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Since I was a teen, I've been a fan of the Doors. My aunt gave me a few cassette tapes when I got my first boom box, old classic rock tapes she'd bought but didn't really listen to anymore (she told me she didn't respond to music very much, something I still find odd and alien). This was a bit before grunge took off and most pop music at that time left me cold, so I was pretty pleased to get some Jimi Hendrix, Jethro Tull's Aqualung, Iron Butterfly, and most of all the Doors.
As a depressed, brooding kid, I couldn't really relate to a lot of late 80's music (or maybe I just didn't know where to look for the good stuff). Partying and having a good time was pretty alien to my experience, and I was awkward, shy, and terrible at talking to anyone. The Doors had lots of songs about love (mostly gone wrong), but tracks like People are Strange, When the Music's Over, Break on Through, and the End resonated with me as a social outcast and pariah at my school. I played the tapes over and over, entering into a imaginary landscape of haunting imagery to go with the haunting music I was hearing.
A couple years later the movie came out, which I uncritically enjoyed and embraced. I still think the film has a lot of intriguing themes and is quite visually interesting (especially when you're utterly stoned, which came a bit later for me). I hadn't watched it for a long time so, as a bit of a distraction from my constant studies and fretting over the crises shaking society around me, I ordered copies of a few of my favorite films and popped in the Doors with my girlfriend.
It was enjoyable enough that I revisited a few books of interviews I had of Jim's (he seems to have been a colossal jerk, but in his interviews he seemed thoughtful and cogent enough). From there, I picked up a few cheap biographies written about the time the movie came out in the 90's.
Both of them were pretty good reads. The first one was by John Densmore, the Doors' drummer. It was interesting and I don't regret reading it, but I also wouldn't have regretted not reading it. The other was by by Patricia Keneally, who was a witch, occultist, and writer. I say was, because I finished her book today and checked to see what she's been up to, only to discover she died on July 23rd this year. Maybe she's with Jim at last, she never really seemed to get over him.
I was pretty excited when she mentioned they'd conversed about William Butler Yeats and his occult interests, and that Jim had a real interest in magic. I knew he was into the odd brand of psychedelic shamanism he talked about, but the overlap in our interests in traditional occultism pleased me.
Keneally was a thoughtful lady and a good writer. There were a few moments in her book where I thought she might be fooling herself a bit about Jim (especially because of all the lurid stories about him), but to be fair, she acknowledges that herself. She was pretty interesting in her own right.
It was nice to read about the troubles of the fairly recent past through the frames of these rock biographies, events that shaped my youth by shaping the lives of my parents, but at a fair remove from the different tumultuous times that are shaping my life now. I couldn't help wondering what Jim would think of current events, if he would still be revolting against the liberal powers that be as much as he railed against the conservative power structures of his own time. Of course, he probably wouldn't be railing against much of anything if he'd lived, he'd be 78 (same age as our current President, who seems more interested in eating ice cream and rambling incoherently than anything else).
It's been a welcome distraction and a good reminder that the 60's were also incredibly unstable (lots of riots, assassinations, protests, wars, and the threat of nuclear annihilation). No doubt, lots of people thought that they were living in the end times, that the country was hopelessly polarized, that mass deaths were just a heartbeat away. People got through it.
As a depressed, brooding kid, I couldn't really relate to a lot of late 80's music (or maybe I just didn't know where to look for the good stuff). Partying and having a good time was pretty alien to my experience, and I was awkward, shy, and terrible at talking to anyone. The Doors had lots of songs about love (mostly gone wrong), but tracks like People are Strange, When the Music's Over, Break on Through, and the End resonated with me as a social outcast and pariah at my school. I played the tapes over and over, entering into a imaginary landscape of haunting imagery to go with the haunting music I was hearing.
A couple years later the movie came out, which I uncritically enjoyed and embraced. I still think the film has a lot of intriguing themes and is quite visually interesting (especially when you're utterly stoned, which came a bit later for me). I hadn't watched it for a long time so, as a bit of a distraction from my constant studies and fretting over the crises shaking society around me, I ordered copies of a few of my favorite films and popped in the Doors with my girlfriend.
It was enjoyable enough that I revisited a few books of interviews I had of Jim's (he seems to have been a colossal jerk, but in his interviews he seemed thoughtful and cogent enough). From there, I picked up a few cheap biographies written about the time the movie came out in the 90's.
Both of them were pretty good reads. The first one was by John Densmore, the Doors' drummer. It was interesting and I don't regret reading it, but I also wouldn't have regretted not reading it. The other was by by Patricia Keneally, who was a witch, occultist, and writer. I say was, because I finished her book today and checked to see what she's been up to, only to discover she died on July 23rd this year. Maybe she's with Jim at last, she never really seemed to get over him.
I was pretty excited when she mentioned they'd conversed about William Butler Yeats and his occult interests, and that Jim had a real interest in magic. I knew he was into the odd brand of psychedelic shamanism he talked about, but the overlap in our interests in traditional occultism pleased me.
Keneally was a thoughtful lady and a good writer. There were a few moments in her book where I thought she might be fooling herself a bit about Jim (especially because of all the lurid stories about him), but to be fair, she acknowledges that herself. She was pretty interesting in her own right.
It was nice to read about the troubles of the fairly recent past through the frames of these rock biographies, events that shaped my youth by shaping the lives of my parents, but at a fair remove from the different tumultuous times that are shaping my life now. I couldn't help wondering what Jim would think of current events, if he would still be revolting against the liberal powers that be as much as he railed against the conservative power structures of his own time. Of course, he probably wouldn't be railing against much of anything if he'd lived, he'd be 78 (same age as our current President, who seems more interested in eating ice cream and rambling incoherently than anything else).
It's been a welcome distraction and a good reminder that the 60's were also incredibly unstable (lots of riots, assassinations, protests, wars, and the threat of nuclear annihilation). No doubt, lots of people thought that they were living in the end times, that the country was hopelessly polarized, that mass deaths were just a heartbeat away. People got through it.
