He was so at home thumbing rides in the parched and windswept land that he is now almost synonymous with it. However, despite the darkly poetic overtones that Morrison imbued upon his chosen landscape, this apocalyptic vision was one that proved alluring to him. It would form a tapestry alongside slithering snakes, spitting lizards, storms, flash floods, bubbling creeks and lost, disenfranchised souls, all of which were wrought out in his work, most notably in HWY: An American Pastoral. He always thought about that crying Indian.” This image was scarred onto Morrison’s visceral young mind. As his father would later recite, “We went by several Indians. On one journey, he witnessed a truck overturned on a battered desert road. But there was a danger and darkness to his itinerant soul too, and this was also borne of American travels. As a boy his father had also been in the military and the family constantly hot-footed around America, weaving the fated image of Morrison as a wandering enigma forevermore. In college, his girlfriend lived three hundred miles away and Morrison would thumb rides towards her on his lonesome. Morrison himself was no stranger to wandering the serpentine roads of the west with an outstretched thumb. In fact, few songs in history conjure up a landscape with as much immediacy as ‘Riders on the Storm’ as it draws upon the stark and stripped West’s dusty haze. While The Doors may have taken the song in an entirely different direction thereafter, this brooding sense of epic Western theology remains. The song began as a jam of ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’, a country tune which was originally written by Stan Jones and depicts a coterie of cursed cowboys forced to ride horseback through the sky for tortured eternities. As Fred Powledge, a political correspondent who was inadvertently roped into his oeuvre, once wrote: “Morrison is a very good actor and a very good poet, one who speaks in short, beautiful bursts, like the Roman Catullus… You sense that Morrison is writing about weird scenes he’s been privy to, about which he would rather not be too explicit.” The desert is full of such oddities. And, as it happens, it was a song a lifetime in the making for Morrison, himself a careworn wayfarer of the highroads by now. When it comes to ‘Riders on the Storm’, The Doors managed to capture enough atmosphere to sustain life in space. With the evocative image of a road-weary traveller, the band crafted an atmospheric masterpiece that housed more imagery than the Museum of Modern Art. It seems to me to be the road toward freedom”. Woman: “I’m interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos, especially activity that appears to have no meaning. As Jim Morrison said long before the band arrived at the opus of L.A. In the eternal summer of peace and love, the flowery sanguine sound that most of the mainstream music in the era propagated was in direct contrast to the iconoclasm that followed shortly after. When The Doors first formed in 1965, starting a song with a lightning crack and an apocalyptical atmosphere was out of the question. His farewell to that short life was his masterpiece, ‘Riders on the Storm’ is undoubtedly one of the greatest rock ‘n’ roll songs ever written. This notion of the long unfurling roads of America stretching out like lonely ventricles is not just a vignette to open a film, but a singular fascination that Morrison seemed to hold throughout his short life. The opening shot of the movie sees a stretch of asphalt unspool with the credits painted onto it before the camera eventually arcs towards the bruised sky of a moody desert dusk where the desolate moon hangs like a milk bottle top on a washing line awaiting the hissing company of the night. In 1969, Jim Morrison made a film called HWY: An American Pastoral.
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