Jim Morrison Meets the Spirit of Music

[Note: The following piece is an excerpt from my book

“The Myth of Jim Morrison,” which can be found here:


http://www.lulu.com/content/e-book/the-jim-morrison-myth/6344919

The book is actually a long essay written over 10 years ago

for a Folklore class at the University of Pennsylvania.

At the time, I had not yet taken any psychedelic and so

did not fully understand the import of what happened

to Morrison in the gestation period leading up

to his formation with Ray Manzerek of the Doors.

Honestly, I think a lot of what happened had to do with Morrison’s use of LSD. And I also feel that the “Mythic Concert” that

Morrison spoke of later might well have taken place

while on LSD. Morrison wouldn’t have mentioned

this in the interview in which he described the concert

as by that time (late Sixties, early Seventies) taking

LSD was somewhat passe, and certainly for him.

I definitely welcome any commentary on this, thanks!

The Mythic Concert


In that year there was

an intense visitation

of energy.

I left school & went down

to the beach to live.

I slept on a roof.

at night the moon became

a woman’s face

I met the Spirit of Music. (poem: In That Year)

I may have not made this clear enough in the earlier sections, but I don’t think it can be reasonably said that Morrison pulled his myth out of his gluteus maximus, so to speak. That is, he did not completely make up a myth about himself and then try to foist it on the credulous masses. Rather, it seems that he had certain experiences that he later recalled in mythic terms. In other words, the experiences on which he based his myth actually happened, though perhaps not in quite the way he mythologized it. So what is in question is what he made of those experiences, how true to those experiences was the myth that he constructed?

To make this concrete, I have chosen to look into what Morrison referred to at one point as a “mythic concert” that he heard in his head while living on a friend’s rooftop in Venice beach the summer prior to the formation of the Doors. During those months, Morrison underwent a somewhat radical change in physical appearance from a somewhat chubby film school student to that of a sleek, leonine movie star. The “myth” (if you will) is that Morrison spent that summer up on the rooftop dropping acid, fasting, and doing a lot of writing – a story which I think there is every reason to believe (though we shouldn’t suppose that all he did was get high and write on that rooftop). I personally interpret his experience as being the equivalent of a spiritual preparation for his calling – the often trying work he was about to embark on with the Doors. It was maybe the equivalent of Moses’ forty days on the mount, or Jesus’ forty days in the desert, or any holy person’s hermetic retreat.

The poem “In That Year” above is Morrison’s most mythic/poetic rendering of his experience on the rooftop that summer. Again, the experience was probably at least a little bit more mundane that the poem let’s on; on the other hand, I don’t doubt that

this is the way it felt for Morrison. The experience was probably intense and it also probably transcended his ability to express what happened. For instance, not knowing how else to describe the music that he began to hear in his head, he used a phrase from the translation of Nietzsche’s Die Geburt der Tragodie (a book which apparently had a great influence on Morrison) – “The Spirit of Music.” Even though the phrase tells us very little about what Morrison actually experienced, in another sense it says everything.

In a late interview, Morrison spoke more directly about what he meant when he wrote he had met “The Spirit of Music”:

I heard in my head a whole concert situation, with a band singing and an audience – a large audience. Those first five or six songs I wrote, I was just taking notes at a fantastic rock concert that was going on inside my head…I just started hearing songs. I think I still have the notebook with those songs written in it. This kind of mythic concert that I heard…I’d like to try to reproduce it sometime, either in actuality or on record. I’d like to reproduce what I heard on the beach that day.”

Not only does Morrison here make explicit what he meant by “The Spirit of Music,” but he even goes so far as to suggest that he could go even further and actually reproduce his experience for public consumption(!) What is also interesting here is that he seems to be suggesting that, for whatever reason, those “first five or six songs” had never seen the light of day, and the question is: Why not if they were so great? The answer appears to be that while he still had the words, he had forgotten the music (and he didn’t know musical notation). Or maybe they were so great that Morrison didn’t feel he could do them justice on record, but later, having gained experience making songs and records he believed that he just might possibly be able to pull it off (if not sooner, then later)? As for the question as to how Morrison could remember the songs he heard during that mythic concert, apparently he had the idea that he could reconstruct them with the help of hypnosis or a drug.

Whatever the case may be, I think this is a reasonable example of a scene from the movie of Morrison’s life – or his “cosmic movie” as he referred to it – that was certainly based on a personal experience of his. But I want to say that even the “myth” that he later made of that experience did not stray too far from the truth of that experience – unless you want to say that he was making this up, and I don’t think he was as it seems too right . How else could this kid who had no prior musical training whatsoever have been so inspired to write all of those early songs if he had not met his muse at that point? The Spirit of Music was also his Spiritual Muse, his spirit guide that was directing him toward perfecting the musical art. At least in this case, myth and reality seem less irreconcilable than other moments.

But then we should ask: Why does Morrison refer to it as a “mythic” concert specifically? Why not just a “great concert”? Perhaps something from his reading inspired his choice of phrasing (Nietzsche? Wagner? Nietzsche contra Wagner?), or maybe it was that his own personal mythology always came to him thus, seeming a divine revelation or sorts. But whatever Morrison meant by “mythic” here, he surely didn’t mean one thing: that it was untrue, just a story he made up. Again, it really happened, though perhaps not exactly as Morrison remembered it. If I could presume to jump into Morrison’s head for a moment, I would suggest that he saw the creation of myths (his own and others like Oedipus) as visions that are perceived by the poet or seer/visionary or shaman, which he then attempts to impart to his tribe, however failingly.

These visions can relate to tribal or cosmic origins or the source of a particular human emotion, etc.; or they can refer to the visionary himself.