WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
BooMusic: 50 years ago today Jim Morrison broke on through to the other side…
byVanderleunonJuly 3, 2021
… in a heroin-powered bathtub.
His death came two years to the day after the death of Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones and approximately nine months after the deaths of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin — all of whom died at the age of 27.
Everybody loves my baby.. She gets high. She gets high. She gets high.
SkorpionJuly 3, 2021, 11:35 AM
My favorite rock star. As an undergrad at his alma mater UCLA, I emulated him, and The Doors provided a soundtrack to that time of life that’s still evoked richly every time I hear “Break on Through,” “Light My Fire,” or their other many great songs.
For a while, The Doors were the house band at the Whiskey-A-Go-Go, in Hollywood. In the summer of ’67 they actually played a gig in the gymnasium at my high school, along with another group, The Standells. I think they wanted three or four bucks to get in. Too much. I just sat out behind the building, and listened to the show through the open back door to the gym. Some of the kids who went said Morrison barfed on stage.
JWM
ghostsniperJuly 3, 2021, 3:06 PM
June 1969, our 9th grade class had a “Skip Day”, which meant the 9th graders got to bullshit all day. The gym was converted to a den of evil and the cafeteria had the place stocked with drinks and snacks. The bullshit band I was in at the time, “Mass Intrusion”, played for hours, same 10 songs over and over, and the Doors were sponsored heavily. We broke on through cause most people didn’t even know we were players. Suddenly we were cool. I had a sears silvertone copy of a 335 and a used fender bronco amp and a shorted out distortion box my cousin gave me. But we wailed!
gwbnycJuly 3, 2021, 6:48 PM
when younger he was great, Manzarek’s keyboard was the half of it. then he kinda just screamed malformed lyrics in decline.
JWM- the Who played the Winter Dance at a friend’s high school, Central Catholic in Scotch Plains, NJ, c.1967.
Mike AustinJuly 4, 2021, 1:58 AM
Ironic that Morrison, who was notorious for avoiding soap and water, died in a bathtub.
Gnawbone JackJuly 4, 2021, 3:59 AM
Indiana Beach, the riviera of the midwest, home of the Cornball Express, in 1967 Jefferson Airplane on the stage, loud and proud… I was never the same after one pill.
Sid VJuly 4, 2021, 11:04 AM
I remember reading in “no one here gets out alive” that he invited his mom and dad one of their earliest shows. He put them in the front row or something and then sang the two lines from one of their songs – I forget the name – about wanting to F his mom and kill his dad. Yeah, a real a-hole. Good riddance to you and that awful decade.
Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way.
straying planets,
These poems, people,
lost ponies with
Dragging saddles –
and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
four-dimensional
Game of Go.
ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.
Gary Snyder
The Waking
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.
Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
The scientists are in terror
and the European mind stops
Wyndham Lewis chose blindness
rather than have his mind stop.
Night under wind mid garofani,
the petals are almost still
Mozart, Linnaeus, Sulmona,
When one’s friends hate each other
how can there be peace in the world?
Their asperities diverted me in my green time.
A blown husk that is finished
but the light sings eternal
a pale flare over marshes
where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change
Time, space,
neither life nor death is the answer.
And of man seeking good,
doing evil.
In meiner Heimat
where the dead walked
and the living were made of cardboard.
from Preludes
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
— Eliot
ARTIST: CASEY KLAHN
Song of Myself
I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this
air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
— Walt Whitman
“From a student radical/hippie/leftist of the Free Speech Movement/Vietnam Day Commitee era and a full-on Democratic Liberal in the decades after, I think I’ve evolved a politics that is neither right nor left but is, in its elemental nature, draconian. In the last 20 years, I’ve taken apart my beliefs with a sledgehammer. Now I’ve got to put the surviving parts back together with tweezers and other ‘shabby equipment, always deteriorating’.”
Real World Address for Donations, Mash Notes and Hate Mail
Gerard Van der Leun
1692 MANGROVE AVE
APT 379
Chico, Ca 95926
![That Was the Whopper Weekend That Was [Illustrated]](https://americandigest.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/welcometohell-150x150.jpg "That Was the Whopper Weekend That Was [Illustrated]")
Gerard Van der Leun
Lay down these words
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
The scientists are in terror
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Everybody loves my baby.. She gets high. She gets high. She gets high.
My favorite rock star. As an undergrad at his alma mater UCLA, I emulated him, and The Doors provided a soundtrack to that time of life that’s still evoked richly every time I hear “Break on Through,” “Light My Fire,” or their other many great songs.
For a while, The Doors were the house band at the Whiskey-A-Go-Go, in Hollywood. In the summer of ’67 they actually played a gig in the gymnasium at my high school, along with another group, The Standells. I think they wanted three or four bucks to get in. Too much. I just sat out behind the building, and listened to the show through the open back door to the gym. Some of the kids who went said Morrison barfed on stage.
JWM
June 1969, our 9th grade class had a “Skip Day”, which meant the 9th graders got to bullshit all day. The gym was converted to a den of evil and the cafeteria had the place stocked with drinks and snacks. The bullshit band I was in at the time, “Mass Intrusion”, played for hours, same 10 songs over and over, and the Doors were sponsored heavily. We broke on through cause most people didn’t even know we were players. Suddenly we were cool. I had a sears silvertone copy of a 335 and a used fender bronco amp and a shorted out distortion box my cousin gave me. But we wailed!
when younger he was great, Manzarek’s keyboard was the half of it. then he kinda just screamed malformed lyrics in decline.
JWM- the Who played the Winter Dance at a friend’s high school, Central Catholic in Scotch Plains, NJ, c.1967.
Ironic that Morrison, who was notorious for avoiding soap and water, died in a bathtub.
Indiana Beach, the riviera of the midwest, home of the Cornball Express, in 1967 Jefferson Airplane on the stage, loud and proud… I was never the same after one pill.
I remember reading in “no one here gets out alive” that he invited his mom and dad one of their earliest shows. He put them in the front row or something and then sang the two lines from one of their songs – I forget the name – about wanting to F his mom and kill his dad. Yeah, a real a-hole. Good riddance to you and that awful decade.