Monday, November 26, 2018

Music Inflames Temperament


Jim Morrison : An American Prayer


In November of 1978, seven years after Jim Morrison's death, Elektra/Asylum records released An American Prayer, a collection of spoken word poetry with musical backup by The Doors. It has always been a controversial record. Paul Rothchild who produced most of The Doors’ albums, called it  a posthumous “rape of Jim Morrison”. Critics blasted the elevator cheese the remaining Doors played.  




What nobody could have possibly known is the role it would play in the revival of The Doors and the ascendency of Jim Morrison into rock god.



Note: the album came out before Apocalypse Now, but Rosemary Breslin does gather the basic facts of the revival here for a 1981 Rolling Stone article:

The Morrison revival began about three years ago and has grown from a modest renaissance into a landslide. Though the roots of this posthumous popularity are not perfectly clear, music-industry executives tend to trace its origins to the 1979 release of Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, which prominently featured “The End.” This unexpected bit of re-exposure was soon followed by the appearance of An American Prayer, an album of Morrison reading his own poetry (recorded in 1971) with instrumental backing added years later by the remaining Doors. Though sales were poor, it stirred further interest in this disembodied voice, this done from the past. 


But the big push came with the publication of a Morrison biography. No One Here Gets Out Alive, by Daniel Sugerman and Jerry Hopkins. To date, 740,000 trade and mass-market-paper-back copies have been printed, and the book made the best-seller lists. Its last chapter, which raises numerous questions about the circumstances of Morrison’s death and the disposition of his remains, is just the sort of dark, eerie, mysterious tale that tends to set impressionable minds dreaming.



In additions, David Bowie opened his BBC DJ gig in May of 1979 with the Doors's "Love Street". 
Fans may recognize snippets of  Doors songs: check out Newborn Awakening, Stoned Immaculate (The Wasp) , The Hitchhiker (Riders on the Storm), and Hour For Magic (The End) . 


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