One Door Closes

Jim Morrison and Our Introductions to Ourselves

Jim Morrison?  Really?  Yes, really.  You mean the guy who wrote, “There’s a killer on the road/ His face is squirming like a toad”?  Yes, that one. Is everybody in?  The ceremony is about to begin.  When I was 12, I knew there was a thing called poetry, a thing called sex, and a thing called rebellion, but I had only experienced that third thing.  Of course, there already was poetry emanating from my speakers.  I already knew Bob Dylan and Paul Simon and The Beatles.  There have been singing poets since Caedmon, since Homer, Sappho, since before we even know. I first heard “The End” in Apocalypse Now, used as memorably as Wagner, and Classic Rock radio delivered the rest.  “I woke up this morning and got myself a beer.”  Cool.  I remember being with Patrick, my best friend at age 12, and we hung out with his ultra-cool older sister who had a boyfriend named Jay Lavender who sang in a band called The Living Daylights.  We were at a party in his loft, and he had a copy of An American Prayer, a recording of Morrison reading poetry, accompanied with music recorded by The Doors after he died.

Do you know the warm progress under the stars?
Do you know we exist?
Have you forgotten the keys to the kingdom
Have you been borne yet and are you alive?

I didn’t know it yet, but this sounded like Walt Whitman, and Whitman would have rocked if he could have.  Patrick and I lied down half awake like we did with Pink Floyd albums, feeling like we were just being born.  I had never been confronted like this.  Jim Morrison was the bad older brother you never had.  There was poesy, there was darkness, there was a death wish.  Adulthood was a plank.  We have this one chance to really get it while we are here, and it’s going to keep getting faster.  The last time I ever talked to Patrick was when he called to inform me that Jay Lavender had OD’d.

This led me to reading, really devouring, Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman’s No One Here Gets Out Alive, and I took it with me everywhere.  I snuck it into my 7th Grade classes.  During Texas History, while everyone else was (maybe) learning about Sam Houston and Stephen F. Austin, I was learning about how this chubby, nerdy kid from Florida, went to UCLA film school, dropped acid, lost weight, and wrote poems that turned into rock and roll, with his fellow film school dropout Ray Manzarek.  It gave me hope that I could grow up to have the kind of sex I was seeing in movies.

They got signed to Elektra Records, sold millions, all while not hiring a bass player.  Did they forget to hire a bass player?  Was the acid that good?  The 60s were weird.  What I didn’t realize was that I was reading the gold standard of rock biography.  Did Jim really need Pamela to hang him out a window just so he could get an erection?  And did we then have to accept the Oliver Stone version when Pamela was Meg Ryan as a perkiest smack addict ever?  The book sales were through the roof, even more so after it was used as the basis for Oliver Stone’s The Doors.  Tapping into the rock audience had found the perfect bad boy protagonist.  You couldn’t make this stuff up, even if Robby Krieger, guitarist and writer of “Light My Fire,” accused the authors and then Stone of doing exactly that.  Did Jim really trap Pamela in a closet while she was shooting up and then set the place on fire? The more extravagant the story, the more it would suck in a 12 year old like me, and anytime someone wanted to write a rock biography, their publisher really wanted another one of these. Jim Morrison exposed himself onstage in 1969, and fled to Paris awaiting trial and probably OD’d, though we’ll never know for sure.  The book devoted much space to the idea that Morrison didn’t really die but just went underground, as one does in Paris, and this is before such debunking went way mainstream.  He was buried, allegedly, in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris’s 20th arrondissement, alongside Proust and Verlaine and Oscar Wilde.  After the Oliver Stone film came out, his headstone was stolen, and the grave was off the official map.  I went to the cemetery and followed the signs, “Ou est Jim?” before I found something that looked like it belonged in Burning Man, and that felt about right.

12 would turn into 13 and keep going.  No One Here Gets Out Alive introduced me to William Blake, and Blake would eventually introduce me to everyone else.  I got deeper into Dylan, then Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell and the more greatness I encountered, the more I thought of The Doors as something of an embarrassment.  Yet they really were Doors.  They opened me to so much of the good stuff, including the ones whose lives couldn’t have been less rock star.  Wallace Stevens was a Republican Vice President of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, a man you would not want to see in leather pants, the squarest person with poetry so visionary and transporting, it became clear it was about the language, not the life.  You could go deep, then deeper, and it could resonate as far as the muses could take you. Jim Morrison sang that “people are strange when you’re a stranger.” Wallace Stevens came before but still resonates later.

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

Was Jim Morrison a poet?  If being a rock star is a kind of poetry, then he was a perfectly sculpted Icarus.  Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen didn’t wear leather pants or get arrested for disorderly conduct—twice. Getting older meant going deeper into better poetry, and yet so much of it brought me back when I knew less but felt endlessly.  I can’t deny what pierced my heart at 12.   And those obsessive hours of reading Morrison’s biography eventually led me to writing a biography of his onetime Laurel Canyon neighbor Joni Mitchell, who had a brutal experience with Doors producer Paul Rothschild.  David Crosby recently went on Twitter to tell everyone that The Doors sucked.  I know, David Crosby.  I’m listening to The Doors now, and I hear everything that’s wrong with them, though there are some songs that land perfectly, probably the ones that rock and don’t try too hard.  I’m not going to tell young people to not be young, and I’m not going to tell older people that their youthful passions didn’t matter. 

People who are still into The Doors wonder what life would be like if Jim was still here, if the conspiracy theories of his biographers were true.  Well, you don’t have to wonder anymore.

Jim got himself disappeared in 1971.  It’s been over 50 years and he’s still here.  As the 70s unfolded, he wasn’t really sold on Patti Smith. He was more of a Bette Midler guy, especially in Beaches.  He thought McCartney peaked with “Wonderful Christmastime.”  Reagan was misunderstood, and he remembered when he was governor, but really, when those personal diaries came out—that guy was like Ralph Waldo Emerson.  Why couldn’t people see that?  He looked at Hall & Oates with envy. Why didn’t I think of that? he thought.  Kurt Cobain’s suicide meant nothing to him.  He was more if a Soundgarden guy.  He was personally shaken by the Milli Vanilli scandal because he wrote those songs.  He saw Titanic over and over again.  He couldn’t believe dialogue could be that good, and thought its Byronic hero was Billy Zane.    By 2000, he voted for Ralph Nader from his secret property on Palm Beach, because he thought, hey, what’s the difference?  He loved Oasis, before they went commercial.  He learned that Joan Didion wrote about him from that Netflix documentary, and it made him really want to read her stuff one day.  The value of the Doors catalogue continued to proliferate.  Around $115 Million for six albums.  And no getting busted, hanging outside windows or being hassled on the Sullivan show?  That show you never saw on that streaming service that time?  Him. That other show you didn’t see, you may recall?  Him, too.   Charlie Sheen, the fun years—you’re welcome, America.  Jim Morrison has been everywhere.  He contains multitudes.  He cut carbs a long time ago and really started working on his practice.  He’ll be 80 soon and really thinking about what the hell it all means.  He has transferred his funds to Crypto.  He just started a Substack, and if you follow it, his numbers will be brutal.  He will dominate.  He will kill.  That Lizard King was just here and is making it rain, bitches.  This is the strangest life he never lived.

For the music is your special friend
Dance on fire as it intends
Music is your only friend
Until the end