There’s a game I like to play. It’s called “Who’s the worse poet, Jim Morrison or Patti Smith?” Morrison generally wins by a nose. Like Patti Smith, the late Mr. Morrison viewed himself as a visionary in the grand tradition of 19th Century French poète maudit Arthur Rimbaud, but the duo’s sum contribution to poetry consists of a few decent song lyrics and some very bad books of poetry.
So why don’t I give the nod to Morrison? He wrote “L.A. Woman” for one. And he possessed a sense of humor. “Some of the worst mistakes in my life were haircuts” is a great one-liner, as is “Actually I don’t remember being born, it must have happened during one of my black outs.” So far as I know Smith hasn’t delivered a legitimate quip in her life—she’s far too busy taking herself seriously.
All of which brings us to 1978’s disgraceful American Prayer, which I doubt Morrison would have found amusing. What you get for your wasted money is shit and shinola without the shinola. American Prayer is a dog’s breakfast comprised in part of short (and purposeless) fragments of Morrison spouting off at live shows and “collages” melding well-known Doors’ songs to scraps of Morrison’s verse.
But what you mostly get are tracks on which the surviving Doors add after-the-fact musical accompaniment to Morrison’s poetic detritus. Most of said music is mediocre jazz fusion along the lines of later Steely Dan, although you also get tastes of bad funk and (believe it or not) disco.
American Prayer includes examples of Morrison at his poetic worst. There are too many examples to cite in full, but let’s start with “Lament,” with its lines “Guitar player/Ancient wise satyr/Sing your ode to my cock.” Equally awful is the title track’s “Cling to cunts & cocks of despair/We got our vision by clap/Columbus’s groin got filled with green death.”
In “Curses, Invocations” Morrison gives shout outs to “large, buxom obese queens/Garden hogs and cunt veterans/Quaint cabbage saints/Shit hoarders and individualists.” Oh, and let us not forget “lustful fuck salesmen.” I had a lustral fuck salesman knock on my door just last week peddling a limited “Buy Two Fucks Get One Fuck Free” offer. I anteed up, naturally. On the positive side Morrison intones some terrible verse I’m hoping he meant to be funny. A primo example is “The World on Fire” with its lines “I’ll never wake up in a good mood/I hate these stinky boots.”
Most of Morrison’s poetry isn’t that bad. It’s merely mediocre, varying from pure doggerel to subpar Kerouacian spontaneous bop prosody. “Bird of Prey” is a singsong example of high-school notebook poetry. The Lizard King may have been aiming for William Blake—instead he hit that sensitive kid in the third row of Mrs. Bernice Ferkel’s 11th grade creative writing class.
“Babylon Fading” isn’t a poem at all, just Morrison tossing out individual words like “carnival,” “bullfight,” and “football,” each of which are followed by the appropriate sound effect. I find it impossible to believe anyone would include this on an LP—even that sensitive kid in the third row of Mrs. Bernice Ferkel’s 11th grade creative writing class would crumple it up in a little ball and toss it in the trash lest it be discovered in his notebook, and he become a figure of derision until graduation.
American Prayer offers some decent lines embedded in various tracks, like diamonds in cow shit. “To Come of Age” is an unfocused spew of generalities until the end, when Morrison gets into specifics with the lines “In the afternoon dance show/They gave out free records/To the best couple/Spades dance best, from the hip.”
That last line is great, as are “Black Polished Chrome” with its “The music was new black polished chrome/And came over the summer like liquid night/The DJs took pills to stay awake and play for seven days” and its counterpart “Latino Chrome,” which offers a description of lower class Latino street life: “My gang will get you/Scenes of rape in the arroyo/Seductions in cars, abandoned buildings/Fights at the food stand” and so on. It ain’t Ezra Pound, but Morrison is painting vivid pictures, as he does with his haunting description of death on a desert highway in the conjoined “Dawn’s Highway” and “Newborn Awakening.”
The irony of Morrison’s career is that while he wanted nothing more than to escape the constraints of being a mere rock star by following his poetic muse to Paris, the only truly good poetry he ever wrote was in Los Angeles with The Doors. Could he have written “L.A. Woman” in Paris”? Or “Moonlight Drive” for that matter? The true wellspring and subject of Morrison’s poetry was the City of Night; it was there that Morrison’s muse resided, and the pity is they never saw one another again.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
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