I haven’t blogged in a while as I have been busy with other faccets of my life…  From politics to just internet de3ign and maintenance, I’ve been a busy little bee.

But due to recent circumstances — the other shoe falling — I’m back for the moment and maybe longer. 

I read John Densmore’s Riders on the Storm a few years ago and heard about this song in an ancedote where Jim Morrison showed him the lyrics to this song while in the Hollywood hills.  It had presented a new vulnerability aspect to Morrison and Densmore thought he was maturing as a songwriter… it fits my mood of coming to grips but celebration of what you are…

So I’m on Pandora — I have been here a few times in the past trying to find similar music to what I love as a way to introduce myself to new music.

The problem is more times than not I get introduced to stuff that doesn’t sound at all similar to what qualities I like in a song.

For instance, tonight I started with the Doors and Moonlight Drive — The deep baritone vocal from Morrison, coupled with the trance like bridge section from Manzarek and the jazz style drumming from Densmore make this song a classic to me. Those are the qualities I am endeared to in the music.

What I get are songs that are probably comparable in structure but not too comparable – to me – to what the song invokes with the mood. A song that invokes the pace. A song that simply makes me do a double take that I want to hear again.

I tried You’re Going to Lose That Girl by the Beatles next. Again, the genome project picked up on the structure of the music and not so much the mood that’s set. The pace of the song doesn’tseem to carry over in the suggestions, nor does the vocal harmonies, nor the rhythem bae of the song that doesn’t overstep it’s bounds… But mostly it’s the vocals that are most catchy with the song.

And wasn’t catchy at all with the suggested songs that followed. I know, I am asking for a tough act to follow with bands that can compare to the Beatles or songs that can compare to the Beatles but there has to be something out there. This is a 43 year old song for god sake…

I did have a better time when I tried surfer instrumental rock (Walk, Don’t run gave way to soem great music) but that’s instrumental all the way. That’s how Pandora is supposed to work.

Maybe I’m just too picky with music…? Or maybe I am just doing this wrong.

I was taking a Zogby poll the other day and a question surfaced within the poll that actually made me freeze and think long and hard before I cast my vote. It’s soemthing that can come up in idle conversation at any time and you might throw out an immediate answer but I took this question real serious…

What dead rockstar best epitomizes the spirit of rock and roll

Jim Morrison (The Doors)
John Lennon (the Beatles)
Janis Joplin
Jimi Hendrix
Stevie Ray Vaughn
Freddie Mercury (Queen)
Duane Allman (The Alman Brothers)
Kurt Cobain (Nirvana)
Jerry Garcia (The Grateful Dead)
Frank Zappa
Buddy Holly
Ronnie Van Zandt (Lynyrd Skynyrd)
Elvis

It really mad eme stop and think — I’m not sure why. I mean, the first thought i had was Lennon but John — for all the good he gave to the world as a musician just didn’t feel like the guy who represented Rock in life and death. One could say Elvis but he didn’t liv efast and die young…

I thought of Jim Morrison and his glory days that people remember him for and Jimi Hendrix and how he was the genius on guitar that everyoen strives to be. I thought of Kurt Cobain who wrote and sang, lived fast and died young leaving the beautiful corpse — and how his insecurity (a traight with almost all musicians) was a profound attribute to his personality.

Just who best eptomizes Rock?

It’s been a while since I decided to read any non-ficiton. Usually it’s biographical works on icons of the Entertainment industry (ie: Beatles or the Doors). Keeping with that trend, I decided to pick up Ray Manzarek’s Light My Fire, it’s a Doors autobiography I’ve been meanign to read for some time.

And yet, as I’m still in the early areas of the book, I’m trying to understand why I thought it was a must read? Probably because of all the positive reviews of the book when it originally was released. Can’t be bad at all then, can it?

From a writing standpoint, it can be all that bad. And worse. Though Manzarek has a unique perspective on his tail…. He’s not a writer.

The book comes off much like a personal journal would, I guess… Reporting the mundane as well as the gripping, life-altering events of Ray’s life… But Manzarek loses focus and direction on any given topic quite easily. At one moment he’s about to discuss finding a live performance of the Blues in the south side o fChicago, and the next moment he’s rambling about attire he wore to graduation from the 8th grade…. One moment he’s about to get into his first exposure to Beat poetry, the next he’s laying the smackdown on facism and intimidation of the California Highway Patrol. He goes off on the broadest tangents and does not focus on the event that inspires the tangent thought.

Another instance of Ray veering wildly is a recounting of Jim Morrison’s UCLA film school student film… While trying to detail Jim’s non-linear movie that Rya found “poetic”, he begins recounting Oliver Stone’s version of the student film that he made as part of his feature film on the Doors. Ray goes off on Oliver for makign an innocent film into something with anti-semitism and Nazi inneundo. He attacks Stone (as he has since the film came out in the early 1990′s) and lets the UCLA film school experience vanish from the story.

It almost comes off like a conversation — one that varies wildly as those who partake in the conversation ramble on into the night. Yet, having to read this conversation is painful… Especially with gramatical errors of repeated run-on sentences, short sentences that woudl be better combined, repetition of adjectives, etc….

Ray’s book, while from the heart, has nothing on John Densemore’s Riders on the Storm autobiography.,

Odd I post this twice in a year.

This is the end, beautiful friend
This is the end, my only friend
The end -
Of our elaborate plans
The end -
Of everything that stands
The end -
No safety nor surprise
The end –
I’ll never look into your eyes again

This is the End

– Taken from The End by James Douglas Morrison
© 1967 The Doors Music Company

Still appropriate a year later. The fact I’m not playing the crutch again signifies the relevance.

I’m not down… just these lyrics do mean a lot to me and it’s strange how they mirror my life now…

Help! (Lennon/McCartney)

Help! I need somebody,
Help! Not just anybody,
Help! You know I need someone.
Help….!

When I was younger, so much younger than today,
I never needed anybody’s help in any way
But now these days are gone, I’m not so self assured,
Now I find I’ve changed my mind I’ve opened up the doors.

Help me if you can, I’m feeling down
And I do appreciate you being ’round
Help me, get my feet back on the ground,
Won’t you please, please help me?

And now my life has changed in oh so many ways,
My independence seems to vanish in the haze.
But every now and then I feel so insecure,
I know that I just need you like I’ve never done before

Help me if you can, I’m feeling down
And I do appreciate you being ’round
Help me, get my feet back on the ground,
Won’t you please, please help me?

When I was younger, so much younger than today,
I never needed anybody’s help in any way
But now these days are gone, I’m not so self assured,
Now I find I’ve changed my mind I’ve opened up the doors

Help me if you can, I’m feeling down
And I do appreciate you being ’round.
Help me, get my feet back on the ground,
Won’t you please, please help me?!
Help me! Help me, oh.

I’ve been thinking of the
Doors a lot lately. I downloaded video music clips a few months ago off Kazaa
Lite and of course i have been enjoying them (even though the audio is ratty
on Light My Fire performed at the Ed Sullivan Show) to no end. Moonlight
Drive, Break on Through, Touch Me – excellent through and through.
I’ve long been a fan of Mr. Mojo Risin’s poetry and verse.

So watching the video for
Touch Me (which was performed live by the Doors on the Smothers Brothers show)
I noticed a little anomaly that featured guitarist Robbie Krieger with a nice
shiner on his left eye. Curious, I went and asked about it on the Usenet newsgroup
alt.music.the-doors…

And was re-introduced to
anal-final-word-on-the-Doors-author Patricia Butler.

Ms. Butler wrote Angels
Dance and Angels Die which is a biographical account of Jim Morrison and
Pamela Courson (Jim’s wife). Butler, however, seems to think that what anyone
else wrote in their books is fictitious or if anyone takes something from their
books and had it put into The
Doors by Oliver Stone, it’s completely fictitious… which is bullshit.

Look, not everything written
is a factual statement or a exactly-how-it-happened account, yet when John
Densemore, Jerry
Hopkins and Danny Sugerman all concur on a story — I’m going to accept
that as a fact and not believe a woman who wasn’t there. I mean Hopkins wasn’t
"there" but Sugerman
was (as a kid). Densmore was the god damned drummer in the band. I am going
to believe what he says over what Patricia Butler says any
day.

Anyway, it’s another pleasant
valley Sunday here in status-symbol land. I think I’m going to go find Mr. Green
(who’s so serene with a TV in every room) and tell him a thing or two about
living in excess and glamor.

I’m trying to write a new short story that is going to be part of something greater in the coming weeks and months. A chronicle of short stories that turns into a short book perchance? I don’t know, we’ll see what happens there. At any rate I’m a good bit done (not finished at all) with the initial story that stood out in my mind for this tale but I’m not sure how I’m going to get to the finish of this “Chapter” just yet. That’s one thing you can like about writing – never knowing how it ends until you find a spot where you’re comfortable with finishing.

At any rate, there’s a key to this short story int he form of music and I was listening to this song over and over again in order to get the full of it and help me out with the scene – and now I can’t get the friggin song out of my head… For the sake of doing so, I’m just dumping the song on the reader.. The rhyme is really easy to follow and it displays how great a poet the lead singer of this band was…

Ladies and Gentlemen – The Doors:

Moonlight Drive

Let’s swim to the moon
Uh-huh
Let’s climb thru the tide
Penetrate the evenin’ that the city sleeps to hide

Let’s swim out tonight, love
It’s our turn to try
Parked beside the ocean
On our moonlight drive

Let’s swim to the moon
Uh-huh
Let’s climb thru the tide
Surrender to the waiting worlds that lap against our side

Nothin’ left open
And no time to decide
We’ve stepped into a river
On our moonlight drive

Let’s swim to the moon
Let’s climb thru the tide
You reach a hand to hold me
But I can’t be your guide

Easy to love you as I watch you glide
Falling through wet forests
On our moonlight drive
Moonlight drive

C’mon, baby, gonna take a little ride
Goin’ down by the ocean side
Gonna get real close
Get real tight
Baby gonna drown tonight
Goin’ down, down, down

© 1967 Doors Music Company

I hope to have the story that the song is an integral part to online in the future but it is not the begining of the story – it’s a part of the story, that’s all. A chapter of a greater tale.

This is the end, beautiful friend
This is the end, my only friend
The end -
Of our elaborate plans
The end -
Of everything that stands
The end -
No safety nor surprise
The end –
I’ll never look into your eyes again

This is the End

– Taken from The End by James Douglas Morrison
© 1967 The Doors Music Company