8 Seconds in the new attention economy . . . what do I have now? Maybe 4 more seconds? Do you know what Jim Morrison's last words were?
Many people who have come close to death or have been resuscitated report their lives flash before their eyes, memorable moments replay, and they may undergo an out-of-body experience, sensing they're looking at themselves from elsewhere in the room. While we're dying, No one here gets out alive . . . a burst of activity in our brains still occurs after our hearts stop loving the preconceived ideas of our life experience real or imagined.
When a person dies their brain continues to function from seconds to hours. And believe me, if anyone had a brain you could call obstreperous it would be Jim Morrison. Today the doomsday clock is at 90 seconds. That puts 8 seconds in perspective. Eight seconds may not seem like much, but waking up in the morgue would be a great encore.
In 1964 my friend Elizabeth Buckner brought Jim Morrison to her boyfriend Max Schwartz' house because Jim needed a place to stay. Elizabeth met Jim at UCLA where She worked in the school library. Ahhhn 1964, just twenty more years to go.
At 8 o'clock on February 9th 1964, I was in the living room of the church mance in New Orleans, Louisiana (my father was the pastor of the Canal Street Presbyterian Church) tuned in to CBS and The Ed Sullivan Show. But this night was different. 73 million people gathered in front of their TV sets to see The Beatles' first live performance on U.S. soil. The rumor the next day was there was not a hubcap stolen that night.
Jim's friend Max Schwartz wore leather pants because he was always riding his motorcycle. Yep, that's the connection. That's where Jim got the leather pants bug. Jim was in film school at UCLA with another student named Ray Manzarek. Jim was figuring out how this whole film thing works and as part of the process, Elizabeth, Max and Jim got together to create a movie called First Love. It was not cinema because that would have required a soundtrack. It was a black and white 16mm film with no sound. A sunlight noir.
I made a couple of documentaries about the film, and since we were given a film made in Hollywood, where the industry is what J. Hoberman refers to as an "obscure conspiracy" it only made sense to call a documentary about First Love the movie, Obscura.
James Douglas Morrison was a creative mind. He started out as an American film student at the University of California Los Angeles in the mid-20th century. Morrison was known for a "visionary style" which embodied a voyeuristic pleasure of spying on relationships under pressure. He later further developed this approach and incorporated it in other art forms, i.e., poetry, lyrics and song. Morrison's initial work consisted of delicate grayscale concentration, unorthodox camera points, and blurred or soft images. When blended with hard hitting contrast and sharper crisper pictures, this evolved into a subtle yet strong style of mystery photography. He also utilized a Capraesque, or very close up approach with a number of shots. A student of human nature, he liked to mimic. In his work he mimicked candid photography and the conclusive moment. This is the point where visual and mental components of individuals in a life scene, immediately and quickly culminate in an amazing visual reverberation. His supernatural ghost-like images make you stare for quite a while due to their uniqueness. The best photographers impact with their thoughts more than with their imagery. Morrison dared to share his inventive ideas and face strong challenges. As Nicholas Roeg once said, "I believe the audience is the final judge, and I believe in a vast audience".
Back to the story. Roughly 18 months later, September 5, 1965 Jim and Ray came out with an acetate recording with the same voyeuristic quality, My Eyes Have Seen You.
Two months later almost to the day, November 6, 1965 the Rolling Stones released Get Off My Cloud.
During this time frame in 1965 my family had moved to Dallas, Texas in January as my father had a new calling. This time it was as the senior pastor of the Casa Linda Presbyterian Church. It was the gymnasium of the church where dad and youth pastor Allen Gulledge started The Crossroads, one of the first psychedelic ballrooms which eventually led to the San Francisco psychedelic scene. The Roots of The Psychedelic Scene are in Texas, Not San Francisco. It started in 1965 in Austin Texas with the band The 13th Floor Elevators. Around this time I met a guy named Kenny Hackler who lived down the street and we used to ride stingray bicycles together. I had been a Dylan and Beatles fan when Kenny turned me onto the Stones. I was 7 going on 8 years old. I had bought some cameras and box cameras and started taking pictures. My friends Doug Ross and his brother Ken were already shooting movies with a 8mm home movie camera. Again, Doug and I were only eight years old.
I remember the Beatles were still wearing funny outfits and the Rolling Stones suit Jackets. There was a band in Dallas called the Peppermint Phonetic They wore white stove pipe pants and red shirts. Think peppermint eye candy for girls with bee-hive hairdos.
I ended up owning a touring car owned by the Beatles they used in 1965. A Vanden Plaus Princess Salon. Then I met a friend of mine who was friends with Elliott Smith, poet Nelson Gary and Gary's wife, who worked for The Rolling Stones. Doug Ross produced and edited Hyacinth The Movie and my music producer Dave Aron, who produced the soundtrack for Obscura and Hyacinth was the engineer on Fredrick the DJ's remix of Riders On The Storm with Snoop Dogg. If you haven't heard this rendition I highly recommend it. Dave Aron did a great job!
Here is an ode to Nelson and Elliott too;
"One situation that defined much of Elliott's behavior during the beginning of our relationship before the recording of From a Basement on the Hill centered on him obtaining a mixing board from Trident Studios that served The Beatles at the end of their recording career. For months, obtaining this board obsessed him. It was his second most impairing obsession, which served as a relief from another: his unhappiness with his contract at DreamWorks. This obsession led, at times, to paranoia that the record company was bugging his home and studio where he cut demos, even the plants in his lawyer's suite, while also tapping his phone. There was nothing that Elliott did not know about this old board in terms of how it could and could not function. Aside from songwriting, he was a masterful engineer and producer, but he was not a tech. While his obsession with the record company was a nightmare that would take the likes of Franz Kafka, Edgar Allan Poe, and Hunter S. Thompson, therefore, Jorge Luis Borges with a sense of humor to render the disintegration of his logic, even his sanity altogether, with a precision of detail that was both as lurid and lucid as the subject matter deserved, the Trident Board was a dream. To that English board was the place he would go as an escape from mad thoughts about DreamWorks, but eventually this place would become the circular ruins of despair because he did not have the object of his desire." - Nelson Gary
Life is a journey and it is all about the story. "It's about finding it, examining its origins and then letting it go with Peace and Light." - Michaela
Trying to look through the past, and hopefully not too darkly, eight seconds, eight minutes, eight years. In America, as Willie Nelson would say, "if you got the money honey I've got the time." Or as the Stones so nicely stole and made it their own, "Time waits for no one."
The Author is Marvin Rodney Pitman. The Photo is taken by Jim Morrison.
Author Bio: Rod Pitman is an award-winning film and television producer airing over sixty (60) shows as well as creating entertainment programming for Warner Bros. Records, Warner Bros. Television and MTV. His work has been featured internationally at the British Film Institutes' London Film Festival, and the IDFA International Documentary Festival Amsterdam, with distribution including NETFLIX, Amazon, iTunes & Hulu.
* This is a contributed article and this content does not necessarily represent the views of musictimes.com
