\u201c<\/em>I had a copy Jim autographed and gave to me but I lost it.\u00a0 Yeah\u2026That was so cool. That was so fuckin\u2019 cool. On that particular day I had no specific real duties to perform other than I just happened to be there. Jim was really excited. Everybody was. All of his band mates and all of the Doors family as it were just really happy for him. An incredible festive moment that wasn\u2019t real done in a formal sense. The cases of the books arrived and everybody went, \u2018Hey Jim. Your books are here.\u2019 Low key. Jim was like real shy about opening it up and he was trying to hide how proud he was because this was a step to legitimacy as a poet and after we opened the first case of books, everyday said, \u2018Fuck it, man, let\u2019s party.\u2019 I thoroughly enjoyed the occasion of seeing him that happy. Unbridled pure happiness. Not with sticking his chest out getting all stupid, the quiet happiness of seeing oneself validated. So that was so fuckin\u2019 special.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\u201cJim was really as humble guy and almost apologetically so. He cared about such things that others would recognize if not his talent his efforts to be an artist. That\u2019s why the Lizard King, bull shit teeny bopper shit that drove him up the wall,\u201d underscored Funches. \u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI knew Jim was a great poet,\u201d Doors\u2019 co-founder\/keyboardist Ray Manzarek reiterated to me during a 1995 interview.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cSee that\u2019s why we put the band together in the first place. It was going to be poetry together with rock \u2018n\u2019 roll.\u00a0 Not like poetry and jazz. Or like it, it was poetry and jazz from the \u201850s, except we were doing poetry and rock \u2018n\u2019 roll. And our version of rock \u2018n\u2019 roll was whatever you could bring to the table. Robby, bring your Flamenco guitar, Robby bring that bottle neck guitar, bring that sitar tuning. John, bring your marching drums and your snares and your four on the floor. Ray, bring your classical training and your blues training and your jazz training. Jim, bring your Southern gothic poetry, your Arthur Rimbaud poetry. It all works in rock \u2018n\u2019 roll. Jim was a magnificent poet.<\/p>\n
\u201cI loved his poetry, that he was doing ecological poetry. But don\u2019t forget in late 1967, the potheads were aware. That\u2019s what was so great about marijuana opening the doors of perception. The potheads were the first mass ecological movement.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Doors were part of Raymond Chandler, John Fante, Dalton Trumbo. It was the dark streets and The Day Of The Locust<\/em>, ya know. Miss Lonely Hearts<\/em>. That\u2019s where the Doors come from,\u201d summarized Manzarek. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n\u201cI had started the song \u2018Do It\u2019 with a lick that I had and we needed words for it,\u201d added Doors\u2019 guitarist and songwriter Robby Krieger, \u201cand I didn\u2019t have anything. And so, we would go to Jim\u2019s poetry book. A lot of times that\u2019s what happened. Like with \u2018Peace Frog.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
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<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\u201cThe Doors radiated a sexual heat that evoked ancient blood rituals,\u201d suggests Dr. James Cushing, a retired Professor of English and Literature at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and deejay on KEBF-FM.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cMorrison\u2019s poetry formed one part of a larger theatre-music-performance that climaxed when tragic heroism blossomed up out of his intimate Freudian night-garden. The Doors\u2019 first two records almost captured that dark bloom, and they retain great power to disturb us with their shadowy images of private life palpably heightened to the realm of myth.\u00a0 When the band performed, they also had a jazz flexibility in their set lists.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n
In July 1995, at the MET Theatre on Oxford Avenue in East Hollywood, I produced and co-curated a month-long Rock and Roll in Literature series with director Darrell Larson and associate producer Daniel Weizmann.<\/p>\n
Manzarek, Densmore, and Krieger reunited for us and played \u201cPeace Frog,\u201d \u201cLove Me Two Times,\u201d and \u201cLittle Red Rooster\u201d on July 8. Music journalist Kirk Silsbee read from Art Pepper\u2019s\u00a0Straight Life<\/em>,\u00a0John Densmore recited an entry from his new novel, and actor Michael Ontkean recited\u00a0Ode to L.A.<\/em>\u00a0by Jim Morrison.<\/p>\nLast decade I discussed the Doors and Morrison\u2019s relationship to cinema with novelist Weizmann.<\/p>\n
He subsequently emailed me Motel Money Murder Madness: Jim Morrison and the Noir Tradition.<\/em><\/p>\n\u201cSome like to make fun of Jim Morrison for his poetic ambitions\u2014he was young, ultra-serious, and at times he had the somber college student\u2019s yen for Hamlet-like navel-gazing. What\u2019s more, like Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor, the force of Morrison\u2019s stardom at times threatens to overshadow his artistic gifts.\u00a0Patti Smith recently wrote that she felt \u2018both kinship and contempt\u2019 watching Morrison perform.\u00a0But Jim Morrison\u2019s lyrics did introduce a whole new and highly literary sensibility to pop music\u2014the Southern California noir of Raymond Chandler and\u00a0the Southern Gothic tradition of\u00a0William Faulkner. And pop music has never really been the same since.<\/p>\n
\u201cOf course, new things were already happening to the song lyric before Morrison made his move: Dylan shocked the airwaves with biblical passion and Whitmanesque frenzy. The Beatles followed with colorful utopian imagery that had roots in James Joyce, Lewis Carroll, and Edward Lear\u2019s nonsense verse. But nobody brought the gravity, the hard realism and the psychological pressure of noir to the popular song before Jim. He represented a major leap toward adulthood in \u201967 and the boomers flipped for it. After a youth saturated with sunshine and goody-goody-gumdrops consumerism, they had secretly been craving just such a counter-move.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe first album\u2019s shadowy album cover and billboard, shot by Guy Webster, was a knowing nod to noir film posters like Out of the Past<\/em> and In a Lonely Place<\/em>. And Jim\u2019s crooner voice and movie-star good looks defied the rock template, as well. But most of all, the words, their impressionistic, nightmare-like alienation, were strange and yet instantly recognizable.\u00a0<\/p>\n\u201cWe can\u2019t know exactly what inspired Morrison to fuse the noir dreamscape to the popular song… but he was a military brat, raised in Florida and New Mexico. The South, with its backwoods quiet, its open highways, its malevolence, and its anti-culture, was in his bones. Throw a UCLA dose of Nietzsche, Rimbaud, the exotica of Eastern philosophy, Jungian psych, and the Native American tragedy into the mix, and you\u2019ve got a potion powerful enough to challenge the lyrical norms as deeply as the sound of Hendrix\u2019s guitar did.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the last of the Venice Beach beatniks, Morrison self-published slim volumes of verse, even at the height of his rock stardom. He certainly had a hard time straddling his roles as shaman, youth leader, pop icon, and serious artist. But he struggled in earnest, and it\u2019s impossible to talk about the Los Angeles tradition that stretches from Chandler, West and Fante to Didion herself, Bukowski and beyond, without seeing Morrison\u2019s part.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat\u2019s more, for better or worse, whole music genres have Morrison to thank for forging darkness to the pop song. Bowie\u2019s Berlin Trilogy, post-punk, and even grunge couldn\u2019t have happened without him. Some, like the Cult, seemed only to get the histrionics; others, like Jane\u2019s Addiction, reached harder for poetry but lacked the warmth of Morrison\u2019s highly intimate voice. Because, in the end, despite the shaman poses, the billboards and the spotlights, Morrison really portrayed himself as a lone human, in true noir fashion, struggling through the night. He wrote from the personal inner space that is poetry.\u201d<\/p>\n
(Harvey Kubernik is the author of 20 books, including 2009\u2019s Canyon Of Dreams: The Magic And The Music Of Laurel Canyon<\/em>, 2014\u2019s Turn Up The Radio! Rock, Pop and Roll In Los Angeles 1956-1972<\/em>, 2015’s Every Body Knows: Leonard Cohen<\/em>, 2016’s Heart of Gold Neil Young<\/em> and 2017’s\u00a01967: A Complete Rock Music History of the Summer of Love<\/em>.<\/p>\nSterling\/Barnes and Noble in 2018 published Harvey and Kenneth Kubernik\u2019s The Story Of The Band: From Big Pink To The Last Waltz<\/em>. In 2021 they wrote Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child<\/em> for Sterling\/Barnes and Noble.\u00a0<\/p>\nOtherworld Cottage Industries in 2020 published Harvey\u2019s Docs That Rock, Music That Matters<\/em>. His Screen Gems: (Pop Music Documentaries and Rock \u2018n\u2019 Roll TV Scenes<\/em>) was published on February 6, 2026 by BearManor Media.<\/p>\nHarvey spoke at the special hearings in 2006 initiated by the Library of Congress held in Hollywood, California, discussing archiving practices and audiotape preservation.<\/p>\n
In 2017, he appeared at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, in its Distinguished Speakers Series and as a panelist discussing the forty-fifth anniversary of The Last Waltz <\/em>at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles in 2023.<\/p>\nDuring 2025, Kubernik was interviewed in the Siobhan Logue-written and -directed documentary The Sound of Protest<\/em>,airing on the Apple TVOD TV broadcasting service. The film also features Smokey Robinson, Hozier, Skin (Skunk Anansie), Two-Tone’s Jerry Dammers, Ang\u00e9lique Kidjo, Holly Johnson, David McAlmont, Rhiannon Giddens, and more.<\/p>\nHarvey was an interview subject with Iggy Pop, the Beach Boys\u2019 Bruce Johnston, Love\u2019s Johnny Echols, the Bangles’ Susanna Hoffs, Victoria and Debbi Peterson, and members of the Seeds for director\/producer Neil Norman\u2019s documentary The Seeds: Pushin’ Too Hard<\/em>. In summer 2026, GNP Crescendo will release the film on DVD\/Blu-ray). Author Miss Pamela Des Barres narrates).<\/p>\nJim Morrison photo by Heather Harris<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n