31-01-2009, 02:23 AM
Linda Minor Wrote:This is fascinating. I think it's unfortunate that Kate Story reacted in such a tacky way to Myra's comment, but I am wondering, Myra, why you classify this website as a hit piece? Do you know something we don't know? It's such a huge website, it would be hard for me to make such a conclusion without reviewing all of it. Could you elaborate?
I wasn't categorizing an entire website Linda. I remarked on the one column on the website that Kate Story linked to at http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr93.html
My remark was:
Quote:Well this is quite the little hit piece, full of snide innuendo in lieu of facts and research.
And it targets some of the most unlikely people, like Frank Zappa who, shortly before his (IMO suspicious) death from cancer was an articulate and outspoken opponent of censorship in the record industry.
Davesweb should back up their insinuations with evidence.
Here are quotes from the column which I consider innuendo with nothing to back them up:
"It is the first week of August, 1964, and U.S. warships under the command of U.S. Navy Admiral George Stephen Morrison have allegedly come under attack while patrolling Vietnam's Tonkin Gulf. This event, subsequently dubbed the 'Tonkin Gulf Incident,' will result in the immediate passing by the U.S. Congress of the obviously pre-drafted Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which will, in turn, quickly lead to America's deep immersion into the bloody Vietnam quagmire....
One of the earliest on the Laurel Canyon/Sunset Strip scene is Jim Morrison, the enigmatic lead singer of The Doors. Jim will quickly become one of the most iconic, controversial, critically acclaimed, and influential figures to take up residence in Laurel Canyon. Curiously enough though, the self-proclaimed "Lizard King" has another claim to fame as well, albeit one that none of his numerous chroniclers will feel is of much relevance to his career and possible untimely death: he is the son, as it turns out, of the aforementioned Admiral George Stephen Morrison.
And so it is that, even while the father is actively conspiring to fabricate an incident that will be used to massively accelerate an illegal war, the son is positioning himself to become an icon of the 'hippie'/anti-war crowd. Nothing unusual about that, I suppose. It is, you know, a small world and all that. And it is not as if Jim Morrison's story is in any way unique.
...
Many years before their nearly simultaneous arrival in Laurel Canyon, Gail [Zappa] had attended a Naval kindergarten with "Mr. Mojo Risin'" himself, Jim Morrison (it is claimed that, as children, Gail once hit Jim over the head with a hammer). The very same Jim Morrison had later attended the same Alexandria, Virginia high school as two other future Laurel Canyon luminaries – John Phillips and Cass Elliott."
So what is the point here? Is Jim Morrison being accused of something nefarious? If so, what? It's not clear in part one. So maybe there are more concrete allegation against Morrison in part 2:
"Why did Jim Morrison never denounce, or even mention, his father's key role in escalating one of America's bloodiest illegal wars?...
As previously mentioned, victims Folger and Frykowski lived in Laurel Canyon, at 2774 Woodstock Road, in a rented home right across the road from a favored gathering spot for Laurel Canyon royalty. Many of the regular visitors to Cass Elliot's home, including a number of shady drug dealers, were also regular visitors to the Folger/Frykowski home (Frykowski's son, by the way, was stabbed to death on June 6, 1999, thirty years after his father met the same fate.) Victim Jay Sebring's acclaimed hair salon sat right at the mouth of Laurel Canyon, just below the Sunset Strip, and it was Sebring, alas, who was credited with sculpting Jim Morrison's famous mane. "
That's everything about Morrison from part 2. Still don't see the point. On to part 3:
"Jim Morrison, who for a time lived in a home on Rothdell Trail, behind the Laurel Canyon Country Store, may or may not have died in Paris on July 3, 1971. The events of that day remain shrouded in mystery and rumor, and the details of the story, such as they are, have changed over the years. What is known is that, on that very same day, Admiral George Stephen Morrison delivered the keynote speech at a decommissioning ceremony for the aircraft carrier USS Bon Homme Richard, from where, seven years earlier, he had helped choreograph the Tonkin Gulf Incident. A few years after Jim's death, his common-law wife, Pamela Courson, dropped dead as well, officially of a heroin overdose. Like Hendrix, Morrison had been an avid student of the occult, with a particular fondness for the work of Aleister Crowley. According to super-groupie Pamela DesBarres, he had also "read all he could about incest and sadism." Also like Hendrix, Morrison was just twenty-seven at the time of his (possible) death."
Part 4, nothing. Part 5, nothing. Parts 6, 7, 8, 9 nothing. Unless you count this:
"But here I seem to have digressed from our discussion of Elvis (which was, if I remember correctly, itself a digression from our discussion of Ricky Nelson). Given though that he had only peripheral connections to Laurel Canyon, I guess I don't really have much more to say about Elvis, other than that he reportedly died on August 16, 1977, the victim of a drug overdose at the young age of forty-two. As with Morrison, however, there have been persistent rumors that Elvis didn't actually die at all, but rather reinvented himself to escape from the fishbowl."
Ok, persistent rumors that Jim Morrison is alive. Righto.
Perhaps there's something more substantial in subsequent parts; 11 and 13 focus on Morrison. Here we go:
"At the very beginning of this journey, I noted that Jim Morrison's story was not "in any way unique." As it turns out, however, that proclamation is not exactly true. It was a true enough statement in the context in which it appeared – which is to say that Morrison's family background did not differ significantly from that of his musical peers – but in many other significant ways, Jim Morrison was indeed a most unique individual, and quite possibly the unlikeliest rock star to ever stumble across a stage.
Morrison essentially arrived on the scene as a fully-developed rock star, complete with a backing band, a stage persona and an impressive collection of songs – enough, in fact, to fill the Doors' first few albums. How exactly Jim Morrison reinvented himself in such a radical manner remains something of a mystery, since before his sudden incarnation as singer/songwriter, James Douglas Morrison had never shown the slightest interest in music. None whatsoever. He certainly never studied music and could neither read nor write it. By his own account, he never had much of an interest in even listening to music. He told one interviewer that he "never went to concerts – one or two at most." And before joining the Doors, he "never did any singing. I never even conceived of it." Asked near the end of his life if he had ever had any desire to learn to play a musical instrument, Jim responded, "Not really."
So here we had a guy who had never sang (apparently not even in the shower or in his car, which seems rather odd to me), who had "never even conceived" of the notion that he could open his mouth and makes sounds come out, and who couldn't play an instrument and had no interest in learning such a skill, and who had never much listened to music or been anywhere near a band, even just to watch one perform, and yet this guy somehow emerged, virtually overnight, as a fully-formed rock star who would quickly become an icon of his generation. And even more bizarrely, legend holds that he brought with him enough original songs to fill the first few Doors' albums. Morrison did not, you see, do as any other singer/songwriter does and pen the songs over the course of the band's career; instead, he allegedly wrote them all at once, before the band was even formed. As Jim once acknowledged in an interview, he was "not a very prolific songwriter. Most of the songs I've written I wrote in the very beginning, about three years ago. I just had a period when I wrote a lot of songs."
In fact, all of the good songs that Morrison is credited with writing were written during that period – the period during which, according to rock legend, Jim spent most of his time hanging out on the rooftop of a Venice apartment building, consuming copious amounts of LSD. This was just before he hooked up with fellow student Ray Manzarek to form the Doors. Legend also holds, strangely enough, that that chance meeting occurred on the beach, though it seems far more likely that the pair would have actually met at UCLA, where both attended the university's rather small and close-knit film school.
In any event, the question that naturally arises (though it does not appear to have ever been asked of him) is: how exactly did Jim "The Lizard King" Morrison write that impressive batch of songs? I'm certainly no musician myself, but it is my understanding that just about every singer/songwriter across the land composes his or her songs in essentially the same manner: on an instrument – usually either a piano or a guitar. Some songwriters, I hear, can compose on paper, but that requires a skill set that Jim did not possess. The problem, of course, is that he also could not play a musical instrument of any kind. How then did he write the songs?
He would have had to have composed them, I'm guessing, in his head. So we are to believe then that a few dozen complete songs, never heard by anyone and never played by any musician, existed only in Jim Morrison's acid-addled brain. Anything is possible, I suppose, but even if we accept that premise, we are still left with some nagging questions, including the question of how those songs got out of Jim Morrison's head. As a general rule of thumb, if a songwriter doesn't know how to read and write music, he can play the song for someone who does and thereby create the sheet music (which was the case, for example, with all of the songs that Brian Wilson penned for the Beach Boys). But Jim quite obviously could not play his own songs. So did he, I don't know, maybe hum them?
And these are, it should be clarified, songs that we are talking about here, as opposed to just lyrics, which would more accurately be categorized as poems. Because Jim, as we all know, was quite a prolific poet, whereas he was a songwriter only for one brief period in his life. But why was that? Why did Morrison, with no previous interest in music, suddenly and inexplicably become a prolific songwriter, only to just as suddenly lose interest after mentally penning an impressive catalogue of what would become regarded as rock staples? And how and why did Jim achieve the accompanying physical transformation that changed him from a clean-cut, collegiate, and rather conservative looking young man into the brooding sex symbol who would take the country by storm? And why, after a few years of adopting that persona, did Jim transform once again, in the last year or so of his life, into an overweight, heavily-bearded, reclusive poet who seemed to have lost his interest in music just as suddenly and inexplicably as he had obtained it?
It wasn't just Morrison who was, in retrospect, a bit of an oddity; the entire band differed from other Laurel Canyon bands in a number of significant ways. As Vanity Fair noted many years ago, "The Doors were always different." All four members of the group, for example, lacked previous band experience. Morrison and Manzarek, as noted, were film students, and drummer John Densmore and guitarist Robby Kreiger were recruited by Manzarek from his Transcendental Meditation class – which is, I guess, where one goes to find musicians to fill out one's band. That class, however, apparently lacked a bass player, so they did without – except for those times when they used session musicians and then claimed that they did without.
Anyway, the point is that none of the four members of the Doors had band credentials. Even a band as contrived as the Byrds, as we shall soon see, had members with band credentials. So too did Buffalo Springfield, with Neil Young and Bruce Palmer, for example, having played in the Mynah Birds, backing a young vocalist by the name of Rick "Superfreak" James (Goldie McJohn of Steppenwolf, oddly enough, had been a Mynah Bird as well). The Mamas and the Papas were put together from elements of the Journeymen and the Mugwumps. And so on with the rest of the Laurel Canyon bands
The Doors could cite no such band lineage. They were just four guys who happened to come together to play the songs written by the singer who had never sung but who had a sudden calling and a magical gift for songwriting. And as you would expect with four guys who had never actually played in a band before, they pretty much sucked. But don't take my word for it; let's let the band's producer, Paul Rothchild, weigh in: "The Doors were not great live performers musically. They were exciting theatrically and kinetically, but as musicians they didn't make it; there was too much inconsistency, there was too much bad music. Robby would be horrendously out of tune with Ray, John would be missing cues, there was bad mike usage too, where you couldn't hear Jim at all."
As luck would have it, I have heard some audio of a young and quite inebriated Jim Morrison at the microphone, and I would have to say that not being able to "hear Jim at all" might have, in many cases, actually improved the performance. But sucking as a band, of course, does not really set the Doors apart from its contemporaries. Another thing that was unusual about the band, however, is that, from the moment the band was conceived, the lineup never changed. No one was added, no one was replaced, no one dropped out of the band over 'artistic differences,' or to pursue a solo career, or to join another band, or for any of the other reasons that bands routinely change shape.
It would be difficult to identify another Laurel Canyon band of any longevity that could make the same claim. After their first two albums, the Byrds changed line-ups with virtually every album release. Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention were in a near-constant state of flux. Laurel Canyon's country-rock bands were also constantly changing shape, usually by incestuously swapping members amongst themselves.
But not the Doors. Jim Morrison's band arrived on the scene as a fully-formed entity, with a name, a stable line-up, a backlog of soon-to-be hit songs – and no previous experience writing, arranging, playing or performing music. Other than that though, they were just your run-of-the-mill, organic, grass-roots rock-and-roll band – with a curious aversion to political advocacy.
Jim Morrison was, by virtually all accounts, a voracious reader. Former teachers and college professors expressed amazement at the breadth and depth of his knowledge on various topics, and at the staggering array of literary sources that he could accurately cite. And yet he was known to tell interviewers that he "[had]n't studied politics that much, really." But that was okay, according to drummer John Densmore, since "a lot of people at our concerts at least, they're sort of – it seems like they don't really come to hear us speak politics."
That's the way it was in the 1960s, you see; the young folks of that era just didn't concern themselves much with politics, and certainly didn't want their anti-war icons engaging in anything resembling political discourse."
The point seems to be that Morrison is suspicious because he wrote songs yet he couldn't read or write music. I guess I'm underwhelmed. Even if true, so what? Bobby Darin, a prolific song writer couldn't read or write music either. Parts 1 through 13 of "The Strange but Mostly True Story of Laurel Canyon and the Birth of the Hippie Generation" were written over months, an epic work, yet it's still not clear what the charges are against Jim Morrison. Maybe parts 14 through 16, "coming soon," will contain the smoking gun.
Frank Zappa gets the same shoddy treatment. Lots of innuendo (Zappa "born, curiously enough, on the Winter Solstice of 1940..."!!!); no concrete claims or evidence against him. A lot of other performers get the same treatment.
If there is a compelling case to be made against Frank Zappa et al, I don't see it here.