'If Only I' by Jim Morrison, Rock's Revisionism

"If only I could feel, The sound of the sparrows & feel child hood 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 by Jim Morrison (1967)

The more "beloved" and "respected" figures in rock music have a nice, revisionist-style in the re-telling of their life story. Keith Moon terrorized, controlled, psychologically abused and stalked his wife, and his only child was terrified of him. There are many stories of him abusing people outside of his family as well. But that get's "glossed over", and Moon is remembered as an adorable and "funny" drummer! Read excerpts from Mike Nesmith's Infinite Tuesday autobiography. The "smart" Monkee? The great visionary? The respected businessman? Nothing more than an arrogant idiot, a nitwit who got very lucky. And from what I can gather little Davy Jones made Jim Morrison look like a prince. Oh, those adorable Monkees...

The problem with Jim Morrison was that he was thrown under the bus in the worst possible way by his own camp. Little Danny Sugerman went to work for Ray Manzarek. Manzarek oversaw and contributed to Sugerman's "No One Here Gets Out Alive" project, which made for salacious reading but set the Jim Morrison scumbag image in stone. If you trash Jim Morrison, a deafening silence is the only response. Could Jim Morrison be a scumbag? Sure. But let's put every single rock figure from the 1960s on the witness stand and let's see how well they come across. David Bowie liked young flesh, as young as 13, and he was one the biggest sell-outs in rock, magically became no longer bisexual at the height of the AIDS crisis. A lot of them have sins in multitudes that far exceed Morrison's. All of them could be scumbags. I'm partial to Lou Reed, because though a well-known prick, he was hugely talented. How could I have left out Prick Jagger, sorry, Mick Jagger? Does Axl Rose still enjoy covering songs written by Charles Manson?

By all accounts Jim Morrison could also be a very sweet, loving, generous guy too. Despite Stephen Davis' malicious speculation, Morrison was the definition of an oversexed hetero male. Also, a sensitive, deeply unhappy, lonely, individual who obviously suffered from clinical depression and possible identity disorder, dealing with a broken heart after Mary Werbelow left him. Robby Krieger summed it up saying "Jim was an unhappy and troubled soul." There is the Asshole/'mystical shaman' image that Jim Morrison always gets painted with. Mostly by the late Ray Manzarek who pressured constantly Morrison to stay in the band. What would Syd Barrett's fate have been if Roger Waters said, "This is guy is nuts! I'm gonna make him the centerpiece of the band! Think of the publicity!", instead of realizing there was a serious problem going on and then opting to cut ties with him, for Barrett's own good and for his own well-being?

Most of The Doors' fans are not aware that after the third album Jim Morrison was pretty much ready to walk away and that he had to be dragged in to record "The Soft Parade". I would love to have been a fly on the wall to see the sheer amount of badgering it took to get Morrison back into the studio. Oh, and don't think that Jim Morrison's status as a sex symbol, even though the poor kid has been dead for almost 50 years, and the fact that women still drool over pictures of him doesn't play into the way he is perceived. A certain amount of male jealousy and resentment is at work here too. At one point, a sorrowful Jim Morrison told Ray Manzarek, "I think I'm having a nervous breakdown." Manzarek asked him to "give it six more months". It was as if Morrison was looking for Manzarek's permission to leave the group. I wish Morrison had followed his instincts and left when he felt it was the right time to leave. —by RiderOntheStorm1969

Jim Morrison's girlfriend and "life partner" Pamela Courson, who famously described Jim as a poet who “shouldn’t be wasting his time in a rock’n’roll band,” had gone to Paris to scout out places where she and Jim might live. One month later Morrison left Los Angeles on March 10, 1971. Poem found in Jim & Pam's apartment the night that Jim died: "I have a vision of America 28,000 feet and going fast/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, Paris, 1971