As a young man I was a bit obsessed with Beat Poetry and also people like Arthur Rimbaud. This naturally led me to The Doors. Morrison’s words often draw heavily on those sources. The combination of sometimes florid, ambitious words and a music which was and still is like nothing else was very attractive to me. It speaks to a greater artistic ambition than much music.
But of course this was to be a case of going to the edge for Jim to create a lot of this and that came with a lot of self-destruction. Some of the stories around how they recorded much of their output are hair-raising. But what music. I think this reached a peak on the Absolutely Live album, which was on my teenage daily playlist. Songs like ‘When The Music’s Over seemed to be almost theatrical pieces full of drama. And The End was nothing short of an Oedipal play which was challenging and shocking in equal measure. They really embodied, for me, an intense grown-up life, lived by different standards and thus really attractive to a kid like me struggling with home life.
The Celebration Of The Lizard is another musical drama and contains some of his best lyrics;
One morning he awoke in a green hotel
With a strange creature groaning beside him
Sweat oozed from its shiny skin
We are in an alternate world of surreal visions and it felt to this hormone ravaged kid, vaguely sexual, though not especially explicable
The snake was pale gold
Glazed and shrunken
We were afraid to touch it
The sheets were hot dead prisons
And she was beside me
Old, she's not, young
Her dark white hair
Her white soft skin
It’s punctuated with shouts of ‘stop’ and ‘wait’, part verse, part song, it’s like nothing else. It echoes biblical stories and ends with an almost Christ-like figure
Tomorrow we enter the town of my birth
I want to be ready
What did it all mean? That’s like asking what colour a paintbox is. Clearly it was a piece-together of songs, verse and fragments of ideas. But it was the difficult sort of obtuse writing I loved. I don’t think I wanted it to literally mean anything and was happy just to be taken along by it. Lines like
Night arrives with its purple legion
Just lived with me as a beautiful way to describe the coming of nighttime. I blame songs like this for leading me astray into a land of hedonism. It seemed preferable to living in the back end of nowheresvelle.
And to this day, The Doors have no real imitators. They cut their own path and few have even tried to walk it since.
