An American Prayer

Yesterday, I descended into a moment of pure bohemian pomp. Sitting on the shag rug in my living room, listening to poetry, a cup of herbal tea short of being a complete douche bag. Stick with me here and you'll understand why. I might own a tweed suit and a literature degree but I'm not a huge fan of spoken verse and you'll do well to catch me at a poetry bash.

You see, this was Jim Morrison's poetry. And if, like me, you love The Doors, then you can see why I muted Soccer Saturday and took a perch.

This is the first Doors record I've managed to find looking through record shops and it would seem that they're pretty hard to come by without paying a premium. So, although I didn't immediately recognise it, I wasn't going to pass the record up. As it turns out, An American Prayer is the Doors' final album and was produced in '78, seven years after Morrison's death. It's essentially old recordings of Morrison's poetry, some of which ended up as lyrics on earlier tracks, played on top of new music by the rest of the band.

Now, I'm not a huge fan of poetry. As I mentioned before, despite spending half of my degree studying the stuff, it never really enthused me and I was pretty happy to see the back of the likes of William S. Borroughs and Jack Kerouac - funnily enough, the professor who lectured us on Beat poetry had the hair and the beard to fancy himself as a Morrison tribute act.

Conveniently enough, the record comes with a booklet of the verse to trace along. Some of the text was clearly developed and (potentially) discarded for other tracks, and the record alludes to that, dropping in Morrison's vocals from tracks like 'Peace Frog', 'Roadhouse Blues' and my favourite, 'Riders on the Storm'. 

When I was out in the desert, ya know,

Like a dog without a bone 

An actor out on loan

I don't know how to tell you,

Riders on the storm

but, ah, I killed somebody.

There's a killer on the road

No...

His brain is squirming like a toad

It's no big deal, ya know, 

I don't think anybody will find out about it, but...

Of the words I'd not heard before, my favourite is in the picture below. As you can probably tell, it's not the deepest of thoughts on the record. But then again, that's poetry, you take what you want from it. 

It's not the most beautifully laid out album note - I can't imagine production techniques were great in the seventies - but there are some of Morrison's original illustrations included, in a similar fashion to the more explicit passages. It's already one of my favourite buys and is exactly why I always check the 'Ds' out first whenever I go sifting. Not sure I'll be sharing Morrison's 'Lament (for the death of my cock)' with my mum though. Then again, maybe I will - he was pretty interested in that Oedipal mess.