Dead Indians scattered on dawn's highway bleeding
Fri 03 June 2011
Thomas Gray, Bach of Communication
It starts just like the rest of them, with Jim’s renowned childhood experience of a horrific road fatality in the New Mexico desert.
But that’s where the similarities end, as the newest documentary on the Doors seeks to de-mystify the cult of personality surrounding Jim Morrison.
When you’re strange resists the impulse to deify and distort a man who, though talented, enigmatic and mysterious, was after all just a man.
Few bands have had their status and intent more comprehensively inflated than The Doors, the sixties quartet who’ve inspired as many fatuous claims as they’ve sold albums-80 million or so.
They were, starting from 1965, a seditious pop band, practitioners of the overwrought and the baroque and finally sturdy bluesmen, but the serious deification rests with frontman Jim Morrison, who died in 1971.
Though unarguably a brilliant poet, great performer and good singer, Jim’s god-like status in popular culture has often overshadowed his other attributes of an alcoholic, drug addict and loner.
This depiction of him as the noble poet often omits the buffoonery and hell-raising that he was notorious for in his time.
He offended countless people, and apparently even left the brutally self-critical Janis Joplin in tears on one occasion.
Narrated by Johnny Depp and sourced from previously unreleased footage, the documentary is filled out with scenes featuring an eerily-accurate Jim look-alike who is trapped in a type of purgatory, looking over his life as we the viewer do.
Go and see it.
Image(s) designed by