Sonic Cocktail #2 - The Doors’ Kamikaze

Popping the Cork on the Mysterious Elixir of Rock

The Doors’ Kamikaze

   Combine equal measures Frank Sinatra, William Blake, and Howlin’ Wolf. Shake all ingredients together in a mixer. Infuse with Bach organ fugues and Kurt Weill’s macabre cabaret songs. Add zest of the Living Theater and a dash of flamenco guitar and serve straight up in a cocktail glass. Enjoy while waiting for the sun, but beware the inevitable tragic landing.

   Jim Morrison was essentially a crooner with a haunted, lilting voice and ability to phrase lyrics that went far beyond most rock singers of his (or any other) day. One earful of “Crystal Ship,” “Touch Me” or “Love Her Madly” and it’s obvious how he earned the nickname, “The Psychedelic Sinatra.” Morrison, who was known on more than one occasion to start his day with a beer, followed in the Chairman of the Board’s footsteps in more ways than one. Although worlds apart politically, they shared a similar philosophy when it came to booze: “I feel sorry for people who don’t drink. When they wake up in the morning, that’s as good as they’re going to feel all day.” While that sentiment could have come from either of them, it was Frank Sinatra who voiced it.

   Named for Aldous Huxley’s book The Doors of Perception, which had its origins in the eternal imagination of the 18th-century visionary poet/painter William Blake, The Doors were the dark mirror of the hippie’s psyche, that reflected “a wilderness of pain” dreadfully less idyllic than what anyone who’d been looking through The Beatles’ “Glass Onion” had previously imagined.

   In concert, Morrison took sinister pleasure in provoking his crowd. There was a surreal carnival-like atmosphere that surrounded The Doors’ performances. No one, not even the musicians themselves knew just how far Jim was willing to go on stage.

   This was years before narcissist upstarts like performance artist Chris Burden began a series of outrageous spectacles in which he was cut, impaled, electrocuted and even shot in public, or the punk rock “martyr” G. G. Allen defecated on stage. 

   Morrison’s penchant for mayhem was inspired by Julian Beck and Judith Molina’s Living Theater, where anything could and did happen. Anti-authoritarian to the core, their play from the early sixties, Paradise Now featured a scene in which actors publicly undressed while discussing societal taboos, predating both the Broadway musical Hair and Morrison’s moment of arrogant buffoonery in Miami Beach in 1969 when he was arrested for allegedly exposing himself on stage.

   Morrison considered himself a poet. Steeped in the verse of Blake, the French symbolist Arthur Rimbaud, and the plays and lyrics of Bertolt Brecht (on the first album he covered “Alabama Song” AKA “Whiskey Bar” from Brecht and Weill’s classic Mahagonny Songspiel), Jim soon grew cynical from the limitations of pop stardom. A drunken malaise soon set in and it became apparent that hit singles, gold albums and sold-out arenas meant nothing to him. (Here, check out the lovely original version of the song with Lotte Lenya.)

   In his early blues cover of Willie Dixon’s “Backdoor Man” Jim went far beyond the threatening guise of the badass gangsta lived to the hilt by Howlin’ Wolf, to sounding downright feral, as if he’d just been let out of a cage and was ready to bite the head off a chicken for sick kicks (this was before Alice Cooper became known for such pleasantries) rather than eat it, along with an extra helping of pork and beans.

   His drunken joyride, “Roadhouse Blues” celebrates the benefits of beer for breakfast over a driving boogie that John Lee Hooker would’ve been glad to ride shotgun to.

   In the guise of “The Lizard King,” Morrison prophesized the dawn of a new tomorrow while instigating revolution from within. The charismatic young shaman assured us the time had come to “break on through to the other side” where anything was possible. He held his audience in the palm of his hand and seemed to possess the power to either heal us or lead us all into mayhem and madness. His band followed his every move, improvising in the moment, by the seat of their pants. Ray Manzarek’s organ reverberated with the heavenly mathematics of Bach’s fugues while Robbie Krieger’s guitar zigzagged between Wes Montgomery’s cool jazz riffs and hot flamenco, all maniacally driven to the edge by John Densmore’s drums, taking the moment higher and higher… But ultimately where would it all lead?

   It was a short ride, from the time that Morrison and Manzarek, two UCLA film students first met at Venice Beach, to Jim dying, bored, bearded, bloated, in self-imposed exile in a Paris bathtub, exactly two years to the date that rocks’ grand decadent, Brian Jones drowned in his own backyard pool. Although it was all over in less than six years, The Doors’ myth and intoxicating sound will last an eternity.