Moonlight Drive

So I've been going thru these coments on a lot of the songs today. I've ponderd long and hard on the fact that the very first time I heard a Doors song (summer of 67) I was immediately taken away, somewhere other than where I actually was. There was great power in the songs.

Much of Morrison's stuff is just poetic musing--much is not, like Cobain, autobiographical. All four Doors were college boys, and at least Morrison and Manzarek graduated from UCLA (Krieger may have graduated from UCSB, for all I know). So what you had here was a bunch of fairly literate guys exposed to a lot of art and even European Romantic/Post Romantic/Decadent poetry and literature.

Now as the years went by and I really started to look at Morrison's poetry and lyrics, I realized that, really, they can be pretty immature.

Yet here we are, he's been dead 40 years and more, and we're still talking about him, and there's still a boatload of mystique. Some of this is just plain circumstance, like with James Dean, dying young, but still, there's more to it.

What we had was a literate competent band led by a tremendously charismatic and confident character who came to think of himself as a hybrid of Dionysus, Blake, Byron, and some kind of new age shaman. And it looks to me like he kind of believed it.

Bands I saw at that time were closer in stage persona to shoe-gazers--maybe "rockin' out" a bit more, but there was not a lot of "perfromance art", which is what it looks to me like the Doors' live performances were: early experiments with spontaneous performance art, like rituals, done to music and chanting. They predated a lot of the very theatrical stuff of the 70s, like Alice Cooper, but they were more spontaneous and here's the important part: unlike the acts that followed, I think that Morrison bought this: he felt that he was the Lizard King--whatever that was supposed to be.

So he wrote about very vague, but powerful, emotions, like fear of an apocalyse, death, dissolution, losing one's self in the dissolute luxury of the senses.

Again, I think that there are some autobiographical lyrics, but many of the others were like the prose peom genre, as done by Blake, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, etc. His songs sound like a Gustav Klimt or Aubrey Beadsley painting looks--kinda scary and yet fatally attractive. Once you understand that this is where a lot of Morrison's work is coming from, you'll stop thinking that he's writing a wistful song about a cute girl he'll never get over, and instead he's trying to do archetypes: Alexander, Dionysus, every great volatile, flawed hero. And he should get credit for trying, even if he's pretty immature in how he's doing it. But the guy died at 27: what could he actually know of life?

He is really a decent raw intellect who had been exposed to a fairly good education in the wesern artistic tradition, who was absorbed by pagan spiritualism, and was trying to write poetry. There is a lot of fairly sad output (low quality, immature), but mixed with an undeniable power that grips you, at the level described by Karl Jung.

That's his legacy, I think. The last truly commited adherent to Romantic decadence, and almost entirely untainted by cynicsim.