"When You're Strange": The real Jim Morrison

http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/andrew_ohehir/2010/04/08/when_youre_strange/index.html

Thursday, Apr 8, 2010
"When You're Strange": The real Jim Morrison
Almost 20 years after Oliver Stone's legendary "The Doors," Tom DiCillo's doc takes on the Lizard King
Andrew O'Hehir

During a concert recording heard on the soundtrack of Tom DiCillo's trippy, fascinating documentary "When You're Strange," Doors lead singer Jim Morrison demands of his audience, "Would anybody in here like to see my genitals?" When the response to that rhetorical question has died down, Morrison continues: "I don't think there should even be a president, man. I think we should have total democracy."

It would be easy to conclude that the Lizard King was massively wasted on booze or hash or acid or some other drug cocktail of choice on that occasion, and that moreover he was kind of a self-important idiot. Both things are very likely true, but the intellectual thread that connects Jim Morrison's cock to the White House is not as flimsy as it appears. However you feel about the Doors and their music -- and DiCillo's generous and substantial film leaves room for varying interpretations -- the band had an outsize cultural impact, embodying the Dionysian macho-rebel spirit of late-'60s white (male) American youth with psilocybin intensity.

At this point, documentaries about '60s rock bands constitute their own genre, and it's frequently a tiresome one: Clips of civil-rights protests and Vietnam firefights, a highlight tour of assassinations and campus uprisings. There's a little bit of all that in "When You're Strange," but the film stands out for several reasons. There's the total absence of talking-head interviews with grizzled scenesters (or any other present-day footage); the cool and measured narration by Johnny Depp (clearly the perfect choice); the direction by DiCillo, a hard-luck indie veteran making his first documentary. "When You're Strange" is also free of the "fair use" copyright restrictions that plague so many rock docs. All the surviving band members signed off on the project, and you'll hear all the major Doors hits (from "Break on Through" and "Light My Fire" to "L.A. Woman" and "Riders on the Storm") in this film, which has been timed to accompany a 13-song soundtrack release from Rhino Entertainment.

"When You're Strange" consists almost entirely of archival material: home movies and photos, concert and rehearsal footage, period TV broadcasts, even clips from a UCLA student film in which Morrison appeared before he became famous. Especially since we're talking about a band whose entire career spanned less than five years (from early 1967 to Morrison's death in the summer of '71), this strategy collapses the historical distance between us and the Doors, and spares us the morass of maudlin pseudo-Proustian reflection into which many such pop-nostalgia films tumble. Furthermore, this underscores the ways that Morrison, in all his confusion and self-contradiction -- reclusive poet, leather-clad sex god, reluctant celebrity, abusive drunk, pop star with limited musical gifts -- remains a vital cultural force, the conscious or unconscious model for many rock stars, actors or rappers who came later.

While it's entirely true that nobody's made a Doors documentary before, the band has already been the subject of a quasi-legendary film. Oliver Stone's 1991 "The Doors," featuring a mumbling, incoherent Val Kilmer as Morrison, is the ne plus ultra of fictional '60s films. It transcends the so-bad-it's-good genre in a lysergic, sweat-lodge cloudburst. It's not even quite accurate to say that "The Doors" is so bad it's a masterpiece, although that's close. It's more like a risible mass of clichés and a visionary masterwork of cinema at one and the same moment. Even though Doors guitarist Robby Krieger and drummer John Densmore served as "technical advisors" to Stone's movie, they were irritated by its portrayal of Morrison as a drug-addled, death-obsessed shamanistic babbler. Keyboardist Ray Manzarek (who refused to help Stone) has long vowed to help produce an "anti-Oliver Stone" movie that would tell the band's real story. Almost 20 years later, "When You're Strange" is that movie.

Certainly the historical Morrison we see in DiCillo's film is a long way from Kilmer's debauched rock idol, and more a nuanced, confused human being. The son of a career Navy officer -- an admiral who commanded a fleet during the Vietnam War -- Morrison grew up infatuated by Arthur Rimbaud, William Blake and Elvis Presley, which is almost all you need to know about him in one sentence. The band's name came not from Aldous Huxley's drug memoir "The Doors of Perception" but from Huxley's original source, Blake's poem "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell."

Morrison reportedly disliked his own singing voice (he preferred Frank Sinatra's) and told a friend he was afraid he had nothing to say. As Marshall McLuhan and Andy Warhol could have told him, none of that mattered: Morrison's brooding, let's-fuck persona and unpredictable stage behavior sent their own message, for which the Doors' music, and even his own droning baritone and portentous lyrics, sometimes seemed like context or background.

That said, DiCillo does an outstanding job of explaining the Doors' musical oddness: They were a rock band with no bass player to keep the beat, whose members had little rock experience. Morrison had never sung before (outside the shower) and Manzarek was a classically trained pianist and organist. Densmore was a big-band and jazz drummer, and Krieger a flamenco guitarist. They weren't aping either Chicago blues or Merseyside pop, they didn't sound quite like anyone else and there genuinely was something elliptical -- something symbolic or even spiritual -- behind the sex-and-drugs double entendres of their songwriting.

"When You're Strange" offers a mesmerizing, behind-the-music glimpse at a crucial and bizarre moment in rock history, and maybe in American cultural history, period. Certainly all the legendary episodes are here: the Doors' sudden lurch from third billing at the Whisky a Go Go on the Sunset Strip to a three-record deal with Elektra; their acid-trip forays into Joshua Tree and marathon recording sessions with Paul Rothchild and Bruce Botnick; Morrison passing out on stage in Amsterdam, antagonizing cops in New Haven and (apocryphally) exposing himself in Miami. (The wacky witch-journalist girlfriend, played by Kathleen Quinlan in Stone's film, is reduced to an unnamed parenthetical here.)

Still, even though this authoritative and often mesmerizing film provides a crucial counterweight to Stone's "The Doors," it could use a little of the latter film's bogus Nietzsche-Blake-Huxley babblequest. To grasp what Jim Morrison and the Doors were all about, you need to watch both movies one after the other, consume a whole bunch of drugs and beer and sugar and then drive out into the American desert half-dead from hangover. And then maybe you'll understand it all for a split second, or understand that there was never anything to understand in the first place, or that you already understood it as well as you ever will. I'm sure Doors fanatics already know this, but DiCillo's movie blew my mind in revealing that "Mr. Mojo Risin'," the repetitive chant from the end of "L.A. Woman," is an anagram for "Jim Morrison." Whoa. Damn! This shit is powerful, dude.

"When You're Strange" is now playing in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Madison, Wis., New York, Nashville, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Seattle, with more cities to follow.

The Doors "Light My Fire" on The Ed Sullivan Show

Robalini's Note: Jim Morrison blows smoke here. I love the little smirk on Robby Krieger's face after Jimbo says "Girl, we couldn't get much higher," which was forbidden by the Sullivan show. In the movie The Doors, Val Kilmer is in your face over the line while Jimbo is actually pretty casual. Speaking of which, that's one of Stone's real underrated gems, with both Kilmer & Crispin Glover as Andy Warhol actually being more bizarre than the guys they were playing, if that's possible.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LtPVBqQsf8

The Doors "Light My Fire" on The Ed Sullivan Show
TheEdSullivanShow
August 19, 2009

Performed on "The Ed Sullivan Show" on September 17, 1967. Available on "Ed Sullivan's Rock & Roll Classics", "The Very Best of The Ed Sullivan Show Vol. 1" and "Rock'n'Roll Forever" DVDs at www.SOFAentertainment.com

New questions about Jim Morrison's death

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070711/ap_en_ot/books_jim_morrison

New questions about Jim Morrison's death
By ANGELA DOLAND, Associated Press Writer
7-11-7

The official story goes like this: On the last night of Jim Morrison's life, the rocker went to a movie in Paris, listened to records, fell ill and died of heart failure in his bathtub at the age of 27.

But rumors have always swirled around the death of The Doors frontman and, 36 years later, a former Paris nightclub manager is telling a different story. In a new book, Sam Bernett says that Morrison died in a toilet stall of his club after what he believes was a heroin overdose.

He writes of his shock on finding Morrison's body: "The flamboyant singer of 'The Doors,' the beautiful California boy, had become an inert lump crumpled in the toilet of a nightclub." Bernett, whose French-language book is called "The End: Jim Morrison," says he believes two drug dealers brought Morrison's body back to his apartment.

Bernett, who was in his early 20s when Morrison died in 1971, went on to become a prominent radio personality, rock biographer and a vice president of Disneyland Paris. Though he was pestered for years by reporters investigating Morrison's death, he kept his story quiet until his wife suggested writing a book last year.

"For me it's a very bad (memory)," Bernett told The Associated Press.

Rumors have long suggested that Morrison died of an overdose and that he had fallen ill at the nightclub, but witnesses did not come forward.

Patrick Chauvel, a noted war photographer and writer, sometimes helped run the bar at the club. He recalls giving a hand to men who were carrying Morrison in a staircase there.

"I think he was already dead," said Chauvel, who considered putting the episode in a 2005 book before his publisher cautioned against it. Chauvel said he thought an ambulance would have been called if Morrison were still alive.

"I don't know," he said. "It was a long time ago, and we weren't drinking only water."

An official at the Paris prosecutor's office said it was very unlikely the case on Morrison's death would be reopened or that anybody could be prosecuted in the affair, because the statute of limitations — the time limit on legal proceedings — had run out.

Stephen Davis, the author of "Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend," says he would not rewrite history because of the new book. Based on his reporting, he believes Morrison did overdose at the club, but that it was shortly before his death — not the same night — and that he survived the experience.

"It just seems likely that if he died in the toilet of a nightclub, it would have come out before now," Davis said.

Morrison came to Paris in March 1971 at a troubled time in his life. At a 1969 concert in Florida, he was accused of exposing his genitals to the audience. He was convicted of indecent exposure and profanity, and the episode led to promoters canceling concerts and earned the band a stream of negative publicity.

Morrison left for Paris with his appeal pending. There, he lived in a Right Bank apartment with his girlfriend, Pamela Courson, and he wandered the streets, sightseeing and toting around a plastic bag containing his writings. In Paris, he gained so much weight as to become almost unrecognizable, and his health suffered.

He also partied. Morrison spent "practically every night" at the Rock and Roll Circus, the hip Left Bank nightclub that Bernett managed, where stars like Roman Polanski and Marianne Faithfull were regulars, Bernett said.

At around 1 a.m. on July 3, 1971, Morrison went to the club and was joined by two men — drug dealers who sold him heroin for Courson, Bernett said. At one point, Bernett noticed that Morrison had disappeared. Later, the bouncer broke down the door of a locked toilet stall, and they discovered Morrison unresponsive, Bernett said.

Bernett says he asked a doctor, a club customer, to examine the singer.

"When we found him dead, he had a little foam on his nose, and some blood too, and the doctor said, 'That must be an overdose of heroin,'" Bernett said. Bernett added that he did not see Morrison take any heroin that night but said the singer was known to sniff the drug because he was afraid of needles.

Bernett says the two drug dealers insisted Morrison was just unconscious and carried him out of the club. Though Bernett says he wanted to call the paramedics and authorities, the club's owner ordered him to keep quiet to avert a scandal.

Bernett believes the dealers brought Morrison's body home and dropped it into the bathtub, a last attempt to revive him.

Morrison's girlfriend, who died three years later of an overdose, told police an entirely different story.

Courson said the couple went to the movies and out for dinner that night, listened to records and fell asleep. According to her testimony in police records, Morrison awoke in the night feeling ill and took a hot bath. Courson said she found him dead in the tub.

Morrison was buried in Pere Lachaise cemetery, in a small ceremony without fanfare, on July 7, 1971. No autopsy was ever performed.
__
Associated Press Writer Verena von Derschau in Paris contributed to this report.