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.
Through the wild cathedral evening the rain unraveled tales
For the disrobed faceless forms of no position
Tolling for the tongues with no place to bring their thoughts
All down in taken-for-granted situations
Tolling for the deaf an’ blind, tolling for the mute
Tolling for the mistreated, mateless mother, the mistitled prostitute
For the misdemeanor outlaw, chased an’ cheated by pursuit
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
Even though a cloud’s white curtain in a far-off corner flashed
An’ the hypnotic splattered mist was slowly lifting
Electric light still struck like arrows, fired but for the ones
Condemned to drift or else be kept from drifting
Tolling for the searching ones, on their speechless, seeking trail
For the lonesome-hearted lovers with too personal a tale
An’ for each unharmful, gentle soul misplaced inside a jail
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
They will declare: Every journey has been taken.
You shall respond: I have not been to see myself.
They will insist: Everything has been spoken.
You shall reply: I have not had my say.
They will tell you: Everything has been done.
You shall reply: My way is not complete.
You are warned: Any way is long, any way is hard.
Fear not. You are the gate – you, the gatekeeper.
And you shall go through and on . . .
—Alexandros Evangelou Xenopouloudakis, THIRD WISH
ARTIST: CASEY KLAHN
from The Painter by Neil Young
The painter stood Before her work She looked around every where She saw the pictures and she painted them She picked the colors from the air Green to green Red to red Yellow to yellow In the light Black to black When the evening comes Blue to blue In the night
To the Stonecutters
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers
Search American Digest’s Back Pages
Contemplation of the Sword
Reason will not decide at last; the sword will decide.
The sword: an obsolete instrument of bronze or steel,
formerly used to kill men, but here
In the sense of a symbol. The sword: that is: the storms
and counter-storms of general destruction; killing
of men,
Destruction of all goods and materials; massacre, more or
less intentional, of children and women;
Destruction poured down from wings, the air made accomplice,
the innocent air
Perverted into assassin and poisoner.
The sword: that is: treachery and cowardice, incredible
baseness, incredible courage, loyalties, insanities.
The sword: weeping and despair, mass-enslavement,
mass-torture, frustration of all hopes
That starred man’s forehead. Tyranny for freedom, horror for
happiness, famine for bread, carrion for children.
Reason will not decide at last, the sword will decide.
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
from Canto CXV BY EZRA POUND
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 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’.”
Ferreya
ARTIST: GIBSON
Edwin Deakin, American
Hillegas
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
Through the wild cathedral evening the rain unraveled tales
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
The scientists are in terror
Comments on this entry are closed.
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.