Jim Morrison Research: 27 Members Club

'The Doors' got their name from a book written by Aldous Huxley names 'The Doors of Perception'. 

Originally a philosophical essay, released as a book, it was first published in 1954 and details his experiences when taking mescaline. The book takes the form of Huxley's recollection of a mescaline trip that took place over the course of an afternoon in May 1953. The book takes its title from a phrase in William Blake's 1793 poem 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell'. Huxley recalls the insights he experienced, which range from the "purely aesthetic" to "sacramental vision". He also incorporates later reflections on the experience and its meaning for art and religion.

Accordingly we can see Morrison was extremely interested in psychedelics and the philosophies of the human and natural world. 



An American Prayer (1978)

Throughout Morrisons life 

An American Prayer is the ninth and final studio album by the Doors. In 1978, seven years after lead singer Jim Morrison died and five years after the remaining members of the band broke up, they reunited and recorded backing tracks over Morrison's poetry (originally recorded in 1969 and 1970). Other pieces of music and spoken word recorded by the Doors and Morrison were also used in the audio collage, such as dialogue from Morrison's film HWY: An American Pastoral and snippets from jam sessions.

Morrison recorded his own poetry in a professional sound studio on two separate occasions. The first was in March 1969 in Los Angeles and the second was on December 8, 1970. The latter recording session was attended by Morrison's personal friends and included a variety of sketch pieces. 

The themes of his poetry are death and what it means to be alive

An American Pastoral

• HWY: An American Pastoral is a film by Jim Morrison, Frank Lisciandro, Paul Ferrara, and Babe Hill and stars Morrison as a hitchhiker
• 50-minute experimental film in Direct Cinema style
• It was shot during the spring and summer of 1969 in the Mojave Desert in Los Angeles
• Morrison stated the film "...was more of an exercise for me and a warm-up for something bigger.
• Apart from select excerpts used in the 2009 documentary When You're Strange, the complete 35mm movie has yet to be released commercially.
• It's suggested that the inspiration for the Protagonist in the film, played by Morrison, with the script name 'Billy' was inspired by the very real Hitchhiker serial killer Billy Cook who murdered six people on a 22-day rampage between Missouri and California in 1950–51
• The film was based on Morrison's experiences as a hitchhiker during his student days
• Parts of the movie were meant to be used for fundraising purposes in order to complete the whole project
• Morrison showed HWY during his second stay in Paris in early 1971. The film was publicly shown only once in Vancouver in 1970 and again in Paris in 1993. An audio sequence from the film was published on The Doors' spoken word album An American Prayer in 1978.

The American Night 

• A volume of poetry written by Jim Morrison, front-man for the 1960s psychedelic rock group, The Doors, and published posthumously in 1991, 20 years after his death (to the month) by Random House under the trade name imprint Villard Publishing. The book is structured into 10 sections. The title is eponymous with a poem that appears on the album American Prayer, itself a collection of spoken word and musical vignettes released in 1978.
• The book consists of his theories on night which the publisher describes as containing "nightmarish images, bold associative leaps, and [a] volcanic power of emotion" and being "the unmistakable artefacts of a great, wild voice and heart."
• The American Night is a follow-up and second volume to Wilderness: The Lost Writings of Jim Morrison (first published in 1989)

The Doors (1991 film)
Proved excellent research to grasp the character of Jim Morrison, his trials and tribulations, as well as relationships with the people around him. His obsession with death is clearly illustrated throughout the film and well matched to how it is described within his poetry. 

the film is extrememly intense with many scenes relying solely on the words of his music rather than a script itself. It visually sets the tone of the era

References:
colour, typography, form, layout

Is Jim Morrison a Poet?

David Doody, 2011

• An essay by Daniel Nester on The Poetry Foundation’s website, where the author tackles that very question: “Should we consider Jim Morrison, rock’s Bozo Dionysus, a real poet?” Nester’s first sentence gets the discussion off on just the right foot: “There are two kinds of people in this world: those who think the Doors are a hokey caricature of male rock stardom and those who think they’re, you know, shamans." I’ve known those people on the “shaman” side of the aisle and have no idea where they stand on the matter years later. Nester’s essay assumes most of them, in their elder, wiser years, are slightly embarrassed by their devotion to the man and the band. He’s probably right. But he comes across serious people who have thought about the matter seriously and have concluded that The Lizard King was a serious poet.
• Nester reasons, “I have stopped worrying whether James Douglas Morrison…can join the tenuous tribe of poets. He’s been showing up for the meetings for so long now, there’s no sense in throwing him out.”

William Cook, 2003

• Morrison's poetry is very surreal at times, as well as highly symbolic--there is a pervading sense of the irrational, chaotic, and the violent; an effect produced by startling juxtapositions of images and words. Morrison's poetry reveals a strange world--a place peopled by characters straight out of Morrison's circus of the mind, from the strange streets of Los Angeles boulevards and back alleys. Morrison's speech is a native tongue, and his eye is that of a visionary American poet.
• He motifs that pervade all of his poetry abound: the city, sex, death, assassins, voyeurs, wanderers, deserts, shamanism, and so on. The autobiographical and historical references in the poems reflect the myth-making process of turning fact into fiction: the inner world of the psyche and its perceptions of surroundings, a mythological landscape of Morrison's mind. 

Nietzsche

• Christianity was created by slaves to justify their shortcomings
• Morrison's various biographers concur that he read and revered the works of Friedrich Nietzsche. In the most widely read biography of Morrison's life, No One Here Gets Out Alive, the authors attest to the fact that Morrison "devoured Friedrich Nietzsche, the poetic German philosopher whose views on aesthetics, morality, and the Apollonian-Dionysian duality would appear again and again in Jim's conversation, poetry, songs, and life." John Densmore, the percussionist in The Doors, wrote in his memoir Riders on the Storm that "Nietzsche killed Jim Morrison . . . Morrison the Superman, the Dionysian madman, the Birth of Tragedy himself."
• "Jim Morrison was probably the most effective populariser of Nietzsche in the twentieth century."
• "The first and greatest satyr alive today." FWN
• In the first book-length biography of Morrison, published 1980 in the USA - i.e. some nine years after his death - its co-authors presented him very much as a Nietzschean. Not only was he said to be well-read in Nietzsche, but he too was a 'philosopher'. The authors assert that: "like Nietzsche, Jim identified with the long-suffering Dionysos, who was without images, himself pure primordial pain and its primordial echoing." 
• One of the co-authors, Danny Sugarman, claims that Morrison gave him books which exemplified his Nietzschean devotion to Dionysos. In a somewhat garbled account Sugarman describes the Doors' singer enthusiastically giving him a copy of Nietzsche's 'The Birth of Tragedy', but then goes on to quote from W. F. Otto's 'Dionysos,' while seeming to describe another book by Karl Kerenyi : "I was digging through the books Jim had given me. I set down the one I was reading and picked up 'Dionysus: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life.' 
• In a later, thorough, and less hagiographical biography of Morrison, author Stephen Davis confirms that "nothing he read left a more lasting impression on Jimmy Morrison than his encounter with Nietzsche." 
• While the posthumous 'legend' of Morrison has emphasised the Dionysian Nietzscheanism, the same image was being cultivated in his lifetime during the 1960's when writers on the popular music scene obviously longed to put a more intellectual spin on a hitherto lowbrow culture. Among those writers was Richard Goldstein, who in 1967 called the emerging 24 year-old singer and song-writer with the Doors a 'Shaman Superstar', going on to say that Morrison "suggests you read Nietzsche on the nature of tragedy to understand where he is really at. His eyes glow as he launches into a discussion of the Apollonian-Dionysian struggle for control of the life force."

Quotes on Dualism

• "You favour Life, he sides with Death: I straddle the fence, and my balls hurt."
  JDM 
• "Mankind will not put aside its sickness and its discontent until it is able to abolish every dualism."
  N. O. Brown 
• "... there is a sharp conflict between natural demands and certain social institutions. Caught as he is on this conflict, man gives in more or less to one side or the other; he makes compromises which are bound to fail; he escapes into illness or death; or he rebels - senselessly and fruitlessly - against the existing order. In this struggle, human structure is moulded ..."
  Wilhelm Reich