There are people you love, there are stars that you idolize, and then rarely, there is a man who stands out from the rest – the one artist who steals your heart away. For me, that someone is Jim Morrison, the lead singer of the band The Doors.
James Douglas Morrison was a poet, a screamer, a singer, a performer par excellence. He had a profound outlook towards life which ran thus “People need connectors – writers, heroes, stars, leaders – to give life form.” He saw himself as a connector. For me, he was and still is a hero.
If any man could be real and call a spade a spade, it was Morrison. Was it his unapologetic writing which endeared him to me? Or was it his sort of music – edging on into the dark and obscure? Or was it all mixed up into that raw bundle of energy that he was during a performance, which made him special? He wrote about love, about things he saw around him like this verse titled ‘Texas Radio and the Big Beat’
I cannot pinpoint what made James Douglas Morrison special. Nor can I say when I started loving him. It just happened. I was hooked by his voice, the passion in them. His eyes, though doped saw beyond the yesterdays. It held the promise of tomorrows for me. He was and will always be an enigma for those who knew him when he was alive, and for crazy fans like me who were born after his death. Despite many attempts to demystify him including the movie by Tom DiCillo ‘When You’re Strange,’ Jim Morrison remains a mystery.
Flashback to 1965. Jim Morrison meets up with fellow UCLA student Ray Manzarek. Then came John Densmore and Robby Krieger. And together, they gave music a special something. The dark, pensive, thought-provoking music which set’ The Doors’ in a class of their own, was born. Good music can never be bottled up. It flowed, unbridled. Morrison, the poet of the team penned most of the lyrics. Some were written by the other team members and yet others were joined efforts.
In Morrison’s own words, he was ‘the guide to a labyrinth’. A labyrinth, which for him was the human mind. His quest to identify with the rest of the world took him through waters uncharted. He was influenced byFriedrich Nietzsche, William Blake, Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud. He was interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos, especially activity that appeared to have no meaning. For Morrison, it was the road towards freedom. And it was only natural for him to reach out to drugs and alcohol as his travelling companions.
His discoveries on the path to life translated into his poems and his music. Through his poems, he sought to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel. He was a rebel and an entertainer, a deadly combination. Morrison wrote “I like any reaction I can get with my music. Just anything to get people to think. I mean, if you can get a whole room full of drunk, stoned people to actually wake up and think, you’re doing something”. Watch him take this lucky crowd by storm.
Ten years after his death, The Rolling Stones ran an article on him. It introduced me to thousands who, had given our hearts to him.
His views on life made him controversial. And Jim’s courtship with controversy went with The Doors, to each and every concert, till his death. How did he die? We have just stories to go by; the truth is still unsaid.
Jim Morrison died young, at 27, a time when The Doors were very popular. Did Morrison know that he would be someone who would always steal the hearts of millions of music buffs across the globe even after he was gone? I think he did. Why else should he say “I see myself as a huge fiery comet, a shooting star. Everyone stops, points up and gasps “Oh look at that!” Then – whoosh, and I’m gone…and they’ll never see anything like it ever again… and they won’t be able to forget me – ever”.
Now, years after his death during a self-exile to Paris, on the 3rd of July 1971, his words, as usual, reverberate.
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