Labile emotions, Jim Morrison

Psychiatrist Oleguer Plana-Ripoll knew that many individuals have multiple conditions — anxiety, depression, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. He wanted to know how common it was to have more than one diagnosis, so he got his hands on a database containing the medical details of around 5.9 million Danish citizens. He was taken aback by what he found. Every single mental disorder predisposed the patient to every other mental disorder — no matter how distinct the symptoms. “We knew that comorbidity was important, but we didn’t expect to find associations for all pairs,” says Plana-Ripoll, who is based at Aarhus University in Denmark. The study tackles a fundamental question that has bothered researchers for more than a century. What are the roots of mental illness?Scientists have found evidence that many of the same genes underlie seemingly distinct disorders, such as schizophrenia and autism, and that changes in the brain’s decision-making systems could be involved in many conditions. Researchers are also drastically rethinking theories of how our brains go wrong. Perhaps there are several dimensions of mental illness — so, depending on how a person scores on each dimension, they might be more prone to some disorders than to others. The most immediate challenge is working out how to diagnose people. Since the 1950s, psychiatrists have used an exhaustive volume called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, currently in its fifth edition. It lists all the recognized disorders, from autism and obsessive–compulsive disorder to depression, anxiety and schizophrenia. Each is defined by symptoms. The inherent assumption is that each disorder is distinct, and arises for different reasons. However, even before the DSM-5 was published in 2013, many researchers argued that this approach was flawed. 

Few patients fit into each neat set of criteria. Instead, people often have a mix of symptoms from different disorders. Even if someone has a fairly clear diagnosis of depression, they often have symptoms of another disorder such as anxiety. “If you have one disorder, you’re much more likely to have another,” says Ted Satterthwaite, a neuropsychiatrist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Psychiatrists have tried to solve this by splitting disorders into ever-finer subtypes. “If you look at the way the DSM has evolved over time, the book gets thicker and thicker,” says Satterthwaite. But the problem persists — the subtypes are still a poor reflection of the clusters of symptoms that many patients have. As a result, the world’s largest funder of mental-health science, the US National Institute of Mental Health, changed the way it funded research. Beginning in 2011, it began demanding more studies of the biological basis of disorders, instead of their symptoms, under a programme called the Research Domain Criteria. In 2019, the World Health Assembly endorsed the latest International Classification of Diseases (called ICD-11), in which some psychopathologies were newly broken down using dimensional symptoms rather than categories. The challenge for the dimensionality hypothesis is obvious: how many dimensions are there, and what are they? Satterthwaite calls this “a very large problem”. Ultimately, a future version of the DSM could have chapters devoted to each dimension. A 2009 study found that thousands of gene variants were risk factors for schizophrenia. Many were also associated with bipolar disorder, suggesting that some genes contribute to both disorders.

One study of six psychopathologies found that the brain’s grey matter shrank in three regions involved in processing emotions: the dorsal anterior cingulate, right insula and left insula. But subsequent studies by Adrienne Romer, a clinical psychologist now at Harvard Medical School and McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, identified a totally different trio of regions with roles that include the pons, cerebellum and part of the cortex. One key to making sense of this might be to focus on the brain’s executive function: the ability to regulate behaviour by planning, paying attention and resisting temptation, which relies on many brain regions. Romer and Satterthwaite have independently found disruptions in executive function in a range of psychopathologies — the suspicion being that these disruptions could underlie the p factor. Suicide is one of the most observed symptoms in DID and suicide rates reported as 70 - 72% in DID and presence of a dissociative disorder was the strongest predictor of a suicidal behavior. DID is highly associated with consequent risk of recurrent suicidal behavior. Self harm, labile emotion, and impulsivity suggest the diagnosis of comorbid borderline personality disorder. Evidences show that Borderline personality disorder (BPD) and DD have often been reported to occur comorbidly. BPD diagnosed in 30% to 70% of DID patients. “I think it’s a time for much more empirical research rather than grand theorization,” says Neale. At the genetic level at least, he says, there are many disorders, such as PTSD and generalized anxiety disorder, that remain poorly understood. Source: www.nature.com

Alan R. Graham: I believe Jim Morrison was descending deep into depression and alcoholic schizophrenia. Frustrated by the mediocrity of his fans, Morrison distanced himself from thems. In his last interview before he left for Paris, Jim had told a reporter, “One morning, I woke up and was surrounded by all of these spirits.” 

Jeff Finn: Subtlety, in the form of fine-detail gray-scale shading, is in order if we are to fully empathize with Jim Morrison's wounded core. When You're Strange briefly broaches the reality of its title: feeling like a stranger, or an outcast. It's been noted elsewhere that Jim Morrison knew that pain, which hit at a young age, so it begs the question: why didn't DiCillo wade further into that particular mire, in order to extract the actual motivations that drove a volatile artist to raging alcoholism, depression, and early burnout, all in a pre-rehab world? It's convenient to now view Jim Morrison merely as a popular icon/cultural oddity and forget that, in the end, the psychic pain that came with feeling like an outsider was what ultimately secured his psychedelic place in the rock pantheon. When I met with Alain Ronay, whom Oliver Stone had hired as a consultant for his Doors film, he told me he marched up to Stone, and asked him why he wasn't telling the truth about Jim. According to Ronay, Stone smiled and said, "Because the truth doesn't sell."

Patricia Butler: I had no opinions formed about Jim and Pamela when I started out my research. I didn't have many opinions formed. That's why it was easier for me to dismiss the oft-repeated theories when actual facts proved those theories to be wrong. I talked to Dr. Arnold Derwin, The Doors' occasional physician. At the time Jim left for Paris, Derwin hadn't seen him professionally for over a year. In truth, Jim was in bad health when he left the States. Ray Manzarek remarked on his horrible cough. Jim filled a prescription for asthma medication just before he left the States. There is difference between what people believe and what they say in public. I know from personal experience that Ray Manzarek, for instance, said many things in public which, in private conversation, he'd laugh about. Manzarek actually confirmed that Jim's asthma was giving him real problems before he left the States. Danny Sugerman, too, would write things for public consumption because it was good for the Doors's mystique, not because he believed those things to be true.  Despite later revisionist claims, Sugerman was not even friendly with Jim at the time. So asking what certain people believe is not the same as asking what what they'll say "on the record." When I spoke to Alain Ronay regarding that interview he did for that Italian magazine, his exact words to me -- and I remember them very well, because he actually cried -- "How could you believe I would say such terrible things about Jim and Pam? I loved them both so much." He swore to me that he had been grossly misquoted and his statements completely misrepresented. Now I don't know whether that was true or not. I can easily see Alain saying sensational things in order to sell a big story to a magazine, and then crying over it when he got called on the carpet for it. I also talked with the Morrisons, who confirmed Jim suffered from asthma since he was a child. Until the 1990s, Jim's parents never visited his tomb in Paris and later Pamela's sanctuary. I was really angry with Stephen Davis when he called me. When he did tell me what he was planning for his book, I found it completely disgusting, not to mention entirely irresponsible. But Davis didn't care. What do you think sells more books -- the truth or the scandal? I recommend Frank Lisciandro's book as one of the few reliable books. Frank told me Paul Ferrara had refused to be interviewed for Friends Gathered Together because Ferrara 'didn't have a good recall of Morrison.' More than that, I think, Morrison had not a good recall of Ferrara, given his flirtation with Pamela.

Virginia Flagg: I did not deal with Jim in public but there are witnesses of our friendship, albeit a bit perplexed that I visited his house. He goofed on never explaining my privileges or purpose in his life. Other than that, our relationship was very reclusive. I spent a lot of time at his house in Laurel Canyon, and Pam knew it. Pam came to trust me, and I had lovely times with her as well. Pam was bright, beautiful, charming, and funny. I never went to a Doors concert but sometimes I hung out with Jim in the afternoon during setup, or after a concert. Once I gave him acid tied to a flower before the Hollywood Bowl concert, as I lived up the hill, and he asked me to come by--but there was a form of wisdom that I gained early on, by not getting in the line that would assign me to groupiedom and would have made lose my objectivity. I only slept with Jim once. Believe me, if you had ever slept with him, you would not forget it--it was an infectious state you found yourself. Pamela was Jim's true love, she was his little girl, and the woman he chose. In that era the artistic scene in Los Angeles was a relatively small community, compared with what it birthed later. About the influence of Warhol/Nico on Jim, I don't think the Factory's scene mixed that well, being Jim straight. My grandfather was James Montgomery Flagg who collaborated in the creation of the "I Want You" poster when FDR asked for a more sobering image for Uncle Sam. John Barrymore and my grandfather were bohemian friends. In the 60s I worked serving drinks in the booths of "The Brave New World" (the coolest underground club, even moreso than Bido Lito's). One night, amidst Arthur Lee and Frank Zappa and the Mothers--suddenly sauntered a rebel dressed in nondescript jeans and a tattered shirt, and I was struck by the sheer weight of his authority onstage. My heart was swollen, it was truly stupefying. Jim was way ahead of the times in his consciousness of what was coming. I was an acquaintance of Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison though Jim referred to me as a friend. We exchanged poetry and he liked my poems. I never idolized Jim Morrison. He was a man of considerable inner strength and personal integrity but his faults were many, with a tendency to self-pity and evasiveness, and I dealt with those faults as well as I could. Source: groups.alt.music

"If you watch the footage of Jim speaking with Pastor Fred Stegmeyer you see more of the real Jim. He was very cordial and, at heart, a true southern gentleman." -Robby Krieger. It’s refreshing to see him sober and enjoying a conversation in this segment of The Doors: Feast of Friends (1970) documentary directed by Frank Lisciandro. The mystique of Jim Morrison kind of fogs the true side of what he was like. It was really nice to see this side of Jim. He listened, he was respectful and gave intelligent answers to the pastor.

Strange Days with Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison

Like a Rolling Stone may have been more revolutionary, but Visions of Johanna has a strong claim to be Dylan’s greatest song, a parade of luminous symbolism that manages to be both mystifying and incredibly potent (“The ghost of electricity howls through the bones of her face”). His Nashville backing band, meanwhile, sounds perfect: subtle but insistent, the small-hours setting of the lyrics seeping into the sound. In the mid-60s Dylan complained that he had never written anything as “far out” as the strangest folk ballads, but on Desolation Row, he succeeded in taking the ballad form to a completely new place. It’s a cliche to compare it to TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, but it fits: 11 stark minutes of oppressive, absurd imagery that never slackens its grip on the listener despite its length.

As I’ve listened to the song during these last traumatic weeks, I’ve come to see “Murder Most Foul” as Dylan’s gift to the world at another terrible moment in our history, when our leaders have failed us and we are living through a calamity that seems to have no end. Like Kennedy’s murder in 1963, the federal government’s utter failure to protect the people in 2020 is a collapse of biblical proportions. Life expectancy, a basic indicator of a society’s health, was simultaneously improving around the world, except in the United States. What we hear in “Murder Most Foul” is the weary voice of a Nobel laureate who’s closing in on his 80s, walking us through our trials and tribulations as only a great poet can do. Clocking in at over 17 minutes, “Murder Most Foul” is the longest song Dylan has ever recorded, just surpassing “Highlands,” released in 1997. President Kennedy “being led to the slaughter like a sacrificial lamb” by unseen men seeking to collect “unpaid debts” who killed “with hatred and without any respect.” Backed by the melancholy chords of his piano, Dylan takes us through the terrible images of the Zapruder film of the assassination that he’s seen “thirty three times, maybe more” (“It’s vile and deceitful—it’s cruel and it’s mean / Ugliest thing that you ever have seen”). At its most essential level, “Murder Most Foul” marks the collapse of the American dream, dating from that terrible day in Dallas, when a certain evil in our midst was revealed in ways not seen for a hundred years—a day that, for Dylan, myself, and others of our generation is forever seared into our collective memory. The murder and the hidden machinations behind it, he tells us, robbed us of Kennedy’s brain, a symbol for the positive, forward-looking American spirit that he represented, and “for the last fifty years they’ve been searching for that.” The contrast between the culture of Dylan’s musical past and the Trump-stricken country of today is summarized in his take on Kennedy’s plea to the nation, turned upside down: That’s the place where Faith, Hope, and Charity died. As Dylan points out midway through the song, they mutilated Kennedy’s body for science, but nobody ever found his soul.  Source: www.thenation.com

Jim Morrison is the ultimate Rorschach Test, in that people only see what they want to see and it is often through a personal myopic view. To some he is forever the leather-clad rebel rock star challenging society and the powers-that-be. To others he is the quiet, introspective poet, and to many raised on the cinematic cartoon from Oliver Stone, he is a drug-addled narcissist with almost no redeeming qualities. There is seemingly no end to the Morrison maze. As Jim’s close friend Frank Lisciandro says: “The fact is that 90 percent of what I hear about Jim Morrison strikes me as being totally wrong; absolutely and totally wrong. The stories that have been made up about Jim Morrison outweigh the facts by so much that I don’t even know where to begin to remend the fabric of truth because its been so torn apart.” Robby Krieger: “Why did Jim go to Paris? It was partly that we couldn’t play anywhere and partly that he needed to broaden his horizons, get rid of all the hangers-on, and just be with his lady. It was unexpected. But there was nothing we could say. Jim obviously needed some kind of vacation, and eventually we all agreed it was a good idea.” Morrison was allegedly seeking a “artist expatriate” lifestyle comparable to many of the writers who found a sanctuary in the City of Light, like John Singer Sargent, Lawrence Durrell, Edith Wharton, etc

However, while the other Doors maintained that Jim did not quit the band, their manager at the time Bill Siddons insisted in no uncertain terms that Morrison was done with the band. “Jim did quit the band. That’s not a rumor, that’s a fact. Jim said that he was leaving the band and was going to pursue other avenues for the foreseeable future. In my mind, Jim had left, but because he hadn’t defined his new future as a screenwriter or whatever he wanted to do, he may come back. While Jim was in Paris, the other three Doors auditioned other singers because they knew that Jim might never come back. A friend of mine at A&M Records had recommended this guy that he had heard and I even ended up managing this guy who was going to replace Jim as the lead singer of The Doors. His name was Mike Stull.” Danny Sugerman controversially wrote in Wonderland Avenue that Pamela Courson had confessed to him that Jim snorted some of her heroin, thinking it was cocaine and overdosed. Of course Pamela died 15 years before Sugerman published this particular story; a story, incidentally, which he never bothered to mention in his 1980 Morrison biography No One Here Gets Out Alive (cowritten with Jerry Hopkins), even though he knew this story by that time since Pamela died in 1974. The number of people who could be called Jim’s closest friends and confidantes can be counted on one hand. Pamela Courson, Babe Hill and Frank Lisciandro are the best known; yet only Lisciandro is available to talk. 

Frank Lisciandro: Anyone who engages in substance abuse spends a lot of time reconstructing reality for themselves, so how can you really know who a person really is when they’re always reconstructing their own reality. The sober Jim Morrison was such an appealing dude, and such a gentle and considerate person. However you also have to understand that this “drunk Jim” wasn’t always hostile. Sometimes he was hilariously funny when he drank, sometimes he was charming and witty, and he loved to play the fool for laughs at times. There were times when I saw him get drunk and obnoxious, but a vast, vast majority of the time he was more playful and just social when he was drunk. I just never felt that he was playing games with my head at all, never. I never once felt that way, but I did see him manipulate or try to use a situation to screw with people. But then again, from my experience, these were usually people who had it coming [laughs]. 

I think Jim assumed a stage character. His stage persona was the character he played. And when it worked he could not only entertain the audience, but also scare them and getting them on a whole other consciousness trip. I can say that Jim's motions were different onstage, his demeanor was different and his voice was different. He was acting a part. There was something about being onstage that forced him to assume a persona that wasn’t his own. Maybe there was a fear or insecurity that forced him to become someone else. Maybe it was simple stage fright, maybe it was his role in the script he had written. Maybe it was in the tradition of shamanism. Who really knows why?

-Steve Wheeler: Did Jim ever talk to you about being disgruntled or tired of performing with the Doors?

-Frank Lisciandro: We know that Jim didn’t like playing in the larger arenas. He told me that countless times and he’s also on the record saying that he wasn’t interested in being a jukebox and pushing out the same twelve songs every show. He was a creative person, so, of course, he wanted to do different things. So who was the guy onstage? It depended on the stage and the night. There was a different Jim Morrison on the stage in Miami in 1969 than on the stage at the Hollywood Bowl in 1968. We have the film and can see what kind of performer he was at the Hollywood Bowl, and he was a pretty damn good performer that night. And while the Hollywood Bowl is a fairly big place—when compared to a club like the Whisky—he was still able to create his magic; like he did with his performance of “The End” that night. I can tell you without hesitation that Jim really didn’t have a lust for material possessions, because it was not his goal to make money with his art. The money he did make with the Doors, he would spend on a shop for Pamela or making a movie like he did with HWY. Pamela was friendly enough with me, and I had some short conversations with her over the years. I even stayed at their house one time and she was perfectly friendly to me when we were together, but I can’t say that I really knew her. I can say that when Jim talked about her, it was always in praise of her or about what a great job she was doing with the shop. Jim was very supportive of her. I think she was about three years younger than Jim, so there could have been a bit of shyness. Sure, I’ve heard stories about Pam from other people, but I dismiss them. I try to talk about only what I personally experienced, and not repeat gossip. No other woman had anything close to the relationship with Jim that Pam had. The main reason he gave for going to Paris was that Pam wanted to go there and live. He had completed his contract with Elektra, and he wanted to do some writing over there and he also was taking HWY with him to show to some French film people that he had met previously—Agnes Varda and Jacques Demy—to get their feedback and opinions as a way to maybe find some funding to make films. There were multiple reasons and objectives for his going. Pam was there and he wanted to be there with her. 

I did get the feeling that he felt a sense of disappointment that the “movement” that he had become part of after his rooftop experience in Venice—that is the movement of music and art and the re-establishment of an American Renaissance in the arts—had been co-opted by the media and by commerce. I believe that it all went sour for him. I don’t recall any specific words that he said to bolster that belief, but I had the strong feeling that he felt a sense of loss for that initial Summer Of Love movement when it wasn’t about business, but when it was about artistic freedom and community and peace and saving the planet. Jim said it out loud more than once to unreceptive ears that he was tired of continuing his music career the way it had become. He said this in interviews in various ways, and he said it to me on more than one occasion specifically, that performing in big arenas—the size that the Doors had begun playing in—was something that wasn’t enjoyable to him. In fact, he was talking to Michael McClure and other Hollywood agents about writing a screenplay for one of Michael’s books at the same time that we were working on the editing for HWY. He was really, really interested in film at that time more so than he was in his music career. In my presence, he did talk about the fact that he just didn’t enjoy performing anymore. He did suggest that he would enjoy performing if they could do it in small clubs again, where he first felt the magic, but he didn’t want to do the large venues anymore.

There’s definitely a disconnect from the real Jim Morrison and it’s because people have been making up stories about Jim Morrison for more than 30 years. All of us, who were his close friends, all have the same remembrances of Jim being very discreet. He was just rather smart in not saying private things to people who didn’t need to know about them. There are so many stories about Jim you hear from people who have suspect motives and even less credibility. Did they actually know Jim Morrison? I’m reminded of the communication experiment in Psychology 101 where one person tells another person a story and then he repeats it to someone else and so on down the line. By the time the story gets to the fifth person it’s a complete jumble that has nothing to do with the original story. And, in the case of Jim, you can see what has happened. There are folks telling Jim Morrison stories who met him once or twice and maybe had a drink with him. My advice to those interested in Jim is to believe very little of what you hear or read.

-Steve Wheeler: There are quite a few theories about Jim’s death, did you ever get involved in that parlor game mentality or try to find out anything?

-Frank Lisciandro: Well, I’ve read stories and I’ve heard stories over the years. I read the so-called first-hand account written by Alain Ronay which was published in an Italian 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 don’t feel comfortable repeating it and 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. Then there’s the fire department’s report, the medical examiner’s report, what Bill Siddons has to say, and before you get done you’re more confused than when you went into it. 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; so I don’t have any first-hand experience to conclude that Jim died a heroin death. I do know that a lot of stories that I’ve heard about me are totally made-up and completely untrue. So why should I take any stories about Jim or Pam as gospel? 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. These are people who met him in a bar for an afternoon, people who casually ran across him for five minutes, people who really didn’t know him, but these are the same folks who endlessly speculate as to who Jim was or make up stories about him 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

Patricia Kennealy rewrites her own love life in "Blackmantle," a messy and rather dizzying fantasy novel, which is too vengeful and wild to be enjoyable. Imagine her autobiography "Strange Days," but with a lot more murder. Her alter ego Athyn was born on a battlefield to a dying mystery woman, and was brought back home as a foundling by one of the surviving warriors. Years later, she is cast out of her family's home, and goes on to become a legendary brehon. Then she discovers she is actually the hereditary queen of Keltia. During this time, she also falls in love with famed bard Morric Douglass (Jim Morrison's alter ego). Eventually the two are married, as Athyn drives out the Firvolgi invaders. But the beautiful junkie Amzalsunëa (Pam Courson's alter ego) is still obsessed with Morric, and poisons him when he comes to comfort her. Now Athyn goes on a rampage against anyone who wronged Morric -- and then she goes into the underworld itself, to challenge the god of death. At first glance, "Blackmantle" sounds like a sci-fi version of the Orpheus legend. But it becomes clear this is a therapy session put to paper, where Kennealy can get revenge on all the people in her life who have ticked her off, then live happily ever after with an idealized, faithful Morrison. It gets a little stomach-turning, in more than one way. It certainly doesn't help that Athyn is such a nasty person. Reality and fantasy collide with a nasty splat in "Blackmantle." In the end, it seems merely like a way for Kennealy to get back at Pam Courson and the Doors in fiction, as she could not do in life. Source: www.amazon.com

Patricia Kennealy: I didn’t really hang out with musicians, it wasn’t my job. Like they say in Almost Famous, “it’s not your job to be friends with them, it’s your job to criticize them.” When you see them over and over again you do develop a personal fun relationship with them. Janis Joplin was a pet of the magazine. We loved her so much and we were devastated when she died. Janis was so amazing. Jimi Hendrix, I was not a fan. All the musicians I met told me what a great musician he was and how incredible he was and frankly, I just didn’t hear it. I was an Airplane girl, I was a Doors girl, a Grateful Dead fan to some extent, but Jimi Hendrix, I just didn’t get it. Lillian Roxon was the first who commented in print my association with Jim. I was indirectly mentioned as “a chick who Jim promptly balled on the living room floor”, and “the next morning Jim’s old lady (Pamela) showed up to complain 'Jim, you always ruin my Christmas'”—a clear reference to the incident at Diane Gardiner’s house in December 1970. Before, Richard Goldstein wrote a 1968 piece about Jim and Pam for New York magazine, in which he remarks Jim “picks up his girlfriend” and they all head out for the beach. I think Jim wanted to protect her privacy so Pam wouldn't be bothered by the fans. The hardcore bandfollowers and people in rock circles knew about Pam. Another writer, misled perhaps by flawed chivalry, even claimed Pam was “Jim’s intellectual equal”.

I wasn’t around Pamela Courson all that much, I only met her a couple of times. For whatever reason Jim needed her in his life. I do believe she killed him, absolutely. Most people think that’s a really terrible thing to say but I really do believe it happened. I mean maybe it wasn’t deliberate or intentional, more like, “here, Jim, just take this, it’s cocaine” and it wasn’t, it was her smack. There are many many theories about how it actually happened, many contradictory stories about he was in a nightclub to score heroin and he came home and overdosed. But he didn’t do smack, you know, when he talked about it he said that heroin was horrible and he didn’t understand why Pamela did it. Maybe Pam just stood by and let Jim take the heroin in hopes of getting him hooked along with her, as junkies are so fond of doing to their nearest and dearest, to cut their own guilt and shame. Also, as an emotional batterer, Pam Courson was right up there with the gold medalists. Jim died because Pam fucked up as much as he fucked up. Source: rocknwomen.avidnoise.com

“Pamela showed me a marriage certificate when I was in Paris with her. Clearly no one else in Jim’s life was as close to him as Pamela was. Of course she was his wife, Pamela was Jim Morrison’s soul wife if nothing else.“ –The Doors’ manager Bill Siddons.

In Patricia Kennealy's Strange Days we don’t see any instances of Pamela being a big bitch to Jim Morrison. In fact, she comes across as rather sweet and nice, which only seems to make Kennealy angrier. Patricia Kennealy: 'Pamela Courson had great charm, when she wasn’t strung out on smack or screaming at Jim like a fishwife, by all accounts both regular occurrences.' Most of Patricia's knowledge of Pamela in the book was secondhand information from other people, and she seems to have only focused on the negative. And again, this is a third-hand account we’re supposed to believe. Note how she says “by all accounts.” So, she didn’t actually see this, she just heard it through the grapevine from who-knows-who, and took it as gospel. She doesn’t even say it was according to people who knew Jim well, or people she trusted. Most of the actions Kennealy attributes to Courson are hearsay or theory. Her 'highly respected' musical Jazz & Pop magazine has pretty much been forgotten except for the pieces they produced on old-time rockers like the Grateful Dead, Frank Zappa, and some jazz guy called Jim Pepper. In Strange Days, it's funny when Jim suggests that Patricia Kennealy was a secret lesbian and she loses her marbles. Later, Patricia goes apeshit when she discovers Janet Erwin having sex with Jim. And the handfasting ritual she describes honestly doesn’t sound like Morrison’s taste. Patricia met Pamela for maybe a couple of hours. James Riordan credited Pamela as Jim's longtime companion and their relationship as the predominant relationship of his life, saying 'their romance was a tumultuous blend of tenderness and uncontrolled passion right from the beginning and this fire and ice quality lasted right to the end'. Riordan also refers to Pam Courson as Morrison's sexual and intellectual equal. Source: authorial-madness.com

Horse Girl, Mental Illness, Straight Whisky

Alison Brie’s Sarah in Horse Girl (2020) is an intriguing part for her. Effortlessly empathetic, Brie has always had an interesting presence, and no matter how crazy her character gets throughout, she never loses our sympathy. Rather, it’s an occasionally frightening look at what it's like to have your sense of reality slowly snatched away from you, where, to a certain extent, you know you’re losing it but can’t help but go down the rabbit hole. Beana does something interesting by taking us right into Sarah’s mindset. From the start, we know she’s an oddball, spending all of her nights at home obsessing over a cheesy drama called Purgatory. We know she’s sick, and in a daring move, for the last act, we experience the world wholly through Sarah’s fractured perspective, a unique approach to dealing with mental illness that has an unsettling, open-ended effect. As a result, the movie takes on a surreal, dream-like quality, bordering on sci-fi. Overall, it works pretty well, even if the occasional surreal touches from the perspective of other characters feel a bit out of place, as if they couldn't make up their mind whether they were making a serious film about mental illness or a surreal, David Lynch-style mindf*ck. Composers Josiah Steinbrick and Jeremy Zuckerman help build the bizarre tone of the film. Shimmering music matches tender moments. Droning sounds match Sarah's dream sequences. Elements of her mind bleed into each other illogically, which is visualized by editor Ryan Brown's experimentation to portray the way her mind works: subtle cuts and slow dissolve transitions create time and space lapses; ominous sound edits portend her deteriorating mental state. The final scene elicits more than one interpretation, and viewers can find closure in the established ambiguity, but they won't experience a neatly tied-up ending -- just as lingering mental illness will not offer a clear resolution. Source: www.popmatters.com

Interpretation by Imdb user Palange Music: It seems that many people think it's about mental illness, but there is one detail that they seem to overlook in the very beginning. If you watch the first few minutes, when they are talking about ancestry-like dna tests, you will notice that when the conversation concludes, Sarah walks away and Joan notices out the window that there is a horse in the parking lot - she catches just a quick glimpse of it and makes a strange face (about 2:30 into the film). At the end of the film when Sarah is walking her horse (which she took without permission) she walks past the shop and it shows the exact same frame and Joan's reaction to the horse being in the parking lot (1 hour 35 minutes approximately). If you look closely the same cars are in the parking lot and you can also see Sarah standing with Joan proving this is intended to be the same scene as the one in the beginning. This would mean she actually did jump back in time. To me this proves that she is not crazy and that it was intended to be a science-fiction film (time travel/aliens or unknown creatures, etc.) Source: www.imdb.com

In his essay “The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years,” Greil Marcus writes of Jim Morrison, “Here’s this nice-looking person on the stage all but threatening you with a spiritual death penalty and turning you into a jury that convicts yourself.” As usual with Marcus we are not entirely sure what that means. One of the most infamous onstage jams was the fleeting union between Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison on stage at hip New York club Steve Paul’s The Scene in the spring of 1968, while Janis Joplin looked on. Peace and love wasn’t on the agenda when what should have been a supreme meeting of minds disintegrated into a chaotic brawl that ended with Joplin smashing a bottle on Morrison’s head. It sounds like Janis Joplin was just lying in wait because she felt Jim was being rude to Jimi Hendrix. Obviously Morrison could be crude, weird and obnoxious, but this just sounds like typical drunken stupidity on the part of all parties involved.

Danny Fields (publicist, Elektra Records): I was working for Elektra, which meant I was working for Jim Morrison, but he and I didn’t get along. I knew Jim was at The Scene that night, and Jimi Hendrix was always there. And I was a teenage boy who worshipped Janis, so I knew she was there as well. Janis’s hatred of Morrison, I don’t know where it started. But if you mentioned Jim’s name she would say: “That asshole.” She was not going to put up with what she thought was his childish behaviour, wherever she encountered it. Janis stepped on the stage and hit Jim over the head with the bottle, then she poured her drink over him. The three of them, Morrison, Joplin and Hendrix, started grabbing and rolling all over the floor in a writhing heap of hysteria. They were in a tangle of broken glass, dust and guitars. Naturally it ended up in all three of them being carried out. Morrison had been sending off danger signals from the moment he got there. He was behaving like someone from the sewers. Morrison was the most seriously hurt. Source: www.amazon.com

Dawn’s Highway (2019), a short story by Jim Cherry:

A phone booth stands alone, empty in the Los Angeles night, its dull plastic light an island, in the sea of neon fused darkness. a car pulls up to the curb and a lone figure gets out. The car pulls away, the figure walks to the phone booth closing the door behind him. The inside light pops on illuminating him, a silhouette in relief against the night. He takes a dime out of his black jeans, and picks up the receiver, he puts the dime in the coin slot, waiting for the dial tone. As the phone rang on the other end, his girlfriend picks it up. “Yeah, it’s me,” he says, his voice a soft conspiratorial whisper, “we just got back into town tonight.” Jim was walking down Sunset Boulevard, he’d been wearing the same clothes for the last couple of days, black jeans, t-shirt, boots, a dark welder’s jacket. His pants still had some remnants of desert sand in the creases and folds, he had other reminders of the desert as well, the cuts and bruises on his face. It had only been six months since he’d come down off of Dennis Jacobs roof, where he’d subsisted on acid. Under the summer sun he burned away a lot of ideas of himself and while the rest of the city slept he took notes at a fantastic rock concert in his mind, as he wrote down the songs he heard. No one, not even his friends had understood that. Most of the time, they only saw the Jim they wanted to see, the Jim they expected. A police cruiser drove past, one of the cops was looking at him, suddenly it screeched to a halt and the cops jumped out. “Are you Jim Morrison?” “Yeah,” Jim said defiantly, “who wants to know?” The cops pushed him against the wall of the nearest building and pat him down before handcuffing and putting him in the back of the cruiser. The cops hustled him through the police station and they threw him into an interrogation room, his hands still cuffed in front of him. Jim understood the game they were going to run on him and wondered which would play the good cop, and which would play the bad cop. “I’m officer Ellison and this is officer Hanson, we’re the investigating officers.” The suit jacketed cop said. “Investigating what?” “Do you know the whereabouts of one Phillip O’Leno?” Hanson asked, taking the lead. “Not really.” “He’s missing, we think he may have been killed.” “What makes you think I had anything to do with it?” The cop stared at Jim hoping the silence would intimidate Jim. Jim returned the stare. “Where’d you get all those bruises from?” “Some bikers didn’t like our long hair.” “Do you have a job?” Ellison asked in a softer tone, trying to break through the barriers Jim had up. “No.” “What do you do for a living, son?” Jim thought a moment, considering the audience. “Nothing you’d understand.” “We really don’t care about you kissing some Mexican girl,” Hanson said with a look of mild distaste on his face. “Why don’t you just tell us what happened out in the desert son?” Smiling, Jim asked, “What if life is nothing more than an act of remembering?” The cops looked at each other, perplexed by the question. “What if we’re dead already and just remembering this?” The two cops just looked at each other, “What if we’re just sitting around remembering life and telling each other our stories?” “What’re you talking about son?” “You know, like Sunset Boulevard, Citizen Kane, Carousel.”

Flashback: “Manzarek isn’t like you, he isn’t a poet, he’s a capitalist, he wants fame, money, power.” Jim remembered Felix Venable's words. “Felix, since you're not going to let me drive,” Jim said, “wake me when we get somewhere,” as he lay down in the backseat. The car pulled up in front of a roadside bar, it was a sun bleached, weather-beaten wooden building with a porch running across the front, there were some motorcycles parked off to the side of the building. “Wake up Jim, we’re here!” “Where?” “Somewhere.” Felix said. They went inside, it was cool, quiet and dark, despite the soft moaning of the jukebox. The bar ran the length of one wall, a little farther in and across from it was a pool table, sitting at a table were five bikers with their girlfriends. All the guys were dressed in leather jackets, white t-shirt, jeans, and biker boots. The girls were all dressed in low cut flowery blouses and tight pants. They all watched as the outsiders came in, Jim was the first to get to the bar. “What can I get for you?” The bartender asked. “Beer, por favor,” Jim said, smiling broadly. “We’re on a mission of discovery,” Jim chimed in smoothly, “looking for a new world.” “A new world?” the biker said, “you mean a new world like when Europeans came here and killed our ancestors?” “No, it’s like space, but instead of going outwards we want to go inward.” “You college boys are tourists slumming, looking to get high.” Phil and Felix turned to their beers, While Jim looked around taking in the surroundings trying to memorize everything about the place, he caught the eye of one of the girls. Her blouse was low-cut and there was the undulation across the top of her breasts as she walked, came up to the bar, ostensibly to get a drink. She sidled up next to Jim, and he started talking to her. The bikers started to notice and get agitated, the talking amongst themselves grew louder. Phil was the first to notice and leaned over to Jim, “I don’t think that’s such a good idea Jim.” “Why not?” “Well, for one,” Phil said, “you almost got us busted in L.A. when you jumped out of the car and kissed that chick.” “Phil,” Jim said innocently, “she was a beautiful angel, and I just thought I’d break the ice.” “That’s beside the point Jim, all those guys over there are getting upset.” Jim looked over at them, and roared, “Well, fuck them!” The bikers all stopped talking and the leader walked over to Jim. “You like my girlfriend, gringo?” “Who says she’s yours?” Jim questioned. “We’ll see who she leaves with.” “You like girls?” the biker confronted him. “Why? You want to fuck me?” Jim said in a mocking tone. “More like fuck you up.” The biker punched Jim, Felix jumped up and blindsided the biker and then there was an explosion of sound, as chairs crashed to the floor, and the bikers jumped on them. The bartender started yelling, “You’re not going to break up my bar!” Jim, Felix, and Phil jumped into the car, the tires spinning out a cloud of dust and rock in their wake. Jim was thoughtful and he didn’t want to expose himself, Phil would understand, but Felix would think him naïve and mock him. “I want to live a life without regret.” “You think that is possible?” the shaman asked, “for every choice you make you may later mourn what you’ve lost or suffer what you’ve gained.” 

Jim didn’t know what to say, ever since he could remember he knew what answers a teacher was looking for. He knew which buttons to push to impress a school teacher. The shaman said, “You can’t expect knowledge to be given to you.” “Why not?” “Knowledge is power you have to earn it and if you risk not using it wisely, it can destroy you.” “What will happen when we take the peyote?” Jim asked. “It will change the way you see the world.” “How?” Phil asked. “Each of you differently, what you fear is out there but you will also find the greatest joy.” “And afterwards?” Jim asked. “You will awake on dawn’s highway,” the shaman said, pointing towards the road. “What’s at the end of this dawn’s highway?” “No one knows what’s at the end of the highway, madness or bliss.” Jim looked enthralled for the adventure, Phil, hesitant, not sure if this was a trip he really wanted to go on. Jim looked to the sky, it was dark, and the moon was full and bright and held dominion over the desert. The music throbbed, he looked around and saw the concert in his head, clearer than he ever had. The scene was bent, curved, as if he looking through some other lens, there was a sea of people. The music pulsated through his body, it was scintillating, a scream came ripping through the atmosphere and he realized it was from him. Out of the darkness he saw a silvery spiderweb, he felt the prickling of fear at the edge of his consciousness, then some silvery nails pushed down out of the darkness and he knew he was in a coffin, he told himself not to be afraid if he let the fear in it he couldn't return from his trip. “What about all those aphorisms you’re always spouting from Nietzsche and Rimbaud? Aren’t those your rules?” “I’m beyond that, man. Nietzsche and Rimbaud are just signposts in the wilderness, they tell me I’m on the right trail.” He is already missing the horizon, thinking they should have lingered on the beach. They are in West Hollywood now. Vegetation contending with sidewalks, palms leaning in over cornices. Billboards obstreperous, affronting the senses. “Nietzsche gave us Zarathustra. And then the lights went out. He went mad.” Jim looks now over at his friend. “Oh come on, Jim.  You’re not mad. Just back off on the booze.” Smiling now, but eyes widening, Jim's stare is vacant: “Madness begets madness.” That stare unnerves him. The flatness of it, as though James Douglas Morrison had turned into pure ice at the center of hell. In his movie mind, Jim saw the final scene of the sensuous wild west for a turned-on generation, in disconnected images with the mind choosing the order, creating its own context. As he neared The Whisky he could feel the music thumping through the walls, the doors. He walked in and was swallowed by the music. Source: medium.com

Straight Whisky (2004) by Erik Quisling & Austin Williams: With varying degrees of success, Quisling and Williams reconstruct 40 years of hip-shaking, altered consciousness and groupie-love at Sunset Strip nightclubs Whisky A Go-Go and its sister establishments the Roxy Theatre and the Rainbow Bar & Grill, in an attempt to bring to life the L.A. music scene since 1964. Focusing on random events meant to emblemize the Whiskey ambiance and demonstrate its cultural impact, the authors chronicle the club from its early Tinseltown days to the Black Flag riots. The list of acts that have graced the stage of Whisky is a veritable who's who of rock, with compelling tales of Jim Morrison passed out back stage. Williams recounts the time Charles Manson dropped by the Whisky just days before the mass killings at Benedict Canyon, harassed a waitress and was thrown out by the owner, Mario Maglieri. Central to rock 'n' roll history, the Whisky was a place of raw, untethered emotion, debauchery and mayhem. As Henry Rollins claims in his surprising foreword, "When you think about who's been at the Whisky, it reminds you that LA actually used to have some culture. Now LA seems just to be sort of a cultureless wasteland. But back then, there was a real scene. Something worth real documentation." Source: www.amazon.com

Mario Maglieri, who presided over a rock ’n’ roll mini-empire on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood at the Whisky a Go Go and the Rainbow Bar & Grill, where he nurtured generations of musicians with encouragement, food and tough love, died on May 4, 2017 in Los Angeles. The Whisky a Go Go was opened in 1964 by a former policeman named Elmer Valentine, who soon asked Mr. Maglieri, a friend from Chicago, to help run the club. It became a critical part of the Los Angeles rock scene. For a time, the Doors were the house band. Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin also played there. So did Led Zeppelin, the Byrds, the Who, Otis Redding, the Turtles and Neil Young. The Beatles demanded to visit the Whisky when they toured the United States in 1964. Mr. Maglieri understood that some needed a free meal at the nearby Rainbow Bar and others a kind word. “I don’t think it was innate in him to love rock ’n’ roll people,” Lou Adler said in a telephone interview. “But being around it for all those years, he just took a fatherly, grandfatherly, feeling toward these people. He loved those kids with problems, like Jim Morrison.” Mr. Maglieri told The Los Angeles Times in 1993 that he had warned Jim Morrison, the lead singer of the Doors, and Janis Joplin to straighten out, without success. Jim Morrison, Mr. Maglieri said, “was a good boy” who “would look at me all goofed up. I couldn't help liking him for his lack of guile. The reprimanding I gave him didn’t do any good. Too bad he’s not alive. I’d give him a spanking. When The Doors were the house band, I saw Morrison two or three times a week. He was drunk or stoned but he could talk. A bit pathetic, but Jim was a good kid. His girlfriend Pam, a redhead looker, danced as a go-go for a while, but Jim got jealous and he told her to learn to cook instead." In Pamela Courson, Jim Morrison finally met his match. In many ways, she was as bizarre as he was, always looking for something exciting, something special. While Pam entertained a fantasy of one day settling down with Jim and living a normal life, she must have known the reason they thrived together was because both were tormented souls." -Straight Whisky (2004) by Erik Quisling & Austin Williams

"I will never be untrue/Do anything you would want me to/Never stay out drinking/no later than two (two thirty...)/I will never treat you mean/and I won't cause no kind of scene/Tell you all the people/all the places I have been/I will always treat you kind/try to give you peace of mind/Only you tell me that you love me/one more time/Now darling/please don't be sad/Don't run off like that/when you get mad/Cause if you do you gonna lose/the best friend that you ever had/That's no lie/I will never be untrue/Do everything you want me to do/Bring all my loving/all my money/bring it all home to you." -"I will never be untrue" (1969) by The Doors, written for Pamela Courson.

Oliver Stone: Chasing the Light, Making The Doors

A new intimate memoir by the controversial and outspoken, Oscar-winning director and screenwriter about his complicated New York childhood, volunteering for combat, and his struggles and triumphs making such films as Platoon, Midnight Express, and Scarface. Before the international success of Platoon in 1986, Oliver Stone had been wounded as an infantryman in Vietnam, and spent years writing unproduced scripts while driving taxis in New York, finally venturing westward to Los Angeles and a new life. Stone, now 73, recounts those formative years with in-the-moment details of the high and low moments: We see meetings with Al Pacino over Stone’s scripts for Scarface; his risky on-the-ground research of Miami drug cartels for Scarface. Chasing the Light is a true insider’s look at Hollywood’s years of upheaval in the 1970s and ’80s. It will be released by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (July 21, 2020)

“Everyone got the demon in here,” Mickey says in Natural Born Killers. “It feeds on your hate. Cuts, kills, rapes. It uses your weakness, your fears. We all know we’re no good pieces of shit from the time we could breathe. After a while, you become bad. You know the only thing that kills the demon, Wayne? Love. That’s why I know that Mallory’s my salvation. She was teaching me how to love.” Stone's work and his critiques of the way white men have gone about making this country constantly summon James Baldwin, who wrote, “People pay for what they do, and, still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply: by the lives they lead.” We see this most glaringly in Stone’s white heroic depictions, like the hero of Platoon, realizing that he has to pick a side and kill the representative of “the machine.” We see this in the hero of Wall Street selling good fathers, including his blood father, to get in good with Michael Douglas. We see it in the hero in Born on the Fourth of July, buckling under a superior officer’s pressure to lie about battlefield atrocities, then rising up years later to oppose the entire war effort. 

Stone's greatness is his audacity, which lies partially in his talent as a skilled storyteller, but mostly in his ability to explore and exploit his moral mediocrity while standing utterly unafraid of looking at how bad, bad, bad our nation has made you, him, and me. Although he is in many ways very far left by Hollywood standards, he is also not the most enlightened person when it comes to feminism, race relations, homophobia, and the like. He struggles with terminology, and like most straight men of his generation, he tends to go into a rhetorical defensive crouch when interrogated about his language and beliefs. Here and there you’ll see lines that are redacted instead of deleted. No one will ever know who requested the redactions—a lawyer working for Abrams Books; my editor or a copy editor; Oliver; me—or what, exactly, is hidden under the redaction lines, but I wanted them to have a presence on the page, even if you couldn’t actually read them. You should think of these blackened lines as spirits cut down during the battle to get this book published. In 1969 Stone wrote his first (still unproduced) feature-length script, Break, an expressionistic piece that turned the war into a psychedelic interior journey, equally influenced by European art cinema, and the rock and roll that made life bearable for soldiers in the bush. Stone sent a copy of the screenplay to Jim Morrison, who was eking out his final days in Paris; his favorite sergeant in Platoon Elias, is a Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol infantryman, whom Stone described as having a Morrison-like face and a dreamy, mystic quality. 

After NYU, Stone obsessed over the war while he wrote spec scripts, worked odd jobs in the East Coast film scene, and drove a cab at night. In 1976, Stone wrote the first draft of a screenplay titled The Platoon—a more straightforward account of his experiences than “Break,” filled with journalistic details and savage violence, and anchored to a blank-slate hero not unlike Crane’s Henry Fleming. In 1986, Stone finally got to direct Platoon which is set in the sixties, and its story of a young US Army infantryman (Charlie Sheen) morally torn between a stoner Jim Morrison/Jesus figure (Willem Dafoe) and a ruthless leather-faced, alcoholic redneck (Tom Berenger). Chris is noble, naive, doomed: an innocent abroad, coming of age in hell. 

Stone, who sent his first feature-length script “Break” to Morrison right before the singer’s death and modeled Platoon’s Elias on him, has said that The Doors is his fantasy of the rock star as an embodiment of Dionysian fearlessness—a dream figure who carried the emotional arc of the sixties counterculture within him, moving from utopian rebellion and feral boldness to booze-soaked depression, withdrawal, and oblivion. As a film stylist, Stone shares Morrison's interest in breaking away from convention, and at times he frees his movie The Doors from the usual Hollywood formulas, gliding through time and space with exhilarating, psychedelic ease. Stone is less inventive at scene-by-scene storytelling, though. Pamela Courson is depicted as saying hostile things to Patricia Kennealy, when by all reports their interactions were polite. What Stone found particularly compelling about Morrison emerges through such a motif as he studies his hero as doomed not just by internal failings, but also by the specific flaws of his society. Just as much as Nixon represented to Stone both the beauty of America in his capacity to rise from straitened youth to national captaincy—and its dark flipside in his resentment and paranoia—Morrison likewise represents a spiritual America doomed to be tortured by a materialistic age where hedonism is offered as substitute for liberty.  

Deleted Scenes on The Doors DVD — These extended scenes are introduced by Oliver Stone who regrets removing some of them from the final cut: Pamela and Jim are on a plane to New York talking about how they would like to die. Another scene showing Ray and Dorothy Manzarek's wedding, followed by Pamela and Jim shopping for their dinner. Also, Morrison in a motel room crying in company of a groupie. What ruined Jim Morrison? The film, at times, dares to make the outrageous suggestion that he died for his audience's sins. One of Mr. Stone's most effective tricks is to fade out the sound entirely at one crucial moment, as Morrison becomes fatally out of touch with his audience. Perhaps Morrison is symbolic of the death of the artist in a society bent on war and destruction. 

—Steve Wheeler: What are your thoughts about the Stone movie? 

—Frank Lisciandro: "I found it to be intolerable. Oliver Stone did not want to know who Jim Morrison was and he did not come close to capturing the essence of Jim. The film never presented the quiet, sensitive, extremely intelligent human being that Jim was. He wasn’t frantic and manic as he is portrayed in this movie. Jim had a sensational sense of humor and that is what is entirely lacking in the Stone film. The guy was hilariously funny and he would make himself the butt of jokes. I never saw Jim lock someone in a closet and set the room on the fire. I couldn’t even imagine him doing anything remotely like that; this was absolutely not in his nature or personality. He was not a violent person. If Jim needed to get back at you, he would do it with words, and he could be devastating that way. Jim loved to laugh and he was not shy about laughing at himself either. He had such humility that he would do that. Yes, he did some crazy things on occasion, but he was also a warm and sensitive person a vast majority of the time. There’s a balance that you don’t find in the movie and that imbalance totally eliminates the real Jim Morrison from the screen.”

—Steve Wheeler: We did interviews with Morrison's closest friends, bandmates, managers, and others over the years. People thanked us very much for searching and exposing the truth, and not the usual unrealistic, ignorant, garbage gossip people are presented 99% of time. I do find it sad that Stone refused to show any of Morrison's good sides. Even Danny Sugerman, not one to shy away from spewing myths and salacious rumors about Morrison, admitted: “It’s Oliver Stone’s version of Jim. There is some truth within it, but it’s not the truth, and it contains numerous fictionalized accounts and considerable exaggeration.” Robby Krieger: “Oliver was only interested in the self-destructive, brooding personality so he was focusing on that aspect of Jim. We were always complaining that the script was too dark, and that’s why Ray bailed on the movie. Oliver did make Jim into a caricature. I mean Jim could be a little freaky from time to time, but not all the time like the movie would have you believe.”

Jim Morrison: “The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you'll always be seeking. I've never seen anybody really find the answer. They think they have, so they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer."

"Yeah, I missed out on the sixties," Stone admits. "I'm not angry about it, but I am saddened that I missed it—especially the healthy male/female relationships. I never had a coeducational existence. The sixties had this enormous sense of sexual liberation. Women started to come out of the closet and fucking was 'in'. It was stylish, fashionable. I missed all that, and the honest, open man/woman communication that came with it." Stone saw Jim and Pam's relationship as a great love story: "She may be basically a figure of innocence, but I see the movie character of Pam as a monster, too. She's very much a sixties child, not too thoughtful, not too intelligent. She decides to ride the snake with Jim, she can hold on and stay with him all the way out—till the point where she's willing to die with him. What I like in their story is that Jim had this loyalty, too. He stuck with her to the end. That's at the center of the movie. He really loved her. Morrison was even darker than we showed in a lot of ways—what struck me was his sadness and depression. I couldn't find the exact Jim. He's an enigma. Nobody could play Jim Morrison but Jim Morrison." —"Oliver Stone: The Controversies, Excesses, and Exploits of a Radical Filmmaker" (1995) by James Riordan

“Part of what made it easy to play Jim was that he was a brilliant actor. He acted a lot. He didn’t want people to know him and he presented something which prevented you from getting close.” -Val Kilmer

We're reaching for death on the end of a candle. We're trying for something that's already found us. Everything human is leaving her face. Soon she will disappear into the calm vegetable morass. Stay! My Wild Love! Earth Air Fire Water. Mother Father Sons & Daughters. Airplane in the starry night. First fright. Forest follow free. I love thee. Watch how I love thee. Shake dreams from your hair. My pretty child, my sweet one. Choose the day and choose the sign of your day. A vast radiant beach in a cool jeweled moon. And we laugh like soft, mad children. The time has come again. Choose now, they croon. Beneath the moon. Enter again the sweet forest. Enter the hot dream. Everything is broken up and dances. Your milk is my wine. My silk is your shine. —Wilderness (1971) by Jim Morrison

Ray Manzarek: A lot of people didn’t care for Jim’s shades back in the day. My wife complimented him on them and he seemed stunned. He told her “Pam thinks they look too far out there.”

Alan R. Graham (ex-husband of Jim Morrison's sister Anne): Pamela Courson was so very close to Jim Morrison from the beginning because of her love for his poetry. She told him he was a real poet before anyone else did. In return for her love and nurture, Morrison let her deep inside of his heart. He needed this kind of love badly.

-Matt Zoller Seitz: Do you see a connection between The Doors and Natural Born Killers?

-Oliver Stone: Yeah, I think of it as a line. Filming Natural Born Killers was like being free again. I think The Doors is like Natural Born Killers. It’s in that line of film where with imagery we freed ourselves and allowed free associations. I rewrote Randall Jahnson's script. My concept was to set the story to the songs. The song would set the scene, like we did later in Natural Born Killers. There’d be a song that’d be the mood, and it was written. I'd sent Morrison a script of Break, which was my first script which I wrote when I came back, about Vietnam. It was very psychedelic. I thought Jim could play the soldier. He could play the character of me. It was quite a wild script. I didn’t hear back, of course. I’m used to that, I’ve been rejected before. 

-Matt Zoller Seitz: So he never contacted you?

-Oliver Stone: No. He died in ’71, so that would’ve been probably two years after I wrote the script. I thought Jim was serious, almost suicidal, all out for nothing. I think you see it in the movie, he takes no prisoners. ‘Do you love me?’ ‘Would you die for me?’ It’s crazy stuff. When he left LA for Paris, he was finished with the band. I do think Paris was the beginning of a new stage but it got derailed. I think part of that, this is my opinion only, I can’t prove it, but I do feel that Pamela Courson had a drug problem. My feeling is that he was trying to help her, and kept up with her, and I think he overdid it. We weren’t allowed to depict her addiction, because her parents didn’t want to have any of that, but you can see in the film that she’s high. I actually had access to 120 transcripts through the kindness of Jerry Hopkins, who had collected them. But Manzarek, who I don’t believe ever saw Hopkins’ transcripts, was outrageous in what he said, and totally mean-minded. But the thing that really bothers me is that Manzarek, if you really go over Hopkins’s transcripts, doesn’t figure prominently, except as a musical coworker. He’s Jim’s colleague and all that, he's very important at the beginning, but after the first album you sense Manzarek was a complete opposite to Jim. Everything with Jim was freedom; Manzarek is control. Manzarek is the authority figure. Jim never really had a social life with Ray anyway. Manzarek was like an Iago figure to me. I probably made Morrison more dangerous than he wanted him to be, but I read those transcripts: what was going on sexually, his impotence, all kinds of issues. 

-Oliver Stone: He was an alcoholic with a capital A and he wasn’t that sex-driven as much as he was this idea of sex, and you know, Pamela’s a pretty straight woman, kind of boring in a way, [Redacted] But in other words, I don’t see Pamela as some exotic hippie chick. So Meg Ryan was not bad in the part, although she’s strange somehow. Pam Courson was a strange lady, but I find her to be kind of bland, and I think Jim liked that quiet quality of her. I think he was so outrageous that he wanted the opposite. In the film it wasn’t the way Pam really was, but she would probably be happy with Meg. I think we got away with Meg Ryan. Val Kilmer told me—he broke my heart—at the end of the shoot, he said, "You don’t know how to direct" at the last wrap party.  —The Oliver Stone Experience (2017) by Matt Zoller Seitz

Watergate's Exposed Secret Agenda, Oliver Stone's Controversies, Jim Morrison's American Prayer

Who in 1972 when Watergate broke could have foreseen that the scandal eventually would lead back to President Trump’s uncle John G.Trump, an eminent scientist at MIT in the 1940’s who was delegated by the government among other classified tasks with reading Tesla’s secret files after his death and investigating the UFO phenomenon and then into the next century to Donald Trump inside the White House in a titanic struggle for global control? Only one person foresaw this: President Richard Nixon who 48 years ago predicted that year 2020 would be cataclysmic not only for America but for the whole planet and who 33 years ago predicted that Donald Trump one day would be president. Robert Merritt was employed by the police and the FBI in spying on the New Left, a task that ultimately led to his infiltration of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a bete noire of America’s right wing. That said, Secret Agenda since its publication has been eclipsed by startling revelations that undercut much of its account of Watergate. For example, scholar Jim D'Eugenio recently wrote in the Education Forum, “I mean has everyone read what Angelo Lane said? He was the chief investigating officer for the FBI. He even goes as far to say either Hunt or McCord tipped off the police. I should add, today Jim Hougan (author of Secret Agenda) agrees with that. He feels he was too mild on Carl Shoffler in his book.”  

The work that Merritt did for the FBI dovetails with the numerous revelations of FBI illegal acts described in David Wise’s authoritative The American Police State published in 1976.  On June 8, 1972, the FBI terminated its CI contract with Merritt. He was still, however, employed by the MPD as a CI with Shoffler supervising him. What happened next is history as commonly accepted. Shoffler was parked in a police vehicle one block from the Watergate when Frank Wills telephoned the MPD about 1 a.m. on Saturday, June 17, of a possible burglary underway within the Watergate building. The MPD dispatcher alerted Shoffler to Wills’ call and he accompanied by two fellow officers who also had been in the police vehicle entered the building and arrested the burglars. Shoffler knew in advance that a crime was to take place. He had an obligation to report it to his superiors in the Washington Metropolitan Police Department. Merritt had attempted to alert Sgt. Gildon in the Intelligence Division but he cursorily brushed him off. Shoffler then forbade him to have any further contact with Gildon on the matter. Shoffler, the consummate narcissist, dreamed of becoming a famous detective even if it meant creating a constitutional crisis that would lead to the destruction of the Nixon presidency and the defeat of America’s armed forces at war in Vietnam. 

Enemies of Nixon were aware of a plan to break into the Democratic National Committee on June 18 and that the break-in would result in the downfall of Nixon from the presidency. Nixon responded that he was aware of a general plan to break into the DNC that had been authorized by the government agencies involved in the Huston Plan. He said he did not know any of the details as to who exactly would carry out the break-in. He said the purpose of the break-in was to gather evidence of a prostitution ring being operated out of the DNC that would be used in his reelection campaign. There was some further discussion about the planned break-in that was wrapped up when the President became quiet and thoughtful and then mused aloud, “I wish I could get a handle on this.”   

Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA, was published to acclaim in 1984, I lost no time in buying a copy. I had been the original attorney for the Watergate seven burglars: Howard Hunt, Gordon Liddy, James McCord, Bernard Barker, Frank Sturgis, Eugenio Martinez and Virgilio Gonzalez, having been retained as defense counsel by Hunt and Liddy who had escaped after the five other burglars had been arrested inside the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in the Watergate complex on June 17, 1972. When I checked the index I saw that my name appeared in the appendix.  “Among those who are skeptical of the Ervin committee’s investigation of the Watergate affair, there is a school of thought that holds that some Washington police knew in advance that the June 16-17 [1972] break-in was about to occur. Skeptics as politically disparate as H.R. Haldeman and Carl Oglesby point the finger of suspicion at arresting office, Carl Shoffler. Secret Agenda since its publication has been eclipsed by startling revelations that undercut much of its account of Watergate. For example, scholar Jim D'Eugenio recently wrote, “Has everyone read what Angelo Lane said? He was the chief investigating officer for the FBI. He even goes as far to say either Hunt or McCord tipped off the police. I should add, today Hougan agrees with that. He feels he was too mild on Carl Shoffler in his book.”

Why does Hougan feel differently about Shoffler today? One factor may be that Robert Merritt wrote a book that was published in 2010 titled Watergate Exposed: How the President of the United States and the Watergate Burglars Were Set Up as told to me as the original attorney for the Watergate seven. Our book, which contains a number of documents from the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, proves that it was Robert Merritt who tipped Shoffler off on June 2 of the plan to burglarize the Democratic National Committee on June 17, not Hunt, McCord or Baldwin. Nixon in the wake of the breaking of the Watergate scandal concluded correctly that there was no longer anyone inside the White House whom he could trust. Alghough he was a college dropout, Merritt had an I.Q. of 138. After six months the CIA told Merritt his services were no longer needed and they parted on good terms. But the whole venture had hooked Merritt on the idea of clandestine work for the government. In October 1971, Merrritt worked with the MPD Intelligence Division for about a year, and was transferred to the Washington, D.C. Field Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI assignment primarily dealt with targeting the Institute for Policy Studies and the Weather Underground, two organizations deemed radical and dangerous under the government’s COINTELPRO program. 

Merritt decided to bring to Nixon’s attention of the telephone conversation that he overheard while operating the switchboard at the Columbia Plaza Apartments. The conversation revealed that enemies of Nixon were aware of a plan to break into the Democratic National Committee on June 18 and that the break-in would result in the downfall of Nixon from the presidency. The meeting ended with the President telling Merritt that he would be summoned again to meet with him on an unknown date. Merritt’s final meeting with Nixon took place in the second week of July 1972, three weeks after Watergate broke. Merritt found President Nixon distraught with some tears rolling down his checks. Merritt asked Nixon why he was crying. Nixon pointed to an article about the Watergate case in the early edition of the Washington Post lying on top of his desk. He said he was being destroyed, and his presidency was over. He said that he had been betrayed by many in the White House who were motivated by power and money. He could trust no one. He said John Dean was a traitor and Dean had visited Nixon’s enemies on Capitol Hill before and during Watergate. Nixon also singled out by name General Alexander Haig, Carl Shoffler, T.D. (Shoffler’s police buddy) and Captain Edmund Chung as traitors. The President again acknowledged that he knew of the general idea of a break-in at the Democratic National Committee being planned under the Huston Plan but had  known nothing of its details. He expressed remorse for not taking more seriously the information that Merritt had provided him at their prior meeting. 

Nixon blamed the NSA, FBI, CIA and Military Intelligence for wanting him destroyed. The President spoke about the goals of his presidency that were now in jeopardy. He said it might be years before the historians would realize what he had hoped to accomplish, which was to assure the security and well being of Americans alive and those of future generations. He told Merritt that he was going to give him the letter to deliver to Kissinger. He told Merritt to remain quiet and not say a word as he read the letter out loud. Nixon said, “I took my order from above and have followed it to the T.” Merritt was taken aback by the remark and asked Nixon what he meant. Nixon did not reply directly but instead declared that “the year 2020 would be cataclysmic not only for America but for the world.” Merritt asked Nixon how he knew this would happen. Nixon replied, “Think of me a prophet.”  Merritt never saw the President again. He remembers the occasion as one in which the president was distraught throughout.

As recounted in that posting President Nixon told Robert Merritt at their third and final meeting in mid-July 1972: “It was then at Nixon made a cryptic remark, apparently to emphasize the importance of the assignment that he had given Merritt. Nixon said, “I took my order from above.” Merritt was taken aback by the remark and asked Nixon what he meant. Nixon did not reply directly but instead declared that “the year 2020 would be cataclysmic not only for America but for the world.” Merritt asked Nixon how he knew this would happen. Nixon replied, “Think of me a prophet.” The coronavirus entered America’s consciousness in January 2020. Its impact has been horrific and the worst of it lies in the coming months. Nevertheless it does not fit the definition of being a cataclysmic event, which is one of violent change or upheaval, because soon a vaccine will be developed to deal with it. The real cataclysmic event will take place later this year. Actually it will be two events, the first immediately triggering the second. Source: www.amazon.com

Between the late 1950s and the early 1960s Jim Morrison preferred to skip school and visit beatnik hangouts in San Francisco. Two significant events had shaken America. First the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first satellite to orbit the earth. This sensational event provoked spasms of American self-doubt about being beaten into space by the Russians. It began the so-called missile gap debate that later helped put John Kennedy in the White House. In the summer of 1960, something in Jim Morrison changed. Classmates remembered he seemed to undergo a change of personality. He appeared depressed and angry, and neglected his studies. Apparently he took no interest in the November presidential election—hotly debated in his politically conservative school—in which John Kennedy beat Richard Nixon. But Kennedy’s death occupied a dark corner of the Morrison psyche, making frequent appearances in notebooks and later lyrics. “Dead president’s corpse in the driver’s car” is one of the keystone images from both 'Celebration of the Lizard' and the song “Not to Touch the Earth.” On the same notebook page on which Morrison recorded the Kennedy assassination, he wrote the name of Aldous Huxley. Huxley had died at his home in Los Angeles on the same day Jack Kennedy was murdered. Oliver Stone's "JFK" reprised the circumstances and complexities behind that historic and fateful day: that precise instant when an entire civilization was forever changed. 

Kennedy's death established a milestone that American society had reached unknowingly. It became more significant the further away in time we got historically from that event. The assassination was a huge tragedy that created an inability for the nation to find firm footing after it had been knocked off balance. Leonard Pitts, Jr., a columnist for “The Miami Herald,” wrote: "Whatever you think of the 60's one thing is undeniable: They tore us apart, ripped American society to pieces and threw those pieces in the air so they rained down like confetti, falling into new configurations, nothing where it used to be. It was an angry time—we are still sifting through confetti pieces, trying to find a way.” The events of the 1960's set up the impulse toward “psychic disintegration” we are now encountering in recent times.

Morrison saw what was happening to our souls as a society and reported as a witness to "the vultures descending on the scene for curious America aplomb," a nation possessed and frozen in time. JFK and Jim Morrison seemingly had in common health ailments and a sex addiction, but whereas the President had multiple liaisons with Hollywood stars (Gene Tierney, Marilyn Monroe, June Allyson, Arlene Dahl), Morrison juggled female journalists and groupies. Although often exhibiting a lusty attitude, Morrison was usually both mild-mannered and passionately inclinated with women. He liked to cite John Stuart Mill's quote: "Women are a subject of which most men know absolutely nothing." Inspired by the 60s tumultuous days, Morrison wrote “Peace Frog,” with innovative guitars by Robby Krieger. For Morrison it was a song not only of isolation but a complete rejection of what America had become that suggested an inevitable and violent end. He unconsciously intimated that mayhem in America would become epidemic. In the song’s opening line there is a chorus chanted in counterpoint. “She came” is the chorus that follows Morrison's opening warning, “There's blood in the streets, it's up to my ankles.” “She came,” has a dual meaning. It is an easy reference to sexual climax. But the phrase also refers to a line in the first break, “Just about the break of day, she came, and then she drove away, sunlight in her hair.” The sunshine in her hair is a brilliant image that might be just Pamela Courson. She is a fleeting, unreachable image when she leaves the city, and she remains beyond us, unobtainable, the queen of the highway, beckoning to us on the edge of town. 

Dennis Jacob: Pamela said something I will never forget: “I feel sorry for Mary.” I knew it meant she was not threatened by the emergence of Mary Werbelow in Jim's life. That something had long been settled between Pam and Jim. A relationship deeper than either one of them had ever had before. I’d begun to suspect that something had been settled between the two of them – unbreakable except by death itself. Nietzsche once said: 'In the end what a woman wants is a warrior'. Perhaps the women who gravitated toward Jim Morrison were attracted to this quality. Morrison felt that women had a greater future perhaps than most men would have because most men were concerned with the accumulation of empty numbers. Morrison was the contemplative type, hardly the freak that popular consumption would have us believe. He was Apollonian in his life, and Dionysian on stage. He aimed at the heart of American Democracy. He believed in it. —"Summer with Morrison: The Early Life and Times of James Douglas Morrison, A Memoir" (2011) by Dennis C. Jakob and "Some Are Born to Endless Night: Jim Morrison" (2011) by Gerry Kirstein

Jim Morrison: "Most men chase power and control, but they miss the meaning of life. Women have a comic approach to life. They are noble creatures who carry on your name with dignity after you die."

"When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness.” -Marcus Aurelius

Oliver Stone's JFK (1991) is the way most Americans learn about one of the most traumatic events in their recent history. According to Robert Brent Toplin, JFK has probably “had a greater impact on public opinion than any other work of art in American history.” Indeed, the movie remains a great source of pride for Stone, if not his masterpiece. Hollywood had been chasing the Jim Morrison story over the years. The Doors story had been pursued by eight directors: Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese, William Friedkin, Walter Hill, Paul Schrader, Ron Howard, Barry Levinson, and Francis Ford Coppola. "I read hundreds of transcripts from people who had known Jim," Stone said. However, Jerry Hopkins contradicts Stone saying there were roughly "less than 100 transcripts, and most were mine". Stone expounds: "It was like Citizen Kane in a way, because every one of these people had a different point of view. Still, the Doors script was always problematic. I wrote it quickly that summer 1989 in Santa Barbara. The script was written more as a tonal poem. The concept was that the movie was all in Jim's lyrics. I picked the songs I wanted and wrote each piece of the movie as a mood to fit that song. The motivations of the characters were murky to some, clearer to others. I trusted to his lyrics to tell his tale. I tried not to put my rationalizations about his motivations. Jim looked at everything as an artistic creation. It's almost like he constructed his life in the same way as he would labor over a piece of poetry or a song. I think Morrison looked at his life as an epic poem, as if it were a long suicide note. He had sexual problems, he was an alcoholic in the severe sense in that he had a cut-off point, so he couldn't really enjoy drinking; for him it was an all-or-nothing affair. He couldn't even enjoy most drugs any more, he had to go beyond, into heroin. Everything got jaded." As 1989 drew to a close, Stone's second draft was completed and circulated among the concerned parties. Immediately, there were problems. When Morrison died, he left everything to Pamela Courson, including the rights to his poetry and his share of the rights to the music of The Doors. When Pamela died in 1974, all this went to her parents; after a series of lawsuits, it was now controlled jointly by Morrison's parents and the Coursons. The Coursons weren't at all pleased with Stone's script and tried to slow the production down.

The producers had already agreed not to portray Pamela Courson as having anything to do with Morrison's death (some believe Morrison accidentally snorted Pamela's heroin stash). Manzarek was equally unenamored of Stone. "Oliver Stone was over there in Vietnam and the hippies were back here smoking dope and practicing free love, and he was jealous. Oliver Stone is using the Doors to get revenge." Kathleen Quinlan seemed to enjoy playing the free-spirited Patricia Kennealy. The Kennealy character is a composite of different women who were part of Morrison's life and was originally named Annie O'Riordan, but later changed to Kennealy. "Meg was much more about control than Kathleen," Stone said. "Quinlan in dealing with the sixties seemed to understand it immediately and was able to work easily in that framework. I combined several women from Jim's life and by rights I should have used an alias for the name Kennealy because it's somewhat misleading." —"Stone: The Controversies, Excesses, And Exploits of a Radical Filmmaker" (1995) by James Riordan

John Haeny: "I would never say that I was especially close to Jim.  I actually rather doubt that anyone (besides Pam) was truly close to Jim. When I saw Jim with others he always seemed to be somewhat preoccupied and distant, caught up in his own thoughts, always wary of others. Jim was always warm and polite around me. From time to time we would sit on the desks at the back office at Elektra and have social chats. Over a very long career I have never been intimidated by any ‘star’. I always accepted them as normal people, respecting them as artists but never allowing them anymore than that. I think Jim sensed that in me. I did notice that in really intense situations when Jim and I were in the same studio control room we would exchange brief glances and quiet smiles. Although Morrison was essentially a lonely and tortured rebel, he was likable and engaging in all kinds of conversation.  Jim and I had about a half dozen meetings at my house in Coldwater Canyon to discuss and plan the project "American Prayer". Jim was always clear minded, softly spoken and exceedingly polite. Jim also left me his entire collection of notebooks so I could become more familiar with his work at a formative level. The time came when I heard through the grapevine that Jim had left The Doors.

I had always known that Jim considered himself firstly a filmmaker and a poet. His Rock and Roll life was an unexpected development that was thrust upon him. Now he felt tired of that role. After Jim’s death his notebooks were scattered to the four winds. I think there are still some missing, some sitting in private collections, other lost forever. I resisted every legal, civil and social pressure to give up those initial recordings, especially during the lawsuits regarding the estate of Jim. The Doors then attorney, Max Fink, threatened to send up the Sheriff to pick up the tapes. I told Max to go ahead and try. If he did I would deliver a pile of ashes and he could figure out if they were the ashes of the real recordings or not.  It was somewhat similar during the making of Oliver Stone’s film “The Doors” although with a bit less threat on display. When Oliver’s people contacted me to ask for access to the poetry tapes I simply said “no”. I felt Stone's portrayal of Jim was embarrasing, by the way. The estate of James Douglas Morrison was shared between Jim’s parents and the parents of Pam Courson, Jim’s wife. Individually I always found The Doors reasonable, even warm and funny. But collectively there emerged what I called “The Doors Mentality”. They would become aggressive, greedy, extremely distrustful and could easily become litigious. There were also a big stack of tapes known as “The Endless Night Tapes” recorded during an all night session at a motel room in Palm Springs. But, we had a problem.  Jim’s voice was buried in the roar of a cheap air conditioner in that Palm Springs motel room. We had to reclaim Jim’s story from those tapes. This was going to ultimately involve a trip to Salt Lake City, Utah. The brilliant and highly advanced work of Dr. Thomas Stockham of Soundstream helped us salvage that recording. Dr. Stockham had also created a highly complex digital restoration process called ‘Blind De-Convolution’. Eventually we had all our materials sorted.  Jim only occasionally titled his poetry and never dated them, creating a huge dilemma for us.  We had to discover a way to make order out of seemingly chaos. This was the single biggest challenge we faced during the making of the album. Source: johnhaeny.com