albiehereforyou: It wasn’t Jim Morrison’s looks...

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

It wasn’t Jim Morrison’s looks that struck me first about him. It was the poetry of his songs and the way he would get completely lost in the music….I got to know Jim Morrison particularly well during this time. He had been at the UCLA film school with the keyboard player Ray Manzarek, so we shared a common love of visual images…Jim was a very thoughtful person and we became very deep friends. A lot of that was due to the photography connection.

The image of Jim as a Christ-figure that is now being handed down to us is pathetic. I find it unbelievable. Jim would have hated it. You can tell by the way that he deliberately allowed himself to get fat and grow a beard toward the end of his life. He wanted to be respected as a poet and a musician, and he believed that this image of him as a sex god was interfering with people’s perception of him as a true artist.

It all really came about through a great looking picture..where he was stripped to the waist and wearing black leather jeans. That brought him a lot of attention. I think Jim was encouraged by it at first. He started to read what people were saying about him and then tried to live up to what was being said. There were certain aspects of success that he really enjoyed. But at the same time, he resented it. I can remember him coming to me one day in a very disturbed state. He told me all about his background as the son of a Rear Admiral in the US Navy and how much he hated everything that it represented. He also told me that he’d grown up as the fat kid that no one wanted to know and that this had caused him a lot of emotional pain.

Then he explained what had brought it all to the surface. Apparently he had been walking around Greenwich Village that morning and a girl who he knew as a child had spotted him and started going crazy over him. That bothered him because he sensed the hypocrisy of it all. When he was a fat military brat these people had rejected and ignored him but now, because of his new public image, they were fawning over him. Jim was essentially a shy person. He never thought of himself as resembling the glamorous image that made him appear so confident. LIke most of us, he had hang-ups. Maybe he felt deprived of real meaningful love.

-Linda McCartney