Bloated and obscene like Elvis, cheeky like John Lennon and, like every real American since Doc Holliday, drunk all day: But instead of settling for that, he also had to be Rimbaud and Artaud, Blake and Baudelaire, Nietzsche and Freud, all in one, one in all.
In addition to the huge amount of beer, schnapps, LSD and finally even heroin, that was a bit much;
and so this self-proclaimed lizard king died on July 3, 1971 in Paris, presumably in the bathtub, without rubber ducks, but with a broken heart.
Edo Reents
Editor in the features section.
Follow I follow
Jim Morrison, with whom the psychedelic blues rock band The Doors lived and died for six years and seven records for the most part more badly than right, is certainly not among the many poets and thinkers he is buried next to in the Paris cemetery the biggest.
In the end, it was not enough to become a rock opera composer, whom he had wanted so much to be.
The "Celebration of the Lizard", which has only been handed down live, next to which "The End" looks almost plain, is probably the lyrically most demanding and charming thing he has ever managed, but as a rock piece it is much too long and, like some others, too preaching.
What is this "American Prayer" (the title of an inheritance record with spoken words) of our business? About every ten years there is a Jim Morrison and thus also a Doors recollection: first immediately after death; then in the early eighties when forgotten live material came out. Later memorial days were and are primarily about the circumstances of death. In between is Oliver Stone's “The Doors” (1991), a document of its own artistic standing. This feature film held a double surprise in store: on the one hand, how deceptively real the singer's appearance, habitus and voice could be imitated (by Val Kilmer); on the other hand, that you were dealing with someone who fell for yourself, and then of course everyone else with him. After all, why had he read Nietzsche? Of course he knewthat you can walk around in such a silly Zarathustra costume for a season at most and then dress properly again. Jim Morrison, however, played the fool's role of the unholy redeemer the longer, the better.
Sometimes really repulsive
Oliver Stone was one of the first to see through him, although he designed his film, which is probably the most accurate artist portrait that cinema has produced and which has been essentially confirmed by the authentic material published afterwards, as a tribute to both visually and audibly .
Thanks to the careful research, in which two of the surviving band members were included, and despite the manipulative streak that is otherwise attached to his work, a public far beyond devoted fan base got a sobering insight into the life and work of a musician, who probably really believed that he could free his audience from social constraints and personal inhibitions, and that he could even help him to a life that would break the boundaries of knowledge.
You have to understand an artist from his time. If it fell to many bands, especially on the American west coast, to make hippie clichés appear important, then Jim Morrison and the Doors have probably made it the furthest. The expansion of consciousness in this penetrating cockiness and beyond conventional, drug-induced trips was just nonsense; Others have tried it too, with more serious means. The whole secrecy, the cult that Jim Morrison waged with the Dionysian, with the forbidden delights of the absurd, could not help intellectually but seem half-baked. So although most of what he had in his head got lost in the sand like a drop on the hot beach of Venice Beach, where the Doors found themselves in 1965,It is safe to say that as a poet and filmmaker he has rather realized himself too much - unless you value poetry, which mostly only pretends profundity and is basically nothing more than an expression of late adolescence, uncontrolled despair, or on film images that were put together without any sense or understanding.