dark, foreboding, almost experimental songs which really is a masterpiece in spite of it’s tragic, chaotic berthing.
With such offerings as Riders on the Storm (which was actually the band’s attempt to write a song something like Johnny Cash’s hit, Ghost Riders in the Sky!) Break on Through, LA Woman, People Are Strange and The End, it was always going to be a classic for the ages.
Jim baled out of this world long before its eventual release, six months after his death and some say it is their best musical offering and a portent of what could have been had he lived. But by then, Jim was more interested in his poetry than being a rock icon. After all, he’d already done that, to the max.
His body was found by his long time girlfriend Pamela Courson, who would follow him to the grave less than three years later. His burial was hasty, leading to rumours of a faked death, but his legacy was already written.
This ultimate rider on the storm, of his own making, had broken on through to the other side, jumped from this ship of fools and found out that when the music’s over, it really was the end.
I remember meeting a girl in a record store a few years after his death, who drunkenly told me that one day, she would visit his grave and dig him up because … “he must still have one good fuck left in him”
No love …………… Jim really couldn’t give a fuck … then or now.
Mark Vine
Discussing Jim Morrison and The Doors:
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