The Lizard King Reborn Every Ten Years Part 1
The confluence of culture with respect to Jim Morrison, Nico and Joan Didion.
Sometimes I award parallels to objects that are not are not at all related to each other. This frequent practice of mine has usually bored the ever loving shit out of my friends for years. Yet, sometimes these objects or people or concepts weirdly are so relatable that it is like the universe planned it all along. Synchronicity, some call that phenomenon. Anyway, this week past was just such a week where all three of the aforementioned people in the subtitle of this article seem to coalesce. Firstly, I am a regular subscriber to the Bret Easton Ellis podcast and frequently he or his administrator will post on his website photographs pertaining to an upcoming episode of his show. The photograph in question was a Rolling Stone magazine cover circa 1981 with Jim Morrison on the cover with the caption, “He’s hot, he’s sexy and he’s dead. I actually bought that issue new when it was on the newstand but I never was a huge Doors fan growing up. Maybe it was the preponderance of organ in most of the songs but I was still a little fascinated by the imagery of the lyrics and the spectacle of performance that was Jim Morrison. As a teenager, I had also read an early book about Morrison titled, “No One Here Gets Out Alive” which was lascivious and startling in its treatment of the overt sexualtiy and out of control substance and alcohol abuse of the protagonist. I thought Jim seemed pretty cool to an adolescent starved for information about rockstars and their habits. Pun intended.
I was still not a FAN. Until my good friend, an avid record collector had a “trunk” sale out of his car of all the records that he bought and no longer listened to. Amongst the hordes of albums in his car, were a bunch of Doors records, actually the whole collection except Waiting For The Sun. I asked my buddy how much he wanted for the Doors collection and he said without skipping a beat, that “The Doors were shit” and that I could take them all for nothing. And there I was, a casual fan now bequeathed the entire Doors collection sans WFTS and all ready for my perusal. I did not start out chronologically but started to listen to unfamiliar albums tracks from each album and almost instantly I became a FAN. “Wishful Sinful”, “Strange Days”, “Crystal Ship” and 20th Century Fox were pretty clever melodic songs with some obtuse lyrics. Those songs were just a smattering of the deep cuts that I was yet to discover. I thought Morrison as a song lyricist was pretty unusual;kind of “beat” and Rimbaud-like but I never would say to anyone that it was poetry even though a huge chunk of my friends certainly claimed it was. Here’s the thing about the Doors for me that still exists today; I binge listen to them until I can’t stand them anymore and then I file them away for roughly ten year cycles. Weird, right? I don’t think I do that kind of listening or bingeing with any other band. Coincidentally, I was flipping through rock documentaries on Prime the other day and noticed that there was a new doc titled Jim Morrison: The Wild Child. I thought okay what haven’t I seen or heard about Jim Morrison. What new footage or new perspective can this new film bring? I was back on the binge. Again. To be continued.
