Faking the Dawn

(25.-27.11.2022) Neither Jim Morrison, nor The Doors seem to have been much interested in dusk (or in a bluish evening). No, Jim Morrison was, with The Doors, rather obsessed with dawn. Not in a way of adapting Rimbaud, although Rimbaud, the inventor of the ›blue hour‹, indeed was one of Jim Morrison’s heroes, nor in a way, or at least not particularly in such way, of giving dawn, or its bluish colors, a value of its own. No, I think that with The Doors it is about the extremes of light and darkness, about the intensities of such extremes, and such extremes prepare during dawn (or dusk). Which is what we will see here, while looking at dusk and dawn (and the color blue) – in Jim Morrison and The Doors. And which was so important to The Doors, that, for the cover of their Waiting for the Sun-album, the photographer had to fake dawn (with poetic licence, as one may say).
It is end of November, 2022, and we might also need a little Westcoast sun(set). So why not climbing the hill, to look at the canyon, to look at the shore, while waiting for the sun (to climb, respectively to sink).

One) The Cosmic Cycle

While I am writing this I am listening to the six studio albums of The Doors, and I think that the essence of The Doors is beautifully captured in the verse of the song Waiting for the Sun: the chords are progressing on the organ point of D, with a minor seven initially (and it is a D7 without third, as I would say); then we have G major, which darkens immediatedly to G minor, to reach finally D, respectively the bars, where the Moog synthesizer comes in, majestically, in one or two waves of the same riff (no thirds, but we have f now, not f#, indicating a minor mood, not that of the blues, but rather that of a riff as played in rock).
The beginning, with the minor 7 is somewhat bluesy, but not very much. It is rather a progression from something still undefined, which defines itself only with the Moog, as something rather sublime, mighty, mighty like a big wave coming, at least something big coming, seen from the cliff above. And we have the element of the blues here, but set into a framework, which is not that of the blues, but rather that of an artful, classically composed romantic song. We have the very effective keyboard work of Ray Manzarek, offering mysterious sounds and colors, or grooves, and it combines with the bottleneck guitar voices that Robby Krieger has his guitar singing, while Morrison is adding his brass-and-leather sonority of a voice. And this is only the description on a level of sound, rather. Because what Morrison is singing prepares indeed for something big to come, respectively for a sun to come, while the light is still dark, and dawn has not yet fully begun. Dawn? Not only dawn, it is about the creation of a world, the world, because the first words refer to Eden.

While I am writing this, I have noticed, to my surprise, but also pleasure, that Ray Manzarek, in his memoirs, shows also as a gifted writer. The keyboarder of the Doors, Chicago-born former filmstudent, found his vocation in becoming the keyboarder of the Doors, and worked with his fingers and hands. And in the Doors, his work was perhaps less flamboyant than in his writing, more restrained, perhaps because a) the long-time producer of the Doors, Paul Rothchild, seems to have been a perfectionist; and b) because Manzarek had to react to to and to interact with Morrison’s ideosyncrasies on the one hand, but also with a very talented guitar player such as Robby Krieger. And if one does read other books on the Doors, also other memoirs, one does get indeed the impression that Manzarek must have been an alpha player, a grand character, boasting with self-confidence and at times garrulous, perhaps, but in his keyboard work he showed as a master, and as a writer he could be as garrulous as he (or his editor) wanted, and it is skilled story-telling, indeed, and only more baroque than one would have expected, at first, from the keyboard player of the Doors.

The genesis of the band The Doors is an often-told tale, and it can only go back to either Morrison or Manzarek, because, initially these are the only ones involved, having met at the beach, late in the afternoon of a summer day in 1965 (later in the evening Dorothy would come in, but only when the two man had already written the beginning of that story, while kneeling in the sand of Southern California. Manzarek published his memoirs rather late, but his version is mighty, cinematic and beautifully told, and it is obvious that journalists who want to question that account have actually little chance to do so. Admitting that Manzarek did also write beautifully, they remain in a position of raising the question, if, what a grand character, boasting with self-confidence, might offer you, was – perhaps – not the full truth, or at least not the truth as seen from every angle. Be it as it may – this is actually not relevant here, because what interests me in Manzarek’s account is the setting, and the way Manzarek comments on it, describing how Morrison looked, while the sun was already low above the horizon, and how, in passing-by, Manzarek imagined what the sun would do next, respectively soon:

»It’s called backlighting. It gives everything a halo of light; it makes translucent objects shimmer with an inner fire. And the sun is coming in low and hard. It’s the beginning of eventide. The great orb is beginning its descent into the waters of the unconscious, into the underworld, where it will pass through the darkness, battling the negative powers, and rise triumphant at the next day’s dawning.« (p. 100)

Two) Blue Frames

In 1912 a perfume named Heure Bleue had been created, and it is not surprising that Jim Morrison, as a poet, seems not to have been tempted to use expressions that, on the one hand his hero Arthur Rimbaud had created, but on the other hand had sunken to be adapted by commercial culture. A second reason for Morrison, as a poet, rather avoiding atmospheric descriptions of dusk or dawn (with blue-isms, as one might call them) might be that Morrison yet was eager to sing the blues, to practice the blues in his singing, but that he was less eager perhaps to sing about the blues (as a genre), and any reference, using the designation of blue, might be understood, immediately, in a framework of music that draws – also – on the blues, as a reference to ›being blue‹ and so on. Such practice runs into danger of losing intensities, by replacing them with (with actually rather colorless) intellectual references. And this was not often the practice of The Doors (even if they had a couple of songs that did that). Still Morrison was obsessed with the motif of dawn, he decribed the scenery of a car crash that he had seen in his childhood as a scenery of dawn, he had a killer awakening ›before dawn‹, he spoke of ›wasting the dawn‹, and his practice, as a poet, seems to have been one of improvising around such suggestive, and often dark motifs (weird scenes inside a gold mine; a crystal ship; a blue bus), having them to develop strong intensities, to have such intensities build up. And yet it is possible, if one would like so, to study also the blues and the history of the blues, by studying the various memoirs the other three members of The Doors have published.
Ray Manzarek, for example, the Chicago-born filmstudent, is offering many reminiscences of growing up with blues music, and also, very literally, of blue, as Manzarek recalled cobalt blue:

»Old bottles of a cobalt blue not used in bottle making since the discovery of its dangerous properties, but what a beautiful deep blue color.« (p. 42)

As well as did recall electric blue:

»For graduation from Everett School, my father bought me – from the Bernstein brothers – one of the sharpest suits I’ve ever worn in my life. It was a one-button roll in a deep and cool blue color. Not a business blue but a sort of crazed and electric blue. Very cool.«

(Picture: canva.com)

(Picture: hollywoodreporter.com)

Three) Predawn Light in Robby Krieger

In times of autumn blues or winter blues, it is perhaps helpful to remind that one particular Doors classic, namely the song People Are Strange, another song that is reminding of Kurt Weill rather than of the blues, was actually the result of overcoming an actual state of depression.
Jim Morrison, as Robby Krieger recalls in his memoirs, had come to the house of drummer John Densmore and of Krieger, a house in the Hollywood Hills, where the two other band members had been entertaining some female companionship. And Jim Morrison had been in a depressive mood, so serious that only one thing seemed to be left to help him out of that state, and this one last thing seems to have been light. The scenery is the Laurel Canyon, with its Appian Way:

»We all tried to cheer him [Morrison] up, but nothing was working. As the predawn light filtered through the windows, I suggested we all take a walk up to Appian Way to watch the sunrise.
It worked. The sun brightened both the sky and Jim’s mood.« (p. 118)

And immediately after that the song People Are Strange was born, with Morrison coming up with the initial ideas, a song that in many ways can be understood, and also in the way that, in the first lines of the song, Morrison is the stranger, who has estranged himself from everything, with the result that people look back strange to him. In that way (as in other ways) the song is timeless, and another level it is linked to a particular scenery and experience with light and perhaps also with landscape. Which is why we remind that song here with pictures of such sceneries and such intensities of light.
I don’t know whether the house of John Densmore in Hollywood Hills is the actual house of the aforementioned scenery, but it is worth to take a look at that house (and inside the house) too.

(Picture: reddingpa; Dusk view from Mulholland Drive)

(Picture: Doug Dolde; Dawn in the Santa Monica Mountains)

Four) The Cosmic Cycle, Again

And yes, it is well known that the supposed sunrise on the cover of the Doors album Waiting for the Sun is actually a sunset. The scenery (behind the scene) here is Malibu. And the album came out, before the actual song Waiting for the Sun was published. It did already exist, but published it was only on the album Morrison Hotel (which has another story to its cover photograph attached). But here it is about dusk and dawn, and here is what we know (quote taken from the Doors biography by Mike Wall).

»Paul also shot the album cover for Waiting for the Sun. He’d wanted to shoot a sunrise, but it was impossible on the West Coast, so they shot a sunset instead, in Malibu, at the top of the canyon, Paul standing on top of his car, some shiny boards in front of the band to reflect the setting sun back onto their faces. Faking the dawn. An apposite image for an album that was as twisted and contrived as some of it was uplifting.« (p. 205)

It is sometimes good to know that with the art that deals with big intensities, also such rather banal stories come up, that, if being associated with strong intensities, might relativize a bit the myth, by showing that sometimes a big myth has to work with little tricks and gadgets and also, as here, a little faking. But it is all in the framework of poetic license, as I would say, because the idea of dawn was absolutely essential. The album cover, as the whole album, actually prepare for the aforementioned song, which, at least in my view, embodies, already in its chord progression of the verse, what the Doors were (and still are); a band that dealt with the extreme intensities of light and darkness. And only in the end, with the song Riders on the Storm, that longtime producer Paul Rothchild had initially referred to as ›coctail music‹, the Doors had seemded to be on a way of becoming ›cooler‹ and more introverted perhaps. This song’s atmosphere, in its pensiveness, in its rather ›inner singing‹, has, as I would say, an atmosphere of dusk, of losing oneself in long improvisations also (as thoughts may take their own ways in all kinds of directions). And the song had been indicating, according to Manzarek, the directions the Doors might have taken, if not Morrison had died in Paris in 1971.

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