Before the End, Lou Reed (Endless Cycle)

 

Before the End: Searching for Jim Morrison, documentary directed by Jeff Finn. Release date: January 13, 2025 on Apple TV.

Before the End: Searching for Jim Morrison is less an excavation of truth than an exercise in indulgence, a quixotic pilgrimage through the mists of conspiracy and nostalgia. Directed by Jeff Finn, the documentary styles itself as an investigative probe into the final days of The Doors' frontman, but in reality, it is more séance than scholarship. It toys with the well-worn whispers of Morrison faking his death without the burden of serious evidence. Finn and his parade of interviewees seem convinced that the "official story" is somehow suspect, yet they produce little more than speculative embroidery on an already rich tapestry of myth. To his credit, Finn unearths rare archival material and interviews that offer a glimpse into Morrison as a man, not just a spectral figure in rock 'n' roll lore. 

But where the documentary might have explored Morrison's literary ambitions, his existential unraveling, or the paradox of his self-destructive genius, it instead opts for the well-trodden path of counter-narratives that fail to hold up under scrutiny. The introduction of a shadowy "Mr. X," hinted to be Morrison himself is laughable because his name is Frank Wagner and he's younger than Morrison. Critics seem divided, with some lauding Finn's passion and others dismissing the documentary as a hallucinatory echo chamber. Jonita Davis of The Black C.A.P.E. magazine acknowledges its compelling storytelling, while audience reviews on Rotten Tomatoes skew toward exasperation, one viewer branding it "filled with innuendo, half-baked theories and outright fiction." Before the End is not an exposé but a testament to our inability to let our icons rest. This documentary does little but add another layer of fog to a legend that scarcely needs it. 

Jeff Finn: I think Oliver Stone’s a brilliant filmmaker: JFK, Natural Born Killers. I think his documentary work on Kennedy is amazing. But that brilliance is not displayed in The Doors. I was just so disappointed because it just clearly presented a one-dimensional view of Jim Morrison as this dark, narcissistic, self-absorbed asshole. And that’s not to say Jim didn’t have his asshole-ish moments. Of course, he did. We all have a dark side. I was doing street interviews in Virginia, outside the library Jim went to as a child. One young man replied, “He was an asshole.” And he knew that from the Oliver Stone movie. So, I’ve tried to do damage control regarding Jim’s legacy from the fallout of that biopic. Everybody has their version of Jim. The notion of Jim as an introvert, as being neurodivergent is not what we generally think of Jim Morrison. I want people to know the Jim that Gayle Enochs, one of his lovers, knew. A man who drank wine and read poetry. A contrast to this rock god. Where are The Doors of today? Why people today aren’t rising up and forming bands the way it was in the late 60s and protesting? I’m probably unaware of them, but I keep my ear to the ground and haven’t seen anything. It could be just as Jim said that it was an incredible springtime, that moment in the late sixties, and it couldn’t be replicated. Source: bandsaboutmovies.com

“I’m most concerned with compassion and happiness these days. I know things that impede happiness; drugs impede it, tension impedes it. People just don’t want to believe there’s any integrity. They’re always looking for some really ugly little thing. I think drugs are the single worst, terrible thing. And if there was any single thing that I thought would be effective to stop people from dealing in drugs and taking them I would do it. However I don’t think there is, apart from telling people to use them with caution. I find self-destructive people very boring. I would like to think that I’m not one of them.” —Lou Reed, interview for BBC Radio 1 (June 5, 1980)

It took years for The Velvet Underground to be understood. Most people caught on with the rise of alternative rock in the ‘90s, 30 years later. Now matter how bad, low, worthless someone feels there is Lou saying: 'I find it hard to believe you don't know, the beauty you are...' You are being told how, despite what you feel, that you are valued and loved. And Reed pulls that trick again and again in his solo work. And the fans of John Cale must know it’s hard to imagine The Velvet Underground commercially successful with Cale staying in the band longer. If they’d delivered another album like White Light/White Heat there’s no way they'd make the jump to Atlantic from Verve. 

MGM kicked the Velvet Underground off the label around the beginning of 1970 as part of its infamous "purge" of artists who supposedly advocated taking drugs. In November 1970 Mike Curb announced the termination of the contracts of eighteen bands that "advocate for drug use." In a December 1970 Rolling Stone news item, an MGM rep claimed that "The cuts were made partly to do with the drug scene—like maybe a third of them had to do with drug reasons. The others were dropped because they weren't selling." Certainly the Velvet Underground would have been at the top of the drug purge list. Sterling Morrison thought so, telling Mix magazine that Curb "wanted to get rid of the controversial bands, including the low-selling Velvets." 

Despite of the chronic painting of Lou Reed as the miscreant in his fallout with John Cale and later with Robert Quine, the reality is in fact quite different. In White Light/White Heat: The Velvet Underground Day By Day by Richie Unterberger, Michael Carlucci, longtime friend Lou Reed's guitarist Robert Quine said: "Lou told Quine that the reason why he had to get rid of John Cale in The Velvet Underground was Cale's ideas were just too out there," says Carlucci. "Cale had some really wacky ideas. He wanted to record the next album with the amplifiers underwater, and Lou just couldn't stand it." Cale's autobiography, What's Welsh for Zen?, which was written in collaboration with Victor Bockris is a clear example of one-side reporting. After the dissolution of The Velvets, Sterling Morrison explained that Cale could be also a hard pill: “People talk about Lou, but John was also truly difficult to work with. Once we were doing “Pale Blue Eyes,” which is a quiet song. I’m playing the solo, which is also quiet, and in the middle of my solo, he purposely steps on the button that turns on my distorter. It’s a Vox distorter, so all of a sudden there’s this blast of sound distorted and three times louder than all the rest. John looks at me like I’m the crazy one, turns it off, and then kicks it! I look over at Lou and we’re both going, OK, what the hell?! But if I had done that to him he would’ve had a stroke.”

John Cale obsessively blames Lou Reed of the acrimonious reunion of The Velvet Underground in 1993, with a great deal of jealousy. In What's Welsh for Zen? Cale whines about Reed to no end: "We supported U2 for Swiss stadium dates. As soon as we did that we were no longer the focus of attention and Lou could not bear the fact that he was a small fish in a big pond. Everybody else was having a great time, U2 were fun people to be around. Eden and Rise joined the tour in Switzerland. Rise was very worried and tried to understand what was going on between Lou and me, via Sylvia, which was a big mistake. One afternoon in the first week I was sitting around with a bass riff and Lou started playing guitar through this echo machine he had that was just making gorgeous noise. It was floating around in a miasma and then he started singing. I asked 'What did you say? You said "coyote"?' He said, 'Yeah.' So that song got done. And I expected that when we got out on the road we'd start trying new songs. In the middle of it all, I brought up this thing about publishing. All of a sudden Lou stopped the rehearsal, went outside and got on the phone. Sylvia showed up and came up to me and said, 'You can't talk like that to Lou. If you do, you're going to be very disappointed.' 'This is band business,' I said, 'are you a member of the band? You're not, are you? Right, so why don't you stay out of it?' She said, 'I manage Lou Reed.' That was a dead end. We knew we would attract a lot of ambulance chasers, people who wanted to see us fail. I read an article that said, 'There are some bands who shouldn't even think about re-forming.' We were one of them. 

Lou was trying to control everything and I knew a storm was coming. One night in Italy, I was doing 'Waiting for the Man' with a huge orchestral introduction, and I was trying to give them the tempo from the piano, but I was too far away. Lou went and told my tech to turn the piano off. At that point I was ready to knock his teeth down his throat. He was getting stranger and I couldn't deal with that. As soon as the tour was over, Lou was completely lost. I looked at him on the plane back from England to the US, and I realized: this guy is empty. He does not know where to draw the line. He's completely adrift. MTV wanted the Velvet Underground as part of their series of 'Unplugged'. Lou was insisting that he had to produce the 'Unplugged' album. 'I'm the only one who can produce the VU,' he said. I pointed out that we could have Chris Thomas or George Martin. Lou likes to obsess over things. I have different production values, in that Lou will go for the audiophile situation and I will go for the excitement. Everybody left Lou alone and he was very quiet, saying only, 'I must produce.' 'Absolutely not,' I replied. That night I dreamed he did not drive back to Manhattan; he swam away, just drifted off into the wild blue yonder and drowned. The thing about being a star is it's so one-sided that it's corrosive. 

Nico, for instance, was really in need of being completed as an artist and at the same time she could hold that grandiose position of being a star. Lou attempted to do the same, but he wasn't truly elegant enough in his demeanour to pull it off. People laugh at Lou a lot, but the thing is, Lou doesn't know when he's funny. He can be absolutely hysterical and have you rolling on the floor grasping your stomach, begging him to stop, and he still doesn't know what's going on. The point is, I don't think that Lou would like it if you told him. Lou and Sylvia had earlier insisted that the reunion tour would only happen if everyone refused to cooperate with Victor Bockris's work on his Lou Reed biography. And now they demanded that the mixing and production of any Velvet Underground recordings be Lou's domain. To me, if he did not want our input, fine, he would not get it. Certainly our only reason to refuse him was our conviction that we were best served by an outside ear. As a solo performer, I had been earning an income the equivalent of what we each could have expected from the reunion tour. What attracted me to the reunion tour, therefore, had not been the financial bonuses that were on offer, but the artistic stimulus of recreating the still uncompromised values of the original entity. 

The final stroke in this conflict was a fax Lou wrote Moe in reply to a gentle note from her suggesting another producer. Moe told me it said something like, 'Moe, of course your drums sounded great because I made them sound great. John of course doesn't realize that, because his viola never sounded better because I picked the amplifiers and the PA system.' Now I wanted to say to him, 'While you were making holes in your arm, Maureen was raising her children, so fuck you! And as far as making remarks about my knowledge of recording and production, I've been known for producing people and I've been a successful at it, so I'd be careful if you're accusing me of not knowing what goes on in studios too, because I have my own studio that's fairly well equipped and I know what I'm doing down there.' So I said, 'If you don't stop doing this, you're not going to have me as a friend anymore.' 

Moe called me up again and said, 'I just got a very nice fax from Sylvia.'  I saw red. Yeah, what does it say?' 'Well, it says, "John's a musician, don't listen to him." The resentment I felt at the end of the day was the same I had felt throughout the years. The situation with him and Sylvia just went on and on like that. I don't want to see Lou and I don't want to talk to him and I don't want to hear anything about him. I went through the roof. My subsequent letter to him was intended to purge him of even the slightest doubt of what I saw as his motives, total control. Moe could not have known how deeply offended I was by the meanness of his tone. I was not going to forgive him again. So I wrote Lou a nine-page fax that I knew he wouldn't get up from and he hasn't. There were many blow-ups. I'm sure there will be many more. The fax machine should have been taken away from Lou and me."

Lou Reed in RockBill magazine (August 1984): “I’ve never wanted to offend anybody. I’ve never wanted to make fun of anybody. This might sound strange coming from me. I have written songs where the characters are very bitter or are borderline psychotics. But I try to be non-judgmental about things.” After his break-up with Bettye, Lou rekindled a relationship with Barbara Hodes, a clothing designer that Lou had met at the Factory. She designed knitwear-style mohair jumpers. Betsey Johnson had given Barbara a whole corner of her boutique Paraphernalia. Barbara and Lou reconnected—he moved in with her and they had a romantic and sexual relationship before Barbara married Michael Gross, a reporter from The New York Times. According to Barbara, Lou was 'tender and polite' while he was not on drugs. She said Sally Can't Dance was critiziced by Lou because of Steve Katz's involvement. "I fear that I am a lone voice in proclaiming the brilliance of that record! Seriously. I think it contains some of his loveliest melodies. “Sally Can’t Dance” is actually about a woman who lived life on the edge and was always into the latest fashions, but later wound up in a rent-controlled apartment living a hum drum life." 

“When Lou Reed talks in Coney Island Baby about wanting to play football for the coach and “giving the whole thing up for you,” he is expressing the profound dream of the damned—and his loss is given greater intensity because both he and we know that such wishes were impossible from the very beginning. And it hurts all over again. It's also a way of recapturing his more innocent days.” —Paul Nelson for Rolling Stone magazine (25 March, 1976)

Bob Quine had a singular sound but he was just a sideman. Quine was a Velvet Underground superfan—something Reed’s wife Sylvia appreciated when she scouted him for The Blue Mask. A musicologist, Quine gave Lou a thorough analysis of why Lou’s particular guitar playing was genius and what an impact it had. “We recorded it in this gigantic orchestral soundstage that was built inside a mid-century office tower on 6th Avenue in Midtown,” Fred Maher says about those sessions: “Lou was in very good humor and we really stretched out. It was just me on drums, Lou, Bob, and Fernando Saunders. During the recording, everything was hunky-dory, and Bob and Lou were getting along. But when the final mixes were done, I think Bob wasn’t very happy with the mixes. He complained bitterly to Lou, and that was pretty much that.” “Bob didn’t really have ambitions beyond being a sideman,” Richard Hell recalled: “He didn’t like having his stuff edited. He couldn’t handle it. I talked to him about it. I was like, ‘Bob, it’s their record, not yours.’ But he was not rational that way.” 

 

Even those who say that Lou Reed had "normal parents" acknowledge that his father had a cutting sense of humor, cutting people down to size. That might seem innocuous from the outside, but for a child it can have a big impact. "Beginning of a Great Adventure" shows us Reed facing down the impossibility of being a father. Reed had grown as an artist, as a writer, and tapped into universal truths in New York and Magic & Loss and expressed them in such a crystalline way that almost everyone could relate. The true depth of Reed’s artistry sunk deeper and deeper whereas most of his 60s contemporaries were out of ideas and churning out drivel. The last song on his last album Lulu: Junior Dad is absolutely heartbreaking. It belongs alongside with other songs that paint negative or frightening portrayals of father figures: Kill Your Sons, My Old Man, Endless Cycle, Sex With Your Parents, Rock Minuet, etc. —Sources: Lou Reed: The Life (2017) by Mick Wall and Lou Reed: A Life (2017) by Anthony DeCurtis

“Daisy Jones & the Six”, "Behind the Doors"

There’s a thrilling moment a little before the halfway point of Amazon’s new limited series “Daisy Jones & the Six” in which two stars collide. The ethereal vocalist Daisy Jones (Riley Keough) has been invited to perform her collaboration with a rising rock band, but crashes the stage a bit early and then refuses to leave after her one song has been performed. Daisy and the Six’s lead singer Billy (Sam Claflin) share the microphone for a while, if “share” is the word for what one does in a battle for territory; faces close together, they’re competing for a claim on the song they sing, competing to be heard. That rivalry is the essence of “Daisy Jones & the Six,” a flawed but compelling adaptation of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s 2019 novel of the same name. Reid has described her novel as “a Fleetwood Mac vibe,” if not precisely drawn from Fleetwood Mac’s story — and, as with the real-life Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, the two musicians at the center of this fictional group generate as much drama as they do music. Unlike Fleetwood Mac, Daisy Jones & the Six definitively break up in 1977, which we’re told at the start. As we watch Daisy, in the 1970s, stomp over the Six in an act of willful spotlight-seizing, we hear Daisy, in the 1990s, tell us that this was simply beyond her control. 

“They wouldn’t let me leave!,” she laughs. We’re being told this story by characters looking back with regret. There’s little of the swirling heedlessness of blossoming attraction here, Billy is trying to keep himself from falling in love: At least notionally committed to the mother of his child (Camila Morrone). And Claflin, never more watchable than when he’s watching Daisy, sells the struggle nicely. But then, Daisy is primarily interested in herself — which is not to say she’s a narcissist, just someone who acknowledges she’s a born star. Daisy’s personality is huge, but it’s not just the band over which she’s running roughshod — it’s the show. Source: hollywoodgossip.co.in

A new book about The Doors and Jim Morrison seen from the road manager Vince Treanor: Behind The Doors. The Story Of A Legendary Band's Road Manager (2023) will not be available for purchase through Amazon or international bookstores. Behind The Doors. The Story Of A Legendary Band's Road Manager can only be ordered directly from the publisher Aldus Boek Compagnie, from Netherlands. Source: www.aldusboekcompagnie.nl 

David Warren: Was the glue within The Doors falling apart?

Vince Treanor: After Jim Morrison's death, everybody was shattered, everybody was devastated. It was a case of a reformation of the band. It was a different sound and music. It wasn't The Doors anymore. I knew when I heard the music that this was not good. This just wasn't The Doors and it wasn't going to be a success. Nevertheless, we did the 1971 tour, the four performances, and sure enough, people did not like it. When the five guys played Doors pieces, the audience was ecstatic, really happy, clapping and cheering, when they played the new music, the excitement just wasn't there, they didn't have their hearts in it.

David Warren: A lot of rumors have been said to come from the 1980 biography No One Here Gets Out Alive.

Vince Treanor: That book was not factual. It's Danny Sugerman's dream about making himself an important figure in Jim and Pam's life. He was 14 at the time and claimed to be Jim's confidant. You have a 14-year-old who claims to be the confidant for a 24-year-old alcoholic. Danny was nothing more than a pest, he was a groupie. And I said so in the book. He was constantly trying to sneak into rehearsals, and we had a way to getting him out. Many times, he tried to ingratiate himself to Kathy, by going up and down saying 'I'll open the fan mail' so he hung around the Office, and every once in a while, Bill Siddons would give him some money and tell him 'Go over get me something to drink', sending him on silly errands just to get out of the place but he was nothing more than a pest. He claimed he helped The Doors to move into their new office. He didn't do any such a thing. He was a boy in school, it was 1968, he was 14 years old. What kind of an idiot has a boy moving The Doors into their new Office? 

DW: Did it ever cross your mind that Jim Morrison would never return from Paris or that he'd die at such a young age?

VT: No, nobody suspected that, why would you believe that? Jim had called John a couple of weeks before he died and he said 'I'm feeling better, I wrote some new stuff and stopped drinking, I've cleaned myself up, I realize all the stupid mistakes that I made and I'd like to come back. How about we consider to get together again, you can look at my new stuff and we can go on.' I think Jim called John because he was the one who was adamant that he would never play with Jim on stage again. He was trying to let John know that things were different, that he was cleaned up, and two weeks later he was dead. Nobody suspected that, why would we? There were a couple of post cards and a letter suggesting that things were going well. He and Pam were enjoying their stay in Paris and he was fine. Pamela Courson was a terrible influence, she was one of the sources of his disquietude, they fought often and violently. 

DW: Do you think Pamela Courson contributed to his early death?

VT: Absolutely. First, she was a junkie, she was manipulative, she had him buying her heroin. They argued a lot. She had him buying all the clothes for her boutique Themis and then she gave the clothes away to her friends, Jim would be buying more clothes and she'd give them away to her friends. The whole place was a den of iniquity. She and her heroin buddies would be over there shooting up and smoking grass, while sitting on the floor telling each other how wonderful the world was, while Jim was out there trying to earn money, at that time he was doing HWY. She was one of the causes of Miami's debacle. First, Jim had seen the Living Theater performance, second he had a violent fight with Pam before he got on the plane, then he was totally drunk by the time he got to Miami. When he heard about the Miami promoter cheating him, and he was determined not to do a show in Miami, that was why there was so much talking and not so much singing. You could talk to him when he was sober, and it was interesting cause he could talk about things that people didn't know, understand and didn't think about. That made him seem extremely brilliant. 

The times have changed for the worse. I like steam locomotives, rockets, electronics, I love the machinery, all the things that made the United States great, the industry that made America great. America lost its heavy industry and will never be great again until the United States wakes up and realizes it handed its technology to China and they made China not only strong but a strong enemy. That was a stupid thing to do. That's what greed does, a lack of foresight, and the fact that you can get into bed with the politically opposed, and make a goal of it and you can't do it. All you do is make them a stronger enemy. Source: www.popexpresso.com

-Patricia Butler: In the spring of 1973, Pamela Courson was living in San Francisco with Michael Verjaska. She had been friends with Michael for a few years but they became lovers after Jim died. She was also dating Randy Ralston. My sources of information about Pamela not being a heavy heroin user before Jim Morrison's death are: the LAPD report; Pamela's autopsy report; January Jensen and Ellen Sander's recollections; Ellen Sander hastened to refute Pamela's rumored heroin addiction while she was in Paris, and after. "When she stayed with me, I did not see her do anything like that. And if she was a heroin addict in Paris -- it's awfully hard to hide it. It's not like you can put it down for a week. I saw no evidence of any kind of hard drug usage while she was at my house, and I was with her almost constantly." January Jensen, who lived in nearby Sausalito and became Pamela's confidante, echoed Ellen's observations.

-Frank Lisciandro: I read the so-called first-hand account written by Alain Ronay which was published in Paris Match magazine. He contends that he was there and that he knew what happened. Then again, I spoke with Mrs. Courson—Pamela’s mother—who told me what Pamela told her over the last few years, which contradicts what Alain Ronay wrote. This was a private conversation, so I never have written about it or told anyone in the press. What I will say is that if what Pamela told her mother was true, and if I understood what her mother told me, then it would contradict the major points of Alain Ronay’s version of events. There’s been a lot of talk that Pamela was some sort of heroin junkie. I don’t know that for a fact; I only know that from hearsay. I never saw any marks on her arms, and I never heard her or Jim ever talk about heroin at any time. Likewise, Babe Hill admits to taking nearly every drug known to man with Jim, but he categorically denies that Jim ever used heroin. With the exception of Pamela, there is no one who spent more personal time with Jim than Babe. And anyone who says they were around Jim as much as Babe, is just not being truthful. I think Babe would have seen heroin use by Jim. Heroin was definitely around so Jim could have definitely gotten some, but I just don’t think he would have hid that from Babe or me. And to complicate the matter, there are people out there who make comments about Jim and tell stories about him who didn’t know him at all, but these are the same folks who endlessly speculate as to who Jim was or make up stories because they want to pretend that they really knew Jim Morrison. The fact is that 90% of what I hear about Jim Morrison strikes me as being totally wrong; absolutely and totally wrong. Source: rokritr.com

Rock Wives: Bettye Kronstad, Angie Bowie, Lynn Krieger, Pam Courson (Set the Night on Fire)

An advocate for the downtrodden, Lou Reed gave a voice to those who were never heard before. He showed us people just like ourselves, but although they were underground, they were in no way beneath us. We could easily become them. Bettye Kronstad was Reed’s first wife. She met him as a young college student in NYC in the fading embers of 1968. She memorably recounts meeting him in an elevator where Reed tried to impress her by acting like an imperious jerk and slapping her rear. From meager beginnings, she eventually found herself falling for the moody artist. Ms. Kronstad writes about Reed inviting her to his last performance with The Velvet Underground in August of 1970, and this was the point at which their relationship began. Ms. Kronstad writes of that fateful concert at Max’s Kansas City “The band played notoriously loud, and Cale’s droning climbed over, around, and through us, yet you could also hear Lou singing – screaming, really, over the instruments. Lewis sang his heart out – sometimes, I could have sworn, right at me. It was a bit intimidating.” This would all be fine except for the salient fact that by August of 1970, John Cale had been gone from The VU for nearly two years. He had been fired from the band after a show at The Boston Tea Party in September of 1968. Okay, so this was that kind of book. 

Ms. Kronstad and Reed were in an erratic orbit of each other as Reed left The Velvet Underground, worked for his father’s business, and ultimately made his name as a solo performer. The dialogues contained within the book depict the mercurial Reed as a tortured, emotionally insecure artist who bluffed his way through life to protect his damaged core to the best of his ability. While attempting to work in theater, Ms. Kronstad decided to give Reed a chance, to the extent that she and Lou were living together for several years as Reed came to depend on her for emotional stability. Given that I can’t begin to remember anything that I say to someone the next day, never mind 48 years later, the conceit of the book to recount exchanges is entirely suspect to my eyes in the veracity department. While the exchanges may or may not have happened, the emotional truth of the bouts of emotional and chemical dependency between Bettye and Reed do have the whiff of truth to them. Along the way the pills that Ms. Kronstad was fine with gave way to the demon in the bottle, Johnny Walker Red, who ultimately kept pushing her away from Reed even as she became his emotional crutch by the end of their time together.  Like many drug users, she “drew the line” at needles, only to see Reed succumb many times over their relationship. Ironically, they finally married near the end of their tumultuous relationship, around the time of Reed’s “Berlin” album. Ms. Kronstadt was comfortable with a song like “Perfect Day” recounting the details of their intimacy together, but when Reed used her painful family history as inspiration for “Berlin’s” harrowing narrative, then she finally came to the point where she had to leave Reed. That wasn’t the end of the tale, though. Reed’s manager talked her into accompanying Reed on his crashing and burning “Berlin” tour where she was expected to “mind” the erratic Reed until she walked out on him, finally, in Paris in 1973 after a cocaine fueled argument. 

The doomed relationship depicted here seemed to set the tone for the self-destructive Reed throughout much of the seventies. Bettye Kronstad lives today in Wytheville, VA. While I doubt things played out exactly as depicted here, Reed was depicted with both light and shadow with all of his personal strengths along with his worst tendencies. Lou Reed was a gifted, pivotal artist who dramatically expanded the vocabulary of rock to encompass literary concerns. Yet at the end of the day, he was also a troubled man whose destructive defense mechanisms took their tolls on both himself and those around him. By the end of the book, I marveled at Bettye's ability to leave him behind and move forward on her journey. Source: postpunkmonk.com

As Madeline Bocaro (writer for Dazed & Confused and Mojo magazines, and author of biographies Stardust: The David Bowie Story (McGraw Hill, 1986), and The Wild One – The Story of Iggy Pop (Omnibus, 1988) stated after Lou Reed's passing: "Ironically, Lou's influences were Bettye LaVette, Doc Pomus, Delmore Schwartz, Edgar Allan Poe, 1950s Doo Wop… somehow it doesn’t come out that way, but Lou did it his way. His life was saved by rock n’ roll. But who was Lou Reed? A crazy, cool, sarcastic genius who influenced thousands of lives across several generations. Reed had a bad rep for a nice guy. His masterpiece was Berlin. His 20th and final solo album was Hudson River Wind Meditations (2007). He was finally at peace."

Angela Bowie: David [Bowie] was the one who was gaga over the Velvet Underground. He just thought the Velvet Underground and Lou Reed as a songwriter was the greatest thing that ever happened. Also whatever David was into I immediately took interest. I was that naive and that much of a youngster at that time, I believed that if I echoed what he said, and trumpeted it louder, people would believe what David said was important. As David started talking about Andy Warhol I never told him I thought he was an idiot. I’d shut up on that part. I was the perfect hostess. Iggy Pop and The Stooges were awfully nice to me. I don’t know if somebody had told them that I was well-intentioned or basically nice underneath it all. I suppose the only person who I was really very nervous of knowing was Iggy but I mean he was a sweetheart. I liked Lou Reed intellectually. I loved his conversations, he was so articulate and intelligent, but personally I didn't find him sexy, although he had a sort of romantic, sexy aura. I always thought that he was totally asexual. I did a lot of listening when Lou and David spoke about New York and David would draw him out and get him to talk about what was going on in New York and it was very easy to impress David because England was very backward; I mean, it was against the law to commit sodomy. So you gotta understand where David was coming from is not because he was stupid, or because he was juvenile, or naive, it was because he was looking at it with this whole look of an English man.

At that time in England you realize how repressed they were and how even the slightest hint of that kind of scandal could mean the difference between someone getting a recording deal or someone spending their life playing working men’s clubs in the North of England and never actually becoming really popular, well yeah, you have to remember this is like late 1960s, beginning of the 1970s. It was very different and so when Lou Reed would talk about the Factory and Candy Darling and all of these incredible characters who Andy Warhol was making stars out of, for David that was like America must be the most wide open, wonderful place. And so what I mean is you’re like looking at it from a social mores, and from the point of view that if he hadn’t had all of those experiences, when they asked him in that Melody Maker article and he said he was bisexual, he would never have had the balls to do that unless he’d been around Iggy and Lou and realized that fuck it, if the English wanted to behave like that with that kind of hypocrisy, fuck it, but there was this place in the States where things were changing - not that much in the Midwest but David didn’t know that, he just knew New York. Both Lou and David were extremely professional–which is an over used word–let's says, manic about detail and getting it right and so that’s what they were involved in; they were involved in the musicality of doing something incredible. The Ziggy Stardust tour ended in L.A.–and then Iggy was at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. He was in a terrible state. Iggy was staggering around and apologizing. I can’t remember what he’d done. Maybe he'd tried to fuck me or something. I picked him up off the floor and carried him to my suite. I think David was just as stoned as Iggy was. Later, at the Mercer Arts Center I met David Johansen when he was going out with Cyrinda Foxe so I knew him a little more than I knew Johnny Thunders, these guys were all so cool, too, so sweet. That’s what everybody doesn’t realize is that there was ten years of this stuff going on before the Sex Pistols. I mean, Malcolm [McLaren] even says it and everybody else. The New York Dolls, The Stooges, The Ramones: I thought they were fabulous, because it was caricature and cartoon-like and larger than life. 

I don’t know if Lisa Robinson promoted David Johansen and Cyrinda Foxe as a great couple, but they were a great couple. I thought they were terrific but I only know my own feelings about them but this is a personal opinion and I just felt that Cyrinda always had very little vision as far as her own talent was concerned. Then I think that for her to leave Johansen and go with that crap guy in Aerosmith who was a total ignoramus, you know, compared to David, who was bright, intelligent and treated her well. I mean, she was my friend, I loved her to death, but I’ve never been able to fathom her perception of men. Johansen positioned himself to be with her, he wanted to be with her, he was smart, it would appear to me that he would be an extremely supportive person to be with and stay with. As soon as David [Bowie] said he was going to put Cyrinda in the “Rebel Rebel” video I knew he was fucking her. I think it’s incredible that David and I were together for so long. I can only put it down to my stamina and endurance. I must be some kind of masochist to have been able to endure it. And with David the first thing that shocked me was he could write such intelligent lyrics and so it was very much in the same mode of Lou Reed and Iggy Pop, you know, they wrote intelligent lyrics. Now, you could laugh and say, “Now I wanna be your dog” is an intelligent lyric? Yes it is! Those lyrics conjure an image in your mind. —Backstage Passes: Life on the Wild Side with David Bowie (2000) by Angela Bowie

Robby Krieger: In the fall of 1966. The Doors had recently arrived in New York City to play a month-long residency at the Ondine Discotheque, to finish the mixing of our debut album, playing five half-hour sets each night, finishing just shy of sunrise. On our nights off, drummer John Densmore and I explored jazz clubs in the Village. During the daylight hours, keyboardist Ray Manzarek and his girlfriend, Dorothy, ventured out to the museums. Even though the New York crowd hadn’t heard our songs before, they seemed to dig us, and the local groupies seemed fascinated by these mysterious aliens from California. I had brief flings with several of them, including Rory Flynn, a six-foot-tall model I knew from back in L.A., who also happened to be Errol Flynn’s daughter. I found out later that the groupies at Ondine’s compared notes with one another and bestowed ratings on their conquests. I didn’t get much attention from anyone after Rory, so I must not have rated too highly. Before I met my wife, Lynn, she was hanging out with her friend Peggy at the New York apartment of a guy forebodingly known as Danny Overdose. Peggy found Danny’s supply of liquid Owsley acid (a particularly potent formula) and said, “Let’s have a tea party!” Instead of placing a single droplet on their tongues, Peggy and Lynn filled up half a teacup each and started sipping. A normal acid trip kicks in after about a half hour; the Owsley hit them almost instantly. The people outside on the street suddenly appeared to have bizarrely long necks, and their heads were bobbing around like they were in some sort of spooky cartoon. In hopes of finding a new way to look inward, I tried an alternative to acid: morning glory seeds. I had heard that by eating the crushed seeds I could achieve a similarly psychedelic high. So off I went to my local florist. Despite my wife Lynn’s negative experiences with acid, she had no interest in meditation and rolled her eyes whenever John or I talked about it. For all my dedication and practice, she said she never saw much of a difference in me. I was already a mellow guy. According to her, if I got any mellower I would drop off the face of the earth. Lynn’s mom was a fanatic Catholic who dragged the family to regular church services and forbade any of her eight children to curse, even though she herself cursed all the time. Lynn’s dad was generally laid-back, but her mom had wild mood swings and kept the whole house on edge. When Lynn was a teenager, her brother told their mom that Lynn had gone on a date with Sammy Davis Jr. It was an absurd story, intended to inflame their mom’s simmering racial prejudice, but it worked better than expected. Lynn’s mom not only flipped out in the moment but held it over Lynn’s head for years, no matter how many times Lynn attempted to explain that it was a joke. Lynn had to get out. She couldn’t take the pressure and the hypocrisy and the oppression, so she escaped into New York City to go clubbing whenever she could. At only sixteen years old she moved into an apartment on the Upper East Side with one of her closest companions, a gay hairdresser named Kenny. By the time Lynn was eighteen, she had friends at clubs all over the city, so she had no trouble getting into the Ondine Discotheque when the Doors made their New York debut in 1966. I didn’t meet her that night, but Jim Morrison did. She met the humble, gentlemanly version of Jim and was predictably charmed by him. That night, with the enthusiasm of a tourism board member, Jim told her all about Los Angeles, and how the West is the best. Palm trees, sunshine, beaches… she was sold. She and her friends drove cross-country and saw that Jim wasn’t lying. But he hadn’t been too forthcoming about his relationship status. One day during her visit, she was hanging out at Jim’s house on Rothdell Trail in Laurel Canyon when Pam walked in and shrieked, “Jim! Who’s that?” Lynn asked. “Oh, this is Pam, my girlfriend.” 

Jim had failed to mention Pam before then. Lynn wasn’t naive; but a secret, official, live-in girlfriend? Lynn ran out of the house and down the steps past the Canyon Country Store. Jim chased after her, shouting, “Don’t go!” Somehow, Jim convinced Lynn to keep hanging out with him. She went back to New York and they met up whenever the Doors traveled east, and she saw him whenever she took trips out to L.A. with her friends. It was the beginning of the hippie era, and L.A. wasn’t as crowded or as noisy as Manhattan. At first it was almost too peaceful for Lynn, but after a while — convinced that she could maybe solidify things with Jim if she lived a little closer to him — she finally made the move to Laurel Canyon. Jim tested Lynn’s limits just as he did with everyone else. Once they were at a party at a fancy Malibu beach house, with a deck that stretched out over the sand. Lynn was leaning over the railing when Jim grabbed her ankles and hoisted her over the edge. He held her dangling there as the blood rushed to her head. She screamed, “Get me up! Get me up!” He made a single demand: “Tell me you love me.” She could barely sputter out the words because she was so furious, but she told him what he wanted to hear and he pulled her back onto the deck. At first it was easy for Lynn to cope with Jim’s behavior because she had been surrounded by one type of craziness or another her whole life. But he kept pushing. Lynn’s relationship with Jim officially ended for good when she moved to a house at Horse Shoe Canyon with a new group of friends.

By early ’68, though, we were both officially single, and Lynn's hilarious sense of humor, her East Coast edge, and her fearless spirit set her apart from other girls and made her irresistible. So one night when I found out that Lynn was going to be at a party at a mutual friend’s house, I made sure to attend. I had recently bought a burgundy Porsche 911S, so I gallantly offered Lynn and her friend a ride home. Like every dumb guy, I tried to show off by gunning the engine and taking corners at dangerous speeds. Nothing physical happened that night, but it was the first chance Lynn and I had to really get to know each other, and we started hanging out. I never asked Jim how he felt about me dating Lynn because he still had Pam, so it seemed like everything had worked out well for everyone. About a year later, Lynn and I moved into a house in Benedict Canyon that would later become the inspiration for the song “Hyacinth House.” Later, Jim complimented me on my choice of partner. He never went after Lynn again. Lynn and I remain together to this day. Set the Night on Fire is dedicated to her. "This book is dedicated to Lynn Ann Veres, my wife of fifty years so far. She’s the only person I’ve ever met who lets me be me. And that’s why I’ll always love her."

Pamela Courson never tried to put a wedge between Jim and the band. She never meddled in our creative process. I always thought she was good for Jim. Their relationship may have been tumultuous at times, but they never had any major fights when I was around. They made their own rules. It was clearly an open relationship since they were both seeing other people, and that incited trouble from time to time. But they genuinely seemed devoted to each other. A true couple. And even their unstable version of stability was better than Jim bouncing from girl to girl every night. Pam used to date Arthur Lee from Love, who called her Yellow Tooth due to her discolored incisors. But her sweet looks outweighed her dental shortcomings enough that John hit on her at the London Fog before Jim ever did. Her squeaky voice and goofy demeanor made her appear sweet and innocent, but she was crazier than Jim in some ways, taking up with weird guys and doing heroin. To many men that would be a negative, but Jim had finally met someone who could walk on the edge right alongside him. Pam was too flaky to get into poetry or literature on the same level as Jim, but she was smarter than most people realized. Some people question whether she was calculating the cost-benefit of dating Jim in the name of a financially comfortable future. I can’t say that wasn’t a factor, but she still legitimately loved him. It was a complex coupling, to say the least. The bottom line is that she was weird, he was weird, and they were lucky they found each other to be weird with. Pam and I were both Capricorns so we always got along well. She seemed to get along with the other band members and all our girlfriends, too, even after Lynn’s awkward introduction to her at the Rothdell Trail house. But Jim and Pam were often in their own bubble. I don’t think Pam ever consciously tried to separate Jim from the rest of us. She just hung out with all these junkies and oddball Europeans, and the separation naturally evolved. I can’t say for sure that moving to Paris with Jim in 1971 was her idea, but I’ve always believed that her long-standing affair with a French count/heroin dealer must’ve factored into her enthusiasm for the idea. After Jim died, Pam returned to the States, exited the airport, got in a cab, and entered into a heroin-fueled fling with the driver, who happened to also be a drug dealer. I saw her only a few times after that. She was still the same Pam, but her silly side had been blunted by severe depression. She never wanted to talk much about what had happened in Paris, of course. The last time I ran into her was when Lynn and I met Ray and John and their wives for dinner up in Sausalito. Pam coincidentally walked into the same restaurant with another new boyfriend  and made chitchat but then excused herself to eat at a separate table. There has always been speculation about whether Pam’s fatal overdose was accidental or intentional. I couldn’t possibly say. I just know she was sad. And one way or the other, the grief took her. —"Set the Night on Fire" (2021) by Robby Krieger

Heroes and soulmates: John Kennedy Jr & Carolyn Bessette, Jim Morrison & Pam Courson

Investigating heroism in mate choice: An article published in the July issue (2021) of Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, by Bhogal and Bartlett, sheds light on the importance of heroism in the context of mate selection. Participants were required to read various scenarios (four involving a target with low/high heroism, plus two control situations) and rate the desirability of the target for both short-term relationships and long-term relationships. Compared to men, women expressed greater desire for heroic targets. Nevertheless, heroism mattered to both sexes. Desirability of heroic romantic partners: It is puzzling why heroism exists at all. After all, heroism is quite nonadaptive. According to Dunbar and Kelly, “Brave, courageous and self-sacrificing individuals” should be rare, “both in evolutionary terms (sacrificing self for unrelated others is not an ideal way of promoting your own genes) and in terms of lifetime survival chances (the more risks taken, the greater the likelihood of disaster).” However, we also need to remember the following: While it is true that heroes are risk-takers, heroes’ risk-taking is prosocial. Perhaps this explains why women are attracted to heroic men. After all, care and concern for others are important qualities in a supportive romantic partner, particularly one who might become a parent one day. In their own investigation, these researchers found male bravery had the biggest impact on female choice for short-term sexual partners. For long-term partners and friends, however, altruism was more important. And to the extent heroism relates to risk-taking, it might signal fitness (in mating situations), thus increasing the desirability of the person as a romantic partner, at least for short-term relationships. As Bartlett and Bhogal state, “Through displaying heroic behavior, one can signal that they can bear the costs of behaving heroically, thus making them more desirable in mate choice contexts.” Source: www.psychologytoday.com

“Against the exceptional individual are the great numbers of men, trained in a vice that ensnares them.” —Jim Morrison

Jim Morrison talked of his cosmic soulmate Pamela Courson to one of his last lovers, Eva Gardony: “She was a child when we met, and I feel responsible for her because she never grew up. She has been everything for me, my mom, my sister and my daughter.’ And he forgave her a lot of things. Even though at times she was impossible to be with—because she would be stoned or bad tempered—he would say, ‘She’s a sweet child.’ It was touching he just felt he had to take care of her the rest of his life. They argued, both had their grievances, like ‘You done that to me, and for that I done that to you.' But they always gravitated back to each other after every little escapade. He always spoke of Pamela with total affection. Pamela was quick, she was witty, she was funny; she was neurotic. She had the clarity of a child, with very good intuitions, and an innocence that Jimmy loved in her a great deal.” —"Jim Morrison: Friends Gathered Together" (2014) by Frank Lisciandro

"It wasn’t that I didn’t like Jim Morrison. I just didn’t really know him as a friend. One time, I was at the Tropicana Hotel, on Santa Monica, and out of my window I saw Jim and Bryan MacLean standing, face to face. All of a sudden, Jim socked Bryan in the mouth, pretty hard. Bryan made the mistake of mentioning Pamela or something. I actually thought that was the best thing I’d ever seen Jim Morrison do. Bryan said that they were arguing and Jim hit him square in the mouth. I said to myself, “Regardless of what I think, Jim Morrison’s got a heart.” —"Arthur Lee: Alone Again" (2001) by Barney Hoskyns

"Everything that he did with his power, his fame, it was all about some greater good," Rose Marie Terenzio (his former executive assistant at George magazine) said of John Kennedy Jr. "He's truly missed for the way that he gracefully took that mantle of responsibility and lived an honorable life full of integrity—and he's missed for what we all want, which is somebody to look up to and to be proud of." 

Kevin Myron (Celebrity & Spectacle: The Making of a Media Event): John Jr. signifies purity and virtue since the act of publicly shaming his cousins is an attempt to separate himself from those negative connotations. There is also a discourse of family betrayal running through John’s figure, that he somehow broke the code of family protectionism. Here, we see that in life the acceptable discourses for a Kennedy figure might be much more complex and controversial than in death. Last, if we analyze all of the television tributes and coverage of John Jr.’s death, we get the realization of the American dream, where the Kennedy family is seen as American Royalty, with John Jr. as the fallen prince. We get a vision of politics, where liberal is not seen as a dirty word. John Jr. embodies the Kennedys’ brand of compassionate, pragmatic democratic politics even though he never ran for office himself. We saw John Jr. as the newest tragedy from a family virtually defined by the dialectic of tragedy/success. I want to address Carolyn Bessette here now. She is a powerful image and certainly powerful from the perspective of the image of the marriage. She does a lot of things symbolically and from the perspective of a sign to perpetuate this. First of all, she fulfills the popular myth of Camelot. There must be a queen or at least a princess in Camelot, and Carolyn Bessette filled that purpose in a very, very compelling way.  —Celebrity & Spectacle: The Making of a Media Event/Mediated Realities of the JFK Jr. Tragedy (November, 1999) edited by Gregory Payne

50th Anniversary of Jim Morrison's death

wemissyoujim · The Village Recorder Tapes

Audio book poems read by Jim Morrison.

The sister of Doors singer Jim Morrison said their father, a decorated flag officer in the U.S. Navy, offered to resign as his son became a counterculture icon. George Stephen Morrison served from 1938 until 1975, retiring as a rear admiral with 15 career decorations, including honors for valor and merit. He fought in World War II, Korea and Vietnam. In a recent interview with the Del Mar Times, Anne Morrison Chewning recalled that her older brother had been known for misbehavior long before he found fame with the Doors. “Jim was loads of fun,” she said. “He would do pranks and silly things, and he would get us into trouble on the Navy base.” Even though the first song Morrison wrote was a collaboration with his pianist father, Anne said that George Morrison “just didn’t understand Jim’s poetry, and he was clearly not into rock ‘n’ roll.” At one point, the officer wrote a letter to his son, telling him to “to give up any idea of singing or any connection with a music group because of what I consider to be a complete lack of talent in this direction.”

Anne – who compiled an upcoming book of Morrison's writings – added: “I only heard this later, but my dad offered to resign from the Navy if what Jim was doing was upsetting to the Navy – and my dad loved the Navy! It was really special to him, and he didn’t want anything to upset the apple cart with the Navy. But, in the end, he didn’t have to resign.” Both of Morrison’s parents outlived him by decades, and although they were estranged at certain times, Anne said the singer told people they were dead in order to protect them from his world. On the subject of the Doors song “The End,” which refers to a character killing his father and sleeping with his mother, Anne noted that "people would whisper to me: ‘Are your parents upset about ‘The End?’ And I’d say: ‘Not in the least. The lyrics are just a Greek myth.’ Jim did it in a new way, and I loved the drama of it.”

On his record label biography distributed in 1967, Jim Morrison listed his parents as dead. "He just didn't want to be involved in dad's life," Chewning observes today. "And he knew dad probably wouldn't approve of some of the things he was writing and singing about - and his behavior and his life. He was just totally the opposite of my dad. So, I think he just decided to separate." Chewning moved back to California with her husband and infant son shortly after discovering that her brother was a rock star. Hearing that the Doors were due to fly into Los Angeles, she decided to surprise Morrison at the airport. "We went and met him - my husband and my little son. Jim looked at me and said, 'You don't happen to be my sister, do you?'" It was the start of a joyful reunion for the Morrison siblings. Chewning dropped in on a Doors session, where Morrison gave a sweet mid-song shoutout to her baby boy.  Source: people.com

They also visited the home Morrison shared with his girlfriend, Pamela Courson, and cooked them a Thanksgiving meal. "We'd see him, but not often," Chewning admits. "We were all in our 20s, I was pregnant. People were just busy in their own lives. You didn't know that soon it would be the last time. There just wasn't an urgency, which was the sad thing. I didn't ever see him perform. I wish I had." When Jim Morrison died on July 3, 1971, at the age of only 27, he left behind a formidable library of notebooks and loose-leaf. One scrap bore the heading "Plan for Book," followed by a short outline for how to organize his original works. He never lived to finish the project, but now, 50 years after his death, his family has fulfilled his creative wish. Chewning, who wrote the prologue for “The Collected Works,” is the co-executor of her late brother’s personal estate. She devoted years to compiling and guiding this comprehensive new book, which includes a foreword by novelist Tom Robbins and an introduction by Frank Lisciandro, Morrison’s close friend and collaborator.

“I knew several Jims,” Lisciandro writes in his introduction. “The shy loner who was my classmate at the UCLA School of Film; the rock performer who was always raising the stakes on what was culturally acceptable; the lyricist, poet and writer who surprised me with notebook pages of complex poems and gifts of self-published books ...” In one of his notebooks from the trial, Morrison wrote: “The joy of performing has ended. Joy of films is pleasure of writing.” Those sentiments are shared by former Doors guitarist Robby Krieger. His memoir, “Set the Night on Fire,” is due for publication this fall by Little, Brown and Company. The Morrison men were never able to put aside their differences - in life, at least. "It's too bad," says Anne Morrison Chewning. "Pam called my dad after Jim had died and said they had talked about Jim reconnecting. It had only been five years or six years. That's really not very long in terms of most lives." 

“There’s so many young people who just see him as a rock star,” Chewning explains. “I want to dispel the ‘Lizard King’ and all those things that you hear. We wanted the reader to see the complete Jim, to see that he was a full writer in multiple areas, thinking in lots of different directions.” Agreeing that the trial made Morrison realize he needed a reset and led him to seek solace in Paris, Chewning says the trip was “kind of what he needed.” “He actually said, ‘Maybe I was ready to be done,’” she shares. “He was quite drunk and who knows what he was saying. But he said himself, ‘Maybe I wanted this to happen, so I could be done for a while.’ Later, reflecting on his conviction, he admitted, “Miami blew my confidence, but really I blew it on purpose.” For Chewning, going through her late older brother’s writings was bittersweet. She was amazed at the vast sum of writings he completed at such a young age. But it’s what Morrison envisioned for his future that touched Chewning the most. But there were glimmers of hope, as he also wrote about his “desire for family” and wished for “a chance to write my Paradise Lost?” “Doesn’t that break your heart?” Chewning asks, adding that she’d never heard him speak about wanting a family of his own, but that he was always “very sweet with children.” Source: www.thedailybeast.com