ROCK '70 by Chris Hodenfield
Pyramid Books #511-02208-075
A used paperbook book called Rock '70 caught my attention, and the price was right. Its colorful cover had photos of Mick Jagger, Ringo Starr, Janis Joplin and (possibly) Bob Dylan.
The first chapter following the Introduction is entitled SENSATIONS AND HERO ACTIVITY -- The Doors and the Led Zeppelin
Sensationalism is big business in rock&roll, y'understand, and The Doors and the Zeppelin make the most of it. Except in two different ways: the Doors do it through the cerebrum, the Zeppelin punch straight through the old spine.
When the Doors made stardom in the summer of 1967, when "Light My Fire" outplayed everything on the radio except "Ode to Billie Joe," certain sensual notes were seen. And the album! Migod! Oedipus legends. Liquid sounds that writhed through the speakers. "That's sex," snapped the experts.
And the Doors became legend. And the Doors were busted. And then Jim Morrison and his Doors were busted again. Obscenity! Yahboe! And the Doors took their message and ran it into the ground and then seemed to be on the edge of floundering with their Soft Parade: a chewy chewy-ish yechh UNrevolutionary UNsexy UNcharismatic UNdoors politician-like statement. A let-down, to be sure.
But the Soft Parade was innovative (and, well, wasn't everybody else adding the big-brass sound and getting away with it?). And of course, the arrival of 1970 brought on the all-new-all-over-again Doors album with just them sitting on their instruments. Showing that they could play "Land Of A Thousand Dances" any old day of the week and be a powerful band again, to boot.
As great instrumentalists as they are, they made their scarlet theatrics. Reason being: Morrison the Satyr. The Led Zeppelin are all technical masters of their instruments with Robert Plant having the most powerful blues voice to ever come out of England. Both have albums that are masterpieces. Yet, on stage, they're both prone to just falling off ... and more so the more popular they get. The Doors, towards the middle of 1969, started to feel the bad vibrations, climaxed by Morrison's arrest down in Miami, and then started to shape up. The Zeppelin, all of them a bunch of kids out for a hot time, got more and more sloppy/ribald as their fame and notoriety grew. Even their second album, Led Zeppelin II, was barely held together at the seams as they flipped out, running into excess.
THE DOORS
As a group band, they've really had it. Partially thanks to Jim Morrison's antics and partially thanks to those awed critics to whom Morrison was the "Hellmouth-demon-serpent-king-dollars" kind of hero. As it is, people can tell you the length of Morrison's erect elbow, but as for Robbie Krieger's tremendous flamenco-blues-liquid-silk guitar? "Ahh, yah ... it's him." And so on. Any subtlety in their overpowering performance ability disappeared at the drop fo the infamy. The youthful fresh-faced lads started to use Morrison as a thrill epic rather than a poet or singer. The other Doors were just his vehicle. "He was so strung out, man," they'd say. "Whew!"
Putting these pieces together, you could say half-righteously "It went to this head." But only half-righteously. In one of his volumes of poetry, The Lords/Notes on Vision, that he had printed up to send to friends, he stated, "The Lords appease us with images. They give us books, concerts, galleries, shows, cinemas. Especially the cinemas. Through art they confuse us and blind us to our enslavement. Art adorns our prison walls, keeps us silent and diverted and indifferent."
This is, shall we say, a "heavy rap." Morrison is, however, inadvertently a Lord. He has appeased the audience with blind images he's raked up. Analyzing the Doors , on the other hand, should be a body thing. And it takes all the Doors to make that spine-swelling, surging-urging whump tingle-ringle. Takes the organ and the guitar and the key bass and the drums, as well as Mr. Caruso up there. One night in London, Jim ... just, well, "got sick," had to miss that night's show. The Doors then went on as a threesome, and according to Deep Purple organist Jon Lord, "It was the best show they did there. They were tighter than ever before."
The music, understand, all soapy and superlative and waterjet smooth, demands the attention of all of you, cerebrally and bodily.
One worthy critic called Ray Manzarek's organ playing "professorial" (and there is no better adjective). John Densmore was once called rock's most "sensitive" drummer. (Listen to "The End.") And Robbie Krieger said himself that the Doors have the best guitarist in the world, only they never let him do anything. Every time you see them, you have to get astounded, unless you see them on the Hollywood Bowl - Madison Square Garden - Money Circuit. If they chose to make themselves "super-instrumentalists" they could overwhelm any of the English super yahboes because they have the nerve.
What we have, however is the Morrison Cult. Not that this is entirely bad, because he is the one that's doing things, like films, books, poetry, screaming, carrying on ...
His first film ("just an exercise thing") is called Hiway. Done in 35 mm, it concerns the doings of a hitchhiker. The film is a stepping-stone to a feature-length film he is doing now with Michael McClure. And this ... this is my idea of a supergroup: McClure and Morrison. McClure wrote, a few years back, The Beard, which was a highly seasoned dialogue Jean Harlow and Billy the Kid.
McClure, mad Kansas playwright, and Morrison, ex-UCLA film school tough. That's gonna be some film. If it ever gets shown down at the neighborhood Bijou ... well ...
Morrison's efforts aren't really to be taken as seriously as some people would have you think. He is, yes, the Only Hope and Salvation to a lot of people out there. And they would have it that ol' Jim ... is ... Ghod.
Harvey Perr, a critic in Los Angeles, said, "It's like Morrison's poetry; some of it is the work of a genuine poet, a Whitman of the revolutionary-ready 60's -- and some of it is embarrassingly sophomoric."
Well, I imagine that some of Harvey's writings (while he is quite a good journalist) can sometimes be sophomoric too. Morrison's work is just magnified and aggrandized and blown out of proportion and larger than life and ... man, all on his own free will.
One morning he awoke
With a strange creature groaning beside him
Sweat oozed from its shiny skin
Is Everybody in?
The Ceremony is about to begin.
-- In "Celebration of the Lizard"
Jim Morrison
Scores of poets didn't get down to bare grits of their illumination until they were advanced and mellowed in years. Others, like Rimbaud, had it down by the time they were eighteen. Where does this leave Jim Morrison? Culture-fest cinemascope living room. Surrounded by thousands of squirming television sets with viewers' eyes surveying the scene like the Eleven O'Clock News Wrap-Up. In his own coliseum. That's why New York disk jockey, Brother John, said one night in a familiar bellowing voice: "When I was back there in radio school ... there was a person there who put forth the proposition ... that you can petition the audience with hype.
Petition the audience with hype ...
Petition the audience with hype ...
YOU CANNOT PETITION THE AUDIENCE WITH HYPE!"
The Doors are earthy and brilliant, yes, but they put people on as well as the next band. And image-hungry kids (yes, teeny-boppers) reversed the intent and SCREAM all bloody murder, go charging at the barricades, yelling and coughing, wanting More. Well now, is that rock&roll?
Jim has previously explained that the rushing up to the stage and the mob action were all planned and in control by him. That could rightly be so, but was Morrison in charge of his own self?
Mob-hysteria is a very popular item for cuff-link philosophers. When the Doors turned out music that was simpler in delivery than their early "The End" days (and after all, weren't "Love Me Two Times" and "Unknown Soldier" banned?), a lot were quick to disclaim the bubble-shuck. Further, if you compared that particular song with Ray Davies' "All Of The Day And All Of The Night," you would see horrendous similarities. And so, casting off the singles market as unintellectual and uncool, they, the Doors, had Sold Out. (Now there's mob hysteria.)
Any rock band these days is a child of media. Torn apart. Analyzed for roots value. McLuhan said that myth is anything you can make up. In this case, the myth was made simultaneously by both sides. Sort of reaction-reaction.
To get coldly analytical about it all, my research department figured out "Jim Morrison" by the Cheiro Book of Numbers system, which is more fun and accurate than astrology. His name puts him in the number nine bracket, which speaks of crimson mysticism, war and destruction, the planet Mars, and that "their greatest dangers arise from foolhardiness and impulsiveness in word and action ... For affection, they will do almost anything ..."
His is not a dedicated and furious Yevtushenko, but rather a swilling corker of a new Frank Sinatra. Simon & Schuster will make his books of poetry, The New Creatures and The Lords / Notes On Vision, available by the summer of 1970. If they could take John Lennon, in his own write, as another James Joyce, then Jim Morrison shouldn't really be slammed as any Elmer Fudd of the Sophomore Vision Class. At times, while he seems self-consciously baroque, he is able to set down his vision extraordinarily. Not quite as salty as us plain-folksy rock writers, y'understand, but it's all there.
The Doors are a rock&roll band. And yet people take them for Tarzans and message bearers. And dirty feelthy heroes. When they played a gig in Las Vegas, a certain Sheriff Lamb tried to stop the show with a law that dated back to the 1800's.
How many poets have to go through this? How many film-makers?
If the Doors stuck to hard rock, they could really be soopergroup. They are like the Beatles, except less imitable. Plus all the trimmings an American band would inherently have: certain gaudiness, an occasional failure in public relations and a big sense of potency and sensationalism. And what other American band has done that?
Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Gene Vincent, and all the old guard had their days of blood-gushed fandom ... but nobody recently. The English counterparts have their own charisma, and so even the Bee Gees rate a few screams over there. And then the more solid types like Mick Jagger, Alvin Lee, and the rock-blues screamers.
Morrison is the only American (outside of Hendrix who had to go to England to get it together anyway) who was able to become the actual hero of today's woman and girl. Lean jeans. Not necessarily the Creedence Clearwater version of big lumberjack types, but rather ... they seem to be Brave New World men. Men of visions.
return to Ida's L. A. Woman Confidential home page
for more Doors news and reviews