Despite their accelerated mastery of sarcasm, teenagers can generally put up with a lot of cheese. I remember, for example, swooning over Bob Dylan when I was fourteen and fifteen. Actually swooning! And the Dylan I swooned over was Dylan at his most affected & angry, his most dualistic and glib. In short, it was cheese Dylan (and I'm not naming tunes right now, because the truth is that most of his work, esp. his cheesy work, functions on multiple levels of the psyche. Nothing overtly special there - all writing does. Dylan's at his best when he's most nuanced, though. And that's really what I'm talking about: nuance. These damn kids these days don't see the elegance and power of nuance. Then again, either do the damn adults these days, generally speaking. O Sweet Nuance, Whence & Whither Hast Thou Bounced? Anyway-) It would be a while before I could tune my fork and sink deeper into Dylan's profundity.
Unlike Bobby D., though, Jim Morrison never did anything but cheese. Even his death was cheesy. (OD-ing on scag in a fuggin' bathtub? Come on, man. That's a very un-Rimbaud way to be.) And yet, despite myself and despite Jim and his bullshit "I have the soul of an Indian" posturing, despite all the drunken buffoonery and despite my own affectations of being somehow above the cheesy poetry of the Peace Frog, the raw ugly divine wart-like fact remains that I love American Prayer with an enduring, shameful love, and cannot, will not, stop listening to it. Eff the Doors. Gimme undiluted Jim!
See, most Doors apologists will agree that the real beauty of the Doors consisted of (1) The fortuitous time and place they happened to inhabit and (2) the virtuosity of the musicians (as opposed to J.M.). They'll say "Yeah, Jim was pretty over-the-top, but he helped balance out the experimentalism of the guys in the band, which created a nice counterpoint." That's crap, though. Nobody really cares about Robby's solos or John's bangin' sevenths. I mean, they were good, had skills, but at the end of the day do you want "good," or do you want a lizard king (whatever the hell that is)? And if you look at individual lines, it's plain to see that JM had the makings of a skilled poet. (Of course for every "High Style/Flash & forgive me/high button shoes" there's a "I'm Me!/Can you dig it?/ My meat is real.")
If Jim Morrison and Robert Zimmerman got into a fistfight at any point in their careers, Bobbie would have gotten his ass kicked. That's just all there is to it. Say what you will, Jim was Irish-American loco. Of course, it was an AXIS II, cheesy, L.A. loco. But still, he had heart. I mean, he actually believed all that mumbo jumbo about snakes and pentagrams and Indian souls crowding his "fragile eggshell mind" and whatnot. Nobody would wanna get in the ring with a guy like that.
And, at the end of the say, there's something really fun about listening to crazy, cheesy J-dog talk about Latin street gangs (something he surely knew absolutely nothing about) and sticky fumblings "in the arroyo." It's such a train wreck of pretenses - problematic in about seventy different ways. But still, but still...I'm certain he must've spent a lot of time thinking that maybe, just maybe he really was the Rimbaud of his generation. (What else could that kind of pretentiousness be communicating?) And that makes my heart go out to him...because we know who the real third eye laureate was/is - it was that guy over at the Kettle O' Fish, honing his Woody impersonation.
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