” incident, the book reveals that likely all that really happened was he made a fool out of himself, moving entertainingly if not smoothly from “Ain’t nobody gonna love my ass?” to “You’re all a bunch of fuckin’ idiots,” surely an appropriate homage to the Living Theatre's Paradise Now. When you’re reading all of this stuff, one emotion you may well feel is envy, like I too would like to be able to have a fullblown temper tantrum whenever I pleased, and not only get catered to by everybody around me but called a genius and an artist for letting myself act out this way. Or actually, any of us who aren’t catered to in this way can count ourselves lucky, because it's supremely unhealthy. In a way, Jim Morrison's life and death could be written off as simply one of the more pathetic episodes in the history of the star system, or that offensive myth we all persist in believing which holds that artists are somehow a race apart and thus entitled to piss on my wife, throw you out the window, smash up the joint, and generally do whatever they want. I’ve seen a lot of this over the years, and what's most ironic is that it always goes under the assumption that to deny them these outbursts would somehow be curbing their creativity, when the reality, as far as I can see, is that it's exactly such insane tolerance of another insanity that also contributes to them drying up as artists. Because how can you finally create anything real or beautiful when you have absolutely zero input from the real world, because everyone around you is catering to and sheltering you? You can’t, and this system is I’d submit why we’ve seen almost all our rock ‘n’ roll heroes who, unlike Morrison, did manage to survive the Sixties, end up having nothing to say. Just imagine if he was still around today, 37 years old; no way he could still be singing about chaos and revolution. There are some people who think that everything he’d been through had finally wrought a kind of hard-won wisdom in him that, had he lived, would have allowed him to mellow into perhaps less of a cultural icon and a better poet. Though there is another school of thought which holds that he’d said it all by the first Doors album, and everything from there on led downhill.
My response is somewhere in between. I never took Morrison seriously as the Lizard King, but I’m a Doors fan today as I was in 1967; what it came down to fairly early on for me, actually, was accepting the Doors’ limitations and that Morrison would never be so much Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Villon as he was a Bozo Prince. Surely he was one father of New Wave, as transmitted through Iggy and Patti Smith, but they have proven to be in greater or lesser degree Bozos themselves. One thing that can never be denied Morrison is that at his best (as well as perhaps his worst or some of it at any rate) he had style, and as he was at his best as a poet of dread, desire, and psychic dislocation, so he was also at his best as a clown. So it's no wonder our responses got, and remain, a little confused.
Certainly there are great Bozo moments scattered through the Doors’ records: the mock-portentousness of the “Do you remember when we were in Africa?” coda to “Wild Child,” the drunken yowling sermon Yew CAN-NOTpe-TISH-SHON the lo-WARD with PRAY-yer at the beginning of “The Soft Parade;” the whole idea of songs like “Five to One” and “Land Ho,” extending to the rhythmic bounce of the latter. Hopkins and Sugerman point out the line I see the bathroom is clear in “Hyacinth House,” and of course there are many here among us who always thought “The End” was but a joke, not to mention the scream of the butterfly. I recall sitting in another hippie pad, in Berkeley during the Summer of Love, when one night in our dope-smoking circle on the floor we were not at all nonplussed to hear the FM deejay take off “The End” halfway through and bury it with snide comments before returning to his fave rave Frisco group; admittedly there was probably some Frisco vs. L.A. chauvinism at work there, but we laughed right along with him at this “masterpiece.