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BEATS OF LOVE

20.The Crystal Ship by The Doors

I CAN safely say that the apex of poetic popular music was The Doors and that living past 27 is vastly over-rated. I love Lawrence, whose integrity and wit sear into his songs in a highly unpretentious, poetic manner. However, being honest, he self-destructed over a lack of fame. He was hardly popular. 

 

NME darling Morrissey is now a bugbear for many, but me especially. I bunked off school in part to memorise his lyrics, especially Headmaster Ritual, which brilliantly caricatured the state school monsters who made my life so miserable. This song became a sort of survival kit.

Sadly, to keep his songs relevant nowadays means freezing in time, the monsters that characterize many of his songs. Sadly, the only allies he can find, intent on doing this, are the far-right. A far-right he duly sucks up to in a despicable fashion by wearing shitty little For Britain button badges. 

Another important band of my late adolescence, the Stone Roses, utilized the Bible to give gravitas to their lyrics on otherwise formulaic songs. Front man Ian Brown sang these songs in a broad regional dialect but was still propelled by a lot of music journalists into the limelight, and he actually seemed like an iconic figure. With hindsight, he wasn't. 

It's tragic that they reformed to desecrate their name. Perhaps a twenty-something can still hear the fiery menace in I Wanna Be Adored, a song written by and for folk in their sexual prime. Not fifty-somethings, who are already decaying. Who are they even kidding? More tragic still is that he now bangs on about covid inanely to desecrate it further. Despite Oliver Stone trashing Jim Morrison's character in his hateful biopic by lampooning him as completely insane, it wasn't real. Alas, Ian Astbury's tragic karaoke bastardization was. It actually happened. 

   

Morrison's short time in the limelight testifies to a sensitivity, evidenced in his poetic lyrics, which more than confirmed he wasn't completely insane. In that all too brief spell before the whiskey took a hold of him, he both looked and thought better than anyone else before or since. This baroque lament for a left love has been over analysed for its drug connotations, but I prefer to read it as a sombre love song. The Doors brought his poetry to life, and it's the richly colourful instrumentation here that kills me. Left on a page, it wasn't too great. This truly emotive love song is made all the more intense by realizing he never did make it back to drop a line.

It's also one of my favourite love songs of all time and needs another spin as everything in my life becomes uncertain. I have many records, but not that many musical anchors.