Awake
Shake dreams from your hair
My pretty child, my sweet one.
Choose the day and choose the sign of your day
The day's divinity
First thing you see.
A vast radiant beach in a cool jeweled moon
Couples naked race down by it's quiet side
And we laugh like soft, mad children
Smug in the wooly cotton brains of infancy
The music and voices are all around us.
Choose they croon the Ancient Ones
The time has come again
Choose now, they croon
Beneath the moon
Beside an ancient lake
Enter again the sweet forest
Enter the hot dream
Come with us
Everything is broken up and dances.
Indian scattered on Dawns Highway bleeding
Ghosts crowd the young child's fragile eggshell mind
We have assembled inside this ancient and insane theatre
To propagate our lust for our life,
And flee the swarming wisdom of the streets.
The barns have stormed
The windows kept,
And only one of all the rest
To dance and save us
From the divine mockery of words,
Music inflames temperament.
Ooh great creator of being
Grant us one more hour,
To perform our art
And perfect our lives.
We need great golden copulations,
When the true kings murders
Are allowed to roam free,
A thousand magicians arise in the land
Where are the feasts we were promised?
Where is the wine, the new wine, dying on a vine?

On this day in 1971, Jim Morrison was found dead in his bathtub in Paris. If Jim were alive today, he’d be 64 years old. It's hard to imagine someone who died so young, who was so beautiful at his peak, what he’d be like now. A burnt out rock junkie some may say? Maybe. But I don’t happen to think so. I like to imagine if Jim were still alive he’d be making films, he’d be involved in the internet somehow. Innovating. Creating. Showing up at the Grammys, receiving lifetime achievement awards and standing ovations. Maybe even an Oscar for a low budget flick that went mainstream. He would have loved that I think.

Call Jim what you will; a reckless drunk, strung out hippie, the Lizard King, a Shaman. god of rock, god of cock, Adonis, Dionysis, the most influential artist of the 20th century…I grew up on the music of the Doors and the poetry of Jim Morrison. An American Prayer, the Lords and New Creatures. The Graveyard Poem, Horse Latitudes, the Soft Parade. As a teenager, I devoured all of his biographies and consumed his favorite authors like milk and bread; the Greeks and the beats. Ginsberg, Rimbaud, Kerouac. And Blake, Yeats, and Nietzsche. I wanted to know what he knew, feel what he felt. Be inspired by what inspired him. The written word. I guess we’ll never know what might have been and maybe its better that way. Maybe some lights shine too bright too fast to go on burning forever.

Today, 36 years after the death of Jim Morrison, I’ll share with you a few of my favorite selections of Doors songs for your Tuesday listening pleasure. When I hear them now, each one is like a beloved old friend with a special place in my heart. They bring back memories of times and places that are long gone but definately not forgotten.