They will be out in force this Sunday, I suppose, a ragbag of devotees straggled down the boulevards of Paris leading to the cemetery Pere Lachaise. Their destination will be the spot that, to the continued discomfort of the French authorities, remains one of the most-visited places in Paris after the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre. Here resides the grave of one Jim Morrison, and this Sunday marks the fortieth anniversary of his death.
During his brief time on Earth, Jim Morrison was many things to many people. The speed of his physical deterioration, from the lithe poetic rock-and-sex Adonis of 1967 to the podgy grizzly bear figure awash with alcohol of 'Roadhouse Blues' and 'L.A. Woman' remains difficult to grasp. Yet he stands apart from the rest of the pantheon of the era on more than one count, thereby qualifying for serious mention on Pale Green Vortex in a way that Lennon, Hendrix, Clapton and the others simply don't.
I have come across the criticism that Jim Morrison's verse reads like the poetry of a high school kid. Setting aside the question of what is wrong with teenage poems anyway, communicating as they can from a mind that is relatively fresh and uncluttered by the luggage that burdens the mind in later years, the fact remains that there is a simple directness about the best of his work that is rare indeed. A few words strung together is all it takes to conjure up imagery that is deep, vivid and powerful, a communication direct from the primeval swamp, the source of his vitality.
Unique among his counterparts, Jim Morrison was endowed with a genuine shamanic sensibility. Replete with images from the animal world and nature, his words can communicate the intense aliveness and (sometimes disturbing) meaning of the world around us. At his best, he calls up those primitive and archetypal forces that are part of our being, but which 'civilisation' has done its level best to disown. Chris Knowles, author of 'The Secret History of Rock'n Roll', shares a similar view in his interview on Red Ice Radio, Sept 30th 2010 (second hour, for subscribers only!). Speaking about the cultural upheavals of the late 1960s, including the revolution of the psyche centred on psychedelics, Chris asserts that Jim Morrison, alone among the icons of the period, recognised that this was all an attempt to reconnect with our shamanic heritage, reaching back into deepest prehistory. Its roots were profound and natural (a theme more fully elucidated for the next generation by Terence McKenna in his call for an 'archaic revival'). We can speculate that the overall failure to properly realise this ancestral birthright was a major factor in the eventual demise of the cultural revolution of the time.
Read as a metaphor, an incident in Jim Morrison's life can shed light upon this topic. In January 1966, Jim took off with a friend, one Felix Venable, heading for the Mexican desert. Their aim was to find a shaman with whom to eat peyote, the sacred cactus. However, taking some acid on the way south, they never made it beyond Arizona, and returned to Los Angeles battered and bruised (literally), having been attacked, presumably by a bunch of southerners who didn't take kindly to longhairs.
Had he reached Mexico and found the great cactus shaman, the 'total fantasy' take on the story goes, Jim Morrison's life just might have turned out differently. As it was, his own primordial visions remained insufficiently anchored, and his life began to spin increasingly out of control. Without a strong and concrete sense of connection to the gnostic shamanic traditions of the past, life can be extremely difficult indeed. I speak from personal experience here. If the archaic connection is not directly - and regularly - sensed, the individual can be tossed around like flotsam on the surface of the great stormy ocean: of inner psychic craziness, alongside extreme dissonance with Control System consciousness on the outside.
Jim, of course, was also an object for Control System fear, aggression, and paranoia. He didn't play by the rules, created trouble; like Timothy 'most dangerous man in America' Leary, he was a man marked by the authorities. Inciting kids to tribal riot wasn't exactly the name of the game; basically, they wanted him out. Their chance came in Miami, on March 1st 1969, when a characteristically alcohol-loaded Morrison went into overdrive, with the result that he was charged with lewd behaviour and indecent exposure while on stage. The surviving Doors have always maintained that the charges were trumped up, a claim laughably backed up on December 9th, 2010, when Florida State granted Jim a pardon. Thanks, Florida; that makes everything all right then.
That he had been thumbed by the U.S. authorities and stood to spend time in jail clearly spooked Jim: 'Can you give me sanctuary/ I must find a place to hide/ A place for me to hide. / Can you give me soft asylum/ I can't make it anymore/ the man is at the door' he sings plaintively near the beginning of 'The Soft Parade'. He fled the U.S.A. in March 1971 to France. With no extradition order between the two countries, it was a place he could feel safe. He spent four months in the cultural haven of Paris before dying the typically ambiguous death of a rock star, at the black magic age for that era, twenty seven. Dead most likely from heroin on top of the savage treatment meted out to his body over several years; and hastened, I would add, by the machinations of the Control System. The translation of the words on his gravestone at Pere Lachaise reads 'According to his own daimon.'
'Now night arrives with her purple legion/ Retire now to your tents and to your dreams/ Tomorrow we enter the town of my birth/ I want to be ready.' (Celebration of the Lizard)
