Was Jim Morrison a real poet?
When You’re Strange.
There are two kinds of people in this world: those who think the Doors are a hokey caricature of male rock stardom and those who think they’re, you know, shamans. The Doors, who took their name from a line in William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infiniteâ€), combined jazz chord changes and Latin rhythms with flamenco, surf, raga, blues, and psychedelia, all in one ’60s rock band, often in one song: “Light My Fire,†“The End,†“Roadhouse Blues,†and “People Are Strange,†just to name a few. The power of the Doors’ music is that it is so unabashedly arty that it begs to be made fun of, especially by older people or those who went through Doors periods themselves and are now into Steely Dan or Animal Collective or some other less embarrassing musical endeavor.
And why embarrassing? Because the Doors reflect a conflict many of us have with artists we think we have outgrown. For those with a youthful bent, sustained naïveté, or a poetical inclination, the combination of the Doors’ music and Jim Morrison’s lyrics can be transformative. In Just Kids, Patti Smith’s memoir depicting her early days in New York and friendship with artist Robert Mapplethorpe, the singer neatly encapsulates how she, and many others, “felt both kinship and contempt for [Morrison]†while watching him perform for the first time. “I observed his every move in a state of cold hyperawareness. I remember this feeling much more clearly than the concert. I felt, watching Jim Morrison, that I could do that.â€
Read the entire article by D. Nester here.
This article is a comment instigator. I appreciate the writer’s ability to do that. I’ll bite. Patti Smith couldn’t fucking do The End, I goddamn promise you. Morrison went figuratively naked on stage. Despite saying a bunch of cunty shit, he showed big artistic flares. I hate when people go psycho over the 60s like it was the coolest shit of all time, but Morrison had the damn chops. The importance of him was that he showed that artists are jackasses, all over the damn place. If you take any form of artist seriously all the time, you’re setting yourself up to get let down, and that’s you’re own fault. He threw himself into an intense position and acted all fucking weird like real people do. That’s what I think is cool about him.