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By Root 480 0

” Finally the Bozo Classic to end ‘em all was probably Absolutely Live, which included such high points as Morrison stopping “When the Music's Over” to scream at the audience to shut up; the way he said Pritty neat, pritty neat, pritty good, pritty good before “Build Me a Woman,” which begins with the line, I got the poontang blues; the intro to “Close to You”: Ladies and gentlemen … I don’t know if you realize it, but tonight you’re in for a special treat—crowd cheers wildly—No, no, not that, not that… last time it happened grown men were weeping, policemen were turning in their badges…; and, best of all, the (almost certainly improvised) sung intro to “Break on Through #2”: Dead cat in a top hat suckin’on a young man's blood/wishin’ that he could come… thinks he can kill and slaughter/thinks he can shoot my daughter… dead cats/dead rat/thinks he's an aristocrat/that's crap … —true street poetry indeed. Plus the bonus of a brief reprise of the Petition the Lord with Prayer bit, in which this time he sounds like no one so much as Lenny Bruce doing Oral Roberts in his “Religions, Inc.” routine—listen to ‘em and compare.

In the end, perhaps all the moments like these are his real legacy to us, how he took all the dread and fear and even explosions into seeming freedom of the Sixties and made them first seem even more bizarre, dangerous, and apocalyptic than we already thought they were, then turned everything we were taking so seriously into a big joke midstream. Of course, there are still the other songs too, which will always be starkly poetic in the evocations of one gazing on a city under television skies, perhaps the best conjurings of the L.A. myth in popular song: “End of the Night,” “Moonlight Drive,” “People Are Strange,” “My Eyes Have Seen You,” “Cars Hiss by My Window,” “L.A. Woman,” “Riders on the Storm.” But even in these there are lines, all the “Mr. Mojo Risings,” that give away his own sense of humor about, if not his talents as a poet, certainly his own persona and even the very real way in which he let his pop stardom lead him unto a betrayal of his poetic gifts. And perhaps what we finally conclude is that it's not really necessary to separate the clown from the poet, that they were in fact inextricably linked, and that even as we were lucky not to have been around any more than our fair share of “Dionysian” infants, so we were lucky to get all the great music on these albums, which is going to set rock ‘n’ roll standards for a long time to come.

Musician, August 1981

Bring Your Mother

to the Gas Chamber!

Part One: Are Black Sabbath really the new Shamans?

I need someone to show me

The things in life that I can find

I can’t see the things

that make true happiness

I must be blind.

—Black Sabbath, “Paranoid”

The world's comin’to an end.

bloom of Beatlemania —British bobby, interviewed on network news in the first

We have met dark days; the catalog of present horrors and dire morrows is so familiar there's not even any point in running through it again. It may be a copout, but people will do almost anything now to escape from the pall. The (first) Age of Anxiety gave way to the clammy retreat of the Fifties, when every citizen kept a tight bomb shelter, then to the sense of massive change in the Sixties, but the passing of that agitated decade has brought a new Age of Implosion, yesterday's iconoclastic war babies siphoned off en masse, stumbling and puking over each other at the festivals which were celebrations such a short time ago. Tying off their potentials and shooting them into the void in bleak rooms.

It's a desperate time, in a “desperate land” as Jim Morrison said just when things seemed brightest. If the terminal dramas of the Doors and Velvet Underground were prophetic, their “sordid” plots have now become the banal stuff of everyday life, which certainly doesn’t lessen the pervasive dread, but does imply the need for a new music, a music which deals with the breakdowns and psychic smog on another level and, hopefully, points toward some positive resolution.