Writings
All authored by Rob Chevelle…
I WENT TO SLEEP
Driving south on the 110 freeway in Los Angeles
Downtown is to my left
Engaged in light conversation with a woman who is driving
It’s a nice day out – mid day sun warms my legs
I look out the window to the right and I think about where I am in life
I’m happy overall but yet hungry for a lot more
I guess I have done more right than wrong to be where I am at
But I feel like I have been working hard for something
But yet on some kind of an extended vacation
The person on my left continues to talk
It’s a good vibe but I don’t really get what she is saying specifically
As if she is talking to me from the other end of a tunnel
As I look in front of her and off to my left I see it
Completely fucking shocked, amazed, stunned and outraged
Each slow century of a second moves one to the next in disbelief
I see very large light-brown vertical clouds that are white on top
Appear one by one in huge silent explosions across the city
Like hot smoked filled gaseous screams
Then a dark haze starts to fill the sky
Why is there no sound?
Does anybody else see or hear this?
Why is the woman driving looking straightforward and then over at me smiling?
I realize right then – that nuclear bombs are hitting and going off on a seemingly beautiful day
In down town Los Angeles, California
In the United States of America
I’m thinking shouldn’t everything be over in seconds? Fried? Toasted?
Shouldn’t the skin be falling off the bones by now?
How do I get the hell out of hear? How am I going to survive this?
How long is it going to take for people to comprehend what is going on?
I think about my daughter who is visiting Grandpa and Grandma in Switzerland with her mother
Are they safe? Can I reach them? Or are they still over here on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood?
Why don’t I remember?
Inside the car, things seem quiet and safe for a moment
As I watch the skyline being painted by Einstein
The next moment the sky is black and I wonder if it is nighttime?
The next moment after that I am crawling through some kind of burnt out down town building
That looks worse than any crack house
People are screaming and in pain or dead
It completely looks like hell or what one might expect hell to be
As I stumble through the rubble and flames and pain I realize that I am ok – or at least physically
I think about my daughter and decide I must reach her
How do I get from down town LA to Hollywood in these conditions?
Or should I continue to what remains of LAX and cross the seas to find her?
I’m living a nightmare
I feel all has been lost
And communication is no more
I feel a void of apathy in mankind which now moves down to death
As I seem to move on and making my way I think back on my life like a movie
What have I done? Have I done enough? Have I done right?
I know I have done wrong
There are things I would change
Societies are so frail
Groups of people and most trying to get along
The collective mind
There seems to be more than meets the eye
I feel I have progressed greatly spiritually and mentally in this life
Will I make it through all this?
The streets are black now, and I hear sounds of death and destruction and last gasps
Pictures of families and trips to lakes fall from the sky in embers
I now get very hot
I try to notice if the body is breathing
I look at my skin and it is gone
The heart has stopped beating
But I still move the body forward
Then realize I am leaving it and floating above it as it falls
I think of all the times I criticized my body
And now I look down on it and feel sad for it
I look around and I see the city is still burning
What used to exist and was taken for granted is gone
Then I hear it.
I hear a garbage truck
It won’t stop pounding
I get angry
And then I awake
In my own bed
In my nice apartment
Alone
The sun is coming through the window
I see my posters and paintings
I look at my body’s arms and legs and all is there
I realize I am awake
I burst into enthusiasm and jump out of bed
And then slide comfortably into cheerfulness and walk around my place
I open the front door
I see flowers blooming
Life lives on
Life is good
I’m going to do better
I’m going to call my daughter
And reach a new DAWN…
WHO, REALLY, WAS JAMES DOUGLAS MORRISON? (1943 – 1971)
When we hear people talk about Jim Morrison, we usually hear things like he was the singer of the rock band, The Doors, and Light My Fire is a great song. Other people might say he was a total alcoholic and a jerk, as portrayed in the 1991 Oliver Stone movie, The Doors. And we all know what we see and hear on the silver screen or in the media must all be true, right? He was the Lizard King, dressed in leather and he could do anything. People seem to love him or “don’t care for that kind of music, much”. I have even heard that he couldn’t sing worth a damn.
I have read 18 books dedicated to him and the band. I have listened to all of the music countless times, read the lyrics over again, read all the poetry in printed form, listened to the spoken poetry and pretty much everything else I have been able to experience, including his last recorded words on a rare tape recording in June of 1971, four weeks before he died. Ok. A little much, but I did it!
I’m into a wide variety of music and art—everything from the Pet Shop Boys to Slayer, poets Rimbaud to Bukowski, dives to pent houses, from being an MVP in football to Buddha.
Even though I never met the man (I was 2 1/2 when The Doors had their first hit single), I feel at this point I might be able to at least attempt to put down what kind of person he really was, for others to read. Of course this is coming from my viewpoint.
Jim (the dude), Jimbo (the drunk) or James (the gentleman and poet), did have different moods that were captured by many different people who wrote about him during his time or sometimes much later. The viewpoints of him span from seeing him as a loving person to a deliberately cruel person. It is a mix of viewpoints. What I mean by that is, if five people witnessed a car accident there might just be five different stories or variations of the story if the witnesses were interviewed separately from each other. And then being asked again years later you might get even more of a varied story. After reading these stories and viewpoints from the band members, girlfriends, people in the industry, straight up friends or so called friends, I noticed a lot of common observations that I will concentrate on in this text with my own conclusions at the end. (No peaking or skipping down to the end of the text. – Very bad.)
Some of the more well known details about Jim, that have been repeated and that many people know, are some of the documented facts, like he was born in Melbourne, Florida, December 8, 1943. He was a Sagittarius. He was a Navy brat and moved around a lot. His Father was an Admiral in the Navy and was rarely home. There are stories of abuse and problems that a psychologist would have a field day with, endlessly blaming all of his later foes in life or his childhood and his parents and leaving Jim not responsible. He lived a modest but not poor early life and he attended several colleges, including St. Petersburg Junior College, Florida State University and UCLA, where he graduated, after majoring in cinematography, in 1965.
Most of us have heard how Jim and Ray Manzarek, the bands keyboard player, met on the beach in Venice, California, and how they decided to put a rock and roll band together and make a million dollars. They both knew each other in film school at UCLA then met up again one fine day in the summer after graduation.
At this point, Jim was a college graduate living on a rooftop in Venice, California. He was living on scraps, eating LSD regularly and writing poetry. Having no money, he was about 5’10 and weighed about 145 lbs., tops. He had never actually sung in a band and only once sang on stage when he was drunk at a party that Ray attended. Ray was a seasoned musician with blues and classical training on piano in his background and who gigged regularly. Ray was 5 years Jim’s senior and later became a big brother and father figure for him.
Enter John Densmore, the band’s future drummer. He was from California and was also a working musician with a background in Jazz. He was honest but also liked to complain, especially about Jim. Then there was Robby Krieger, a guitarist, who was very mild mannered, and was also from California and a working musician who came from a background in folk rock and flamenco guitar. Ray knew both John and Robby from a meditation group. So Ray really brought all four points of the diamond together.
When the band first got together it was shaky. John did not think Jim could sing at all, but he noticed a certain presence about him and decided to give it a go.
After some time, songs started to come together. Jim had poetry and lyrics for many songs, for which he had already created melodies. Then the rest of the band created music from their specialty backgrounds. After a while Jim announced that the others needed to contribute to writing songs or coming to rehearsal with their own songs. In the end, Jim and Robby were the prominent writers of the Doors songs on all albums, with Jim writing the majority of the songs.
During the early period before the band was signed, they struggled as many bands do. Jim lived with Ray or with other friends and actually rarely ever had a place of his own, which continued until his death, well after he had the resources to buy whatever he wanted. Jim stayed in hotels with little more than the clothes on his back or slept on friend’s couches or at different girlfriends places, throughout his career.
The most consistent attribute of the band around this time is that they rehearsed and rehearsed and then rehearsed some more. This went on very consistently in a few different places in LA. Finally they started to gig and became the house band of the London Fog on the Sunset Strip. The stories of Jim singing with his back to the audience seem to be consistent. This actually came about from how they would rehearse in a garage. They would all face each other like a diamond. Many times the bars they played in were literally empty, so they would just keep on getting the songs together and writing more songs at these places in which they were supposed to be gigging. In this way, The Doors had about two full years to get the material together for their first two albums. During this time Jim’s baritone voice formed and really expanded with his ability to reach high pitch screams.
During this time, Jim met Pamela Courson, who became the most consistent girlfriend he had and was with him in the end.
The band basically gigged and gigged and shopped their demo around Los Angeles and the Sunset Strip but were rejected by everyone except for one small deal that was later dropped. But the band got to keep some equipment. Finally one night they were invited to play by a girl from The Whisky A – Go Go. This night is well documented as the night they played the song The End, and Jim added the section of Kill the Father, Fuck the Mother, after being almost dragged to the gig by John and Ray from a hotel where he had taken a large amount of LSD. That night there were several industry people present and they got an offer from a representative of a young label called Electra.
Between 1965 and 1971 Jim Morrison wrote one hundred songs, recorded seven platinum albums, wrote and published four editions of poems, made three films, recorded his poetry, wrote screenplays, and filled dozens of notebooks with verse and notations. He played more than two hundred concerts with the Doors. He established himself as a sex icon and the major American rock star of the Sixties. The Doors were actually the first stadium rock band and were the original group to work out new technology in lighting and sound, business and profits, which big time bands used for years to come. This was a tremendous amount of production and goal achievement in six short years, for its time or even today.
Jim Morrison, as it turns out, was much more important than anyone had realized at the time. Critically dismissed as a has-been Bozo/Dionysus before his death, Morrison’s poetic visions have stayed on the radio for more than thirty years and on into the next century.
Having written the above in a very condensed version, who was he? Who was this guy who came to the party, or walked down the street, who liked to sit in a café and read or write by himself? Who was this guy who covered a room, where they had just cut the final recording of The End, with white foam from a fire extinguisher, after returning to the studio that night and leaving one boot behind? Who was this guy who wrote the perfect essay for a friend who was freaking out before his finals and produced an A+ grade for him?
James Douglas Morrison was a man who walked the planet like any other person with the same rules and agreements that we all seem to hold. The person, the spirit, was a bit bigger, if you will, and more able than many. James, the person, had a very high IQ and was extremely well read. He lived in a time of chaos and change. It was a time of a terrible and unnecessary war called Vietnam, which ruined countless lives. It was a time of riots across the USA, assassinations, and so on. Many bands at the time wrote about peace and love and dressed in flower child clothing. The Doors were the dark band from LA—The Acid Rock Psychedelic Doors—the Demon Doors.
Jim’s purpose was to wake up mankind and to disagree with the controlling establishment. His vehicle to do so started with his poetry and then later he saw the means of fronting a rock band to communicate more to the masses. Doors shows at the time were literally rituals and gatherings and he screamed and screeched many times at the start of a show “Wake Up!”
I believe that Jim slowly went into apathy after he saw his goal was not being achieved. Not only would he take every drug available or handed to him, he also drank more and more until his death. He saw that his audiences were no longer listening but just wanted more and more antics and wanted to observe a kind of a freak show. Most did not care about the message or words he offered. He had a wonderful ability to move people in an audience out of their heads. Doors shows were either incredible, beyond belief, or some- times real bad, depending on Jim’s mood and how much booze or drugs he had in him, which accelerated towards the end.
Jim also embraced early on in life a philosopher who was also a poet and writer from Germany named Fredrick Nietzsche (1844 – 1900) who went mad late in life and spent the rest of his days in a hospital. I have read some of his texts and with the exception of a very small amount of one line quotes, the body of his text is very confusing and short of any actual answers to life in my opinion. However, Jim took many of his writings to heart it seems as well as part of his philosophy. Jim also embraced Arthur Rimbaud (1854 – 1891), who was a very young French poet. Arthur Rimbaud, was very much into the disorganization or derangement of the senses to get to truth. He said “A poet makes himself a visionary through a long and systematized disorganization of all the senses.” And “The poet makes himself a seer (a person who sees) by a long, prodigious (large) and rational disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, and keeps only their quintessence’s” (pure essence). – Arthur Rimbaud
Jim came to believe that by doing as many drugs and booze as possible and to do the unexpected or go against the grind as much as possible was following these ideals.
It is hard for most people to comprehend the amount of drugs and booze this man swallowed. If you look at pictures of him, his body seems to have literally aged 20 years in a 6 year period. When he would come clean for a while he did look much better but the drugs and booze still took a toll. He used his body like a rag doll.
Jim must have put 25 years of living into those 6 years. He was a candle lit at both ends and he burned twice as bright. He was a Lit Soul that was in serious trouble. He invented himself and consciously put his style, character and persona in the spot light. It was no accident. He decided to do the leather lizard king thing that he later threw in the trash when he felt his message was no longer being heard.
The bottom line is that we all have the unconscious mind that gets out of hand and controls us to different degrees and is the source of all our pain. Adding drugs and that much booze makes it way worse, to say the absolute least. Jim also embraced a philosophy that one clearly cannot survive without chains, in my opinion. There is no way a being can take that amount of drugs and alcohol and keep his sanity. I do believe Jim was doing the best that he could with his decisions and the information he had at the time. He was not consciously committing suicide but was slowly succumbing.
He started off with a purpose and he took it to the next level. When he was no longer achieving that purpose and going down the road of a dead end philosophy, while doing the drugs that he did, he began piling up some bad deeds and unfortunate events along the way and at that time he left the USA and went to Paris.
The reasons he went to Paris were several. Firstly, he had completed his contract to Electra Records and fulfilled his original contract and was free from that commitment, so he decided to take off for Paris with Pam, his long term girlfriend. Secondly, the court case for the Miami trail for his alleged exposing of himself, which he did not do, was coming to an end. His lawyer was informed by an inside source that Jim would be going to prison and that the prison he would go to would give him little chance of surviving and that he might be killed. This person said it was part of the plan from the corrupt judge who was going for re-election and wanted to set an example of hard discipline to garner votes. Thirdly, he wanted to get away from some of the bad feelings and bad times that he had created and felt that going to Paris to start anew on his poetry and film career would give him the possibility of doing more music, after a long break. He had plans to come clean.
But what happened was that Jim died in Paris. There are several stories of what happened in the end. The Oliver Stone movie would have you believe a romantic ending in which his body simply gave out on him in a Paris bathtub with Pam crying by his side when she discovered his body hours later after he did not come back to bed. Yet another story has Jim out getting heroin for Pam and then over dosing on it, himself. Other stories are of Jim being taken out by the government, possibly in the same way that Hendrix, Joplin and Jones are reported to have died, in almost the same year. Another story says the mob took him out for sodomizing a minor, whose father was in the mob. The most recent version in late 2007 is that he was found in the bathroom of a Paris bar called the Rock n Roll Circus in one of the men’s stalls after sampling Pam’s herion by snorting it. The drug dealer thugs took his body back to his apartment and thretened Pam that they would kill her if she told the truth. The owner of the bar who was there that night finally came out and told what he calls the truth since he thought it was now safe as the drug dealers have been dead themselves for many years.
The last story above seems the most real to me. Before that I considered the following as the closest to the truth. One night Jim was out partying. When he came home to Pam she was nodding out on heroin. He asked her if the white stuff on the table was cocaine and she, in her dazed state, said yes and that she was mad at him for leaving her at home. So, Jim got down on his knees and snorted a few lines of what he thought was coke but actually took in pure heroin and died of a heart attack with the overdose to his system. Pam freaked out and called The Count who supplied the heroin. He told Pam to touch nothing and then came over with some help to clean out the apartment of all drugs. He put Jim in the bathtub to revive him but it was too late. Jim’s body stayed in the apartment with Pam for about four days in a coffin with a change of ice twice a day until it was buried in the famous Paris cemetery.
Pam died two years later in 1973 of a heroin overdose in Hollywood. Jim left his incomplete will to Pam.
Jim’s entire estate and ¼ of The Doors annual royalties went to Pam’s parents in the mid 70’s. Pam saw very little of it before she died. Jim met Pam’s parents twice. Jim’s parents have battled for some of the money for years.
We can admire Jim for his accomplishments and his art and his original purpose and goal. We can actually agree that he might have achieved many of those accomplishments and goals, in actuality, as his art is still persisting through time, to this day. He touched a lot of people in his day and well after. And, although there were some really bad times, I am sure he had a really great time, overall, while he was around.
We can also learn from his failures…
