Dear Ray M.,
I’m sorry I suggested that you were naïve back in my “Morrison” Op-Ed – I forgot one of my own maxims, that: we’re only as good as the information we have (not to mention the luxury of hindsight being 20/20).
I’ve definitely had a few extra years to grow my cynicism about the folks who did (or didn’t) survive the 60s – and I always seem to forget how young you all were when THE DOORS were happening. The other aspect that struck me was that you looked down memory lane in a non-critical and non-jaundiced fashion (which irks the Cynic residing in me).
Everyone I know who did lots of acid back-in-the-day – seems a bit paranoid and edgy in-the-here-and-now: they either run a lot – or, keep themselves sedated to keep the paranoia at bay. I remember Lilly (and others) seeing demons in another dimension trying to break through into our “plain” (or is it ‘plane’) of reality (I think both qualifiers of our reality work). But no such paranoid or jaundiced analyses of your experience with Jim Morrison and the other DOORS seems to color your prose: you seem to write from within-the-moment, and I congratulate you on that.
And now that I’ve finally finished Light My Fire – I realize that You and I connect on a-couple-of-key-issues:
1) You saw the Viet Nam war as a nodal event in American history; and,
2) You dissected Jim Morrison’s split personality for the Lay Man…
Let’s look at the importance with which we both view the Viet Nam War – that it basically fucked this country up – making us quite crazy…a craziness that Morrison certainly apprehended, and, that we have never recovered from. The lies, the loss of innocence, and the images of violence – on American color TVs – wreaked havoc for us all: and I’m not sure that we will ever recover from it. So you guys (THE DOORS) were more of the reporters of the milieu – because we can’t really know beyond what we know – though the mind of Morrison probably put any number of the variables together in his poetry – and caused him to fly-out-of-the-envelope on many occasions…
Which brings us to the redneck “Jimbo,” whom you reported overwhelmed James Douglas Morrison quite often (lest we forget — alcohol has often been referred to as the ‘demon drink’). And sometimes the Shaman errs and becomes a “door” for those demons seeking to enter our dimension; rather than the being “soaking” up those demons that cause pain in our plane/plain.
Elsewhere I have written about my “bouts” with alcohol – though I’m with you Ray – I’m sure that Jimbo would have drunk me under the table as well – but I’ve often been accused of becoming someone different while imbibed (I shudder to imagine the effect upon me had I ever [knowingly] taken LSD).
So, you watched a Being break on through to the other side and channel demons for quite awhile – and maintained your almost childlike innocence as you authored your book. Again, I congratulate you – and hope to use your text one day as a sociology course textbook as we delve into how, when, and where — America made the wrong turn.