Mental Illness on the rise, Suicidal ideation, Jim Morrison: The White Blind Light

An estimated 8.3 million American adults — about 3.4 percent of the U.S. population — suffer from serious psychological distress, an evaluation of federal health data concluded. “Mental illness is on the rise. Suicide is on the rise. And access to care for the mentally ill is getting worse,” said lead researcher Judith Weissman. She’s a research manager in the department of medicine at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York City. “Earning and sustaining a living is getting harder for people, especially for men,” Weissman said. “The loss of jobs could mean there’s a loss of community and a loss of role as wage earners and providers.” “In the past, you may go out and meet with your friends and talk about something, but when you got home you’d go to sleep,” Dr. Trivedi said. “The difficulty now is you can’t really turn things off. We don’t necessarily have downtimes to recharge and get our bearings straight again.” The study was published April 17 in the journal Psychiatric Services. Source: www.cbsnews.com

Therapists have long been aware of the connection between media depiction of suicide and a spike in suicide rates. An Australian survey of over 20 relevant studies from 2010 concludes: “There is good reason to expect that entertainment media depictions of suicide could lead to imitation acts: Such portrayals are widespread, often send a message reinforcing suicide as a course of action, often include graphic footage of the method of suicide, and often appeal to young audiences.” “I can almost guarantee that within the next year there will be a student we hear about on the news that actually does this exact process with the tapes,” said Katie Rutherford, a family therapist in Manhattan. She works with at-risk youth in the child welfare system, who have high rates of suicidal ideation.  90% of people who commit suicide suffer from mental illness. While external circumstances such as bullying can contribute to suicide, the show misses the opportunity to discuss the underlying cause. Source: www.indiewire.com

Patti Smith performed her debut album, Horses, and received a standing ovation on the first night of the  Byron Bay Bluesfest festival, on Thursday, 13 April. Released December 1975, Horses fused rock and roll structures and Smith's free-form, and was hailed by music critics as one of the greatest and most influential albums in the history of the American punk rock movement. Smith performed Gloria, Redondo Beach, Birdland, Free Money. Break It Up, Land, and Elegie. Before singing Break It Up, Smith explained to the audience that she wrote this song about The Doors frontman Jim Morrison, and based on her recollection of her visit of Morrison's grave in Père Lachaise Cemetery, in Paris, as well as a dream in which she witnessed Morrison stuck to a marble slab shaped as an angel, trying and eventually succeeding in breaking free from the stone with Morrison donning 'big white wings.' Source: www.northernstar.com.au


Around the time Waiting For The Sun was released, Morrison became discouraged and then drank some more. Sometimes he'd have a fight with Pamela and say, "Well, you don't love me anymore, so I'm gonna jump." Then he'd crawl out the window and hang from the ledge. He'd just hang there and after a while he'd say something like, "You better be nice to me or I'm gonna let go." Jim wasn’t concerned about Pam’s expenditures, even though he would complain about it in a good-natured way to his friends. “He’d complain about, ‘God, all the money she’s spending on that place!’” says Babe Hill: “But he said it in such a way that you could tell he was really proud of her. Like a man talking about his frivolous wife. He loved her very much.” Morrison had Max Fink draw up a will in which he made Pamela his sole beneficiary. Jim signed it and had Paul Ferrara witness the will on February 12, 1969. “Pam was the all-inclusive person he would leave anything he had to,” says Ferrara: “His will was intended to prove to Pam that he did love her.” Seventeen days after signing this legal love letter, Jim Morrison committed professional suicide. He had screamed Wake Up! a thousand times and only a few eyes had even flickered. Maybe what destroyed him was their refusal to let him set them free. ―"Break on Through: The Life and Death of Jim Morrison" (2014) by James Riordan and Jerry Prochnicky

"I've become obsessed with Morrison. In his own way, he was very much on the front line. He was a warrior," Oliver Stone said of Jim Morrison. "He was an outlaw rebel pushing at boundaries. A searcher who wrote about sex and death, two things any guy who'd been in Vietnam could relate to." Morrison had come to personify what French philosopher Camus once said: "Nihilism results when clinical despair is permeated by a sense of life's absurdity." Ray Manzarek believed Stone's film The Doors portrayed Morrison as "a violent, drunken fool. That wasn't Jim. All you see is Jim as a drunken hedonist. The tragedy is that fame consumed him. But that wasn't Jim's message. He was intelligent. He was loving. He was a good man who believed in freedom and in questioning authority." Manzarek felt the lavish, re-created Doors concert footage was "brilliantly filmed, although over-amped and sensationalistic." Source: articles.latimes.com

Your home is still here. Violet, uncertain. Thank you, oh lord, for the white blind light. Jumped humped, born to suffer... Made to undress in the wilderness. All of us have found a safe niche where we can store up our riches and talk to our fellows... in the same premises of disaster. Thank you, oh lord, for the white blind light. Let me tell you about heartache in the loss of god... wandering, wandering in hopeless nights. Moonshine night, mountain village insane in the wood and the deep trees. ...and the deep trees... and the deep trees... Your home is still here. Violet, uncertain. Oh, I want to be there, I want us to be there, oh, I want to be there...beside the lake, beneath the moon.... Woolen, swollen... drinking its hot liquor... I want to be there. Thank you, oh lord, for the white blind light. A city rises from the sea. Let me tell you about heartache in the loss of god. Wandering, wandering in hopeless nights. Let me show you the maiden with rot iron soul. Out here in perimeter there are no stars. Out there we are stoned... Immaculate...

"The Mist" TV trailer, "Strange Days" (Jim Morrison & The Witch)

Stephen King’s 1980 novella The Mist, about a small town lucky enough to be engulfed in a mysterious fog filled with monsters, is getting the TV series treatment at Spike, and as a trailer shows, series creator Christian Torpe has expanded the Mist-o-verse. While the novella (and Frank Darabont’s 2007 feature film) was set almost entirely in a single supermarket, the TV show, with hours to fill, will add everyone’s favorite thing about television: subplots! Now we’ll get to see how other, nonsupermarket-shopping inhabitants deal with the onslaught, whether they are trapped in a church, a mall, or even a car. What’s more, the mist itself now appears to have psychological effects on those caught in it, rather than simply being a convenient harbinger for a deadly attack by prehistoric monsters. The Mist will premiere on Spike on June 22, which should allow plenty of time for binge-watching before the actual mist arrives in late August.

Despite these changes, however, it seems like Torpe has stayed true to the positive and uplifting theme that has made the novella such a favorite all these years: Give people an excuse, no matter how slim, and they’ll bring back human sacrifice faster than you can say “Stephen King’s The Mist.” The cast list doesn’t include the characters from the story, so there’s no Mrs. Carmody, the religious nut who first suggests appeasing the monsters Old Testament–style in earlier versions of The Mist. Smart money’s on Frances Conroy’s character taking her place—she looks like she’s got some of that old-time religion in the trailer, plus she’s named “Natalie Raven.” In the novel, Mrs. Carmody is an elderly townswoman with a borderline reputation as a witch and an extreme belief in a bloodthirsty God. She actively thrives in the situation, eventually convincing a large fraction of the survivors that a human sacrifice must be made to clear away the mist. Source: www.slate.com

"Strange Days" is a narcissistic memoir of, mostly, a love affair with Jim Morrison. When Kennealy met the rock star in the third-to-last year of his life, they shook hands and there was a ``visible shower of bright blue sparks.'' ``What are you?'' Morrison asked. Kennealy replied that she was a witch--a Celtic high priestess. Then, she says, Morrison married her by her Celtic coven (a ceremony that -Kennealy admitted in Victoria Balfour's Rock Wives book- Morrison took “probably not too seriously”) and, in a ``blaze of love and passion ignited,'' they consummated their union six times in two hours. Morrison (who never lived with Kennealy) is a nebulous presence here, impossible to visualize by manner or by the romance-novel speeches supplied for him, and appears mostly as a foil to the Kennealy ego--which is queen-sized. Much ado about the high priestess, not enough about the Lizard King. Source: www.kirkusreviews.com

Jim Morrison Progression video, featuring photos of Jim Morrison with his family, his girlfriend Pamela Courson, his musical partners The Doors, etc. Soundtrack: "Moonlight Drive", "Strange Days", "Love Me Two Times", "The Crystal Ship", and "Light My Fire" (stereo).

"Saving Capitalism", Memories Storage, Cheap Living in the Sixties, The Doors from the outside

Robert B. Reich begins by recalling fondly how his father’s small business was able to provide for their entire family to live comfortably in the sixties. Since the 1970’s, however, the market has been restructured, leaving wages for most Americans stagnant and upward mobility more unsure. The rate of new business formation has fallen by half, from 1978 to 2011, partly because longer patent protection, mergers creating larger firms with greater scale/scope economies, and the increased political power available to larger firms. Between 2000 and 2014, quarterly corporate after-tax profits rose from $529 billion to $1.6 trillion. By 2013, the median household inflation-adjusted earnings were less than in 1989; job security also declined. During the 1970s, only 13 hostile takeovers involved companies valued at $1 billion or more; during the 1980s, the number reached 150. In 1980, over 80% of firms gave workers defined-benefit pensions. Now the figure is less than 1/3. Fifty years ago, G.M. was the largest U.S. employer, and its workers earned $35/hour in today's dollars. The percentage of total income going to the top 1% in the U.S. rose from 10% in the 1960s to over 20% by 2013; in Germany, it remained constant at about 11%. Leading political economist and author Robert B. Reich presents a paradigm-shifting, clear-eyed examination of a status quo that no longer serves the people. Visionary and acute, Saving Capitalism illuminates the path toward restoring America’s fundamental promise of opportunity and advancement. Source: www.amazon.com

Beginning in the 1950s, studies of the famous amnesiac patient Henry Molaison, then known only as Patient H.M., revealed that the hippocampus is essential for forming new long-term memories. Molaison, whose hippocampus was damaged during an operation meant to help control his epileptic seizures, was no longer able to store new memories after the operation. However, he could still access some memories that had been formed before the surgery. This suggested that long-term episodic memories (memories of specific events) are stored outside the hippocampus. Scientists believe these memories are stored in the neocortex. A more recent model, the multiple trace model, suggests that traces of episodic memories remain in the hippocampus. These traces may store details of the memory, while the more general outlines are stored in the neocortex. Further studies are needed to determine whether memories fade completely from hippocampal cells or if some traces remain. The research was funded by the RIKEN Brain Science Institute, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the JPB Foundation. Source: news.mit.edu


In the late sixties/early seventies when Jim Morrison and Pamela Courson were struggling with their own demons, people did not go on national television and air their dirty laundry; personal problems, real or perceived, were kept within the home or within the individual. Women who worked outside the home were still an exception rather than a rule. So if Jim kept certain traumas from his past a secret; if Jim’s bandmates turned a blind eye as his alcoholism escalated or if Pamela was supported by Jim—none of these things seem unusual in the context of the era. “He always came on weekends, a very attractive lad,” recalls Tom Reese, who continually tried to convince Jim to model nude for the club’s Life Studies class, offers Jim continually declined. Reese, asked if he had been Jim’s lover during this time (as it had been speculated) he chuckles: “Well, let’s put it this way: everybody wanted to.” But when pressed to disclose further details, Reese hedges around the subject, indicating nobody should  speculate. As had been the case with Tandy Martin, one of the first official girlfriends of Jim, he would invest all his pent-up emotion in his feelings for Mary Werbelow, an intensity she found both compelling and frightening. “At that particular time he was really, totally enamored with her,” says Bryan Gates (Jim's classmate at St. Petersburg College): “And unlike virtually everybody else he was around, he was polite to her, considerate, never provoked her like he did the other people, and sort of wanted to be not only her friend in the boyfriend/girlfriend sense, but somewhat of her mentor and intellectual coach. It was a nice relationship.” With subsequent girlfriends and lovers, Jim seemed more interested in playing with their emotions or push their buttons; for instance The Doors' secretary Ginny Ganahl confirmed Morrison just had a liaison with Jazz & Pop magazine journalist Patricia Kennealy because her review of an interview with Morrison in January 1969 had been scathing.

Early photos of Jim and Pam taken from Pamela’s scrapbook show the two gleefully clowning around in a photo booth, Jim wearing a leather jacket, Pamela looking well scrubbed and glowing. But in spite of their seemingly idyllic happiness, at least one person had some instant reservations about the couple’s relationship. “What are you wasting your time with this guy for?” Pamela’s older sister, Judy, reportedly asked Pamela in 1965. “Get yourself someone with money!” Jim and Pam's love for each other was a constant thread that appeared throughout Morrison’s writing, and even some of their fights were immortalized in the pages of Jim’s notebooks. January Jensen says: “We were going down Highway One headed to L.A., Jim always carried a notebook with him. And every time we’d come to a restaurant, a general store, or a gas station, he’d have to stop and call Pam.” Jensen, Babe Hill, and Paul Ferrara would tease Jim about his obsession with Pam. Mirandi Babitz remembers, “The first time Jim actually got some money for singing, he and Pam went wild! They bought Chinese food and had a feast. Anyone would have thought that Jim had brought home a million dollars, but I think his cut had been about twenty bucks!” “That was the great thing about Los Angeles at that time,” says Mirandi Babitz, “you could live so cheap. People had these little scrappy apartments so nobody was ever really on the street because you could get by: You could make it on unemployment, you could make it on a waitress’s salary.” —"Angels Dance and Angels Die: The Tragic Romance of Pamela and Jim Morrison" (2010) by Patricia Butler

Miles Teller & Shailene Woodley in "Adrift", Lizard King & Snow Queen (Jim Morrison & Pamela)

On Friday, The Hollywood Reporter announced that a new movie starring Shailene Woodley and Miles Teller may be happening, which would make it the fifth movie that the talented twosome have starred in together. The movie is a survival thriller called Adrift, and is based on the true story of a woman who sets off on a sailing trip to Tahiti with her fiancé, only to find themselves stuck in a perilous storm with their boat in ruins. Teller is reportedly currently in negotiations to star in Adrift, but if he is confirmed for the movie, then it would certainly mark Teller and Woodley as Hollywood's newest power acting duo.

In fact, considering that they starred together in three movies from the Divergent series, as well as The Spectacular Now, they're definitely well on their way to becoming acting partnership royalty. I'm talking, Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling, or Julia Roberts and George Clooney. They've totally got that vibe happening, people. And, funnily enough, it's something that Woodley has even acknowledged as a goal in the past. Clearly, the two actors have a lot of respect for each other professionally, but Teller and Woodley's friendship has also been evident for a long time, making such an acting partnership between the two feel powerful. These two are bound to be unstoppable. Source: www.bustle.com

The unseen future is coming. Sutter Keely should be graduating, if he can get his act together. He's a hit with the ladies, has tons of friends and even more funny quips for every occasion. He's adored but he's saddled with a not-so-secret problem: Nearly every moment Sutter is holding a flask, or some other booze receptacle. After a crazy-long bender the night before, he wakes up on the front lawn of Aimee Finicky's home. Sparks fly between a way-cool dude and the bookish (hippie) gal. She's definitely into him. As Sutter flirts, he entangles himself in her life, but the post-high school world is quickly approaching. He only lives for moment, the spectacular now… Miles Teller as the nerdiest bad boy ever — As Sutter, Teller's endless amount of swagger is intoxicating. The way he imbues this teen with insecurity though is new territory. Sutter is ultimately his own bully. As Aimee, Woodley's the ultimate dream girl mainly because she doesn't realize how awesome she is: Adorable! Source: www.eonline.com

Pamela Courson's world was seriously shaken when she met Jim Morrison in 1965. Three years after, in the summer of 1968, Jim Morrison had become the acclaimed 'bad-boy' of The Doors, who after playing the Hollywood Bowl, went on the road again: Dallas, Honololu, New York. Arriving to the Big Apple, Morrison snapped at hearing his redhead sweetheart had been seen with another guy — word got around to Jim that she was incensed about his new public desirability. “You’d better get your ass out to New York, I miss you,” he'd growled into the phone. She was being deliberately stubborn, he reasoned.

Morrison had felt somehow forced to sleep with photo-journalist Gloria Stavers, and to have furtive sex with star-struck groupies. While in Los Angeles Pam ruminated to her best friend Diane Gardiner: "He's the one all the girls want, and yet he says he doesn't love any of the girls, but me. All his friends wanted me, but I only wanted him." Diane would comment about Pamela: “Pam was one of the funniest people I ever met. She was beautiful, she looked like the Snow Queen and yet she did things like collect Lugers. She had a vicious sense of humor. She loved travel because she said you never had to think about it. She was the most dangerous girl I ever met. After Jim died, we were both just out of our heads, we would go to Tijuana and get crazy. We’d go down to Rosarita Beach and drink everything in sight.” Men fell in love with Pam because she seemed to need to be protected. And Jim Morrison tried to protect her, despite of his own self-destructive ways.

"I hate to tell you this but I see no lasting energy in the truth," Jim Morrison would state in 1969: "I think most rock musicians and singers really do enjoy what they're doing. I think what screws it up is the surrounding bullshit that's laid on them by the press, the gossip columnists and fan magazines... all of a sudden everyone's laying all this extraneous bullshit on his trip. So he starts to doubt his motivation. There's always a group that for whatever reasons they just jangle the sensibilities. So you feel a little sense of shame and frustration about what you are doing. It's really too bad."

The Sunshine Makers, LSD, Jim Morrison

“The Sunshine Makers” (2017) is a true San Francisco story. Set in the Haight-Ashbury in the ’60s — times that were a more interesting stretch of the city’s history than current times — Cosmo Feilding-Mellen’s documentary about the kingpins of the top-line LSD called Orange Sunshine nevertheless has one eye on current drug laws. Shot mostly in the Bay Area, the stars of the movie are Tim Scully, an East Bay native and Berkeley-trained scientist, and Brooklyn-born hippie Nick Sand. Operating out of a farmhouse in Sonoma County, they made 3.6 million tablets of LSD before federal authorities got them. Included are Timothy Leary patron Billy Hitchcock, who funded the scheme; Mike Randall, founder of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, which distributed LSD; and Owsley Stanley, a sound engineer and LSD maker who later created the Grateful Dead’s “wall of sound.” Feilding-Mellen clearly sees them as counterculture heroes. As our national attitude toward drug laws evolves, “The Sunshine Makers” makes that case fairly well. Source: www.sfgate.com

In 1953, Oswald Huxley and his friend Humphry Osmond, a British research psychiatrist, began taking mescaline. They were following in the footsteps of the psychologist Havelock Ellis, who in 1898 described the ritual use of mescal, by the Indians of the American South-west. Mescal, a mild hallucinogen taken from certain cactus plants, led to mescaline, a synthetic version of the chemical agent present in peyote, which led Osmond to coin the word 'psychedelic' to describe the effect of hallucinogens on the brain. Huxley and Osmond experienced supercharged visual phenomena, peculiar time expansions, and heightened streams of consciousness. In 1960 Timothy Leary, a psychologist working at Harvard University, returned from a vacation in Mexico with “magic mushrooms” containing the psychotropic agent psilocybin, which he gave to Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Neal Cassady, who had been the model for Dean Moriarty in On the Road.

In 1964, the year that Jim Morrison arrived in Los Angeles, Timothy Leary published his first book, The Psychedelic Experience, that pointed to the quasi-religious cast that psychedelic drugs were already acquiring, especially in San Francisco where LSD-25 was sold on the street. Leary assumed the mantle of LSD’s prophet, followed by the hypnotic mantra: “Turn on. Tune in. Drop out.” Turn on meant activating your neural and genetic equipment. Tune in meant interacting harmoniously with the world around you. Drop out meant a voluntary detachment from involuntary commitments like the military, and corporate employment. Jim Morrison began tripping during weekend excursions to the haunted deserts southeast of Los Angeles. He would drive out to Joshua Tree in the high desert, or to Santa Ana Canyon, where the Indians thought the devil had lived. On one trip to the hidden canyons around Palm Springs, Jim had a shamanlike experience that flashed him back to the Indian car wreck he had witnessed as a child. He began taking daily doses of LSD, using the still-legal hallucinogen to raise his consciousness and blot out the psychic trauma of his past. He was using his languid Venice days to change himself from a college student to a neo-Beat poet.

The town of Venice had been laid out as a fashionable resort by developer Abbot Kinney in the southern Santa Monica wetlands just before World War I. Eventually Kinney overextended himself and went broke trying to re-create an Adriatic port in southern California. By the 1940s Venice was full of bingo parlors, beauty pageants, elderly pensioners, and clip joints catering to the World War II sailors who flocked to the boardwalk’s carny attractions. Jim Morrison seemed to take dream-come-true pride in living the poverty-stricken Beat life in Venice. Walking the beach, he experienced strange auditory visions, like a psychoprophetic radio show, featuring him singing in front of a rock band. He carried around Edith Hamilton’s best-selling Mythology everywhere. For Morrison, the Rimbaud protocol, the systematic deregulation of the senses, involved tripping every day, sometimes ending up in an almost comatose LSD induced psychosis. With his brain pulsing in lysergic waves, Morrison continued to transform himself from a pudgy college kid to a hipster godling. As his face lost its school cafeteria fleshiness, Jim’s Celtic cheekbones took pride of place in his visage between intense blue eyes and sensual Byronic lips.

On August 2, 1968, The Doors played the Singer Bowl in Flushing Meadows Park, Queens, New York. Pete Townshend wrote the song “Sally Simpson” (She knew from the start/Deep down in her heart/Sally decided to ignore her dad/And sneak out anyway/She spent all afternoon getting ready/And decided she'd try to touch him/Maybe he'd see that she was free) from The Who's album Tommy (1969) in a backhand tribute to Jim Morrison. Backstage, as the film crew’s camera rolled, Morrison comforted a teenage girl who’d been hit in the head by a flying chair. She was bleeding from a scalp wound and trying to stop crying as Jim put his arm around her. “It’s a democracy,” Jim said soothingly: “Somebody hit her with a chair. There’s no way to tell who did it.” Tenderly, Jim wiped blood from her face. “It’s already coagulating,” he cooed: “She was just an innocent bystander.” When a groupie-looking chick sashayed by in a red dress, Jim grabbed her and stuck his hand up her dress, smiling broadly.

Scientists at the University of Basel have shown that LSD reduces activity in the region of the brain related to the handling of negative emotions like fear. The results, published in the scientific journal Translational Psychiatry, could affect the treatment of mental illnesses such as depression or anxiety. Hallucinogens alter perception, thought, and temporal and emotional experience. After the Basel-based chemist Albert Hofmann discovered lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) in the 1940s, there was a huge amount of interest in the substance, particularly in psychiatry. In the late 1960s, LSD was declared illegal worldwide, and medical research on it came to a standstill. In the last few years, however, interest in researching hallucinogens for medical purposes has been revived. It is now known that hallucinogens bind to a receptor of the neurotransmitter serotonin; LSD is associated with the amygdala. This appears to be the case: the lower the LSD-induced amygdala activity of a subject, the higher the subjective effect of the drug. “This ‘de-frightening’ effect could be an important factor for positive therapeutic effects,” explains Doctor Felix Müller, lead author of the study. Source: neurosciencenews.com

45th Anniversary of Lou Reed's debut album, Jim Morrison's affinity for rock poetry

Lou Reed‘s self-titled 1972 album found one of rock’s most innovative, uncompromising auteurs striking out on his own for the first time. But even though it kicked off a long, celebrated solo career, it’s always been largely and unjustly ignored. When Reed left the Velvet Underground in August 1970, his prospects were far from promising. Though they earned plenty of critical plaudits, the band he spearheaded for the last five years had never come anywhere near commercial success. 

The relatively radio-friendly feel of Loaded, their last Reed-led album, was the result of pressure to produce some hits. Fed up with it all, Reed split in between the album’s completion and its release. With a legacy of four commercial failures to his name, Reed didn’t exactly emerge as a hot property. Wearied from his Velvets experience and unsure about his next move, Reed ended up moving back to his parents’ house on Long Island and started a relationship with theatre student Bettye Kronstad. Contrary to what might be expected, they became serious just when Reed had vague aspirations of becoming a writer/poet. Bettye found him a kind, gentle, sensitive guy who telephoned her ceaselessly and called her 'Princess.' In fact, the first year she spent with him was living at his parents’ Long Island home. 

The opening track of Reed's debut album, “I Can’t Stand It,” is downright dirty-sounding, arguably harder-hitting and more visceral—if less primal—than the Loaded outtake version that was unearthed years later on the VU collection. Similarly, “Walk and Talk It” is undeniably edgier and more biting than on the Velvets’ 1970 demo. “Lisa Says,” a near-ballad in its Velvets version, gets a bump up in tempo, and Wakeman’s piano and the backing vocals of Helene Francois and Kay Garner actual inject a dash of soul flavor. And instead of amplifying the artiness of the Velvets arrangement for “I Love You,” with its merry-go-round running-down feel, the Reed version adopts a more straightforward (and slightly speedier) feel. 

“Wild Child,” with its lyrical mix of the prosaic and the poetic, has a constantly shifting cast of street characters. It’s not a huge journey from this track to the carefully cultivated noir seediness of “Walk on the Wild Side,” which would see the light of day less than a year later. “Berlin” would appear on a later Reed album too, providing the title track to his 1973 cult-classic song suite. But for whatever reason, the record failed to connect. It staggered its way to the 189 spot on the Billboard album chart, and neither of its singles (“I Can’t Stand It,” “Walk and Talk It”) earned a foothold on either side of the Atlantic. The vagaries of the music business are eternally inscrutable, but more puzzlingly, the album has never really been reassessed by critics either. Fortunately, what Reed achieved on his first solo flight is still there to hear for anyone with ears. Source: diffuser.fm

Although the Velvet Underground are sometimes portrayed as existing in near-total-obscurity totally out of the mainstream of 1960s rock culture, in fact they intersected with—and sometimes even influenced—many major shakers and movers between 1965 and 1970: The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Mick Jagger confessed to Nick Kent of NME in June 1977, "Even we've been influenced by the Velvet Underground. I'll tell you exactly what we pinched from Lou Reed. Y'know 'Stray Cat Blues' from the Rolling Stones' 1968 album Beggars Banquet? The whole sound and the way it's paced, we pinched from the first Velvet Underground album." Also when an interviewer asked Keith Richards who he thought among his generation of rockers was still producing solid stuff and had maintained his integrity, Richards said, “Lou Reed,” naming no one else.

Some have speculated that the dress and image of one of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable's dancers, Gerard Malanga, might have influenced Jim Morrison's own appearance. Morrison had seen the Velvet Underground at their first California shows at the Trip in Los Angeles in May 1966. Morrison also attended a couple of the Velvet Undergrond's shows at the Whisky-A-Go-Go in Los Angeles in late October 1968. Morrison and The Velvet's singer Nico had a passionate affair around the summer of 1967. Eye magazine, revealed Danny Fields in 1970, took his suggestion to set up a photo shoot with Nico and Jim Morrison for "a series on beautiful couples... But Morrison refused to do it." Morrison might be wary of angering his volatile core girlfriend, Pamela Courson, with such a public posed picture with another beautiful woman. 

"The VU influenced the Doors?" said Ray Manzarek when interviewed for White Light/White Heat: The Velvet Underground Day By Day. "How? Musically? No chance. We were working John Coltrane modal territory. Miles Davis was our influence. Lou Reed influenced Jim? Lyrically? Jim was coming from a point of cosmic consciousness: Carl Jung. Friedrich Nietzsche. Lou was New York street hustler punk. No way. They did have a nice junkie rush, however. I liked that. A punk band before its time. Jim liked Lou Reed's lyrics a lot. Almost like John Rechy in City of Night"—the 1963 novel whose title the Doors would use as a key lyric of their classic "L.A. Woman."

Lou Reed and Jim Morrison had in common an affinity for literary lyrics. Reed, however, didn't seem to appreciate The King Lizard's poetic visions. Maybe there was a personal/professional jealousy, because perhaps at one point Reed may have resented The Doors' commercial success, hit singles and gold albums whereas he had to return home to Long Island to live in his parents' house. Lou Reed on Melody Maker, 1975: "I didn't even feel sorry for him when he died. There was a group of us in New York, and the phone rang and somebody told us that Jim Morrison had just died in a bathtub in Paris. And the immediate response was: 'How fabulous. In a bathtub in Paris. Fantastic.' That lack of compassion doesn't disturb me. He asked for it. I had no compassion for that silly Los Angeles person.'' Lou Reed confirmed his animosity towards Jim Morrison in 2008 saying: "I worked with my father [an accountant] and he was not very generous. During a moment of weakness I nurtured the idea of becoming a professional journalist. I remember that I was commissioned to write a praise of Jim Morrison. So far!, I thought. Morrison believed he was a sex god, but he would not have survived a night at the Factory."

Jim Morrison looked like more of a prototypical rock star whereas Lou Reed was more unassuming, atypical in a way. Although both rock legends wouldn't never be officially introduced, they shared key personalities in their respective careers, as the publicist Danny Fields — Elektra Records' Vice President Steve Harris invited Morrison and Fields to a party at Fifth Avenue with 54th St. but Morrison didn't want Fields in the scene and asked Harris to eject him because The Doors' lead singer thought Fields was using him and riding on his coattails; or the glacial Nico — both Reed and Morrison had a tempestuous relationship with her. Nico would say of Reed 'he was very soft and lovely, not aggressive at all. You could just cuddle him like a sweet person. I used to make pancakes for him.' Morrison was 'the best sex inside her ever,' though, she'd confess to her biographer Richard Witts.

Jim Morrison was a sex idol, and all over the country women vied for his attention. But only Pamela Courson possessed the intelligence, beauty, and allure to keep Jim coming back. Mary Werbelow had been Jim’s longest romantic relationship prior to Pamela. On December 9, 1967, Jim was arrested onstage during a performance in New Haven Connecticut: it was not the first, nor the last, in a series of bizarre encounters with the law. His friend Babe Hill said: "Maybe Jim had a Jesus Christ complex. He definitely didn’t love another woman anywhere near as much as Pam. He had a lot of other girlfriends and he treated them so gentlemanly that some of them invented or assumed things, but, no, there was no one but Pam, and history bears it out: he was with her from the beginning to the end." Sexuality-wise, Jim Morrison had a reputation for wild trysts whereas Lou Reed's was much more subdued. 

Although Howard Sounes pushes the standard Lou Reed narrative of the substance-addled artist who slapped women and pulled knives on bandmates, a spirited Reed defense among fans and intimates opposed to this “Mommie Dearest” invective. Mental illness, Mr. Sounes says, was always a factor in Reed’s erratic behavior. His longtime wife and manager, Sylvia Reed (now Ramos), broke her media silence to dispute Mr. Sounes’s portrait. Coverage like that, Ms. Ramos said, describes a very different man from the one she was with for 18 years. “I was with him all those years,” she said. “I saw him through not only the intense cycle of drinking and drugs, but through nine lawsuits, which were extremely stressful, and his financial condition when I met him was terrible. No matter how hard it got, I never had that behavior from him,” Ms. Ramos said: “That’s not a person I recognize.” Many damning anecdotes, she added, seem to come from people Reed knew in the hazy drug-fueled 1970s “that I know for a fact were not capable of remembering anything they did in any given six-month period during that time, much less come back all these years later.’ She added that “he was never physically aggressive with me.” Ms. Ramos also disputed the idea that Reed was mentally ill. “He saw things differently,” she said. “He was a creative genius.” While Reed and she had discussed his undergoing shock therapy as a youth because of depression, Ms. Ramos added: “In the years that I lived and worked with him, he had no diagnosis of severe mental illness, no hospitalizations, he was always working." “Lou was a prince and a fighter,” Laurie Anderson (Lou Reed's widow) wrote. Source: www.nytimes.com

50th Anniversary: The Velvet Underground and The Doors albums (Lou Reed & Jim Morrison)

50th Anniversary of "The Velvet Underground & Nico" album (1967): If The Velvet Underground & Nico taught us anything, it’s that perfection in rock and roll is actually the inverse of perfection. There are no golden ratios to be found in Sterling Morrison’s spiraling guitar work on “Heroin”, no sublime sense of symmetry to glean from John Cale’s noisy electric viola on “Venus in Furs”. To a classically trained ear, a song like “Run Run Run” is a disaster masquerading as pop music. Lou Reed’s lead guitar lurches left and right with drunken imprecision, Moe Tucker’s drums play hide-and-seek, and producer Andy Warhol refuses to step in and color the scene with even the slightest hint of professionalism. It’s chaotic and also, 50 years after its initial release, widely considered to be one of the greatest rock and roll albums of all time. Lou Reed reminded me of Dylan with his rhythmic style, but he had this solemn, effortless swagger that was really cool. "My God is rock'n'roll," said Reed: "The most important part of my religion is to play guitar."  Source: consequenceofsound.net

Lou Reed began suffering panic attacks and after a mental breakdown following his first semester at NYU, his parents submitted him for electroshock therapy. “Panic attacks and social phobias beset him,” wrote Lou Reed’s sister in 2015: “He possessed a fragile temperament. His hyper-focus on the things he liked led him to music and it was there that he found himself.” Reed’s love of music became his guide, and rock ‘n’ roll became his voice. He landed work as a pop songwriter, churning out middling hits for Pickwick Records while composing songs for himself on the side. “I studied classical piano, and the minute I could play something I started writing new things,” Reed said in 2004. “And I switched to guitar and did the same thing. And the nice thing about rock is, besides the fact that I was in love with it, anyone can play that. And to this day anyone can play a Lou Reed song. Anybody. It’s the same essential chords, just various ways of looking at them.” “Sunday Morning” is a beautiful ode to paranoia (“Watch out—the world’s behind you”), and an early indicator that Reed was capable of remarkably simple melodicism that rivaled the more mainstream songwriters of the era while not directly emulating any of them. With the benefit of hindsight, the most mythologized album of 1967, the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper, looks more like a relic of the Summer of Love and an exercise in pretentious pomposity. Conversely, The Velvet Underground and Nico looks more like the future of rock music. Glam, punk, noise rock, art rock, college rock—it all seemed to draw from The Velvet Underground and Nico. There has never been a rock album more ahead of its time. In many ways, the world is still catching up to it. Source: www.thedailybeast.com

50th Anniversary of "The Doors" (1967) album: In a contemporary review for Crawdaddy! magazine, Paul Williams hailed The Doors debut album as "an album of magnitude" while likening the band to Brian Wilson and the Rolling Stones as creators of "modern music", with which "contemporary 'jazz' and 'classical' composers must try to measure up". Williams added: "The awesome fact about the Doors is that they will improve." Robert Christgau was less enthusiastic in his column for Esquire and later he would say: "Jimbo reminds us that some assholes actually do live with demons. His three sidemen rocked almost as good as the Stones. Without him they were nothing." The Doors has since been frequently ranked by critics as one of the greatest albums of all time. In 2003, Parke Puterbaugh of Rolling Stone called the record "the L.A. foursome's most successful marriage of rock poetics with classically tempered hard rock — a stoned, immaculate classic." Sean Egan of BBC Music opined, "The eponymous debut of The Doors took popular music into areas previously thought impossible: the incitement to expand one's consciousness of opener 'Break on Through' was just the beginning of its incendiary agenda." The Doors is ranked number 42 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. It is ranked number 75 on Q magazine's "100 Greatest Albums Ever" and ranked number 226 in NME magazine's "500 Greatest Albums of All Time." In 2007, Rolling Stone ranked it number 1 on their list of the 40 essential albums of 1967. 

Lester Bangs suggested in "The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll" (1976)  that “Light My Fire” paved the way for “Gimme Shelter” by The Rolling Stones (an argument Greil Marcus picked up in his book "The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years" in 2013). Jim Morrison was ranked #1 of the Greatest Rock & Roll Rebels list in Rolling Stone, 2013. "Jim Morrison probably got the closest to being an artist within rock and roll. He was also desperate," said Patti Smith in 1977: "His death made me sadder than anyone's." The Doors released two more albums after Morrison's death before disbanding. Jim Morrison became a cult figure, celebrated for his excesses as much as his work, to Robby Krieger’s dismay. Krieger takes exception to Morrison’s depiction in Oliver Stone’s film “The Doors,” saying: “It just made him out to be a total ass. It didn't show Jim's kind side.” 

"Let's just say I was testing the bounds of reality. That's all. I was curious. I kind of always preferred to be hated. I go out on stage and howl for people. In me, they see exactly what they want to see. Some say Lizard King, whatever that means. Or some black-clad leather demon, whatever that means." —Jim Morrison in "The Doors" (1991) directed by Oliver Stone

'Damage & Joy,' Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison

The Jesus & Mary Chain have addressed a lyric from their new album that includes the line: “I killed Kurt Cobain/I put the shot right through his brain”. The Scottish shoegaze veterans are currently gearing up to release their first album in 18 years with ‘Damage & Joy.‘ The album’s twelfth track ‘Simian Split’ includes the Cobain lyric, with Pitchfork asking the band’s Jim Reid if it was a call-back to their 1992 song ‘Reverence’ in which he sings: “I wanna die just like JFK”. Reid explained: “It’s fiction. It’s total fiction. It’s not meant to be taken too seriously. It’s just a work of fiction, and people shouldn’t get too het up about it.” Meanwhile, Reid recently spoke to NME about the state of modern guitar music. He argued that in the time that the group has been away, rock and guitar music has seen a sharp decline. “There’s not much of guitar music left at the moment, I don’t hear many guitar bands out there,” the frontman told NME. “It’s kinda pushed underground, guitar music seems to be limping at the moment.” Source: www.nme.com

The 1990’s was a great decade to grow up in. Music was a huge pivot point for society, with the 80s punk movement morphing into grunge. Grunge became the voice for the ’90s young people, bringing socially conscious issues into popular culture. One of the biggest bands of the era was Nirvana. Kurt Cobain was what many would call a tortured soul. He was unusually negatively affected by his fame and popularity as lead guitarist and vocalist of Nirvana. Often hailed as “the spokesman of Generation X”, Cobain was uncomfortable with the label as he believed his message and vision was misinterpreted. Nirvana has sold over 25 million albums in the US alone, and over 75 million globally. However, this massive success had profound effects on Cobain, who struggled to reconcile it with his underground roots. The frontman developed a resentment toward people who claimed to be fans of the band and yet misinterpreted, or refused to acknowledge, the core social and political views of Nirvana. Source: www.m2now.co.nz

It could be argued that without Jim Morrison you don’t get Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, or going down another line, Kurt Cobain. I can’t say I agree with Lester Bangs’ quaint notion that there ain’t NO SALVATION without rock and roll, and I’d bet Jim Morrison didn’t either. I couldn’t really tell you whether rock & roll has ever needed anything as ridiculous as a king, or if kings especially need rock and roll, but if there ever was an approximate, I would hafto insist on Jimbo as the goddamn King of Rock and Roll.  ―"Best Goddamn L.A. King: Jim Morrison" (2003) by Richard Meltzer

Jim Morrison: "A bad photograph can give you several moments of real psychic loss. You trade in your reality for a role. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. Love hurts. Feelings are disturbing. People seek tyrants. They worship and support them. They co-operate with restrictions and rules, and they become enchanted with the violence involved in their brief, token rebellion. They love their chains. They forget all about who they really are. And if you try to remind them, they hate you for it, they feel like you're trying to steal their most precious possession. The LA cops are almost fanatical in believing the rightfulness of their cause. They have a whole philosophy behind their tyranny. Religion is like philosophy, what you devote most of your time to. It might be a woman. It might be money. It might be literature. I think religion is what you think about the most. Philosophy doesn't interest me as much as it used to. I finally was forced to realize that no one in the world really knows about what's going on. Poetry is the ultimate art form, because what defines us as human beings is language. And so I appreciate philosophy these days from the standpoint of poetry, the use of one word next to another word next to another word. So, philosophy is semantics, I guess."

Frank Lisciandro: Jim Morrison was an alcoholic, but not a 'drug addict'. He might have used LSD, and even abused it, but he used it to search for something, not to escape. He lived his life with a calm, unhurried simplicity. He read novels, pulp fiction, scientific journals, history, philosophy, psychology. Alcoholics suffer from their disease. Do we say that people who have cancer or heart disease destroy themselves? No! We acknowledge that the disease destroys them. The myth of the tortured artist is a literary conceit. I don't know how Jim died, but I think that his death must have been an careless accident. Or the culmination of a life of alcoholism. 

-I'm not especially fond of Ray Manzarek, but he had a point when he told Rolling Stone magazine: "we can't let the fascists joke about the Sixties and the counter culture." Too much was at stake. My generation, Jim's generation, we stopped a war, but we took casualties. He fled to avoid being another one. I can understand that. ―Mike Jahn in "Jim Morrison & The Doors"  (1969)

-Frank Lisciandro: Jim dedicated his books of poetry to Pamela who was his companion, lover, muse and friend. She encouraged him to write and publish his poems, and in many ways she was the most important figure in his life. Pamela was beautiful, intelligent, creative and as wild and willful as Jim was. They made a perfect pair. I think they loved each other as only very strong hearts can love. I can say that when Jim talked about her, it was always in praise of her. Jim was very supportive of her. There was a consistency to their relationship that far, far transcended any other relationship that Jim had with any other woman. Jim’s appreciation of the Living Theater led to his over-the-top behavior in Miami. Another possible contributing factor was an argument. Jim and Pam were going to Jamaica right after the Miami concert, but, at the last minute, they had an argument and Pam decided not to go, and Jim missed his airplane to Miami. Then, in order to get to Miami close to the starting time of the concert, he had to take a series of connecting flights. And he was drinking the whole way there.

“Jim was a humanist because he accepted people and believed that all human beings deserved to be treated with dignity. He was a direct, no bullshit dude and hated being lied to, conned or exploited. By the time he left for Paris in March of 1971, the friends he could depend on numbered less than ten. Jim was a performer and he would get up on stage and weave a spell for you. I didn’t see him as that leather-clad heartthrob icon that other people did. Jim was more Rimbaud than Mick Jagger. He was just a tremendously likeable person to be around.” Source: www.lisciandrophotos.com

The Nietzschean Influence of Jim Morrison

'Those who envy or culminate great men hate God, for there is no other God.‘ ―"The Marriage of Heaven and Hell"  (1793) by William Blake 

Although Jim Morrison‘s work displays a strong Nietzschean influence, his early explorations with sensory perception relate more specifically to William Blake and Aldous Huxley. Jim Morrison eagerly joined the pursuit for personal freedom in the Nietzschean fashion accepting both the rewards and the sacrifices. Through the process of misprision, Morrison accepts the role of poet which allows him to reinvent Nietzsche. In his poem 'The Opening of the Trunk,' Morrison reflects this idea: "Moment of inner freedom/ when the mind is opened and the infinite universe revealed/ the soul is left to wander." In order to set himself apart from his precursors, Morrison‘s work often contains an aspect of fear and revulsion. Morrison was no stranger to experimenting with mind-altering drugs like marijuana and LSD and found himself drawn to Aldous Huxley‘s essay 'The Doors of Perception.' In Morrison‘s view, everyone designs an alternate life for themselves in their mind which sometimes conflicts with their life in the real world. In "The Lords and the New Creatures" (1971) he states: "Drugs are a bet with your mind/ Where I can construct a universe/ within the skull, to rival the real." 

Jim Morrison writes: "I drink so I can talk to assholes/This includes me." Morrison‘s experimentation left him with an expanded consciousness yet increased his anxiety about life. In keeping with his darker thoughts, Morrison writes: "Films are collections of dead pictures which are/ given artificial insemination." Morrison describes the moment he accepted the task of creating: "Those first six songs I wrote, I was just taking notes at a fantastic rock concert that was going on inside my head. I just got out of college and I went down to the beach…I was free for the first time… It was a beautiful hot summer, and I just started hearing songs… This kind of mythic concert… I‘d like to reproduce what I heard on the beach that day." In 'The American Night" he remembers: "One summer night, going/ To the pier, I ran into/ two young girls. The blonde was called Freedom,/ the dark one, Enterprise./ We talked and they told me this story." Another version of that poem alludes to Nietzsche as he concludes with the lines  "At night the moon became/ a woman‘s face./ I met the Spirit of Music." 

The terror celebrated in Morrison‘s work goes beyond the Nietzschean acceptance of life‘s suffering. Morrison‘s familiarity with the poetry of Blake, as well as Rimbaud and Baudelaire, encouraged his attraction to darker themes. Although many of the nihilistic thoughts echo those of Nietzsche, Morrison‘s fondness for absurdist texts instills in him a preference for nonsense rather than rationality, telling a generation starved for love that 'music is your only friend.‘ Morrison sees no point in trying to combat nihilism. His work suggests that the absurdity of the world enhances man‘s sensory perception and allows the world to be whatever can be created in the mind. Morrison confronts conflicting feelings of remaining in the comfortable role of the spectator or assuming the unpredictable role of the actor—a problem he will ponder often during his career. Morrison recognizes "self-deception may be/ necessary to the poet‘s survival." Morrison‘s self-doubt extends beyond his abilities as a writer to his abilities as performer as well. 'The Discourse of the Sublime and the Inadequacy of Presentation' essay contends that an interest in the alliance between the mind and imagination challenged traditional views on aesthetics and in turn redefined the boundaries of disproportion, obscurity and monster-like appearances.  Morrison‘s poem 'Crossroads' depicts his perception of this process while showing his proclivity for darker images: "Meeting you at your parent‘s gate/ We will tell you what to do/ What you have to do to survive/ Leave the rotten towns/ of your father/ Leave the poisoned wells and bloodstained streets/ Enter now the sweet forest."

Jim Morrison summarizes his philosophy as he writes in 'The American Night': "We have assembled inside this ancient/ & insane theater/ To propagate our lust for life/ and flee the swarming wisdom of the streets." Both Nietzsche and Morrison believe in the destructive condition of the creative process. Morrison uses elements of Dionysian myth in his poetry to describe his own creative experiences: "Running, I saw a Satan/ or Satyr, moving beside/ me, a fleshy shadow/ of my secret mind. Running, Knowing. As the body is ravaged/ The spirit grows stronger./ Forgive me Father for I know/ I want to hear the last Poem/ of the last Poet." Morrison‘s lonely trip takes him to places that even he cannot endure: "I had a splitting headache/ from which the future‘s made." Following a long tradition of strong poets, Morrison uses Nietzschean themes to rewrite/reinvent Nietzsche and develop a philosophy of willful absurdity. ―"The Nietzschean Influence of Jim Morrison" (2008) thesis by Megan Michelle Stypinski 

Bob Dylan's "Triplicate", Jim Morrison and Lou Reed (Rock & Roll Masculine Mystique)

Triplicate (planned to be released by Columbia Records on March 31, 2017) marks Bob Dylan’s 38th studio album to date following 2016’s Fallen Angels. Triplicate sees the Nobel laureate covering 30 American standards by the likes of Frank Sinatra, Charles Strouse, Lee Adams, Harold Hupfield, and Cy Coleman & Carolyn Leigh. All three discs of Triplicate are presented in a thematically-arranged 10-song sequence. "Rock and roll was indeed an extension of what was going on – the big swinging bands – Ray Noble, Will Bradley, Glenn Miller, I listened to that music before I heard Elvis Presley. But rock and roll was high energy, explosive and cut down," says Dylan: "It was skeleton music, came out of the darkness... Rock and roll was a dangerous weapon, chrome plated, it exploded like the speed of light, it reflected the times, especially the presence of the atomic bomb which had preceded it. Back then people feared the end of time. The big showdown between capitalism and communism was on the horizon. Rock and roll made you oblivious to the fear, busted down the barriers that race and religion, ideologies, put up. We lived under a death cloud; the air was radioactive. There was no tomorrow, any day it could all be over." 

Here’s Dylan on whether he picks vocal approaches like an actor playing a role: “An actor playing a role? Like who? Scatman Crothers? George C. Scott? Steve McQueen? It would probably be more like a method actor, whatever a method actor is. Remembrance of things past, I do that all the time.” Asked if he was a fan of the tragic singer Amy Winehouse, Dylan says, "Yeah, absolutely. She was the last real individualist around." Source: www.billboard.com

-There are stories of Jim Morrison being courted by the Hollywood industry, but he torpedoed any chance of that by alienating producers, directors, agents and actors with a cocky attitude... 

-Frank Lisciandro: I just didn’t see that type of behavior from Jim in these situations. Jim was much more passive than actively hostile to people. So rather than become abusive or cop an attitude, he’d get drunk and screw it up that way, ducking out of situations that frustrated him. The fact is that 90% of what I hear about Jim Morrison strikes me as being absolutely wrong. And the ultimate irony is how that type of spin has impacted his own life story and turned it upside down to the degree that it’s nearly impossible to find any truth…I think he would be amazed at what has been said about him over the years. He was more interested in whether the media was beginning to control the thought patterns of society in some horrible ways. His main concern was that the media should not have control over our lives, that was the strongest political statement he ever made.

-Jim's stage persona was the character he played. He was acting a part. Maybe it was insecurity that forced him to become someone else. Maybe some people might find it strange that Jim was a huge Elvis and Beach Boys fan, but Jim heard something in their music that he enjoyed. At parties, he would want people to put on either Elvis or the Beach Boys. Jim really, really loved the Beach Boys. I remember this one time we were driving around and Dylan’s song “And Dogs Run Free” from his album “New Morning”, came on. And it was funny that this amazingly abstract, jazzy song with almost spoken poetry was on the radio. I remember Jim smiling and saying, “Only Dylan could get that played on the radio”. Jim was honoring Dylan’s power as an artist that he could make something so out of the mainstream and still get it played on a rock station. Source: www.lisciandrophotos.com

Lester Bangs wrote this defense of Jim Morrison back in 1981 for Creem Magazine, reminding people of the indelible mark Morrison had made on rock ‘n’ roll and the reach of his influence: Jim Morrison was really the end of the Masculine Mystique as celebrated American culture up to and through rock ‘n’ roll; he was a master of the sly inflectional turn, so that his every utterance, no matter how repetitious, rolled out oozing irony and sanity. A strategy scripted from day one to ultimately reveal that all rock stars were huge oafus cartoons. Jim understands the single kernel of no mind koan-truth that eluded both philosophers and poets (including Patti Smith) over the centuries: that our attempts to rationalize death are beautifully, lovingly funny. Jim was hip to the comedy implicit in romantic obsessor: “I pressed her thigh and death smiled… We could plan a murder or start a religion.” The Beatnik poets gave birth to Jim Morrison, a giant resplendent in the conviction that clowning is ultimately sexy.

Lou Reed enjoyed a solo career renaissance primarily by passing himself off as the most burnt-out reprobate around (and it wasn't all show by a long shot). People kept expecting him to die, so he perversely came back, not to haunt them, but to clean up. The central heroic myth of the sixties was the burnout. Lou Reed was necessary because he had the good sense to realize that the whole concept of sleaze, of decadence, degeneracy, was a joke and he turned himself into a clown. A large part of Lou's mythic appeal has always been his total infantilism. Like Jim Morrison, Lou Reed realized the implicity absurdity of the rock 'n' roll bète-noire badass pose and parodied it, deglamorized it. Lou Reed, like all the heroes, is there for the beating up. They wouldn't be heroes if they were infallible, they wouldn't be heroes if they weren't miserable wretched dogs, the pariahs of the earth.  –"Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung" (2013) by Lester Bangs

American Gods, Labyrinth, Fantasy Movies

American Gods is an American television series created by Bryan Fuller and Michael Green for Starz, based on the novel by author Neil Gaiman. Its premise is what if all the ancient gods were still around and waging a war against the new gods of technology and media? The series focuses on Shadow Moon, a man who is just released after serving three years in prison. Shadow meets a man named Wednesday, who offers Shadow a job. Wednesday appears to be a con artist but is in fact the god Odin. Wednesday is making his way across America, gathering all the old gods, who have now incorporated themselves into American life, to confront the New Gods, including Media and Technology, who grow stronger. Left feeling like he is looking at the world from the bottom of a well, Shadow must literally walk his heroes' path back to a time where he even resembles sanity.

American Gods is a Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novel by English author Neil Gaiman. The plot is a blend of Americana, fantasy, and various strands of ancient and modern mythology, all centering on the mysterious and taciturn protagonist Shadow. A special tenth anniversary edition, with the author's preferred text and including an additional 12000 words, was published in June 2011.

American Gods premieres on Starz on April 30. Gillian Anderson assumes in American Gods the role of the shape-shifting god, Media, the “new Goddess” of television, that’s to say a Goddess who’s been engendered by contemporary collective American desires. As opposed to the Old Gods, engendered by religion and myth, the new Gods are a result of a new form of religiousness: the cult to celebrities. 

Media takes the form of assorted icons: David Bowie, Marilyn Monroe, etc. In Labyrinth (1986), a musical fantasy film directed by Jim Henson, produced by George Lucas, Sarah (Jennifer Connelly) initiates a coming of age fantastic journey in search of Jareth, the Goblin King (David Bowie). Sarah is much like The Neverending Story's Bastian and Return To Oz's Dorothy in this respect. Her character has echoes of Alice in Wonderland's Alice, and Snow White, too. She's a romantic soul who prefers books, stories and her imagination to the real world. Sarah's route to adulthood is a convoluted trek through a magical world where normal logic doesn't apply. Critic Bruce Bailey admired the film's script, stating in The Montreal Gazette: "Terry Jones has drawn on his dry wit and bizarre imagination and come up with a script that transforms these essentially familiar elements and plot structures into something that fairly throbs with new life."

Bailey was also impressed by the film's depth, writing, "adults will have the additional advantage of appreciating the story as a coming-of-age parable." Bowie's music fits the story perfectly: the breezy ‘Magic Dance’, the darkly romantic ‘As the World Falls Down’, the celebratory ‘Underground’ and the menacing ‘Within You’, which is performed during a striking scene inspired by MC Escher’s lithograph print ‘Relativity.’ Combining the puppetry magic of director and legendary creator of The Muppets Jim Henson with the concept design of fantasy illustrator Brian Froud (who previously worked with Henson on The Dark Crystal), Labyrinth is a gorgeous demonstration of ‘old school’ special effects that rely on matte paintings, puppetry and other in-camera visual effects in contrast to modern CGI effects. There is a tangibility to the film that makes its dream logic inspired sequences and playful manipulation of perception even more impressive.