Panmankey.com

Awake, shake dreams from your hair my pretty child, my sweet one . . . . . . . .

My love for The Doors and Jim Morrison often creeps up on me.  Due to their significance in my spiritual life, it can be hard to just listen to The Doors without entering a trance like state.  I'm cool with the ocassional Top 40 Doors song being on the radio, but anything more than that sort of raises the beast so to speak.

I like to say that Led Zeppelin (or perhaps Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers) is my favorite band, but I probably know more about The Doors, and I certainly know their musical catalog better.  Some of that's due to Jim being more of a crooner than a white blues belter like Robert Plant, but much of it's simply due to the transformative power of the music.

Not every Doors song is art, and some of them border on atrocious, but many of them are near perfection.  And if they are a bit over the top lyriclly, at least Jim did it first.  It's kind of funny to yell "Fuck the Mother Kill the Father," in 2010, but in the mid-60's that was something that could have gotten you jailed in Alabama.  I'm not going to argue that it was in good taste, or even ahead of its time, it was probably neither, but it was ballsy.

I don't think Jim Morrison will ever be celebrated as one of the great poets of the 20th Century, but he might deserve to be.  For every great Morrison lyric, there are two shitty ones, but the ones that are great, are truly great, and when spoken they are nearly hypnotic.  There's a cadence and a rhythm to Morrison's poetry that is so easily overlooked when it simply stares at you from the printed page.  His words were meant to breathe, to be heard, to be spoken.  Despite the attempts of his bandmates, I'm not sure all of this words need to be put to music either.

The Doors "American Prayer" is mostly a collection of Morrison poetry readings with the band adding background music nearly a decade later.  Like much of The Doors' catalog, some of it works, and some of it fails.  Parts of the music reflect the era in which it was recorded (the late '70's), and sounds nearly discoesque.  The tracks that work nail the whole Dionysian Doors Live in Concert Bacchanalia sort of thing they had going down in the late 60's.  No band screams "Decadent Transcendent Pagans!" quite like The Doors.  I'm not using Pagan there to reflect a deeply held religious belief.  I'm using Pagan more to describe a way of life, a world of phsysical and spiritual ecstasy, the path of excess, an existance spent in technicolor instead of black and white.

If I could deal with the hangovers, I'd spend my life with my head swimming in a wine glass, my face pressed up against the glass to listen to The Doors.  There's something very pleasant about tipsiness, even more so when that drunken feeling is spent with words and music.  There's a lonliness to it, but you can find great joy while being alone.  I think Morrison essentially lived his entire life in the Doors alone, with a bottle for his best friend, and words as his most prized mistress. 

As I grow older spirituality can get harder and harder to grasp.  I know the steps to go through in order to feel spiritual, but it's better when it just happens.  I think when you come to a belief system the early years are the best ones, because you view everything with a sense of child-like wonder, a sense that gets lost the further down the road you go.  With a few exceptions (like sex), the first time you do something is often the best that something will ever get.  (Sex is different because it lasts longer the more you do it, which is a big relief to Ari, etc.) 

The transcendence offered to me by Jim Morrison and The Doors is just the oppossite.  It's always easy to grasp, and has become easier as the years go by (which is why I can't always listen to it).  Preparing for a Morrison Ritual tonight I began going through my Doors catalog, deciding what to play, etc.  After two glasses of wine and one verse of "Break on Through" I was dry humping Ari in the living room, screaming my fool head off, and finding myself entirely lost int he moment.  I could have been in ten other places in that moment, and it all felt pretty good, and right.

Life is change, but I'm glad that the power of Jim and his bandmates only grows.