Jim Morrison's mythology, The Flynn effect

Jim Morrison’s voice on the early Doors’ records is haunting. It conjures an earlier self and the need to achieve a spiritual autonomy above all else. This evolution was also reflected in Morrison’s writing, which became more concrete, and in his singing voice, which slowly degraded as the toll of his suicidal lifestyle began to show. “Blood in the streets it’s up to my ankles/Blood in the streets it’s up to my knee,” he sings on the 1970 “Peace Frog,” one of their best late songs. “Blood on the rise it’s following me.” The song, which shows off all the band members’ muscles, is tough to beat as a testament to late sixties dread. On the group’s last album, L.A. Woman, the blues orientation becomes most explicit, as does Morrison’s sense of isolation. Rock’s best long song, “L.A. Woman” has served as accompaniment for countless ecstatic road trips, but it’s more desolate than it sounds, while “Riders on the Storm,” though ostensibly about a serial killer, sounds almost hopeful by the end. The emotional core of “L.A. Woman” comes from its famous bridge, in which the last remnants of the Lizard King dissolve into Morrison’s final incarnation, Mr. Mojo Risin’.

In the Morrison mythology, his admiral father plays the part of the standard 1950s dad, too invested in his career and too repressed to understand his artistic son, whose middle name, Douglas, was for Douglas MacArthur. George S. Morrison’s life was every bit as eventful as his son’s. At 22, he was serving aboard the minelayer Pruitt in Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked. He became the youngest admiral in the navy in 1966, just as the Doors were astounding audiences at the Whiskey a-Go Go on the Sunset Strip and preparing to record their first album. By then, the admiral and Jim had fallen out, polarized by years of mutual incomprehension and by the father’s harsh dismissal of the son’s career plans. When the Doors made it, Jim told reporters that his parents were dead. Though he had seemed on a career fast track, George S. Morrison never became a 4-star Admiral, and Doors drummer John Densmore believes that Jim’s notorious reputation was a key reason why. The navy, Densmore suggests, was reluctant to give the father of the Doors’ lead singer a higher profile. During Jim’s Miami obscenity trial, his defense team admitted a supportive letter from the admiral in which he vouched for his son’s good character while acknowledging that he had barely spoken with him for years. He had followed Jim’s career, he wrote, “with a mixture of amazement and in the case of Miami, great concern and sorrow.”  Source: www.theamericanconservative.com

Earrings owned by Pamela Courson. "Personally given to my aunt by Pamela Morrison during the last year of Pam's life. Pamela was lonely, troubled and severely addicted to heroin. Unfortunately, my aunt was also addicted to heroin, which is how they became friends. Fortunately, she survived to a much older age than Pam. I met Pam only one time during a vacation to visit my aunt. She was pretty, although she looked older than her true age. I only got to spend not much longer than an hour with her, but I cherish the memory. Pamela was a sweet and engaging person, even with the cursing. As curious as I was, I didn't ask any questions about Jim. My aunt warned me not to. Pamela confided to her that she and Jim had been using heroin the night he died and he probably overdosed. I have never worn the earrings since inheriting them, they are an irreplaceable piece of history and were kept in a safety deposit box." Source: www.ebay.com

According to Tone McGuire (from Toné McGuire Media Productions), it was really a testament to Pamela Courson that, despite the difficulty of her relationship with Jim being a musician, she was always going to be the centerpiece in his heart. I think that Jim at the end (in Paris) had done the wild thing and that he was ready to just wind down with Pamela.  Jim allowed Pamela to use his last name as she saw fit. She used both names, Courson and Morrison, and sometimes wore a ring on the ring finger, one that she chose for herself as a symbol of her taken status. Jim gave her whatever she wanted, and happily, because if Pamela was happy, it meant that he could relax too. 

Pamela lived how she wanted to live (she traveled and stayed in nice hotels and flew first class impulsively), and it was because Jim wanted her to. Tone McGuire had a lot of candid conversations with Jim about Pamela, and Jim really expressed to him that Pamela was his one true half, they just struggled a lot with the scene's lifestyle they experimented. Pam had two brief relationships after Jim's death, with Randy Ralston, whom she met at a restaurant in 1972, and Phil Barnett, a friend of hers and Jim's who she lived with for about six months. Phil Barnett took the last known photo of Pamela before she died.  —Pamela Courson-She Dances In a Ring of Fire 

The surviving Doors must have felt resentment toward Jim Morrison (and probably a fair amount of jealousy) to stand idly by and allow for this "image" to get so out of control, or maybe this was their stupid way of staying on the radar. But "No One Here Gets Out Alive" backfired. Since Jim's camp was more than willing to throw him under the bus it has been open season on him ever since. I truly feel that the problem stems from  "No One Here Gets Out Alive". People who were interviewed for the book, from Jim's family members to Doors producer Paul Rothchild, were very angry about how Jim Morrison came across in what, to me, is Rock's answer to "Mommie Dearest". As Paul Rothchild put it, "The best parts of Jim Morrison are not in there." The book was clearly marketed to appeal to a young audience and it took the story of an unhealthy, deeply unhappy, self-destructive young man and tried to coat it with a gloss of "mystique," and people resent that. Morrison did not have a lot of friends in the industry and was probably the object of a lot of jealousy and resentment. 

Maybe if they had put him in a more accurate context - that he was also a painfully shy, self-conscious, lonely, sensitive, perceptive, intelligent young man who battled depression and other emotional problems on top of alcoholism. They also left out the side of Jim Morrison that has been described as sweet, funny, generous, kind and loving. The part about him standing outside his girlfriend Tandy Martin's window before his family moved. "The dark figure got in the car and disappeared" or something to that effect. They angled everything to make him sound creepy. Jim Morrison was sad about leaving his friends again and was taking one last look at Tandy Martin's window.

The Doors producer Paul Rothchild had this to say about "No One Here Gets Out Alive" and Danny Sugerman: "Danny Sugerman took Jerry Hopkins' original manuscript and destroyed it. Danny didn't interview me, Jerry did. Danny then changed a lot of my interview to HEARSAY that other people did. I am furious about the book, and so is everyone else I've talked to who is quoted in it. It's a great piece of sensationalism, very little of which holds to historical fact. Jim is sensationalized rather spectacularly, and the best parts of Morrison are not there. The only people who come off well in my opinion are the groupies and sycophants who were hanging around the band and close to Danny Sugerman - who was a groupie himself." Also, Sugerman insisted on giving credibility to some nasty, self-professed Pagan witch who basically stalked Jim Morrison and claimed to have had a long term relationship with him and that claim has been proven false many times over. Its hard to find a book that is fair and truthful when it comes to Jim Morrison. —Am I the only one who feels like the Doors have been forgotten by most people? by RiderOntheStorm1969

Researchers find IQ scores dropping since the 1970s: Population intelligence quotients increased throughout the 20th century—a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect—although recent years have seen a slowdown or reversal of this trend in several countries. A pair of researchers with the Ragnar Frisch Centre for Economic Research in Norway has found that IQ test scores have been slowly dropping over the past several decades. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Bernt Bratsberg and Ole Rogeberg describe their study and the results they found. They also offer some possible explanations for their findings. Prior studies have shown that people grew smarter over the first part of last century, as measured by the intelligence quotient—a trend that was dubbed the Flynn effect. But, now, according to the researchers in Norway, that trend has ended. Instead of getting smarter, humans have started getting dumber. The increase of scores of general intelligence stopped after the mid-1990s and it's difficult to interpret since these countries have had significant recent immigration from countries with lower average national IQs. During the last century, there is a negative correlation between fertility and intelligence. Sadly, other researchers have found similar results. A British team recently found IQ score results falling by 2.5 to 4.3 points every decade since approximately the end of the second world war. And this past December, another group from the U.S. found that children who grew up eating a lot of fish tended to have higher IQs—and they slept better, too, which is another factor involved in adult intelligence levels. Source: medicalxpress.com

Hollywood's Eve, A Rock-and-Roll Memoir

Hollywood, California, in the 60s and 70s was the cultural capital of America and the world—a movie factory, a music factory, a dream factory. Eve Babitz, the subject of Lili Anolik’s remarkable new book, is Hollywood’s native daughter. "What truly sets Babitz apart from L.A. writers like Joan Didion or Nathanael West is that no matter what cruel realities she might face, a part of her still buys the Hollywood fantasy, feels its magnetic pull as much as that Midwestern hopeful who heads to the coast in pursuit of 'movie dreams.'" Babitz turned herself into the West Coast’s answer to Edie Sedgwick: a groupie with an artistic streak. She designed album covers for Buffalo Springfield and Linda Ronstadt, and seduced Jim Morrison. Throughout Babitz’s stories, there’s an awareness of the dichotomy between the often vapid realities of Los Angeles and the ideals of an authentic Bohemia. Anolik’s dazzling Hollywood’s Eve is many things: a philosophical investigation, a critical appreciation, a sociological study, a cultural commentary, and a noir-style mystery. Hollywood's Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A. will be released on January 8, 2019.

Eve Babitz in L.A. Woman (2015): "Greatness is a disease. That must have been what was wrong with Jim Morrison. His silences were deadly and the fury within him to capture the world's imagination was so dignified and ironical that, like pain, you only remembered what it was like when it was too late." Eve may be LA Woman, inspiration for The Doors song. “Never saw a woman/ So alone”– that’s her. Source: www.amazon.com

“Grace Slick always thought she was ugly,” said Eve Babitz. “But she was certainly gorgeous.” Grace Slick, the Acid Queen of Haight Ashbury, had just as much fun as the guys on the road. “I pretty much nailed anybody that was handy,” she claims. “My only regret is that I didn’t get Jimi Hendrix or Peter O’Toole.” During the legendary Doors/Airplane European tour of 1968, she ended up in Jim Morrison’s bedroom at the Belgravia Hotel, where they romped around and covered each other with strawberries. “Jim Morrison inhabited two places at once, and although there was some pattern of events going on in his head that connected what I’d just said, it never made sense. I’m sure that the people who knew him well must have heard normal dialogue out of him like, “What time does the plane arrive?” But I never heard anything intelligible I could respond to until I was able to see what he was like alone, away from the frantic energy of the music halls. I also wish I could tell you that he came to my room to hustle me. But I was the perpetrator. “Okay if I put this plate on the radiator?” I asked. This was Europe, 1968. No central heating. After I set the plate of  frozen strawberries on the cold radiator, he crawled over the top of the bed. I can play this, I thought, and I relaxed. It wasn’t 9 ½ Weeks with Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke using food as erotic lubricant; it was more like kindergarten play. I was afraid I’d be stepping on that Fantasia tape that seemed to be running in his cranium. This was like making love to a floating art form. I’d never had anyone “study” me like that. He seemed to be appraising the distance between us as if it was an invisible garment that needed to be continually breached with each motion. With our hips joined together and his body moving up and down, if felt like he was taking a moment each time to circle the area between our bodies and consider the space that separated us. At the same time, he was surprisingly gentle. Somehow, I’d expected a sort of frantic horizontal ritual. It’s interesting; the most maniacal guys on stage can be such sublime lovers. He was a well built boy, his cock was slightly larger than average. Jim mystified me with that otherworldly expression, and at the same time, his hips never lost the insistent rolling motion that was driving the dance. 

When Jim did look directly in my face, he seemed to be constantly searching for the expression that might break the lock, as if I might be wearing a disguise. I’m not sure what I mean by that, but I can say that it was both intriguing and disconcerting, waiting for him to ask me if I was someone else – an impostor or a product of his imagination. I dressed as fast as I could, without looking like it was a race. Jim didn’t seem to notice; he appeared to be totally unconscious, just lying there motionless on the bed. But naked, with eyes closed and without moving a muscle from his completely immobile posture, he said, “Why wouldn’t you come back?” Since I hadn’t said anything about coming or going, I didn’t know what he expected to hear, so I went into proper Finch College mode and said, “Only if I’m asked.” He smiled, but never asked. Danny Sugerman said, “You know, Grace, I’m glad you're telling everybody you screwed Jim. You can’t believe the amount of ugly women who’ve claimed to have fucked him.” —Somebody to Love?: A Rock-and-Roll Memoir (1999) by Grace Slick

Judy Huddleston on Jim Morrison: "Like everyone, he had moments of happiness or joy, but clearly he was not happy. On balance, he was more tortured than most--genetics, karma, childhood, alcoholism--whatever the reason. Was he bipolar, borderline psychotic? It was like a switch got flipped, far beyond a regular mood swing." A new peer-reviewed paper (published in the January 2018 issue of ScienceDirect) has shown that possessing a high intellect could be directly linked to several psychological disorders including Depression, Anxiety, ADHD and Autism. The highly intelligent individual has a remarkable capacity for seeing and internalizing vast uncertainties, possibilities, and problems. This gift can either be a catalyst for empowerment and self-actualization or it can be a predictor of dysregulation and debilitation. The study also found that high intelligence could also potentially be linked to almost double the risk associated with autoimmune disease. The study also suggests that an above average IQ could also have a large impact on physical health. *Mood Disorders - National average 9.5% High Intelligence 26.8% *Anxiety Disorders - National average 10.9% High Intelligence 20% *Depressive disorders - National average 6.7% High Intelligence 25.8% Source: www.sciencedirect.com

During 1999–2016, suicide rates increased in nearly every state in America, including >30% increases in 25 states. In 2016, a Harvard University study revealed that 51% of people between the ages of 18 and 29 “don’t support” capitalism—and only 42% support it. So if not capitalism, then what? The study found young people favor socialism, but that’s not the only alternative. There has been an uptick of interest in a 170-year old political system — that dirtiest of C-words. Communism. It’s no secret that the United States doesn’t have the best relationship with communism. Much of this is rooted in the The Red Scare of the 1940s and ’50s, which fueled the Cold War and the wars in Korea and Vietnam, and which had a lasting effect on how people in the U.S. view the political system. Since then, the U.S. government has interfered in multiple countries  in order to weed out communism anywhere it popped up. In any case, in recent months, communist ideology has seemed to catch on with more Americans. The Communist Party USA — a national organization founded in 1919, with 7,000 registered members — has reported a significant spike in interest and membership with 5,000 new members. CPUSA’s international secretary said, “There is growing interest in communist ideas.” The Seattle Communists, a chapter of the Pacific Northwest-based Communist Labor Party, has seen its numbers swell. Further, communists believe that fascism happens when capitalism is under threat. As the economic system becomes unstable, white working class people are directed to blame immigrants and people of color and are steered toward white nationalism. In this sense, simultaneous rises in both far right and far left ideas are inevitable under capitalism.  Source: theestablishment.co

Jim Morrison could be pretty funny at times. He smirked: “Well, in fifty-sixty years this whole set-up is going to collapse. Everybody's gonna lose their money to a bunch of crooked politicians and white-collar criminals. You'll see. And then these guys, let’s call them economists, they're all gonna say finally, ‘Well, Ezra Pound was right!’ And Social Credit will come in." “Well Jim, ya’know Pound was in the nuthouse at Saint Elizabeth's hospital for twelve years.” “So what?” “Well, there’s this charge of Treason.” He cocked his head and gave me a sharp glance. “Sure. His transcripts were censored. And what the fools don't realize is that Pound is a hero and should’ve been given the Congressional Medal of Honor! It's all in code, the broadcasts! It's in cypher! You just gotta know how to figure it out. Pound was a spy for the government and he oughta be decorated." He concluded, “Everybody else thinks you’re a communist or whatever. Actually, you're a patriot. So Pound was doomed – unless he played ball with the Government. Of course, he could have stayed right here in America, but that's what makes him such a hero.” “Well, why didn't all this come out at the trial?” “Because, by 1946, when the troops arrested Pound, Roosevelt was dead, and Truman didn't know anything about the code." And there he had me. “Well, why didn't Pound say anything after they put him in the nut house, Jim?” “Because the U.S. Military put him in that cage in Pisa and he went bonkers. This was a case of state security. It's as plain as day.” 

Jim Morrison could be oddly patriotic. “Dostoyevsky said, the Russian hates freedom. Those fuckers wouldn't know what to make of it. Like a primitive man under an open sky gone crazy from the light. The Politician, one of the two examples of the ‘secular Priest’, becomes the consummate actor of our day,” Jim said. “What's the other example?” “The Psychiatrist. According to Freud, the future of illusion needed secularization.” I said: “Your Mr. Pound said that Rome was destroyed by its Rhetoriticians.” “The Rhetoriticians took over when the Romans lost their Poets. Rhetoric is just another word for politics,” said Jim: “Politicians are too shrewd to be neurotic, by and large. Greed so wonderfully concentrates a man’s mind.”—"Summer with Morrison: The Early Life and Times of James Douglas Morrison, A Memoir" (2011) by Dennis C. Jakob

RIP Jerry Hopkins, Before the End

Jerry Hopkins (RIP): "Oliver Stone bought the rights to my book, and he bought the rights to my research material, which were essentially the transcripts to 200 interviews I had done. That was the extent of my involvement in the film. I have mixed feelings about the movie. Mainly that it was so one-sided. I knew Morrison. I knew him to be a man who had a sense of humor about himself. He was a man of staggering intelligence. He read enormously, and he remembered everything he read. The man put things together in an interesting manner, and he was a great conversationalist. Very little of that comes out in the movie. Forty percent of the movie is sheer fiction. Stone merged characters. He ignored chronology. It was Stone writing his version of the sixties. Hollywood never has let the facts get in the way of a good story. People credit Rolling Stone with inventing gonzo journalism but Hollywood was way ahead of them. The way Hollywood portrays the American West wasn't the way it was. Oliver was just being Oliver. He is a terrific filmmaker. What bothers me most about Stone is that most young people today use movies as their major information sources and he knows it. If they get misinformation from the film they won't even bother to crosscheck with a book. Oliver's dishonesty and he is not alone in this, is a disservice to young people whose ideas are formed by what they see in the movies." Source: scottmurray.info

Letter from Jeff Finn for one 'not a fan' of Jim Morrison: At any rate, after 32 years of researching Jim’s life and interviewing his family, friends and lovers, I’ve come away with a vastly different picture of Morrison than the mainstream media have painted. Jim was not the narcissistic, tantrum-throwing, raging drunk/man-child Oliver Stone would have said media and everyone else believe. Keep in mind Stone, after Alain Ronay asked him why he chose not to portray Jim the way he really was [displaying warmth, humor, etc, in addition to his darker moments], was said to have replied with a grin: “Because the truth doesn’t sell.” According to Ronay, Jim was chockfull of the nuances of humanity, as opposed to the one-dimensional, fallen rock god-cum-buffoon to which he’s been reduced by former fans such as yourself. So, imagine if you will: Jim was an actual human being, riddled with complexity. Did he hit bottom? Yes. But he also lived and breathed and flourished in stark contrast to the totally self-absorbed, drunken/stoned-24/7 human cartoon Stone chose to depict, an image that has deeply tainted Jim’s legacy. Hence the making of my documentary in general and my response to your reply in particular.

We ALL have levels of “healthy” narcissism, some healthier than others, but you seem to imply Jim had full-blown Narcissistic Personality Disorder which, to my knowledge, is a rather rare condition (between 0.5-1% of the general population). And I’m not trying to paint Jim as some goddamn saint, but nearly all those I interviewed refuted the notion that he had NPD, or that he was even a “narcissist.” Narcissists, by nature, are uninterested in anyone but themselves. Jim, conversely, is said to have been vastly interested in others. But say for the sake of argument Jim did have NPD. Would that then have entitled the New Haven police to beat the hell out of him on December 9, 1967? That’s apparently the case - as per your cruel logic. Now, the way I see it, Jim’s real “crime" that night was daring to stand up to a New England cop [who'd been hired to protect Jim & The Doors!]. From what I’ve gathered, the cop flaunted his ego, along with his Mace, and that resulted in ABUSE OF POWER and POLICE BRUTALITY.

All this begs the question: Whose side are you on, man? Jim Morrison, who used his MIND to help evolve the Free Speech movement and help Rock & Roll come of age or the New Haven Police Department, a corrupt gang of thugs who apparently chose to overcompensate for their insecurities by using their FISTS to pound on a skinny 145-lb singer already half-blinded by their Mace? I will end by paraphrasing a quote from Henry Rollins: “There is no existential threat to the police that rivals what the police inflict upon themselves.” I find your lack of compassion disturbing and indicative of the mass apathy that’s sweeping the U.S. BEFORE THE END documentary is in the process of being shopped to the major streaming services (Netflix, Amazon). A DVD release is in the works as well. ~ Jeff Finn

The Doors: Waiting for the Sun's 50th Anniversary

Jim Morrison had a deep, almost classical baritone, and when accompanied by the Doors' rhapsodic garage ensemble, he lent a unique, mesmeric clarity to the primordial yearnings of the late ’60s. He was also the first superstar hippie with an aura of pre-counterculture masculinity. There was nothing remotely smiley or reassuring about Morrison. Mostly, though, Oliver Stone's film wants to be an intimate portrait of Morrison. And that’s where Stone’s frenzied, one-thing-after-another approach takes its toll. As docudramas go, The Doors is more docu than drama: It simply presents Morrison’s life and dissolution, bottle by bottle, without really giving us a peek into his soul. Stone essentially buys into the star’s myth about himself. Then the movie undercuts the myth by showing us, in agonizing detail, what the booze did to him. Morrison’s fatalistic yearnings seem to touch a responsive chord in Stone. Lying dead in his Paris bathtub, Morrison has a transcendent smile. Stone doesn’t pretend to know whether Morrison did break on through to the other side. But the flashes of brilliance in the film exert a powerful hold. Forty years after his death, Jim Morrison can still convince an audience that he’s onto something. Whatever one can say about Morrison’s method toward revelation, the truth is it ultimately destroyed him. Source: hiphappy.com

"I was born to sail away to touch the land of my dreams but evil winds filled my sails and finally I lost my way. The ship run aground of my life and now, I lie here broken, helpless." —Jim Morrison

Break On Through: The Life and Death of Jim Morrison, (ekindle, 2014) by James Riordan and Jerry Prochnicky, reveals how Morrison overdosed on Pam Courson's heroin. This is, without a doubt, the most thoroughly researched book on Jim Morrison and the Doors yet to be published, and reveals Danny Sugerman's No One Here Gets Out Alive for the puerile, fawning mess it is. But it is less the star and more the martyr that surfaces here, with gruesome accounts of Morrison being beaten by cops, lambasted by finicky critics, verbally abused by audiences, and emotionally drained by a neurotic girlfriend. The story is that Morrison was a failed visionary, and that "I can do anything" was the shallow, desperate boast of a man already fallen off the edge on which he so loved to live. The tragedy of Jim Morrison—who, like all sacrificial media gods, will always be young; that's why we love to kill them—is that he destroyed himself in full view of millions, and no one did a thing to stop him. Source: www.stereophile.com

Waiting for the Sun was the third studio album by The Doors, recorded from February to May 1968 and released in July 1968. It became the band's first and only No. 1 album, spawning their second US number one single, "Hello, I Love You". Waiting for the Sun contains two songs with military themes: "Five to One" and "The Unknown Soldier". In his 1980 Morrison biography No One Here Gets Out Alive, Jerry Hopkins speculates the song seems to be a parody of all the naive revolutionary rhetoric heard on the streets spouted by the "hippie/flower child" hordes, an interpretation strongly supported by the final verse "Your ballroom days are over, baby." Waiting for the Sun was praised by James Riordan as The Doors' best album with no complaints about its brevity. Sal Cinquemani of Slant magazine wrote: "Despite the fact that Morrison was becoming a self-destructing mess, Krieger,  Manzarek and Densmore were never more lucid – perhaps to compensate. This was a band at its most dexterous, creative, and musically diverse..."

I’m With the Band, the classic confessional of Pamela Des Barres’s sexual and romantic escapades with a cacophony of rock stars, is republished in a 30th anniversary edition this month. In bracing detail, the woman born Pamela Miller in Reseda, California, details her high jinks on the Sunset Strip of late-60s and early-70s Los Angeles. “I was the muse,” she adds, “and I don’t care what people say about that. Groupies enhanced these people’s lives in a huge way. And if it weren’t for us, they would not be who they are.” Mick Jagger was asked once in Rolling Stone what he thought of Des Barres' book. He said he had no problem with it: ‘I was there.’ “Jimi Hendrix hit on me and it’s impossible to describe his charisma, it was huge,” she said. “I didn’t sleep with him though — I was only 17 and way too young.” But Miss Pamela didn’t think twice when it came to Jim Morrison, although she only went to second base with The Doors front man. Source: www.nme.com