by PenultimateManStanding » Tue 06 May 2008, 23:37:29
I got a week long job covering Mariachi music classes. One of the 5 classes is advanced and these kids can play. Quite well. But I can't teach them anything. So I was looking around for something to read and found a biography of Jim Morrison. I'd read a biography of Janis Joplin before so I thought I'd read Morrison's biography. Found out that he was quite a scholar and very brilliant with a genius I.Q. He wrote an undergraduate paper at UCLA that was considered to be worthy of a PhD dissertation. He was also cruel, charismatic, mercurial and just generally crazy. Eventually he was hanging out in Venice Beach as a hippie and got the idea to form a rock & roll band. He wasn't a musician, had never sung, and didn't know the first thing about it. But he had ideas and lyrics and showed them to musician friends. Their response was, "these are the best fucking rock lyrics ever! Let's form a band and make a million bucks." So they did. They practiced and practiced and got some bottom feeder gigs. They were performing at a sleazy dive next door to the Whiskey A Go Go in L.A. Somebody noticed them and they got a slot at the Whiskey. Morrison's Presleyesque good looks got them attention, he was as they said, 'ripe.' But they were taking a lot of LSD and getting into a very weird space. So one night they rolled out their famous song, The End. Everything stopped in the club. No drinks were poured. The waitresses froze. The Go Go Dancers stopped dancing. Conversation ceased. That must have been, as golem would put it, an archetypical moment. A strange blend of Eastern Mysticism and Western Nihilism. Ending with the Oedipal climax: Kill The Father, Fuck The Mother, a theme which he got from Friedrich Niestzche. Much more powerful, creepy and in tune with the zeitgeist than Dylan could have dreamt of. "And all the children, are insane," and so on. Of course he spent the next few years being famous and drinking himself to death.
Turn those Machines back On! - Don Ameche in Trading Places