miker wrote:
>Soul Kitchen, Backdoor Man. Lots of great, fun songs.
Some of it
>enchanting, hypnotic, like Light My Fire. Great
stuff.
Weren't those all on the first album?
>I remember an artist for their successes, not their
failures. Anybody
>that works at it long enough has got a good chance of
doing something
>that sucks.
So it's really amazing, then, how Morrison was responsible
for so much dribble in such a short time. :-) Maybe it was
the drugs.
Anyway, my point was that while I enjoyed much of the Doors'
music
(particularly the first album which, even with THE END, still
ranks as one of the truly great rock debuts) I always felt
that lyrically, and especially once he started truly
believing all this poet/shaman bullshit, Morrison produced an
awful lot of excrement. Nor do I think many of his lyrics
even come close to hard-boiled, except for isolated
snippets.
A killer on the road whose brain is squirming like a toad?
Toads hop, they don't slither. Ah, but then "snake" doesn't
rhyme with "road"...
Anyway, Morrison didn't write BACKDOOR MAN or LIGHT MY FIRE.
Or the ALABAMA SONG either.
And Mark, with tongue-in-cheek:
>So Morrison was the James Ellroy of hardboiled
music?
More like the Boston Terhane, probably. He displays a similar
portentousness as ol' Jimbo. Maybe it's me, but there's
something I find off-putting about such earnest and
heavy-handed literary pretentiousness: "Look at me, I'm a
GREAT WRITER!" It all just seems so self-conscious.
Maybe the little girls understand Howling Wolf, but I think
it's mostly frustrated lit majors who "understand"
Morrison.
Hard-boiled is an attitude, and I don't think Morrison had
that attitude, whereas Zevon and Cash both did. In spades.
There was a darkness at the heart of some of their best work
that was presented straight up, no chaser. I doubt either of
them considered themselves poets, but they were both damn
fine writers whose work was (Jim, take note!) tough and
colloquial.
--
Kevin Burton Smith Got game? The Thrilling Detective P.I. Trivia Challenge is waiting. http://www.thrillingdetective.com -- # Plain ASCII text only, please. Anything else won't show up. # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
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