Deaths of Despair, Jim Morrison & Pam

From economist Anne Case and Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (2020) paints a troubling portrait of the American dream in decline. For the white working class, today's America has become a land of broken families and few prospects. Case and Deaton tie the crisis to the weakening position of labor, the growing power of corporations, and, above all, to a rapacious health-care sector. Capitalism, which over two centuries has lifted countless people out of poverty, is now destroying the lives of blue-collar America. 

Kevin MacDonald (Individualism and The Western Liberal Tradition): My basic theory here is that it’s not really about despair. I argue there are two things at work here: one is the decline in our culture generally brought about by the 1960s’ counter-cultural revolution affecting health in childhood, marriage, child rearing, and religion. But added to that is a very specific situation involving a corrupt pharmaceutical industry, especially Purdue Pharma owned by the Sackler family, and lax government regulation because of manipulation by the pharmaceutical industry. The increasing trend toward low-investment parenting in the United States largely coincides with the triumph of the psychoanalytic and radical critiques of American culture represented by the cultural success of the counter-cultural movement of the 1960s. The irony (hypocrisy?) is that Erich Fromm and the other members of the Frankfurt School, who strongly identified with a highly collectivist group, advocated radical individualism for the society as a whole. 

In his book Coming Apart Charles Murray notes that for Whites beginning in the 1960s, there has been an increase in crime, lower levels of religiosity, work ethic, and marriage. For the upper-middle class, marriage went from 94% to 84% between 1960 and 2010, but for the White working class it went from 82% to 48%. For the White working class, never-married went from 10% to 25%; and there has been dramatically lower work force participation. Murray attributes this to a loss of “virtue” but he doesn’t discuss the forces behind this massive cultural shift. The steep upward trend in social/family dysfunction begins in the 1960s and continues to climb until around 1990 when it temporarily falls back before reaching new highs. According to Case and Deaton, the increased mortality among the White working class begins in the 1990s. The first cohort to really show increased mortality was the one born in 1950—they were 40 years old in 1990 and thus the first generation to experience the counter-cultural revolution as teenagers. For every cohort after that, the increased mortality from drugs, alcohol, and suicide starts at an earlier age and is steeper—it gets to higher levels faster. I suspect that if the cultural supports that existed up until the late 1950s had remained in place, the White working class would not have succumbed to the opioid epidemic. In this regard it’s interesting that the first generation to show increased mortality was the one that became teenagers in the 1960s. Source: www.theoccidentalobserver.net

In Human, All Too Human (1878), Nietzsche elaborates that all human symbolism – even music – is rooted in the ‘imitation of gesture’ at work in Greek tragedy. Nietzsche began writing his tragedy only after breaking off relations with his friends, the psychologist Paul Rée and Lou Andreas-Salomé, the woman they both loved. Nietzsche believed that he had found in Andreas-Salomé the one person who understood his quest for a radical affirmation of life. He made plans with her and Rée to live together in an intellectual society that she called their ‘Unholy Trinity’. However, due primarily to suspicions planted by Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth, the trio’s plans did not materialise. A despondent Nietzsche wrote to his dear friend Franz Overbeck: ‘Unless I can discover the alchemical trick of turning this – muck into gold, I am lost.’ Nietzsche’s ubiquitous references to dance are ever-present reminders that the work of overcoming oneself – of freeing oneself enough from anger, bitterness and despair. David Lynch said that understanding pain and anxiety can be essential to creating great art, but that actually experiencing pain and anxiety can be toxic to the creative process. Freud’s quest for light echoes the ancient Greek ‘know thyself’. But I am also reminded of an old Talmudic verse, probably dated from the same era as Socrates: ‘If you meet the devil, shine on it the light of knowledge. If it is stone, it evaporates; if it is metal, annihilates.’ What a triumph to the human spirit is the belief that the hardiness, nastiness and ‘stone-ness’ of our nature can be overcome by the ‘light of knowledge’. Source: aeon.co

Recent years have seen an increasing number of studies on relationship extradyadic behaviors (Silva et al., 2017; Fisher, 2018). Individuals who perceived themselves as being more attractive tended to have a higher sexual desire and higher relationship quality. However, these extradyadic behaviors can have serious consequences, such as low self-esteem, mental problems, loss of trust, decreased personal and sexual confidence, rage, and guilt. A cross-cultural study with a sample of 186 societies found that in every culture, both males and females actively resort to mate-guarding tactics in order to try to control their mate’s extradyadic behaviors. Studies have shown that approximately 22–25% of men and 15–20% of women report having sex with someone other than their spouse while been married. In a study of Mark et al. (2011), 23.2% of men and 19.2% of women indicated that they had engaged in sexual interactions with someone other than their partner. Specifically, women who perceived themselves as being relatively more attractive had a tendency to report a higher sexual desire than those who perceived themselves as being relatively less attractive. This result was not obtained for men. Previous research has shown that women who consider themselves physically attractive show a greater preference for masculinity and symmetry, suggesting that these women may attempt to maximize phenotypic quality in potential partners. What is described as the “human mind” component is the cardinal dimension of the affective human space. This dimension maps states “purely mental and human specific vs. bodily and shared with animals”, which is in line with our interpretation of emotional complexity. Source: www.frontiersin.org

“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.” ―Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow. The issue is that "Rock" as we define it, is no longer the driving force of culture that it used to be. It's not cool anymore or even feasible to be an outsider. Rock always thrived on individuality. Instead, Rap and EDM are more tribal. Popular music took a very drastic turn for the worse after the 1996 Telecommunications Act was passed. The effects started being felt big time in 1998, with the FCC allowing the creation of streaming monopolies. Rock didn't stand a chance from that point on. Much easier to market and control pop and rap than Rock. There's still some quality rock music being made (electric guitar rock will never die off entirely) but unlike from the 50's-90's you have to actively search for it - you're not going to hear it otherwise. 

“Do you know we are ruled by TV? Sometimes a moment is enough to forget a lifetime. But other times a lifetime is not enough to forget one moment.” ―Jim Morrison. In Pittsburgh, on May 2, 1970, for the fourth number of the set, the band hammers into Roadhouse Blues, and the drama unfolds when Morrison descends into the bubbling swamp of the tune. He disappears into the maw of the music and keeps going—he sustains it all for a solid minute. In that long minute, Morrison sings the whole song in another language, one only he could speak, but that anyone could understand. All of that was in “Roadhouse Blues”: not as autobiography, not as confession, not as a cry for help or a fuck you to whoever asked, but, as Louise Brooks liked to quote, she said, from an old dictionary, “a subjective epic composition in which the author begs leave to treat the world according to his own point of view.” The Sixties come forth as a time and place where people lived by breaking rules they know are right, mainly to see what might happen. What I remember most about the Dinner Key Auditorium concert in Miami was the feeling that if Morrison had passed out, we might have cheered as spectators in the Roman colosseum Morrison imagined himself in. This moment hit not like some defining event in one person’s insignificant life, but as a moment in history. —"The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years" (2013) by Greil Marcus

-Greil Marcus: There’s a hint of undifferentiated loathing and decay in the video for Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” the most surprising hit of 1991—and irony may be the currency in the five minutes that pass as the band grinds out its corroding punk chords. Words take a long time to emerge from Cobain’s hoarse throat—but the feeling of humiliation, disintegration, of defeat by some distant malevolence, is what the music says by itself. This is one of the least spectacular and most suggestive videos ever made, and everything about it is slightly off. As the cheerleaders lift their pom-poms, stretching to the roof even more spookily than Cobain expands his fuzztone, they could belong in the ‘50s; the crowd is dressed in an indecipherable motley of styles from the ’70s through the ’80s; the musicians look like ’60s hippies who had to hitchhike for three days to make the gig. Slow motion is used but it seems like real time. Kids snap their heads back and forth to the music but they don’t give off any sense of pleasure. Cobain communicates not abandon and joy but hopelessness and mistrust of his audience. A string comes loose on his guitar, he hangs sound in the air while he fixes it, and you lose all sense of performance. Cobain rails out a blank curse: “A denial! A denial!” Of what? By whom? The moods and talismans of five rock ‘n’ roll decades are in the little play, and as it finishes, implodes, scatters, it seems as good a death as the music could ask for. Sometimes, though, you need to speak without irony—and the irony in “Smells Like Teen Spirit” can’t really neuter the corruption in the rock industry. For any attempt to talk about the death of rock must finally be made without irony, even if that ensures that the fool is the only role left to play. For there is no way to talk about the death of rock without facing what, exactly, is being consigned to the scrap heap—without recognizing what is being given up. Source: greilmarcus.net

Finally, there actually is some stuff out there suggesting Jim Morrison was a good guy who people didn't really know. I was of the school of thought that Morrison was a talented artist who happened to be a deplorable human being. However, I've done quite a bit of independent research into the matter and gradually found that much of what I had believed as fact was actually untrue. In the course of several discussions in Frank Lisciandro's Friends Gathered Together, numerous myths are shattered, and the true image of Morrison takes shape as a man who was actually quite shy and soft-spoken, generous to a fault, who was very rarely provoked to anger, and a man who cared little for personal possessions. I appreciated his interest in seeing the world from different perspectives by listening to the different people he met throughout his life. In particular, he enjoyed getting a woman's perspective on issues, as Bill Siddons' wife Cheri recalls.

It's a very different portrait of the man when compared to the way he was characterized in the media during his life, never mind the way he's been portrayed since his death. Author Lisciandro first met Jim Morrison in 1964 at UCLA film school, where both were studying, and he became one of Jim's closest friends until the singer's death in Paris in 1971. His goal was to get different and accurate perspectives on who Jim Morrison was as a man and to strip away the layers of myth and falsehoods. Jim Morrison wasn’t a chauvinist, according to his lover Eva Gardony in the chapter “This Affair of Ours” from Friends Gathered Together.  Source: rnchemist.blogspot.com

-Eva Gardony: Jim was a wonderful person to be with because he was so giving. He was giving of his time, of his attention a great deal. He treated me as his intellectual equal. I found him very shy the first time I met him. I find him very self-editing. It was very strange, because, before I met him, I heard the stories about him and I was ready to meet this incredibly out-of-control, crazed man. And when I met him I was surprised how quiet, how observant he was. I just found him very shy; painfully shy. He said he liked me for a long time before. He had a crush on me then, which I didn’t know. I thought he was a maniac depressive, probably undiagnosed.  

-Frank Lisciandro: Coming from your Hungarian culture, what was your impression of Jim onstage?

-Eva Gardony: My impression of Jim onstage was absolute amazement, because I had met this very shy and timid and always smiling Jim with no visible aggression whatsoever. And then I see him onstage performing rock and roll, and his command of his audience was startling. Total transformation as far as I’m concerned. I had heard about his bad reputation and then nothing of the sort came out. Only time when I’d see something of it was when he was onstage. He never talked about this transformation. He was extremely shy about it. He didn’t want to really discuss his onstage act as such, but it was just very interesting to see this amazing strength that he could show on people.

-Frank Lisciandro: Do you think he liked the company of women more than he liked the company of men; in terms of who he would hang out with?

-Eva Gardony: He really liked women but he felt more comfortable with the boys. I mean, obviously, look at you three guys, you always hung out together: Babe, you and Jim.

-Frank Lisciandro: Did Jim ever talk about any of the women he was with?

-Babe Hill: No. Jim was absolutely the most discrete gentleman. I mean, a gentleman, a true southern gentleman. And if we could go out and find all these girls, they’d tell you the same thing.

-Babe Hill: Jim never made excuses for Pamela or tried to explain her attitude. Anyway, I got along with Pam. When Jim went to London and Pam had that little place in Topanga, I went down there and I took care of Sage [Jim and Pam’s dog], and the place for a month or two. And we just got along together famously. She thought everybody was taking advantage of Jim and riding on his coattails and we just hit it off, as if me and Jim didn’t have that kind of relationship. In fact, the night before Pam died [April 25, 1974], she told me on the phone that she wanted to buy a ranch someplace and wanted me “to come up and take care of it.” We were supposed to get together for breakfast that next morning and discuss it, and then the next morning she never showed up. Tom Baker called her house, and her mother answered the phone and said she was dead. And then they had that memorial service for both Jim and Pam after Pam died. So I was going through the line, meeting these people in Pam’s family. And there’s this lady there and it’s Corky’s wife, Penny [Pam’s mother]. I said, “I’m Babe.” And she grabbed me and hugged me and said, “Oh, Babe, Pam loved you so much.’ And that made me feel like a million bucks, man. So, no, we never had any problems, me and Pam. —"Jim Morrison: Friends Gathered Together" (2014) by Frank Lisciandro

Shocking Stories: Marilyn Monroe, Mamie Van Doren, Jim Morrison, Lou Reed, Mick Jagger

Marilyn Monroe’s turbulent final months before her death in 1962 are to be the subject of a drama series from 101 Studios and UK producer Seven Seas Films, titled The Last Days Of Marilyn Monroe. In what is being pitched as the first “tell-all” authorized by the Marilyn Monroe estate owner Authentic Brands Group, The Mallorca Files scribe Dan Sefton will adapt Keith Badman’s book The Final Years Of Marilyn Monroe: The Shocking True Story. Seven Seas optioned the novel in 2017. It will transport viewers back to a time when Monroe found herself caught between the warring factions of the Mafia, the Kennedy political dynasty and the Hollywood elite. Sefton, who co-founded Seven Seas, said the story will be told with “compassion and sensitivity.” 101 Studios CEO David Glasser added: “Keith Badman has uncovered gems of never before released details, centered around the last few months of her sensationalized life and the accusations made. The series pays homage to the bright star whose life was extinguished too early.” Comparing her busy schedule with that of President John F. Kennedy, Keith Badman concludes that their alleged ‘romance’ was probably no more than a one-night stand. However, he does not underestimate the Hollywood rumour mill, and the likelihood that any explicit association with America’s most famous sex symbol could damage the Kennedys’ reputation in Washington. 

In Anthony Summers’ 1986 biography, Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe, Dr Timothy Leary, guru of the psychedelic era, spoke of having taken LSD with Monroe after they met at a Hollywood party in May 1962. After researching Leary’s life at this time, as well as Marilyn’s, Badman concludes that this probably never happened. ‘The tale about his encounter with screen legend actually grew out of one of his several, highly embellished LSD flashbacks,’ Badman counters, ‘which in turn passed on to his many disciples over the ensuing years.’ Badman then speculates that Leary had confused Marilyn with one of John F. Kennedy’s girlfriends, the artist Mary Meyer who reportedly introduced the president to marijuana. Source: deadline.com

Mamie Van Doren, known as one of “The Three M’s” alongside blonde goddesses Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield, has been keeping busy writing the follow-up to her titillating 1987 memoir “Playing the Field,” where she detailed her adventures and sexual escapades as a star in Hollywood during the ‘50s and ‘60s.

-Mamie Van Doren: I like sex better than rock ‘n’ roll. I was the first to do rock ‘n’ roll on the big screen and that definitely exudes a lot of your sex appeal. I got away from all the bad stuff that was going on in Hollywood. This was around the ‘60s when I left. There were a lot of drugs. Marilyn died. Jayne died. A lot of my contemporaries were gone. I just thought it was time to leave Hollywood.

-Fox News: How did you cope with the casting couch?

-Mamie Van Doren: I’m the type of person that if I don’t like someone, I’m not going to bed with them. I don’t care who they are. I missed a couple of good roles because of it. But looking back, I’m glad I didn’t do them. If some guy said to me, "I’ll put you in a movie if you do me"–I just couldn’t do it. And then I became unapproachable. So they didn’t dare. You have to put yourself in a position where you’re unapproachable. I certainly opened a lot of doors during a postwar time when things were very conservative. I was way ahead of my time. I didn’t know what the women’s movement was, but I was there living it.

-Your bio is quite original. While you are honest about your sexual escapades I lost count of how many men you turned down: Howard Hughes, James Dean, Frank Sinatra, Cary Grant, Johnny Carson, Henry Kissinger...

-Mamie Van Doren: Warren Beatty was another. He was kind of a drooler when he kissed me. I wrote my first book in 1987. It was called "Playing the Field." But a lot has happened between 1987 and 2020. So now I’m writing about what it’s like getting older and appreciating life a little more as you go along, as well as getting smarter as you get older. There’s so much to write about. A lot of material just didn’t make it in the first book. My book publisher was very conservative and a lot of stories were taken out. So I’m putting a lot of those stories back in. Source: www.foxnews.com

Eve Babitz: "Jim Morrison, a film school poet, could be all things to all people, like Marilyn Monroe. Casting anyone to play Jim was just totally ridiculous to me. Oliver Stone was asking everyone in connection with The Doors if Jim Morrison was impotent, and it makes you think Oliver didn’t know much about Jim’s main disease. You’d think he’d at least read up on the symptoms that show up in a person who takes depressants as a cure for depression. Taking Seconal and Tuinal and drinking brandy will bring your sex life to a grinding halt. After his death in Paris, I began running into women who kept Jim alive–as did I–because something about him began seeming great compared to everything else that was going on." —Eve Babitz for Esquire Magazine (March, 1991)

Andy Warhol, in his memoir POPism, remembered: ‘Jim Morrison would stand at the bar drinking screwdrivers all night long, and he’d get really far gone.’ Warhol also pinpointed part of Morrison’s appeal: "The girls were only interested in the guys that didn’t go after them. I saw a lot of girls pass on Warren Beatty, who was so good looking, just because they knew he wanted to fuck them, and they’d go looking for somebody who looked like he didn’t want to, like Jim Morrison." Janet Erwin, a friend of journalist Patricia Kennealy, remembers an occasion when Jim Morrison was cluelessly hit on by a 'poor schlub' who didn't realize that "Morrison was one of the most robustly and notoriously heterosexual men on the planet, the goddam Warren Beatty of rock."

—Patrick Humphries review for Vox magazine (May 1991): Oliver Stone's film is a wet dream for all those that wallow in the mire of the Jim Morrison myth but as a document to offer any understanding of the man, the times, or any insight into that myth it’s worthless. —(Edmonton Weekly, 2004): Stephen Davis' biography is derivative and disappointing, relying on previous biographies like No One Here Gets Out Alive. Davis does seem to claim Jim Morrison might have been bisexual based on the evidence that he sometimes hung out with a literary circle which might have involved some gay/bisexual poet. This, at best, seems ridiculous. Even Ray Manzarek hated Stephen Davis’s book. “Woof! This is a strange story by a weird guy turning Morrison into an Oliver Stone-like stranger again,” Manzarek told me over the phone from Los Angeles. “I don’t know the Jim Morrison he writes about. Why this guy wrote this book I have no idea unless the author is himself bisexual, had a crush on Jim and wanted to get into that supposed bisexual action himself. It’s Freudian. No way was Jim bisexual. I always saw him with women.” Davis' speculation would be worthy if it were backed up with some facts or testimony but all he does is spread gossip without any kind of evidence. Character assasination by innuendo is all this silly book is. Davis is your typical gutless coward who is also a fantasist of the worst ilk. Mick Wall has lost his crown as writer of the stupidest Morrison book ever. 

Wild Child - The Doors

Wild child full of grace/Savior of the human race/Your cool face/Natural child, terrible child/Not your mother's or your father's child/Your own child, screaming wild/An ancient lunatic reins/In the trees of the night/With hunger at her heels/Freedom in her eyes/She dances on her knees/Wild child full of grace/Savior of the human race (Song dedicated for Pamela Courson, 1968)

“Most of the time Jim was very calm and he wasn’t drinking very much,” says Alan Ronay during Jim and Pam's stay in Paris. “He wrote practically every day. I really felt that he’d totally reclaimed himself. For the first time, he began talking about having children.” As they had done several times before in the States, the couple obtained another marriage license. Jim had also made the first tentative steps toward bridging the chasm that had so long existed between him and his parents, following Pam's advice. Alain Ronay, Jim’s French-born friend from UCLA, stayed with Jim and Pam in Paris for a few weeks and remembers an evening Jim spent recounting affectionate, funny stories about his family. “The stories were really tender and warm,” says Ronay. “I wish his parents could’ve heard it.”

-Nancy Dixon (from Whittier, California): Pamela Courson was a very creative lady. We had lots of fun together in Laurel Canyon.... it's sad she couldn't overcome her demons. Maybe Pamela had a problem in Paris because she ran out of heroin and Jean de Breteuil was in London temporarily. It seems Jim told a friend of Elisabeth Lariviere (a model nicknamed "Zozo") that he didn't want Pamela scoring, supposedly saying, "Scoring is a man's job." Someone from Orange County recently told me that Pamela didn't care for people who couldn't appreciate her unusual personality and that's why she looked so unreachable. The people who really didn't like Pam were the people that she wasn't going to let in her life. I think it takes a lot of empathy and some advanced perception to understand her. A lot of people could not understand the relationship between Pam and Jim and it made them jealous.

-Lizzie James: I met Jim Morrison for the first time in the winter of 1968. It was a recording session for Waiting For The Sun, their third album. I was a journalist and a moonstruck groupie. I was with a writer who was interviewing Morrison for the New York Times. Jim was coming out of the studio "to get a bite to eat" with Pamela, his lady. My writer friend and I went inside, waiting for Jim to reappear. Soon we were watching him from inside the tracking room while he sang Not To Touch The Earth on the other side of the soundproof glass. "Nothin' left to do but run, run, let's run…." That night, his eyes held light, interest, intensity. His mouth moved in motions of pleased surprise. He argued, criticized, consented, refused, laughed, and suggested. Pamela, the ice queen, in a green velvet coat, waist long red hair, jerking her delicate jaw, followed Jim's movements with her heavy-lashed urchin eyes, providing him cigarettes. 

The last time I saw Morrison was in April of 1970. We went to a house high in the windings of King Canyon, a house chilled and dust-veiled from a long absence of human presence. "Sex is full of lies," he said. "The body tries to tell the truth, but it's usually too battered with rules to be heard. We cripple ourselves with lies. Sex can be a liberation. But it can also be an entrapment." He had shaved his beard and looked almost like Morrison of early "ride the snake" nights at the Whisky. But there was a certain demon that had left him and not returned. He was more solemn, smiled less readily, moved with low vibrancy, without the coiled, ready-to-spring tension. He seemed almost saintly - calm, thoughtful, resigned.  —Lizzie James for Creem Magazine - A Rock & Roll Tribute to The Doors (Summer 1981)

-Frank Lisciandro: Talking to about 30 of his closest friends, everybody says the same thing about Jim in different ways. Everyone says that he was sensitive and intelligent, that he was generous, that he was reckless. He didn’t care about money, he didn’t care about fame, he was actually like an alien in the American culture. In An Hour for Magic I asked every person the same questions, and one of the questions was, “Did you ever see Jim being violent?” No one had a story where he broke a chair or damaged furniture. Never did he hit anybody else. Never he did start a fight in a bar. Not one of the people I met even knew about a fight in a bar, let alone they had seen one. And some of these people were drinking buddies of his. Babe Hill doesn’t remember any fight in a bar. Jim avoided fights.

-Rainer Moddemann: I remember the story written in No One Here Gets Out Alive about you, Jim and Babe Hill getting into a fight at Barney’s Beanery.

-Frank Lisciandro: It’s not true. Danny Sugerman made it up. Danny and Ray Manzarek made it up. I add Ray, because I know that Ray was one of the people that worked on No One Here Gets Out Alive. Ray should have stopped trying to make Jim the bad boy of rock and a petulant child. I’m not interested in The Doors. I’m interested in The Doors only in that allowed Jim Morrison a certain amount of freedom, and then they took that freedom away from him. They did both things. It’s a very good metaphor for the fact that in our culture, the American culture, commercialism allows you an opportunity, and then it closes the door. Without demands, the band would have had to play clubs. Perfect for Jim, because Jim didn’t care about the money. He didn’t care about adulation. What he cared about was the creation. His focus was on performance. And in our culture you cannot combine the two things. Look at how many writers went to Hollywood and left. You can’t be a great writer in Hollywood because it’s a contradiction. You can’t be a good writer and become a part of a major supergroup. It’s impossible in our culture. Source: www.doors-quarterly-online.com

Shelley Albin responded to both the sensitivity she detected in Lou Reed and the larger world that his interests suggested. Her parents showed little interest in where she went to school, believing that she would only be going to get her “Mrs.” degree. “It was a completely different era. You were going to be a secretary or a teacher and that was it. It was never taken seriously that girls should study or be interested in books.” She had hoped to attend Berkeley, an adventurous choice for a Midwestern girl, but her parents vetoed that. A cousin who was an artist recommended Syracuse because of the quality of the school’s art programs. Albin met Reed when she was a freshman and he was a sophomore. “When we met he had the reputation of being kind of a rascal, and you had to be careful around him,” she said. Despite his image-making, Albin did not initially find Reed a fearsome figure. “He was still more of a kid who would play basketball or tennis, and he listened to old fifties stuff,” she said. “That’s what that era was. He’d hang out on street corners with a guitar and play folk music. It wasn’t the same Lou Reed as people think of. It was a sweeter Lou. Lou was basically looking for a replacement for his mother with a little sex thrown in. He was very insecure, and he needed a nurturer.” They would remain in touch even after Reed graduated from Syracuse and returned to New York, and Albin would loom for a long time as a symbolic figure for Reed, the metaphoric embodiment of everything he “had but couldn’t keep,” as he put it in “Pale Blue Eyes,” the gorgeous ballad he wrote about her, though Albin did not have blue eyes.

“I think he toyed with the idea of having a child by then, he brought the issue up in 1964,” Shelley says, but she decided that someone who couldn’t even look after himself was not the fatherly type. Reed, she said finally, was “a romantic. He could be very sweet. He’s probably the only person who ever literally gave me a heart-shaped box of chocolates on Valentine’s Day. But he wasn’t happy unless he made somebody more miserable than he was. That is exactly what he fed off as an artist, as a writer, as a songwriter. Misery made for his best work, whether it came from me or somebody else. So I’d call him a romantic and I’d call him sweet, but I’d also call him an incredible pain in the ass. He wasn’t anybody I wanted to live with and put up with. It wasn’t worth it. It was too much grief.” —"The Dangerous Glitter of David Bowie, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed" (2009) by Dave Thompson 

Cecil Beaton’s famously bitchy diaries describe sitting next to Mick Jagger at dinner, his skin of “chicken-breast white,” “inborn elegance and perfect manners, his small albino-fringed eyes notice everything.” Meeting him again in the next morning’s harsh sunlight for their poolside photo session, Beaton could hardly believe it was the same person: “his face a white podgy, shapeless mess, eyes very small, nose very pink, hair sandy dark. He is sexy yet completely sexless. He could nearly be a eunuch.” The synchronization of the raid with Mick and Keith’s court appearance in Chichester made clear that Britain’s antidrug agencies, such as they were, had declared open season on the Rolling Stones. And this time there was no doubt about police collusion with the press. The original, wise plan had been that Marianne should not attend the trial and should stay well out of the media searchlight until it was over. That first day, as Mick stood in the dock, she had taken her son, Nicholas, to the home of the Small Faces’ Steve Marriott.

Marianne was taking acid with Marriott and the other Faces. Marianne had not been charged with any offense, so her name could not be mentioned in court. Marianne would recall that they’d been liberally dosed with Valium beforehand and were still “very scared... you got the feeling they only had to say one word out of place and they’d have been taken straight back to Brixton Prison.” Moderation was Jagger's watchword, as in everything else except vanity; despite being around heavy drug users all the time, he himself never took a smidgen too much or lost an iota of precious self-control. Even LSD gave up in despair after finding no inner demons with which to unsettle him. Marianne, by contrast, was both naturally addictive and recklessly adventurous. Mick thoroughly disapproved of her growing drug intake and did all he could to discourage it—sometimes with anger, occasionally with heartfelt tears. Marianne was expecting a baby. By then she was actually five months pregnant. She and Mick were agreed in wanting a girl and had already chosen the name Corrina, after the blues song by Taj Mahal. Mick’s immediate response on learning the news was to say they should get married. Marianne suffered a miscarriage, and she felt “devastated and guilty . . . it took me ages before I could even begin to grapple with my feelings about it.” For Mick, the loss of the baby he so much hoped would be a little girl named Corrina can have been no less devastating. His only hint at heartbreak was a seemingly incongruous line in “Memo from Turner”: “the baby’s dead, my lady said.” A couple of weeks after the Stones left Klein and Decca, Marianne left Mick. She waited until he went away on a European tour, then packed a small suitcase and took Nicholas back to her mother’s. Mick pursued her again and pleaded for them to try again, but she managed to stand firm. However, he did not try to take back the cottage at Aldworth that was now her main refuge. —"Mick Jagger" (2012) by Philip Norman

Love Songs, Easy Rider, Jim Morrison

If love were a purely cultural invention, it would stand to reason that love would simply not exist in some cultures. However, anthropological research suggests that love is a universal emotion. For instance, biological anthropologist, Helen Fisher, studied 166 societies and she found evidence of romantic love in an overwhelming 147 of the 166 societies, or nearly 90% of the time. Scientific research suggests that the brain activity of couples in mature relationships is very similar to the brain activity of those newly in love (sharing the "cuddle hormone"). In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin devoted almost twice as much space to bird songs as to human music. He saw these melodies, which play an important part in courtship and mating, as the prototype for more advanced types of music. Just as birds sing to attract the opposite sex, "primeval man, or rather some early progenitor of man, probably first used his voice in producing true musical cadences... This power would have been especially exerted during the courtship of the sexes,—would have expressed various emotions, such as love, jealousy, triumph,—and would have served as a challenge to rivals." Put simply, all songs were originally love songs.

In its long history, music has brought people together in many ways—in work and worship, ritual and recreation, and other settings where social cohesion can benefit from its aural glue, its ability to transform isolated individuals into a larger whole. The love song brings people together on a more intimate level, encompassing the most stylized forms of modern-day romance. Darwin, for his part, aimed to trace all these manifestations back to the same biological origins; and once he found this key, he decided that it unlocked many doors. Early human songs of courtship and mating also served, he surmised, as the foundation for language. Not just vocal music but, according to Darwin, even instrumental performances had their roots in the animal kingdom. He called attention to the "drumming to the snipe's tail, the tapping of the woodpecker's beak," perceiving them as the forerunners of our musical rhythms. He heard prototypes for human song in the croaks of frogs and the squeaks of mice, in the sounds of alligators and tortoises, even in the "pleasing" notes produced by the "beautifully constructed stridulating organs" of insects and spiders. "Love is still the commonest theme of our songs," Darwin noted, asserting confidently that birds "have nearly the same taste for the beautiful as we do. This is shown by our enjoyment of the singing of birds, and by our women, both civilized and savage, decking their heads with borrowed plumes." 

Yet even Darwin hedged his bets, noting that bird songs serve an additional purpose, allowing the mate to assert territorial claims as well as court the female. Meanwhile a growing body of research has documented the aggressive qualities of bird song. In the 1970s, ornithologist Douglas Smith found that birds surgically deprived of their singing ability were far more susceptible to territorial intrusions by other males. Around this same time, zoologist J. R. Krebs demonstrated that when recordings of a male's song are played on loudspeakers, the sound alone can dissuade rivals from entering his territory. The hormone vasopressin and its avian counterpart, vasotocin, have emerged as the key "missing links" connecting these different spheres of behavior. The injection of just a tiny amount of vasotocin in a frog's brain immediately leads to the initiation of mating behavior, and stimulation of vasopressin receptors in certain brain regions can turn a promiscuous vole into a monogamous one. Some have even started calling vasopressin the "monogamy hormone." Researchers have found that vasopressin not only plays a key role in regulating our sexual behavior—men in a state of sexual arousal show markedly higher levels—but is also linked to musical aptitude in humans, and even to receptivity in listening to music. 

If song and sex share the same hormonal triggers, might they also possess an intertwined evolutionary history? Research conducted by Sarah Earp and Donna L. Maney at Emory University in 2012 shows that the neural patterns in female songbirds when exposed to the mating songs of males of their species resemble neural responses in the mesolimbic reward pathway of humans enjoying a musical performance. Neuroscience strikes another blow for Darwin! And, coming back full circle to The Descent of Man, recent research tells us that the avian hormone vasotocin, which differs by only one amino acid from our "monogamy hormone" vasopressin, is connected to increased singing by male sparrows and the acquisition of stable stereotyped song patterns in songbirds. Certainly there are many missing evolutionary links between the white-throated sparrow and the Homo sapiens performing in a rock band, but the basic functionality seems the same. In a survey of thousands of commercial recordings, evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller found that 90 percent were recorded by males, most of them made during their peak years of sexual activity. This finding matches results, drawn across a wide range of species, that mating display practices tend to be exaggerated in one sex. If we judge by the Billboard charts, males initiate most of the musical courtships in human society, just as with Darwin's birds. "Music is what happens," Miller explains, "when a smart, group-living, anthropoid ape stumbles into the evolutionary wonderland of runaway sexual selection for complex acoustic displays."  Source: www.popmatters.com

50th Anniversary of Easy Rider: Situated at the end of its decade, Easy Rider literally and symbolically marks the turning point at which the idealism of the 60s curdled into the indulgent solipsism of the 70s. Though Wyatt and Billy’s long hair, sideburns, and far-out couture outwardly align them with the flower children and estrange them from squares at small-town diners giving disapproving looks, they’re far from avatars of peace and love. In his essay for the booklet accompanying the Criterion Collection’s home video release, critic Matt Zoller Seitz describes the film as “a freewheeling take on freedom – what it means and what it costs”. Tapping into that sentiment afforded Hopper and the trailblazers who’d follow his example their own version of the liberty he prized without romanticizing. After all, as Wyatt mumbles around a lonely campfire, they blew it. In the oft-cited campfire scene near the end, Wyatt tells Billy, “We blew it.” 

That line has been taken as an indictment of the American counterculture, which, like so many protean revolutionary movements, started self-destructing once it gained enough prominence to effect real change. One can read it that way. But the line strikes also as a more personal sort of confession, an admission that they have ultimately succumbed and bought into their own outlaw version of the capitalist rat race. For the New Orleans sequence with Karen Black and Toni Basil, while tripping on LSD, Hopper persuaded Fonda to talk to a statue of a woman in a cemetery as if it were his mother. “Oh God, how l loved you,” Wyatt sobs. The film’s piquant final shot—the camera rising away from Wyatt’s shattered, burning bike—suggests a soul’s ascent to heaven. It could represent the death of a man, or of a dream of revolution. Source: www.theguardian.com

Jim Morrison: "Real poetry doesn't say anything. It just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors."

-Frank Lisciandro: What’s the background of the “Graveyard Poem”?

-Ron Alan (music producer): That took place a night that we played at a club called the Sea Witch which was on the Sunset Strip, right across from Ben Franks, a little east of that. Jim had come down and we had been hanging out for about three days. We met Pamela and Peggy (Green) and we all took some acid and we saw the graveyard across the street; right there on Gower. On Gower, just south of Santa Monica Boulevard, there’s that very large graveyard. Anyway, it was like two or three in the morning and we were looking at that graveyard and we figured, that’d be a real good place to go. So me, Jim, Pam and Peggy climbed the walls and went into the graveyard. The minute we got into the graveyard, we saw a white rabbit and we chased it until he got away. And we just stayed in there and walked around. It was like almost defying death in a way, to embrace it. There is death, why hide from it. We were on acid and it was kind of like laughing in death’s face in a way. Then, Peggy got freaked out, she laid down on a grave and started crying and kicking her feet. And that’s in Jim’s poem, it’s the line: “One girl got drunk and balled the dead”. The cemetery scene from Easy Rider comes from Jim's Graveyard Poem. It was the greatest night of my life/Although I still had not found a wife/We were close together/We tripped the wall and we scaled the graveyard/Ancient shapes were all around us/The wet dew felt fresh beside the fog/Two made love in an ancient spot/One chased a rabbit into the dark/And I gave empty sermons to my head/Cemetary, cool and quiet/Hate to leave your sacred lady/Dread the milky coming of the day ―Graveyard Poem. Jim also wrote that song “My Wild Love” that night. “My wild love went riding... My wild love’s crazy, she screams like a bird, she went to the devil...” And then that came out on the next album Waiting for the Sun. 

“All hopes of eternity and all gain from the past he would have given to have her there, to be wrapped warm with him in one blanket, and sleep, only sleep. It seemed the sleep with the woman in his arms was the only necessity.” -D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

-Frank Lisciandro: How was Jim's relationship with Pamela?

-Ron Alan: Obviously, Jim must have loved Pamela a lot or else he wouldn't have been with her. He didn't have to be with anybody, he had pretty much the whole world at his feet as far as girls were concerned. But there was something about her that, well, somehow they connected, and whether they agreed all the time or not, it doesn't matter. Somehow their souls connected. He really cared about Pamela. That's the only girl he really cared about.

-Frank Lisciandro: He never talked about his conquests?

-Ron Alan: No, never. He was so far beyond that kind of thinking. He would talk about things he would reflect on what he would see in life if he was going to talk about anything. He was kind of a loner. His friends, he could count on one hand.

Raeanne Bartlett: Jim Morrison and Pamela Courson's love story and relationship was far from being perfect but we can't really judge it from the current mindset, for several reasons: even their closest friends said they didn't really knew what happened in their privacy, they were a secretive and a very private couple. It is hard, if not impossible to judge a story between two people that happened in such a different context, in such a particular era as the 60s, when men usually took care of their girlfriends/wives and did so with pride. Even though Pamela and Jim had their breaks, he always provided for her. Pamela would usually take long trips to Europe when they had their breaks, and whose money do you think she spent on those extravaganzas? Jim was her constant financial backing. Pamela had expensive tastes, although she liked everything from fancy French cuisine to junk food. She smoked Parliament Lights and her favorite restaurant was Canter's Deli. Jim smoked Marlboro Reds and Barney's Beanery was his favorite restaurant. The real Jim Morrison was quite different from his public persona, and far more conventional, despite his mental afflictions. Bobby Klein (The Doors' photographer) said, recalling Jim and Pamela's relationship: “Jim was truly in love with Pam. She came with us to San Francisco for The Doors appearance at the Avalon Ballroom. There was such an intensity between them. That intensity survived until they both died, and who knows, perhaps after that as well.” There's also a short memoir by Janet Erwin (Tiffany Talks) where she wrote about her affair with Jim right before he went to Paris, and Janet remembers how “Jim glowed when he talked about Pamela.”

-Michael McLure: Pamela called me when she got back from Paris after Jim’s death. She was living in Sausalito, living with some very strange people in a house over there. And then she gave me Jim's portmanteau, like a leather doctor’s bag that opened on the top with one handle at the top. I gave it back to her and said to her that it was clearly my understanding that Jim considered her to be his editor and I thought it would be a good thing for her to edit it. Then I did say to Pamela, “Look, the place you’re living in is not a place to have anything you’d care to keep. Put it in a safe, put it in some kind of a bank vault before it disappears.” And unfortunately, that’s what happened, it disappeared. The portmanteau itself was one of the most impressive examples I’ve seen of how a poet works. What was in the portmanteau was a hundred-and-thirty-page manuscript. I laughed, because I thought I had been like Jim’s best friend. I mean he had no other literary friend, you know, and he never told me about this portmanteau. I laughed and I thought, “He’s as secretive as I am; he’s as secretive as any writer.” —"Jim Morrison: Friends Gathered Together" (2014) by Frank Lisciandro

Writing a prose poem can feel like accepting the unconventional; it is a form that invites the reader to re-invent it, and Morrison effectively establishes a conflicting ambiguity in his prose poem Notes on Vision: "Look where we worship. It is wrong to assume that art needs the spectator in order to be. The film runs on without any eyes. The spectator cannot exist without it. A room moves over a landscape, uprooting the mind, astonishing vision. A gray film melts off the eyes, and runs down the cheeks. The Passengers change terribly in their reeking seats, or roam from car to car, subject to unceasing transformation. Inevitable progress is made toward the beginning (there is no difference in terminals), as we slice through cities, whose ripped backsides present buildings. Sometimes other vessels, closed worlds, vacuums, travel along beside to move ahead or fall utterly behind. Farewell." Morrison paints a very gloomy, pessimistic picture of modern life and its message is irrefutably clear. The first stanza of this poem reveals an enigmatic and horrific description of the effect of the cinema, as the melted eyes are running down the spectators' cheeks instead of tears. The opening part of the poem scans as blank verse ("A room moves over a landscape, uprooting the mind, astonishing vision"), owing its force to the tension between the flatness of the delivery and the grotesque quality of the imagery. —"Unravelling Jim Morrison's Poetic Wilderness" (2017) by Koben Sprengers 

She's a Rainbow, Anita Pallenberg, Pamela Courson and Jim Morrison

Much has been said and written about Anita’s transference from Brian Jones’s to Keith Richards’ corner and yet little has been documented about how she led both relationships. While Keith Richards’ arrest for Anita's heroin possession in Canada during 1977 would cast a dark shadow over their relationship, further torment would come two years later when Anita would find herself embroiled in an almightily seamy situation when a seventeen-year-old boy shot himself in her New York state home. Keith Richards described Pallenberg as a "very strong woman" who was "extremely bright" and "a great beauty". The couple had three children together, one of whom died as an infant, before they finally separated in 1980. Pallenberg sang backing vocals on classic Stones track Sympathy for the Devil and was said to have had a "profound" influence on the band. 

“They were like schoolboys,” Anita would recall from her first interactions with The Rolling Stones. “They looked at me like I was some kind of threat. Mick Jagger really tried to put me down, but there was no way some lippy guy was going to do a number on me. I was always able to squelch him. I found out that if you stand up to Mick, he crumbles.” While enchanted by Anita’s blonde hair, leggy stature and elegant gait, it was her fearless presence– incongruously offset by her pixie features–that truly caught their attention. Some reports have claimed that it was Brian Jones who singled Anita out, saying (in German): “I don’t know who you are, but I need you.” “Brian was very unusual,” reported Anita in 2006. “He was moody and he was physically attractive. He looked like a girl in a funny kind of way. Sexually I like girls as well as men and he had a wonderful curiosity. The other Stones were more like, what shall I say, frightened, Brian was much more ready to go to strange places. Except for Brian, all the Stones at that time were suburban squares.”

“I’ve obviously contemplated marriage,” Brian told some waiting journalists. “Anita is the first girl I’ve met I’ve been serious about.” Behind Anita’s cool exterior, Pattie Boyd observed the dynamics of the Jones/Pallenberg alliance. “She was definitely in control of that relationship. You could see that she could do exactly what she wanted. She actually was a bit scary. To me, she seemed that she had secrets that she would never reveal. I’ve never met a young woman with such incredible confidence.” “The first time he took acid,” Anita would later recall of Jones’s trip, “he saw creatures coming out of the ground, the floors. He was looking in all the cupboards for people, ‘Where are they?’” For those already walking a thin line between reality and fantasy, LSD would serve to join up the dots. The drug confirming and furthermore propelling Anita’s already furious sense of being, she took to LSD with considerable gusto. While for Anita its earth-shattering experience was liberating and informative, for Brian’s fragile sense of self and worth, the torturing visions, demonising voices and unfiltered memory recall would serve to increase his already unbridled paranoia.

Keith Richards' cool detachment masked a shy innocence that only a few would detect. Unlike some members of the band, Richards would nonetheless maintain a fairly modest libido, preferring the attention of one woman to the smorgasbord of sensual delights that were available to pop stars of the moment. Jane Fonda’s interest in Richards would extend well beyond the shoot of Barbarella. Anita would later recall Fonda visiting her and Keith at their London residence, only to be ignored by Richards because he said she reminded him of his aunt. “On tour he desperately missed Anita,” confirmed The Stones' road manager Sam Cutler. “He was never unfaithful to her. I was with him every minute of the day of the 1969 tour and he was never with any other women. He was a one-woman man; a great romantic and a gentleman. Whenever we got to a hotel, he was calling her. He pined for her.” With Keith travelling to the States in preparation for the fifteen-date tour on October, Anita would be left home alone with baby Marlon. The tour separating the couple for the best part of two months, the vacuum left by Keith’s absence was considerable, and a heavier reliance on drugs was perhaps somewhat predictable. It was during this period that Keith would begin work on perhaps his most enduring paean of his love for Anita and Marlon, ‘Wild Horses’.

"I have never put the make on a girl in my life. I just don’t know how to do it. My instincts are always to leave it to the woman. Which is kind of weird, but I can’t pull the come-on bit: “Hey, baby, how you doing?” and all of that. I’m tongue-tied. I suppose every woman I’ve been with, they’ve had to put the make on me. Meanwhile I’m putting the make on in another way—by creating an aura of insufferable tension. So Anita made the first move. She was one of the prime women in the world. She certainly made a man out of me. I loved her spirit, even though she would instigate and turn the screw and manipulate. Anita and I got back to my little pad in St. John’s Wood. And Brian made desperate attempts to get Anita back. There was no chance of that happening. Once Anita makes up her mind, she makes up her mind. It’s said that I stole her. But my take on it is that I rescued her."

Although Anita received a fairly healthy wage from her film and modelling assignments, her spending had far exceeded her income, leaving Keith as the major breadwinner. Walking down the aisle of the Chapelle Sainte-Anne, Mick and Bianca were accompanied by the theme song from the film Love Story, a somehow cheesy soundtrack that elicited loud guffaws from both Anita and Keith. On April 28, 1976, before a concert in Frankfurt, Keith announced that after nine eventful years together, he and Anita were to get married. Ever the iconoclast, Keith would tag the announcement with the information that it was to facilitate a passport for Anita, and yet made it clear from the public statement that he wanted some permanence to their relationship. Keith announced that the union might take place live onstage in front of 18,000 fans during one of the Stones’ run of gigs at Earls Court Arena during the May of 1976. Ultimately, the event never happened–nor, as evidenced from official records, did the marriage ever take place. Finding their third child Tara motionless in his crib, Anita called nearby physicians–to be confronted with the reality that her child had died overnight. On inspection, the little baby–just two and a half months old–had developed respiratory issues and had succumbed to sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). 

“Keith was very protective and loving,” recalled Anita later. “He just said, ‘Forget it.’ And everybody else told me the same thing. They all said, ‘Forget it. Look after your other children.’ I am sure that the drugs had something to do with it. And I always felt very, very bad about the whole thing.” Understandably, Keith would be deeply haunted by the tragic episode. In 2011, he would relive the trauma of losing his child. “Leaving a newborn infant son is something I can’t forgive myself for. It’s as though I deserted my post.” Journalist Nick Kent was present for the pitiful reunion in the most upsetting of circumstances. “Anita was crying and seemed to be having difficulty moving,” wrote Kent in The Dark Stuff. “Keith was shepherding her along but he was crying too and looked all of a sudden to be impossibly fragile. They looked like some tragic couple leading each other out of a concentration camp.” The couple settled at Nellcôte in the French Riviera. Celebrated visitors at Nellcôte would include John Lennon and Yoko Ono, William S. Burroughs, aristocratic drug dealer Jean de Breteuil (who romanced Marianne Faithfull and Pamela Courson) plus The Stones’ entourage. 

Entitled ‘All About You’, the song (written in late 1979) would be seen by many as a direct response to his break-up with Anita and the emotional detritus that lay around them. While Richards has been nebulous over the years as to what spawned the lyrics, his lamenting words saying he “may miss you” or he’s “still in love” suggest there was an ongoing love for Anita. “That song is about Anita,” recalled Keith to Loaded magazine in 1997. “I was breaking up with her around that time. I’d said, ‘Look, if we clean up together, we’ll stay together.’ Well, I cleaned myself up. But she didn’t. And I realized that I couldn’t sleep with someone who had a needle beside the bed. I was too fragile at that point. I loved her, but I had to leave her.” Keith’s generosity towards Anita never diminished since their gradual split in the late 1970s. Welded together through their children and grandchildren, the couple would often find time to catch up, the spirit of harmony never once challenged by the separate paths they took. “There is an underlying love that goes beyond all of that. She'll be always in my heart,” Keith reported in 2011 to Rolling Stone magazine. —"She’s a Rainbow: The Extraordinary Life of Anita Pallenberg" (2020) by Simon Wells

The Doors were playing at the Hollywood Bowl on July 5, 1968. Jim was staying across the street from The Doors’ office at the Alta Cienega Motel that day because, Pamela explained to Christopher Jones, “He likes to stay there to work himself up before a performance.” Chris was spending the afternoon at Pamela’s apartment in West Hollywood. There were no phones in the rooms at the Alta Cienega, so Jim was at a pay phone when he called Pamela that afternoon and asked her to come pick him up and take him to the concert. Don’t go pick him up!” Chris suggested her as a dare. Jim called several times, “really pissed off,” according to Jones, but Pamela decided not to go to La Cienaga. Jim knew that Pamela had spent the day with Chris, and when she didn’t come pick him up at the motel, he was just as sure that she would be bringing Chris to the concert. But Jim didn't imagine Pam would find Mick Jagger and would seat on his lap instead. As though to curry her favor, onstage Jim wore an intricately embroidered vest from Pam's boutique Themis. Robby Krieger: "I remember Jim's girlfriend Pam took a liking to Mick Jagger and sat with him for the entire show. I don't know how Jim felt about that (laughs)." Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull skipped the backstage afterward.

After the show, Pamela brought Chris backstage, while she went to see Jim in the dressing room. As soon as Chris entered the dressing room, Jim reached for Pamela and sat her down on his lap. “He just sat there grinning at me, defiantly, with Pam on his lap,” says Jones. “Pam was looking at me kind of nervous. But Jim knew about us at that point, and he was trying to get it up on me. I just left the backstage.” The Doors embarked on a tour of the States in November, and still Pamela hadn’t come home. She was in London with Chris Jones. Their breakups before had always been minor ones, quickly healed, but this was stretching out for weeks, and Jim felt he had to take action. Without telling anyone where he was going, he left for London to get Pamela back. “Jim left town and didn’t show any of us the respect to tell us that he was leaving, how long he would be gone, when he was coming home—he just disappeared,” says Bill Siddons. The Doors left to tour Europe less than two months later, and Pamela came along, choosing mostly to stay in London while the band toured. Ray and Dorothy Manzarek were impressed by the domestic bliss the couple seemed to have fallen into their furnished flat on Eton Square.

Many of Jim Morrison's statements are clearly not to be taken at face value, he often meant the opposite of it, and they were sarcastic. What else do you say to a shallow audience? It has always bothered me that neither the media nor those who want to make money off of Jim Morrison ever acknowledge that he obviously had mental health problems with severe depression being the most obvious problem. Krieger's father was a psychologist and noticed Jim could not attend the band's first rehearsal because he had gotten drunk and thrown in jail. That was a red flag. Manzarek had his personal assistant/gopher Danny Sugerman be the one to actually put his name on No One Here Gets Out Alive. "With his crooked smile, agile mind, and great gift for gab, Ray surprised me at our first meeting by placing a typed manuscript in front of me: a copy of No One Here Gets Out Alive, the Morrison bio by Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman, still some months away from publication," explained Chris Morris. Manzarek was going to get that Buick money, one way or the other. This kid's short, unhappy life became a morbid cottage industry with every book being nothing more than an uglier rehashing of 'Jimmy Dearest', with Jim simply being a drunk asshole as the only narrative, even though Jim was a choirboy compared to other more respected and "beloved" figures in rock. —by RidderontheStorm1969

Cheri Siddons echoes The Doors's manager Bill Siddons’s sentiments. “It was never The Doors. I mean the crowd was always screaming, ‘Jim! Jim! And he looked at me once and said, ‘Cheri what do they want from me? They don’t know me, they don’t know who I am. What do they want?’ I mean that was the crux of it to me, right there. Jim was the antithesis of Mick Jagger. Everyone was sucking more, everyone wanted more, I don’t really know what it was. Maybe because Jim was deeper—it could’ve been a lot of reasons. But I think somewhere in the middle of it, he didn’t want to play anymore and yet this whole cog wheel was going around him.” “Jim was kind of being worshipped into a box,” confirms Bill Siddons, “and he was really victimized by it. ‘Okay, you’re the crazy Jim Morrison! You’ve got to jump off the stage and reappear in a cloud of smoke!’ And the audience was hungry and wanted their show, goddamn it! But he was taunting the audience, going ‘What are you here for? Is this what you came to see? I mean, what do you want from me?’ It was a bunch of teenagers that wanted to party, and here was this tormented artist who was kind of doing his Van Gogh impression. Jim created a monster that got out of control and started to eat him away.”  —"Angels Dance, Angels Die: The Tragic Romance of Pamela and Jim Morrison" (2010) by Patricia Butler

Because Morrison had a tendency not to talk about his relationships, it was difficult to gauge how things were going on with Pamela. “She was a constant force in his life, but they were volatile,” explains Siddons. “They’d taken a house on Verbena Drive and were attempting to live a domesticated life, but that only lasted a few months. That’s why Jim was living at the Alta Cienega Motel.” Morrison had a knack, like Dylan, to pen lyrics which tie to elemental themes. He also tracked down some of the eternal chords and rhythms of how our culture breathes inside the continuum of the West. The Road which chases the setting Sun. The same way someone can find those echoes in Whitman, Crane, Williams, Frost, Dylan etc. Morrison was less consistent then those seers, but when his pick found the proper vein the traces of the ever circling West Hawk can be traced back home. That is a legacy, regardless of its lack of consistency, that won’t be forgotten. 

Patricia Kennealy: "Oliver Stone, who is, of course, Satan, raped both me and Jim on screen. Oliver had the chance to make the Citizen Kane of Sixties movies, the Lawrence of Arabia of that amazing era—Jim is the only rock star about whom such a movie could have been made—and he blew it. Here was this guy who has absolutely everything going for him: He’s brilliant, gorgeous, he’s a creative genius, he has dramatic love relationships—and he lives his far too brief life in the most unbelievable pain, doing his best to destroy himself, and he dies doomed and alone at 27. Why?? The answer to that could have made a compelling piece of cinema. So does Oliver Stone make a heartbreaking piece of art from all this? No! He makes a lying vicious mean-spirited piece of unmitigated garbage. What I will never forgive him for is that you don’t care that the Jim character is dead at the end of the movie; nowhere in that evil damned piece of slander is the viewer made to care about Jim and what becomes of him. That’s not an artist at work, that’s just Oliver fucking Stone doing business as usual, and that is why I say that had he been present when I first saw the movie at a screening, I would have ripped his throat out. What Oliver did to me was terrible. But what he did to Jim was criminal. I hasten to add: I was never pretty like Pamela, but in my days with Jim I was 117 pounds when I was thin and 125 when I was fat; either way, at almost 5’9″ that’s far from chubby." Source: http://satireknight.wordpress.com

-NME (July 2019): Do you see a connection between The Doors and Natural Born Killers?

-Oliver Stone: "Yeah, I think of it as a line. Filming Natural Born Killers was like being free again. I think The Doors is like Natural Born Killers. It’s in that line of film where with imagery we freed ourselves and allowed free associations.  Jim Morrison was much more advanced than I was. I was 21 and still learning about the world. I was in Vietnam and I considered myself an explorer. I looked up to him. When I came back in ’69 and ’70, I was in New York and he was on his trip. But I sent him a script. That was an interesting story. I sent him the script of Break, which was my first script which I wrote when I came back, about Vietnam. It was very psychedelic. I thought Jim could play the soldier. He could play the character of me. It was quite a wild script. I didn’t hear back, of course. I’m used to that, I’ve been rejected before. Jim was all out for nothing, almost suicidal. He was serious. I think you see it in the movie, he takes no prisoners. ‘Do you love me?’ ‘Would you die for me?’ It’s crazy stuff. He was finished with the band. I do think Paris was the beginning of a new stage but it got derailed. I think part of that, this is my opinion only, I can’t prove it, but I do feel that Pamela Courson had a drug problem. My feeling is that he was trying to help her, and kept up with her, and I think he overdid it. We weren’t allowed to depict her addiction, because her parents didn’t want to have any of that, but you can see in the film that she’s high.” Source: www.nme.com

The fact that Max Fink (Jim's lawyer) disliked Pam maybe was due to her refusing his advances which could have created tremendous resentment for a rich Beverly Hills lawyer. Fink probably made a pass at Pam, trying to make her mistress, so she eventually would leave Jim. Others, like Jean de Bretueil had already failed previously at separating her from Jim. Fink tried to persudade Jim to break up with Pam after she had run away to Paris with Bretueil. But Jim thought it was more of a drug-related relationship than a romantic relationship. Fink asked Jim to reconsider his stormy relationship with Pam. Jim bluntly said to Fink that Pam was her woman and he wouldn't tolerate one more cross word from Fink, especially since Jim had heard (through Diane Gardiner) of the seduction game Fink had attempted on Pam behind Jim's back. Fink, as last ditch, pondered if an unstable Pam could charge Jim with abuse during the trial. Jim got red and furious against Fink, assuring him: "I would never strike my woman." Miranda Babitz agreed: "Jim suffered from clinical depression. He was not agressive. She threw plates, crockery, and frying pans at him, but he just laughed. When they went out at night, Pam hit Jim in the face with her tiny fist if he was getting too close to another chick. The only scratches that I saw in Jim's face I think were related to their passion nights."

"Sometimes, after a real passionate night, Pam would get up a bit soured, but showing a big smile. They dropped acid together and then got B shots at UCLA Medical Center to help them come down." Quoting Margaret Fink: "Jim seemed to despise his mother. She used to call me up and she just wanted to know if her son was still alive. When I asked Jim about his mother, his face became contorted in anger. 'If that bitch calls again, tell her I am dead. She just wants my money." Max Fink also quotes Jim saying him during the trial he had done the Miami incident on purpose: "Jim thought it was a good way to pay homage to his parents in Florida." Jim confessed Max his doubts about his bandmates, quoting  Fink: "Jim told me he felt that they were secretly enjoying his predicament, that there was a smugness now in their attitude towards him." Fink controversially exposed his suspicious in a conversation with his wife Margaret: "I think Pamela was in part responsible for Jim's death. I can’t even state for a fact whether it was deliberate or accidental." According to Eva Gardonyi, after Jim's death: "Pamela was obviously using heroin and she was sort of showing it to me for effect. She was doing this Bonnie and Clyde sort of thing. She was desperately missing Jim and there was something majorly off with her head. I feel she was mentally unbalanced." —"Jim Morrison: Friends Gathered Together" (2014) by Frank Lisciandro

The Fear (poem by Jim Morrison): Eternal consciousness/in the Void/makes trial jail seem almost friendly/Further and further, I shall push the masses/Where is the solution?/The Trip, The Escape/Can I do it?/Can I manage?/Why do I drink?/So that I can write poetry./Sometimes when it’s all spun out/and all that is ugly recedes into a deep sleep/There is an awakening/and all that remains is true.

The key to heroism is a concern for other people in need—a concern to defend a moral cause, knowing there is a personal risk, done without expectation of reward. By that definition, then, altruism is heroism light—it doesn’t always involve a serious risk. Compassion is a virtue that may lead to heroism, but we don’t know that it does. We’re just now starting to scientifically distinguish heroism from these other concepts and zero in on what makes a hero. What M.C. Escher’s illustrations tell us is that the world is filled with angels and devils, goodness and badness, and these dark and light aspects of human nature are our basic yin and yang. George Bernard Shaw captured this point in the preface to his great play “Major Barbara”: “Every reasonable man and woman is a potential scoundrel and a potential good citizen. What a man is depends upon his character. What he does, it depends on upon his circumstances.” Another conclusion from my research is that few people do evil and fewer act heroically. Between these extremes in the bell curve of humanity are the masses—the general population who do nothing—those who refuse the call to action and, by doing nothing, often implicitly support the perpetrators of evil. So on this bell curve of humanity, villains and heroes are the outliers. Heroic acts are prosocial actions that involve extreme sacrifice and risk. Our research suggests that one group refrains from praising heroic acts—heroes themselves. Source: journals.sagepub.com