PATRICIA KENNEALY-MORRISON FAMOUSLY SAID THAT SHE AND JIM MORRISON WERE WED IN JUNE 1970 DURING A CELTIC HANDFASTING CEREMONY — WHERE THEY DRANK EACH OTHER’S BLOOD.
When Jim Morrison approached the microphone on December 12th, 1970, there was already a commotion. For years, Morrison enthralled crowds with some of the most powerful and wild antics that rock audiences had ever seen. As the self-appointed Lizard King, Morrison cavorted and careened across the stage, leaving audiences in fits of hysterics.
Through his work with The Doors, Jim Morrison became a classic rock legend. The Monkees’ regular songwriters had strong reaction to The Door’s songs. Subsequently, they drew influence from Morrison to write “Words” and other Monkees songs.
The relationship between Jim Morrison and Nico was not what you would call Kosher. Opening up about her time with The Doors frontman, Nico once said: “I like my relations to be physical and of the psyche. We hit each other because we were drunk and we enjoyed the sensation.”
Jim Morrison didn’t fare particularly well, health-wise, in the last years of his life. Alcoholism took a heavy toll, as we know. “Images of him with the shaggy beard, hair receding at the temples, and excess flesh gathering around the armpits,” writes Rob Fischer at Rolling Stone, “can resemble, in retrospect, T.J. Miller more than Father John Misty.
The older I get, the more I think that the one thing that unites most countercultural icons is that they were all walking, talking paradoxes. Forgive me if I sound cynical, but it seems that every figurehead of the hippie age was talking out of their arse.
One of The Doors’ most famous classic rock songs is “People Are Strange.” The Doors’ Ray Manzarek recalled Jim Morrison saw something one time when he got up early in the morning. Subsequently, he wrote “People Are Strange.”
At school, Jim Morrison’s teachers could see that he was a little different. He was a notable bookworm and his senior year English teacher once recalled: “Jim read as much and probably more than any student in the class, but everything he read was so offbeat I had another teacher (who was going to the Library of Congress) check to see if the books Jim was reporting on actually existed.”
Despite being a crude and tangled precursor to the refined beauty heard in The Bends (1995) and OK Computer (1997), Pablo Honey still has a great deal to offer. The album represents an important stage of Radiohead’s early development; the group were still only in their early-to-mid-20s when recording the album, so it shows signs of their lack of experience and immaturity while revealing a smorgasbord of ideas that can be seen as a proverbial launchpad.
The music of The Doors has a timeless appeal. Born in an era of technological innovation, distant conflict, charismatic cult figures, and social transformation, the band’s enigmatic frontman, Jim Morrison, tapped into the dark underbelly of the American cultural imagination, dredging a literary and cinematic heritage that has allowed them to take on enduring universal appeal. While much is made of Morrison’s musical contribution, less is known about his initial interest in cinema.
