I am the Lizard King, I can do anything

Photographer: Ben @Ugly/Rage Models. Model: me

I am grateful to Marianne Faithfull's desire for self-promotion as it has given me an opportunity to reassess my fascination with Jim Morrison, who was one of my teen idols, even though by the time I was a teenager he was very much dead and rock was changing into punk. Former rock chick Marianne Faithfull has an album coming out in September and to bring attention to this she could not come up with anything better than announcing that she knew who supplied the heroin overdose that apparently killed Jim Morrison - even though there has been much speculation around the issue of his death. According to Faithfull, it was her former boyfriend drug dealer Jean de Breteuil, who apparently did it.  On the basis of this 'revelation', coming forty three years after Morrison's death, with de Breteuil also conveniently dead, Faithfull has managed to get some renewed attention in the press.
I have never cared much for this woman as a musician/singer/writer, she does not do it for me at all, so perhaps I am a little biased here, starting from the position of utter indifference to her art.  As for her public persona, she has on occasion made inane comments, like the one about Kate Moss - when La Moss was going out with Pete Doherty - trying to copy her and be the new Marianne Faithfull, or that she really knew how L'Wren Scott must have felt, "it could have been me". No one can ever know what drives someone to commit suicide, thank you for your unnecessary insight, Miss Faithfull.

Photographer: Tony Attew. Model: me

But this post is not about Marianne Faithfull, it is about Jim Morrison aka The Lizard King, as he styled himself.

Jim Morrison. Google images

I know he has plenty of detractors, from people that call his poetry sophomoric - perhaps it was - and people who point out that really all he did was to fill himself with drugs and alcohol till he managed to break on through to the other side. By the time he died he was in a terrible shape, only twenty seven years old, the stuff he took had taken a toll on his body, he was bloated and overweight -  he, who had been a sex symbol for so many women, and, I am pretty sure, a lot of men too, the one man who was able to wear leather pants like no heterosexual male ever did or has since. 

What did a great disservice to Jim Morrison was Oliver Stone's film The Doors. Val Kilmer was amazing in it, he really was a very believable Jim, but the whole film is very much Stone's personal vision of who The Doors were and what they stood for.
Ray Manzarek said in an interview that Stone's' film is the anti-Doors, it "makes Jim out to be an alcoholic, drunk weirdo; a strange poet totally out of control and you never see the intellectual side of Jim Morrison. You never see the wit, the charm, the elegance. You never get a sense of the real poet. You see a crazed Jim Morrison." Manzarek knew Morrison very well , so he has a point.
But Stone's portrayal of Morrison  is not meant to be a true biography of him, it is not a documentary, it is a commentary on the second half of the 1960s which The Doors became an icon for and which Stone lived through.  The best part of the film is when Stone shows us a young Jim, living on Venice Beach in 1965, the alternative culture of the times, the nakedness, the desire for freedom and spontaneity, the fascination with Shamanism. Stone is a consummate film maker, who learnt from Scorsese, and has gone on to make excellent movies such as JFK, Natural Born Killers and more. I watched an interview with Stone in which he explains his biopic of Jim Morrison and it really helped me to put it in context. I also watched the film again on DVD late last night and whereas when I first saw it I did not like it, because it countered my very own ideas of who Jim Morrison was and what he meant to me, I was able to appreciate it.

Morrison will always be a bit of an enigma. He was an amazing performer - just listen to the various live performance albums that The Doors made and the quality of his showmanship simply hits your core. He really did give the whole of himself to performing, imagine what it must have been like to be there at one of those live events. Everyone wanted a piece of Jim Morrison, if people could have eaten him alive they would have (and metaphorically they did), there was something really visceral in those encounters between this man and the crowds.
Whenever I think of Jim Morrison I remember The Celebration of the Lizard by which I was totally obsessed when I was sixteen, I used to listen to it again and again. I guess I became fascinated with lizards and their potent alchemical symbolism following Jim's declaration he was the Lizard King!

Augrabie lizard. Google images

But when I think of The Doors, as opposed to only Jim Morrison, I always remember that  incredible film by Francis Ford Coppola which opens with The End (the link here is to footage on VIMEO), Apocalypse now (1979), whose very mention gives me goose pimples. I don't think there could have been a more appropriate choice for the anti-war film par excellence, about the horror that was Vietnam.
Finally, on a very personal note The End was the song I was playing way back on an old tape recorder, in the days when people played tapes and my then four year old, who was in the same room as me, clutching his favourite toy, suddenly said "Well he is naughty, he wants to kill his daddy but what does he want to do to his mummy?" It stopped me in my tracks, he had been listening to the lyrics. And that put me on the spot: how do you explain oedipal urges to your four year old?
I will leave you to ponder.