Channeling The Shamanic Truth-Teller… The Doors Jim Morrison

 
 

 

 

 

 

I was always stuck watching Oliver Stone’s film on The Doors by the scene taken somewhere out in the desert, some concert lights blaring in the night, decibels searching for the high white note, the crowd stoned to heaven waiting, well, waiting for the word, any word in a sullen world, maybe the scene taken in nearby Joshua Tree in the high desert out in California and there is Jim Morrison on stage shirtless in full trance mode singing, oh I don’t which song, maybe The End, acting like the old shamans, the old time medicine healers and truth-tellers, among the indigenous tribes of the area, bringing righteous anger down on a misbegotten world. I wrote somewhere that while, no question he, they, the Doors, we were children of the rock and rock generation, the acid rock generation just then, that we owed a lot to the Native American traditions that our forebears tried desperately to stamp out without a trace. We owed a lot to the peyote button/acid/ marijuana buzz that put us closer to those ancient warriors trying to heal a broken earth than we could have believed. And Jim Morrison epitomized that whirling dervish root of the earth, root of the matter, better than anybody.

But Jim was not the only one who experienced that oneness with the broken earth, tried to be the warrior king, the righter of wrongs, gain an edge on the world. A guy I knew a long time ago, in the time of Morrison’s time, Peter Markin and his friend Josh Breslin, whom he had met at some dance in the 1960s, after being ditched by their respective girlfriends started to hit the Kerouac/Cassady/Ginsberg hitchhike road west when west was the place to go to start anew, to get washed clean. Naturally they had plenty of adventures starting from Portland, Maine where Josh was from heading to the Pacific sea splashes. Like being picked up by good guy long-haul truckers, stray females looking for adventure, and what concerns us here, the ubiquitous converted school bus/minivan that provided living quarters for a good segment of youth nation and who were always willing to take one or two more passengers up the road. And  provide, if they were holding, or if somebody was holding, some righteous drugs to take the edge off the road, off the hungers.