Melbourne Writers Festival, Regal Ballroom, 24 August 2014
Side 1
The Changeling JOSH EARL
Love Her Madly ANDY GRIFFITHS
Been Down So Long JANE CARO
Cars Hiss By My Window EMILIE ZOEY BAKER
L.A. Woman DOUG JOHNSTONE
Side 2
L’America OPHIRA EISENBERG
Hyacinth House ALICIA SOMETIMES & SEAN M WHELAN
Crawling King Snake GEORGE MEGALOGENIS
The WASP (Texas Radio…) LUKA LESSON
Riders on the Storm MISSY HIGGINS
They say if you remember the ’60s you weren’t really there. But oddly, bookshelves are groaning under the weight of memoirs by the leading lights of the ’60s… and their hangers-on… and hippies who were only four years old at the time but remember protesting the Vietnam War. So, do they remember it or not? And it’s not just the ones who took the advice to avoid the brown acid at Woodstock – even Keith Richards published a memoir. Perhaps we’ve just agreed to let them make up what happened during those fateful years, and we all buy into it, because it sounds so interesting. Or maybe some of it is, in fact, remembered all too clearly. Maybe “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” really happened.
Whatever the truth about the ’60s, we know The Doors were definitely there, because for a long time no-one remembered them.
They had been and gone in just six years, enjoying huge notoriety and reaping number one hits and albums… before Jim Morrison’s fateful death in a bath in Paris in 1971, but The Doors seemed quickly forgotten once it ended (notwithstanding two post-Morrison albums and the appalling American Prayer featuring the rest of them playing floral jazz to accompany his recorded poetry). Other contemporary bands who weren’t able to play on till pension age, say the Beatles, or Jimi Hendrix, remained on a continuous high, but The Doors were set aside, as a phase that ’60s youth had gone through. Until 1979, when Francis Ford Coppola opened Apocalypse Now with army helicopters amid napalmed forests set to the mesmerising strains of The Doors’ intense raga “The End”. It was as though everyone had a mutual flashback, and remembered it all – “Light My Fire”, “People Are Strange”, “Love Her Madly”. The huge bestselling Morrison biography No-One Here Gets Out Alive was published in 1981, and that same year Rolling Stone put a regal Jim in his full glory on their cover, with the strapline, “He’s hot, he’s sexy and he’s dead.” The Doors’ records went back into the charts, and the band took its rightful place in the rock firmament.
That it was a film that revived interest in them was very appropriate for a band founded by two film school graduates from UCLA, Ray Manzarek and Jim Morrison. Their coming together in LA’s arty Venice Beach neighbourhood seems an improbable union – the future enfant terrible of rock and the squarest hippie on the West Coast. Ray Manzarek, despite the hip talk and meditation, was a slightly patrician young man, expanding his mind in an orderly fashion, like a cosmic librarian. His fellow graduate Jim Morrison was expanding his mind by the handful, having become an unruly drifter, living on a warehouse rooftop where he read philosophy and wrote poetry, and spied on girls through their apartment windows below, and considered LSD a hot dinner.
The story goes that in the summer of 1965, Ray was sitting on the beach, just thinking about, I dunno, waves, man, and was surprised to see Jim. It wasn’t just that he thought Jim had moved to New York after college, but that the shuffling slightly pudgy 21-year-old from a few months ago now looked… freaking incredible. Long curly hair, barefoot and shirtless, he was lithe and slinky, and benefitting from his highly, er… acidic diet. They caught up, talking about Ray and his brothers’ R&B band, Rick & the Ravens, and Jim said he’d been writing songs. “Far out,” Ray said, in his unmistakable baritone, “let me hear some.” Jim, in his soon to be much more unmistakeable baritone, sang “Moonlight Drive”, pretty much complete: “Let’s swim to the moon, uh-huh, let’s climb through the tide…” Ray looked at the crooning Adonis spouting lyrics more poetic than anything on the charts, say “Pretty Woman” or “I Want to Hold Your Hand”, and immediately announced that they should form a band. “We’re gonna make a million dollars!” Jim replied, “Ray, that’s exactly what I had in mind.”
And it’s as well to hold the paradoxical principle in mind, about not remembering the ’60s if you were there, when you read in Ray’s memoir his account of the end of that conversation: “All right, man. But one thing: What do we call the band? We can’t call it Morrison and Manzarek, I mean, you know, M&M, or Two Guys from Venice Beach or something. He said, ‘No, man, we’re going to call it The Doors.’ And I said, ‘The what? That’s ridiculous, the – oh, wait a minute, you mean like the doors of perception, the doors in your mind?’ And the light bulb went on, and I said, ‘That’s it, the Doors of Perception. Like Aldous Huxley…’ He said, ‘Yeah, but we’re just The Doors.’” Well, the doors in your mind would be the first thing that would occur to anyone, right?
And thus began the rock legends named for Huxley and William Blake, and not for home supplies enthusiasts. The Doors were completed by the recruitment of a serious, jazzy drummer from Ray’s transcendental meditation class, John Densmore, and a flamenco-picking space cadet guitarist, Robby Krieger. Ray took on bass duties too with his left hand, and together the trio spun out wild improvisational grooves for their unpredictable front man to riff his poetry on, and to unleash the shaman he felt had been inside him since, when four years old, he witnessed an accident that left ‘Indians shattered on dawn’s highway bleeding’. He believed he’d been possessed by one of their spirits – Jim Morrison would be no ordinary rock star. He would deliberately create a persona built on his theories of personal and sexual revolution, derived from Nietzsche and Rimbaud – not that one, the nineteenth century mad genius poet, believed to have faked his own death. Early in the Doors career, Jim tried to get their record company to help him pull off a death hoax, for publicity. ‘Let’s tell everyone I’m dead’. The label’s PR man replied, “Great idea, Jim – except that nobody knows who you are yet.” So instead he threw himself, often literally, into his visionary persona, exploring the dark side of the psyche, while others sang about wearing flowers in your hair, or letting the sunshine in. The Doors were like a reverse flare, sent up into a sunny sky, emitting a brilliant darkness, as a clear-eyed warning that one way or another, it’s all going to end.
“I am the Lizard King, I can do anything,” Jim Morrison winningly rhymed, and he took absurd amounts of drugs and drink and jumped from moving cars and cavorted on high-rise ledges to prove it. For the blues, he then assumed the famous anagram of his name, Mr Mojo Risin’ (sadly overlooking the cryptic and lightly bisexual “I Join Mr Or Ms”). But Jim’s Mojo was unpredictable. He had his demons – the brilliant and studious poet Dr Jekyll could quickly turn to a bitter self-destructive drunk Mr Hyde. The band looked down, closed their eyes and hoped for the best as Jim took them from theatrical soul explorers to a post-psychedelic roadhouse blues band, with a lead singer goading huge crowds to start a fight and trash the venue. When the music’s over, what more could he do? He fumbled in his pants onstage and the Establishment came down on him hard.
So, tonight we tell the story of two organs. One, the Vox Continental keyboard that Ray Manzarek used to add carnivalesque motifs to the Doors’ unique and dramatic sound. And the other, the one Jim Morrison may or not have released from his pants during a concert that would change their fortunes forever.
Morrison and the Doors helped create the ’60s as we pretend to remember them, and, as L.A. Woman’s shaggy blues climbed the charts, his death in Paris in ’71 ended the ’60s, a warm bath turned cold.