Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [98]
The toboggan was less than twenty yards from the side of the cabin on a certain, horrifying collision course. Anne stared dead ahead, the features of her face numbed by terror. Andy was whimpering.
The toboggan swept under a hitching rail and five feet from the cabin was stopped by the children's father. As the children tumbled out of the sled, Anne babbled hysterically about how Jim had pushed them forward and wouldn’t let them escape. Andy continued to cry. Steve and Clara Morrison tried to reassure the younger children.
Jim stood nearby looking pleased. “We were just havin’ a good time,” he said.
Surely an auspicious episode with which to begin recounting the life of a god. But it is only the beginning. Later we will see Jim's little brother breathing heavily at night due to chronic tonsillitis and the future Lizard King sealing his mouth with cellophane tape and laughing at his near-suffocation. Or ridiculing a paraplegic. Or, at the age of seventeen, rubbing dogshit in his little brother's face.
What the book makes clear is that this sort of thing was no different in kind from later Doors-era antics like covering an entire recording studio (when they first went in to cut “The End”) in chemical fire extinguisher foam, or dragging a cab full of people up to Elektra Records president Jac Holzman's apartment in the middle of the night, where Jim ripped out massive amounts of carpet and vomited all over the lobby. Yet this was the sort of thing that not only the authors but his friends and fans from the Sixties seemed to admire, even encourage. On one level it's just another case of a culture hero who you may not by now be so surprised to learn you would never have wanted to be around. On another, though, it's just more Sixties berserkitude of the kind that piddles down to pathetic sights like Iggy Pop walking through a song called “Dog Food” on the Tomorrow show in 1981 and then telling Tom Snyder that he represents the “Dionysian” as opposed to “Apollonian” type o’ performer. But there was a time that was true for both Iggy and Jim, though one must wonder just what the creepily conservative teenagers of these supremely Apollonian times might see in this kind of behavior which if anybody they knew was imitating would probably cause them to immediately call the cops. These kids would feel threatened by any performer who came out today and started acting like Morrison did, so is it only the remove of a decade that allows them to feel safe enjoying his antics? Or is it that, just like they could conceivably march happily off to get shot to pieces in El Salvador or Afghanistan to the tune of “The Unknown Soldier” without perceiving any irony, so they can take the life and death of Jim Morrison as just one more TV show with a great soundtrack? And could it be that they are right? If Jim Morrison cared so little about his life, was so willing to make it amount to one huge alcoholic exhibitionistic joke, why should they or we or anybody finally care, except insofar as the seamy details provide trashy entertainent? Or do they, like Danny Sug-erman, take exactly these rantings and pukings as evidence he was a “god” or at least a “lord?”
Similarly, in the legendary Miami “cock-flashing