yes, but put away the chest rug, jim. please.
Emmett and I had a conversation of sorts (
or did I dream it ?) some while back regarding how much of a shame it was that the
Doors suffered from such glaring overexposure. Super-heated tungsten flash overexposure, at that. The fault lies with Oliver Stone, primarily, I feel.
I
love* the Doors. Genuinely. Simple as that: easily as much as Iggy Stooge (did), if not Pop.
I know that Morrison has taken much flak - naval big gun salutes, in the main, of the kind like a drill sergeant's slap - on account of his being an admiral's son, but one can't seriously expect the child to shoulder the sins of the father, right ? Or are we all suddenly converts to the crushing inherited slavery of the Hindu caste system just to make amends for generations of racial and cultural intolerance ? Don't concern yourself over that eight year old child ferrying tin cans of raw sewage, boys; she comes from a long line of untouchables. Such is her lot. Bullshit.
No, the problem with Morrison stems squarely from his overbearing, habitually drunken and boorish demeanour and the varying degrees of enmity generated as a consequence. All self-inflicted, of course. That, and his lamentable penchant for too-tight leather trousers. And only in hindsight, of course. I can certainly
buy that. Small wonder I'm such a social pariah. But listen, I'd like to believe he'd have grown out of all that if only he hadn't taken that cold bath that night in Paris. The trousers too. He would still have had his poetry. Who knows how that might have developed with the passing of years into brittle middle-age and beyond ? Devoid of Ray Manzarek's admittedly pretty but wholly unwarranted noodlings ? The music, while good, was never intended.
Look. Lay off
Jim, motherf@ckers. And Elvis, too, while we're at it.
All those carefully delivered jokes were quite amusing at first dropping out the side of Bill Hicks' face, but let's face it, Denis Leary has gotten way too much mileage out of adapting the same - very stale, now - routine to unceasing applause. And let's not forget Leary's own leather fetish. The words '
pot', '
kettle' and '
black' definitely spring to mind.
With that in mind, I sit here determined to provoke the backlash. I won't hold my breath. Paul A. Rothchild can eat my shorts. It would be a lot worse, I promise you, save for the crucial fact that his production was reasonably good. Just not as good as Bruce Botnik on "
LA Woman".
* it's a thin line between love and hate.
▼ THE DOORS: INDIAN SUMMER from "Morrison Hotel, Hard Rock Cafe" LP (Elektra) 1970 (US)
▼ JIM MORRISON: GHOST SONG from "An American Prayer" LP (Elektra) 1978 (US)
▼ JIM MORRISON: LATINO CHROME from "An American Prayer" LP (Elektra) 1978 (US)
MORRISON HOTEL / HARD ROCK CAFE
AN AMERICAN PRAYER
Of those five, covered famously from Linda Ronstadt to the Pixies, "Down To The Wire" - performed with Buffalo Springfield with additional piano from Dr. John - is the one which I've never shaken out of my head. Recorded for the prematurely shelved "Stampede" sessions in New York with Buffalo Springfield collapsing as a functioning unit in 1967 under the weight of drug busts, deportations and heated internal bickerings, "Down To The Wire" is a surprisingly upbeat account of the circumstances which led Young to drop out of the band prior to their hugely successful appearance at the Monterey Pop Festival, only to replaced to great applause by David Crosby guesting for the show.
Fore-shadowing both "Elements" and their soundtrack to Roman Polanski's bloody "Macbeth" - which I was first treated to as a school kid, courtesy of the BBC (in the USA you got Sesame Street, in the UK we got Polanski) - the heavily improvised sound owes much to those venues like the UFO club in London where both Pink Floyd and members of Third Ear Band first fleshed out their skeletal tones. Alchemy is very much, then, a fitting subject for this peculiar ensemble's foray deep into the woods to practice an unusual collective chemistry, but it is not the transformation of base metals into gold they appear to be drawn to ; rather, it is a descent of sorts into the underworld, watched over by Pan, and the elemental change of self.
Eric almost made it onto the recent "Revere(n)d Moon" list, with Sun/Moon from Eric Burdon & War's "The Black-Man's Burdon" from 1971. In the end I just felt it was a little too "bluesy". I think I might just correct that. Those of you familiar with my guest posts on Art Decade will have long since got a handle on my affection for all things 'Burdon'.
Deriving their name from a line by William S. Burroughs, the Thin White Rope sound revolved around singer/songwriter/guitarist, Guy Kyser and second guitarist, Roger Kunkel; an intertwining of strings and feedback writhing like diamond skinned rattlesnakes tied up in a sack on the desert floor. And the strangled, wounded howl of singer Kyser with that same rope wound tight around his throat. At their best, their sound paints a picture of abandoned mining communities and the bones of family pets left bleaching under an unforgiving sun. Broken things.
"The concept for the Bernstein album Prison was for Jesse to do a raw, live performance at Monroe, Washington State Penitentiary Special Offenders unit in 1991. Jesse went with his manager Barbara Buckland, Bruce Pavitt from Sub Pop Records, Grant Alden (then with Seattle's Rocket Magazine, now known as the co-founder of No Depression Magazine), photographer Arthur S. Aubry, and various tech people. None of the session except for the photos taken by Aubry was usable. SubPop later contracted Steve Fisk to finish the project. The album was intended to be produced along the same lines as Johnny Cash's At Folsom Prison, but Fisk later decided to score the recordings with jazz and ambient music. The album was only partially completed when Bernstein committed suicide by stabbing himself in the throat three times with a knife. He was 40 years old when he died - about a month and a half before his 41st birthday."
