The Isle of Wight Festival, created in 1968, reached its peak in 1970, when nearly 600,000 spectators gathered on this piece of land in the south of the United Kingdom. Fifty years later, Europe 1 looks back on the various concerts given for what was, one year after Woodstock, one of the last great hippie meetings. This Monday, Jim Morrison, the Doors and their concert in the form of a will.
A minimalist service on British soil
When the four members of the Doors step onto the stage of the Isle of Wight Festival this Sunday, August 30, 1970, the night is already well advanced. It's not bad, the star of the evening does not want a light. In a sepulchral atmosphere takes place what will be the group's last filmed concert.
That night in Wight, in front of probably over 500,000 people, the Doors played one of their most minimalist scores. The singer as unbearable as he is fascinating, Jim Morrison, all dressed in black, is almost motionless. The concert lasts less than an hour and the musicians fly to the United States just after dropping their instruments. At the time, Jim Morrison was under a heavy conviction for exhibition and contempt. The Miami court, which simply allowed the group to make a fast, non-stop round trip, will impose 60 days of forced labor for this prank.
A group a thousand leagues from its flamboyant beginnings
A year earlier, The Doors performed in a seedy Miami hangar. The singer had arrived on stage tipsy and aggressive. He had insulted the audience, uttered some sexual nonsense and started to undress. At the same time, the completely dilapidated scene had literally collapsed. The police then intervened in a climate of riot and the concert canceled. From that moment on, the group, a symbol of a decadent youth that must be brought into line, became the target of conservatives of all stripes.
The Doors are banned and their concerts banned. Jim Morrison sinks into a chemical depression. The group is a thousand miles from its flamboyant beginnings symbolized by its first two albums. In the second, Strange Days , is notably the title "People are strange", an extraordinary journey between blues, psychedelia, Latin music and European interwar period, Kurt Weill and Bertold Brecht era.
Morrison's texts, Manzarek's music
The song is further proof that The Doors are one of the most learned groups of their time. Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek, his keyboard friend, met at film school in Los Angeles. Love at first sight is immediate between the intellectual musician a bit dandy that was Manzarek and the beatnik poet Morrison, escaped from a family of soldiers who moved according to the missions of the patriarch. Morrison writes the lyrics and Manzarek sets them to music. It remains to find the last two sides of the square: they will be John Densmore, a jazz-keen drummer whom Manzarek met in a transcendental meditation class, and Robby Krieger, a guitarist passionate about Indian music.
Two strokes of genius complete the shaping of the group's sound. The Doors do not have a bass player: Manzarek plays a two-stage keyboard, with the melody and solos below and the bass above, giving a hypnotic effect. Also, Krieger adopts the "bottleneck", a kind of metallic cylinder used in country music, to slide on the strings of his already very original playing. The result is an extraordinary musical richness.
From "Light My Fire" to "Love me Two Times", successes follow one another, carried by the dazzling voice and beauty of Morrison. The events of Miami mark the descent into hell. Before the end of the group, the Doors will still have time to burn their ultimate masterpiece, LA Woman . On this album appears what is perhaps their most beautiful composition: "Riders On The Storm".
Rimbaud and Baudelaire as models
This is one of the last texts by Jim Morrison, whose fiery verses have fueled the imagination of several generations. Heavy, bearded, exhausted by excess, he decides to settle for a while in Paris, at 17 rue Beautreillis in the 4th arrondissement, with his fiancée Pamela Courson, in order to escape the intolerable pressure of the United States and to get closer. of his models, Rimbaud or Baudelaire. On July 3, 1971, at the end of a night whose mysteries have never been truly clarified, Jim Morrison was found dead in his bathtub. Accident or suicide by overdose? He was only 27 years old.
Since then he has been one of the most visited residents of the Père-Lachaise cemetery, where he rests in the poets' corner, not far from Edith Piaf, Oscar Wilde, Chopin, Bizet or even Honoré de Balzac. The other musicians of the group continued to play together for a few years but the magic had flown with the one nicknamed "The Lizard King", title of one of his most famous poems. Ray Manzarek died in 2013, Krieger and Densmore are still alive, the last witnesses of a group and an extreme collective experience, without any real equivalent in the history of contemporary music.