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The Lizard King
Being considered as one of the most charismatic frontmen in the history of rock and roll really has to build an ego beyond capacity of the human head. Perhaps just hearing the phrase would cause a guy to develop an altered state of mind, a second personality if you will. And when you are talented in many things, and develop your art, or arts, into what people eventually know them as today, that is a true symbol of your greatness.
Even if you don’t live to see it.
He was a musician, a singer, a song writer and an intelligent person that was drawn to literature, poetry, religion, philosophy, psychology and Beat Writers such as Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and Michael McClure. McClure was impressed by his poetry as well, and encouraged him to develop it further. And with that support, he wrote some of the strongest poems of American poetry. It almost seems that he was telling his life story, the way that he was seeing it from the after world, before he died. For example:
“He sought exposure and lived the horror of trying to assemble a myth before a billion dry ruthless eyes. Ask anyone what sense he would preserve above all others. Most would say sight forfeiting, a million eyes in a body for two in the skull. Blind, we could live, and possibly, discover wisdom. Without touch, we would turn into hunks of wood. Mates are first chosen by visual, not order or rhythm or skin. It is an error to believe that the eye can caress a woman. Is a woman constructed out of light or skin? Her image is never real in the eye. It is engraved on the ends of the fingers.”
If that isn’t a way to express how he felt about the number of people who watched his every step to see what he would do next, and him looking for somebody to truly love, and for that person to love him back for who or what he was, I don’t know what it could be.
James Douglas Morrison was born December 8, 1943 and Mr. Mojo Risin’, an anagram of his name, may have died on July 2, 1971 after moving to Paris to concentrate on his writings and to take a break from the lifestyle that he had been living. But do to French law, since there was no evidence of foul play or an attack that killed him, there was never an autopsy performed. And, according to Stephen Davis and the biography that he wrote about Morrison and the life that he lived, Morrison, “had blood around his mouth and nose and large bruising on his chest”, signifying that The Lizard King may have had a horrendous hemorrhage due to tuberculous. And people who think that he is deceased believe that he died as a result of a drug overdose.
But, does this really mean that Morrison is gone? Beside Pamela Courson, the police officers on the scene, the emergency paramedics, the mortician and two other people, nobody ever witnessed his body. For a man that was followed like a God, that seems to be a very minuscule number of people that can actually say that he is dead.
As members of The Doors have said before, Morrison used to say to them that after the band had reached a desirable level of acceptance and fame, he would fake his own death, much like one of his favorite poets, Frenchman Arthur Rimbaud. He said that he would do this to escape from the eye of the public, to be able to live the remainder of his life not under scrutiny from them and the media. Morrison told his band mates that he would write to them with the name Mr. Mojo Risin. And it doesn’t matter that none have ever received a letter, it is still believed by fans that he is still waiting to resurface.
There have been rumors that Morrison committed suicide in the Paris bathtub his body was supposedly found in. There has been talk about him being assassinated by the CIA because of the amazing amount of persuasion that he held over the American public, the young public, to be exact. There are people who believe that he was murdered by a witch and some that believe that he died while using a toilet at Paris nightclub, Rock and Roll Circus. But none of these can be proven.
There are even people who believe that he is living in Africa, India and South America. And even some who believe he is a cowboy in Oregon, living above a Quick-Check in New Jersey, a cab driver in Los Angeles, a car attendant in Chicago or just living anonymously in the great plains of North Dakota.
Beside the great music and thought that this man played and held, he has been an enormous influence on many great musicians. Musicians such as: Glenn Danzig, Patti Smith, Jude Rawlins, Eddie Vedder, Scott Stapp, Perry Farell and Henry Rollings.
But there are people who question if he is dead or alive or if he will ever come back. And I have an answer for them:
Somebody, a great singer, a composer, a poet, once said that HE was the Lizard King. That HE could do anything. People laughed and people learned both, at and from, those simple words. With glass of red and joint in hand he spread his words across the land. People smiled more people cried the day he sat in the wash, and died. His body has gone but his spirit remains,WE are this Lizard King.
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