Jim Morrison

Jim Morrison "Friends can help each other. A true friend is someone who lets you have total freedom to be yourself-- and especially to feel. Or not feel. Whatever you happen to be feeling at the moment is fine with them. That's what real love amounts to-- letting a person be what he really is.... Most people love you for who you pretend to be.... To keep their love, you keep pretending-- performing. You get to love your pretense.... It's true, we're locked in an image, an act-- and the sad thing is, people get so used to their image-- they grow attached to their masks. They love their chains. They forget all about who they really are. And if you try to remind them, they hate you for it-- they feel like you're trying to steal their most precious possession." - Jim Morrison (1943-71) Jim Morrison Jim Morrison is often thought of as a drunken musician. He is also portrayed to many as an addict and another 'doped up' rock star. These negative opinions project a large shadow on the many positive aspects of this great poet. Many famous authors influenced Jim's music heavily. You must cast aside your ignorance and look behind the loud electric haze of the sixties music. You must wipe your eyes and look through the psychedelic world of LSD. Standing behind these minor flaws, you will see a young and very intellectual poet named Jim Morrison. Jim Morrison's distraught childhood was a contributing factor to Jim's fortune and his fate. As a young child, Jim experienced the many pains of living in a military family. Having to move every so often, Jim and his brother, and sister never spent more than a couple of years at a particular school. Jim attended eight different schools, Grammar and High, throughout his schooling career. This amount of traveling made it hard for a young child to make many friends. In high school, Jim had an especially hard time; "The only real friend he made was a tall but overweight classmate with a sleepy voice named Fud Ford ". Although there seems to be many negative aspects of Jim's child hood, many positive aspects did arise, as well. The traveling done by the Morrison family brought Jim through many different experiences and situations. For instance, while driving on a highway from Santa Fe with his family, he said he experienced, "the most important moment of my life". The Morrisons came upon an overturned truck of dying Pueblo Indians. This moment influenced Jim and later became the basis of many of his songs, poetry, stories, and thoughts. Jim Morrison's estranged childhood was the root underneath his bizarre and eccentric personality. The negative effects of his upbringing helped to mold Jim into the person he would later become. Jim Morrison's strange sense of humor and sickness were just fractions of his very intellectual mind. Jim and his family moved to Alemeda, California. This is where he would start the first year and a half of his high school journey. Morrison's creativeness and infatuation with Mad Magazines led to the horrification of many. When he would arrive late to class, he would tell elaborate stories to the teachers about being kidnapped by gypsies. Jim's subtle and bizarre personality was now starting to appear. Jim's wild imaginations began to produce hundreds of scatological and sexually explicit ideas in the form of pictures and make believe radio commercials. The deranged pictures that Jim created, were ones with quite an abnormality. For instance, the picture Jerry Hopkins describes, "a man with a monster coming out of his mouth, one hand ripping his chest wide open, the other hand held out and dripping with slime, more of that slim dripping from his ears." All of Jim and Fud's focuses again were sexual, or scatological, but they were imbued with sophistication and subtle humor unusual for someone only fourteen. No doubt, Jim's sexually demented mind was now partially formed. The once young and innocent Jim Morrison was now older and more harmful. Late in his sophomore year, Jim moved to Alexandria, Virginia. Her he met Tandy, his first girlfriend. Jim now ill mannered constantly horrified others, especially Tandy. He would make public scenes by kissing her feet or asking her to do ridiculous acts out loud. Tandy though, was not the only one subjected to Jim's "tests", his teachers suffered as well. "I asked him why he played games all the time," Tandy says today. "He said, 'You'd never stay interested in me if I didn't." Indeed that was the case not only with Tandy, but also at school. His peers now looked upon Jim as the ringleader. Everybody wanted to be like Jim, they all competed for his attention, "Jim's magnetism was becoming obvious". Right down to his expressions, his peers mimicked all of his actions. But Jim never led them like they wanted to be led. Jim once again started taking death-defying risks that he would also subject his brother to. He forced Andy to walk along an edge that hovered fifty feet above the ground. All of the risks that he subjected others to were ones that he was never afraid to complete. "Throughout his senior year his parents pressured Jim to apply to colleges, just as they badgered him into having his photograph taken for the high school yearbook". When graduation came around, Jim decided not to attend. Later on his parents succeeded in enrolling Jim at St. Petersburg Junior College in Florida. The instability and rootless ness of Jim Morrison's child hood, helped build a character that later became the emptiness of this great poet. It was also in high school that the intellectual side of Jim's unique mind started to emerge. The same year that he moved to Alameda, Jim stumbled across a new novel by Jack Kerouac. On the Road held Jim captive for hours upon hours. He also started to copy down paragraphs he liked into a spiral notebook that he would carry around with him from that day on. The more Jim read, the more he started to drift away into the infinite world of poetry. He also read Lawrence Ferlinghetti, along with other favorites Kenneth Rexroth and Allen Ginsberg. "Ginsberg made one of the greatest impact, for he was the real-life Carlo Marx (On the Road)''. It was an image that stuck with Jim like glue, "the sorrowful poetic con-man with the dark mind."