Amazing footage of The Doors recorded live on sound stage studios. Oddly enough Ray Manzarek, a few years older than the rest of the group and usually level headed group member comes across cheesy and insincere as if trying to do a TV commercial rather than a sensitive retrospective. This leaves John Densmore as a more mature voice than his autobiographical account of The Doors and Robbie Krieger still pinned downed by shyness punctuated by great guitar work and fine lyrics when Jim was uninterested.
My top four picks for people who ruffled the feathers of counter-culture management and were taken out for writing or speaking words that got a bit too close to the programme are Terence McKenna, Bill Hicks, Amy Whitehouse and Jim Morrison. People think Amy and Jim died because they drank but I suspect they drank because they were go to die and it wouldn't be hard to include Hendrix and Joplin in that small group where 27 is popular.
Coming back to Morrison's work some decades after I knew everything he ever wrote including the posthumous album 'An American Prayer' it's extraordinary to listen how clued up he was about how the machine and 'the man/man works from Nietzsche to Greek mythology his intellectual grasp was not one of a frivolous man.
Morrison died in a bath like Whitney. Unlike Whitney he wrote a lyric about dying in the bath in a song called Hyacinth House. Worth a listen to the uninitiated.
Via The Very Hip Dangerous Minds
