Combinatorics from The Crystal Ship:
“A thousand girls, a thousand thrills
A million ways to spend your time”
|A| * |B| = | A x B |
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I’ve learned that he was a pretentious twatwaffle but not nearly as pretentious as he was portrayed in that awful movie. I still like a lot of the music.
The Doors are on a short list of ‘60s performers, along with Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, who I liked just fine when I was in high school and college, and haven’t listened to in 30 years.
OTOH, I regularly break out volumes of Yeats, Williams, Rilke, Frost, Larkin, Plath, Apollinaire, etc., and dig them just as much as when I was a fairly strong young rose.
Morrison’s lyrics - most good song lyrics, to be honest - are meant to evoke emotion. I am not sure you’re supposed to learn anything from them; you’re supposed to FEEL something from them.
I mean, you couldn’t be the way Morrison was portrayed in the movie and accomplish anything. Morrison really could sing, was bright, very well read, and knew a little bit about writing music. Until he really fell apart he was a productive member of a group that churned our six studio albums in five years, all of them pretty good.
Morrison absolutely was a wild guy, but the superhuman level of it is to a large extent a creation of Ray Manzarek. I don’t think it’s than Manzarek was lying, I think he just worshiped Morrison.
Excellent!
I can’t say that I learned anything from Jim, but I can say that he, Robbie, Ray and John made a lot of music that I really love.
From the opening of Break On Through to the final fade out of Riders On The Storm, The Doors created a unique lyrical and musical world, one that I go back to often. One of my best Doors memories is driving through LA and up the coast through Malibu on an almost traffic-free Christmas morning with The Very Best Of The Doors playing. it was just the perfect soundtrack for that time and place.
Nah. If he blew it at the most important moments nobody would have heard of him. I have experience with this.
Let’s see…I learned that ‘L.A. Woman’ was one of my favorite songs to play drums for in bar bands in the '80s. Epic.
I like the phrase “Roman wilderness of pain” and ‘The End’ as the opening for Apocalypse Now! is probably my favorite beginning of a movie ever.
With rare exceptions (Shelley, Keats, Mozart, Dylan) one is not as brilliant or profound in their mid-20s as we’d like to believe. Even Alan Ginsberg didn’t write *Howl *until he was 30.
Jim Morrison was not Shelley, Keats, Mozart of Dylan.
That’s wonderful - thanks. Insights about computers, women and society, and much else.
You’re welcome. It’s a fine interview.