In 1981, autumn began to leave red, then yellow traces in the forests of the world. Canopies hid military warehouses and guardhouses around them. The rhythm of life was simple, two hours on guard, six hours of rest. The rough fabric of the military uniform smelled of the never-well-washed sweat of generations of soldiers before me. We borrowed real live ammunition. There were stories among us about cars that stop in the middle of the night with their lights off on a nearby local road that leads to Zagreb. Someone sneaks through the thicket to the guard house and twists the neck of the sleeping guard, and then returns quietly, like a beast on bloody paws, to the car that slides into the darkness towards the lights of the metropolis.
I wasn't sure if the story was made up by the captain to keep us awake with fear, or if someone really got hurt once. I welcomed the first autumn rains on guard duty in the forests of the world under the oak canopy - none of the guards went to the guard houses because uninvited guests would look for us there first.
One night the pattering of drops on the leaves was similar to that of the tune I loved in my high school life before the army. On the internal record player - and I had it ready in my imagination - I clearly heard at three in the morning: Riders on the Storm - Riders of the storm:
born in this house
thrown into this world
like a boneless dog
an actor without an audience
storm rider...
This is the end. End of what?
A few months later, I found a translation of the song "The End" in my diary - the only item from my former civilian life that meant something to me. Pasted clip from the youth rock press. I didn't remember that thing for a long time. I found I still knew it by heart. Those verses came to my mind again on guard duty - that year we were constantly guarding something from someone.
The barrel of the gun was freezing in the north, the sleet turning into fine, treacherous snow and the darkness weakly broken by the lighting along the barracks fence.
The world before dawn sometimes seems like a dying man who will never wake up.
The cold seeped into the young bones, creating a store of bone pain for old age. I started walking with a mechanical step along the concrete path, along the fence of the Borongaj barracks where I was assigned to guard. The rhythm of boots on concrete started the internal gramophone.
I heard that brotherly, desperate, bluesy voice: This is the end, my only friend, the End.
I threw myself first into my bosom, and then more and more loudly, to the icy Zagreb night:
This is the end my beautiful friend
This is the end my only friend
Morrison spoke of the final parting, of never looking a friend in the eye again, of a stranger's hand in the land of hopelessness, of how all the children are crazy waiting for the summer rain.
That deaf age on the edge of the barracks was filled with crazy images that - paradoxically - gave it some meaning.
Morrison wrote the song when he broke up with his girlfriend Mary Verbelow.
But the images he created captured more than love's pain—they were a mixture of Old Testament prophecy and a generational sense of loss. A signpost to nothingness at the end of an era. Or - as for me - violence marked the end of childhood. At eighteen I was forced to stamp my boots on the concrete before dawn, reciting Morrison's lines, lest I doze off and collapse into a white death. Or that I wouldn't go crazy with so much systemic violence and stupidity.
"The Doors of Perception"
My Kinship with the American rebel and charismatic singer was not of an idolatrous nature. I didn't want to be like him. I just felt that what he was communicating through music and lyrics was something that I had in me too. Later I realized that in fact the artist, the poet Morrison chose rock as a means to realize his art. His role models did not come only from the American musical tradition, but to a large extent from world poetry. The metropolitan "Flowers of Evil" by Charles Baudelaire left its mark on Morrison's dark poems, as did the symbolic revolutionism of Arthur Rimbaud or the prophetic singing of William Blake. Traces of Kerouac's cult novel "On the Road", a whole generation of beatniks, Fraser's "Golden Branch" and many other capital works are recognizable.
And the name of the group - The Doors? It comes from a book The Doors of Perception - The Doors of Perception Aldous Huxley. Huxley described his experiences with mescaline in 1954. But Huxley also took the title of the book from William Blake who wrote:
If the doors of perception were cleansed
everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.
If the doors of perception were cleared,
everything would appear before man as it is - endless.
So, in the sixties, when I was born, Huxley was being read by a Californian student, Jim Morrison, who was interested in mescaline and Blake and ways of expanding perception. When the time comes to give the band a name, he won't hesitate. The Doors. The door of perception through which he will want to lead us with his music, his images. "I offer pictures. I evoke memories... Freedom. But we can only open the door, we cannot bring people in," he said in an interview.
Tragedy and music
The images that Morrison's best lyrics conjured up in my head were the ones I, as an older teenager, aspired to when I wrote—I wanted them to have equal parts aesthetic playfulness, irrational charm, and deep, incurable sadness.
Here is the time to introduce Dionysus, the ancient Greek god of fertility, vegetation, wine, enjoyment and - ecstasy, into the story. In the Mysteries of Dionysus, full of wine, orgies and "free love", which were later sometimes persecuted by the authorities in ancient Greece and especially condemned by Christianity, our imperishable life can only be glimpsed in the mystical-ecstatic cult. In short, it is about our need to touch eternity with our senses. I came to Dionysus by reading Nietzsche, his big Yes to the sensual, Hellenic attitude towards life. Although then, in the mid-XNUMXs, I did not understand the direct connection between this German philosopher and the musical-mystical quest of Jim Morrison, now this connection is so obvious to me - both were restorers of the Dionysian sense of life: the will to live is the will to ecstasy. With the fact that Morrison sprinkled some apocalyptic spices into it all.
I was not surprised when I later found out that Morrison was strongly influenced by Nietzsche's book "The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music". Morrison, since he studied film and loved theater, called his concerts "sessions".
He was looking for a cure for the trauma when, as a four-year-old, he saw a traffic accident on a desert highway - he later claimed that the souls of two dying Indian passengers from the wrecked bus moved into him, and since then the souls of people from the Navajo nation have lived in him. . He became a rock shaman, the "king of lizards", he wrote verses in which snakes crawled through the desert sand with patterns on their backs that were codes for the other side.
Yugoslav Jimi
Traces of the erotic charisma of the shaman from America remained in the Yugoslav era. Wild strawberries sang of the girl's fascination with Morrison: "And you/ You're in Morrison then/ she swore".
In his ironic report from the night in Zagreb entitled "Smart and bookish people", Johnny Štulić sang:
I tell Ceri that we are strangers, just like Morrison said
Lonely outcasts, half a world...
I did love this thing, but Johnny mixed up Morrison's lyrics and Sartre's. In the song People Are Strange Dorsi say: People are strange when you're a stranger - people are strange when you're a stranger.
In 1983, the Slovenian progressive band Buldožer, in the Balkan sarcastic glorification of Morrison Jim, reached for ten:
Morrison's mother asks Jim
oh my son, from the lizard king
have you ever been startled
jal' from wine, jal' from spicy drugs
Tell her Morrison Jimmy
I was never surprised
neither from drugs, nor from September of wine
I already darkened everything in order...
A little later, along with wine and drugs, virgins are also mentioned.
It remains for us to state that the reaction of our rockers to the Morrison myth was served by the cliché of a sociopathic, promiscuous consumer of all kinds of opiates. During his lifetime, Morrison was aware that he was no longer the owner of his own production because, as he said in 1970, the media "focused too much on my reproductive organ."
Of course, I sometimes contributed to this by flirting with the lenses, for example, in a series of black and white pictures by the author Joel Brodsky where Morrison is photographed in the poses of Jesus or Alexander the Great.
"The End of the Night We Tried to Die"
Jim Douglas Morrison traveled a long way from Florida where he was born to Paris where he died at the age of 27. And the legend about him travels even longer to today's kids. His revolt against civil America was revolt against the strict discipline he was surrounded by while growing up in an officer's dormitory. A wild drive for freedom and testing the boundaries arose from that stuffiness. It was recorded that in the first performances, the shy Morrison turned his back to the audience so that he could sing. A few years later, he invited the audience to the stage, to resist the police. And they followed him.
Morrison's father commanded the US Navy at the time of the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964, when the unproven attacks by North Vietnamese patrol boats on US ships served as the basis for legalizing US entry into the Vietnam War. Parents didn't approve of Morrison's path - but neither did theirs. Cuts off all ties with them. He refuses to see his mother at one of his performances. His father becomes an admiral just as Morrison's stuff is capturing the soul of American and global youth. Perhaps only the son of an admiral could be such a radical pacifist.
Dors' song "The Unknown Soldier" inspired Morrison's colleague who, like him, attended the Film Institute at the University of Los Angeles. That colleague - Francis Ford Coppola - created the film "Apocalypse Now" in 1979, in which a curtain of sound next to bars from Wagner Valkyries makes Morrison's "The End". Never has the nightmare of war been so palpable as in that synthesis of Coppola's images and Morrison's voice.
After 50 years
Morrison's revolutionary temper, which he did not hide, and his willingness to provoke the establishment, were enough for the FBI to take him on the teeth for a while, considering him a potential danger to US security. All this made him an ideal projection figure for the youth who did not want to die in unjust wars, but to realize themselves in a world with less restraint and conventions.
Oliver Stone's 1990 film "The Doors" contributed to the renewal of the myth from which both the artist and the man Morrison had slowly faded. Doors keyboardist Ray Mazarek said after the screening of the film that it is a good film about an American band, but not about the Doors, and Jim Morrison - not at all.
Half a century has passed since the death of the shamanic rocker who burned the candle of his desire for absolute freedom. What's left? When I was very young, with my hair cut and stuffed into a uniform, the dead Morrison sang to me on all-world nights and it gave me comfort.
What is the most vital part of Morrison's legacy?
The fashion magazine Vogue noted with admiration during Morrison's lifetime: "Jim Morrison writes as if Edgar Allan Poe had returned in the guise of a hippie." And that poet was disguised as a hippie in July 1969 in an interview for Rolling Stone to the question of what remains behind the artist prophetically answered: "No one can remember the entire novel." No one can describe a film, a sculpture, a painting. But since there are people - songs can live on".
Bonus video:
