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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pamela Des Barres, Musical Heroes, Dion, Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, Lou Reed

After decades of loving Dion Di Mucci, I was invited by his manager to see him reunite with the Belmonts at Radio City Music Hall in ‘87. As a card-carrying member of Dion’s fan club, back in 1961, I’d hustle home from Northridge Jr. High to catch his suave glory on American Bandstand.  I gave him a copy of my first book, and he was as kind and charming as humanly possible. I got to hang out with him for awhile, and I still never miss Dion play. I went all the way to New Jersey last fall, and wept through my favorite song, Love Came to Me just like it was 1961 all over again. I’ve also made the Dion pilgrimage, walking the hallowed streets of the Bronx. It took 40 years, but I did finally meet Paul McCartney. After I handed him my first book, he raised those oh so famous eyebrows and asked nervously, “We haven’t met before, have we?” I'd met John Lennon, Keith Moon introduced us, in the middle of his Lost Weekend, and it turned into “Pamela John, John Pamela,” staring at me like he was not very interested. I met the flirtatious Mr. George Harrison three times, but as much as I enjoyed his seductive attention, I’ve always left married men alone.

I attended a bash to celebrate Dylan’s 50th year on the planet, along with a few of his friends, including all of the Traveling Wilburys. That glorious Malibu afternoon turned out to be right up there as one of the best days in my life. At one point, Patti d'Arbanville and I were sitting under an umbrella with Bob and George Harrison when the quiet Beatle asked Dylan if he‘d read my book I’m With the Band, adding, “I’m not in it – unfortunately…” In that British accent! If that wasn’t enough, George introduced me the mechanic fellow he’d brought along to the party, “He works with engines the way you and I work with words.” you and I?! Great God Almighty! Call me an old flowerchild, but I believe we are all someone’s hero at one time or another – even if it’s just for one day.  We recognize ourselves in our heroes, and by adoring our them, we’re adoring ourselves.

A little later, Bob Dylan motioned me over to him, took a little piece of paper from his wallet and asked for my phone number, “Maybe we could write together on something. A screenplay maybe.” How does one respond to such an unexpected offer?  “Sure, that would be swell.” A few weeks later, I was invited backstage after Dylan’s gig, a rare occurrence indeed. He opened his arms wide as I walked in, exclaiming “I read your book cover-to-cover, and you’re a good writer!” I’ve said many times that I could have died happily at that moment. It’s a cliché but I swear to Buddha, all the clocks in the world stopped ticking. Dylan is my favorite musical hero.

The Earl Carroll Theater in 1967 across from the Hollywood Palladium was where I climbed a rickety ladder to a dark and dusty loft above the Doors stage where I made out wildly with Jim Morrison. And it involved a dangerous short-lived drug called Trimar. When Jim Morrison suggested the Trimar stuff might “hurt our heads,” I paid attention and that’s probably why my gray matter still functions. I thought he was the most beautiful man I had ever seen. One of God's greatest gifts to rock and roll was that guy's face. He was so gorgeous, everything about him was just perfect. The 60s was a very special time. All of a sudden women could express themselves sexually, freely. Much more than now. I had never kissed anyone while high before and it was a revelation, it felt like we melted into each other! Later we drove all around Hollywood and on our way to Tiny Naylor's on La Brea, Jim Morrison grabbed my bottle of Trimar, and threw it out the window into a yard full of overgrown ivy. 'Now we won't be tempted,' he said. We had nut bread and fresh orange juice while the sun came up. He told me the persona he put forward onstage was an elaborate act, and he really wanted to be noticed as a poet. After some heavy necking, he climbed from behind the wheel and said, 'I really want to see you again, darling, come here and see me or call anytime.' 

That was the only time I had my hands on Jim Morrison. I never went all the way with him, although I know we would have if Pamela wouldn't have interrupted us. He turned out to be very much a one-woman man. As far as I know, he spent the rest of his life with Pamela Courson, and their relationship was of the stormy nature, but I guess he loved her madly. I didn't dare return to his house on Laurel Canyon after Pamela ordered me out. The last time I saw him was right before he left for Paris. I was walking down La Cienega. Jim was on the other side of the street, driving a convertible, and he turned left into the Benihana parking lot, stopping me dead in my tracks. He told me how nice it was to see me again and how pretty I looked. He took my hand and kissed it; then he backed into the honking traffic and careened down the street." —"I'm with the Band: Confessions of a Groupie" (2005) by Pamela Des Barres

-Frank Lisciandro: Is it true you were hired to keep Jim out of trouble and from drinking too much?

-Tony Funches (Jim Morrison’s bodyguard): Keep him out of trouble? Yes. Drinking too much? Generally no. He wasn’t so constantly wasted that he couldn’t stick up for himself. There were times I observed some hoity-toity schmuck (male or female) observe, “Oh! Jim Morrison! Do something weird, Jim” as in “thrill me you fool!” He would then ‘read’ them and regurgitate back to them that which they uniquely feared the most about themselves. He was truly a magnificent guy, really. They took him for a lightweight because of the image, press coverage and such. They should have looked closer and witnessed the genius. I did and I’m no Rhodes Scholar. I never saw the guy start any trouble with anybody. But in terms of everyday activities, he was extremely polite to everyone, soft spoken, shy, and incredibly generous. The man tipped service extravagantly, even very rude service. I witnessed this numerous times, especially on a road trip from LA to San Francisco. We encountered a rude, bitter old waitress who didn’t approve of hippies or blacks. When Jim left a $50 tip, she came running out of the restaurant, demanding to know why. Jim replied, “For such great service.” You should see that woman's face expression, it was priceless.

-Tony Funches: The power brokers and radio jocks set him off with their bullshit, but he was the nicest guy on the planet with the faceless crowd. It would really take a book to tell that part. Has he been portrayed accurately by the media? Fuck, no! That Lizard King bullshit was dreamed up by some marketing idiot. Jim never really subscribed to it but did allow others to see it that way if they wished. Again, much of that sex-god image was contrived by others and Jim went along because they babbled that it was good for the band and record sales, etc. He couldn’t have given a shit about all that crap.

-Frank Lisciandro: What about his relationship with Pamela?

-Tony Funches: Jim didn’t really feel close to any other living human being, maybe with the exception of Pamela. She passed for whatever closeness his kind of loner could connect with. He knew she really cared for the real person. As much as his intellect could fathom that recognition, he loved her. The rest of the band usually had their wives along on the tours, but we all dreaded Pamela attempting to show up. Like fingernails on the blackboard. She drove Jim up the wall and consequently the rest of us as well. She was definitely high maintenance and could be very critical of Jim as performer. Jim wasn’t a clotheshorse, and I’m pretty sure Pam bought whatever clothes he carted around with him. 

-Frank Lisciandro: Did he ever discuss how he felt about being famous? Was he comfortable with having a rock star image or is it true he was more interested in pursuing poetry/film?

-Tony Funches: The latter is true. He could not stand the media circus and phony assholes populating that hemisphere of indulgence.

-Frank Lisciandro: Do you think his problem with alcoholism escalated because he had a hard time dealing with his success?

-Tony Funches: Yes. Again, I repeat many of the assholes that crawled out from under the slime would cause extreme reactions from anyone! That Jim’s genius allowed him to tolerate them is testament to how irritating they were in the first place. —"Jim Morrison: Friends Gathered Together" (2014) by Frank Lisciandro

-Steve Katz: When I first met Lou Reed, he was doing epic amounts of speed. His drug of choice was methamphetamine hydrochloride, the brand name Desoxyn. He was losing weight and his shaking hands got worse, he shook like a leaf. I was curious as to what Desoxyn felt like. One day, I asked Lou to leave me a pill before he left. Taking a break from my daily weed regimen, I swallowed half of it. I couldn’t get to sleep nor could I properly form a chord on my guitar or press the play button on my tape deck. My wife had to change the channels on the TV. I was a zombie. My first thought was, “How does he do this shit?” Lou was probably too intelligent for his own good, but he could be one of the funniest people I had ever known, a refreshing change from the studio guys in boring old Blood, Sweat & Tears. Lou respected that I was a musician and that we had a shared history in the New York underground, even if the Blues Project had been abjectly terrified of the Velvet Underground. During the summer of 1973, Lou and I started spending more time together. Most of the time, I was able to see beyond the arrogance and the drugs and I learned that much of what Lou did was an act. His questionable bisexuality during this period also lent him a mystique that he himself helped foster, but I knew that when you took that much speed, you probably couldn’t even get an erection. In a perverse way, it probably caused his relationships to be less threatening, but the illusion certainly fed his fans and critics alike. —Blood, Sweat, and My Rock 'n' Roll Years (2015) by Steve Katz

Strange Days with The Doors, JFK lyrics

“Not To Touch the Earth” (1968): House upon the hill/Moon is lying still/Shadows of the trees/Witnessing the wild breeze/Come on baby run with me/The mansion is warm, at the top of the hill/Rich are the rooms and the comforts there/Red are the arms of luxuriant chairs/And you won't know a thing till you get inside/Dead president's corpse in the driver's car/The engine runs on glue and tar/Come on along, not going very far/Wake up, girl, we're almost home/We should see the gates by morning/We should be inside the evening/ Burn... 

“Small minds cannot grasp great ideas; to their narrow comprehension, their purblind vision, nothing seems really great and important but themselves.” ―James George Frazer, The Golden Bough (1890). The Doors song “Not To Touch the Earth” (whose opening lines are inspired by “The Golden Bough”) deals with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy (“dead President’s corpse in the driver’s car,” as Kennedy was killed while in a motorcade). Similarly, there are no stones unturned in Dylan's narrative of "Murder Most Foul" (2020). Dylan puts us again in that limousine, before the shots fired, during the assassination, and on that six-mile trip to Parkland Hospital, to when Vice President Lyndon Johnson is sworn in as President at 2:38 pm that afternoon. It's especially chilling and emotionally soaring, when he notes in the next verse, "I said the soul of a nation been torn away / And it's beginning to go into slow decay / And that it's 36 hours past Judgement Day." Similarly, Jim Morrison wrote (in one of his Hidden poems, 1969): "I have a vision of America. Seen from the air 28,000 ft. & going fast. A one-armed man in a Texas parking labyrinth. A burnt tree like a giant primeval bird in an empty lot in Fresno." Source: www.popmatters.com

John Humphrey Noyes (1811-1886) was an American preacher, radical philosopher, and utopian socialist. He founded the Putney, Oneida and Wallingford Communities, and is credited with coining the term "complex marriage". He left Andover for Yale University and started an uproar when he began preaching Perfectionism, the heretical notion that a religious life must be free of sin. Argumentative and charismatic, Noyes became a local celebrity and attracted small crowds of supporters, opponents and gawkers. It was around this time that Noyes met Abigail Merwin. He was 22; she was 30. It’s hard to find details about Merwin, other than that she was smart, beautiful and had dark-grey eyes. Many of Noyes’s descriptions of her are saturated with ecstatic religious imagery. During a period when he stopped eating and sleeping and instead wandered manic through the streets of lower Manhattan, he envisioned her ‘standing, as it were, on the pinnacle of the universe, in the glory of an angel’ (although, in his mania, he wondered whether she was actually the devil incarnate). Merwin was Noyes’s first follower, and he loved her. In his Confessions of Religious Experience (1849), he admitted that ‘she was undoubtedly the person to whom I was attached more than any other person on earth’.

Noyes’s instability eventually scared off Merwin. After his manic spell in New York, she deserted him and Perfectionism. Her father later told Noyes to keep away. Yet when Merwin announced her engagement to a man named Merit Platt, Noyes sent her a letter. ‘I loved you as I never loved another,’ he declared, confessing that ‘the thought of marriage was unavoidable’. She had left him but Noyes was convinced that they were joined in divine matrimony: ‘God shall make you know that he has joined us in an immortal marriage, and that what God hath joined together man can not put asunder.’ Merwin and her new husband moved to Ithaca. Noyes followed them, but Merwin refused to acknowledge him. It was then that Noyes began to develop his doctrine of free love, which, conveniently enough, would justify his having a relationship with Merwin. Today, Noyes is best known for founding the Oneida Community, a religious utopia that, among other ambitions, eradicated traditional marriage. Any man could ask any woman to have sex; each woman could in turn reject any man. The nuclear family disappeared. The Oneida experiment is one in a long line of anti-marriage crusades stretching from 2nd-century North Africa to 20th-century Israel. And like all of them, it failed. After 30 years of enforcement, 30 years of criticism and religious indoctrination, the impulse for special relationships was too strong to control. Younger members revolted. Some developed relationships in secret; others quit the community and married outside. Noyes’s failure to destroy marriage demonstrates just how resilient the institution is. It suggests there’s something deeply human that inspires us to create and participate in marriage. Despite modern trends, most people cohabiting want to get formally married eventually. According to a recent survey (February 2020) from the Pew Research Center, around 70 per cent of respondents in the US said that marriage is either essential or important to living a fulfilling life. Source: aeon.co

"Inside The Fire - My Strange Days With The Doors" (2009) by B. Douglas Cameron—As an 17 year old from the mid-west he bought a ticket for a Doors show in Chicago, November 3 1968 that forever changed his life. In 1969 Douglas Cameron became a roadie for the band who worked very hard lugging 240 pound amps for gigs in the mid-west and down to Mexico City for $60 per week. Cameron knew personally Morrison, his girlfriend Pam Courson, and even paid a visit to the Courson family. Some extracts: “Morrison generally was fair. If he went on the attack against somebody they usually deserved it. Morrison hated feeling he was being used. He rarely used people, that was not his style. Despite the legend, I only saw him around groupies a few times. He treated girls fine, groupies, girlfriends, whatever they were. Pam was in another category, practically she was his wife. They loved each other, but there was this weird competition they had, like a test to see who was the stronger, who loved the other one the most. There was a lot of mind fucking going on. She had been there from the start, from when Jim had nothing at Venice, until that final, fatal night. His final words were ‘Pam, are you still there?’ She was lovely and very funny, but most of The Doors' entourage hated her. I would lie if I said she was all sweetness and rainbows. She could be very difficult to deal with a times and knew how to press Jim's buttons. When she called him Jimmy it reminded him of when he was a kid. I think that’s what his grandma called him as a kid. When Pam was really pissed she called him James Douglas Morrison, you know, like a mother would. Pam kinda went into helpless girlish mode and then he melted to her. She didn’t do baby speak or play the fool, but she could give off this vulnerable vibe. Jim told me he loved her and they shared a common destiny. I thought that destiny thing was a crock, just more of weird luck, but there was no way he was going to believe me. Anyways, he said they were meant to be together.”

Jim was the ultimate existentialist. It wasn't that he didn't want to talk about the band so much as he didn't want to talk about anything that was a burden. The image of the dead albatross hanging around his neck was a metaphor for Jim's freedom. He wasn't free because he had an albatross called the Doors hanging around his neck. Pam's dependency on heroin complicated the things between them even more. I witnessed first hand a couple of their foul arguments, where she would threaten to leave him for the count, a French dealer. We all thought Jim was going to break it up with her but she actually had given him an ultimatum, it was her or The Doors. Diane Gardiner admitted so much ('Pam was fed up after Miami's catastrophe. She said Jean de Bretueil wanted her as his girlfriend and she had outgrown Jim'). It may sound ludicrous, but what if she was not bluffing this time and was leaving Jim for good? Could you imagine what was going through Jim's mind? Even his own sister Anne said that everyone in the family thought Jim would end up as a ‘bum’. The same insecurities, the same desperate attempts that he exhibited in Miami after fighting with Pam at the L.A. airport, resurfaced. Nearly all the lyrics of his songs ‘We could be so good together’; ‘Hyacinth House’; ‘Cars Hiss by my Window are about Pam. What if Morrison was actually shy? Maybe Pam was, in his mind, his only real friend or soulmate. I think she made him feel like a man because she looked vulnerable and romantic. He got drunk so he could talk to the press and perform for the fans. The idea of death obsessed him. I remember him saying once: “Well sometimes people die by accident, sometimes by design and sometimes they just die and there isn’t a reason.” He was being crucified by his own mind. 

On 1st March 1969 Jim missed his direct flight from Los Angeles to Miami, where The Doors were booked to play at the Dinner Key Auditorium, an old stuffy hall near the harbour, constructed of corrugated iron. He sat down in a bar at the airport and drank a lot, ruminating on the ultimatum Pam had given him. As there were no more direct flights, he had to change planes in New Orleans around noon, and had to wait several hours for the connecting flight. Eventually he arrived at the Dinner Key Auditorium just minutes before the beginning of the concert. He was totally drunk. The atmosphere backstage was already at its lowest point. Against an arrangement that had been made, several thousand extra spectators had been squeezed into the venue. And when Bill Siddons, the manager of The Doors, voiced a desire to cancel the concert, he discovered that the lorry that had picked up the band's equipment from the airport had suddenly and mysteriously disappeared. Amidst the concert, Jim takes the microphone and rambles. "Wake up! You can't remember where had this dream stopped? The snake was pale gold, glazed and shrunken. We were afraid to touch it. The sheets were hot, dead prisons. Run to the mirror in the bathroom, look, she's coming in here... I can't live through each slow century of her moving..." At this point someone throws a bag of red paint at him. Jim's pants got covered with paint. One of the security guards has had enough, and amongst all the howling from the fans, he shoves Jim off the stage. One of the promoters pushes through to the microphone and shouts: "Hold it, someone's gonna get hurt! Stop it." Not until an hour later is the hall empty. In L.A. the heat was already on. The first comments about the cancelled concerts arrived, and the press began publishing exaggerated and fabricated reports about the Miami concert. Every article picked up on the contents of the warrant, and to most of them Jim Morrison was guilty right from the beginning. It was found particularly distasteful that he had performed his 'exhibitionist show'. Jim Morrison was now a fugitive from the law, and with an international warrant out for his arrest, was wanted by the FBI. This warrant eventually arrived at the Doors Office, and Jim gave himself up to the FBI in L.A. in the presence of his lawyer, Max Fink, on 3rd April 1969. A degrading court case followed, which would stretch out until pronoucement of judgement on 30th October 1970. Despite the recording of the concert, as well as 150 photographs that did not show one shred of evidence of Morrison's apparent exhibitionist behaviour in public, he was found guilty on these charges. On top of this, he was harassed by that witch from New York, who is a professional liar. Morrison hated her presence. He was given 28 months of probationary time. Due to Jim's subsequent death, however, there would never be another meeting in court. It was obvious that Judge Murray Goodman, with a lot of pressure from outside, wanted to make an example of this case. 

My feelings after watching the Miami debacle. Disappointment, despair, frustration and I also knew that the future for me and everyone in and around the Doors was very much uncertain. In New Orleans, on the way to the stage prior to the show Jim gobbled hashish laced with opium which contributed to his 'lethargic performance.' Jim was burned out from performing by the end of 1969. Going way back to Amsterman in 1968, Jim already was signalling an end to his desire to perform live on stage. I was sorry to witness such a collapse of a human being who really was at his core, a decent fellow, with a penchant for becoming a "wordsmith". Jim pleaded his case to the band about the stress of the upcoming trial, fights with Pam and other excuses for his lethargic and unprofessional behavior. But the guys decided that they had enough and they planned, in secret, to form a new band, Other Voices, and continue their careers as a new group. This was planned only after New Orleans. The planning went on through the recording of LA Woman. When Jim left for Paris I was asked to set up a stage while they organized new performances. Bruce Botnick also rehearsed the set-up and recording of the stage performance and got his equipment ready for the road. It was disappointing to me because it lacked the content and mystique of the original Doors sound and music. This was also reflected in the audience reactions. The Tour in 1972 was finally cancelled owing to lack of ticket sales. The Doors had, indeed, closed. Jim went to Paris to lick his wounds, knowing full well that, as a stage performer, he was finished with The Doors. If Pam was in Paris it was because Jim paid for it with cold cash. She had no income due to the financial failure of her boutique Themis. He told me both were going to detox and he was going to propose her marriage in Paris.

In New Orleans, Densmore said Jim caught the mike tripod and began smashing it on stage, again and again, until wooden boards fly into pieces while the spectators of the first rows watched horrified. That's not the total truth. They all remember Jim bashing the stage with the mike stand and Jim's "crappy" performance. That's about it for their "truth." But they have no recollection any longer of what happened throughout the duration of the show. As wasted as Jim was, he was able to last for just about the entire set. He probably sounds like crap and his voice is certainly no better than it was at Dallas, but they embellished the story to make Jim sound the big bad wolf again. Jim just shattered some layers of plywood and made a hole. On that last stroke, the base of the mike went through the hole and snapped off the shaft. Jim was a little surprised, I think. John then approached him and shook Jim while verbally reprimanding him. Jim then walked off stage, on the sudience left side, and disappeared through the door. John threw down his stick, commented that he would "never play with that asshole again" and walked off. Ray and Robby were sort of in shock. One after the other they followed John off stage and up the stairs. As a group, they did not do nothing constructive about it. It was this shaman crap promotion that allowed Ray to justify not taking any step to stop Jim. To tell you the truth I think they cannot remember because they do not want to. It was a painful experience to remember they didn't help him. They were definitely angry with Jim and his drunken antics. One thing certain, this affirmed their resolve to get rid of Jim. From that ill fated day in New Orleans, the path led straight to "Other Voices" just 10 months later. Only for Jim all of it seemed a joke. There was only one problem, however, no one was laughing.

Notes on a Screen (Jim Morrison's prose poem, 1969): "It's a matter of demolishing experience, just a question of gathering up all fragments into one zone of awareness, then pulverizing them to expel from the system through its tiny doors, leaving behind the mind stripped bare, devastated and stark as ground zero. You got to have the guts to lace your own network with it. Let the risk illuminate your own dreams. Lit up like emerald peacock feathers! You gotta hook your brain fibre on the spike of a distant star and let it stretch you at the receding speed of the primal explosion. All the way, brothers and sisters, to the breaking point, and pray for a glimpse before the tissue tears. The extension of the human mind, the structure of technology, on the area of collective consciousness. Get out from under the antientropic plumbing; become not just the source of energy but the receiving substance as well. Rediscover your self-programming! For now, take it as a delight to be nothing more than a stab, a fragment with the total mathematical content of a pleasure quotient. Use your brain as an instrument for appreciating sensual input with its developed intricacies only as method of acquiring more pleasure. Kill the image!" 

I think Jim Morrison was light years ahead of their bandmates. They didn't understand his goals. Danny Sugerman lied about Morrison a lot. I mean if Danny was close to Jim, how come we don't ever see him in the footages we've got recorded? How come he is never in photos with Jim or even near Ray, Robby, John? I know his only work was to answer fan mail at The Doors Office if that's what he did and didn't go on tour with the band. He just made up stories to make a profit. No one can say what was in Jim's mind at any time on any subject. It is nothing more than presumption to do so. Not only Sugerman lied about Jim, also Max Fink, his lawyer. I didn't expected that Max Fink would have said anything good about Pam since he was well known to hate her. The letters Jim wrote in Paris and the fact he ordered Bob Green that a credit card should be put under Pam's name shows that they had reconciled and were still in love with each other. It doesn't really matter what Max Fink thought. He was from a different generation and probably judged everything that way. He was Fink by name and Fink by nature, as they say. A contemptible person. What books on Jim would I recommend? I wouldn't know because in my opinion most of them are seriously flawed by willful errors, sloppy scholarship, macho pseudo-identification, jealousy, ignorance, deliberate lies, and hostility. I think The Jim Morrison Scrapbook by Jim Henke is supposed to be pretty good. He interviewed Pam's parents and other people who tell some reliable stories. Source: www.thedoorscollection.com

Patricia Kennealy-Morrison in a letter to Rainer Moddemann for The Doors Quarterly Magazine. "Jim was terribly scared, and he wasn't embarrassed about showing it to me. While we were talking about a possible abortion, he cried. We reached the opinion that the timing wasn't good, and he said that we could have a child together later at another time. I would have had the child for only one reason, that it was Jim's child - and I think it was terribly egotistic of me to want a child just because it was with a certain person, and not because I wished to have a child. It was the most difficult decision in my life."

-Frank Lisciandro: Did you have a feeling that there was a strong relationship going on between Jim and Patricia Kennealy? I mean, were they lovey-dovey?

-Leon Barnard: Oh, no, when I got where she lived, a very casual apartment in the Greenwich Village area, it wasn’t at all like that. I didn’t feel that there was any special connection between them.

-Frank Lisciandro: She did an interview with Jim for Jazz & Pop magazine. What was that interview like?

-Leon Barnard: Well, it was more of just a conversation. It wasn’t a formally structured interview. It wasn’t a question/answer thing at all. That’s when we went out to dinner and it was more of an informal conversation. I think his main interest was getting a review of his poetry books—The Lords and The New Creatures—talking about his poetry in a casual sense.

-Frank Lisciandro: Did you have the impression that Jim thought of himself as a poet first before he thought of himself as a rock & roller?

-Leon Barnard: Yeah, I would say definitely, I would say more as a writer across the board, where maybe there’s a possibility of screenplays too. So I don’t think it was specifically poetry though.

-Do you think Pamela Courson was an influence in Jim’s life in terms of his artistic life?

-Leon Barnard: Yes, I think she was. I mean she must have had something. She may have been one of those people that could read his poems and make comments about them. She didn't talk of Jim's poetry with us. She was just a secretive person. I think Pam managed Jim on several levels and sometimes she sought to control him. And I think that to some degree he enjoyed that. But if I were going to look at the psychology of it, I think he also enjoyed breaking the rules so he could get punished for it, and then forgiven by Pam to keep it interesting.

-Frank Lisciandro: Do you think Jim and Pam had any violence in their relationship?

-Kathy Lisciandro: I remember him saying once or twice, “my little woman,” in a very sarcastic way. But I would never believe that he was actually violent with Pam, because I don’t think he had that in him. He was not a violent person so I don’t think he would have been violent with Pam of all people. They yelled at each other from time to time.

Murder Most Foul, new epic song by Bob Dyaln

Along with a new single released on 27th March, Murder Most Foul, Dylan released the following message: “Greetings to my fans and followers with gratitude for all your support and loyalty across the years. This is an unreleased song we recorded a while back that you might find interesting. Stay safe, stay observant and may God be with you.” Bob Dylan is no stranger to longer epics. Time Out of Mind had a track “Highlands” that lasted over 16 minutes. And his album Tempest had the title track that clocked in at almost fourteen minutes. Murder Most Foul is mesmerizing. The music is hushed. It’s a piano being quietly played over very muted percussion. Doug Herron’s violin plays along as a beautiful accent. There’s no jam or big guitar solo that tears up 10 minutes like CCR playing “Heard It Through the Grapevine.” The focus is all on Dylan’s voice – which sounds much less gravelly here than he’s sounded on his latter day albums. He’s singing in a less fierce, more melancholy way so maybe that’s why it isn’t so scratchy. He’s not whispering but it’s like a secret being murmured. The music is almost ethereal. There’s an almost spiritual or holy vibe. The focus on Dylan’s vocals are key because the lyrics of this song are mind blowing. The theme, on the surface at least, is the assassination of JFK in November of ’63. Leave it to Bob Dylan to write a song about one of the darkest chapters of America’s history during the current dark period of America’s history. It's poetry set to music. It feels like ‘The Iliad’, being the title “Murder Most Foul” probably from Shakespeare. One thread is a surreal, fever-dream imagining of JFK’s thoughts/conversation after he’s shot. But the lyrics seem to point to a bigger story than just JFK’s assassination. When he sings “The day they killed him someone said to me, “The Age of the Antichrist has just only begun,” we get the feeling there’s more to this song. It plays more like a travelogue through the last fifty years of culture. It’s more a commentary of how things were never quite right in America after JFK was killed. “For the last fifty years they’ve been searchin’ for that, Freedom, oh freedom, freedom over me, I hate to tell you, mister, but only dead men are free.” You could almost suggest that Dylan is painting a picture here that JFK wasn’t the only one who died on that grim November day in Dallas. As Dylan sings, in what seems to be a stream-of-consciousness way, he makes so many cultural references. This one is a stone-cold classic. It’s wonderful when rock and roll transcends the format and becomes art. Dylan’s music has always had the power to move us. This song is no exception. The song closes by inscribing itself into the corpus of American song through which American history is both forged and preserved: Play “Love Me or Leave Me,” by the great Bud Powell, play “The Blood-Stained Banner,” play “Murder Most Foul.” Source: bourbonandvinyl.net

Jim Morrison and the Secret Gold Mine

Friedrich Nietzsche described in his notebooks (which were published posthumously in The Will to Power) a choice between ‘active ‘ and ‘passive’ nihilism. One of his many aphorisms on nihilism was that it is the result of the highest values devaluing themselves. Values such as truth and justice can come to feel like they are not merely ideas, but that they have some supernatural power, particularly when we say: ‘The truth will set you free’ or ‘Justice will be served.’ When these values turn out not to have the power attributed to them, when truth turns out not to be liberating, we become disillusioned. According to Nietzsche, we can then become active nihilists and reject the values given to us by others in order to erect values of our own. Or we can become passive nihilists and continue to believe in traditional values, despite having doubts about the true value of those values. The active nihilist destroys in order to find or create something worth believing in. In epistemology (the theory of knowledge), nihilism is often seen as the denial that knowledge is possible, the stance that our most cherished beliefs have no bedrock. There are, however, several problems with trying to base morality on reason. 

One such problem, as pointed out by Jacques Lacan in ‘Kant with Sade’ (1989), is that using universalisability as the criterion of right and wrong can let clever people (such as the Marquis de Sade) justify some seemingly horrific actions if they can manage to show that those actions can actually pass Kant’s logic test. Another problem, as pointed out by John Stuart Mill in Utilitarianism (1861), is that humans are rational, but rationality is not all that we have. Though we might say we want to be free and independent, such liberation can feel like a terrible burden. This was expressed for example by Søren Kierkegaard in The Concept of Anxiety (1844) when he described anxiety as the ‘dizziness of freedom’ that arises when we look down at what appears to us as the ‘abyss’ of endless possibility. Rather than letting ourselves feel powerless in a world that seems to have stopped caring, we should ask where nihilistic views of the world are coming from, and who benefits from our seeing the world that way. 

For example, as Thomas Kuhn argued in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), we can certainly develop very complicated and very successful models for describing reality, which we can use to discover a wealth of new ‘facts’, but we can never prove that these correspond to reality itself – they could simply derive from our particular model of reality.  This leads to another problem, the problem of infinite regress. Any claim to knowledge based on some foundation inevitably leads to questions about the foundation of that foundation. Nietzsche’s body of work is notoriously difficult to navigate. He wrote in multiple styles, including essays, aphorisms, poems, and fiction. He introduced idiosyncratic concepts such as the free spirit, the Übermensch, eternal recurrence, ressentiment, the ascetic ideal, the revaluation of values, and the affirmation of life. He shifted allegiances: writing books, for example, in support of the composer Richard Wagner and the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, but later delivering blistering critiques of both. Not surprisingly, scholars range widely in their interpretations of Nietzsche: was he a poet or a philosopher? A nihilist, moral relativist, or Nazi sympathiser? A critic or a system builder? Anti-Christian or Christian? In the face of this complexity, Nietzsche offers an interpretive key: his references to dance (Tanz). 

Taken together, these references light a path that begins in Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), and wends through every major work into his final book, the posthumous Ecce Homo (1908). Nietzsche’s dance references call attention to the sensory education that he insists is necessary for creating values that ‘remain faithful to the Earth’. Nietzsche calls the effect a ‘magic transformation’: spectators’ sensations of suffering and terror yield to feelings of ‘metaphysical comfort’ and the notion that ‘life is at the bottom of things, despite all the changes of appearances, indestructibly powerful’. In Human, All Too Human (1878), Nietzsche elaborates that all human symbolism – even music – is rooted in the ‘imitation of gesture’ at work in ancient tragedy. He writes that the human impulse to move with others ‘is older than language, and goes on involuntarily… even when the language of gesture is universally suppressed,’ as he observed among Christians of his day. When humans don’t learn how to move their bodily selves, Nietzsche insists, their senses grow dull. As Zarathustra exhorts: ‘You higher men, the worst about you is that you have not learned to dance as one must dance – dancing away over yourselves! What does it matter that you are failures?’ Source: https://aeon.co

"Everything is broken up and dances." —Jim Morrison

"Dance related metaphors are central to Nietzsche's philosophy; dance is a reminder about the work of overcoming oneself and to free oneself from anger, bitterness and despair." Jim Morrison was very influenced by Nietzsche. Although Morrison‘s work displays a strong Nietzschean influence, his early explorations with sensory perception relate more specifically to William Blake and Aldous Huxley.  The terror celebrated in Morrison‘s work goes beyond the Nietzschean acceptance of life‘s suffering. Morrison‘s familiarity with the poetry of Blake, as well as Rimbaud and Baudelaire, encouraged his attraction to darker themes. Although many of the nihilistic thoughts echo those of Nietzsche, Morrison‘s fondness for absurdist texts instills in him a preference for nonsense rather than rationality. Morrison suggests that the absurdity of the world enhances man‘s sensory perception and allows the world to be whatever can be created in the mind. Morrison confronts conflicting feelings of remaining in the role of the spectator or assuming the unpredictable role of the actor—a problem he will ponder often throughout his career. Morrison recognizes "self-deception may be necessary to the poet‘s survival." Jim Morrison‘s self-doubt extends beyond his abilities as a writer to his abilities as performer as well. 

Jim Morrison: “Nietzsche said once women are the loveliest swans in the world. He's wrong about women, though, they aren't fools.” He just laughed at some Philosophy Professors who wrote about Nietzsche. Like Walter Kaufman's chapter of his Nietzsche, Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist  (1956) about “Nietzsche's admiration for Socrates.” “It's nothing but a lie,” Jim said. “It's not true.” I waited for his reaction. “That lousy Sophist,” Jim declared. “What an old ugly pederast. Socrates lurking in Greek law courts so he could pick up enough gift of gab to con innocent young men into the sack! They should have killed that fucker decades before the hemlock.” Jim wasn't going to be fooled by Kaufman. “He taught Plato a skeptical philosophy and utterly ruined him. Why? Because Socrates wanted to kill off the Greek religion – another Sophistry – a lawyer's rhetoric. And what happened? That poor bastard Plato takes a trip to Egypt. Ever read The Egyptian Book Of The Dead? It's nothing but a primitive form of the ‘allegory of the cave’, i.e. the love of the dead. Pure nihilism! These philosophy teachers – they can get rid of ‘God’, but they can’t get rid of Socrates? Why, it’s ridiculous.” Jim often favored the German culture over England's. Jim exempted the Irish, the Scotch, and the Welsh.“I never knew an Englishman I didn't despise," he said, "or an Englishwoman I didn't love.” Jim thought the class structure and behaviourism had ruined England: “It's a shopkeeper’s mentality. Survival at any price.” —"Summer with James Douglas Morrison, A Memoir" (2011) by Dennis C. Jakob

One of Jim Morrison’s most important lines is “weird scenes inside the gold mine,” a lyric from The End that metaphorically describes what he has found (weird scenes) and where he has made those findings (the gold mine). What T. S. Eliot called the artist's final destination “the still point,” Morrison would eventually use other expressions including “the gold mine,” “universal mind,” “the perimeter,” and “the only solution.” Each symbolizes the same illumination and ecstasy. In her 1968 Saturday Evening Post essay Waiting for Morrison, Joan Didion distinguished The Doors from their peers, saying, "The Doors are different. They have nothing in common with the gentle Beatles. They lack the contemporary conviction that love is brotherhood. Their music insists that love is sex and sex is death and therein lies salvation." In any case, Didion is quite perceptive in using the word "salvation," for it's one of the most important themes of Morrison. On the other hand, her lasting and oft-quoted characterization of the group as “missionaries of apocalyptic sex” is cute but extremely trite. Ultimately, Jim Morrison wasn’t primarily interested in sex, as his lyrics show. He is interested in timeless pleasures and treasures that go beyond the physical. Didion is regarded as one of our sharpest cultural observers, but her understanding of The Doors is quite thin. Sex and death are useful as starting points for getting into The Doors (and they have been endlessly cited as Morrison’s obsessions), but it is unfortunate that many critics remain stuck there. Going to a Doors concert was about participating in a Neuro Linguistic Musical Programming experiment that could go in unpredictable directions. Doors music is about what Joseph Campbell called “the soul’s high adventure, the quest of mortals to grasp the reality of God.” The Doors combined poetry, mythology, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and tragedy.

Sex sells, and Morrison was certainly oozing sex in his persona. On the other hand, his lyrics took us far beyond sex to something timeless and ethereal. Yet his message was difficult to hear over the controversy and confusion. As the band attracted more attention, audiences hoped that Morrison would do something outrageous onstage. In the beginning, audiences came to the concerts to hear music. Later, audiences came looking for a freak show. Michael Cuscuna interviewed Morrison for DownBeat magazine and found a totally different person from the one he expected. Cuscuna writes that he was initially “dismayed at the prospect of encountering another rock ego.” However, he ends by saying, “in Jim Morrison, I found to my surprise a beautiful human being who, not unlike Charles Mingus, has been a victim of sensational publicity and harassment by silly journalists.” The crowds of rock and roll explorers became a mob of weekend voyeurs who came not for adventure but to see a freak show. The audience no longer saw Jim Morrison as the poet who used stage theatrics to communicate. They now wanted Morrison to “do his act.” Robin Richman said of The Doors that “their music has no meaning, only mood.” Such a comment is entirely ridiculous and condescending. Richman’s piece appeared in Life Magazine in 1968 and essentially told America that Morrison’s lyrics weren’t worth paying attention to. As another scathing example, Dave Marsh wrote in 1979 when he was an editor for Rolling Stone that The Doors were the most “overrated group in rock history.”

For one reason or another, dozens of critics who have been listening to The Doors from the very beginning haven’t the slightest knowledge of what Morrison was all about. Really. They are entirely keyless when it comes to grasping Morrison’s vision. In his review of the doc When You’re Strange, Stephen Holden called Morrison “faintly ludicrous” and “a charismatic male pin-up strutting about in leather pants. He started out with psychedelics and ended up a burnt-out drunk. As a case study of a self-destructive performer consumed by his own mystique, he remains in a class by himself.” Tom Robbins summed Morrison up in July 1967: "Sexual in an almost psychopathic way, Morrison's richly textured voice taunts and teases and throbs with incredible vocal control and the theatrical projection of a Shakespearean star." Bernard Wolfe, sent by The New York Times Magazine as a replacement for Robert Gover to do a hatchet job on Morrison, eventually published in Esquire magazine his 1972 essay: Jim Morrison: Slamming the Door in the Woodstock Nation. Morrison had befriended Wolfe over the course of time, and despite Wolfe’s overall lack of insight, his article is full of witticisms. On the sex and death themes that have been endlessly worked over by critics, here is Wolfe’s question and Morrison’s response: "What transcendence did you have in mind, death through sex or sex through death?" Morrison replied in jest: "The first on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, the second on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays." 

  

Morrison never explicitly identifies just what "the other side" is, but he gives us a good idea of what it isn’t. The first stanza ("You know the day destroys the night, night divides the day / Tried to run. Tried to hide. / Break on through to the other side") puts it somehow outside the eternal cycle of day and night. Morrison’s “other side” is atemporal, outside of time. The second verse ("We chased our pleasures here, dug our treasures there / Can you still recall the time we cried? / Break on through to the other side") indicates that the other side is beyond ordinary pleasures or treasures. "Arms that chain, eyes that lie / Break on through to the other side" negate the physical as the ultimate treasure. He desires something other than sex. The gate symbolizes the passage. Many critics have assumed that the other side is simply death. Within the context of the album, however, and especially in view of End of the Night, which in a sense completes this song, it becomes clear that the other side refers to something positive rather than negative. Morrison’s notion of death is actually one of rebirth. Morrison's "death theme" is a "rebirth theme." Morrison once discussed Light My Fire with Bernard Wolfe, saying its theme was “liberation from the cycle of birth-orgasm-death.” End of the Night in a sense complements Break On Through. However, by comparison it is a very gentle and melancholy song. The message is stated at the outset, "Take the highway to the end of the night" and “take a journey to the bright midnight.” The highway and the journey are one and the same, both lead to "the end of the night." This destination of the "bright midnight" involves "bliss" and "light," unmistakable symbols of joy and euphoria. "Sweet delight" is somehow involved; this positive experience is then set against the contrasting "endless night." The darkness has come to an end. One critic contends that the song is about "irredeemable alienation," but the words support the opposite view. One of the themes of The End is internal travel. Morrison sings “there’s danger on the edge of town.” Danger here refers to one of the three core elements of the hero’s journey: overcoming the obstacles. Morrison tells the listener to "ride the king's highway" and to "ride the highway West." In between is the line "Weird scenes inside the gold mine."

The placement suggests that "the gold mine" is somehow associated with going West. This passage is an invitation to encounter what Morrison called the “dark forces,” symbolic of obstacles that must be defeated on the journey to liberation. We next encounter the image of "the blue bus," which is said to be "calling us." When he says “the West is the best,” he’s not talking about California, he’s talking about the mythological West, which is very much of a landmark within that whole hero’s journey, to reach his Shangrila. When he says “The killer awoke before dawn, he put his boots on,” Morrison has stopped singing and now he’s talking, and he’s also going into third person. So he’s transformed himself into a character, and he’s commenting on this third person, the killer, and he’s talking. And then later he says he took a face from the ancient gallery, so he’s putting on this mask. In concert, when Jim Morrison sang this song, he would sometimes put his hand over his eyes as if to symbolize a mask, so he’s speaking through a character, not in the first person. The End is an invitation to "ride the highway West," "ride the snake," "take a chance at the back of the blue bus." Somehow, these essentially identical commands tie in with the recurring apocalyptic motif of "the end", "the only solution." The End is also about liberation from the cycle of birth-orgasm-death. When the music subsides, Morrison sings “the end of nights we tried to die,” indicating a final ending. The song is a cogent, anti-Freudian prescription for salvation emanating from deep and authentic psychoanalitical knowledge. Freud misinterpreted and distorted the Oedipus myth to suit his own purposes. Morrison summons up the Oedipus Complex in order to challenge its very foundations, not to act it out.  That is Jim Morrison speaking in the role of a character. When critics say that Jim Morrison wanted to violate a taboo, that is completely misreading the lyrics. What is going on here is that the treasure that Morrison’s talking about in terms of the gold mine and go confront the danger in order to win the treasure, that treasure has to do with an anti-Freudian view of the world in terms of what’s possible for liberation. And it’s an anti-Oedipus Complex view. 

Bernard Wolfe wrote, "What an ingenious formula: Morrison did resurrect something in the paved-over human potential, something at least assumed to be there, fantasy freedom, fantasy sex, fantasy departure, through the trick of escaping from the human realm or going through the motions of escape.” Despite the occasional darkness, from the haunting eeriness of End of the Night to the chilling visions in The End, Morrison’s overriding images are beautiful and positive. He ultimately emphasized light over darkness, but light cannot be achieved without first conquering dark and dangerous obstacles. Morrison was ultimately a “light-bringer and emissary of the light.” And Morrison, when you look at a song like When the Music’s Over, right after he screams out, “We want the world and we want it now,” he says, “See the light. Save us, Jesus, Save us.” And the light, meaning love, the sun and the dawn, are the prevailing themes in The Doors, not the dark, the night, the chaos and the abyss.

Many critics focused on Jim Morrison's sex-appeal and 'bad boy' persona. Critics like George Will and Stephen Holden never got beyond their absurd impressions of Morrison as shallow sex symbol. Frank Lisciandro, Morrison's close friend, has written that a deliberate misinformation campaign about Morrison began while he was alive and is still operating today. Most of Morrison’s supposed exploits are, in Lisciandro’s view, a complete fabrication. "I asked him once how he dealt with all the trashtalk. Jim counseled me on the importance of growing a duck's back, so the vitriol rolled right off his back." Although Jim had many adventures, he was a gentleman. He called the groupies 'groovy ladies'. As Eva Gardonyi explained to Lisciandro, "Jim knew these girls who danced at The Phone Booth, the go-go dancers. He did know all the girls in there, he liked them and he respected them. He thought that these girls were honest. He had a real empathy for them." The list of vitriolic anti-Morrison critics is long: Dave Marsh, Nick Tosches, George Will, Timothy White, Stephen Holden, Caryn James, Stuart Maconie, Richard Williams, Dwight Garner, Steve Heilig, Leonard Cassuto, Alex von Tunzelmann, even Robert Christgau or Greil Marcus occasionally. Marcus dissects the performance of The End at The Singer Bowl in 1968 where Morrison is in front of a cacophony of screaming and abusive fans, as a “bizarre, ugly seventeen minutes.” —Jim Morrison and the Secret Gold Mine (2017) by David Shiang