Have you ever grieved for someone who died before you were born?
I have.
On this morning’s run, spoken word poetry album An American Prayer (1978) in my ear, I grieved for Jim Morrison. Tears and all.
If I were Jim Morrison, I would have died in a blood-filled Parisian Hotel bathtub ten months ago. Morrison is part of the 27-Club. A club that includes Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Brian Jones, Amy Winehouse, and Kurt Cobain. Maybe you weep for Hendrix on your morning run, Electric Ladyland in your ears, whilst someone else puts on Joplin’s Kozmic Blues as they lace up their shoes and hits the hills. We’re all weeping the same thing. Intense kinship lost. Gifts ungiven to the world.
What would Morrison say if he were alive today? One can guess as ‘Peace Frog’ washes over them and whips them up – “Blood in the streets in the town of New Haven” – but one can’t be sure. Morrison developed and evolved enough in his one short lifetime. Like Rimbaud who had given up his talent for poetry before the age of 21 and disappeared into the heart of Africa, would Morrison have continued to create even if he did live?
One could argue that Miami was Morrison’s messy way out of the rock-and-roll lifestyle of which he had grown so weary. If you don’t know the story, Morrison attempted to spark a riot in his audience and allegedly exposed himself to the crowd. Many contend that he didn’t actually show anything, though listening to him sing a long ‘lament for my cock’ on An American Prayer one could be excused for doubting that. Six warrants were issued for Morrison’s arrest, The Doors’ concerts cancelled, and after a 16-day trial Morrison was sentenced to six months in prison plus a fine for indecency.
Morrison, heavily bearded and overweight from years of heavy drinking, not even a glimmer of his past physical form of bony clean-shaven rockstar, eloped to Paris with his long-term girlfriend Pam. Morrison no longer wanted the fame. He wanted obscurity. And he wanted to remodel himself as a poet. In Paris, he could breathe. He took long walks through the Père Lachaise Cemetery where many of his literary heroes, such as Oscar Wilde, were buried, likely unaware that in just a few months he would join them.
During this time, Morrison wrote reams of poetry that would posthumously resurface in books such as Wilderness (1988), which shot to the New York Times Bestseller List, and the spoken word poetry album interlaced with music from The Doors known as An American Prayer. And when I listen to that posthumous album, I cry not because the poetry is particularly beautiful (though much of it will hauntingly remain in your head for days), but because I think of Morrison in all that he means to me and the world.
I think of the conception of that album. When Morrison was a young man, he became obsessed with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the poet’s spoken word albums like A Coney Island of the Mind (1958), and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1955), not to mention the bebop beat poetry of Jack Kerouac. Morrison actually met Ferlinghetti on the streets of San Francisco outside the iconic City Lights Bookstore, but was so stunted with awed admiration that he turned and ran away. I think about how Morrison is my Ferlinghetti. I think about how ‘Roadhouse Blues’, ‘LA Woman’, and ’Ship of Fools’ accompanied the good times, whilst ‘Riders on the Storm’, ‘Hyacinth House’, and ‘Been Down So Long’ got me through the bad times, and ‘Peace Frog’, ‘Five To One’, and ‘The Soft Parade’ sparked a fire in me during the rebellious times.
I’m thinking of all this, mourning Morrison on my morning run, and I realise I’m in flow. I’m flying over the fields. Faster than ever. It feels like the first time I realised I could write. Morrison was the soundtrack back then as poetry flowed from my pen, and his voice is with me again, my friend who I never met, who died before I was born.