Sad day in music history

Texanne

Texanne

5,000+ Posts
On his day in 1971, Jim Morrison died.

Love him or hate him, you can't deny his talent , or his strangeness. He was, literally, a tortured genius.
 
Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin both died in 1970 making it three deaths in fairly rapid succession.

February 3, 1959. Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. Richardson (The Big Bopper) died in a plane crash. The day the music died. That even was more dramatic but not as significant as losing the three super stars in 1970 and 71.
 
If I'm not misstaken, all at age 27 correct?

I'm about as big a Doors fan as they come. More for the band as a whole, not just Jim Morrison. I think if anyone in that band should get the credit, it's Manzarek.
Talk about left brain/right brain.

What I like most about the Doors is that they sounded like no one else.

What a front man though.

RIP Jim
 
Check out the book 'No One Here Gets Out Alive' if you're interested in the Doors or just generally enjoy tales of debauchery.
 
My very first rock concert was July 1968 at Dallas Memorial Auditorium The Doors with opening act Moving Sidewalks from Houston featuring future guitar hero Billy Gibbons of Z Z Top fame. The first song the Doors played was Soul KItchen and the best song was a long version of When the Music's Over with Jim going with the mojo muse and taking the audience on a cosmic trip to a place I had never been before. My life was forever changed that night. R.I. P Jim and may you and the Doors forever rock on.........
 
Another great book, (not exactly about the Doors) but about Danny Sugerman's life and life with the Doors.
It's called "Wonderland Avenue."

The book is freaking funny...

Wow I just looked up Danny Sugerman, and he died 4 years ago. Didn't know that.
 
RIP

As far as I know, Jim Morrison wrote all the words and sang the songs, but Ray Manzarek, Robbie Krieger and John Densmore came up up with and played the music.

Morrison was deep and dark and the band's focal point, but the other three members were equally important in The Doors sound.

The Beatles can be ultimately be credited with a diverse sound and a complex, varied body of work, but the Doors accomplished such ecleticism in a much shorter time using many fewer songs.

Doors songs just don't sound that much alike except for the constancy of Jim Morrison's mesmerizing vocals and the use of minor keys on many of the slower songs.

Their far ranging stylings, varied rhythms, multiple influences and their spacious mix of keyboards, guitar and drums intrigued me and held my interest even more than Jim's excellent vocals.

IMHO, I could have been really good as their bass player, but they covered that another way.

smile.gif


Give them the benefit of synthesizers and electronic percussion, which came along a bit later, and some background vocals and harmony singing, which they didn't use, and they could have given us soundscapes of even more incredible variety, lushness and scale.

However, that wasn't their place, mission or lot.

They just did their own thing: darkly inspired, relatively quickly and pretty well and, as I hear it, laid some ground work for such later groups as Genesis, The Cars, Tina Turner's "Private Dancer" comeback and even Michael Jackson's great sonic collaborations with Quincy Jones.

I'm not saying The Doors were the best musically or even my favorite personally, but their recorded output is very varied and certainly influential, especially for those of us who listened to whole albums of their music.

They definitely turned lots of people on, inspired many other musicians and really opened some doors as was their goal.

Not a bad legacy.
 
Tortured, yes.

Genius? No. Unless you mean he had a genius for convincing other people that he's a genius.

I mean:

"There's a killer on the road
His brain is squirmin' like a toad"


Yes ... genius.


I'm always reminded of the following passage from "Please Kill Me ... The Oral History of Punk," by Ronnie Cutrone.


"I loved Jim Morrison dearly, but Jim was not fun to go out with. I hung out with him every night for just about a year, and Jim would go out, lean up against the bar, order eight screwdrivers, put down six Tuinals on the bar, drink two or three screwdrivers, take two Tuinals, then he’d have to pee, but he couldn’t leave the other five screwdrivers, so he’d take his dick out and pee, and some girl would come up and blow his dick, and then he’d finish the other five screwdrivers and then he’d finish up the other four Tuinals, and then he’d pee in his pants, and then Eric Emerson and I would take him home.

That was a typical night out with Jim. But when he was on acid, Jim was fun and great. But most of the time he was just a lush pill head."
 
If I were to start a thread of most overrated bands, I think the Doors would be right at the top of my list.

A few really good songs sprinkled in amongst a HELL of a lot of aesthetic masturbation.
 
Jim Morrison - an interesting note in American music history... here's a place you might want start with: Come with me now, as we join Jim's dad, at the very start of our part of the "Vietnam War"...The Link
 
I loved The Doors when I was in high school trying to be retro before anyone else, and still have them on my iPod. By the end of college, I'd long dismissed my personal view that Jim Morrison was any kind of genius, unless "genius" is creating and becoming a character that will get you a steady stream of booze, sluts, and drugs. Any schmuck can do that if they try. No, the word 'genius' is reserved for guys like Norman Einstein.
 
I was never really into The Doors music that much, but there is no denying that Morrison had a unique sound and was an accomplished vocalist.
 
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