Jim Morrison: Rage from the Stage but Think on the Page

 

Whether he lacked the talent or time to develop into a great poet remains unclear. Much of Jim Morrison’s brief life is obscured—perhaps strategically—with vague pronouncements, clumsy metaphors, spacey diatribes and art house pretension. But when he was great, he drifted far beyond expectations, completely original, yet always too smart for the job.

Importantly, Jim Morrison looked like a rock star. The image matched the music—perfectly. In 1967, he invented how a rock star must appear—the hair, the leather pants, the boots, even the attitude. So powerful is the image of Morrison that his influence remains undiminished.

With The Doors, he found a band to match his dark visions. Ray Manzarek’s brooding organ seemed wired to Morrison’s dread. When Morrison died, so did The Doors, though they struggled for a while, pushed on by the momentum of their silent singer.  

He grew uncomfortable with show business, more artist than magician, more preacher than singer, hungering for fame until aware too late his soul had stopped. You can rage from the stage but only think on the page.

Restless demons empowered his words. He battled bravely until no drug or drink could forestall The Big Sleep—which was his end game anyway. Or maybe not.  With months to live, he was trying to get better in Paris, get his lungs back, repair a heart damaged by rheumatic fever, but never made it. His girlfriend didn’t help. Or maybe it was all predestined, just as he had predicted.  Like his contemporary, George Harrison, much of Morrison’s life seems passed in preparation for death. And Death always obliges the eager.

At Pere Lachaise Cemetery, Jim Morrison appears nightly, courtesy of The 27 Club, alone in a dimly lit corner, forever searching for that single, indelible, timeless line that always tells the truth.

#jimmorrison #thedoors #lizardking #lawoman #lightmyfire #classicrock #perelachaise #georgeharrison #1960s #rock #music #27club #losangeles #whiskeyagogo

 

Stuart Sutcliffe: Those We Leave Behind

 

"[He is my] alter ego ... a spirit in his world ... a guiding force.” – John Lennon

 

It would be cosmically ironic if Stuart Sutcliffe (1940-1962), an original member of The  Beatles, ever wanted to be a famous musician. But he quit the group early on to begin a life behind an easel, not a guitar. Anyway, he had the eyes of a painter, not a musician.

The universe-wide divide between the anonymous solitude of his death and the raucous, global fame of the Beatles leads us to question the role of those we leave behind. Does their essence – like static, temporal monuments - demark the progress of our lives, or are they as unchained as the wind, always with us, changing but unchanged?

 So Stuart Sutcliffe, a leather-clad, pale face angel, ghostly and delicate, decides to emerge on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band – called the greatest rock album of all time. There he is, a silent sentinel, defiant but reassuring, imparting that wisdom shared only by the departed – nothing dies if remembered, nothing leaves if loved.

Just listen to the way he sings Love Me Tender with an ethereal, driving determination - like a playful prayer - sure to leave footprints in the sand. 

 

 

 

Brian Wilson: Tin Pan Became Beach Sand

In the beginning...

Given the phosphoric nature of his creativity, it couldn’t last beyond the next riptide.

He had no John Paul George or Ringo for that matter. Not even a George Martin.

In the middle...

So he lived without irony, which is to live unprotected, and alone offered up lazy-daisy melodies, two-minute paens of teenage angst, deep from within dark studios and collapsed dungeons of an exhausted mind.

Somehow the California sky birthed those sounds, glazed in light beams and downy floss. Tin Pan became beach sand. And the warm blue Pacific curled down the coast and sailed him in a glass-bottom dream.

So it was that ironic and that irony shoved him from a wave’s crest and he fell like an Icarus into the arms of startled sea nymphs. Then Charles Manson came around for coffee. Bad vibrations. Flat harmony.

In the end...

He remains a frozen-faced sentinel, Buddha in exile, now resting on a piano stool, the center of attention, while dancers shimmy and shake to those long-ago melodies raised by a young man (a nod to Yeats) tossing on his bed, rhyming in love’s despair.

Brian never made it out, but his songs race with summer children, forever kicking the sunset waves at Malibu, cheering storm clouds, knowing you can only see real fun fun fun in the rear-view mirror, hanging off the cracked windshield of a Little GTO.

The Beatles: Forever On Their Way to Capistrano

"I think their music could only appeal to adolescents and retarded adults." - Shirley Mair, Macleans Magazine, 1965




There was so much talent that you ignored the raw ambition. How else to explain our willful disregard of their psychotic work regime backed by matching haircuts and suits. The first drip-dry, bespoke boy band.

In (less than) three minute segments, infused with jangling guitars and timpani, Lennon and McCartney delivered truffle-weight paeans to teenage angst. For a brief time, they were the best in the world at it.

Forever winging through the great cosmic clouds

But then something happened. The great space-time tidal bores of fate, talent and time criss-crossed like never before. Drugged-out rock musicians became prominent and respected social icons. And the Beatles reigned from the electronic Olympus of sound reproduction.

But against all expectations, they just got better and better. They actually improved. ‘She Loves You’ was subsumed by the layered dream scape of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ belonged not only to a different band, but a different century, than ‘I Am the Walrus'.

Massive WTF.

The Beatles were embedded gypsies of the day-glo, patchouli-laden 1960s, so hyper-responsive to both their temporal and secular surroundings, that they could move swiftly, without footprints, from Los  Angeles to Rishikesh, from the dank bricks of the Cavern Club to the swirling valleys of the Himalayas.

The absolutely last group photo

By the time an entire generation became lost and despondent on the long and winding road to nowhere, the Beatles themselves had vanished just as fast as they had arrived, leaving few clues to their genius, never to fully reform (anticipating the extreme fragility of collective memory).

Long after their peers have been sealed up silent in tombs of black vinyl, the Beatles are still heard, disembodied melodies, riding the backs of swallows winging through cosmic clouds, forever on their way to San Juan Capistrano. 

It's the next best thing to be...

Tara Browne: a little life rounded with a sleep



...our little life...
rounded with a sleep...

Guinness Heir, 21, Is Killed In London Sportscar Crash

LONDON, Dec 18 (1966) - Tara Browne, 21-year-old heir to the Guinness brewery fortune and a leader of London’s “mod” social set, was killed early today when his sportscar smashed into a parked truck in the South Kensington district.

- New York Times

There are some people whose purpose in life — in a cultural sense — is to offer context to the lives of their contemporaries. They are rarely catalysts for action; rather, they provide a kind of mood music or a subtext for movement. Tara Browne (1945-1966) was like that.

The short, happy life of Tara Browne survives in print and pictures for what he represents, not what he did (although his twenty-one years were not without merit and accomplishment). And what he represents is that burst of color and noise and fashion that ran amok through the Carnaby district of London, from about 1964 – 1970, give or take.



Melted into thin air

Perhaps he represents a little more. By its very nature, ‘Pop’ doesn’t do anything, doesn’t feed the hungry or house the poor. It just is, like Tara. No creativity required, no mesmeric eloquence or moon-lit beauty: you just have to be there in the right place in the right clothes. That’s it – but it’s not that easy because we only know where there is in retrospect. Tara seemed to know.

Browne  spooned some of his inheritance into a fashion store called Dandy (on King’s Road) which sold clothes made by his tailoring business. He also had a failing marriage, kids and girlfriends.



A brief, happy life

He was a little bit Edie Sedgwick, a tiny touch of Porfirio Rubirosa, a dash of David Bailey, a pinch of Sir Guy Grand — with a lime wedge of poor-little-rich-kid. He was well liked. When Tara died, John Lennon wrote about it in ‘A Day in the Life’ and the Pretty Things recorded the more literal Death Of A Socialite’…Every little bit counts.

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air…
We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

It’s been suggested that when Shakespeare wrote those words — almost the final words he ever wrote — he was saying that all art is ephemeral, nothing more than thin air. He was wrong of course (as his own longevity proves — and he knew in his heart): art, just like a person, endures if it — or they — touches the Truth.

Whatever smartly-dressed Tara Browne discovered long ago - under a white Mary Quant umbrella -dancing in a warm rain down Kingly Court - is a mystery - but it must have been some wonderful, deathless, fashionable Truth.