The Lizard King Reborn Every Ten Years Part 3

Nico, Didion and Morrison

While it’s true that Jim Morrison did inspire Nico to write her own songs , that is not how I got to The Marble Index. I got there through Lou Reed specifically from his solo career and worked my way backwards but that is another story for another time. But, back to Christa Paffgen aka Nico and the Jim Morrison confluence. I had mentioned that Jim and Nico had a fling in 1968 for a couple of months and that he encouraged her to write her own songs and that the results was The Marble Index album. Jim called Nico his “soul brother” and often drove together to the desert in California to trip balls on peyote. Jim also encouraged Nico to write down a record of her dreams and read Shelley, Blake and Coleridge. Nico told an interviewer in 1986 that Jim taught her to use her dreams as inspiration for lyrics. Nico remarked that being with Jim was like “ like looking in a mirror”.

The mirror that she was looking into had many cracks and the ripples were beginning to spread for both of them. I have a macabre affinity for artists that start to experience a decline in their respective art and careers and both Morrison and Nico started a magnificent swan dive into the malaise. The Doors did so so with the controversial album The Soft Parade, confused by critics as a pop sellout record. The record had strings and was a giant success probably as a result of the single Touch Me but they would retreat from the experimentation of songs like The Soft Parade and back into more mainstream blues numbers on their next record Morrison Hotel while Nico would take another year to record and release Desertshore , a record no less austere than Marble Index and also produced by John Cale. Both records incidentally are amongst my favourite records by both artists.

And just when I thought that the Doors and Nico bingeing was just a coincidence, I found fictionalized movie about Nico titled Nico 1988. It was released in 2017 (now on Prime) and garnered decent reviews particularly for the lead actor, Trine Dyrholm. I was at first put off by the look of the Nico portrayal as I thought that the actor was too healthy looking but as the film progressed I realized that Trine totally inhabited the character and completely won me over. The story chronicles Nico living in Manchester and touring Europe in 1986, 1987 and 1988 the year her death.

And then a new collection of Joan Didion essays is released a couple of weeks ago and convergences seem to arrive. To be continued.