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