Listen to Ray Manzarek and Patti Smith’s tribute to Jim Morrison
In the late 1960s, Patti Smith moved to New York to pursue writing, stating in her memoir, Just Kids, “My few comrades had moved to New York to write poetry and study art and I felt very much alone.” Despite having nowhere to go, she also travelled to the big city, determined to surround herself with fellow creatives and meet like-minded souls.
Smith achieved her goals when she met Robert Mapplethorpe; “I had never seen anyone like him,” she wrote. The pair became inseparably close, becoming creative and romantic partners until breaking up and remaining friends. They were bound to each other regardless of their situation, with Smith dedicating Just Kids to his legacy as part of his dying wish.
While Mapplethorpe explored photography, Smith pursued music, performing her poems to live music. Together, they assisted each other in becoming successful artists, with Mapplethorpe even providing the iconic image of Smith on the cover of her debut album, Horses, released in 1975.
However, the year before she shared what is now considered one of the first punk albums, she released her debut single, ‘Hey Joe/Piss Factory’, with her band, The Patti Smith Group. A few months later, she was offered the chance to work with The Doors’ keyboardist Ray Manzarek on his second album, The Whole Thing Started with Rock & Roll Now It’s Out of Control. Smith’s performance on the record marks her first appearance on a full-length studio LP.
Smith recited the late Doors frontman Jim Morrison’s poem, ‘I Wake up Screaming’ from The New Creatures, on Manzarek’s album. According to Smith, Morrison significantly influenced her attitude towards creating music. In Just Kids, she explained that while in Los Angeles, she saw “a huge billboard for the Doors’ new album, L.A. Woman, an image of a woman crucified on a telegraph pole. A car drove by and I heard the strains of their new single coming over the radio, ‘Riders on the Storm’.”
“I felt remorse that I had almost forgotten what an important influence Jim Morrison had been. He had led me on a path of merging poetry into rock and roll, and I resolved to buy the album and write a worthy piece on his behalf,” she continued. By the time she got back to New York, “fragmented news of his passing in Paris filtered back from Europe.”
Later in her memoir, Smith writes about her visit to Morrison’s grave in Paris, taking “a small bundle of hyacinths” with her. “At that time there was no marker, and it was not easy to find, but I followed messages scrawled by well-wishers on neighbouring headstones. […] On the unmarked grave were gifts from pilgrims before me: plastic flowers, cigarette butts, half-empty whiskey bottles, broken rosaries, and strange charms. […] This is the end, beautiful friend,” she wrote.
Smith’s rendition of ‘I Wake up Screaming’ is an upbeat tribute to Morrison that captures the essence of his poetry in a few short lines. Listen to the song below.
