By Pepe Escobar, exclusively for the Saker Blog
He was like Blake’s tiger, always burning bright and chasing Rimbaud rainbows – just to finish, like Marat, in a bathtub. He was only 27.
Jim Morrison died on July 3, 1971 in Paris. Half a century later, The Collected Works of Jim Morrison: Poetry, Journals, Transcripts, and Lyrics lavishly celebrates the soul of the poet.
Before he died, Jim had self-published three limited editions of his poetry: The Lords/Notes on Vision (1969), The New Creatures (1969), and An American Prayer (1970).
Now, finally, we may have access to his complete writings, including the screenplay for his 50-minute experimental film, HWY, shot in Godard’s cinema verité style in the spring and summer of 1969 in L.A. and the Mojave desert, with Jim playing a hitchhiker. Old-school petrol heads will savor Jim on the wheel of his 1967 Shelby GT 500 Mustang in this HD clip from a film inspired by HWY.
The Collected Works feel like a collar of magic jade fragments, complete with handwritten pages in notebooks, crossed out words, underlines, the whole perhaps similar to the ‘Plan for Book’ Jim once sketched.
The overwhelming majority of us baby boomers belong to the “die young, stay pretty, leave a beautiful corpse” generation. Following our own road maps, prone to trial and error, we did live all the roads of excess; but unlike Blake’s dictum, we may not have reached the palace of wisdom. We never cease to be amazed that unlike Morrison, Hendrix, Joplin, Otis Redding, we are survivors at best.
For so many of us then in our teens, from 1967 to 1971 the Doors were impregnated in our body and soul. Jim was the psychedelic Dyonisus, his excessive alter egos – Lizard King, Mr. Mojo Risin’- propelling him over and over again towards the next ride in the infinite highway.
Before he metastasized into instant legend, Jim was what Hunter Thompson would immortalize in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which came out in 1971: “A man on the move, and just sick enough, to be totally confident”.
Now the poetry oozing out of the freestyle soundscapes weaved by Krieger, Densmore and Manzarek, or HWY as a sort of prelude to L.A. Woman (“cops and cars / the topless bars / never saw a woman / so alone”) may be relieved as a prequel to what was about to vanish, poignantly evoked by Thomas Pynchon in Inherent Vice, the Greatest Hippie Detective Novel – or Raymond Chandler on LSD:
The Psychedelic Sixties, this little parenthesis of light, might close after all, and all be lost, taken back into darkness… how a certain hand might reach terribly out of darkness, and reclaim the time, easy as taking a joint from a doper and stubbing it out for good.
And all the children are insane
Any Top Ten list of 20th Century Poetry in the Anglo-American sphere would necessarily include Yeats’s The Second Coming, Eliot’s
The Waste Land and Pound’s Cantos. From the mid-century beats, comes Ginsberg’s Howl. Afterwards it’s Dylan land – from
Ballad of a Thin Man, Desolation Row and Visions of Johanna to the total dilaceration in Blood on the Tracks (Tangled Up in Blue, Simple Twist of Fate).
And then, there’s Jim Morrison’s The End – the closing track of
The Doors, recorded in August 66, released in January 1967, six months before the Summer of Love.
It was my dear friend Quantum Bird – not even born when Morrison died – who led me to a re-appreciation of The End in the Western canon, prompted by a Morrison epigraph I used in a column on NATO.
Striking images emerge like rocks out of the Morrison river, like “the streets are fields that never die”, in The Crystal Ship, or “speak in secret alphabets”, in Soul Kitchen.
Strange Days could not be more contemporary: “Strange days have found us / strange days have tracked us down / they’re going to destroy / our casual joys / we shall go on playing / or find a new town”.
Yet we could only guess what shore Morrison’s Crystal Ship was heading for, the words – “be-fore / you / slip / in-to / un-consciousness” – coiling like a snake, barely whispered. The journey could be anything: Chandler’s Big Sleep, an overdose of heroin, a ghastly murder, suicide, even a suicide pact.
Morrison was usually Blake on steroids, rewriting “some are born to sweet delight / some are born to endless night” in his own way. The End is a journey through the corridors of the endless night (“the killer awoke before dawn / he put his boots on / he took a face from the ancient gallery / and he walked on down the hall”). No wonder Coppola carefully chose it for the opening of Apocalypse Now – or Conrad’s Heart of Darkness set in Vietnam, where the Empire was lost “in a Roman wilderness of pain / and all the children are insane”.
Ride the snake
In 1966, when he wrote The End, two years before the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, it’s as if Morrison had already intuited that as a poet laboring at the apex of Empire, life would become necessarily unbearable.
LSD + Rimbaud + insights in Navajo land only amplified his aesthetic and philosophical illuminations. The End includes references to “every element of systemic collapse”, as Quantum Bird remarked, from imperial arrogance to cultural collapse, from wokeism to loss of control of the empire’s own internal space, from dystopic propaganda to the sense of total bewilderment facing a dying ethos. Woke soldiers are about to be reprogrammed as serial killers.
Morrison had his vision way before the Summer of Love, way before Woodstock (summer of 1969), way before the Stones at Altamont (winter of 1969) – the official end of peace and love.
When the Empire collapses “in a desperate land” – look at the tawdry, farcical Afghanistan remix, happening right now – there’s “no safety or surprise”. It’s “the end of laughter and soft lies / the end of nights we tried to die.”
The end of everything that stands.
I’ll leave you now mentally riding a Mustang in the desert, down on the infinite highway and – in geopolitical synchronicity – riding the snake.
Julian Assange – held under psychological torture in Belmarsh by the lords of the Empire for the crime of committing journalism – is 50 years old today. Julian Assange was born the day Jim Morrison died.
Dance on fire. If you dare.
In French, I’m sorry: la chute est dure.
Anyone that speaks of Jim Morrison this way is right on in my book.
As Tom Wolfe says in “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”, “It’s the Sync”.
What an energetic splattering of name-dropping.
Because a writer isn’t allowed to reference his/her influences, or those of the subject he/she is writing about?
Go back to trolling social media.
Thank you. From a child of the 60’s, thank you.
In Portuguese: belo texto, bela homenagem, inequívoca realidade.
machine translation: beautiful text, beautiful tribute, unambiguous reality
Love the music, but will you Boomers ever grow up? (Rhetorical)
A handful of decent lines does not make a poem, much less a poet. “Blake on steroids”? More like Blake meets Dr. Seuss. This is why none of the younger generations take you seriously. Same thing with Roberto “Morrison Disciple” Bolano. It’s only deep to the shallow. Or the stoned.
I’ll give Jimbo this: the man could sing and he saw through the rockstar bullsh*t early on. The only one in his generation that did. And he had the honesty not to play the game. But he died on a toilet in a Paris nightclub after stupidly snorting heroin.
Read his older contemporary, Charles Bukowski. There’s your real American poet. No moon/june rhyming. No pretentious allusions. Real American language, and tough enough to last.
Jimbo was a crooner ala Sinatra. And the moon/June rhyming was Robbie Krieger who wrote most of their hits which Morrison didn’t. He did “write” their most interesting songs, base on the books of others, like Rechy’s ‘City of Night’.
Beatles and all Anglo-Saxon popular culture is inferior art. The superior art, high art is in Russia, some Eastern European countries and some European countries. Eastern Europe is attracted to Anglo-Saxon rock. Rock is the picture of Anglo-American civilization, rock is mediocre, it’s inferior art. Do you want to taste art (classical music, writers, painters and cinema)? Look at Russia. Anglo-American civilization is an illusion.
I am sorry to say I think Bukowski is a pompous marxist fraud. A pretend working man pretending to speak for the masses.
I am not sorry that you said that. I think that perhaps Kerouac had more genuine empathy .
Bukowski is amusing though and his style is perfection. The scene in Women where he bursts into tears is genius. It takes him three quarters of the book to set it up. Tom Wolfe is a much bigger phoney. I always thought Charles Webb an underrated writer. His first three are all good. There’s the famous one Hollywood stole off him, then The Marriage of a Young Stockbroker (good movie too with Richard Benjamin) and Love Roger. All his characters moving towards an inner stillness, something Kerouac would never know.
What a nice column to read in this cold afternoon in Buenos Aires! Indeed, despite, and oppositely, being endlessly broadcasted as a pop music junkie, Morrison was very lucid and far-sighted man. Fully agree with Pepe and his friend, Quantum Bird, on the accurate description, even prediction, of wokeness and collapse of the empire in Morrison poetry.
The “West is the best” mantra does not seduce as once upon a time, not anymore…
Long life and prosperity to Morrison, Saker, Pepe and Quantum Bird.
When i see your byline i’ve come to want to see what you have to say. Slowly i’ve even been starting to trust you, in a world where trust doesn’t come easy.
Now it’s starting to feel like wanting to see what a friend has to say.
Thank you.
Perhaps you’ll find that Pepe is a poet, a visionary, and an avid adventurer into the multiplicities of this world.
We treasure him, immensely!
We read Pepe’s ode to Morrison and we fly on his magic carpet of prose to the time when we had music as the only realm of truth.
Mystic and Mythical and sometimes, Magical Music permeated our lives. Tunes, melodies, riffs, and the lyrics where secret meanings and messages sometimes were nestled.
Of course, it was embossed in our brain because it usually travelled with erotic signals from physical relationships.
As we retouch those ‘songs of J. Alfred Prufrock’, it all comes back with joyful pleasure, even the memory of the pain.
Ahh… so you as well have the poetic/artistic soul Larch … welcome to the declining club as algorisms take over.
Was Jim Morrison an intelligence asset as this article series suggested(https://centerforaninformedamerica.com/laurelcanyon/)? Or was he really dead at the date when he was allegedly dead? After all, his father was the executant of Tonkin Gulf Incident which exacerbated the vietnam war.
Awesome, Pepe. Ride the wild highway, brother.
I know Pepe danced a lyrical tune to get u interested…… ………….
But he made it super ,,,, super …..
…… abundantantly clear …….
by ending w Julian Assange…….and Afghanistan……..
That It Was Not About The Music !!!!
(He was just try’g to get us to read the article with all that boom boom boom lyrics stuff(it worked)
It was about the much heavier themes of:
hypocrisy
Brainwashing
Just enjoying a ultra useless dance party being imposed on us “dancing away our pre-programmed, brains at the highest levels of credentials (modern medical doctors, physics, modern technology- no one critically thinks any more, and the ones that do like Pepe, r forced to explain it to us symbolically instead of just blurting it all out- and that I has sadly come to realize no-one has waken out of yet…they are still, I mean everyone in the modern world- has not grown up yet- I have not met one in my personal life yet – so now I am frightened–
As Putin wrote Be Open, despite your past… I’m trying… like Julian just keep bidi’n time … keep plug’ away… hope for the best…not so much as a society , but I’m putty my hope in people, individules, one good soul at a time.
I see things a little differently but largely agree with Pepe.
https://fivegunswest.blogspot.com/2021/07/the-monk-bought-lunch-paris-jim.html
“Julian Assange – held under psychological torture in Belmarsh by the lords of the Empire for the crime of committing journalism – is 50 years old today. Julian Assange was born the day Jim Morrison died.”
I hope Assange makes it through this ‘trial of the century’ by the criminals in charge.
I always enjoy Pepe’s waxing lyrical. I still remember his “burnt out Gurdjiffians” quip in a “Route 66” riff.
Classic!
I like the Doors but was more a quirky Syd Barrett ‘Floyd’ fan at the time.
I am being way too vague…
The brainwashing starts in kindergarten thru 12th grade. ( with the teachers(they r mostly unaware)- if they become aware – they stick closely to the teacher plan to keep their jobs respectively)
Everything outside the class (music-videos / culture / tv/ news / radio / school dances/ proms- the whole gambit) is designed to groom one until college.
The University is where the final touches r put in place ” brain-washed cycle complete”
Now just wash rinse n repeat…w the young ‘ins
If u want’a stop this insanity… u can not , it’s already inbreed in the American way of life– pushed full steam ahead on all the other countries of the earth… the ones that fight back r doing our job 4 us b/c we r too lazy/ too brainwashed / too full of ourselves to admit this … hence the song lyrics( go back n read um again)
B well, peace( first draft sorry for ipad single finger typing typos)
@ Bostonian I don’t buy your Learned Helplessness. Just because the majority of people throw their lives away does not mean that you, or anyone who cares, is also doomed to throw away their own lives.
I just read a brilliant line from Barbara Tuchman (historian, famous for Guns Of August which went into at least 23 reprints). In The March Of Folly, she ends Chapter Two with this:
“Fire as a character of legend represents the fulfillment of man’s expectations of himself.
Expectations are made to be challenged and broken. You can break free of most of your brain washing, but you have to be determined and thorough. It’s worth it. Set your expectations as high as you can achieve, and be sure to find the various things which will help you to achieve: Friends, books, exercises, languages, music, even a working relationship with the Almighty. Most people are only using 5% or so, of what God gave them. You can bump that up to 10 or 20% just by trying hard enough every day.
Better memory, like for those extra languages, well there’s a system to remember anything, and it’s especially good for languages and math. Your brain wants to toss out the garbage, which it defines as anything you only used a few times and haven’t used recently. So when you first learn something, you have to go back are re-learn it a week or so later. Then go back and re-learn it about a month later. Go back again in 4-6 months. Then a year or two later, be sure to check back that you still know it. But for basic stuff which you will be using in your new world, you will find you don’t have to re-learn it after 6 months.
Keep a steady pace and go for what works well for you. Watch out for the “counter-scripts” which will tell you it’s all worthless and you are a failure, etc. Nearly everyone has those poisonous counter-scripts in some areas, and they have to be confronted when they arise. Keep your own counsel and if your friends are dumb and self-destructive, don’t announce your self-improvement program to them, just go and do it.
Very sorry for my major typo. It should be:
“Fate” as a character of legend represents the fulfillment of man’s expectations of himself.
Tuchman says Fate is an illusion, and we are free, even if we fail to use the freedom.
The real heroes of the 1960s countercultural movement in the US were the anti-war activists and the civil rights campaigners, particularly the Black Panthers. Among the latter, very many were murdered (for the simple reason that they were a real threat to the establishment). The list is long and Malcolm X and Fred Hampton are just two of the more prominent figures. The hippies out at Laurel Canyon in LA were never in the slightest bit interested in those struggles. What they were interested in was LSD and getting as many underage runaway girls into bed as they could lay their hands on. Morrison was part of the Laurel Canyon crowd. They were never a threat to the establishment. Morrison was a junkie with a keen interest in incest and the occult (Aleister Crowley’s writings). While gorging himself on LSD on the rooftop of his pad in Venice Beach, he penned a few meandering and vague lines that came nowhere near poetry but, rather, stand as an exemplar of the most self-indulgent, narcissistic and nihilistic currents in the US then. A co-habitant of Morrison’s in Laurel Canyon at the time was Charles Manson. Perhaps on his next outing, Escobar might pen a hagiographic paen to that ‘gentleman’.
He was alcoholic. There’s a photo of Jim in his last days smoking a cheroot. Saw it in Paris down by the Seine. He looks ill. Bloated and bonkers. Like a fat Dennis Wilson. I said to the vendor why would I want that on my wall? I also got chucked out of Jim’s apartment block in Rue Beautrellis in St Paul. No one quite like Our Jimbo. Nothing quite like addiction.
LOL…you were lucky to get chucked out…who wants to live in a haunted house?
Students at my Uni were listening to The Doors/Santana etc. reading Castenada and popping amphetamines and smoking pot in 1968. The very same songs that Pepe mention here were played so often in the common room. I like their music too, but always viewed The Doors’ lyrics as being decadent to the extreme (mother I want to ….). A whole generation ‘lost’ to a ‘mind blowing’ experience. It was all so ‘cool’ then. Pepe’s take is very interesting reading, but unconvincing to say the least. No, there is no revisionism of my view of this icon of subversive American culture.
Completely agree. The whole hippie thing was a swindle to con people. It set the stage for all the civilizational collapse that followed.
“Thank you. From a 60s kid, thank you.”
“Long life and prosperity to Morrison, Saker, Pepe and Quantum Bird.”
And long life and prosperity to Julian Assange.
Great column.
Pepe has the rare hability to unite past, present and future into unique wonderful analysis… He takes us to travel above the world facts, expanding ouw view, transforming everything into a inspiring experience 🌍🙌thank you!
I always look forward to reading Pepe’s articles but this one smacks of an aging boomer’s romanticized pining for a counter-culture revolutionary prophet that wasn’t. I’m with Ramin Mazaheri on this one, the western 60’s drugs, sex and rock ‘n roll nihilist ethos was merely fake CIA controlled opposition.
Brilliant!!
Both by the memory and the homage.
Thanks Pepe, the title ‘lost in a Roman wilderness of pain’, wedged between black and white banners on either side is rather apt…. I once put a link to J.M’s The End and with lyrics at the Café, to highlight aspects of youth, a tragic story, personally, I wouldn’t wrap it up in wordy sentimentalism, but helps to change the subject anyway.
As I was around at the time and heard the stories and saw him live and all that, he had a really really bad reputation for getting very drunk and beating his groupies violently.
After the fiasco of the last few days on this site I am highly reluctant to post anything anywhere on the internet. Everyone posts but no one listens. I think that is THEE sign of our times. But I’ll give it a last shot. Who the hell cares anymore, anyway.
As I read this article by Pepe I got increasingly upset until he finally connected the vision of Morrison to Empire. I thought, its about time.
I came of age in the 60’s turning 18 in ’65 and was prime red meat for the war machine to ship off to NAM and get blown to shit. And that right there sums up what the 60’s was all about. It wasn’t about “the music” and “myths” and drug induced “visions” and The Doors or The Stones or any of the corporate controlled “music” scene.
If you were male turning 18 in the 60’s your life was about the forced draft, collage, jobs and how the hell to avoid the draft and not get thrown into the meat grinder of death the Empire was pushing as democracy.
Jim Morrison was nothing but a circus like sideshow run through the controlled media lens of demonizing drugs and the counter culture which was itself a side show offering little to those in it.
In fact, just trying to see the Doors live( yes they were an incredible blues band well worth the wait) was one of the great magic tricks of all time. The band was booked all over Los Angeles and tickets were dirt cheap then. The problem was that we would show up but the Doors wouldn’t. We all would settle in and the room was electric. We waited, waited and waited. Then out pops Manzarek to tell us poor Jim had the flu, or a cold or whatever. Soon we found out he wasn’t all that sick. He was shit-faced drunk and or so loaded he couldn’t walk. So Manzarek cancelled the show with some excuse. Morrison was so self centered he finally blew up the Doors and himself and left his fans holding nothing but their dicks. The only ones who benefited from this “music culture” were the performers and music companies who got filthy rich which was what the whole thing was about in the first place.
The “music scene” was a corporate controlled diversion. The real action was on the streets resisting and protesting the Vietnam war. Fighting against Imperialism. THAT is where we grew up for real. Where we saw the real fangs of our rulers and how little they cared for human life and by extension US. Local draft boards were so hated that they met in secret and no one knew their names and no one would put their name on the document selecting you for the machine of death. They were just too scared.
A few of us were just clever enough and persistent enough that we beat that draft with C/O’s and 4F’s and watched some of our less informed and way to patriotic friends go off and get killed.
So Pepe, go ahead and get all nostalgic for Morrison and the Summer of Love but try to keep in mind you are hooked on the diversion. In the end the “vision” was to use a large cohort generation to make massive amounts of money for the music industry and the war machine. A few people got filthy rich at the expense of the many. And quite a few lost their lives to boot.
Pepe. Read Smedly Butler.
You got it right.
And very little has changed.
The change that has occurred has been for the worse.
The rubes are now hooked on their personal devices .
Narcissistic Personality Disorder Rules .
So let me just add that you’re right on here Hank. Morrison was a nothing more than a drunk and an addict who happened to write some lyrics that resonated with a great mass of like-minded people at the time, no doubt all motivated by the mystique of a so-called “Great Society” that was actually anything but. In that sense, I suppose he deserves his place in history, albeit a rather small and inconsequential one. Like Hunter Thompson, who I suppose he could best be compared to as a literary figure (but who didn’t have the good sense to die young), he was certainly no bard for a generation or anything so pretentious as that; but as an indicator of imminent collapse, I suppose he’s as good an example as any.
There are two ways to look at The Doors and both ways contain some truth.
It’s important to note the Laurel Canyon angle and that Morrison’s father was high up in the empire, although that does not confirm any conspiracy. Less important is to note that the (((music industry))) abuses its customers whom it treats like cash cows.
The other way to see it is also valuable. The open decadence of The Doors laid bare unpleasant truths about life under the empire. Some of it is good poetry and good music which can be appreciated without buying into the decadence. Another example is the decadent poet Baudelaire from the 1890’s. To say Baudelaire’s poetry is evocative would miss a larger point. Alain Soral starts his book, Comprendre l’Empire (2011), with an extensive quote from Baudelaire – a short fiction, not poetry. It lays out the premise that the Devil gains power by people believing he is not real, and that a follower of Satan considers the soul to be of no particular value. That is a relevant introduction to understanding that the Empire is evil by design. Here, Pepe was trying to reach out to fans of 60’s music. All successful writers do outreach; it’s their job. The Doors opens the door to larger issues that are peripheral to Pepe’s main topics. Perhaps he could write about that, or link to other essays on it.
One of my favorite songs by Jim Morrison –
Roadhouse Blues – The Doors
https://youtu.be/n2_X4VTCoEo
love this line, it rings so true –
“Yeah the future’s uncertain, and the end is always near”
Riders On The Storm, last song by the Doors. Jim’s ephemeral whispered overdub. Ghost Riders In The Sky, 1948, Cowboy Song by Stan Jones inspired the Doors. I was surprised (early 1970s) how Paris, was not very firey considering the revolution in psychedelic >”Spin Spin Little Wheel >>Big Wheel Turn Around Round Round ♡Buffy St. Marie. The fear porn nowadays has a vice grip on our imaginations. Time to chant mantra, “this too shall pass”. The “Mega Group” (Zionists) decided jabathon to rule the earth. Our collective specie’ unconscious, subconscious, conscious, superconscious must sing “*Hope is the thing with Feathers that Perches in the Soul and Sings the Song without the Words & Never Stops At All” … >who wrote that poetry? Energy is all powerful, let’s all do ephemeral whispered overdubs. Thank’s Pepe for the spark to inspire :-)
And the tide rushes in.