The song Nico wrote about taking peyote with Jim Morrison
In the 1980s, Nico was living in Manchester, a heroin addict drifting into obscuring. With the notion of counterculture and revolution also long eroded, the late Jim Morrison was beginning to seem more like a forgotten relic, too. But there was a time when their deeply poetic union seemed to typify an age of exploration: the sex, drugs and atavistic philosophies of the 1960s, somewhere in the Californian desert.
It was a dreamlike coming together, and its unceremonious ending is typified by Nico’s thought: “I have a habit of leaving places at the wrong time, just when something big may have happened for me.” Nico and Morrison could never truly make it; by their own admission, they both had appetites that were too big to sustain leaner times in a relationship.
Nevertheless, a creative collaboration flourished during their time together, and it is perhaps no surprise that getting out of their gauds was part of it. “Peyote was a spiritual drug,” Nico writes in one particular recollection of their time together. “We were in the middle of the desert and everything was natural, you know, in the open air, nature all around, not a hotel room or a bar. And the cactus was natural. You did not buy it from somebody on a street corner. We had visions in the desert.”
Likening it to poets of the past, she continues: “It is like William Blake; he would see visions like Blake did, angels in trees, he would see these, and so would I. And Jim showed me that this is what a poet does. A poet sees visions and records them. He said that there were more poets in Comanches than there were in bookstores. The Comanches took the cactus, too. We were like the Indians who lived in this way for thousands of years, before the Christians and as long as the Jews.”
This sense of trawling back through history to a primordial heart was central to all of Morrison’s work. He became obsessed with America’s brutal past. He gravitated to the open roads, hitchhiking, the desert, the passage of time, and the struggle for peace. He placed all of this in his defining epic poem, ‘The Lord’.
This art was borne from these desert trips with Nico, who shared one of her own too. “The light of the dawn was a very deep green, and I believed I was upside down, and the sky was the desert which had become a garden and then the ocean,” she wrote about a peyote trip with Jim. “I do not swim, and I was frightened when it was water and more resolved when it was land. I felt embraced by the sky-garden.”
In this haze, she penned what became one of her first songs, ‘Lawns of Dawn’. The lyrics she wrote on the peyote trip are as follows:
“He blesses you, he blesses me
The day the night caresses,
Caresses you, caresses me,
Can you follow me?
I cannot understand the way I feel
Until I rest on lawns of dawns –
can you follow me?”
