‘On the Road’
I, too, had some ‘on the road’ experience. During my first summer in the US, I went from Sarasota, FL to Denver, CO by car – with my parents and two dogs. That was in 1989…
On Jim and Pamela…
One thing a man can teach a dependent co-living female without a marriage license is how to be a good whore. In ancient Greece, daughters of aristocratic households would associate with men for intellectual purposes and be treated as their equals. They would think it a disgrace to allow themselves to engage in sexual relations with these men. (Such services were performed by the lower class: both women and men. Nowadays, on the other hand, in a ploretarian society, we all have come down to this level – we are all -except for a handful workers and we are all prostitutes. Aristocracy is dead). And so, after Jim’s death, when he, in fact, had left millions in the records, Pamela was forced to sell her fragile beauty by the hour to keep her expensive drug habit – all of this due to some legal inconsistencies in their alleged ‘marriage’. I personally prefer Jim’s relationship with Patricia Kennealy – his real intellectual equal who in her autobiography Strange Days righteously encourages us all impressionable fans to “get some weight into our lives, read some books, think some thoughts” and who basically implores us all not to thoughtlessly imitate Jim Morrison but rather to seek that very same light for ourselves which had guided his creativity and which he so spontaneously recognized in his own individual life.
On the issue of materialism
One thing to admire is that he was totally against any notion of it. He came (as most such people) from a rich family. He was much better off than his fellow university students, for example. And then, in his art and in his lyrics, he has tried to expose and fight against the American materialism. This was a big break-through in Rock’n'Roll compared to what is being advertised by most rock stars today: all they project is a desire for money, after the dollar. Their message reads: “money equals power and control”. And Jim Morrison happened to own a car at some remote point of his short life – very briefly – while refusing to own something like a house altogether, for example.
How it all began
One languid summer morning in Concord, MA where I was renting a room in my cousin’s old wooden Queen Anne style house w/ a garden, I happened to watch TV. They had something on the original rock bands: ‘The Animals’, ‘Cream’, and ‘The Doors’. I heard “In the White Room” by ‘Cream’, “When I Was Young” by ‘The Animals’, and “Alabama Song” by The Doors. And the very next day I bought a couple of tapes. I fell in love with “Summer’s Almost Gone” and “I Can’t See Your Face in my Mind” by The Doors. I took that tape to Poland with me and I listened to it constantly. It gave me a great deal of joy, a great deal of pleasure. I was able to get Jim’s The Lords & The New Creatures in Warsaw and I read it both in English and in translation. Upon my return to US in early fall of 1995, I found myself looking for and buying more and more of the Doors’ stuff. I was 21 at the time.
Why I fell in love
Because when he sang: “She has a house and garden, I would like to see what happens, she has wisdom and knows what to do”, I thought it was all about me. And when he sang: “You’re lost little girl, tell me who are you?”, I also thought it was about me. And when he wrote: “Awake, shake dreams from your hair, my pretty child, my sweet one, choose the day and the sign of your day, the day’s divinity – first thing you see”, I could only think it was addressed to me alone and no one else. That was the magic and secret behind his art.
My Poem for the Last Poet
I wrote it on the night of 3rd of July, 1996, the 25th anniversary of Jim’s death:
He was a poster prophet
a favorite of gods
who had proclaimed that sex
made summers ripe
Girls would spread their legs
to embrace his timeless image
both beautiful and sad
a warrior dying on the battlefield
of golden fame
“the gardener found the body
rampant, floating”,
he wrote in his ode to Brian Jones
two years before his own death
-nobody quite knew what for and why
On that night in July
when some faceless French dandies
unknowingly paced
the treeless and narrow
Rue Beautreillis
a jet shot to the sky