"When You're Strange": The real Jim Morrison

"When You're Strange": The real Jim Morrison
Almost 20 years after Oliver Stone's legendary "The Doors," Tom DiCillo's doc takes on the Lizard King
By Andrew O'Hehir


Rhino Enterntainment


During a concert recording heard on the soundtrack of Tom DiCillo's trippy, fascinating documentary "When You're Strange," Doors lead singer Jim Morrison demands of his audience, "Would anybody in here like to see my genitals?" When the response to that rhetorical question has died down, Morrison continues: "I don't think there should even be a president, man. I think we should have total democracy."

It would be easy to conclude that the Lizard King was massively wasted on booze or hash or acid or some other drug cocktail of choice on that occasion, and that moreover he was kind of a self-important idiot. Both things are very likely true, but the intellectual thread that connects Jim Morrison's cock to the White House is not as flimsy as it appears. However you feel about the Doors and their music -- and DiCillo's generous and substantial film leaves room for varying interpretations -- the band had an outsize cultural impact, embodying the Dionysian macho-rebel spirit of late-'60s white (male) American youth with psilocybin intensity.

At this point, documentaries about '60s rock bands constitute their own genre, and it's frequently a tiresome one: Clips of civil-rights protests and Vietnam firefights, a highlight tour of assassinations and campus uprisings. There's a little bit of all that in "When You're Strange," but the film stands out for several reasons. There's the total absence of talking-head interviews with grizzled scenesters (or any other present-day footage); the cool and measured narration by Johnny Depp (clearly the perfect choice); the direction by DiCillo, a hard-luck indie veteran making his first documentary. "When You're Strange" is also free of the "fair use" copyright restrictions that plague so many rock docs. All the surviving band members signed off on the project, and you'll hear all the major Doors hits (from "Break on Through" and "Light My Fire" to "L.A. Woman" and "Riders on the Storm") in this film, which has been timed to accompany a 13-song soundtrack release from Rhino Entertainment.

"When You're Strange" consists almost entirely of archival material: home movies and photos, concert and rehearsal footage, period TV broadcasts, even clips from a UCLA student film in which Morrison appeared before he became famous. Especially since we're talking about a band whose entire career spanned less than five years (from early 1967 to Morrison's death in the summer of '71), this strategy collapses the historical distance between us and the Doors, and spares us the morass of maudlin pseudo-Proustian reflection into which many such pop-nostalgia films tumble. Furthermore, this underscores the ways that Morrison, in all his confusion and self-contradiction -- reclusive poet, leather-clad sex god, reluctant celebrity, abusive drunk, pop star with limited musical gifts -- remains a vital cultural force, the conscious or unconscious model for many rock stars, actors or rappers who came later.

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http://www.salon.com/life/rock_and_roll/index.html?story=/ent/movies/andrew_ohehir/2010/04/08/when_youre_strange

I've always been a huge doors fan.

and I'm old enough to remember when their stuff was fresh and new.

Playing the End at two in the morning when no one else was around was seriously emotional.

"i'm drunk i'm nobody. i'm drunk i'm famous. i'm drunk i'm dead"

1) i wasn't saying leary was historically accurate. he;'s a comedian. it was funny though
2) don't even get me started on jim morrison poetry. ugh

:eyes:

More like cretinous blank verse..

morrison's lyrics were ok.

that's why i referred to his POETRY

when taken away from musical context and written as poetry, to stand on its own - well... ugh

"Ninety percent of everything is crud."

And brother Ted was a flaming optimist.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_Law

like 90% of people are basically doing the right thing, but nothing spectacular or particularly noble

5% are saints and 5% are scumbags/evil

What have we done to our fair sister?
Ravaged and plundered and ripped her and bit her
Stuck her with knives in the side of the dawn
and
tied her with fences
and
dragged her down.


Smack in the middle of some kick-ass psychedelic rock-n-roll
When the Music's Over still resonates after all these years.

I can still hear the scream of the butterfly
Jim Morrison ... :yourock:

K & R

Even though he had died several years before, I was obsessed with him as a teen. Love their music.

He just had a great voice. His approach, and the sound he and the band made, was unique, though their last stuff was pretty bad.

A friend of mine who was at a party where Morrison showed up said that yes, he was indeed a drunken asshole.

I thought it was one of their better efforts..

The whole first album was amazing and is still excellent.

on the other hand, "Hello, I Love You" is almost cartoon-ishly bad.

But brilliance, like beauty, is in the eye (or ear) of the beholder.

Jim the drunken rock boy is what most people saw. Others saw a gifted wordsmith and a powerful spirit. He was a bard, a shaman of the time surrounded by too many hipsters to even know it.

Apparently he and Robbie are still performing and will begin a European tour next month

Densmore is still around but he apparently is nursing some sort of grudge against the other two.

It was a good interview. He was plugging this film and had nothing good to say about the Stone effort.

about something. If it wasn't Jim, it was "the other two". No pleasing some people.

Me too. :beer:

My youngest daughter, who was born in 1985, had a Doors fixation for a while when she was a young teenager. She had CDs of all their albums, posters, books. I guess Jim still had sex appeal and drove young girls wild even after having been dead 30 years.