The two artists that “knocked out” Jim Morrison
Jim Morrison, the late leader of The Doors, loved a lot of music. Throughout his career, he showered praise on an array of his day’s most influential artists and once even named the two that “knocked me out”.
While Morrison might have given the eminent Jimi Hendrix problems one evening, he tended to be more agreeable to his other most prominent peers. Furthermore, Morrison established a somewhat aloof character given his name ‘The Lizard King’ and notorious run-ins with the law. However, when it came to the artists he enjoyed, he was nothing but candid.
The frontman showed this side to his character when speaking to Bob Chorush in 1970, the year before he passed away. Morrison named the two contemporary artists that “knocked me out” as English psychedelic pioneers Pink Floyd and jazz legend Miles Davis. His comment came from talking about the all-star lineup for Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1970 drama, Zabriskie Point.
The Doors leader said: “I kind of came along when rock and roll was a big thing, like I guess a lot of people knocked me out and then I discovered blues in college, I like that. These days I like jazz, but there is just so much music, it’s like swimming in a sea of marshmallows or something, you can’t follow. The only thing I’ve heard (nowadays) is the things in Zabriskie Point in the beginning and the end, they knocked me out.”
He continued: “I heard them (Pink Floyd) in Hyde Park – I happened to be in London when they did a free concert in Hyde Park. I could listen to them a lot, in fact, when I heard them and I heard Miles (Davis), I think it’s good, this new sound he has now. When I heard those two things, I said to myself, “Well, say I’m a musician, all I knew was there was something there and I figured if we couldn’t go in that direction and get complex like that, then it’s best for us to do what we can really do best, which is blues’.”
Moving onto Miles Davis, he said: “I guess Pink Floyd has been together quite a while doing that kind of music. Of course, Miles, music has been his whole life, I guess you can’t get into that thing overnight. I have a friend, a girl, that is married to a friend of mine, and she only sings for friends and I think that if she ever performed publicly or on record, she would be one of the great singers; I won’t say any more about it. There (is nothing) like a good female singer. There are not many, I mean, the ones that I like personally.”
“I actually don’t know a thing about jazz, but for me, what it means is a kind of music that is based on improvising, in which you start out a set, and you have an idea of the steps that it might go through, but it could turn into something different,” he added. “To me, there is a show where they know exactly what they’re gonna do, every step and they come out and do a lot of songs and then there’s another type of music where you can feel the musicians reaching, and that’s the kind that I appreciate”.
Listen to the interview below.
