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.

One such psychedelic caravan picked Pete and Josh up outside of Ames, Iowa heading to the high desert near that Joshua Tree previously mentioned. Carrying a full stash of drugs, including the holy of holies, peyote. One night camped in a canyon maybe forty or fifty miles from where they were heading, campfire blazing, maybe a little hungry from the straight days of drug diets having just a while before ingested a button, the mandatory speaker system hitched to a high-powered battery that some Neal Cassady-type wizard jerry-rigged up blasting out the music to high heaven they flipped out, went wiggly. What happened that night was after seeing shadows, inchoate shadows on the canyon walls, they began, individually, to take their shirts off, their sweaty shirts, and began to dance a strange dance around the fires casting their own shadows, started dancing faster as they got into the root whatever was driving their heads and then suddenly collapsed either from exhaustion or privation. Pete told me he knew that night what those 10,000 years ago warriors were looking for in those lonesome canyons. And understood too what Jim Morrison was up to in the desert night.