The Changeling: Why Jim Morrison Matters

A tribute to one of the 27 club's founding members

The Doors. Jim Morrison, fourth from left

Once as common on classic rock radio in the States as The Stones or Zeppelin, The Doors nowadays scrape for infrequent plays between Bad Company and Boston.  And then, it’s usually “Love Her Madly,” admittedly monotonous dreck, the 2:45 single cut down from the not-much-longer album track—a bad sign when 3:35 is a drag—and their last big single.  What happened to “Light My Fire,” the expansive album version, dark and light, cool and ecstatic, or “Break on Through (To the Other Side),” tight, poetic, and strange, or, for that matter, the entire first side of the startling debut (1967)—from “Soul Kitchen” to “Twentieth-Century Fox,” “Alabama Song (Whiskey Bar)” and the delicate, beguiling “The Crystal Ship”?  If the Doors’ work was uneven from there, who cares (whose wasn’t?), few groups were ever as good at their best, or as original. 

Rock fuses words, music, performance, fashion, and persona; its vision is only partly compositional or musical by classical standards. Its art meets a synergy of radio, television, and portable records, a public intimacy that rewards the witch of personality, a body, a face, and a voice as hovering presence when the needle drops.  The Doors, no mean musicians, mastered this fusion, as did their peers across just a few months that must have been exhilarating while it was happening, and in retrospect, appears magical in the convergence of talents and time: a new art. 

But a recognition of The Doors this is not, or not quite, rather more of their long-dead, long-polarizing leader, whose art of personality, more of being, deserves unsettling appreciation. 

Watching this Morrison abandon himself, listening to his amoral ardor, even in the cool metamorphosis of man-to-closed-eyed-crooner, fall-down frenzies aside, you get the sense that no one knows where this night is going, least of all him.  It could end up in the hills, or by the sea, or in the woods, or tripping, or dead, or bored, or spent on the street, or taking a car or plane or walking somewhere you’ve never gone before.  You won’t go, but he will, and the point isn’t to go or not go, but to look at the confines of your life, your impediments and inhibitions, and all the ways you don’t live.  The unease of the man is the unease of being, of possibility.  Let’s be honest, next to Morrison, front men like Mick Jagger and Robert Plant look (and, worse, sound) like posers.  You get the sense that for them, the night will always end up back at the hotel with some girls.  Good for them, but let’s not pretend this is existential testing of the kind Morrison incarnates.  They enjoy life too much.  He doesn’t.  The line between this testing and recklessness, between a basically lonely openness to some new energy or person, on the one hand, and senseless self-abuse, on the other, is thinner than air, and part of the fear.  Morrison had the courage, or depressive carelessness—a distinction without a difference—to do it, whatever it was, and thereby touch estranged and confined souls in a lot of rooms, big and small.

Handsome, yes, richly voiced, yes, well-mannered and soft-spoken when sober, and a cool reflector of the poetic and philosophical pretensions of bookish adolescents—all these traits layer Morrison’s appeal, and irritate his detractors, who see accidental fame, countercultural self-indulgence, and flabby nonsense masquerading as profundity.  What they miss, or repress, or maybe detect rather too well, is the strangeness and perplexity and sadness of his example, a sadness all the more remote and unreachable because of the jester’s comic indifference it carries.  I know of simply no popular artist of the postwar boom who more palpably and disturbingly inhabits this estrangement, this unease of living, which some people, maybe most, never feel, and others only now and then.  The similarly named Morrissey sings:

I think of life and I think of death

and neither one particularly appeals to me

Splendid wit of this acknowledged, pathos balanced perfectly with humor—which Jim Morrison never achieves, despite a few elliptically beautiful lyrics—The Smiths’ frontman, now perpetual soloist, is too pain-averse and pleasure-needing, too balled up and creased by Freudian frustration, that unfulfilled need for sex amid a basic recoil from all flesh but one’s own, even one’s own, and too desperate for success, for keeping it, its comforts, to embody what Morrison never shakes, the shamble and wince of being, the wandering, the itinerancy, the strangeness.  Such being can’t be conveyed in words, or only in words.  Wit softens its gape; eloquence familiarizes its muteness; hungering guitars drown the weird, unyearning organ.  The gift of The Doors, their heavy originality in postwar culture, which Morrison endowed the group—as far away from typical top-forty sentiments as imaginable—was a paradox of strangeness when fused with carnality, what love takes on when unreconciled to life itself: a frightening, because true, because uncompromised, freedom that reanimates, by defamiliarizing, our desire:

We chased our pleasures here

dug our treasures there

but can you still recall

the time we cried?

Break on through to the other side

The “other side” is where abandonment stands nakedly anew, where the courage to dismiss life, its pain, its familiar parameters of pleasure and hurt, might afford a union more alive to feeling.  It isn’t a place, not merely “here” nor “there,” but the body embracing mere existence—or rather place is all it is, when seen from this dismissal, and it becomes alive, brave, open to experience, even death.  “Dismiss” is misleading, since some tenderness marks the hard stance, and is turned on oneself, an exhortation to forgive, or better yet, transcend involvement and betrayal:

I found an island in your arms

country in your eyes

arms that chain us

eyes that lie

Break on through to the other side

Note the self-distancing achieved, admitted, by the shift from “I” to “us,” recognizing the universality of betrayal or deceit, and so its banality from the point of view of living.  Rock’s hint of the bitter or misogynistic smear dissolves on contact with the singer’s wiser exhortation.

A man that coolly unencumbered, who by accident of talent, nomadic bookishness, familial breach, bright, talented buddies, and postwar economics, finds himself cutting a record in 1966, baritone-rich and organ-trilled, and singing, almost softly—

The time to hesitate is through

No time to wallow in the mire

Try now, we could only lose

and our love become a funeral pyre

and who means it, has gone where no teen idols and Beatlemaniacs, safe in euphemism or deranged by frenzy, can go: conscious abandonment of constraint.  Morrison sings time and again, if opaquely in words but in toto with his mates—the way the best groups transcend their parts—of walking the cliff’s edge where life assumes its miraculous or accidental fullness because death is so close, so easy.  Sartrean nothingness in wide-eyed living, Heideggerian possibility, Nietzschean will-to-life, shadowed by its very pointlessness—Morrison knew these versions well enough to fake it, if he wanted, or to sprinkle their references a little clumsily and in his talk or lyrics, which he did.  But no faker [was] he as their incarnation for a few years at the peak of psychedelia in America, and likely for as long as some people are strange.

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