To celebrate the 50th Anniversary of The Doors, the legendary band’s debutalbum, a deluxe box set was released on March 31, 2017. Its third disc features live versions of the band’s classics at the Matrix club in San Francisco on July 3, 1967, during the Summer of Love. The Doors’ debut album has been hailed as one of the greatest milestones in rock music; Rolling Stone magazine called the record “a stoned, immaculate classic,” and ranked it as number 42 on its list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. In September 1967, The Doors reached number 2 on Billboard, just behind The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (released in June, 1967). So to commemorate—half a century later—the rise of Jim Morrison as a key figure in that period’s counterculture, and his sitll-influential artistic legacy, I'll recount a few snapshots from the life of the Lizard King.
Bill Siddons, who became The Doors’ manager, met Jim Morrison at San Francisco’s Avalon Ballroom in May 1967. He was both moved and scared to death by Morrison’s performance, thinking, “This guy is completely out of his mind. His poetry was like a movie. The images were so strong that they came to mind in photo form instead of imagination.” Siddons is one of the 13 characters interviewed by Morrison’s close friend, the filmmaker and photographer Frank Lisciandro, for the enlightening oral biography Jim Morrison:Friends Gathered Together (2014), which succeeds greatly in dispelling old myths about the singer’s controversial personality—some of them fueled by Oliver Stone’s movie The Doors (1991)—and focusing on the real James Douglas Morrison. “One of Jim’s real strengths was that he could see through any of us; whatever game we were trying to play,” reveals Siddons in the chapter “No Respect for Authority”: “Jim was willing to suffer in his pursuit of the truth. The burden of him being pegged as a miscreant and rebel just destroyed him as a performer. He ended up being branded as a freak and a pervert. I think that’s what broke his spirit. It was the reaction to the Miami [arrest for indecency]. I think he was fundamentally unhappy because he couldn’t escape his demons. Paul Ferrara was the one who said the word ‘demons’ to me.”
Paul Ferrara, official photographer for The Doors, friend and collaborator of Morrison in the film projects HWY: An American Pastoral (1969) and Feast of Friends (1970), recalls in his memoir Flash of Eden (ekindle, 2016) some remarkable impressions of Morrison. Like D’Artagnan and the Three Musketeers, Morrison gathered Lisciandro, Ferrara, and Babe Hill for adventures, excesses, and existential moments on the road: “We were a threesome for some time until Jim started living with Pam more like boyfriend and girlfriend,” explains Ferrara: “Jim would disappear to be with Pam for days on end. We partied all over the place with Eric Burdon, Timothy Leary! In New York Jim met up with Andy Warhol. One of Andy’s actors was Nico (The Velvet Underground), a tall wispy blonde who looked like she was on Quaaludes all the time. Jim and Nico had an on-again, off-again relationship. Through all of his romances, Jim managed to keep a (rocky) relationship with Pam.” Ferrara had a one-night stand with Pamela Courson, Morrison’s muse and cosmic mate, but that isolated tryst didn’t ruin his camaraderie with the singer. In contrast, Danny Sugerman, The Doors’ second manager, tried to bed Pam after Morrison’s death but she kicked him off her bed—shouting at him that Jim would have killed the author of No One Here Gets Out Alive (1980) and Wonderland Avenue (1989) for his transgression.
The most sensationalized stuff by Sugerman and Stone would be countered by Tom DiCillo’s documentary The Doors: When You’re Strange (2009), which manages to separate facts from fiction, giving Morrison a more humane aura. Ferrara also recognizes Morrison’s habitual experimentation with LSD: “Acid can cause long-lasting or even permanent changes in a user’s psychology, and personality. Jim Morrison was one of the people that took a lot of doses. He was always pushing the envelope; he would take four or five hits at a time. He did change. He was always on the edge of hurting himself. Right up to the very end, he was trying to hurt himself.”
Despite Morrison’s reckless lifestyle, Ferrara highlights his often overlooked good qualities: “He was truly unique. He had an elevated sense of his self that is rarely seen among people. Like his dislike for possessions, his generosity, the way he tempted life. His confidence was so strong. He was a prince among men. He didn’t fit any mold. Let’s face it: Jim was The Doors. He was the inspiration. His ‘Jimbo’ character was the link to an alter-ego, a multiple personality.” Morrison confessed to Ferrara that after watching The Misfits (1961) on TV, he had felt like Marilyn Monroe—selling himself and not being comfortable doing it. "Babe Hill and I were very close to Jim and if he was bisexual, we would have known," said Paul Ferrara.
Jim Morrison wasn’t a chauvinist, according to his lover Eva Gardony in the chapter “This Affair of Ours” from Friends Gathered Together. Indeed, as EJ Greenham’s doctoral thesis Vision and Desire: Jim Morrison’s Mythography Beyond the Death of God (2009) illustrates, Morrison recognised “the oracle function of women, particularly the culturally censored, and though his writings are read with a male voice in mind and within the context of a phallocentric language, he honours woman in all her forms. ‘Violence kills the temple of no sex’ is a verse from Morrison’s The Lords and the New Creatures (1969). The transformations of life through threshold experiences—sex, death and sacrifice—are scattered throughout this mytho-graphic landscape.”
Ray Manzarek deduced that “Cars Hiss by My Window,” a song from L.A. Woman (1971), “was about living in Venice Beach, in a hot room, with a hot girlfriend, an open window, and a bad time. It could have been about Pamela Courson.” The line “Can’t hear my baby, though I call and call” seems to reference Pam, who was at that time in Paris dabbling with forbidden heroin while waiting for Jim’s arrival. Morrison had begun to see Paris as “built for human beings,” a refuge in exile, far away from the hellish environment that imprisoned him in Los Angeles.
Morrison, who had been an avid reader and self-declared disciple of the influential poets William Blake and Arthur Rimbaud, “was more Rimbaud than Mick Jagger,” Frank Lisciandro said. Wallace Fowlie, author of Rimbaud and Jim Morrison: The Rebel as Poet (1994), theorized in his dual study that some passages from Morrison’s Wilderness: The Lost WritingsVolume 1 echo the prose poems from Rimbaud’s groundbreaking Illuminations. As Rimbaud wrote in that 1886 work: “I am an inventor… a musician who has discovered something like the key of love. I do not regret my old portion of divine gaiety: the sober air of this bleak countryside feeds vigorously my divine skepticism. But since this skepticism cannot, henceforth, be put to use, and since, moreover, I am dedicated to a new torment—I expect to become a very vicious madman.” The ending of 1960s era—and Morrison’s sudden death at the beginning of the 1970s—marked a deep cultural schism that felt as incongruous as a vivid dream blending Los Angeles’ damaged present and Paris’ glorious past.
Pursued by the big-time gambler he robbed, John Muller takes a new identity, with ironic results. By most accounts, the 1948 crime film, Hollow Triumph, based on a novel by Murray Forbes is as Film Noir as they come. A gangster pulling off a final job against a rival is mistaken for his double, a psychologist. Paul Henreid, the late consummate director and actor, headlined and produced the film, playing dual roles while Joan Bennett kept a watchful eye. The endeavor is a class act and the way Monika Henreid sees it, her father’s film would be a highlight in any Film Noir festival. Coincidentally, Hollow Triumph leads off this year’s Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival at 7:30 p.m. May 11, at Camelot Theatres with a restored 35mm print. And Monika Henreid will be in attendance for a post-film Q&A. Others notables include: Black Angel (May 12) — Richard Duryea, former manager for The Beach Boys and whose late father, Dan, starred in the film, will be on hand; Meet Danny Wilson (1951), a pre-From Here to Eternity Frank Sinatra romp with Shelley Winters and Raymond Burr (May 13). Source: www.palspringslife.com
Crime films adopted a more realistic attitude in the 1950s, shifting away from noir romanticism and acknowledging unsavory realities such as police corruption. One of the best 'bad cop' tales is 1954's Shield for Murder, notable for being co-directed by its star, Edmond O'Brien. The overachieving thriller came from a novel by William P. McGivern (The Big Heat, 1953), who also provided the source stories for Rogue Cop (1954) and Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), all of which dealt with crooked lawmen. Detective Nolan (O'Brien) kills a bookie for $25,000 to further his relationship with Patty, the cigarette girl of his dreams (starlet Marla English). Harassed by the mob and a police colleague who he once mentored (John Agar), Nolan commits more cover-up crimes but cannot prevent the truth from coming out. Critics thought the movie effective and saved special praise for actor Emile Meyer as Nolan's captain on the force. The movie made news in Mississippi as well, where the notorious film censor Lloyd T. Binford, called up on tax evasion problems, attempted to deflect the blame to immorality on our screens. He called Shield for Murder 'a burlesque on the City Police Department.' The movie makes a point of having Detective Nolan cornered at the unfinished tract home he hoped to buy for Patty. Nolan's need for consumer success links to later movie cops tempted by dreams of the good life in the suburbs. In Don Siegel's remake of The Killers (1964) Lee Marvin meets his end on a patch of green lawn, and Glenn Ford surrenders to his fate next to a swimming pool he can't afford in the aptly titled The Money Trap (1965). Source: www.tcm.com
Jim Morrison illustrates a man who was very aware of the power struggle between crowds and their leaders, offering a window into each stage of his increasing fame and growing frustration at his commodification and inability to inspire action in others. The first section of The Lords and the New Creatures (1970), titled "The Lords: Notes on Vision", contains Morrison's autobiographical commentary on the dialectic between individuality and expectation. One of Morrison's concise observations of popular culture reads, "The cleavage of men into actor and spectators is the central fact of our time. We are obsessed with heroes who live for us and whom we punish." He clearly identifies himself wholeheartedly as a spectator, not an actor. Morrison's eventual transformation from spectator to actor is the final blow to his authority; eventually, instead of critiquing the society and the status quo (as DeLillo also believes should be the artist's role), he is irrevocably connected to it, and thus, is unable to affect any real change. Whether intentionally or unintentionally, Morrison eventually became one of the "heroes" that he speaks of.
As Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek put it, in an interview with Andrew Doe and John Tobler, Morrison eventually became "tired of being The Lizard King. Jim Morrison was a poet, an artist-- he didn't want to be the King of Orgasmic Rock, The King of Acid Rock, The Lizard King." Morrison's withdrawal and subsequent death can here be equated with Bucky Wunderlick's withdrawal and the eventual death of language that he suffers in Great Jones Street (1973). DeLillo makes it clear that Bucky regains his power over his fans by willfully disappearing, and Morrison's life can be used as a test case that proves DeLillo's theories. Late in his life, Morrison took to baiting and insulting fans in The Doors' concerts, partly as a manipulative gesture and partly because he himself was miserable about the celebrity that he had attained and his own inability to lead or inspire action in anyone, especially himself. Tony Magistrale points out, "As Morrison argues in many of his poems, the 'sleeping city' is a general metaphor for passive acceptance of the status quo." Morrison uses the metaphors of disease and dying to describe the afflicted society he was living in, in much the same way T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) was an indictment of the societal death happening all around him.
Morrison meditates, for instance, on images that others may find grotesque or macabre to illustrate the uneasiness society has when confronted with anything that reminds them of their own mortality. Later in his life, his fans would become the spies, looking through the camera at him, dissecting each segment of his life ad infinitum, inspecting Morrison himself as if he were a "rare aquatic insect." In this way, Morrison's early writings were prophetic. Another seemingly prophetic passage from this early book reads, "Everything is vague and dizzy. The skin swells and there is no more distinction between parts of the body. An encroaching sound of threatening, mocking, monotonous voices. This is fear and attraction of being swallowed." This passage from Lords and the New Creatures is reminiscent of the opening lines of Elias Canetti' s influential study on crowds, Crowds and Power (1960): "There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown. He wants to see what is reaching towards him, and to be able to recognize it. Man always tends to avoid physical contact with anything strange." Morrison had no interest in pandering to any portion of society, he found that no matter what he did, he was always associated with one group or another and given titles by the media that diverged from his own self-image. "Even the bitter Poet-Madman is a clown. Treading the boards" (Wilderness: The Lost Writings of Jim Morrison). In this poem Morrison calls himself a clown because he realizes that his message is being overshadowed by his image, as the audience expects entertainment from him, instead of guidance. As Dylan Jones points out, "Like many performers, Morrison was unable to harness his own stardom, and because of this, he began lampooning himself." "The boards" are theatrical jargon for the stage; Morrison here again recognizes that he has become an actor.
His audience expects him to be an actor, and due to this expectation, he can no longer reach them. The poem, entitled "Road Days," contains the following verses: "I have ploughed My seed thru the heart Of the nation. Injected a germ in the psychic blood vein. Now I embrace the poetry of business & become—for a time—a "Prince of Industry." Part of Morrison's frustration in this poem (and in his life) comes from his realization of his own entrapment by market forces. Like Bucky Wunderlick in Great Jones Street, he realizes that he is more commodity than person, a name to to be held up as an example of the corruption of the youth of his generation. By "embrac[ing] the poetry of business," Morrison recognizes that he should attempt to take control of his own persona and image by becoming aware of the business side of his career, in much the same way that Bucky begins a corporation, Transparanoia. Morrison, at the height of his fame, realizes that he is more a puppet-like performer than a revolutionary leader, and realizes the fans and the media are consuming him. Unlike DeLillo's Bucky Wunderlick, who used gibberish lyrics as a means to test the crowd's devotion to him, Morrison used his onstage persona to try to push the crowd away. Although he continued to strive against his restraints, he eventually tired out and had no choice but to give in to the public's idea of his identity, because he no longer knew what his identity was. According to friends such as Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek, Morrison never really wanted to be a rock star. James Riordan and Jerry Prochnicky describe his initial reluctance to make himself the center of attention: "When they agreed to form a band, Morrison figured Ray would sing the songs, but Manzarek insisted that since they were Jim's songs, he must feel them more and should sing them."
Morrison had gained the reputation for being so high on LSD that he "could eat acid coated sugar cubes all night without visible effect." Morrison's self-medication also allowed him to anesthetize the spectator part of himself and cultivate his actor persona, a persona he was carefully crafting, but to the detriment of his individuality. Unfortunately, the more comfortable Morrison became with the power he held over the crowd, the more the power shifted toward his audience and ensnared his individuality. As though to mock his stardom, Morrison rebelled against even his band mates and producers, knowing that very little could be done without him. According to Riordan and Prochnicky, Morrison loved to toy with the media by describing the band as "erotic politicians" and telling joumalists that he loved "activity that seems to have no meaning." These sound bytes were jokes to him, and he was surprised when people took them seriously. He found it "ludicrous for anyone to assume that a philosophy worth anything could be summed up in a few choice phrases. I just thought everyone knew it was ironic," Morrison said, "but apparently they thought I was mad." The meltdown in Miami meant he thought he was a fraud to himself by this point in his career, and was the foregone conclusion of such a power struggle between a proliferated image and the man. Morrison fought and pushed back as hard as he could until he broke on through to another stage. —"The sadness of great fame: The conflict between individuality and expectation in the works of Don DeLillo and Jim Morrison" (2005) by Sue-Ellen Norton Francis
Bobby Klein, occasional photographer for The Doors, took a few photos of Jim and Pamela naked in bed, although these snaps weren't ever made public. Klein spread the rumor that Morrison had set Pam's closet on fire. Steven P. Wheeler (editor of Frank Lisciandro's book Jim Morrison: Friends Gathered Together): "The biggest problem, it would seem, is that even if Jim did 20 outrageous things in a 27 year period, too many fans believe that those 20 outrageous moments encapsulate a person's entire lifestyle. I believe that a vast majority of the time that you dealt with him, Jim was a quiet, sensitive and thoughtful human being.... but the Myth is that he was partying every single waking moment of his life, as the Stone celluloid debacle would have us believe. Nobody in the universe, dead or alive, can truly know about Jim Morrison's relationship with Pamela Courson." Maybe nobody can exactly define Morrison and Courson's complicated romance although some tried to. Salli Stevenson, journalist for Circus Magazine (she interviewed Morrison in October, 1970): "I met Jim on October 13, 1970. Jim and I were in daily contact after that until he and Babe Hill left for Miami on October 29th. When Jim returned, he called me. We got together for a movie with Frank and Kathy Lisciandro. We were in touch on and off until January 17, 1971. We finally spoke to each other twice in March, before he left for Paris.
The only woman that Jim ever took seriously was Pamela. They experienced every facet of a relationship that could be experienced together: friends, brotherly, lovers, partners. She was his old lady. She is the only woman he ever allowed to say she was his wife. Jim for many reasons completely bonded to Pamela. I knew that nothing could come between them. I felt that they both deserved Purple Hearts for weathering the challenges of their journey together." In words of Pamela: “The body is such a complex figure. There’s lots of little tricks and even some things feel purely magical. Pain endures through your body—Love endures through your body—Sadness even endures through your body. Yet here we all are, still standing strong as if nothing happened. Sometimes the simplest things can turn me on. Like for instance, if a guy can be really masculine one second and then he next acts like your personalized teddy bear. It’s really simple things like that, that can get me going. I have a soft side too, you know. Just because I put out a mysterious vibe doesn’t mean that I don’t have permission to act girly every once in a while.” In words of Jim: “I drink so I can talk to assholes/This includes me.” According to manager Vince Treanor: "Jim was possibly disgusted by Pamela's heroin habit; however, he supported it."
According to James Riordan: "Jim Morrison always craved attention from male and female audiences while his personal sex life was exclusively heterosexual. His face was more than handsome, it was pretty and displayed vulnerability, but he was not feminine. In his eyes something definitely masculine burned. More than masculine, something dangerous." ―"Break on Through: The Life and Death of Jim Morrison" (2014) by James Riordan and Jerry Prochnicky
Nico - Femme Fatale: "Here she comes, you better watch your step/She's going to break your heart in two, it's true/It's not hard to realize/Just look into her false colored eyes/She builds you up to just put you down, what a clown/'Cause everybody knows/She's a femme fatale." —"The Velvet Underground & Nico" (1967)
The Big Sleep unintentionally subverts its own downbeat noir fantasy by having the dick and the potential film fatale get together. She isn’t a siren beckoning him to his doom like Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon, or like Carmen would have been if he gave in to her advances; Vivian is his peer and every bit as acid-tongued in her retorts as Bogie. It is a bizarre courtship by way of insults, Bogart’s aloofness, Bacall’s disaffection, and Hawks’ rapid fire, dry humor. The Big Sleep is about a tough detective, yet it is not marketed or built upon a lonely cynic like Bogart’s Sam Spade, but around a two-hour flirtation between Bogart and Bacall. Bullets, booze, and bloody corpses amount to foreplay. By the time the movie opened, the most masculine of movie stars who, as Chandler memorably said, “looked tough without holding a gun,” is also considered even more idealized to be holding his off-screen wife’s hand. The war was over and the film noir movement it helped birth with a new streak of urbane American cynicism was just beginning. Yet already, a post-war mainstream contentedness was sneaking in too. Source: www.denofgeek.com
“The streets are fields that never die,” from “The Crystal Ship” was a captivating image; “Before you slip into unconsciousness”—that could be sleep, it could be an overdose, inflicted by the singer or the person he’s addressing, or a suicide pact. Jim Morrison raises his voice, his volume, only once, near the end; his voice never more modest, never more full. He was never a soul singer—the reserve of someone thinking everything through kept him from that—but here he gave himself up to the notes and melody. “Sometimes I make up words so I can remember the melody I hear,” Morrison once said; you can hear that happening here. Inside this soft, deeply elegant song, what Raymond Chandler called the big sleep, what Ross Macdonald called the chill, lingered, lay back on a bed with its lips parted. Already in 1968 the Doors were performing not freedom but its disappearance. This is what is terrifying: the notion that the Sixties was a place, even as it was created, people know they can never really inhabit, and never escape.
Jim Morrison, a confused guy, enters this arena because it’s where the action is, and he becomes a new person, someone he doesn’t recognize. A few years later, on stage, he performs as a double: the old person watching the new one, just like any fan in the crowd. In New York, The Factory, the mood changes as the band (The Velvet Underground) refuses to let the music (Heroin) build in any conventional manner, refuses to even hint at a change, a break, a release. Everywhere in the room there is a sense of anticipation and dread. People know what roles they are expected to play—the amused scene-maker, the would-be groupie, the hipster, the fan, the skeptic, the insider—but those roles are beginning to break down. The camera fixes on single faces in the crowd, isolating them, and there’s a coldness in the faces, as if they’re watching a snuff movie: as if they know they aren’t going to like what comes next, but can’t turn away. In this long sequence, nothing is stressed, nothing is glamorized. —"The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years" (2013) by Greil Marcus
A motif regularly mobilised in Stone’s films, particularly in The Doors: the ‘non-conformist’ raging against the tyranny and hypocrisy of the ‘establishment’ and the blank conformity that sustains it. The Doors narrative splits its women into Pam Courson’s angel (Meg Ryan) and Patricia Kennealy (Kathleen Quinlan) and Nico’s (Kristina Fulton) femme fatales. Susan Mackey-Kallis has argued that Stone’s films are an attempt to counter and make sense of the bewildering fragmentation and social chaos of postmodern America. Stone can be seen, like his protagonists, as a metonymic figure, and the rhetorical tropes that his image has come to signify: paranoia most obviously, but also martyrdom, victimisation, suffering, betrayal, sacrifice, and trauma. Sally Robinson argued that such rhetoric is key to the discourses of mythopoesis and masculine angst emergent in the 1970s. Robinson’s insights are particularly useful in examining how men are caught between two competing truths, masculinity and male experience; male power is secured by inexpressivity, even as inexpressivity damages the male psyche and body.
In Oliver Stone’s own words, overtly hinting a quasi-Freudian worldview: "Death and women are two unknowns to males. Because of that, women assume this mysterious power over our psyche, and death is the same way, it’s the other unknown, and it terrifies us. And I think death and sex are intertwined, death and love, death and women. And that intertwining is partly the demon that motivates me. I think that sometimes you want to locate that demon and purify it, and at other times you should never expose that demon."
Stone’s films can be read as both symptomatically masochistic dramas and as restorative tales of remasculinization. Thus, the flaws of the archetypal metonymic son are those of the contemporary United States as a whole, the state of the nation embodied by his embattled protagonists. As such, the melancholic’s self-accusations function as a strategically distorted moral-political-spiritual critique of the nation, a romanticized view of the melancholic as the misunderstood and self-abnegating but truthful ‘moralist’ critic of society. ‘It is not that Stone is un-American,’ notes John Orr (2000), ‘it's more that he is too American.’ Mark Kermode notes Stone's films present contemporary American culture as a bewildering and disorienting polyvocal nightmare. —"Paranoid Histories and Locker-Room Fables: Oliver Stone Kicking Against the (dead) Pricks" (2013) by Martin Fradley
Jim Morrison appeared hypnotized listening to Nico fronting The Velvet Underground's concert at The Trip on West Hollywood, May 1967. According to The Doors On the Road (1997) by Greg Shaw, Jim Morrison’s band –who had yet to release a record– are soon being considered as a replacement for Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention, in light of the animosity between Zappa and The Velvet Underground members. “We were to be the opening act,” confirmed The Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek: “We were very excited. New York and LA underground go head to head, so to speak. It would have been momentous. What a double bill! But the cops closed the club. Too much weirdness.” In July 1967 Morrison met Nico again at the Monterey Pop Festival, where Nico attended with her date, Brian Jones. The Doors were now riding high, selling more records per week than the Velvets would manage in their entire career together.
Jim Morrison had a crush on Nico and suggested she should get a record deal with The Doors' label Elektra. He loved her platinum-blonde hair and her thick Berlin accent. Because of her crystal beauty and her metallic accent, others made fun, said she didn’t have a heart like other women. But Nico now gave her heart to Jim Morrison. When Nico dyed her platinum-white hair red –like Morrison’s girlfriend Pamela Courson’s– he burst into tears. “He was the first man I was in love with,” Nico would later lament. It wasn’t until August 1967, just as Morrison’s affair with Nico was reaching its nadir, that The Doors returned to LA and the Sunset Sound studio, to begin work on Strange Days. When it came time to record the album’s pivotal track, When The Music’s Over, Morrison insisted the whole track be played live in the studio. The band acquiesced, then sat there for more than 12 hours waiting for him to show up. He never did. Instead, he phoned the studio at 3am and spoke to Krieger. “We’re in trouble here,” he told the guitarist. Morrison and his girlfriend Pam Courson were tripping on strong acid and wanted Krieger to drive them to nearby Griffith Park where they could “cool out”. —Classic Rock magazine, #132
Danny Fields: "I've never had any respect for Oliver Stone, but after seeing his version of the Morrison/Nico meeting in the Doors movie - 'Hello, I am Nico, would you like to go to bed with me?' - the reality of it couldn't have been more different. I met Morrison at the Elektra office in L.A. and he followed me back to the Castle in his rented car. Morrison walked into the kitchen and Nico was there and they stood and circled each other. Then they stared at the floor and didn't say a word to each other. They were both too poetic to say anything. It was a very boring, poetic, silent thing that was going on between them.They formed a mystical bond immediately - I think Morrison pulled Nico's hair and then he proceeded to get extremely drunk and I fed him whatever was left of my drugs that Edie Sedgwick hadn't stolen."
The Velvet Underground were the first important rock & roll artists who had no real chance of attracting a mass audience. This was paradoxical. Rock-and-roll was a mass art. If this was paradoxical, the very idea of rock & roll art rests on a contradiction. The Velvets’ music was too overtly intellectual, stylized, and distanced to be commercial. Lou Reed’s persona was also paradoxical in the context of rock-and-roll, closer to the bohemian hipster: he wore shades, took hard drugs, and he was a loner. In a sense, the self-conscious formalism of his music—the quality that made the Velvets uncommercial—was an attempt to purify rock-and-roll. Heroin is a song of total, willful rejection of the corrupt world, of other people. In the beginning he likens shooting up to a spiritual journey: when he’s rushing on his run he feels like Jesus’ son. At the end, with a blasphemous defiance that belies his words, he avows, “Thank your God that I’m not aware/ And thank God that I just don’t care!” The whole song seems to rush outward and then close in on itself, on the moment of truth when the junkie knowingly and deliberately chooses death over life. It is the clarity of his consciousness that gives the sin its enormity. Yet the clarity also offers a glimmer of redemption. In the very act of choosing numbness the singer admits his longing for something better. In “Pale Blue Eyes” the world has gotten in the way of the singer’s transcendent love: “If I could make the world as pure and strange as what I see/ I’d put you in the mirror I put in front of me.” —"The Velvet Underground: I'll let you be in my dream" (1978) by Ellen Willis
John Cale has revealed the details of the artists set to join him at a special Liverpool show to celebrate the 50th anniversary of The Velvet Underground’s seminal debut album, The Velvet Underground & Nico, which points when pop and art started to speak the same language. The Velvet Underground's songs actively encouraged and romanticised the link between rock & roll and the outsider. Cale previously performed The Velvet Underground & Nico in its entirety at La Philharmonie in Paris on 4 April 2016. On that occasion, he was assisted by special guests including The Libertines, Animal Collective and Mark Lanegan. This year’s gig will see him and his guests perform on a bespoke open-air stage in Liverpool’s docklands which will face outwards towards New York, where the album was recorded. The event takes place at Liverpool’s Sound City Festival on 26 May 2017. During the show, the album will be “reimagined” by Cale and will feature contributions from The Kills, Super Furry Animals’ Gruff Rhys, Nadine Shah, Wild Beasts and Clinic. Source: www.udiscovermusic.com
When I first met Lou Reed at the beginning of 1965, he was seeing a psychiatrist who prescribed him Placidyl tranquilizer. I could not believe somebody who wrote those songs could be crazy. I didn't believe in schizophrenia. All I saw in it was a different way of seeeing things. He couldn't figure me out and I couldn't figure him out. The only things we had in common were drugs and an obsession with risk taking. Lou thought it important to shock me with his version of the hustling scene. In retrospect, I realize he was just doing this to upset me, part of the endless mind-games endemic to his personality. As soon as I went off with Edie Sedgwick, Lou immediately fell head over heels in love with Nico and moved in with her. I'd be dying to go to bed with Susan Bottomly (International Velvet), whom Lou was also fucking on the side. Unfortunately, when Lou came out of the hospital, he caught me in bed with Susan and he threw us both out of the apartment. —"What's Welsh for Zen" (2000) by John Cale
John Cale had a brief 'constipated' affair with Nico, but not very memorable. Lou Reed apparently had liked Jim Morrison enough to note, in an interview with Jim Martin in Open City magazine #78: "he's going through all this whole number [onstage] for the kids, very nice, very religious rock & roll," but Morrison's affair with Nico had seemingly left Reed sour. Danny Fields had told his 'official' introduction of the Lizard King to the blonde chanteuse as having derived in Morrison pulling Nico by her hair and inviting her to a near suicidal balancing on The Castle's parapet in the throes of lysergic ecstasy. The few occasions Morrison had visited The Factory socially, Reed had always avoided him and begun referring to The Doors' leading singer as 'pretentious asshole' or worse. On Morrison's part, he had defended The Factory when going back to his safe port in L.A. but he never suggested he was falling in love with Nico or commented anything about Reed & The Velvets, although Manzarek mentioned later that Morrison had appreciated Reed's originality in lyrics.
Not every reviewer hated the EPI [The Exploding Plastic Inevitable]. Paul Jay Robbins, from Los Angeles Free Press, found the Warhol's show successful from a perspective connected to Guy Debord’s view of contemporary spectacle: "Warhol’s show is decadence. It is only an extrusion of our national disease, our social insensitivity. We are a dying creature, and Warhol is holding our failing hand and sketching the carcinoma in our soul." The EPI was disorienting in a way that was reminiscent of LSD trips; Jackie Cassen’s early involvement in the development of the EPI’s light show likely contributed to that aesthetic from the outset. The avant-garde’s interest in hallucinogenic drugs emerged in the Ten Trip Ticket Book, a play on the term “drug trip.” Chaotic sensory input overwhelmed the faculties: depth perception blurred in the layers of projections and concrete objects, the loud music numbed the ears, the strobe lights froze time for fractions of seconds.
Andy Warhol was a banal Debordian celebrity, but his banality was so explicit and exaggerated that he did not disappear into the mediated fabric of Debord’s highly mediated spectacle. The EPI provided a location for the counterculture of 1960s New York to gather and played a key role in establishing the East Village as a Bohemian port of call. Whether he intended it to be or not, Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable was a act of underground political, social, and artistic rebellion. —"Ready to blow your mind: Andy Warhol's EPI" (2016) by Alycia Faith Lentz
Jim Morrison was a mass of contradictions, probably schizophrenic, and the heavier the mantle of celebrity the worse his behaviour became and the more he sought to escape. The anti-social behaviour on/off stage was the action of a man who thought that people were not taking him seriously. The release he had felt before being onstage was becoming one of increasing anger towards the audience. It was he who embraced the sex symbol role and now it was he who was rebelling against it. Paradise Now (1968) was the Living Theatre avant-garde show that most affected Morrison. The Living Theatre provided the missing piece in Morrison’s revolt against the leather Frankenstein he had created. “At Miami, I tried to reduce the myth to absurdity,” said Morrison in 1969: “I was living out an adolescent fantasy and it just got too much for me to stomach. I told the audience that they were a bunch of idiots, and what were they doing there anyway? Not to listen to some songs, but for something else… so why not admit it and do something about it?” ―"Break on Through: The Life and Death of Jim Morrison" (2014) by James Riordan and Jerry Prochnicky
"Actors must make us think they're real. Our friends must not make us think we’re acting," wrote Morrison. I was greeted by a nightmare. Jim was the young and beautiful poet Sebastian that Tennessee Williams had created in Suddenly Last Summer (1959) starring Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift: Sebastian is devoured in a flashback by a flock of starving urchins. In my dream, Jim’s fans overwhelm him on stage and become the monsters of the Goya paintings who devour people alive. I awoke wanting to understand where this vision had come from, an expression perhaps Jim had slipped into our conversation that I hadn’t noticed consciously. I quickly dressed and fled what seemed like a horrible cell, not the romantic Parisian garret I had fallen asleep in.
Christ, was that how Jim felt? Now I understood another reason for his stage antics, his jumping all over the stage, falling to the ground and his drinking, it was a wall he built to protect himself. He had given me a glimpse of his fame, a freak show that he needed to escape from, to get away from being devoured. Neither of us had wanted to go to Vietnam. Maybe we weren’t afraid to die, we were afraid to kill. The voice from my LSD radiator had returned to haunt me. “Twinkle, twinkle,” Jim had said, emptying the vials. As Rimbaud had dreamed, ‘Christmas on Earth’: I closed my eyes and fell into a deep void. Asleep, I was greeted by a vivid dream. I was in a silent world. The sky was bright like the collages back on Jim’s wall. There was a beautiful woman ahead of me beckoning. The moon and the stars were out even though it was daytime. Jim came over. He was dressed in black and looked cleaner and handsomer than I had remembered him. He motioned to me. I got up and saw I was at the seaside. Waves were crashing against deeply chiselled cliffs bristling in the sunlight. I turned. There was no one to be seen. I felt as if I were the only person now left in the world, but I felt very full, complete. The hills rolled on toward the horizon, a sweet wind in the air. Jim removed two vials of aqua-blue acid. Voices seemed to be coming through the radiator. Jim had forgotten to turn off the radio? What was it that Ginsberg was saying about the CIA, Morse Code? Is the radio taping me through the radiator? Where were my friends? Why did they have to kill me? I wouldn’t play along? What was this LSD? A secret way of recruiting people, transplanting energies into other bodies, transforming your body? Where was Jim? Was it Jim’s reality? I felt there was something almost vicious about this acid, as if it had stolen into my consciousness. That is the meaning of hallucination, hailing the world, stopping it dead in its tracks. –"Tripping With Jim Morrison & Other Friends: With An Introduction By Timothy Leary" (2016) by Michael Lawrence
“Candy Says” (1969) is one of Lou Reed's best songs, certainly impressive, and one of the most underrated items in the entire Velvet Underground catalog. The inspiration behind this tragic song was the Factory transexual Candy Darling, a female psyche stuck in a man’s body. The song was proof that Reed continued to draw on the Factory crowd for material long after the Velvets ended their formal association with Warhol, with one of his loveliest, most heartbreaking melodies, and some of his most sympathetic lyrics.
Transformer (1972) was produced by David Bowie and Mick Ronson, both of whom had been strongly influenced by Reed's work with the Velvet Underground. Bowie had obliquely referenced the Velvet Underground in the cover notes for his album Hunky Dory and regularly performed both "White Light/White Heat" and "I'm Waiting for the Man." Lester Bangs thought of Bowie as overrated, "a vampire, pure Lugosi, lurking behind Reed (wide-eyed in a Quaalude haze)" and accused him of ripping off Reed's guitar riffs. –"Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung" (2013) by Lester Bangs
Male cross-dressers have similar erotic preferences to heterosexual men, according to recently published research in Journal of Sex Research-Archives of Sexual Behavior. They examined the genital arousal patterns associated with autogynephilia. Men who are sexually interested in transgender women exhibited genital sexual arousal patterns similar to typical heterosexual men: Both were sexually aroused by female and not male stimuli. However, relative to the typical heterosexual men, the men sexually interested in transgender women showed increased arousal by transgender stimuli (erotica featuring “shemales”). They also found that the men sexually interested in transgender women tended to be sexually aroused by the idea of being a woman themselves. Autogynephilic men showed genital sexual arousal patterns that were near identical to men sexually interested in transgender women. That is, both groups of men were sexually aroused by female and not by male stimuli, just like typical heterosexual men. Both also differed from typical heterosexual men in their increased arousal by the transgender stimuli. Source: www.psypost.org
"Bowie was always very gracious with me, and deferential to Lou, as they huddled together. David was a rising star and a great fan of Lou’s. He deeply admired Lou’s writing and work with The Velvet Underground. David genuinely wanted to help Lou succeed as a solo artist, but he also knew that being associated with Lou and his legendary cult status with the Velvets would, by association, bring him cachet and prestige himself, too. Lou wasn’t particularly enamored with Angie; she was David’s wife, though, so Lou was always respectful to her. On the road, it was hard for me to watch Lou's deterioration, but I blamed a lot of it on all the pressure he put himself under to succeed, which, coupled with our nomadic lifestyle on the tour, was quite stressful and disorienting. The more Lou wished to impress someone, the less he acted like he cared. Girls were the only exception.
With women Lou was polite, shy, and almost behaved like a high-school kid. It was how you could tell if he was really interested in you. He could be passionate, although typically maintained his guard up. One day Lou mentioned a dress he thought I could wear, which surprised me. He never told me what to say, how to act, or what to wear. He always told me I looked great. The dress Lou was talking about was one I had bought in London, when Angie and I went on a shopping spree on the Kings Road. It was a 1930s white, beautifully draped, crepe floral dress. I wore my red stiletto platform heels (which we called ‘fuck-me shoes’ back then) to match. Lou kissed me. ‘I love you,’ he said quietly. ‘There are no words to tell you how much, Princess.’ Lou loved my red fuck-me stilettos. I thought pairing overtly sexual shoes with such a ladylike dress was a gas.
‘I am a very lucky man, and tonight, when I walk in with you, everyone in the Ginger Man will be jealous. They’ll all wonder, Now, how did this short Jewish kid from the wrong side of Long Island end up with that tall, gorgeous blonde?’ Bowie abruptly turned around to Angie and said, ‘Why can’t you wear a dress, like her?’ The joke was that this was probably the first time I’d been in a dress for a year. Both Lou and I noticed there was some tension between David and Angie, but we didn’t dwell on it. They had an entirely different relationship to us, and they drew very different boundaries around their marriage than either Lou or I would be comfortable with—an open relationship with lovers. From the beginning of our relationship I told Lou in no uncertain terms that if I saw a needle anywhere near him, I would—without fail—leave him. Hard drugs were his Achilles’ heel, and I knew they would destroy him if he started taking them again, as he had before we starting going together. Some months later, I found Lou in bed with a mysterious blonde girl. She was in the pull out bed of our living room couch with him. They were both naked, and clearly she had spent the night. The scene was so obvious it was almost laughable. Lou called out my name in surprise when I walked in. After a while, it seemed like the girl might be waiting for me to leave the room so that she could get up and put her clothing on and make her exit. I noted Lou hadn’t taken her to the bedroom and into our bed of freshly laundered sheets. Even before she’d closed the front door, Lou was profusely apologizing, telling me he thought I’d left him for good. In a panic, he admitted he couldn’t be alone, thinking I’d left him." —"Perfect Day: An Intimate Portrait Of Life With Lou Reed" (2016) by Bettye Kronstad
The Velvet Underground had been always hopelessly managed, they'd operated in a curious sub-fame zone. Legendary Doors twat Ray Manzarek patronised them. But Jimi Hendrix liked them and told them so, and a sharp David Bowie was the first artist in the world to cover the Velvets. Mick Jagger even confessed to the NME that the Stones’ ‘Stray Cat Blues’ was modelled on the Velvets’ ‘Heroin.’ “There’s no other group in rock history with such a disparity between the size of their audience when active and the size of their audience subsequently,” points out Richie Unterberger, a specialist in sixties music who grew up too late to see the Velvets. He discovered them in the late seventies, a time when their critical stock was at its lowest, and their records unavailable. And more than any other sixties major bands the Velvet Underground anticipated punk, new wave and alternative rock.” Source: thequietus.com
Lou Reed – the most important visionary of the Velvet Underground – had in many respects a typical middle-class American upbringing. He dated girls—quite the ladies' man, despite his ambiguous later image—played basketball, and was on the Freeport High track team. “I came from this small town out on Long Island,” Reed told Rolling Stone in 1987. “Nowhere. I mean nowhere. The most boring place on earth.” In the mid-‘50s, however, the explosion of rock’n’roll extended a lifeline to an entirely different world – the new sounds of rockabilly, doo wop, and rhythm & blues beamed into suburban homes such as Reed’s by radio DJs such as Alan Freed and Murray The K. ‘Rock & Roll’ is about me, Reed admits in David Fricke’s liner notes to the 1995 Velvet Underground set Peel Slowly and See. “If I hadn’t heard rock’n’roll on the radio, I would have had no idea there was life on this planet. Which would have been devastating.”
“The Day John Kennedy Died” from The Blue Mask. “That is literally, exactly what happened,” Lou Reed explained in 1982. “It was just a terrible time. It had –at least as far as I’m concerned– a terrible effect that lasted a long time. And I’m still aware of it, so I wrote about it. I’m one of those people who really believed in John Kennedy. And I don’t care if he bought the election, I don’t care about any of that stuff. The Bay of Pigs, I think he would have straightened it out. Some people say this is misplaced idealism. Well, maybe. I still don’t think so. But nonetheless, that’s the way it was for me the day John F. Kennedy died. I’m not into politics, and I don’t have any real feelings about politics one way or another, except I felt bad here, and I wrote a song about it.”
John Cale and Lou Reed had met in early 1965. Reed had recently graduated from Syracuse University, where he’d shared a dormitory with Sterling Morrison, later the Velvets’ guitarist, and fallen under the influence of his ‘spiritual godfather’, the poet Delmore Schwartz. Reed and Cale came from almost diametrically opposed musical traditions, but within a matter of weeks they were sharing an apartment on Ludlow Street in the East Village, and more than that: songs, ideas, needles, hepatitis and girls, including Elektrah, who briefly joined their fledgling band, the Falling Spikes, and Daryl, commemorated in Lou Reed’s 1973 album, Berlin. In John Cale's memoir What's Welsh for Zen Cale tells how shortly after the Elektrah Lobel fiasco, Reed invited another eccentric woman, Daryl Delafield, to join the band. Daryl, a nymphomaniac, engaged in simultaneous affairs with both Reed and Cale. In the end Daryl didn’t join the band, but it’s still interesting to note that, unlike many of their rock contemporaries, Reed and Cale have no reservations about considering women as potential band-members – or at least women with whom they’re having sex. According to What’s Welsh For Zen, it’s on the corner of 75th and Broadway that Cale and Reed met Elektrah Lobel. As well as beginning a brief affair with her, Cale asks Lobel to join the Falling Spikes. Later Cale and Reed elect to carry on without her, deciding that she’s too unstable.
Interviewed by the author in 2011 and 2012, Lobel (who now uses her given first name Marcia, having picked up the nickname Elektrah at a party on San Francisco’s Haight Street) didn’t remember much about her brief stint with Lou and John, but did want to clarify her role in the pre-Velvets. “When I was with them, I never played any instruments,” she emphasizes, denying the anecdotes Cale recounted as her playing a guitar with bleeding fingers: “I was a singer. This thing about me breaking a guitar or something, that was not me!” As Lou Reed later recalls in the 1998 BBC documentary, “We finally were signed to a record company, really on the basis of Andy. I don’t know if we would have gotten a contract if Andy hadn’t said he’d do the cover, or if Nico wasn’t so beautiful.” “People would tell us it was violent, it was grotesque, it was perverted,” Reed is quoted as noting in Nigel Trevana’s Lou Reed & The Velvets (1973). “We said, ‘What are you talking about? It’s fun…” Although the 1995 television documentary Rock & Roll states that Jim Morrison was inspired to start writing songs after attending one of the Velvets’ San Francisco shows, Morrison had already written the backbones of several songs when the Doors formed in 1965.
In fact, Jim Morrison had decided to form a band with keyboardist Ray Manzarek after singing “Moonlight Drive,” to him on a Los Angeles beach. And Morrison was certainly not in the audience at the Fillmore, since the Doors were in the midst of a residency at the Whisky A Go Go in Los Angeles. Jim Morrison will pop up again in the VU story in about a year in a brief yet crucial role as Nico’s lover and muse. Very likely, the insecure Reed would feel a tinge of jealousy over this relationship, which would have contributed to his perennial animosity towards Morrison. Manzarek recalled the Factory abysmally, seeing Warhol's social center as "waiting to begin the mad, downward spiral of consequences." Manzarek disliked Warhol intensily, whom he called "The benign De Sade. The giggling Caligula of the Lower East Side. He held the keys to that quasi-artistic gathering of beautiful people known as the Factory—Andy’s great loft of silver foil, silk screens, and anything goes. Jim was down there within the first week of our opening at Ondine. He loved the games, the role playing, the attitude. The challenges to go further, to go beyond the self-imposed, societally sanctioned bounds of psychic control."
Mary Woronov and Lou Reed at the Factory, 1967.
Manzarek saw the statuesque Nico as "the Valkyrian angel of death who would push Jim Morrison's buttons at every opportunity, in a deep and Germanic-accented voice. They would retire to a silver-foiled room for more drink, more pills, more sex. Jim could only nod in pleasure, being speechless at the intensity of his ejaculation. The pills and booze were melting together in his brain, obliterating his will to power and replacing it with a will to pleasure. Andy’s world was a pill-head scene. Amphetamine uppers and barbiturate downers. And that was not a combination that opened the doors of perception. The holographic universe did not exist on pills and booze. It was strictly pleasure. I love my body pleasure, too, but the denizens of this pleasure dome had gone too far. They were intoxicants without enlightenment. Inebriates without vision, much as today’s crack-meth-bonehead speed freaks and narcoleptic heroin hounds are dope addicts without a clue. At the Factory it was all an ultimately enervating pleasure that could only weaken and debilitate. There was no desire on the part of the denizens to begin the world again, to create the new Garden of Eden, to transcend ordinary reality. The debauchery was not liberating, as such intoxication should be. It didn’t open the doors of perception. It did not break through the walls of the Judeo-Christian-Muslim myth into freedom. It did not charge the psyche with energy. It was merely an end in itself. It was the realm of the cynic, the ironist. A realm of sophistication, of knowledge, of worldliness… but without the sun. It was perpetual pleasure and perpetual darkness."
‘Sister Ray’ is the last song of White Light/White Heat. It goes on for a full half hour. Three chords: EEE, D, A, EEE, D, A, EEE, etc. The scene is eerie. Together the band creates an apocalyptic vision of eroticism, sadomasochism, and violence that is at once seductive and terrifying. The amplifiers feed back – the building seems to be shaking right to its foundations. “Sad Song” is one of Reed’s finest regretful ballads, and imbued with a sense of compassionate humanity that’s often swamped by its author’s crusty public image. Yet it’s another song that won’t be issued until Reed resurrects it as the devastating curtain-closer on his Berlin LP. Reed said in his interview by Howard Smith in the Village Voice in March, 1969: "I’ve always just felt that the people who were the novelists of the ‘50s and the ‘60s would have to make rock and roll records." Smith recalled in a 2012 interview with Ezra Bookstein: “Lou Reed was a challenge because I had written a buncha stuff making fun of the Velvet Underground – and yet he showed up. So I was nervous before the interview. But it was a challenging interview for another reason: Lou was like a cross between mystery and passive-aggressiveness. It might be partly shyness… so he was a strange guy, deep thinker, but kinda passive-aggressive before answering each question.” The MGM press kit gave this odd definition of The Velvet's leading singer: “Lou Reed is a true blue Piscean and a secret sensualist. With a face that arouses interest but gives no satisfaction. Eyes of amphetamine glamour and lips of Phoenician coloring.” Lou Reed liked 50's rock and roll, the Rolling Stones, the Byrds, and The Beach Boys, but found the Doors “tedious.” In an interview to Serge Denisoff for The Peak newspaper, Reed calls “The Gift” a “comedy in the Kafkaesque sense,” and feels that “acid is now an opiate of the people,” perhaps even “a Johnsonian plot.”
“Pale Blue Eyes” is justly hailed as one of Reed’s greatest love songs. Its melody and arrangement come closer than any other VU recording to pure folk-rock, especially with its prominent delicately picked guitar and almost crooning vocals. There’s no percussion save for a lonesome, rattling tambourine, and the subtle organ lends the song a dreamy, almost hymnal quality. Its inspiration is Shelley Albin, Reed’s old Syracuse girlfriend, whom he still saw on occasion in New York, even though she was now married. Certainly, the line about the subject of the song being married talks of Reed's central contradiction– the reassurance that what they did yesterday proving that she’s his best friend yet it's truly a sin too. Reed sounds ambivalent, even guilty, but is unable to let go of a deep emotional attachment and desire. In the May 1971 issue of Creem, Reed lets Lester Bangs in on his growing affection for more soothing music in the latter part of the Velvets’ career. “I’ve gotten to where I like ‘pretty’ stuff better,” Reed says: “I think it can function on both the intellectual or artistic levels at the same time. Like when I wrote ‘Jesus’ and ‘Candy Says.’ Those songs and ‘Sunday Morning’ have always been my favorite Velvet Underground songs.” At any rate, the Velvet Underground’s decision to go on as low-key and introspective a path as they can manage is just as subversive as their previous albums. Later, Reed would express public admiration for Nico’s Cale-produced records afterward, telling Vernon Gibbs in his 1971 interview with Metropolitan Review, “Her stuff with John Cale is gorgeous. It’s unlike anything else that I have heard.” –"White Light/White Heat: The Velvet Underground Day-By-Day" (2017) by Richie Unterberger
"I just hope it doesn’t start getting thought of as this terrible down death album, because that’s not at all what I mean by it,” Lou Reed said of "Magic & Loss" (1992) to the Chicago Tribune: "I think of it as a really positive album, because the loss is transformed magically into something else." This recording project began its life with Lou wanting to write about magicians, before the deaths of his friends turned into an album about grief. In "Power and Glory," Reed begins with tales of magic and sorcery: "I saw a man put a red hot needle through his eye / turn into a crow and fly through the trees / swallow hot coals and breathe out flames / and I wanted this to happen to me." But then he turns, Oppenheimer-like, to the power of the atom. Lou was no doctor, but he knows something about pharmacology: "That mix of morphine and Dexedrine / We use it on the street." In "Warrior King," Reed channels his anger into a fantasy of omnipotence: "I wish I was a warrior king; inscrutable, benign / With a faceless charging power always at my command / Footsteps so heavy that the world shakes / My rage instilling fear." Reed feels his loss, but has reached a level of acceptance: "My friends are blending in my head / They're melting into one great spirit / And that spirit isn't dead."
Jim Morrison: “Sometimes I write a lot under the influence, I can be happy to watch what is happening around me… it changes the point of view. You look at yourself looking and so what you observe is something which you are also creating. It’s kind of… what I think Wittgenstein said about observing reality, that it responds to your looking like a whistle a guy gives to a pretty girl; reality is winking back at you or winking because you are looking at it. I’m interested in film because, to me, it's the closet approximation in art that we have to the actual flow of consciousness. Cinema is the transforming agent. Film is nothing when is not an illumination of this chain of being which makes a needle poised in flesh call up explosions in a foreign capital. The best songs come unasked for. You don't have to think about them. Actually, I think the music came to my mind first and then I made up the words to hang onto the melody. And a lot of times I would end up with just the words and couldn't remember the melody." –"The Doors In Their Own Words" (1991) by Andrew Doe & John Tobler
"It was daunting to see, to be near, to know that someone could be that beautiful, perfection realised. There was the feel of some delicate quality, masculine to be sure, a gentle presence; I was envious of Jim’s beauty, but I could also admire it. My eyes returned to the strange photo of the desert hanging in front of me; there was no life in it, no blade of grass, only texture upon texture, emptiness, a wanting. I had been there before. A place where I was alone. Each visit to the land of high had its own continuity, a welcome sense of familiarity. As if I were returning to where we had left off, and being high. I could return to the desert in Palm Springs, or the seashore in Venice. Return to a zone inside the time/space continuum and being inside the eternal now, I was alive in all time and space. Sitting quietly looking at this empty photo of strata, layer upon layer, forever immobile, it occurred to me that that was why Jim never feared death. He had visited life eternal on LSD and everything was glued together, life-death, space-time. –"Tripping With Jim Morrison & Other Friends: With An Introduction By Timothy Leary" (2016) by Michael Lawrence
