Jim Morrison's End

The other side of flower power (when poet becomes a product)

Jim Morrison. 1968. Source: Wikipedia

I am not mad. I am interested in freedom.

-Jim Morrison

(This is the final part of this Litverse series. Read Part 1 & Part 2.)

On July 3, 1971, Jim Morrison, the lead singer of The Doors, died in a bathtub at the age of 27. The official cause of death was heart failure, but most firsthand reports say that he died from a heroin overdose. Four people attended the funeral in Paris. No one from The Doors made it, partly because they didn’t believe the overseas rumors. Today, about three million people a year visit the gravesite, which bears a bronze plaque with a Greek inscription chosen by Jim’s father, Admiral George Morrison - a man who, more than anyone else, helped start the Vietnam War. The senior Morrison consulted a Greek professor for his son’s epitaph and landed on “ΚΑΤΑ ΤΟΝ ΔΑΙΜΟΝΑ ΕΑΥΤΟΥ,” which offers two translations: “True to his own spirit” or “according to his own daemon.”

Daemon is appropriate. Morrison’s art was more possession than process. It’s easy to argue Morrison never really was acting according to his own spirit. Always, it was someone else’s: whether he was channeling Native American spirits on stage or possessed by a fame that eventually became a prison.

The 1981 biography of Morrison, No One Gets Out of Here Alive, stresses that he never wanted to be a rockstar. Morrison wanted to be a poet. He hated being the face of the band. When The Doors first performed, he was too shy to face the audience until he got drunk. Later, he grew a beard to cover his face and did everything he could to escape the possession of his personality. Nonetheless, Morrison lost the poet’s personality to the performer’s personality because it was the performer’s personality everyone wanted. The ritual became recreation. Forever after, Morrison became a sharply cheeked man in leather pants in his early twenties. No beard. No belly. No slurring. The poet became the product, but the performance became the personality. The performance became reality and, eventually, Morrison had to perform his own escape to find peace by finally breaking on through to the other side.

Put another way: Morrison was simply too hot to not become a vessel for the audience’s desires.

Poet Presence

It is undeniable that Morrison’s performance of his personality had a presence. Even America’s notoriously cynical essayist Joan Didion couldn’t resist. As she writes in the The White Album (1979) about attending the recording session for 1968’s Waiting for the Sun:

The lead singer, Jim Morrison, a 24-year-old graduate of UCLA…. wore black vinyl pants and no underwear and tended to suggest some range of the possible just beyond a suicide pact. It was Morrison who had described The Doors as "erotic politicians." It was Morrison who had defined the group's interests as "anything about revolt, disorder, chaos, about activity that appears to have no meaning."

As she sums it up:

The Doors were different, The Doors interested me. The Doors seemed unconvinced that love was brotherhood and the Kama Sutra. The Doors' music insisted that love was sex and sex was death and therein lay salvation. The Doors were the Norman Mailers of the Top Forty, missionaries of apocalyptic sex.

Contrarian essayists all recognized the strange genius of Morrison. After watching old recordings of concerts, Fear and Loathing gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson once wrote:

That is what we call a Special—straight black- and-white footage of Crazy Jim on stage in the old days, with a voice like Fred Neal’s and eyes smarter than James Dean’s and a band that could walk with the King, or anybody else. There were some nights when the Doors were the best band in the world.

Morrison understood this, and it haunted him all his life.

As No One Gets Out of Here Alive describes a typical concert:

From the moment Jim mounted the stage, it was chaos. The crowd was ecstatic: adoring, stoned.

The Doors referred to these concerts as “ceremonies” and to Morrison as a shaman, rather than a singer. The goal of every concert was to transform the audience. Concerts began with chants for not The Doors, but Morrison. But if Morrison was a shaman, what was he summoning? Didion and Thompson identify the same spirit: an all-consuming daemon on the other side of peace and love. He didn’t want unity, he wanted chaos for the sake of chaos. The more Morrison was adored, the more he sought sanctuary in an anonymous apocalypse. Any kind of order or movement seemed to make him go crazy and his growing fanbase and international popularity still fell into that category. To an artist who despised anything that made him feel trapped, defined, or tame, a poet formed in a constantly moving military family telling him to always cut his hair, this was a nightmare. He spent as many years trying to destroy his image as he did to create it, not realizing this, too, was just performance that had become all too real. Even his apocalypse, had to be acted.

This is where Morrison’s substance abuse became his shamanism, and vice versa. By destroying himself, he was destroying the reality he recognized and the reflection he didn’t without realizing that self-sacrifice is only self-destruction if there was is no cause or creation behind it. A prophet of the flower power movement but not a proponent, Morrison turned on the movement to turn on himself.

Five to None

I ain’t talking about no revolution, I ain’t talking about no demonstration. I’m talking about having a good time… we’re going to lie down there in the sand and have a good time.

-Jim Morrison, March 1969, Miami

No One Gets Out of Here Alive explains that, even as a band identified so often with the hippie movement, The Doors, as Didion sensed, were not interested in flower power. The shaman singer who bragged about doing acid more than 200 times at the start of the band transformed over the years into an alcoholic interested in breaking things just to see them break. The method was madness and the only meaning was motion.

As the book explains:

Another wedge between Jim and his audience was his move from psychedelics to alcohol. The binges were by now querying near mythic proportions.

Sugerman and Hopkins identify the band’s “Five to One” as an anti-hippie anthem. A piece that experimented with proto-metal music and punk, “Five to One” has been cited by Pearl Jam, Kiss, Iggy Pop, and others as what inspired them to get into music and even became the backing sample for Jay-Z’s 2001 track, “Takeover” (which, despite Morrison’s help, still failed to defeat Nas’s takedown of Jay-Z in 2001’s “Ether”).

No One Gets Out of Here Alive spends a lot of time on “Five to One.” This should be expected: the title of the book is from the lyrics.

Five to one, baby
One in five
No one here gets out alive, now
You get yours, baby
I'll get mine
Gonna make it, baby, if we try

Despite Morrison’s claim that the song isn’t political, Hopkins and Sugerman highlight “Five to One” as an example of his distance from the movement that worshipped him, citing the third verse as anti-hippie:

The old get old
And the young get stronger
May take a week
And it may take longer
They got the guns
But we got the numbers
Gonna win, yeah, we're takin' over
Come on!

Your ballroom days are over, baby
Night is drawing near
Shadows of the evening
Crawl across the years

Ya walk across the floor with a flower in your hand
Trying to tell me no one understands
Trade in your hours for a handful of dimes
Gonna' make it, baby, in our prime

As the book concludes:

Whether he liked it or not, [Morrison] was the obvious product of a Southern upper-middle-class family: charming, goal-oriented, and in many ways politically conservative. For instance, he looked down on most welfare recipients with the same contempt he felt for the long-haired panhandlers hue criticized in “Five to One.”

Whatever the case, it was made inescapably obvious that Morrison had developed a deep hatred for the performer’s personality as a product and the people that came to buy it. He sensed in the crowd not transcendence, but consumption. They left without transforming, only taking a piece of him. In the 1969 performance of “Five to One” in Miami, he shouted to the audience that they were “slaves” and “idiots” before, allegedly, whipping out his penis on stage. He would be arrested for starting a riot and for indecent exposure.

A recording of a show in Miami from the same year offers an edifying elucidation of what Morrison was like as he got close to this moment of his fatal escape.

After the so-called “Miami Incident,” The Doors became infamous. Venues banned them. The media abandoned them. Local governments criminalized them. Morrison didn’t seem apologetic for this apocalypse. He explained:

I think I was just fed up with the image that had been created around me, which I sometimes consciously, most of the time unconsciously, cooperated with. It was just too much for me to really stomach and so I just put an end to it in one glorious evening. I guess what it boiled down to was that I told the audience that they were a bunch of fucking idiots to be members of an audience. What were they doing there anyway? the basic message was realize that you’re not really here to listen to a bunch of songs by some good musicians. You’re here for something else. Why not admit it and do something about it?

We can all hopefully agree that unzipping on stage might be too much breaking through to the other side if you’re not part of an off-Broadway effort, but every member of The Doors denies that he ever exposed himself. Five hundred photos were submitted as evidence to prove it.

The Miami Herald disagreed, writing:

Many of the nearly twelve thousand youths said they found the bearded singer’s exhibition disgusting. Included in the audience were hundreds of unescorted junior and senior high school girls… Morrison appeared to masturbate in full view of the audience, screamed obscenities, and exposed himself. He also got violent, slugged several [concert promoters], and threw one of them off stage before he himself was hurled into the crowd.

For about a year, the courts would weigh Morrison’s fate in their hands: what was Jim Morrison, really? What did everyone else see? What did everyone else think he meant? It was the product of the performance, not the poet, who was being judged.

Meanwhile, on May 4, 1970, National Guard soliders would fire 67 rounds in 13 seconds into student protesters at Kent State opposed to the country’s expansion of the Vietnam War in Cambodia, killing four students and wounding nine others. Somewhere forgettably far away, more than 300,000 Cambodians would be killed as well.

Four days later, on May 8, 1970, a riot of 20,000 people broke across New York City when around a thousand construction workers and office-dwellers took to the streets to attack demonstrators protesting the National Guard’s murder of the Kent State protestors. The bizarrely named Hard Hat Riot showed the underbelly of an American population where some 2.7 million citizens, voluntarily or not, had become soldiers for the Vietnam War and protests could not help but be seen as anti-American. In those days, conscription converted convictions.

On May 26, 1970, President Richard Nixon, a man genetically incapable of taking a good photograph, would put on a hard hat to show solidarity with these patriots.

In September 1970, Morrison would be sentenced to six months in prison. He would die in Paris while the case awaited appeal.

In November 2008, United States Navy Admiral George Stephen Morrison, Jim Morrison’s father and the man who, without exaggeration, can be said to have started the Vietnam War single-handedly with his careful construction of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, passed away.

In 2010, the elegantly moderate Republican governor of Florida Charlie Crist (2007-2011) would pardon Morrison of all charges.

Lessons from Legacies

And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn’t enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I’ve never been able to kill myself.

-Celine, Journey to the End of the Night (1952)

We do not remember the bearded, overweight, sloppy mess that was Jim Morrison in the late sixties. We remember a golden figure pure in his prophecies of the apocalypse and painted him gold when he started showing his ash. Waiting for the sun, Morrison didn’t fly too close to it: he aimed for it.

From the beginning, Morrison sang about the end. His performance was the poetry just as much as the music and his protest wasn’t about society or even war - it was about the performance that becomes our personality in the rigid realities of society.

In Litverse’s first piece on Morrison, we looked at how Morrison, a member of the 27 club, unlocked the spirits through substances. In the second, we discussed how art can be created unconsciously, for the sake of the art, or consciously, for the sake of the audience.

In seeing how this combination turned his poetry into a product, the question to explore is not whether Morrison’s fate was a tragedy - he seemed to have a good time doing it - but how to lead a life balancing performance, poetry, personality, and product.

If we are to learn anything from Morrison’s legacy, warts and all, it’s that breaking on through to the other side can free us to find ourselves and create clearly, without self-consciousness. As long as we don’t lose ourselves along the way.

So stop wasting so much on the conscious and focus more on creation.

As Morrison reminds us: “No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn.”

(This is the final part of this Litverse series. Read Part 1 & Part 2.)