The Sacrifice of Jim Morrison

Burning The May Tree: The Sacrifice of Jim Morrison (2019) by Chris M. Balz: The first edition of this thesis (under its original title: The Mass Sacrificial Spectacle: The Doors in Poetry and History), received Stanford University's Golden Award for Excellence in the Humanities. The prize was awarded upon the author's graduation from Stanford University with a B.A. in Humanities, Honors, Modern Thought and Literature. Published on Amazon: March 30th 2019. Credits: "Thanks to all of those who helped with this book. James Winchell and Barry Katz served to guide the development of the core thesis of the first edition of this book, and Frank Lisciandro provided invaluable perspectives on the real-world history, leading to its receipt of the Robert W. Golden Award for Excellence in Humanities from Stanford University in the year 1990. The Doors Collectors Magazine provided greatly appreciated business support and feedback. Frank Lisciandro continued over the years with the assistance described above. Independent cultural activists, speaking from their own experience, provided some key insights. And there are the numerous individuals who have dedicated themselves to the possible historical transformations alluded to in the book.

The School of Humanities and Sciences honors the Golden Medal to Christopher Balz for his thesis “The Mass Sacrificial Spectacle: The Doors in Poetry and History”: "Christopher Balz has produced a superb essay under the direction of Professor James Winchell. As a textually oriented researcher, Mr. Balz sets about an explication of the heretofore inexplicable sense-making systems in the poetry of Jim Morrison. He brilliantly ties together the Frankfurt School, the Situationism of Guy Debord, and the post-structuralist anthropology of Rene Girard in order to demonstrate, in light of the public reception and manipulating of the poet/shaman as commodity, the passage from labor to spectacle, from an industrial to a communication-oriented society. This essay is outstanding for its intellectually adventurous thrust, its commitment to l’imaginaire social, and its profound sense of responsibility." -Ewart Thomas, Dean of Humanities and Sciences, June 16, 1990, Stanford University 

"Congratulations on winning the Robert Golden Award for your wonderful thesis. I was delighted with the paper." -Frank Lisciandro, Editor of Wilderness and The American Night (Jim Morrison's posthumously published poetry), on the original academic thesis submitted for Stanford University, that forms the core of the present book. Source: www.nottotouchthesun.net

Burning The May Tree: The Sacrifice of Jim Morrison - Introduction: The rapid turn of events since the Global Financial Crisis inverts the relation presented in this book: the demographic of the protagonists and their descendants, across the "political spectrum," now finds itself on the defensive, since the ominous process that we saw kick into gear in 2008. Why does the project for a healthy republic meet with so little success when plain sanity, concern for humanity's and the Earth's very survival, demands that at least the project's concrete minimal demands be met? Aside from defeatist observations, the question is one of strategy. Jim Morrison makes an interesting case study for such strategic questions. His downfall as actor for radical change in mass culture may be related to the mission of "activist causes," specific political outfits taking on aspects of the power structure. The strategy pursued by activist causes is flawed fundamentally. Broadly put, they attempt to make use of "ad power" in order to spread their message, yet forget that this is precisely the ground upon which they may be defeated most easily.

Partially obscuring the essence of Jim Morrison’s role is “that movie” by Oliver Stone and the books published about The Doors, their flagship being No One Here Gets Out Alive - Frank Lisciandro warning: “There is an inaccurate and depressing biography published by Warner Books. I strongly suggest you avoid it. It is the National Enquirer version of Jim’s life, and will not tell you anything about the man’s true nature or his creative spirit.” Amidst all the backlog of trivia we now have about The Doors, Jim emerges to the persistent eye as a threat out in the open, flourishing. Call it a political, or social, or cultural threat - one would be counseled to save one’s categorizing breath and admit Jim’s legacy into its fullness. Jim was, simply put, and regardless of whether he thusly intended or not, something of a threat to the established public order at the time. But specifically, a threat to what or whom? Amidst the raging injustice of the nonsensical “evil war,” as Martin Luther King Jr. characterized the Vietnam War shortly before his assassination (a war memorialized by Coppola’s film “Apocalypse Now” to the sounds of The Doors); amidst the stifling conformity of a phenomenally rich and successful post-WWII North America; amidst all of this Jim lived his young life. Jim was not simply a threat, but an agent of cultural change because he expressed his oppositional standpoint and suggestions for transformation through his writings.

Even a cursory study of Jim Morrison’s literary influences reveals that this most overlooked aspect of Jim’s being, that of an agent of cultural change, is actually the central and salient one. This is not surprising, given our society’s mechanisms of co-optation which work with forces that would change it fundamentally in order to neutralize them. Sex appeal and glamorous trivia are universally salable, whereas defense of the gains in freedom won by humanity and the creation of healthy alternatives to practices that have become mainstream has not been widely popular in the past half century. Perhaps Michael McClure, the Pulitzer Prize winning Beat poet who spent a good deal of time with Jim and encouraged his writing, would be qualified to say exactly which writings in particular influenced Jim the most. Beginning our discussion at the outset of its historical concern, Nietzsche stood at the very threshold of unbridled modernity, as it was made possible in his day by the development of industrial processes. It has been well noted in the literature that Jim read quite a bit of Nietzsche.

Nietzsche’s primary concerns were twofold. The first was the “loss” of God, an evolution of consciousness made possible by the liberation of the populace from the direct control of political and financial elites that was exerted through the structure of the churches of the time. The second was the development of a new philosophy which would produce the most human response to this new condition in society. Nietzsche considered himself to be a psychologist, and focused on the psychology of the individual with respect to the new loss of God. Immediately we recall Jim’s concert scream in “The Soft Parade,” “You cannot petition the Lord with prayer!” Nietzsche’s approach to the crisis caused by the loss of God was to re-educate individuals to the Greek tradition of the pre-Christian, critically-thinking and independent individual, the cornerstone of Western culture. While the Greeks may seem distant in time to our contemporary culture, they are in the sense that the soil of a tree’s roots are distant from its branches. Preserved within the Roman Empire and the medieval Islamic world, Greek traditions and knowledge gradually filtered into tribal pagan Europe as it was civilized over time. Like Nietzsche, Jim believed that the problems of life were best resolved by the individual, not by arbitrary morality handed down in the form of laws by the larger society.

Jim’s appreciation of Nietzsche’s work, together with the news that was breaking in the 1960s of communism’s failings and travesties (starting with Herbert Marcuse’s Soviet Marxism in 1958), precluded any affinity on his part with communism, socialism, or any party line (except, perhaps, what could be termed the partying line of Norman Mailer’s political candidacy in New York City, which Jim spoke in support of in a Rolling Stone magazine interview.) But far more importantly, Jim shared with many of his own generation an abhorrence of alienation and a belief that revolution would be the only path to bring about meaningful change. Jim’s lyrics and writings are rife with images of riots, burning, assassination, and revulsion at the contemporary political establishment. This poem from Wilderness, a collection of Jim’s work that appeared posthumously in 1988, encapsulates Jim’s approach to his concerts, and gives a key to another dimension of his songs: What do you want? Is it music? We can play music. But you want more. You want something. Am I right? Of course I am. I know what you want. You want ecstasy. Desire and dreams. Things are not exactly what they seem. You don’t need to be told. You want to see things as they are. I lead you this way, he pulls that way. I’m not singing to an imaginary girl. I’m talking to you, myself. Let’s recreate the world. The palace of conception is burning. The world that his audience was literally born into, “the palace of conception,” “is burning.”

The tumult of the 1960s in the affluent Western society is raging like the flames of a palace set afire. Concurrently in the poem, Jim notes that “I’m not singing to an imaginary girl.” In the recorded songs that Jim sang with the band The Doors, the girl is a metaphor for what was then termed “the Movement.” Actually, the tone of all the songs involving a “girl” mirror the contemporaneous state of the movement in a fashion analogous to that of a floundering relationship. Chronologically, the tone of The Doors albums progresses from mid-60s brand new exuberance, to disappointment, confusion, and disillusionment by 1970. However, the technology spawned seems to have been used in the same mediating manner as the old social codes were. With such technologies as the offset-type printing press, TV, telephone, film, radio, and now the Internet, the society has found a substitute for the old social codes for the job of mediating and representing feeling, thought, and social interaction. The net effect is such that it makes the society appear to have an internal dynamic which militates against the possibility that such areas might become more human and directly person-to-person.


Similarly, The Doors song, “Not To Touch the Earth” (whose opening lines come from “The Golden Bough”) deals with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy (“dead President’s corpse in the driver’s car,” as Kennedy was killed while in a motorcade). The “czar” mentioned in the song lives in the east (Washington, in this interpretation): “going east, to meet the czar,” “the mansion is warm at the top of the hill/rich are the rooms and the comforts there/and you won’t know a thing until you get inside.” The song froths with Jim’s curiosity to know more of the social mechanism of the archetypal sacrificed king he had studied in George Frazer's work.

It is the thesis of The Road to Eleusis that Demeter’s potion, the kykeon, was entheogenic. According to the theory, ergot growing on the barley added to the kykeon accounted for the potion’s visionary properties. Hofmann [creator of LSD at Sandoz Laboratories in Switzerland] argued that, by making an aqueous extract of ergot-infested barley, the ancient Greeks could have separated the water-soluble entheogenic ergot alkaloids (ergine, ergonovine, etc.) from any non-water-soluble toxic alkaloids of the ergotamine/ergotoxine group. Hofmann pointed out that the psychotropic properties of ergot were known in antiquity, and that such folk knowledge of these properties lingers on in Europe, as evidenced by the names for ergot: Tolkorn (“mad grain”) and siegle ivre (“inebriating rye”). Eminent Greek scholar Ruck meticulously showed how the ergot theory fit the available evidence. One of the more telling pieces of evidence is the fact that Demeter was often called Erysibe, “ergot,” and that purple, the color of ergot, was her color.

Perhaps the greatest influence on Jim, even greater than Arthur Rimbaud’s, was the nineteenth century poet William Blake. Blake spanned the dimensions of human existence in his writing more thoroughly than Rimbaud could, who stopped writing after age 19. An Englishman during the American Revolution, he decried England’s “evil war” against its colony. Quite a parallel to Jim in the United States during the Korean war and Vietnam “police action”! An extremely historical poet, Blake taught Jim how to put his observations of worldly matters into poetical language. Blake witnessed the second of the great political revolutions to sweep the modern Western world, the prototypical French Revolution. His trenchant support of and then partial disillusionment with the Revolution, as reflected in his poetry, doubtless helped Jim find his own stance during the 1960’s. Perhaps inspired by Blake’s poem “The Crystal Cabinet,” Jim sang the song “The Crystal Ship.” In “The Crystal Cabinet,” Blake finds himself, or more generally the protagonist of the poem, pleasantly locked into a cabinet made of gold, pearl, and “Crystal shining bright”. His world in there is filled with moonlight, lighting up in its alternate world (alternate to the world of real sunlit daytime) the England he would dream that England could be (third stanza), instead of the evil land warring against the independent American colonists. In “The Crystal Ship,” a song from The Doors’ first album, Jim tells how the Crystal Ship is “being filled” with “a thousand thrills, a million ways to spend your time.” Filled with the exuberance of a brand-new counterculture, the ship’s passengers parallel Blake’s protagonist in their vision of a fundamentally better world. Jim’s song ends with “When we get back, I’ll drop a line.” Unlike events in Blake’s story of the cabinet, Jim leaves the tale of the ship unfinished, except to tell that it will return, sometime. Jim utilizes Blake’s image of a crystal enclosure to tell an allegory of his own generation’s journey.

James Douglas Morrison, the poet, applied literary influences from both the political-historical and dramatic-psychological realms to his poetry, lyric poetry, and songs in a successful, coherent synthesis. This is the mark of a great poet. As Western culture has become more vulgar, Jim’s work has been widely misunderstood because of sensationalism in a prurient climate, a sensationalism which grows wildly well on the fertile soil of a society which accommodates threats by co-opting them into sideshows of one brand or another through disinformation campaigns in the news media or the profit motive of the entertainment industry. In Morrison's poetic, once one crawls inside the repeated symbols, superficially "the same" on the outside like the variations of surf music, one finds a consistent, alternate universe. This method in literature has antecedents in the mantra or religious chant. In a Symbolist poem, one is invited to impress the word "wave" into one's mind. By an incantatory combination of several of these elements, an alternate sensory world is created. In this sense, Morrison combined the best of the surf tradition of his "native" L.A. with the tradition represented by the Symbolist and Beatnik poets.

The discussion of Morrison's poetry is only a conjuring of a "universe" which is "intolerable" to its present, the present reality which it critiques. The poetry's truth, its value as a “discontinuum,” seems like mere lexical folly given the entrenched untruth of everyday life. The real purpose of this work, as critical theory, is to show why this truth has been and still is such folly: to show where its historical mission of transformation has failed. Herbert Marcuse has aptly situated critical theory's responsibilities, in a way which still holds true after over a quarter of a century. He writes, "The critical theory of society possesses no concepts which could bridge the gap between the present and its future; holding no promise and showing no success, it remains negative. Thus it wants to remain loyal to those who, without hope, have given and give their life to the Great Refusal." Jim Morrison would let the life slip out of him, like his final rejection of this world.

I have a vision of America. Seen from the air 28,000 ft. & going fast. A one-armed man in a Texas parking labyrinth. A burnt tree like a giant primeval bird in an empty lot in Fresno. —The Hidden poem

Morrison's Poetry – Themes:

1) Wilderness, anomie, riot, endless corridors; alliteration and underlying meaning

2) L.A

2a. LA, and cities in general, as ant-hill-like breeding grounds for what are seen, overall, as unhealthy and morally degenerate elements

2b."LAMERICA," L.A. seen as a paradigm for the United States and its dominion over the Americas

3) Apocalypse

4) Spectacle, and external control in general

5) Rock 'n Roll, seen as a subterranean, incredibly powerful, perhaps even revolutionary force, a force reaching down into the reptilian under-section of the brain/psyche

6) Historical Change

The city is full of diseased specimens, hotel and motel corridors in which money, murder, and madness, the viral nucleic acid injected by the viri of "the LA / Plague" (lines 10-11), come together in line 21 as an alliterated package of disease for the "citizens" (line 20). The physical environment sheltering this, the virus packing its venomous alliterated nucleic acid, is the "Motel." The only natural element in the poem, a tree, is burnt and primeval, outdated by the searing new universe of parking structures and hotel corridors. And the citizens are as empty within as their barren environment without. As line 23 suggests, they are ghosts, not healthy, living beings, but mere frameworks of the same. The skeletal "burnt tree" stands leafless and empty in its outward environment of an "empty lot," a sad parody of a vibrant, full tree, together with the parking lot a literal "empty forest." Likewise, the ghost-citizens populate their impersonal hotel-motel environment. They "fill" it with "Motel Money Murder Madness," a giddy emptiness liable to change mood arbitrarily, as by a command out of thin air, such as "Change the mood from glad to sadness". Emotional motion in this world only collapses from relatively surface emotion, represented by "glad," into the deep sadness of emptiness, the crooned "ghost song". The motion is comparable to falling through thin ice on a frozen pond. The internal rhyme between "glad" and "sadness" only tightens and reinforces this depressed syndrome.

"Motel Money Murder Madness" synergistically suggesting degenerate sexuality, crass wealth, evil violence, and, finally, a deranged mental state. Similarly, the actual description of the LA Plague, the diseased cityscape of the second section, takes place wholly within the scope of a "vision of America". It conjures up the spectre of the grasping eye, external control, the "eye" of an Orwellian force, as in these two lines from Wilderness: "The girls return from summer balls / Let's steal the eye that sees us all". Like the evil eye, the "eye that sees us all" which almost beckons to be dethroned-stolen-plucked out, the symbol "L.A." or "LAmerica" in part represents an evil or doom-bearing force.

As Anthony Magistrale argues in Wild Child: Jim Morrison's Poetic Journeys (1992), "The 'sleeping city' is a general metaphor for passive acceptance of the status quo. Morrison uses the metaphors of disease and dying to describe the afflicted society he was living in, in much the same way T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) was an indictment of the societal death happening all around him." The image offered by vomition is one of total revulsion and simultaneous battle with this revulsion, the process of ejection of noxious material from deep within. We may view this revulsion-ejection as a hyperextension of the "downward slide" which we have traced thus far, from the grand highway to the lost Highland to the desperate struggle with the "atomic world," with the flipside of the transient world, to the vile but "real" "crowd life of our mound," and then finally to the petrified deathly stillness of the card-world. The struggle for meaning against the atomic world involved in addition struggle with one's inner self, how to "hate or love or judge," how to "put one foot before us". Here, however, the crisis is so unnamable and intense that we lose all distinction between foe and friend. At this point, all will toward externalization is overtaken by inner revulsion. The vomiting comes from within. No longer a battle with social-scientifically describable "anomie in social life," nor a wild Highland to be probed, here we cannot escape, cannot "return to/Mother of man" from "Drugs sex drunkenness battle". Rather, it engulfs us. There is no even meager, elusive or illusory hope in the outside "gentle swarming/ atomic world" to escape to. All, in the first and second stanzas, is egesta comprised of various elements which in concert form a map, an archeological landfill garbage-ology of our society. The engulfment, the vomition, is societal in its totality. Moving through the three stanzas, we have first a broad description of the vomiting, next an immersion in the egesta, and then a purgation.

Nauseated by the corpse of fandom, eight months after the Hollywood Bowl, Morrison would find himself forced to shout at the crowd of the Miami concert, "I'm not talking about revolution! Morrison's refusal to continue to gratify mindless fans (whom he likened to "an army of / vacuum cleaners") and subsequent hyper-marginalization make an interesting parallel to the Cassandra legend. After he had gained acceptance as a "rock god," Morrison became aware of the limits of the situation and rejected it for an Artaudian dissolution of the boundary between spectator and actor. Refusing to fulfill his role as one of "The Lords" he wrote about in The Lords, to set up spectacles only to be watched, to control his fans by pacifying them with "A mild possession, devoid of risk, at bottom sterile."

National disparagement and discrediting of him was forthcoming. He got busted for indecent exposure and public profanity at the infamous Miami concert on 1st March 1969 The Doors showcased at the Dinner Key Auditorium. So Jim was found guilty on two counts, facing a year and a half stint in Raiford penitentiary. The Doors had been in rehearsals trying to get a new album, what was to become the L.A. Woman album. At The Doors workshop on the corner of La Cienega and Santa Monica the producer questioned ”Anybody got any songs?" And sure enough, Jim and Robby came through with a bunch of great songs again. L.A. Woman, in some respects, is rock and roll film noir. In "The Anatomy of Rock", one of the first poems in Wilderness, Morrison himself realizes perhaps better than anyone the terrible limits placed by the commercial apparatus on the revolutionizing potential of rock and roll. "Noon schoolyard screamed / A record noise shot out / & stunned the earth." The poem explains: "The music / had been bolted w/new sound / Run, run the end of repose / the bad guys are winning." The mass, as a euphemism for lack of community, made the crowd's barings at Morrison's zenith concert in Miami as superficial as the alleged nudity that he was only mockingly proposing to them.

I have drunk the drug of forgetfulness/Leave the informed sense in our wake/You'll be Christ on this package tour/Money beats soul/Last words, last words, out" -Jim Morrison's last poem, Paris

The audience went to see the Lizard King, a persona that Morrison had created for himself but that not was fundamentally him. René Girard describes "the Dionysiac state of mind, a hallucinatory state that is not a synthesis of elements, but a formless and grotesque mixture of things that are normally separate," allows for the apparition of the monstrous double. The monstrous double, a perceived evil other that is yet simultaneously perceived as inextricably wedded to the self, is the cathartic crux of a group scapegoating dynamic. The delicate maneuver that is the crux of all art whereby the audience is moved to the zone of the stage had been forcibly substituted for an out-of-control, hallucinatory crowd, the artist ejected from the stage. A renversement of the actor-spectator boundary took place. It was the actual, social fear of this uncontrol, this renversement, which made possible punishing Jim Morrison. The very enforcement of the image of transgression made the crowd so hungry for transgression that, in the absence of sufficient performance by those on the stage, it took over. Unfortunately, this was to have dire consequences for the band.

After the confusion of the monstrous double, the hallucinatory Dionysiac state of the concert, had passed,  Jim became the monster. The effect of this hallucinatory "doubling," whereby the members of the audience perceive the other in themselves and themselves become the monsters, the transgressors faded. Blame shifted to the convenient other, the "freak" Jim Morrison. In an interview close in time to the Miami incident, Jim offered close-up detail on it: “I think I was just fed up with the image that had been created around me, which I sometimes consciously, most of the time unconsciously cooperated with.  It just got too much for me to really stomach and so I just put an end to it in one glorious evening.” Girard places the monstrous double at the foundation of sacrificial crisis, whereby social structures of meaning (the sacred) are eviscerated to the point of social chaos and then reinstituted through the scapegoating process. By blurring the boundary between self and monster, the monstrous double simultaneously enables transgression and blaming of the other. There has not yet been a "revolution" on the order of Horkheimer and Adorno's Enlightment project.

And so, superficially at least, Morrison's project failed. Yet we are left with a legacy which suggests to us that something very valuable was left behind. Robby Krieger, The Doors guitarist, commented on the relation between Morrison and his audience: "I think a big superstar who’s always in the public eye and is always sort of on the edge is really living for us all, you know, he’s not living for himself anymore, he’s living for us all, and we can all vicariously get off on that persona. But in the process he loses his own self." Those who step too far outside the "context," figures such as Morrison who themselves were attempting to change the social context, reveal its true nature in their downfall. Today, we may effectively characterize this context as a highly selective mental gas chamber reserved for those who are (or threaten to become) real threats, herding the wayward back into the mass, by using unjust guilt as a coercive measure. In place of imposing, unified structures of domination, such as the Church, the scapegoating dynamic serves admirably the guilt-generating function in these modern times of sacrificial crisis. This brings the spectacle society closer to its stated goal of perfection, the encrustation of Debord's "image of happy unification," to "make everybody happy."

And of course, it is out of this final happiness, the "phony Fascist mythology" which Adorno and Horkheimer expose, that final solutions, destruction on a massive scale, are made.  In his book Art, Messianism and Crime: A Study of Antinomianism in Modern Literature and Lives, Stoddard Martin "diagnoses" the principle of antinomianism in several (opposite) key figures of modernity: Hitler, Charles Manson, the Marquis de Sade on the one hand, and Herbert Marcuse, Jim Morrison and Oscar Wilde on the other one. Ron Clooney defines Jim Morrison's splitting personality in a fragment of Mr. Mojo Risin' (2011): "Onstage Jim Morrison was a Dean Moriarty lookalike, Jimbo, Mr. Mojo Risin. He was hip and wild. At home with Pam, he wanted to be like Sal Paradise a.k.a. James Douglas Morrison-the poet. He wanted to write the next great American novel about the sixties; the novel which would define a generation. There was, however, the personality split–The outsider, estranged from society who couldn't experience himself as ‘real’. The disintegration of his real self kept pace with the growing unreality of his false self until, in the extremes of a schizophrenic breakdown, the whole personality disintegrated.

Maybe Morrison was an outsider who concocted a story in which to live his reality; spinning unreality like a classic storyteller, he lived a schizophrenic existence. His girlfriend Pamela was described once as 'an Alice in Wonderland character.' Another song dedicated to Pam, Orange County (1970): "She had orange ribbons in her hair/She was such a trip, she was hardly there/But I loved her just the same/All we did was break and freak it/We had all that lovers ever had/Now her world was bright orange/And the fire glowed." Jim loved Pam for her love of freedom. But he played with the rest of people's minds, reflecting back at them precisely what they wanted to see. Like Mary Shelley, Jim Morrison created his own monster, alone in the dark. Morrison had cut up the pieces of other people, philosophers, poets, subculture idealists, novelists, artists and dramatists, then stitched them together to create a new god. But suddenly he’s alone in the dark with all those demons."

Dedicated "To Pamela Susan," The Lords and The New Creatures resounds with imaginative verses centering mostly on romantic conflict and interwoven with images of pain and death. The appeal of cinema lies in the fear of death. The Lords appease us with images. Through art they confuse us and blind us to our enslavement. Art adorns our prison walls, keeps us silent and diverted and indifferent. Morrison recognizes "self-deception may be necessary to the poet‘s survival." The terror celebrated in Morrison‘s work goes beyond the Nietzschean acceptance of life‘s suffering. Morrison‘s familiarity with the poetry of Blake, as well as Rimbaud and Baudelaire, encouraged his attraction to darker themes. Although many of the nihilistic thoughts echo those of Nietzsche, Morrison‘s fondness for absurdist texts instills in him a preference for nonsense rather than rationality, telling a generation starved for love that 'music is your only friend.' Both Nietzsche and Morrison believed in the destructive condition of the creative process. As example, his obscure poem The Anatomy of Rock: "Running, I saw a Satan/ or Satyr, moving beside/ me, a fleshy shadow/ of my secret mind. Running, Knowing. As the body is ravaged/ The spirit grows stronger/ Forgive me Father for I know/ I want to hear the last Poem/ of the last Poet."

Morrison‘s lonely trip takes him to places that even he cannot endure: "I had a splitting headache/ from which the future‘s made." Following the Nietzschean tradition, Morrison develops a philosophy of willful absurdity and eventually madness. "If only I could feel, The sound of the sparrows and feel childhood pulling me back again, If only I could feel me pulling back again & feel embraced by reality again I would die, gladly die." —If Only I poem (1967)

Humanity's current attempt to hold violence in check is a neo-myth, a denial of violence just as it is a denial of humanity, the ground of enforced ignorance of human nature. Violence on a scale never seen before by humankind looms and threatens under the righteous, even happy protection of neo-myth. Yet no one realizes this because violence remains hidden. The overwhelming authority built through overwhelming effort on the part of the human has already crushed this century and even now brandishes a new counterpart to world war: the collapse of the natural environment's life support systems showing, in Girard's rather generous academic terms, violence's sway has "increased in proportion to man's effort to master it". Today this denial stands as a spectacle of what was formerly world capitalism now evolved into a weird hybrid of socialism and fascism. Perhaps the most precariously imbalanced society ever to exist, it is nuclear tipped, alienated in nearly every possible aspect from within and without. It is common knowledge that this system threatens to kill the earth slowly in order only to fuel its own empty dynamic.

Thank you, oh lord, for the white blind light. A city rises from the sea. Let me tell you about heartache in the loss of god. Wandering, wandering in hopeless nights. Let me show you the maiden with rot iron soul. Out here in perimeter there are no stars. Out there we are stoned... Immaculate. —The White Blind Light (1969)

John Densmore "forgives" Jim Morrison

It took the Doors’ drummer, John Densmore, three years to visit the grave of his bandmate Jim Morrison after he was found dead in a Paris bathtub in 1971. He didn’t even go to the funeral. “Did I hate Jim?” Densmore pauses, although he is not obviously alarmed by the question. “No. I hated his self-destruction. He was a kamikaze who went out at 27 – what can I say?” Densmore had lobbied to get Morrison off the road before his death, and even quit the band at one point. “Some people wanted to keep shovelling coal in the engine and I was like: ‘Wait a minute. So what if we have one less album? Maybe he’ll live?’” Why did he carry on? “Because I wasn’t mature enough to say that at the time. I wasn’t trying to enable him. It was another era. I used to answer the question: ‘If Jim was around today, would he be clean and sober?’ with a ‘no’. Kamikaze drunk. Now I’ve changed my mind. Of course he would be sober. Why wouldn’t he be? He was smart.” “It took me years to forgive Jim,” he says. “And now I miss him so much for his artistry.”

Next month, a documentary about another of his bandmates, the keyboardist Ray Manzarek, who died in 2013, will be released. Manzarek’s relationship with Densmore was not smooth either. “When we took LSD, it was legal. We were street scientists exploring the mind. I experimented with cocaine during the 70s and 80s. But it wasn’t my drug of choice. Ugh… drug. I hate that word. I was shocked when heroin became popular. Even Jim knew heroin was a serious drug. Heroin tried to make you forget everything. It scared me. So I stayed away.” Compared with his bandmates, Densmore was a square. He wasn’t the film-school/literary type. He couldn’t understand Morrison’s obsession with Nietzsche (“Why would anyone want to read a whole book of such double talk?” he wrote).

At times, Densmore was envious of the attention Morrison got – particularly from women. “Sure, I was jealous. I’d been a teenage drummer with acne. I remember thinking: ‘Why is Jim’s face so big?’ on the cover of our first album, The Doors. Probably because it wouldn’t have sold a lot of copies if it were my face!” Densmore’s family life became more unsteady. His brother had several stints in a psychiatric hospital. He describes going to visit him, finding him heavily sedated, and wondering how sleeping for 17 hours a day could possibly help his schizophrenia – a point that will be familiar even now to anyone who has had to endure acute mental illness. His brother killed himself in 1978. He was also called Jim; he also died at the age of 27. Densmore later wrote that he struggled handling sharp objects after his brother’s suicide. “I thought that if I did it, too, it would somehow make it better – atone for not saving him.”

There is also an anecdote in Densmore's memoir, one that makes it into the Stone film, too, in which Morrison’s partner Pamela Courson is brought into the vocal booth and asked to perform oral sex on the singer while he is recording the track Lost Little Girl. “Urgh,” he groans, when I bring it up. How does it make him feel? “Not so good. I mean, I don’t think Jim would have done that. I’m at a loss for words: SEXIST, what can I say?” How did it feel at the time, when the whole band was there, seeing it happen from afar? “Well, you know, it didn’t really happen. They were just sort of kissing, and then she left.” So it didn’t happen? “No.” That’s odd, I say, because Oliver Stone creates a scene out of it in his film. “Oh, my goodness. Well, you know, Hollywood movies are an impressionistic painting of the truth,” he says. Source: www.theguardian.com

"Yup, the least important member of the band has spoken. At least Densmore finally confessed that his tale of Pamela Courson going down on Jim during the recording of You're Lost Little Girl was a product of his own imagination. And, as other fans pointed out, part of a lucrative smear job. John never understood Jim and was critical of Jim's voice from the start, openly announcing many times. From what I understand, he is nothing more than a knobhead. An angry, hypercritical, whiny moderately talented drummer who should be grateful for any level of success he was lucky to be a part of and for every penny he has gotten out of The Doors. John, you could easily forgive that guy from the Allman Brothers who knocked up your wife but it took you years to forgive Jim. Jim was unforgivable but you accepted a check to appear in Oliver Stone's smear job on him and you used Jim's image to sell your personal smear job under the guise of writing a "memoir", calling Jim a "lunatic" and "psychopath". Hope all the owies Jim gave you have healed by now. If not, go cry on a big pile of money Jim made for you. I find Robby Krieger to be the most consistent/trustworthy when it comes to speaking about The Doors, but there seems to be instances with all of them where they contradict themselves." -by RidderontheStorm1969

Lynn Veres Krieger, the subject of Love Her Madly, was a go-go dancer from New Jersey who met The Doors in New York in 1967 at the Ondine discotheque – a place frequented by The Velvet Underground and Andy Warhol’s Factory crowd. She caught first Jim Morrison’s eye when her falsies slipped out of her bra, and they had a brief fling, before she gravitated to Robby Krieger. Lynn and Robby would marry in 1972. -Classic Rock magazine, issue 161.

Robert Christgau - Dean of American Rock Critics (Reviews of The Doors records for The Consumer Guide):

The Very Best of the Doors [Elektra, 2001]: Shaman, poet, lizard king, schlockmeister--that's where Jim Morrison's originality lies, and he's never been better represented. Right beneath the back-door macho resides a weak-willed whine, and the struggle between the two would have landed him in Vegas if he hadn't achieved oblivion in Paris first. Compelling in part because he's revolting, Jimbo reminds us that some assholes actually do live with demons. If kids today feel cheated by history because they never experienced the fabled Jimbo charisma first hand, that's one more reason to be glad there are no new rock heroes. His three sidemen rocked almost as good as the Stones. Without Jim Morrison they were nothing. -A

The Consumer Guide database has graded 17271 albums from 7553 artists on 3347 labels, with 15212 reviews.
Source: www.robertchristgau.com

Sex Addiction: Elvis Presley, Jim Morrison

"Treat me like a fool, Treat me mean and cruel, But love me. Wring my faithful heart, Tear it all apart, But love me. If you ever go, Darling, I'll be oh so lonely, I'll be sad and blue, Crying over you, dear only. I would beg and steal, Just to feel your heart, Beatin' close to mine. Well, if you ever go, Darling, I'll be oh so lonely, I'll be sad and blue, Crying over you, dear only. Beggin' on knees, All I ask is please, please love me." ―"Love Me" by Elvis Presley, written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, recorded August 1, 1956

The beautiful Ms Linda Thompson shared so much of the Presley lifestyle after the departure of Priscilla that the word ‘relationship’ barely covers what they meant to each other. Linda met him on July 6, 1972. "I was Miss Tennessee Universe and T. G. Sheppard invited me to the Memphian Theater after midnight. I had a lot of trepidation about it. But my girlfriend, who was Miss Rhode Island, said we had to go. So if we hadn’t have gone, I probably would never have met Elvis. I even made a joke about the Dracula look and Elvis wasn’t fazed. He sat down and was very sweet. It was as if we had known each other our whole lives." But the doubts resurfaced that night. "I got home at about four o’clock in the morning and the phone rang. It was Elvis. His speech was slurred. I had never been around anyone who was incapacitated like that. I said, ‘Are you drunk? Why is your voice slurred?’ He said, ‘Oh, honey, I’m just tired.’ Of course, I found out he took sleeping medication, and I am sure he had taken a sleeping pill before talking to me. I wasn’t nervous because he was so down home and down to earth – there really was a sense of humility about him."

"I never felt more loved and more listened to and more known than when I was with him. One of the most beautiful qualities a person can have is humility and Elvis personified that. I always felt that he took the time to listen, to engage in conversation, to look you in the eye, to get tears in his eyes when the subject got to something sentimental. For Elvis it was love at first sight. He invited me to meet his father Vernon. Right away, he was saying, “Where have you been all my life?” It was part of his personality to want to hear things straight. Then we went straight to Las Vegas, where he was rehearsing for his shows at the Hilton. There were times when he was very paternal with me, very nurturing and caring. And there were times when I was very maternal to him because he was such a big baby." The affection bred pet names for each other: "I called him “Gullion” and “Bunton” and he called me “Adriadne” and “Mommy”. She didn’t accept that he wasn’t always the most faithful of lovers: "I tried to understand it. I was very young and he was very needy. There were times when Elvis wanted me to be with him all the time. In the first year, he did not even go to a dentist without my accompanying him. I was with him twenty-four hours a day in that first year. Apparently, he broke his record for fidelity. I knew he was mostly faithful because he never left my side and I never left his. I adored him and so was happy to be there most of the time. I tried to understand the infidelity. He was a prisoner, sequestered with the Memphis Mafia. He always said he only loved me. I certainly felt very loved by him. He would say that in his own way, ‘I am completely faithful to you and I don’t love anyone else.’ I always felt very loved and very treasured and respected by him. When I look back, the thing I most remember about Elvis is his tenderness, his kindness. When he told me he loved me, he had tears in his eyes. He had great passion. He was so sensitive. And very funny. He had a bracelet that said ‘Elvis’ in diamonds and he flipped it over and it said ‘Crazy’."

Linda also believed that he couldn’t refuse women, that as a southern gentleman, he literally didn’t want to be discourteous to their advances. “He wanted to please, and he didn’t know how to be standoffish with women, because that was not how he was raised. He always treated all women like ladies.” She had no doubt about her status with him. Above all, Linda remembered ‘his tenderness, his kindness. He was sensitive, passionate. Also very funny.’ There was another side to him, she always recognised, which to many people would seem in direct contradiction to his womanising and unruly behaviour. ‘He had a very distinct spiritual side,’ she emphasised. ‘He really felt the need for a God’– and, of course, there were always the songs he chose. ‘He grew up in a spiritual environment in Tupelo,’ she recalled. Elvis's relationship with Linda derived naturally into a cordial friendship, when in November 1976,  Elvis met Ginger Alden, a young model from Memphis.

Elvis invited Priscilla’s family, including her parents Paul and Ann Beaulieu, to his dressing room. He spoke to Michelle, Priscilla’s sister, about his hands. He was self-conscious that they were very bloated. But Priscilla had noticed them three years earlier on the day they met in the judge’s chambers and signed the final divorce decree. As they sat with their fingers entwined, Priscilla grew alarmed at how puffy Elvis was. “I knew something was different; something was wrong. I could see it in his eyes, I could feel it in his hands.” Now in Vegas, Paul sensed that “he didn’t want to let us go. He kept thinking of topics that would prolong the conversation, asking us what we needed and wanted.” After the divorce, Elvis had called Ann and said, “Please speak with Cilla,” and begged her to try to convince his ex-wife to come back to him. “It was a very sad conversation. I felt how desperately he wanted to keep his family together.” Ann knew that her daughter was determined to move on with her life, but she told Elvis that she would do what she could. “Please do,” he pleaded. “I want you all to be part of my family.” It was like a sword through her. “Elvis,” she said, “we’ll always be part of your family.” Priscilla knew Elvis held out hope that they would reunite. “I’d take Lisa over to his house and he’d say, ‘Cilla, go do what you have to do now. Go see the world. But when you’re forty and I’m fifty, we’ll be back together. You’ll see.” She would later say that in the last year of his life, “We underestimated his emotional pain. And he lacked the means to fully express that pain.” 

Ginger Alden was learning that being on the road and staying cooped up in Las Vegas was not the heady trip that it appeared. Once the glamour wore off, Ginger was homesick for her mother and sisters. And, Elvis learned, she missed a young man she had been seeing in Memphis. One day, in their bedroom in the Imperial Suite Elvis was seemed frustrated and adrift. She rarely saw him like that, and asked what was the matter. “Elvis found out that Ginger had a boyfriend, so he told her to call him and tell him that it was over, and she wouldn’t do it. She kept saying no.” Elvis and Ginger exchanged heated words, and then in anger, Elvis picked up a glass of orange juice and threw it across the room. Shirley had just taken the plastic off her dry cleaning, and now it was covered with sticky pulp. Ginger shrugged it off: “Oh, I was so mad! But he felt bad about it, I could tell. It was sad. Linda had taken off with David Briggs, and he wanted to show her that he could get someone who was prettier and younger.” Elvis seemed all too desperate to make the romance bloom, while others accused him of keeping Ginger a virtual hostage. More and more, there seemed to be nothing Elvis wouldn’t do to win Ginger’s affections. He went to her grandfather’s funeral in Arkansas on January 3, 1977, flying her family to Harrison, Arkansas, and then accompanying Ginger on the twenty-mile drive to Jasper for services in a tiny rural church. 

Elvis was more impetuous in all matters of love now. On January 9, he spurred his dentist, Max Shapiro to marry his young fiancée, Suzanne, in Palm Springs that very day, waking Larry Geller in the middle of the night to come perform the ceremony. Elvis bought the rings, and Ginger stood in as maid of honor. “When Elvis met Ginger,” Geller observed, “something came over this guy. Part of it was beautiful, because he just so desperately wanted a real relationship. The next morning, he said to me, ‘Man, I can’t believe this girl! I look at that woman’s eyes, and it’s my mother’s eyes.’ So for the first month, he was really just nuts over Ginger.” Elvis had confided to Geller about a previous sentimental dilemma. “I have to make a decision. It’s between Ann-Margret and Priscilla. I really love them both, but I’m choosing Priscilla because I want a wife who isn’t in show business, somebody who will devote herself to a family.”

In Vegas, 'Memphis Mafia Princess' Shirley Dieu had caught Elvis taking Ginger’s hand and putting it between his shoulder and neck. Then he placed his own hand on top of hers, and patted it. “See Shirley,” he said, “she loves me just like you love Joe.” It worried Shirley and other friends as to how far Elvis might go. Nothing about his involvement with Ginger indicated rational thinking. In Palm Springs, especially, Elvis seemed to have almost no control over his impulses. Ginger was a symbol for Elvis, whom he could project his dreams onto, whilst in denial about what was going on in his life: his health problems, his waning youth, his conflicts with Colonel Parker. On January 26, 1977, Elvis came to Ginger and proposed with an engagement ring. “It was like old-fashioned times, he was on his knees,” recalled Ginger: “He asked me to marry him, and I said, ‘Yes.’” She was sitting in his black reading chair in the upstairs bathroom at Graceland, and he pulled out a green velvet box and produced a stunning eleven-and-a-half-carat diamond worth $70,000. He was in such a hurry for it, that jeweler Lowell Hays took the stone from Elvis’s own TCB flash ring until he could find a replacement. Ginger was now the second woman to whom Elvis had proposed in a bathroom.

Ginger often questioned Elvis’s medication use, she would say later, and tried to get him to not take the packets that Dr. George Nichopoulos (aka Dr. Nick) prescribed and Tish Henley doled out like clockwork. It was, in fact, the reason for some of their arguments. “Although I asked him to try not to use the medication that I thought he did not need, and there were times that he didn’t, I truly believed that in time I would be able to convince him.” However, on the morning of August 16, 1977, Ginger had no opportunity to reason with him because she was heavily medicated herself. She had menstrual cramps, and about 6:30, Elvis had called Tish Henley and asked her to bring up something so Ginger could sleep. The beauty queen would later say she took Quaalude tablets, but the nurse, who kept her drugs under lock and key in her trailer, would insist she sent up one Dilaudid pill, though the opiate was far more powerful than anything Ginger could have needed for menstrual pain.

Ginger didn’t watch Elvis like Linda did. Finally, at 2:20 P.M., Ginger turned over in Elvis’s huge bed and found it empty. Had he never come back to sleep? She noticed his reading light was still on, and thought it peculiar. Ginger knocked on the bathroom door. “Elvis?” There was no answer, and so she turned the knob. “That’s when I saw him in there,” she said later. Elvis was slumped on the floor, angled slightly to the right. He was on his knees, his hands beneath his face, in a near praying position. His pajama bottoms bunched at his feet. Elvis had seemed to fall off the toilet. He laid so still, so unnaturally still. Elvis’s death had not been quick. Nor had it been painless. But if Elvis had called out, Ginger likely would not have heard him, so deep was her drugged sleep. Ginger was in a state of shock. “I didn’t want to think he was dead. God wouldn’t want to take him so soon.” Elvis Presley had died of polypharmacy complications in the bathroom at Graceland, at the age of forty-two. Elvis had crawled several feet and vomited before dying—but he didn’t want Ginger to see any more, and sent her into the other room. Then he called for an ambulance, and got Dr. Nick on the phone and mumbled something about a heart attack. Ginger was struck with “an overwhelming sense of sadness, disbelief, and feeling as if Graceland had also died.” —"Baby, Let’s Play House: Elvis Presley and the women who loved him" (2009) by Alanna Nash

A new classification of sex addiction as a mental disorder by the World Health Organization could monumentally shift the conversation surrounding a condition that's often deeply misunderstood. Experts who treat sex addictions hope the classification will help change the disorder's perception from a moral failing to simply a medical issue. In its new International Classification of Diseases, WHO defines "compulsive sexual health disorder" as a "persistent pattern of failure to control intense, repetitive sexual impulses or urges resulting in repetitive sexual behavior." The new classification means that sex addiction can be diagnosed based on a list of criteria. Experts also hope the new classification will chip away at a larger goal: destigmatizing sex addiction. Most sex addicts, Magness said, are ordinary people. "Most of the people that I work with are people with very high morals, very responsible, leaders in their industries, physicians...," Dr. Milton Magness said. For those people – the vast majority of whom are men – experts hope the diagnosis will open the door for treating sex addiction like any other mental health issue. Source: eu.usatoday.com

Brett Farmer places Elvis Presley's "orgasmic gyrations" of the title dance sequence in Jailhouse Rock (1957) within a lineage of cinematic musical numbers that offer a "spectacular eroticization of the male image". Lester Bangs credited Elvis as "the man who brought overt blatant sexual frenzy to the popular arts in America." Elvis would grow up to be a beautiful man with soft characteristics (full lips, sleepy eyes) that coupled with his swinging dance onstage accounted for his wild sex-appeal. Elvis's traditional upbringing and high testosterone levels confirmed him as a full-blown heterosexual. The adult Elvis saw no conflict in his desire to wear mascara and carry a gun—the symbolic phallus—at the same time. Albert Goldman's biography Elvis (1981) was clearly attempting to sneer and deride, to debunk the "Elvis Myth", to deplore the squandered potential, even to revel in the degradation. For many fans and critics, Goldman's research was undermined by his intense personal dislike of Presley. The popular music historian Charles Hamm even wanted Goldman's Elvis to be reclassified as fiction. Goldman's research was limited to merely recording with every sign of glee, how Elvis's talent, once arisen, fell back into what Goldman sees as the traditional illiterate half-coma of popular culture.

Mama Gladys raised Elvis on stories about a twin brother who died at birth, imaginable cause of what Albert Goldman sees as Elvis' bad/good "split personality." Gladys' death seemed to remove his wholesome foundation, opening the way to drugs, overeating, sex addiction, occultism, and guns. Later came his TV comeback special on December 3, 1968 and his bizarre Vegas phase, soon followed by a descent into "infantilism, drug invalidism and madness", all triggered by anonymous death threats (Colonel Parker notified the FBI they came from Charles Manson's circle) and Priscilla's infidelities. Elvis Presley is merely the focus for Albert Goldman’s contempt for a kind of successful regional man or mass personality. Goldman is palpably scared by the vitality of non-intellectual life among humankind. Source: markduffet.com

Like Elvis, Jim Morrison's at times ambiguous appeal belonged to his onstage antics. Offstage, Morrison was the most flaming blatant heterosexual you can imagine. He was unswervingly heterosexual in his gender orientation, glowingly sensual and blazingly secure in his very considerable masculinity, ardently devoted to his physical enjoyment of women, and theirs of him, and a gentleman besides. Jim Morrison always craved attention from male and female audiences while his personal sex life was exclusively heterosexual. His face was more than handsome, it was pretty and displayed vulnerability, but he was not feminine. In his eyes something definitely masculine burned. More than masculine, something dangerous. ―"Break on Through: The Life and Death of Jim Morrison" (2014) by James Riordan

“Being drunk is a good disguise,” said Jim Morrison. His pupils dilated, forming a black core that penetrated me. I felt his violence prickling under my skin, threatening to erupt between us. “Now, what are you? A cunt.” I blundered defiantly. “You’re mine. You’re my cunt.” He gave me a desperate, searching look, his voice was raw. “Do you understand that? You’re only mine.” He scrutinized me, waiting for resistance. I gave none, feeling strangely secure and comforted, as if we were locked together in some primal way. His harshness subsided. Later, lying peacefully entwined, Jim asked, “Do you know what I mean when I talk to you like that?” ”I think so,” I said. I felt he was trying to define sexuality, reducing us to the basic elements. “It’s hard to explain,” he began. “No. I do know what you mean,” I thought I did. Jim agreed, lying down beside me and smiling sweetly. He sighed and rolled his head across the pillow to look up at me shyly, almost worshipfully. His eyes were wide and vulnerable, with a boy’s 'do-you-like-me' look. When he took his defenses away like that, it blew me away. All I wanted to do was reassure him, love him; he was a stray child with no mother, lost in the world. We felt raw and tender in the moment and held each other with all the love we’d never found. It seemed the warmth and strength of those who will forever be friends. ”If it wasn’t for this, life wouldn’t be worthwhile,” Jim said, his voice near tears. The desolation in his words scared me. “You know, we really get along well, don’t you think?” he asked, an astonished look spreading across his face. “We should spend a lot more time together.” “It’s easy to be with you, too,” I smiled. We just stared at each other, embarrassed. “You take birth control pills or something, don’t you? I mean, if we’re going to keep seeing each other, we don’t want you getting knocked up or anything.” “I grew up on them,” I said icily. When we walked outside, the smog in L.A.’s air had produced a twilight mirage of color; the evening sky glowed an incandescent lavender, pink, and salmon. Piled into his friend's tiny convertible, we drove down Sunset Boulevard. The night was warm, the lights sparkling. ―"Love Him Madly: An Intimate Memoir of Jim Morrison " (2013) by Judy Huddleston

It was the greatest night of my life/Although I still had not found a wife/We were close together/We tripped the wall and we scaled the graveyard/Ancient shapes were all around us/The wet dew felt fresh beside the fog/Two made love in an ancient spot/One chased a rabbit into the dark/And I gave empty sermons to my head/Cemetary, cool and quiet/Hate to leave your sacred lady/Dread the milky coming of the day ―Graveyard Poem by Jim Morrison