“I’ll open doors to strange and exotic countries.” That’s the first line in Ray Manzarek’s 1965 student film Induction, and one of several moments from his UCLA movies that retrospectively became omens and portents of Ray’s near future—his film school classmate Jim Morrison turns up in Induction, too. Though Induction and 1964’s Evergreen predate the Doors, both of Manzarek’s extant student films contain such seemingly premonitory details. (In Evergreen, it’s footage of the Whisky a Go Go and the Venice Beach apartment where Ray and Jim lived during the band’s early years.)

Both movies feature Dorothy Fujikawa, who was married to Manzarek from 1967 until the end of his life, and who was instrumental in the formation of the Doors. “There would be no Doors if it wasn’t for Dorothy Fujikawa,” Manzarek said. “She was the one who supported Jim and me as we put the band together.” Fujikawa’s character in Evergreen is reading Brecht, whose “Alabama Song” Morrison sang on the first Doors album. Her co-star, Hank Olguin (stage name Henry Crismonde), let the Doors use his house for their first rehearsal. (“Hank was the only guy I knew who had a piano,” Manzarek writes.)
 

 
Compared to Ray’s 1985 video for “L.A. Woman”—not his greatest achievement—these films are, as they say, actually pretty good. Both were released as bonus features on the Doors’ Collection DVD (originally a laserdisc), from which Morrison’s student films are conspicuously absent. In his memoir Light My Fire: My Life with the Doors, Manzarek explains at some length why his UCLA films survived but the Lizard King’s did not:

The best of all the student films were screened twice a year for the public at what was called the “Royce Hall Screenings.” The faculty would select a dozen or so films to be composite-printed and projected up onto the big screen of Royce Hall. Dignitaries were invited. Critics were invited. And the carved, Spanish-style doors were flung open to the public as if to say, “See, we’re not insane here. We can do good work.” And, oh, how the faculty would strut. Because Royce Hall was the prestigious auditorium on the entire west side of Los Angeles. Symphonies were performed there, great jazz artists and intense folksingers of the time performed there. I saw the Modern Jazz Quartet play there. The great Odetta sang there. The Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra performed there. I walked in one afternoon on a rehearsal of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and it was absolutely overwhelming, standing at the foot of the stage—Zubin Mehta was the conductor—and I’m watching the L.A. Philharmonic power their way through the Rite of Spring... in Royce Hall. Thrilling.

Well, lo and behold, a few months later a Ray Manzarek student film, Induction (and the year before that Evergreen), was to be shown at the Royce Hall Screening. It was certainly an honor for me. I was very pleased with those films. They worked. And I was very proud of my cameramen, John DeBella and Christopher (Kit) Gray, and my actors, Dorothy Fujikawa, Hank Olguin, and Kathy Zeller.

Jim’s movie, unfortunately, didn’t make it into Royce Hall. He was panned by the teachers and panned by many of the students. What a bunch of dolts! They just didn’t get it. However, they did appear to take great delight in raking Jim over the coals. Jim always rubbed a lot of them the wrong way—those people were called squares—hell, he’s still doing that. And they’re still squares.

“Nonlinear, Mr. Morrison.” “Doesn’t make any sense.” “You’ve violated basic rules of screen direction on the shot with the darts, Morrison.” “Male chauvinist! Why’s the girl in her underwear?” “What are you, a stoner or something?” “Fascist!” “This isn’t the way we make movies in America, Morrison. This is like a Communist would think.”

So his film didn’t make it into the screenings…nor did it make it through the projector. He had trouble making splices. Jim’s forte was not splicing two pieces of film together with the tiny little tape and the tiny little 16mm splicer you had to use. But it was an extremely poetic movie.

It doesn’t exist anymore. It was tossed out with three hundred or so other student movies at the end of the semester. The only films that were saved were the ones that had the negative cut and a composite made for the big show in Royce. The other films were like term papers—seen once and tossed. Just too many to save. So Jim’s is gone. Into the dumpster and into the ether.

Keep reading after the jump…

 
On March 1, 1969, Jim Morrison allegedly exposed his… er… lizard king to a shocked audience at the Dinner Key Auditorium that included, in the words of feverish Miami Herald reporter Larry Mahoney: “hundreds of unescorted junior and senior high school girls” for whom “…Morrison appeared to masturbate in full view of the audience, screamed obscenities, and exposed himself.”

It’s one of the most legendary and Dionysian performances in all of rock and roll history; but was the supposed “main event” just a legend or did “it” really happen? Did a drunken Jim Morrison, inspired by the anarchist thespians of the Living Theatre, really whip it out onstage in Miami and simulate fellatio on guitarist Robby Krieger or is this all just an urban myth?

It seems to be a little of both, perhaps leaning more to the myth side. Mr. Mojo Risin was obviously up to no good that night, and if given enough rope Morrison might well have pulled his plonker out. But did he actually do it or did he merely pretend like he had?

On March 5, the Dade County sheriff’s office issued a warrant for Morrison’s arrest for “lewd and lascivious behavior in public by exposing his private parts and by simulating masturbation and oral copulation” and other misdemeanors including counts of public profanity and public drunkenness. Morrison turned himself in to the FBI in Los Angeles on April 4, 1969 and vehemently denied the allegations. He was arrested on September 20th in Coconut Grove and on November 9, 1969 he entered a not guilty plea in Miami.

The trial began on August 12, 1970. Morrison rejected a proposed plea bargain that the Doors would play a charity benefit concert in Miami, and although over 500 photographs were admitted into evidence—not a single one of them showing Morrison rocking out with his cock out—five weeks later, on September 20, 1970, the jury found Jim Morrison guilty on the misdemeanor charges of indecent exposure and profanity. He was found not guilty on the felony charge and the misdemeanor for drunkenness.

Morrison was given the maximum fine of $500 and sentenced to six months in prison at Raiford Penitentiary including 60 days of hard labor. He was released on a $50,000 bond and a 20 date Doors concert tour was soon cancelled.
 

 
Robby Krieger has always denied that “it” ever happened. So has Ray Manzarek who told NPR’s Terry Gross in a 1998 Fresh Air interview:

“We’re in Miami. It’s hot and sweaty. It’s a swamp and it’s a yuck—a horrible kind of place, a seaplane hangar—and 14,000 people are packed in there, and they’re sweaty, And Jim has seen The Living Theatre and he’s going to do his version of The Living Theatre. He’s going to show these Florida people what psychedelic West Coast shamanism and confrontation is all about.”

Morrison poured champagne over himself and took his shirt off, asking the crowd if they wanted more.

“They hallucinated. I swear, the guy never did it. He never whipped it out. It was one of those mass hallucinations. I don’t want to say the vision of Lourdes, because only Bernadette saw that, but it was one of those religious hallucinations, except it was Dionysus bringing forth, calling forth snakes… And they started coming down on a rickety little stage, and the entire stage collapsed.”

Doors drummer John Densmore told the Hollywood Reporter in 2010:

He didn’t do it! I was there; if Jim had revealed the golden shaft, I would have known. There were hundreds of photographs taken and tons of cops and no evidence. Yeah, Jim was a drunk and a sensational, crazy guy, but he also was a great artist and I want him to be remembered for the art as well as the craziness. At the time, things were pretty political with the Vietnam War—the whole country was polarized, not unlike today—and he went to see Julian Beck and Judith Malina of The Living Theatre and was inspired because they wore minimal clothes and were going up the aisles saying, “No passports, no pieces.” It was pretty wild stuff. Jim tried to inject it in to the Miami concert, and he was inebriated, so it wasn’t so successful. Musically, it was terrible, but politically, it was intriguing. So that was his motive and then it became this sensational, “get the hippie band that represents the counter culture!”

At the time of the incident Doors’ manager Bill Siddons told Rolling Stone that it was “just another dirty Doors show. It didn’t seem to be too big a deal until the police chief took it on as his crusade”—but denied that Morrison had exposed his penis:

“I mean, no one in the group saw him do it. Morrison said he did it, but not onstage. Like he had been tucking in his shirt or something and he might have slipped a little. But offstage.”

Contradicting himself in the very same Rolling Stone article, Siddons also says that as he came offstage Morrison personally told him:

“Uh-oh—I think I exposed myself.”

Continues after the jump…

 
Pamela Des Barres was the original rock and roll groupie, a founding member of the GTOs (which, as Stanley Booth wrote, could stand for “Girls Together Outrageously or Orally or anything else starting with O”), and lover to Mick Jagger, Jimmy Page, Keith Moon, Gram Parsons, Waylon Jennings, and many others.

The woman can obviously spin a tale, what with several books to her name; her 1987 memoir I’m with the Band is essential reading for anyone interested in the sex lives of major 1960s and 1970s rock stars. (Kirkus called it “a classic account of rampant narcissism among guitar egomaniacs,” which seems about right.)

In this amusing short animated by Evan York, Des Barres tells stories of her sexual adventures as a groupie, including encountering a naked Mick Jagger (she was still a virgin at the time), coaxing Waylon Jennings into his long-haired outlaw phase, and watching as Keith Moon perpetrated an epic prank on a major hotel.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Cynthia Plaster Caster, Pamela Des Barres & others in the fascinating 1970 doc ‘Groupies’

 
1968: Harrison Ford was working as a carpenter (working on houses, building sets) when he was asked by photographer and former UCLA student Paul Ferrara if he would like help out on a documentary about The Doors. It was an opportunity the 25-year-old Ford gladly accepted—though his experience of working with the band would leave him “one step away from joining a Jesuit monastery.”
 

Harrison Ford filming The Doors at the Northern California Folk-Rock Festival.
 
Ferrara had access to The Doors through his friendship with Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek. He began filming his documentary Feast of Friends in April 1968 as single shooter/director. He then invited a colleague Babe Hill to record audio on a portable Nagra. After more filming, he decided one camera was not enough and asked around for a second unit cameraman. At a party, Ferrara met Harrison Ford, who he knew through carpentry work Ford had carried out on his house. Ferrara offered him the job of second camera/grip.
 

Ford using a clapperboard at the start of filming.
 
According to The Doors Guide, Ford had a crash course in shooting film at Sixth Annual Renaissance Pleasure Faire in Agoura, CA on May 4, 1968. John Densmore and Robby Krieger from the group were also in attendance while Harrison shot some footage.

Ford’s first gig as second unit cameraman came two weeks later at the Northern California Folk-Rock Festival in San Jose, where he filmed The Doors performing onstage. Ford can be seen operating the camera among the audience.

The following month, Ford was with band in Fresno and can be seen using a clapperboard before a take while Manzarek and co. play cards in the background.

He then filmed at the band’s concert in Bakersfield Civic Center, where he was caught in shot walking behind Jim Morrison.
 

Harrison Ford gets in shot during when filming Jim Morrison.
 
What happened next is unclear. However, when later asked about his experience working with The Doors on MTV’s The Big Picture Show in 1989, Ford said:

When it was over, I was one step away from joining a Jesuit monastery. I thought it was cool, I thought it was hip, but I couldn’t keep up with those guys. It was too much.

One can only guess at what an alleged heavy dope smoker like Harrison Ford would define as “too much”!
 

 
Continues after the jump…

Patti Smith visits Jim Morrison’s grave, 1976
 
Patti Smith released her first single, “Hey Joe” b/w “Piss Factory,” in August 1974; her second appearance on record came later that year on a song by Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek. Billboard’s review of Manzarek’s second solo album, The Whole Thing Started with Rock & Roll Now It’s out of Control, advised retailers that it was strictly for the FM crowd:

Don’t expect much AM action on this one, but watch for plenty of FM action, especially with the likes of Flo & Eddie, George Segal, Mike Fennelly, Joe Walsh and Patti Smith along for the ride. A strong set, and lots of fun as well.

 

 
The sleeve credits Smith as “Poetess” for her appearance on the Doors-ish blues number “I Wake Up Screaming.” Two minutes and seven seconds in, Smith reads Jim Morrison’s “Ensenada”—mind you, not the “Ensenada” published in The American Night, in which “Dog licks shit / Mexican girl whore sucks my prick,” but the seven-line “Ensenada” from The New Creatures which Morrison sometimes recited during Doors performances:

Ensenada
the dead seal
the dog crucifix
ghosts of the dead car sun.
Stop the car.
Rain. Night.
Feel.

The album version of “I Wake Up Screaming”:

A live performance from Roslyn, New York in 1975, minus Patti but with extra Lizard King:

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Patti Smith’s ‘Career of Evil’ with Blue Öyster Cult

 
Jim Morrison died on July 3, 1971 at age 27. The official cause of death on his death certificate was “heart failure.” No autopsy was performed.

Here are the last known photographs of the lizard king taken on June 28, 1971 during a day trip to Saint-Leu-d’Esserent. Morrison is joined by Pamela Courson, and their friend, Alain Ronay. One might assume that Morrison was fat, bearded and bloated due to drugs and alcohol abuse at this point, but he looks trim, clean-shaven and relatively healthy here for a man about to expire.

Photos by Alain Ronay.

 

 

 

 
More after the jump…
 

 
You’d think it would have been a dream pairing—two legends, both lost to us young, turning up on stage together, and by sheer stroke of fate, it was recorded. Had those two legends been Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, or hell, even Jimi Hendrix and Mama Cass, SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY. But no, it was Jimi Hendrix and the drunken clod Jim Morrison. The result was eventually dubbed “Morrison’s Lament,” an apt title if by “lament” one means “drunken, formless discharge of inane profanities.”

The story of how it went down is hazy, accounts are contradictory, and some of the people who could clarify things are dead. What’s certain is that Jimi Hendrix jammed with some folks at the Scene Club in NYC in March of 1968, and a recording—likely made by Hendrix himself—of that night has been widely bootlegged, usually under the title Woke Up this Morning and Found Myself Dead. Some bootleg liners credit Morrison with vocals and harmonica, while online sources say Lester Chambers played harmonica. Some of the drumming is credited to future Band of Gypsys drummer Buddy Miles, some to “Randy Z,” a nom de rock of the McCoys’ Randy Zehringer, who was accustomed to playing with sweet guitarists, as he’s the brother of Rick Derringer. Johnny Winter is credited as rhythm guitarist, which is not implausible, as Zehringer later served Winter as drummer on a couple of albums and the club was owned by Winter’s manager, but many sources hold that Winter not only denies having been present, he claims to never have even met Morrison. Some lore about the night holds that the second guitarist was Rick Derringer. What is certain is that Morrison was on the East Coast in advance of some Doors performances in New York later in the week, and drunkenly grabbed a mic and commenced howling. (You can hear Hendrix telling him to “use the recording mic” at about 0:30.)
 

 
The liner notes on a 1980 UK edition of the LP were written by Hendrix biographer Tony Brown (Jimi Hendrix: Concert Files, Jimi Hendrix: The Final Days), who offered no help as to who played, but DID shed some light on the provenance of the tapes.

This recording stems from 1968 in the Scene Club, owned incidentally by Steve Paul, Johnny Winter’s manager. Jimi was a frequent visitor here because he loved the atmosphere and also loved to jam and as he always had a tape machine on hand, that night was captured forever, giving an insight into Jimi’s blues side, which he always reverted to when playing without any commercial pressures.

The tapes of this jam became the property of Michael Cox, who was founder member of the Irish group Eire Apparent, a band Jimi managed and produced. Peter Shertser from Red Lightnin’ Records had been offered the tapes by Cox and as he liked what he heard, an agreement was made in December 1970. However, another record company famed for issuing country and western records had previously heard the tapes and had surreptitiously made a copy. The tapes soon hit the market as a bootleg under the name “Sky High,” action was taken and an injunction issued to the other record company, whereupon the album strangely disappeared from the market!

 

 
More hammered Jim and Jimi after the jump…

 
Last year Germany’s Leipzig Ballet performed Jim Morrison choreographed by Mario Schröder. Described as “a journey to find this man, wandering through his biography, his thoughtful poetry and his music,” the ballet does look like a trip of some kind, one that I’d like to see in full.
 

 
For the time being, one must settle for this short preview which looks like what might happen if you took Ken Russell, Hair, Chippendales and Bob Fosse, tossed them into a blender with a few peyote buttons, drank it, and then went swimming in the dancing fountains of the Bellagio Hotel.
 

 
The standard modus operandi of a work of “conspiracy theory” is fairly straightforward. The author/researcher takes some commonly accepted historical narrative, and lavishes scepticism upon it, while simultaneously maintaining an alternative understanding of what “really” happened, one that ostensibly better fits the considered facts.

While Dave McGowan’s Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon : Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & The Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream, indubitably follows this approach, its focus is utterly unique. Not to put too fine a point on it, the book is no less than the Official Classic Rock Conspiracy Theory, with individual chapters tackling the unlikely subjects of Frank Zappa, the Doors, Love, the Beach Boys, the Byrds, Gram Parsons and more, the careers of which are scrutinized for the fingerprints of the secret state.

What you make of McGowan’s criteria in and of itself (which ranges fairly widely, and at times wildly, from a “tell-tale” preoccupation with the occult to heavy military-industrial family ties), to my mind the virtue of Weird Scenes dwells in the ensuing atmosphere of incredible fairy-tale strangeness—not unlike Joan Didion’s own famous look at California in the late sixties, The White Album. On almost every page, movie-star mansions, knitted with secret passages, spontaneously combust; murders, suicides and overdoses spread through the celebrity populace; cults spring up peopled with mobsters and spies… and all the while, this timeless, intriguing music keeps on geysering away. I contacted McGowan about his bizarre book earlier this week…

Thomas McGrath: Hi Dave. Could you begin please by telling us something about your previous work?

David McGowan: My work as a political/social critic began around 1997, when I began to see signs that the political landscape in this country was about to change in rather profound ways. That was also the time that I first ventured onto the internet, which opened up a wealth of new research possibilities. I put up my first website circa 1998, and an adaptation of that became my first book, Derailing Democracy, in 2000. That first book, now out of print, was a warning to the American people that all the changes we have seen since the events of September 11, 2001 – the attacks on civil rights, privacy rights, and due process rights; the militarization of the nation’s police forces; the waging of multiple wars; the rise of surveillance technology and data mining, etc. – were already in the works and just waiting for a provocation to justify their implementation. My second book, Understanding the F-Word, was a review of twentieth-century US history that attempted to answer the question: “if this is in fact where we’re headed, then how did we get here?” Since 9-11, I’ve spent a good deal of time researching the events of that day and looked into a wide range of other topics. My third book, Programmed to Kill, was a look at the reality and mythology of what exactly a serial killer is. For the past six years, I have spent most of my time digging into the 1960s and 1970s Laurel Canyon counterculture scene, which has now become my fourth book, Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon.

Thomas McGrath:  Am I right in presuming that you take it as a given fact that power networks are essentially infected by occultism? Are these cults essentially Satanic, or what?

David McGowan: Yes, I do believe that what you refer to as power networks, otherwise known as secret societies, are occult in nature. The symbolism can be seen everywhere, if you choose not to maneuver your way through the world deaf, dumb and blind. And I believe that it has been that way for a very long time. As for them being Satanic, I suppose it depends upon how you define Satanic. I personally don’t believe the teachings of either Satanism or Christianity, which are really just opposite sides of the same coin. I don’t believe that there is a God or a devil, and I don’t believe that those on the upper rungs of the ladder on either side believe so either. These are belief systems that are used to manipulate the minds of impressionable followers. In the case of Satanism, it is, to me, a way to covertly sell a fascist mindset, which is the direction the country, and the rest of the world, is moving. Those embracing the teachings think they are rebelling against the system, but they are in reality reinforcing it. Just as the hippies did. And just as so-called Patriots and Anarchists are. I don’t believe there has been a legitimate resistance movement in this country for a very long time.

Thomas McGrath: Tell us about Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon. What is this new book’s central thesis?

David McGowan: To the extent that it has a central thesis, I would say that it is that the music and counterculture scene that sprung to life in the 1960s was not the organic, grassroots resistance movement that it is generally perceived to be, but rather a movement that was essentially manufactured and steered. And a corollary to that would be that for a scene that was supposed to be all about peace, love and understanding, there was a very dark, violent underbelly that this book attempts to expose.

Thomas McGrath: How convinced are you by it and why?

David McGowan: Very convinced. It’s been a long journey and virtually everything I have discovered – including the military/intelligence family backgrounds of so many of those on the scene, both among the musicians and among their actor counterparts; the existence of a covert military facility right in the heart of the canyon; the prior connections among many of the most prominent stars; the fact that some of the guiding lights behind both the Rand Corporation and the Project for a New American Century were hanging out there at the time, as were the future governor and lieutenant governor of California, and, by some reports, J. Edgar Hoover and various other unnamed politicos and law enforcement personnel; and the uncanny number of violent deaths connected to the scene – all tend to indicate that the 1960s counterculture was an intelligence operation.

Thomas McGrath: You propose that hippie culture was established to neutralise the anti-war movement. But I also interpreted your book as suggesting that, as far as you’re concerned, there’s also some resonance between what you term “psychedelic occultism” (the hippie counterculture) and the “elite” philosophy/theology? You think this was a second reason for its dissemination?

David McGowan: Yes, I do. Hippie culture is now viewed as synonymous with the anti-war movement, but as the book points out, that wasn’t always the case. A thriving anti-war movement existed before the first hippie emerged on the scene, along with a women’s rights movement, a black empowerment/Black Panther movement, and various other movements aimed at bringing about major changes in society. All of that was eclipsed by and subsumed by the hippies and flower children, who put a face on those movements that was offensive to mainstream America and easy to demonize. And as you mentioned, a second purpose was served as well – indoctrinating the young and impressionable into a belief system that serves the agenda of the powers that be.

Thomas McGrath: One thing your book does very convincingly, I think, is argue that many if not most of the main movers in the sixties counterculture were, not to put too fine a point on it, horrendous, cynical degenerates. However, one might argue that a predilection for drugs, alcohol, and even things like violence and child abuse, does not make you a member of a government cult. You disagree?

David McGowan:  No. I’ve known a lot of people throughout my life with a predilection for drugs and alcohol, none of whom were involved in any cults, government or otherwise. And I don’t believe that a predilection for drugs makes one a degenerate. The focus on drug use in the book is to illustrate the point that none of the scene’s movers and shakers ever suffered any legal consequences for their rampant and very open use of, and sometimes trafficking of, illicit drugs. The question posed is why, if these people were really challenging the status quo, did the state not use its law enforcement powers to silence troublemakers? I do have zero tolerance for violence towards and abuse of children, which some people in this story were guilty of. But that again doesn’t make someone a member of a cult – though it does make them seriously morally challenged.

Thomas McGrath: You say in the book that you were always a fan of sixties music and culture. Weirdly, I found that, even while reading Weird Scenes, I was almost constantly listening to the artists you were denouncing. I mean, I found albums like Pet Sounds, Forever Changes, Return of the Grievous Angel,et al sounded especially weird in the context, but I still couldn’t resist sticking them on. I was wondering if you still listen to these records yourself?

David McGowan: Yes, I do. The very first rock concert I ever attended was Three Dog Night circa 1973 – a Laurel Canyon band, though I did not know that until about five years ago. To my mind, the greatest guitarist who ever lived was Jimi Hendrix, and Janis Joplin was arguably the finest female vocalist – in terms of raw power and emotion – to ever take the stage. I don’t know that it is accurate to describe my book as “denouncing” various artists. Brian Wilson, who composed Pet Sounds, is described as the finest and most admired composer of his generation. The guys from Love, architects of Forever Changes, are presented as among the most talented musicians of the era. Frank Zappa is acknowledged as an immensely talented musician, composer and arranger. And so on. It is true that I believe that some of the most famed artists to emerge from Laurel Canyon are vastly overrated, with Jim Morrison and David Crosby quickly coming to mind. And it’s true that on some of the most loved albums that came out of the canyon, the musicians who interpreted the songs weren’t the ones on the album covers. And it’s also true that, unlike other books that have covered the Laurel Canyon scene, Weird Scenes doesn’t sugarcoat things. But the undeniable talent and artistry of many of the canyon’s luminaries is acknowledged. And the book also shines a little bit of light on some of the tragically forgotten figures from that era, like Judee Sill and David Blue, which could lead to readers rediscovering some of those artists and the talents that they had to offer.
 
Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & The Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream is available now in special pre-release hardback only from Headpress. The paperback is out next month, and should be available from all strange bookshops.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Beyond the Doors: Conspiracy theories about the deaths of Jimi, Janis and Jim

 
The Lizard King at the tender age of three.

“Killer on the road.”

A “meatier” Jim Morrison by Andrew Kent, 1969
 

“I felt like a tank, you know, I felt like a large mammal. A big beast. When I moved through the corridors, or across the lawn, I just feel like I could knock anybody out of my way, you know? I was SOLID, man! It’s terrible to be thin and wispy, because, you know, because you could get knocked over by a strong wind or something, man.”

An animated version of a 1969 interview Jim Morrison did with Howard Smith in Los Angeles. The Lizard King discusses his college diet, how he once weighed 185 lbs and proclaims oh so poetically that “fat is beautiful.”

Then he challenges Smith to arm wrestle!

Animation by Patrick Smith. This is pretty genius.

 
Via The World’s Best Ever

 
In one of her very few televised appearances, Nico performs “You Forget to Answer” on French TV’s POP2 program in 1972. The songs’s cryptic lyrics convey the despair the avant garde ice queen felt over hearing of the death of her former lover Jim Morrison and how she was unable to reach him by phone on the day he died. It would eventually appear on her 1974 album The End, which takes its title, of course, from her infamously doomy cover of the already infamously doomy Doors’ original.

Talk about low budget, it looks like they’ve got her singing in a rec room or something, here, but still, once she gets started, it’s like she blots outs everything else and pulls this remarkable, spine-tingling black musical shadow from deep within her desolate junkie soul.

In case it passed you by, last November Universal Music Group put out an expanded 2 CD edition of The End and it sounds a lot better than the old CD does (comparing the two, it sounds like the earlier “budget” disc that Island put out in 1994 wasn’t even mastered for CD). I’ve gotten massively into this album over the past few months, playing it from start to finish on headphones in the darkness (the way it was obviously meant to heard) dozens of times.

Produced and arranged by John Cale and featuring Brian Eno (doing some astonishing things on his VCS3 synthesizer) and Phil Mananzera, The End is clearly not for everybody—or even most, or even many, people when you get right down to it—but to my ears, the new deluxe set, with outtakes, OGWT performances (audio only), Peel sessions and her controversial take on “Das Lied Der Deutschen” from the June 1st, 1974 concert (If Jimi Hendrix could play “The Star Spangled Banner,” why couldn’t Nico perform the German national anthem?) makes for one of the most satisfying releases of the past 12 months.
 

 
Below, Dangerous Minds pal Danny Fields tells the “meet cute” story of how he introduced Nico and the Lizard King at The Castle in Los Angeles.
 

 
Lester Bangs wrote this defense of Jim Morrison back in 1981 for Creem Magazine. He wrote it to remind people of the indelible mark Morrison had made on rock ‘n’ roll and the reach of his influence. Hard to believe it had to be stated, but glad that Lester made the case.

Fat lot Robert Christgau knows about rock and roll. The emperor’s jimmies got the final bronzetone about two years ago when, flesh no doubt nuzzling up the McGarrigles he wrote off The Doors in an “I Remember 1967” Consumer Guide Extra, “Not getting around it - Jim Morrison sounds like an asshole.”

One thing’s sure: Patti Smith wasn’t whispering dictation in Big Bob’s ear when that particular thunderbolt clattered down from on high. Whatever else you might say about her, Patti Smith’s always paid downright somber homage where due to all our sweet boppin’ daddies. Jimbo, Hendrix, Arthur Lee – wherever a stiff drops, there’s Pats hawking memento mori samplers. As well she should, because without Jim she might well have ended up spouting her rocksy poesy in quatrains redolent of Leonard Cohen burrowing his doddering peepnose ‘neath schoolgirls skirts. Which of course wouldn’t have birthed any kind of phoenix.

Think about it. Without Jim Morrison no Patti, but what’s more or less no Iggy perhaps no Bryan Ferry in his least petit-bonbonned moments. Without Iggy, of course, no punk rock renaissance at all, which means obviously that Jim was the real father of all that noise, because if you wanted to look at it as cynically as Ig deserves after The Idiot you could even say that all his whole career amounted to was one frenetic attempt to prove he was as mucho macho as the Lizard King. When, as we all know, Jim was such a complete Man he could even brag about his impotence!

Just ask Dotson Rader if you believe anything he says anymore, or better yet check out Jim’s new spoken poetry with Manzarek overdubs album, An American Prayer, the best recitative sluice of American literature on LP since Call Me Burroughs, and hell, even Burroughs never had the sheer nerve to lead with “All join now and lament the death of my cock.” In a way Jim was really the end of the Masculine Mystique as celebrated American culture up to and through rock ‘n’ roll, because unlike clowns like John Kay or indeed any of his progeny, he was a maters of the sly inflectional turn, so that his every utterance no matter how repetitious rolled out oozing irony and sanity.

Who further to say that he finally showed the fans his weenie in Florida he was not oh-so bemusedly letting them in on the cosmodemonic comedy the whole thing boiled down to, the understanding of which he’d been considerate enough to spare them up to then because he respected virgins as much as the next good Irish Catholic boy? Who’s to say the “bubble gum” / “parody” in the third and fourth Doors albums, so dismaying to early believers, was not entirely intentional, premeditated, one juncture in a vast strategy of liberation? A strategy scripted from day one to ultimately reveal that not only did machismo equal bozo in drag, but furthermore that all rock stars were nothing more than huge oafus cartoons ( more New Wave foreshadowing!), that in fact these games of both “Poet” and “Shaman” were just two more gushers of American snakeoil. He knew! And now, eons later, so do we.

This album proves what the emergence of Patti Smith had given us reason to hope: that beatnick poetry is not dead. Jim’s whiskey breathed wordslinging varooms on, not only in Patti Smith, but in Richard Hell and maybe even Bruce Springsteen if he’d ever get down with the greasemonkies he talks about. Fuck the James Taylors, not to mention the Warren Zevons, who may wave brave handguns but are pure pseudo Randy Newman mannerism. Jim’s violence is cool school: “Hey, listen, man I really got a problem. When I was out on the desert, ya know, I don’t know how to tell you, but, ah, I killed somebody. No…it’s no big deal, ya know. I don’t think anybody will find out about it, but, ah…Let your children play… this guy gave me a a ride, ah ah, If you give this man a ride…started giving me a lot of trouble, sweet family will die, and I just couldn’t take it, ya know? Killer on the road And I wasted him, Yeah.”

I’d like to see Charles Bukowski beat that – “A .45 To Pay The Rent,” indeed! Why even bother playing the fucking rent, when Jim understands the single kernel of no mind koan-truth that eluded both philosophers and poets (not to mention P. Smith) over the centuries: that death is about as serious as anything else we diddle our imaginations with. Or at least that our attempts to rationalize it are beautifully, lovingly funny. Anybody who thinks this stuff just dope-noggined gibberish oughta recheck Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues and “Old Angel Midnight” of the extra opiom-ated latter pages of Lautreamont’s Maidoror. Or Patti’s Babel, for that matter. All those benighted verbiage-vectors went on at ridiculous length about the tragic communication of sex and death: Jim was hip to the comedy implicit in romantic obsessor: “I pressed her thigh and death smiled. Death, old friend. Death and my cock are the word…Hey man, you want girls, pills, grass? C’mon…I show you a good time…”

Sociology? “He’s rich, got a big car.” God-stuff? “We could plan a murder or start a religion. Guru’s questions answered? “Will you die for me? Eat me.” Allen Ginsberg hasn’t written anything this good in 20 years almost. The Beats meant to bring poetry back to the street’s and the guttermind of the people at large, and they succeeded: they gave birth to Jim Morrison, a giant resplendent in the conviction that stardom my guarantee Chivas Regal till you drown, but to clown is divine and ultimately sexy.

End.

 
In 1964, Jim Morrison made the short film First Love as part of his UCLA Film course. This version has been re-cut to The Doors track “The Spy” by Nuno Monteiro, which fits rather well.
 

 
Bonus - alternative version of Morrison’s film after the jump…
 

Morrison in Paris two months before his death.

Jim Morrison died 41 years ago. today. Here’s a fine documentary on The Doors to commemorate this sad day in rock history.

People fear death even more than pain. It’s strange that they fear death. Life hurts a lot more than death. At the point of death, the pain is over. Yeah, I guess it is a friend.” Jim Morrison

Tom DiCillo’s When You’re Strange narrated by Johnny Depp.