The moment Jim Morrison called his own fans “absurd”
The single ‘Touch Me’ from 1969’s The Soft Parade has always been a bit of a dividing line for fans of The Doors.
Some see it as a bastardisation of the original spirit of the band, a sort of cuddly Tom Jonesing of the Lizard King into something spineless and deflated, while others find it to be a pretty joyous and catchy tune, capturing the last vestiges of Morrison’s youthful energy just before he sank fully into addiction and self-destruction.
Around the time of The Soft Parade’s release, which came after a gruelling and consistently miserable six months in the studio, Morrison chatted with reporter Lizzie James to discuss the current status of the band and himself in the zeitgeist. The interview wouldn’t be properly published until 1981, when Creem magazine published it to mark the ten-year anniversary of Morrison’s death.
“The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are,” Morrison told James, “You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your senses for an act. You give up your ability to feel and, in exchange, put on a mask. There can’t be any large-scale revolution until there’s a personal revolution, on an individual level. It’s got to happen inside first.”
While he was seemingly speaking from a place of wisdom, Morrison was only 25 years old, and he was struggling mightily to locate and pursue his own version of freedom after several years of unexpected, international superstardom. Part of the reason The Soft Parade had been such a nightmare to record was that Morrison was nearly impossible to keep on-task and motivated, as his drive and interests seemed to be pulling him away from The Doors and towards other art projects. He probably would have quit the band altogether had Ray Manzarek not convinced his buddy to stick with it, for better or worse.
“A true friend is someone who lets you have total freedom to be yourself, and especially to feel, or not feel,” Morrison continued, perhaps with a critical view of Manzarek floating in his mind, “Whatever you happen to be feeling at the moment is fine with them. That’s what real love amounts to: letting a person be what he really is. Most people love you for who you pretend to be. To keep their love, you keep pretending; performing.”
It’s certainly possible that he was purely speaking in general terms there, but considering where he was in his career at that moment, it’s hard not to hear the soul-searching going on, as he tries to align his own heavy existential philosophy with the decisions he was making in his own life.
At one point, James asked him about The Doors’ fans, the many young people who looked to him as a ‘saviour’ or a ‘leader’ who could help set them free, a question that was intended to determine if Morrison felt this as a burden, but he rolled his eyes instead.
“It’s absurd,” he said, “How can I set free anyone who doesn’t have the guts to stand up alone and declare his own freedom? I think it’s a lie; people claim they want to be free. Everybody insists that freedom is what they want the most, the most sacred and precious thing a man can possess. But that’s bullshit! People are terrified to be set free. They hold on to their chains. They fight anyone who tries to break those chains. It’s their security. How can they expect me or anyone to set them free if they don’t really want to be free?”
