Jim Morrison's Religion of Recklessness

Unconscious art

Jim Morrison lying on stage in Frankfurt, September 1968. Source: Michael Montfort, Swann Auction Galleries.

Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no: drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes.
-William James

From 1964 to 1973, more than 2 million American men were drafted to serve in the Vietnam War. The conflict left an estimated 2 million civilians and 1.1 million Vietcong soldiers dead. US casualties surpassed 200,000.

History books say it all started on August 4, 1964. Captain John Herrick, patrolling the Gulf of Tonkin off the coast of Vietnam, reported that the North Vietnamese had attacked American ships. Commander George Stephen Morrison confirmed the report without evidence and led the US into a conflict that would bring industrially incendiary cruelties to new levels, result in a devastating humiliation for the US, and the end of the draft. Also, the faraway massacres would produce some great music. Even from the liar’s son.

Three years after the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, George Morrison’s son, Jim, would scream on-stage during an acid trip that he wanted to fuck his mother and kill his father in the ending to “The End," by the Doors. Singing:

The killer awoke before dawn
He put his boots on
He took a face from the ancient gallery
And he Walked on down the hall
He went into the room where his sister lived and
Then he
Paid a visit to his brother and then he
He walked on down the hallway
And he came to a door
And he looked inside

"Father?"
"Yes, son?"
"I want to kill you"
"Mother, I want to..."
Come on, yeah

“The End” wasn’t figurative. The first time The Doors played the song live, the lyrics ended the band’s residency at LA’s Whiskey A Go Go. As one source writes:

August 21st would spell the end of The Doors’ run at the venue, however, as during their performance of ‘The End’, which was their set closer over this period, Jim Morrison, who’d missed the first of two sets that night because he was at the Tropicana Hotel tripping on LSD, (allegedly naked excluding a pair of cowboy boots) decided they were going to play it earlier in their performance.

Once they got stuck into the epic track, Morrison began an LSD infused vocal ad-lib that would go on to become the song’s trademark but here was where it was debuted and nobody apart from the frontman knew where it was going. Allegedly, the whole of the venue came to a standstill. Waitresses stopped serving drinka and the go-go girls stopped dancing. 

Towards the end of the track, Morrison finally belted out an Oedipus Rex couplet about killing his father and fucking his mother. It was enough to push Maglieri over the edge and he fired the band as soon as they left the stage. Morrison had gone too far.

When asked about what he meant in saying that his only friend was, in fact, the end, Morrison explained:

Sometimes the pain is too much to examine, or even tolerate ... That doesn't make it evil, though – or necessarily dangerous. But people fear death even more than pain. It's strange that they fear death. Life hurts a lot more than death. At the point of death, the pain is over. Yeah – I guess it is a friend.

A friend. Our only friend. The end. For the rest of his life, Jim Morrison, lead singer of The Doors, told journalists that his parents were dead.

The Doors made mortality sexy and mysterious. They were the first American band to have eight consecutive gold albums, selling 100 million albums worldwide. The group remains one of the best-selling bands of all time. This is all a legacy based on a five-year period: the group’s first album, The Doors, came out in 1967 and the last album with Morrison came out in 1971. Morrison died in a Paris bathtub from an overdose the same year at the age of 27. He became an immortal member of the 27 Club alongside his flower power peers Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, who died a year earlier at the same age. Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain would join the club in 1994. Amy Winehouse would become a member in 2011. The group showcases the powerful cross-correlation of artists and addiction. Although, statistically, there is no such thing as the 27 Club. People have done the research.

Like astrology, the 27 Club makes determinism fun. We get to assume that these tragic yet undeniably cool addicts had their best art ahead of them, not behind them. More insidiously, it’s possible to argue that a group of admirable twenty-seven year-old martyrs normalizes and even romanticizes shameless addiction as a Door (get it?) to better thoughts, feelings. Spirits. If your heroes do drugs and die young, why can’t you try to be a hero, too?

In the 27 club, art, attitude, and appetite are all the same. The art, like the attitude and the appetite, are based on instinct - in a way, this does mean that these artists did have some uncontrollable destiny after all.

When it comes to Jim Morrison, all his recklessness and destruction became the performance. The performance became the personality that made him a legend. The further we are from the person, the more we can safely glorify the performance. But all the glorification of glorification of Jim Morrison does, as Doors drummer John Densmore says, is give everyone “permission to party.”

“Well done, Dionysius,” he writes in his autobiography, Riders on the Storm (1991). Densmore reminds us an early death is not a poet’s death, but a selfish one. There is no soul in gluttony, no transcendence in the sacrifice of self-control. Or is there? Isn’t the data clear? Isn’t the art?

Densmore and the compelling chart above misses the point: if you die at 27 and you’re famous enough, you’ve joined the one percent of musicians who never had time for doubts. Since you never had time for doubts, you never had time to reflect on your drug and alcohol dependence and, likely, substances helped summon the muse. There is one requirement to enter the 27 Club beyond fame: conviction in your addiction to create your convictions. Vices and virtues are values. Art makes values change color so we can see from different perspectives. So do appetites and attitudes.

In 1981’s controversial biography of Jim Morrison, No One Here Gets Out Alive, authors John Hopkins and Danny Superman portray a musician who died young and lived forever because he could not compromise. Read at the right angle, the book shows us that some artists do not create art: they channel it.

To me, the idea of channeling art means letting the unconscious take the steering wheel. In an age of self-conscious art, No One Here Gets Out Alive shows a different way to create. Jim Morrison was an unconscious artist who found peace, not pain, in self-sacrifice, and channeled for the art, not the audience.

In studying Morrison, official member of the 27 Club, I found myself asking how art is made. Is creation conscious or unconscious? Is there a difference between artists? How about the art? What’s the difference between conscious art and unconscious art? And have we lost something in thinking of creativity as a process rather than a possession?

American God(s)

Let’s reinvent the gods,
All the myths of the ages
Celebrate symbols from deep elder forests [have you forgotten the lessons
Of the ancient war]
We need great golden copulations
The fathers are cackling in trees
Of the forest
Our mother is dead in the sea

-Jim Morrison, An American Prayer

No One Gets Out of Here Alive, a tale of Jim Morrison’s life from childhood to death, is an entertaining read with an exhilarating lack of citations flush with unsubstantiated dialogue from Morrison and everyone involved in his life as if the authors witnessed every moment. The prose is a meat sauce of sins, scenes, and sentences where Jim is citing genius poetry in one paragraph and peeing in public singing a song about funky chickens in the next, a satisfying stew of obvious exaggerations and believable hypotheses. Producer Paul Rothchild claimed that some of his statements in No One Gets Out of Here Alive had been flat-out changed by Sugerman. As Doors guitarist Robby Krier describes the book:

[Sugerman] had his own ideas about what happened and various situations. He kind of put his own words into it, and what really annoyed me was that he tried to make Jim sound like was talking through Danny, and it wasn't the way Jim really was

Despite the controversial citations, No One Gets Out of Here Alive is still infinitely interesting and infinitely rewarding. There’s no denying the depth of the content: journalist Jerry Hopkins interviewed Jim Morrison directly to write the first draft of the book. Unfortunately, the contemporary popularity of The Doors died with Jim. It was Danny Sugerman, one of the band’s managers, who made the biography sensational enough for publication. By the time the book hit the shelves in 1980, a greatest hits album, a spoken word album, and the startlingly apt use of “The End” in Apocalypse Now by Jim’s friend and film school classmate Francis Ford Coppola triggered a new interest in the band. A 1981 Rolling Stone article headlined “He’s Hot, He’s Sexy, He’s Dead” helped fan the flames of a new renaissance for The Doors and, especially, their hot, sexy, dead frontman.

It is Oliver Stone’s movie The Doors (1991) which secured Morrison’s reputation once again - and granted him a legacy that, as Hopkins and Sugerman describe it, was not altogether accurate but not altogether inaccurate:

Ultimately, Oliver would portray Jim as an alcohol-soaked, self-indulgent jerk. He was that, of course. But he was so much more: intelligent, sensitive, generous, charming, boyish, and wry. He could laugh at himself. And however much of a pain in the ass he could be, he never took himself seriously. And as difficult tow work with as he could be, the rewards of working with him more often far outweighed the liabilities.

What comes across in any image or story about the band is that Jim Morrison died, because he refused to deny himself anything because to be open meant to act as a vessel for the spirits that helped him channel his art. As keyboardist Ray Manzarek explained:

Jim was not a showman. He was a shaman… He was possessed by a rage to live. That was his trip, his gift.

Does that mean his substances were material for spells he called songs? Morrison defies the narrative that despair is what becomes addiction and offers a different perspective: an addiction to life, with no walls, is just as likely to turn people delirious with self-destructive habits. But they go down in romance, as long as they never lose their spirit. The problem is when you can only open the Doors to those spirits with the substances.

But what’s a shaman without his spells? Maybe inspiration is just letting yourself go crazy for a while, however you get there. The art is the madness, not the method. And in that case, Morrison truly was a first-class artist after all. But is madness or spirits the right word? Is there a difference? On Monday, we’ll take a look at how, in Morrison’s case, his art, at some level, was truly unconscious - because he believed he was possessed by someone else’s ghost.

Read Part 2 here.