On this date in 1971, Jim Morrison, lead vocalist for The
Doors, died in Paris. At the time, today’s song, from L. A. Woman, The Doors’ final album with Morrison, was just making
its way onto the charts, giving the song—which was eerie enough to begin with—the
eerie effect of seeming “beyond the grave.”
But it was a song I had to have, and it seemed a shame it was all over for Morrison, though my discovery of all the band's albums wouldn't happen for another seven years. In retrospect, I’d say the first and the last Doors albums are the
essential ones, though I also have a place for Strange Days (1967) and Waiting
for the Sun (1968).
The view I first heard about The Doors, from an older friend
more aware of their career as it developed than I was, was that the first three
albums were the best, or true Doors, and from The Soft Parade (1969) on things were questionable. I buy that
until we get to L.A. Woman which is a
great comeback album and also shows that The Doors, seemingly, had weathered
that weird year 1970 and were playing rock as vital as anyone was in what was a
great year for rock. At least that’s the view I have now because the more I
hear this album, the more impressed I am. I can almost forget about the earlier
‘poet’ Morrison, ramping up his dream-logic sagas as on the first three albums.
I prefer Morrison the blues singer, the belter, the rocker. And the band seems
very tight on these tracks, mostly recorded live in the studio. They’d lost
producer Paul Rothschild and I think that helps. There is a leaner, meaner
sound on this album than on the other Doors records—it begins on Morrison Hotel but there’s a lot of
filler on that one (released in that weird year 1970), but really comes into
its own here.
I don’t know what Morrison would have done had he continued.
It seems The Doors had decided against future live performance after Morrison
staged something of a “strike” at their last gig and wouldn’t perform. It seems
he’d had enough with being “the Lizard King.” And why not, wasn’t it time to
knock all that Sixties schtick on the head? Could he have been reborn in
another persona? This album leads me to believe that yes he could. From 1972-75
there were some rock classics waiting to be born and I don’t doubt that
somewhere in there would’ve been another great Doors creation. But it was not
to be.
Before “Riders on the Storm” made the airwaves, all I knew
of The Doors was “Light My Fire” from 1967 and “Hello I Love You” from 1968,
and then “Love Her Madly,” which preceded “Riders” as a 45 from L.A. Woman, and which I didn’t care for
much. Reportedly Rothschild called it “cocktail music,” and he may have a
point, but it’s mainly that it’s rather tame. It sits on the album like what it’s
supposed to be: the radio tune, a bit incongruous but not awful.
“Riders” was something else, with its opening thunderstorm
and waves, with that tinkling droplet played on a Fender Rhodes by keyboardist
Ray Manzarek, with the sepulchral intoning of the title and the lines—as starkly
beautiful as any Morrison ever came up with—“Into this world we’re thrown /
Like a dog without a bone / An actor out on loan / Riders on the storm.”
Morrison was a Nietzsche and Rimbaud nut in his youth (hear, hear!) and he may even
have been familiar with Heidegger’s notion of being “thrown” into the world (Geworfenheit). The idea underpins an
existential sense of “the realities of life” (your vital statistics, status,
social connections, family, location, occupation) as simply a “given,” a
situation that is not intrinsic to your actual Being, much as the actual past
is not deterministic of this present.
In any case, Morrison and company gave Top 40 radio in 1971 (and pretty much
ever after) a sense of how slippery the present is—it’s like being a rider on a
storm. Some of us get to ride longer, some of us ride it better, but there’s
going to be slippage, y’know, and spills.
The song includes a couple other verses but none as good as
that chorus, and the “girl you gotta love your man” part isn’t too sexist, is it?
Rimbaud said that one day “we” might understand women, and chose that as a
possible means of improvement for the species—Morrison says
women have to make men “understand.” It might still smack of that “earth mother”
bit but I always took it in a “return to Eden” sense in which the woman isn’t
the betrayer but the means to enlightenment.
Then there’s that bit about “a killer on the road / His
brain is squirming like a toad.” I remember hearing that in the car as a kid—“If
you give this man a ride / Sweet family will die”—and finding it rather
unnerving. And there, on the album cover, was Morrison sporting his big
Manson-like beard. Whew. You had to hand it to Morrison for not doing things
touchy-feely. There was always a sense of danger, of something that might be
smoldering under the surface and that might come to light in a burst of
agonistic venting. I think that’s what made the live shows so volatile. But it
also, it seems, became a tremendous pain in the ass for the other band members,
and for Morrison himself.
Anyway, it’s worth my while to take this post to commemorate
James Douglas Morrison because he did cast a shadow over my early verse-making,
back when it seemed that poems might really be lyrics and vice versa. That view
comes from not knowing very much about poetry, but much can be done in the
ferment of imitation in ignorance. At least for awhile. Wallace Fowlie, who
made the first translation of Rimbaud I read, actually wrote a book about Morrison
and Rimbaud. That seems a bit thin to me, if we’re talking about verse-making,
but it makes sense if we’re talking about the kind of ideas they had about what
makes a poet a poet. The long, sustained deregulation of the senses, and all
that. Morrison certainly had enough of that. I just don’t think much of the
idea of “reading Morrison” without Manzarek’s keyboards and Robby Krieger’s
guitar. They together made The Doors sound that, most of the time, envelops
Morrison’s voice so well. But as a singer/frontman, Morrison knew all about how
to sport with “the poetic”—or, as he conceived it, after Nietzsche, the
Dionysian. Rare enough in rock, we must admit.
Into this house we’re born.
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