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Michael McClure, a prominent poet of what some call the San Francisco Renaissance, and others call the West Coast Beats, says of Jim Morrison in an afterword, “I know of no better poet of Jim’s generation.”
I find this a profoundly depressing thought. Jim Morrison, lead singer of the Sixties group The Doors, was a great showman—he had a talent for exhibitionism, up to and including trying to drop his pants on stage—but was he really any good as a poet?
Some passages from his lyrics:
Riders on the Storm –complete lyrics are here.
“There’s a killer on the road
His brain is squirmin’ like a toad…”
The piece is at the level of a B horror flick—cheap thrills. “A killer”; is there any insight into human nature in that? Or isn’t this a cardboard stereotype?
Can brains squirm? Of course not. It’s a mixed metaphor, and seems to me unintentionally humorous. And so easy to fix—just use the word “soul” instead. The sound values even work better.
“Like” is also weak. It feels as if it’s there only to fill out a line.
Texas Radio and the Big Beat – complete lyrics are here.
"The Negroes in the forest brightly feathered
They are saying, ‘Forget the night.
Live with us in forests of azure.
Out here on the perimeter there are no stars
Out here we is stoned - immaculate.’"
This is the naïvest sort of romanticism—“noble savage” stuff. If I were a “negro,” I’d want to shove one of those feathers up his pampered white upper class butt. Note the Stepin Fetchit grammar of the last line—“we is.” Though “stoned immaculate” would be a nice phrase without the dash.
One of his better lines is:
“I’ll tell you this, no eternal reward
will forgive us now for wasting the dawn.”
Still unnecessarily inarticulate, though, incoherent. What he means to say is
“No later eternal reward will absolve us for wasting this dawn.”
LA Woman - complete lyrics here.
“Are you a lucky little lady in the city of light
Or just another lost angel...city of night”
As a rhyme, City of Light/City of Night is too easy—City of Trite. It is as if the first line, with its alliteration, came easily, and he put in the minimum of effort needed to find a rhyme.
“I see your hair is burnin
Hills are filled with fire
If they say I never loved you
You know they are a liar.”
Bad grammar, and completely unnecessary if he were prepared to put in just a little effort:
“If someone said I never loved you
You know he was a liar.”
“Motel money murder madness
Let’s change the mood from glad to sadness.”
Another pennycandy rhyme; and another bit of ugly grammar. “Gladness” is the parallel to “sadness.”
“Let’s change the glad gay mood to sadness.”
But that first line is also cheap, B-movie stuff. And even so, it is incoherent. As written, it sounds as though he merely wants to be sad, instead of being saddened by what he sees. And saying “I am sad” is weak writing. Better to show than to tell.
Peace Frog – complete lyrics here.
“Indians scattered on a dawn's highway bleeding,
ghosts crowd the young child's fragile eggshell mind.”
No scan there.
The reference is apparently to something that happened to Morrison himself as a child. The problem is, it is not meaningful to others. This is shameless self-indulgence, and Morrison is guilty of it often. In “LA Woman,” he breaks into the refrain “Mr. Mojo Risin’/Gotta keep on risin,’” which has no relevance whatsoever except that it is an anagram of his own name.
“Fragile eggshell” is clumsy and redundant. Are there eggshells that are not fragile? Poetry, as famously defined by Coleridge, is “the best words in the best order.” This is not poetry. This is gas.
“Young child is also redundant. Are there children who are not young?
“Mind” is weak, because vague, and too easy. What is the first sign that you are reading a bad poem? It has the word “mind” in it.
“Scattered,” used to refer to human beings, is disturbingly cold. Hardly the mot just.
Why not:
“Arapaho thrown on a dawn pavement dying
Their shocked shades obsess the boy’s innocent I.”
Truth told, I liked the Doors in their day. They were no special favourite, but they were more interesting than most pop music.
I was always aware, though, that this was not because of Jim Morrison. I always found him an embarassment. It was the carnival sound of Ray Manzarek’s organ. The drumming was also interesting. And a couple of their songs were just good rock: “Light My Fire,” “Moonlight Drive,” and “Love Her Madly.” But Morrison was involved in the writing of only one of those. “Light My Fire” and “Love Her Madly” were completely by Rob Kreiger.
Morrison got all of the attention, first, because he was good-looking, and second, because he was an exhibitionist. He was the Britney Spears of his day.
The sad thing is that, when he killed himself, the Doors disappeared. Without Morrison, no one wanted to listen to them any more. Yet what made them good was all still there.
People are strange…
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