Strange Days with The Doors, JFK lyrics

“Not To Touch the Earth” (1968): House upon the hill/Moon is lying still/Shadows of the trees/Witnessing the wild breeze/Come on baby run with me/The mansion is warm, at the top of the hill/Rich are the rooms and the comforts there/Red are the arms of luxuriant chairs/And you won't know a thing till you get inside/Dead president's corpse in the driver's car/The engine runs on glue and tar/Come on along, not going very far/Wake up, girl, we're almost home/We should see the gates by morning/We should be inside the evening/ Burn... 

“Small minds cannot grasp great ideas; to their narrow comprehension, their purblind vision, nothing seems really great and important but themselves.” ―James George Frazer, The Golden Bough (1890). The Doors song “Not To Touch the Earth” (whose opening lines are inspired by “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). Similarly, there are no stones unturned in Dylan's narrative of "Murder Most Foul" (2020). Dylan puts us again in that limousine, before the shots fired, during the assassination, and on that six-mile trip to Parkland Hospital, to when Vice President Lyndon Johnson is sworn in as President at 2:38 pm that afternoon. It's especially chilling and emotionally soaring, when he notes in the next verse, "I said the soul of a nation been torn away / And it's beginning to go into slow decay / And that it's 36 hours past Judgement Day." Similarly, Jim Morrison wrote (in one of his Hidden poems, 1969): "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." Source: www.popmatters.com

John Humphrey Noyes (1811-1886) was an American preacher, radical philosopher, and utopian socialist. He founded the Putney, Oneida and Wallingford Communities, and is credited with coining the term "complex marriage". He left Andover for Yale University and started an uproar when he began preaching Perfectionism, the heretical notion that a religious life must be free of sin. Argumentative and charismatic, Noyes became a local celebrity and attracted small crowds of supporters, opponents and gawkers. It was around this time that Noyes met Abigail Merwin. He was 22; she was 30. It’s hard to find details about Merwin, other than that she was smart, beautiful and had dark-grey eyes. Many of Noyes’s descriptions of her are saturated with ecstatic religious imagery. During a period when he stopped eating and sleeping and instead wandered manic through the streets of lower Manhattan, he envisioned her ‘standing, as it were, on the pinnacle of the universe, in the glory of an angel’ (although, in his mania, he wondered whether she was actually the devil incarnate). Merwin was Noyes’s first follower, and he loved her. In his Confessions of Religious Experience (1849), he admitted that ‘she was undoubtedly the person to whom I was attached more than any other person on earth’.

Noyes’s instability eventually scared off Merwin. After his manic spell in New York, she deserted him and Perfectionism. Her father later told Noyes to keep away. Yet when Merwin announced her engagement to a man named Merit Platt, Noyes sent her a letter. ‘I loved you as I never loved another,’ he declared, confessing that ‘the thought of marriage was unavoidable’. She had left him but Noyes was convinced that they were joined in divine matrimony: ‘God shall make you know that he has joined us in an immortal marriage, and that what God hath joined together man can not put asunder.’ Merwin and her new husband moved to Ithaca. Noyes followed them, but Merwin refused to acknowledge him. It was then that Noyes began to develop his doctrine of free love, which, conveniently enough, would justify his having a relationship with Merwin. Today, Noyes is best known for founding the Oneida Community, a religious utopia that, among other ambitions, eradicated traditional marriage. Any man could ask any woman to have sex; each woman could in turn reject any man. The nuclear family disappeared. The Oneida experiment is one in a long line of anti-marriage crusades stretching from 2nd-century North Africa to 20th-century Israel. And like all of them, it failed. After 30 years of enforcement, 30 years of criticism and religious indoctrination, the impulse for special relationships was too strong to control. Younger members revolted. Some developed relationships in secret; others quit the community and married outside. Noyes’s failure to destroy marriage demonstrates just how resilient the institution is. It suggests there’s something deeply human that inspires us to create and participate in marriage. Despite modern trends, most people cohabiting want to get formally married eventually. According to a recent survey (February 2020) from the Pew Research Center, around 70 per cent of respondents in the US said that marriage is either essential or important to living a fulfilling life. Source: aeon.co

"Inside The Fire - My Strange Days With The Doors" (2009) by B. Douglas Cameron—As an 17 year old from the mid-west he bought a ticket for a Doors show in Chicago, November 3 1968 that forever changed his life. In 1969 Douglas Cameron became a roadie for the band who worked very hard lugging 240 pound amps for gigs in the mid-west and down to Mexico City for $60 per week. Cameron knew personally Morrison, his girlfriend Pam Courson, and even paid a visit to the Courson family. Some extracts: “Morrison generally was fair. If he went on the attack against somebody they usually deserved it. Morrison hated feeling he was being used. He rarely used people, that was not his style. Despite the legend, I only saw him around groupies a few times. He treated girls fine, groupies, girlfriends, whatever they were. Pam was in another category, practically she was his wife. They loved each other, but there was this weird competition they had, like a test to see who was the stronger, who loved the other one the most. There was a lot of mind fucking going on. She had been there from the start, from when Jim had nothing at Venice, until that final, fatal night. His final words were ‘Pam, are you still there?’ She was lovely and very funny, but most of The Doors' entourage hated her. I would lie if I said she was all sweetness and rainbows. She could be very difficult to deal with a times and knew how to press Jim's buttons. When she called him Jimmy it reminded him of when he was a kid. I think that’s what his grandma called him as a kid. When Pam was really pissed she called him James Douglas Morrison, you know, like a mother would. Pam kinda went into helpless girlish mode and then he melted to her. She didn’t do baby speak or play the fool, but she could give off this vulnerable vibe. Jim told me he loved her and they shared a common destiny. I thought that destiny thing was a crock, just more of weird luck, but there was no way he was going to believe me. Anyways, he said they were meant to be together.”

Jim was the ultimate existentialist. It wasn't that he didn't want to talk about the band so much as he didn't want to talk about anything that was a burden. The image of the dead albatross hanging around his neck was a metaphor for Jim's freedom. He wasn't free because he had an albatross called the Doors hanging around his neck. Pam's dependency on heroin complicated the things between them even more. I witnessed first hand a couple of their foul arguments, where she would threaten to leave him for the count, a French dealer. We all thought Jim was going to break it up with her but she actually had given him an ultimatum, it was her or The Doors. Diane Gardiner admitted so much ('Pam was fed up after Miami's catastrophe. She said Jean de Bretueil wanted her as his girlfriend and she had outgrown Jim'). It may sound ludicrous, but what if she was not bluffing this time and was leaving Jim for good? Could you imagine what was going through Jim's mind? Even his own sister Anne said that everyone in the family thought Jim would end up as a ‘bum’. The same insecurities, the same desperate attempts that he exhibited in Miami after fighting with Pam at the L.A. airport, resurfaced. Nearly all the lyrics of his songs ‘We could be so good together’; ‘Hyacinth House’; ‘Cars Hiss by my Window are about Pam. What if Morrison was actually shy? Maybe Pam was, in his mind, his only real friend or soulmate. I think she made him feel like a man because she looked vulnerable and romantic. He got drunk so he could talk to the press and perform for the fans. The idea of death obsessed him. I remember him saying once: “Well sometimes people die by accident, sometimes by design and sometimes they just die and there isn’t a reason.” He was being crucified by his own mind. 

On 1st March 1969 Jim missed his direct flight from Los Angeles to Miami, where The Doors were booked to play at the Dinner Key Auditorium, an old stuffy hall near the harbour, constructed of corrugated iron. He sat down in a bar at the airport and drank a lot, ruminating on the ultimatum Pam had given him. As there were no more direct flights, he had to change planes in New Orleans around noon, and had to wait several hours for the connecting flight. Eventually he arrived at the Dinner Key Auditorium just minutes before the beginning of the concert. He was totally drunk. The atmosphere backstage was already at its lowest point. Against an arrangement that had been made, several thousand extra spectators had been squeezed into the venue. And when Bill Siddons, the manager of The Doors, voiced a desire to cancel the concert, he discovered that the lorry that had picked up the band's equipment from the airport had suddenly and mysteriously disappeared. Amidst the concert, Jim takes the microphone and rambles. "Wake up! You can't remember where had this dream stopped? The snake was pale gold, glazed and shrunken. We were afraid to touch it. The sheets were hot, dead prisons. Run to the mirror in the bathroom, look, she's coming in here... I can't live through each slow century of her moving..." At this point someone throws a bag of red paint at him. Jim's pants got covered with paint. One of the security guards has had enough, and amongst all the howling from the fans, he shoves Jim off the stage. One of the promoters pushes through to the microphone and shouts: "Hold it, someone's gonna get hurt! Stop it." Not until an hour later is the hall empty. In L.A. the heat was already on. The first comments about the cancelled concerts arrived, and the press began publishing exaggerated and fabricated reports about the Miami concert. Every article picked up on the contents of the warrant, and to most of them Jim Morrison was guilty right from the beginning. It was found particularly distasteful that he had performed his 'exhibitionist show'. Jim Morrison was now a fugitive from the law, and with an international warrant out for his arrest, was wanted by the FBI. This warrant eventually arrived at the Doors Office, and Jim gave himself up to the FBI in L.A. in the presence of his lawyer, Max Fink, on 3rd April 1969. A degrading court case followed, which would stretch out until pronoucement of judgement on 30th October 1970. Despite the recording of the concert, as well as 150 photographs that did not show one shred of evidence of Morrison's apparent exhibitionist behaviour in public, he was found guilty on these charges. On top of this, he was harassed by that witch from New York, who is a professional liar. Morrison hated her presence. He was given 28 months of probationary time. Due to Jim's subsequent death, however, there would never be another meeting in court. It was obvious that Judge Murray Goodman, with a lot of pressure from outside, wanted to make an example of this case. 

My feelings after watching the Miami debacle. Disappointment, despair, frustration and I also knew that the future for me and everyone in and around the Doors was very much uncertain. In New Orleans, on the way to the stage prior to the show Jim gobbled hashish laced with opium which contributed to his 'lethargic performance.' Jim was burned out from performing by the end of 1969. Going way back to Amsterman in 1968, Jim already was signalling an end to his desire to perform live on stage. I was sorry to witness such a collapse of a human being who really was at his core, a decent fellow, with a penchant for becoming a "wordsmith". Jim pleaded his case to the band about the stress of the upcoming trial, fights with Pam and other excuses for his lethargic and unprofessional behavior. But the guys decided that they had enough and they planned, in secret, to form a new band, Other Voices, and continue their careers as a new group. This was planned only after New Orleans. The planning went on through the recording of LA Woman. When Jim left for Paris I was asked to set up a stage while they organized new performances. Bruce Botnick also rehearsed the set-up and recording of the stage performance and got his equipment ready for the road. It was disappointing to me because it lacked the content and mystique of the original Doors sound and music. This was also reflected in the audience reactions. The Tour in 1972 was finally cancelled owing to lack of ticket sales. The Doors had, indeed, closed. Jim went to Paris to lick his wounds, knowing full well that, as a stage performer, he was finished with The Doors. If Pam was in Paris it was because Jim paid for it with cold cash. She had no income due to the financial failure of her boutique Themis. He told me both were going to detox and he was going to propose her marriage in Paris.

In New Orleans, Densmore said Jim caught the mike tripod and began smashing it on stage, again and again, until wooden boards fly into pieces while the spectators of the first rows watched horrified. That's not the total truth. They all remember Jim bashing the stage with the mike stand and Jim's "crappy" performance. That's about it for their "truth." But they have no recollection any longer of what happened throughout the duration of the show. As wasted as Jim was, he was able to last for just about the entire set. He probably sounds like crap and his voice is certainly no better than it was at Dallas, but they embellished the story to make Jim sound the big bad wolf again. Jim just shattered some layers of plywood and made a hole. On that last stroke, the base of the mike went through the hole and snapped off the shaft. Jim was a little surprised, I think. John then approached him and shook Jim while verbally reprimanding him. Jim then walked off stage, on the sudience left side, and disappeared through the door. John threw down his stick, commented that he would "never play with that asshole again" and walked off. Ray and Robby were sort of in shock. One after the other they followed John off stage and up the stairs. As a group, they did not do nothing constructive about it. It was this shaman crap promotion that allowed Ray to justify not taking any step to stop Jim. To tell you the truth I think they cannot remember because they do not want to. It was a painful experience to remember they didn't help him. They were definitely angry with Jim and his drunken antics. One thing certain, this affirmed their resolve to get rid of Jim. From that ill fated day in New Orleans, the path led straight to "Other Voices" just 10 months later. Only for Jim all of it seemed a joke. There was only one problem, however, no one was laughing.

Notes on a Screen (Jim Morrison's prose poem, 1969): "It's a matter of demolishing experience, just a question of gathering up all fragments into one zone of awareness, then pulverizing them to expel from the system through its tiny doors, leaving behind the mind stripped bare, devastated and stark as ground zero. You got to have the guts to lace your own network with it. Let the risk illuminate your own dreams. Lit up like emerald peacock feathers! You gotta hook your brain fibre on the spike of a distant star and let it stretch you at the receding speed of the primal explosion. All the way, brothers and sisters, to the breaking point, and pray for a glimpse before the tissue tears. The extension of the human mind, the structure of technology, on the area of collective consciousness. Get out from under the antientropic plumbing; become not just the source of energy but the receiving substance as well. Rediscover your self-programming! For now, take it as a delight to be nothing more than a stab, a fragment with the total mathematical content of a pleasure quotient. Use your brain as an instrument for appreciating sensual input with its developed intricacies only as method of acquiring more pleasure. Kill the image!" 

I think Jim Morrison was light years ahead of their bandmates. They didn't understand his goals. Danny Sugerman lied about Morrison a lot. I mean if Danny was close to Jim, how come we don't ever see him in the footages we've got recorded? How come he is never in photos with Jim or even near Ray, Robby, John? I know his only work was to answer fan mail at The Doors Office if that's what he did and didn't go on tour with the band. He just made up stories to make a profit. No one can say what was in Jim's mind at any time on any subject. It is nothing more than presumption to do so. Not only Sugerman lied about Jim, also Max Fink, his lawyer. I didn't expected that Max Fink would have said anything good about Pam since he was well known to hate her. The letters Jim wrote in Paris and the fact he ordered Bob Green that a credit card should be put under Pam's name shows that they had reconciled and were still in love with each other. It doesn't really matter what Max Fink thought. He was from a different generation and probably judged everything that way. He was Fink by name and Fink by nature, as they say. A contemptible person. What books on Jim would I recommend? I wouldn't know because in my opinion most of them are seriously flawed by willful errors, sloppy scholarship, macho pseudo-identification, jealousy, ignorance, deliberate lies, and hostility. I think The Jim Morrison Scrapbook by Jim Henke is supposed to be pretty good. He interviewed Pam's parents and other people who tell some reliable stories. Source: www.thedoorscollection.com

Patricia Kennealy-Morrison in a letter to Rainer Moddemann for The Doors Quarterly Magazine. "Jim was terribly scared, and he wasn't embarrassed about showing it to me. While we were talking about a possible abortion, he cried. We reached the opinion that the timing wasn't good, and he said that we could have a child together later at another time. I would have had the child for only one reason, that it was Jim's child - and I think it was terribly egotistic of me to want a child just because it was with a certain person, and not because I wished to have a child. It was the most difficult decision in my life."

-Frank Lisciandro: Did you have a feeling that there was a strong relationship going on between Jim and Patricia Kennealy? I mean, were they lovey-dovey?

-Leon Barnard: Oh, no, when I got where she lived, a very casual apartment in the Greenwich Village area, it wasn’t at all like that. I didn’t feel that there was any special connection between them.

-Frank Lisciandro: She did an interview with Jim for Jazz & Pop magazine. What was that interview like?

-Leon Barnard: Well, it was more of just a conversation. It wasn’t a formally structured interview. It wasn’t a question/answer thing at all. That’s when we went out to dinner and it was more of an informal conversation. I think his main interest was getting a review of his poetry books—The Lords and The New Creatures—talking about his poetry in a casual sense.

-Frank Lisciandro: Did you have the impression that Jim thought of himself as a poet first before he thought of himself as a rock & roller?

-Leon Barnard: Yeah, I would say definitely, I would say more as a writer across the board, where maybe there’s a possibility of screenplays too. So I don’t think it was specifically poetry though.

-Do you think Pamela Courson was an influence in Jim’s life in terms of his artistic life?

-Leon Barnard: Yes, I think she was. I mean she must have had something. She may have been one of those people that could read his poems and make comments about them. She didn't talk of Jim's poetry with us. She was just a secretive person. I think Pam managed Jim on several levels and sometimes she sought to control him. And I think that to some degree he enjoyed that. But if I were going to look at the psychology of it, I think he also enjoyed breaking the rules so he could get punished for it, and then forgiven by Pam to keep it interesting.

-Frank Lisciandro: Do you think Jim and Pam had any violence in their relationship?

-Kathy Lisciandro: I remember him saying once or twice, “my little woman,” in a very sarcastic way. But I would never believe that he was actually violent with Pam, because I don’t think he had that in him. He was not a violent person so I don’t think he would have been violent with Pam of all people. They yelled at each other from time to time.