The frontman David Crosby found “obnoxious”
A good musician and a good person are not synonymous. In fact, it’s regularly quite the opposite. There’s no denying that music-making is an egotistical realm where frontmen build themselves up into gods, and their screaming fans affirm that inflated confidence. Some handle that better than ever, but some, like one artist named and shamed by David Crosby, become utterly “obnoxious”.
Anyone with a loose knowledge of the 1960s rock scene would be able to put in a good guess as to who Crosby was talking about when a 1998 interview turned into a reflective episode about the best and worst characters of the time. In the category of the latter, one name came up quickly, with Crosby being one of many musicians to have stories connected to a certain Lizard King, known for his wild on-stage energy and his inability to turn it off and come back to reality off-stage.
The Doors’ Jim Morrison has gone down in history as one of the most revered frontmen ever. Songs like ‘The End’, ‘Touch Me’ and ‘Light My Fire’ not only soundtracked the countercultural scene but have remained beloved tracks, inspiring generations of bands since. However, Morrison’s own personal reputation isn’t quite so shiny. Instead, it was a known fact that a fair amount of his peers couldn’t stand the musician.
Lou Reed dubbed him nothing more than a “silly Los Angeles person”, while Frank Zappa went in even harder when he called the artist a “raging asshole”. There are tales of him fighting Jimi Hendrix and having a glass smashed over his head by Janis Joplin, both within the same night. The Beach Boys’ Dennis Wilson became terrified of him after they both had run-ins with Charles Manson. The list goes on.
David Crosby disliked the guy so much that he dedicated a whole song to it. Singing on the track ‘Morrison’, he declared the musician “mad and lonely and blind as a bat.”
Even in 1998, when this interview took place, he couldn’t find it in him to warm to Morrison decades after his death. “Yeah, I knew him. I didn’t like him,” he said plainly. It seems that the artist failed to make much of an impression on the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young singer beyond a negative one as he continued, “It was actually, most of the time he was drunk, and most of the time he was obnoxious, during the time I knew him anyway.”
In total, Crosby only seems to manage an incredibly loose and middling compliment for the musician. However, that’s instantly followed up with an affirmation of his earlier insult as he said, “Not a bad poet, but an obnoxious guy.”
But there has always been something about Morrison that has been blown up and mythologised to a God-like level. It started while the singer was alive as he claimed he had the spirit of ghosts within his soul before launching to an almost cult leader-like, shamanic status within his fans. After his death, that only levelled up as he remained this untouchable figure who was held up as the ultimate example of a rockstar.
That myth-making is shown clearly in The Doors, Oliver Stone’s biopic about the band. “You see the movie?” Crosby retorted when asked, “Is his legend romanticised that well out of proportion?” For Crosby, the aura that surrounds Morrison is nothing more than smoke and mirrors, cashing in on ego-trips. He said it all comes down to “General showbiz stuff, plus he died young, plus there wasn’t anybody around like me who was a curmudgeon willing to say, ‘Ah, the guy was an asshole!’” But luckily, he’s more than willing to be the person to say that now.
