The Lizard King and the Donald

I was watching a documentary about The Doors tonight, just after the National Football Conference Championship game ended.

I was surfing, really, not looking for anything in particular, when I came upon the program and thought, Let’s sit here a minute. There’s not much about The Doors I don’t already know- not much that’s in the public record, anyway -but I’m always curious to see if there’s anything an exposé can reveal that I don’t know, and sometimes there is. Besides, I’m always intrigued to watch old footage of Jim Morrison doing just about anything, but especially performing. Tonight, for example, there wasn’t much footage I hadn't seen before, but I did learn that Robbie Krieger, the group’s guitarist, had only been playing electric guitar for six months when the band formed in 1965. I knew about John Densmore’s jazz drumming background, and that Jim had never sung before, and that Ray Manzerek played the bottom on keyboard bass because the group could never find a bass player suitable in style and temperament to the other four members. But I didn’t know that Jim loved Robbie’s bottleneck slide guitar playing so much he wanted to use it on every song they recorded. Or that Jim’s anthemic ode to acid and Oedipus Rex, “The End,” began as a song about his breakup with his then-girlfriend:

This is the end, beautiful friend,

my only friend, the end.

It hurts to set you free,

but you’ll never follow me.

But this column isn’t about The Doors and their music. If you’re interested in The Doors and are so inclined, you can read their story in any of a half dozen very good books, most notably, Danny Sugarman’s biography of Jim Morrison, No One Here Gets Out Alive.

No, what I’m writing about tonight is identity and those who speak for us. Now, it’s been well documented over the years by those who know me that my early youth was deeply, deeply, influenced by Jim Morrison. I have written about it anecdotally, and I have told the story of how I came to be introduced to The Doors in the first place in 1967 when I was in the seventh grade. Thanks to my choir teacher Mrs. McPhail (may she rest in peace or senility, whichever applies today) I was pulled into the Lizard King’s LSD vortex the moment I heard “End of the Night” on the Doors’ first album in her class after she had apparently given up all hope of teaching me and the other motor heads in her fifth period class anything else about music:

Take a journey to the bright midnight

End of the night, end of the night;

Realms of bliss, realms of light,

Some are born to sweet delight 

Some are born to sweet delight 

Some are born to the endless night

Here the Beatles were singing silly songs about yellow submarines, Herman’s Hermits were singing about Mrs. Brown’s daughter, and even the heretofore menacing Stones were echoing across the airwaves for everybody to get off their cloud . . . you know, the usual stuff: puppy love, sex, and easy drugs.

But Morrison. Wow. Morrison was singing about acid trips, shooting arrows at the sun, about breaking on through to the other side (wherever that was), moonlight drives into the ocean, crystal ships, death, and Oedipal wanderings down halls in the ancient gallery. Who was this guy? And what dimension had he come from? More important, how could I get there?

This was a pivotal time in my life, as you can imagine- I was about to enter my teens. Desperately confused about the world around me (race riots, Vietnam, hippies, psychedelic drugs, social revolution . . . long hair and my old man, who hovered just this side of the John Birch Society, loved Barry Goldwater, and believed with all his mind and heart that the company he worked for would take care of him in his retirement years) and inside me. Already convinced that there were dimensions and worlds and colors and sensations surrounding us that, if we could just find and open the Doors of Perception (thank you, Aldous Huxley) we could step through time and space into a reality so far beyond our everyday experiences that our minds would explode. We would weep with joy and exhilaration.

I had believed from the very beginning of my memory that there was far more to this life than we knew or saw, but I had never been able to articulate it, I’d never been able to share it with anyone, because if I told people the places I had visited in my dreams, or the lucid visions that I had had, invited my friends to take a chance with me and meet me at the back of the blue bus, they would have called me insane, or trouble, or worst of all, dangerous. I was unpopular enough already, so to venture into those dark waters was to walk them alone and with no hope of being rescued if I began to drown.

But I had had those visions and lucid dreams. Unlike Jim, I never saw dead Indians dancing ceremoniously in the desert, but I had seen and felt others; I knew they were all around me. It was scary sometimes, but more often than not, it was lonely and maddening. How could I make anyone else understand what I barely understood myself? Why would I dare try?

And then along came Jim Morrison and the Doors, saying it for me. It was only after a lot of listening to Jim’s lyrics and poetry and my vain attempts to imitate his writing style and imagery techniques that I began to realize that what had happened was that Jim had come to my jail cell and unlocked the door. All of the frustration and anger that go with the onset of adolescence had suddenly been released. A freedom Bob Dylan had only hinted at and that I had intuitively recognized as the energy source that drove my engine was all at once mine. As Dionysian as Dionysus himself, I stepped out of my cell and onto the stage, shook my long hair defiantly, and screamed a primal scream at my parents, my teachers, my friends, and my classmates. Ride the snake! I cried. Ride the snake! To the lake! The ancient lake!

And thus began an odyssey of self-discovery that completely obscured the Real Me. A journey to the bright midnight. So long, people! Taking a midnight train to the realms of bliss, I completely lost sight of why I was so elated to be free. Free from what? Either I forgot, or worse, I never knew in the first place.

So, when my fifteen-almost-sixteen-year-old son, who was watching the documentary with me tonight, said, “So, a guy who was high on acid and was an alcoholic was your hero when you were a teenager,”

I said,

“He was an alcoholic, yes. But it was his words that really grabbed me, his lyrics and phrasing. I mean, yes, I was intrigued by his trips and all that, but it was his words. That’s what electrified me.”

“So how’d he die again?” he asked, already knowing the answer.

“He died in a bathtub in Paris.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know that. But how’d he die?”

“The most reliable account is that he died of a heroin overdose. Heroin that his girlfriend Pamela gave him. That and alcohol. Apparently, he was already drunk when he shot up.”

“And this was your hero?”

Uh . . .  yeah?

I left the allure of Jim Morrison behind many years ago, although I still think he was a genius with words. He screamed from the stage and on the records I was listening to all the things I wanted to scream at my parents and teachers, and at all the bullies and assholes in the neighborhood and at school who made life miserable for the rest of us. Jim was speaking- no, shouting and daring and threatening -for me, because I was just a kid who had no voice.

All too often, that’s what we do. We let someone else speak- or scream, or insult, or sing -for us, instead of speaking for ourselves. Why? Because we don’t have a voice, or we feel we don’t have a voice. We allow someone who is not qualified to live our life to live it for us. We see it in sports, we hear it in music (especially metal) . . . we see and hear it every day in our movies and TV shows, even in our books and magazines. We pay or vote for someone else to say what we’re thinking or feeling because it’s safer that way. 

Trouble is, when you allow someone else who has the microphone to speak for you, eventually that person is going to say something you don’t think, that you’re not feeling. But by then it’s too late. You’ve invested too much of yourself, the Self you don’t sufficiently know, into this idol so that when he shouts an obscenity or declares an untruth to be truth, it’s too late for you to retract your loyalty. You’ve worked too hard to identify yourself with the Lizard King. Or the Grand Wizard. Or the King of Pop . . .

Or The Donald.

And that’s when the shit hits the fan.