Obsession And Leather

The California/Fellini Interface … ladies & Gentlemen, The Doors!

“Let’s swim to the moon/Let’s climb thru the tide/Penetrate the evening/That the city sleeps to hide …” —‘Moonlight Drive’ by The Doors

THE DOORS. Black leather. Jim Morrison. ‘Light My Fire’. The obverse (and perverse) side of the psychedelic dream. 60’s. Evil. Shamanism. Movement without Meaning. Through a stream of gold albums and hit singles to the 71 death in a Paris bathtub of the increasingly disillusioned lead singer, Jim Morrison, up to the recent publication of the biography No One Here Gets Out Alive, they remain a source of fascination. Did Morrison fake his death? Why do the records of The Doors sound as contemporary today as they did over a decade ago? Named via Blake and Huxley … Wild symbols.

Jim Steinman, who dots his records with Morrisonesque poems and who appeared on TV’s ‘OGWT’ doing ‘Love & Death & An American Guitar’, a pure shades-and-evil rant in the style of The Doors’ ‘Horse Lattitudes’, is one of the fandom whizzes who genuflected in the direction of L.A. and darkness:

“I love The Doors. They were my favourite group from 68 to 72. No one’s doing that now. The only thing is that Morrison wasn’t all that funny …” —JS, 81.

JIM: “Didja read that book on Morrison?” BRIAN DE PALMA: “Yeh. About 300 pages on a human being who had absolutely no redeeming social value whatsoever.”

Upon leaving college Steinman scored a contract with Robert Stigwood’s then-new RSO label. He was soon disillusioned to find that for the nonce the place was no more than a tax shelter. All he got was a track on a Yvonne Elliman LP and a single which escaped rather than got released. It was by this big guy who auditioned for him, Meat Loaf. That meeting made in heaven was ideally timed:

“I had been in this big fight and had my nose broken by this 6 foot 2 inch lady biker with a tottoo! The surgeon messed it up worse, and I couldn’t even talk for a year and a half. So Meat came along and I thought: THIS GUY IS MY VOICE. … The first thing I thought when I heard him was GET THIS NEGRO MUSIC AWAY FROM HIM! He should be singing Wagnerian rock-opera!” —JS 81/78 hybrid quote

Before the rock opera came the slog. Respected producer Joseph Papp had caught Steinman’s play Dream Engine and brought the boy to NYC to work for his famed Shakespeare Festival. Dream Engine was presented at the Newman Theatre (home of A Chorus Line). When Mr. Loaf auditioned for More Than You Deserve, Jim was already a young hotpoop writer with several productions under his belt. Meat worked with Jim, got a gig doing vocals on some of old buddy Ted Nugent’s Free For All LP, and landed the part of numbskull greaser Eddie in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The duo even toured with The National Lampoon Road Show. But Jim had bigger dreams, dreams for something invested with a grandeur and vulgarity commensurate with Meat Loaf’s stature. Something…

…Heroic!