The Celebration of the Lizard
I’m
talking about the death of rock n roll and who killed it- I’m talking about the
blues. I’m talking about the news. Have you heard ? Have you heard? Have your
heard the word? Rock is dead!Rock is dead! Rock is Dead!
My initiation into the Doors music was the Oliver Stone Movie back in 1991. I was a dumb kid and thought that movies based
on true stories bored me. However one Saturday night, I’m in a que to see that
shitty Charlie Sheen comedy Hot Shots (around the same time as The Doors movie was being
screened) and I just remember seeing this long que full of sexy hippy chicks, goths
and mettallers in leather trousers and (in the days when you could still smoke in
theatres) a cloud of mari-wana wafted down the stairwells. So that image stuck
in my mind, that I should go see this Doors movie at the next available
opportunity, which didn’t happen until I finally rented it on VHS .
Anyway, Val Kilmer blew me away
and the mythology of the Doors cemented into my psyche. The scene where Jim
Morrison is dancing with the ghosts of Indians at a rock concert with a massive
bonfire and a bunch of well endowed woman, (dancing naked to Not to
Touch The Earth) is one of the most evocative of tribal scenes ever filmed and the song itself seemed to me
to be the Doors at the height of their rock n roll prowess. I immediately went
out and bought the first album on CD and became hooked on the Doors sound. The
first two albums seemed to capture their most experimental explorations into
the realms of sex and death, Oedipus complexes and Friedrich
Nietzsche. Being an impressionable teenager I was hungry for more but
when I finally got around to hearing the third album I felt somewhat cheated: I
guess I was expecting perhaps another ten minute long jam about fucking but
instead, found it to be a generic pop album, a compilation of doors songs
which are very good but lacking that all important epic poetry grand finale.
Put it this way, the doors first and
second albums just wouldn’t be the same without The End and When the Music’s
over. Something just didn’t sit right with the third album. Almost as if history had been altered, somebody had fucked with time itself and now Hitler had his own prime-time cookery
program.
Don’t get me
wrong, the Doors Third album: Waiting for
the Sun is still a great album with some great tracks on it such as Spanish Caravan, The Unknown Soldier and Five
To One but perhaps the best song on the
whole album is in fact Not to Touch The Earth . Its weird and fucked up and in
fact the only piece of music that was salvaged from a much bigger composition: The Celebration of the Lizard. A thirteen
minute opus that was originally intended to be the quintessential aspect of the
Doors third album, an album that could have been their ‘Sgt Peppers’.
Here’s how I imagined what that
album would have looked like:
Side A
1. Hello I love you
2. Love Street
3. Five to One
4. Spanish Caravan
5. My Wild Love
6. The Unknown Soldier
Side B
The
Celebration of the Lizard.
But instead we got the above six songs mixed in with a bunch
of track fillers such as Yes the river
knows, Wintertime Love, Summer times
almost gone and We
could be so good together, pretty good songs in their own right but ultimately put on the album to bulk it out, due to
the difficulties in trying to pull
off Celebration.
The main obstacle (so the story goes) is that producer Paul A. Rothchild and Morrison had very different ideas as to how the third album would be realised. Morrison wanted a poetry ensemble. Rothchild wanted a money maker, like Light My Fire and forced the band to bash out endless takes of Five to One under his thumb, until they finally made a version he was happy with. It was this pressure to comply to the money making machine, that ultimately pushed the band and their singer to the limits of what they were capable of (moralistically as well as physically) and ultimately the dream of creating a celebration soon turned into a musical jingle-jangle nightmare, that became the sugar coated album we all know as Waiting for the Sun .
The main obstacle (so the story goes) is that producer Paul A. Rothchild and Morrison had very different ideas as to how the third album would be realised. Morrison wanted a poetry ensemble. Rothchild wanted a money maker, like Light My Fire and forced the band to bash out endless takes of Five to One under his thumb, until they finally made a version he was happy with. It was this pressure to comply to the money making machine, that ultimately pushed the band and their singer to the limits of what they were capable of (moralistically as well as physically) and ultimately the dream of creating a celebration soon turned into a musical jingle-jangle nightmare, that became the sugar coated album we all know as Waiting for the Sun .
Another
contributing factor, may have been the pressure to fully realise Celebration in the studio when it simply
wasn’t ready. A tired sombre studio version was recorded in 68 (intended for
the third album) but it is nothing like the electric live version recorded and
compiled later in 1970. As any musician
knows, you cant expect to write a masterpiece under the clock. It takes time:
songs, (much like people) need time to evolve. The specific
ingredient required to make Celebration
work in the studio, simply wasn’t there: the leisure to jam.
Point taken, the proof is in their two previous albums, in songs they performed perhaps hundreds of times in bars and cafes before they finally got their big break.
Point taken, the proof is in their two previous albums, in songs they performed perhaps hundreds of times in bars and cafes before they finally got their big break.
Celebration
simply wasn’t gonna happen. Perhaps it might have, if Rothchild had
believed in the concept and ultimately his obsession for the pot of gold
began to push Morrison away from being a creative song writer, into a apathetic
drunkard: who stumbled his way though the remaining three albums (that mainly
consisted of blues numbers). A bone of contention for Morrison, his resentment was expressed in a
song (recorded post Waiting for the Sun) :
Rock is Dead, basically a fuck you to Rothchild:
Rock
and roll is dying, baby
I
wanna see some fun
I
wanna see some hanging out
I
wanna see my people
Non-political
Arithmetical
Transcendental
Irathamadental
Coolambindang
bupalookanimbo
Are
you ready?
Are
you ready?
Are
you ready to sing the blues, my baby?
For most rock bands, blues was a no
brainer but the rock band that wrote Light
My Fire, The End and Not to touch the
Earth had irrevocably been forced to evolve into this new beast, producing generic
blues rock tracks such as Touch Me
and Road House Blues just to keep the
suites happy, never to return to the poetic
innocence of their first two albums. In a way, their fourth Album (and in
particular, with its 8 minute finale The
Soft Parade) this is Jim Morrison’s swan song and farewell to his alter ego
The Lizard King. Never again would he
challenge our perceptions, as he did with The
End and Horse Latitudes. Soon the
poet would be drowned in whisky, to reveal Jims darker side, known as Jimbo: The Pig Man of LA. It would be good ole
Jimbo blues all the way from here on in, until the Miami Trial and his ultimate exile
and death in Paris in 1971.
And so The
Celebration of the Lizard became a casualty of a war between The Doors and
Rothchild. Had it been fully realised, it might have been their crowning achievement, cementing The Doors myth forever. Perhaps the only conciliation left to us now, is the final doors album 'An American Prayer'
A theoretical reproduction of what that album might have
sounded like has been painstakingly put together by LosslessFLAC
