http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_1572022,0035.htm

The Lizard King, without the poetry

Indrajit Hazra

New Delhi, December 13, 2005
 

I am interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos, especially activity that seems to have no other meaning.” Well, that’s the good ole Lizard King talking, words that can’t help but appeal to you until, when you’re roughly 20 or 30, depending on your mental rate of growth, you realise that at his best Jim Morrison was one orderly chronicler of disorder. Listen to that overplayed-to-the-point-of-double-fatigue-and-back riff of Roadhouse Blues. That is not a slippery, jazz-like creature that is thrashing around in all directions. It’s one tight, precision weapon of celebrating the way of the highway. The same tightness is evident in all the early Doors classics, whether it be Morrison’s cover of Howlin’ Wolf's Backdoor Man, or the epical Light My Fire — where the warbling looseness comes about thanks to Ray Manzarek’s liquid keyboards — or the intricately playful riff of Love Me Two Times. Even Morrison’s peppy hiccupping that accompanies the keyboard buzz-drenched Hello, I Love You, is classic rock’n’roll — with a twist. And that twist had a name: James Douglas Morrison.

There were blues bands when the Doors were formed in 1965. But there was nothing — then or now — that quite matched the band’s bubbling cauldron sound of blues, rock and jazz. Morrison, the singer-musician, is at his peak in three albums really: the 1967 album Strange Days, (with numbers like Backdoor Man, Alabama Song and Light My Fire); the 1970 Morrison Hotel with the range widening in songs like Indian Summer and Ship of Fools; and the Doors’ last good album, L.A. Woman, with the unquiet quietude of Riders of the Storm and Morrison’s blistering rendition of John Lee Hooker’s Crawling King Snake.

After that, Morrison became a poet — which considering his cult status as one of rock’s greatest singers-performers is actually believed by many of his trans-generational fans to this day. Which is a pity, because his poetry was mawkish; but his music — when he didn’t try to disguise it as poetry — was not. Sixty-two years after he was born and some 33 years after his death, keeping the two Jim Morrisons apart have, however, become easier. Not so much because his poetry sucked, but because his music — his bluesy, ballsy music of his golden years — was so good and demonically basic.

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