The Doors: An Obsession Revisited
Image credit: Joe Daly
My Doors obsession took hold somewhere around the age of twelve or thirteen, when my neighbor loaned me a copy of No One Here Gets Out Alive. It was my first rock biography and therefore my first view into how the sausage gets made in the music industry, not to mention my first exposure to the libertine delights available to a bona fide rock god in the 60s and 70s. For a young kid in Massachusetts, Southern California was as exotic a proposition as the Alps or Siberia. It wasn’t a place I saw myself even visiting, let alone inhabiting.
Reading about the Sunset Strip and the clubs on that drag ignited my imagination with vibrant, sun-drenched images of a nonstop rock and roll bacchanal. I’d never seen a live show at that time, let alone been to a rock club. So when the authors wrote so reverentially about the scene at the Whisky A Go Go, it felt like the pinnacle of rock stardom. They wrote as if everybody understood not only what it was but what it represented — a place where like-minded, peace-loving outlaws gathered to take drugs and watch live music in blissful communion, while guys like Jim Morrison and the Doors blasted their trippy blend of blues, rock and psychedelia.
My mind wasn’t oriented towards critical analysis at age thirteen; I took the “official” account of Morrison’s life at face value and when authors Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugarman wrote about the singer in godlike prose, imbuing his most casual behavior with radiant significance, I bought fully into it. As Morrison descended into alcoholism and the people around him struggled to right his ship, it felt tragically cool, as if that’s what rock stars do - they push themselves to the emotional brink so they can smash through whatever societal barriers surround them. Freedom was the ability to evade or to ignore whatever consequences might arise from one’s actions.
His relationships with women mystified me. It was the bawdy antithesis of the boy-meets-girl paradigms being ladled out in mainstream movies. A dude just running around and having sex whenever he wanted to bordered on the fictional for a young, straightlaced kid drenched in Catholic dogma. I was still years away from dating. The book talks about his partner Pamela Courson largely in terms of a supporting actress, which she was in the context of his story but she had her own story that remained largely ignored in that book. It was only in later years that I realized what a disservice the authors did to her by failing to examine her life and experiences independently of Morrison.
Guitarist Robby Krieger at one point offers to teach Jim guitar but he declines. That rocked my world. I would have killed for a guitar lesson from anyone at that age. Hell, I would have killed just to hold a guitar and pluck the strings — I’d never so much as touched a guitar. To me, it was like somebody offering to give you the secret of life and you saying, “Nah, I’m cool.” It planted the idea in my head that Morrison didn’t even like music — a suspicion I hold to this day. Morrison wanted to be a poet. Though he very clearly enjoyed his sex and drugs, I don’t think they offered him the validation that he wanted and perhaps that’s what those around him failed to understand. Not the band - they obviously knew him as deeply as anybody - but the fans, management, producers, etc. They all seemed to be desperately trying to coax music from him — the kind of music that the band had written for their self-titled debut. The kind of music that was blowing up the charts at the time and the kind of music that the band were very capable of making. And yet, Jim wanted to write and read poetry and be celebrated for his druggy synthesis of philosophy and poetry, not for an ability to write catchy choruses for noisy, boozed-up rock audiences.
In hindsight, his poetry is horrible. Dreary, self-important ramblings by a precocious young man who stopped maturing sometime in his teens. Because that’s what happens with alcoholics and drug addicts — the substances arrest one’s emotional development in a way that doesn’t happen to normal people. It’s one of the first things one realizes in recovery — they are emotionally stunted. Their recovery begins at the emotional age when things first got out of hand. Jim Morrison died at age twenty-seven but emotionally, it’s hard to see him as more than sixteen. A reluctant rock god at best, resistant to the idea that as a singer in a rock band, he should want to write songs and sing for the people. But as time wore on and as life wore him down, it’s clear that being a singer in a rock band was the last thing that Jim Morrison wanted for himself. And it was in this gap between who he wanted to be and who the world wanted him to be that he languished and died, broken, tortured and unfulfilled.
Still, he inspired a generation because he embodied a purity of spirit; he lived his life with an intoxicating curiosity and intellectual freedom that few people manage to cultivate. He sat down at life’s buffet and dug in with real vigor, not just the spoils of rock decadence but with movies and books and conversations and art and all of the other things that fired his creative processes. In the end, he ended up way over his head. In truth, he was way over his head halfway through his stint in the Doors. But he pressed on, as did his bandmates and others and they made a noble run in the flailing final stages of their meteoric trajectory. His father was the one who chose the inscription on Jim’s grave at Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris: kata ton daimona eautou, which roughly means, “[He lived] True to his own spirit”