Always a little amazed when people seem to suggest that Jim Morrison was unaware of his own ridiculousness. I think he reveled in it, plunged into it - pushed right through it.
This quote - "I see myself as an intelligent, sensitive human, with the soul of a clown which forces me to blow it at the most important moments" - suggests self-knowledge. What Lester Bangs pegged - not without appreciation, or even admiration - as "Bozo Dionysus".
All performance is an absurd exhibition.What a grotesque, what an unseemly thing to do - go onstage and mime out emotions, desire, sexuality, for strangers's eyes!
(It's why historically actors and entertainers been linked in the puritan imagination with prostitutes).
Nick Cave (early on very Jim-indebted) wrote a great song about this in the Birthday Party - "Nick the Stripper"
There's a cool quote from Iggy Pop (Jim's Second Coming) about the stage that I've never been able to source - "who can account for facial expressions made in a mirror of people?"
Nick Cave (early on very Jim-indebted) wrote a great song about this in the Birthday Party - "Nick the Stripper"
There's a cool quote from Iggy Pop (Jim's Second Coming) about the stage that I've never been able to source - "who can account for facial expressions made in a mirror of people?"
Yes! Probably the most acrimonious online fight I've ever had was when I suggested that Morrison was knowingly hilarious. The Doors have been cast out into the wilderness of bad taste that can never be redeemed, and Morrison is condemned as a self-important self-serious "rock poet", in a way that entirely misses his levity and self-mockery.
ReplyDeleteThe title track of The Soft Parade, for example, is practically a comedy song from its preposterous spoken intro onwards, peaking in those lines about the four ways to get unraveled: "One is to love your neighbor 'till - his wife gets home."
As you say, that oxymoron of ludicrous-but-awesome that was Morrison's forte is one of the signature flavors of a lot of great rock music. A lot of great rap, too: it is vividly there in Travis Scott and Megan Thee Stallion.
It is also there in The Doors' antecedents. Brecht / Weill and classic Blues are steeped in the humour of - your word - the grotesque.
Arthur Lee is another example. There was some discussion on the recent lyrics post about the notorious "Oh, the snot has caked against my pants. It has turned into crystal." I think it's a fantastic lyric. But that doesn't mean it's not funny.
DeleteI was the one being a bit sniffy about the snotty Love lyric, so I best confirm that I did think it was meant to be comic. My issue with it may just be because comedy tends to date rapidly.
DeleteIf taste in music is irreducibly subjective, a sense of humour must be doubly so!
DeleteI'm going to blame Oliver Stone for this. His Doors film has shaped the perception of Morrison for everyone who didn't experience The Doors in their hey day.
ReplyDeleteFrom the days when I could be arsed to write:
ReplyDeletehttp://andwhatwillbeleftofthem.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20Doors
Oliver Stone certainly shoulder some responsibility, but I think the anti-Morrison thing had already started. I remember being very surprised in the late '80s chatting to one of my colleague at Melody Maker and it became clear that the new cool position on the Doors and Jim was that he was a buffoon and a bad poet and the whole thing was embarrassing. What was funny for me was that this colleague had just done a cover story on Sisters of Mercy, this must have been circa "This Corrosion" and "Floodlands" and clearly regarded Andrew Eldritch as some kind of supercool savant! How do you reconcile thinking you are too sophisticated and discerning to fall for Jim Morrison's shtick but that Eldritch is worthy of reverence?
ReplyDeleteIt helps the anti-Morrison argument that he was widely disliked even among his peers and near-peers - Pop, Grace Slick, and Patti Smith being three exceptions.
ReplyDeleteIt's funny you mention Sisters of Mercy, because I was going to bring up the producer of This Corrosion, Jim Steinman, as another example of this phenomenon - the particular admixture of knowing intention and committed silliness, both at maximum volume, that repulses most critics. Outside of music, you could name Steinman collaborator Ken Russell, and this semi-recent piece on his Mahler biopic has a wonderful summation of this dilemma: 'And you see, the one thing respectable reviewers particularly hate is when you can’t decide whether to be Federico Fellini or Benny Hill (though the distance between is not so great as appears).' https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/6866-manic-mahler
100% agree on Steinman. Meat Loaf was aiming for that same silly-but-cool feeling, but his sources - 50s R'n'R, Broadway musicals, the Shangri-Las, Springsteen - were just less interesting than Morrison's.
DeleteBut the same is true of Eldritch, I think: a lot of his moves were tongue-in-cheek. Certainly after the first Sisters album. And working with Steinman was a clear acknowledgement of that. I think he was much less effective than Morrison, but IIRC he was a charming and entertaining interviewee, which helped buy him some underserved respect in the music press. And of course in the 80s support from the Goth fandom could take you a long way.
Others in the same territory:
- Ian Astbury and the Cult. Always daft, but sometimes - She Sells Sanctuary - thrillingly so.
- Adam Ant. "Ridicule is nothing to be scared of"
Less interesting on the surface, maybe, but if you dig into Steinman he's a lot closer to Morrison in his influences than it would appear (perhaps because once you have the MOR label stuck on you, it's very difficult to shake off?) - his background was in late 60s/early 70s off-Broadway and quasi-underground theater, starting with a production of The Beard by Doors friend Michael McClure at Amherst, then going on to be Public Theater/Shakespeare In The Park impresario Joseph Papp's assistant for the first half of the 70s. His personal writings are chock-full of references to Artaud and Brecht and Jarry, and his plays (mostly play singular, since he spent his career trying to mount variations on a post-apocalyptic rock adaptation of Peter Pan, for which he wrote 90 percent of his songs) are like a much less restrained/tasteful Sam Shepard, or maybe Shepard as directed by Russell.
DeleteAnd of course Ken Russell did the film version of Tommy, which is a record that is also in that strange area of deep portentousness/great fun. It really is incredibly enjoyable to listen to, and amazingly well put together musically, but the concept itself is just fkn ridiculous.
ReplyDeleteThis could be my predilection talking, but are the Doors now universally seen as so mockable? My mates and I in the sixth form (2000-2002) all held the Doors in remarkable esteem, to the extent that the form had a recognised favourite Doors track (Five to One, since you ask). Morrison Hotel was on the college bar jukebox. If the Doors have declined in popularity, it may just be symptomatic of the far more tragic decline in the popularity of rock. I mean, how much are Van Halen listened to nowadays (and I dig me some Van Halen)?
ReplyDeleteMind, in 1850, people considered Hummel on a par with Beethoven as one of the immortals.