Riders On My Wall

As we grow older, we filter our memories so that the happiest stay with us. One of my abiding memories is driving towards a campsite  on a hot summer night somewhere in the north of France. I was probably about five, and I was lay across my sleeping brothers on the back seat of my parents' old Vauxhall Carlton. I can remember the paneled lighting of the motorway streetlights sliding across the face of my dad, past the darkened sun roof and then gone, left behind us.

I can also remember the music my dad was playing. The ripple of thunder. The crackling rain. The trickled organ. And then, Jim Morrison's voice... 'Rider's on the Storm.'

It's my first memory of hearing The Doors, and it's one that will stay with me until I'm old and grey.  Hearing that song now, no matter where I am, relaxes me. It takes me back to that five-year-old sleepily asking his mum for a wine gum at 3am as our car rolled off the ferry. I suspect everyone has a song like that.

And so The Doors have stuck with me. Perhaps in a way they wouldn't have had I never heard Ray Manzarek's descending scales over the crackle of a storm and Morrison's whispered vocal track.

So, with all that in mind, you can imagine how pleased I was recently when my brother presented me with a framed poster wrapped in parcel paper and it turned out to be a collection of my favourite Doors' lyrics. Better than any of the official posters and re-prints I've tracked on eBay, it has been designed by him with me in mind.

 
I don't hang straight, but what man does?

So now it sits pride of place on my wall, across from the Forrest Gump one he made for me a few months ago. My own piece of Doors fan art, there to appreciate, whenever the rain starts pattering and the organ starts playing.

* if you're interested in your own custom-designed fan art, get in touch with Tom Wood via Twitter (@TomWood1987).

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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.

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