Whether Morrison was or is a visionary artist or a drunken buffoon is and always will be irrelevant, since he was obviously both of these and more. How else to explain the cult that has since sprung up around his personality? Oliver Stone's 1991 film The Doors (as much as Val Kilmer's electrifying performance of him) are, despite their individual inaccuracies, the ultimate two-handed reacharound by a pair of Hollywood veterans at the top of their respective games; all that rubbing burnishes and buffs Morrison's best feature* to a very high gloss indeed.For everyone of us who loves and admires a goody two shoes, there are a hundred of us who find arrogant douchebags more irresistibly charming by far, especially if they have cheekbones you can cling to and a bottom lip seemingly made of chewing gum. Oh, and that floppy hair... Hair as lustrous and touchable as the rest of him.
Waitaminnit... What were we talking about again?
Oh yeah! Blah blah blah on this day in 1971 Jim Morrison was found dead under suspicious circumstances** by longtime girlfriend Pamela Courson, but the French authorities ruled that since there was no evidence of foul play no autopsy would be performed. Morrison was later laid to rest in Paris' landmark Père Lachaise Cemetery, where his celebrity has persisted well after his death, as in life making things difficult for his neighbours owing to the constant presence about his once-mouldering person of vast crowds of over-emotional females with a frightening penchant for mob mentality.
Still, weep not for our fallen idol; as they say, 'like attracts like', and in his heyday no one got more cunt than Jim Morrison. Famous***, infamous, or wannabe - they all fell before the might of the Lizard King... Hell, he still gets more tail dead nearly forty years than most men get alive in their lifetime, mainly because he wrote poetry; let's face it, Jim Morrison may not have become a rock star for applause, but he surely became a poet for pussy. The fact that all he would have needed to get it was to look the way he did is neither here nor there.
His was the ultimate 'good life well-lived', which unfortunately made it one of the harder ones to survive, and so for maximum entertainment value was best executed by a celebrity; what, I find myself wondering as I ponder his legacy, would he have done differently had he known beforehand how it was going to turn out?
*Often referred to by the feeble euphemism 'charisma', by which one actually means 'cock'.
**In a bathtub, in France... Most mysterious: what the bathtub was. Badump-tish!
***Nico, Grace Slick, and allegedly Janis Joplin!
*
Probably because he showed his nipples.
ReplyDeleteYou may be right. In those days, men didn't shows their nipples willy nilly (let alone their willies or their nillies), so the shock of it might have driven people to do crazy things, like worship a pop star to death.
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