Jim Morrison -- a rock god or pretentious hack?

ForrestGump

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Mon Mar-28-05 02:54 AM
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Jim Morrison -- a rock god or pretentious hack?

Finally saw Oliver Stone's The Doors. About time. And, yeah, Val Kilmer -- that dude's high on my list of favorite actors -- totally nailed the Jim Morrison imitation.

Seems to me that the Doors don't get much respect on DU. Maybe it's symptomatic of a broader sentiment out there, but I'd previously been under the (possibly erroneous) impression that their place in rock history was unassailable and that they were okay with the hip and cool crowd. Maybe times have just changed. Maybe what seemed deep and like-wow-man back in the late '60s and '70s just now seems dated and empty of lasting truth. Whatever, it seems like many dismiss the Doors -- well, Jim Morrison, at least -- as some kind of a poseur act.

There's no question in my mind that some of the Doors stuff and Jim's poetry probably earns the 'pretentious' label to some degree, especially in light of the back-to-basics rock 'n' roll revival that began in 1968 (probably a reaction to Sergeant Pepper and the like, though the Beatles began to themselves spearhead the return to basic rock right after releasing their psychedelic masterwork). It's hardly light material, most of it -- there's no better use of the Doors' darker side than in Apocalypse Now.

I've always liked the hits, for sure. From "Light My Fire"and the Elvis-like "Touch Me" to "LA Woman" and more. In the last while I've heard a lot more of their material and I've enjoyed it all, studio or live.

The dude was a showman, too. He looked almost too good, on top of it all. For me, of course, those two facts evoke the memory of Elvis and the tragedy is that both figures ended up in essentially the same place, far too early -- even earlier for Jim than for Elvis, though Jim probably burned out faster and may have been destined to have a shorter spell in the big limelight, anyway.

Of course, the Elvis connection goes further than that: Jim (like his similarly doomed contemporaries, Jimi and Janis) loved Elvis and was even thrown out of his college dorm for playing his Elvis records too loud. He also pretty much demanded that Jerry Hopkins, who produced a biography of Jim, write a similar tome about Elvis, the result (published in 1971, the year of Jim's death) being the first fully-realized major biography of Elvis. In return, Elvis is alleged by one of his relatives to have surprised them by calling Jim Morrison the "poet laureate of his generation," a statement even more surprising for Elvis' being so out of touch with most rock happenings by the late '60s and so against the drug culture and its images in pop culture.

Significantly overweight and with his system and mind ravaged by drugs and alcohol, dying alone in the bathroom was a sad way for that 27 (!)-year-old man to go. It's hard to believe he was so young, and younger still when the Doors released their first album. I don't buy that his lyrics were overblown pablum...I'm hardly a poetry expert, but the lyrics to some of his songs really do seem to indicate that this young man had the proverbial 'old soul.'

I think that Jim Morrison was a pretty incredible dude. He may not have been the best, the brightest, or the most influential, but he was a good singer (better than most might credit), an interesting lyricist, and a phenomenal live performer who threw it all away far too soon after ascending to the upper rungs of his field. I mean, he barely got to the top in any meaningful way before he began a precipitous freefall that left him dead around a mere three years later. The self-destructive version of Buddy Holly, in terms of career length.

I don't know if he had many more years of that kind of intensity left in him, but it's interesting to speculate what might have been had he cleaned himself up and returned to the stage and the studio. As was true for too many who self-destructed and died alone, far from the adulation that was theirs -- Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Elvis, and others -- we'll never know what might have been thirty or so years on.

Drugs suck.