The Doors of Misperception

Cultural pressure and government fiat can’t hide this uncomfortable fact any longer: “Riders on the Storm” is not a good song. Longtime Doors' producer Paul Rothchild is said to have denounced early versions as “bad cocktail jazz.” Far too kind an assessment. Upgrading “Riders” to bad cocktail jazz would require full reconstructive surgery. When I think bad cocktail jazz, I think harmless background noise that at least offers some relief from the suffocating silence of our inner doubts. “Riders” can’t even give us that much.

The song tries to set an eerie mood using rain and thunder sound effects and cinematicish lyrics:

There’s a killer on the road
His brain is squirming like a toad

These lines might be acceptable if they weren’t riding the same bus with headscratchers like:

Like a dog without a bone
An actor out alone

and

Girl you gotta love your man
Take him by the hand
Make him understand

Surely you can’t be serious, Mr. Morrison?

Now contrast the words of "Riders" with the beguiling pop verite found in earlier songs like “Soul Kitchen:”

The cars crawl past all stuffed with eyes
Street lights share their hollow glow
Your brain seems bruised with numb surprise

Those are lyrics that stick to your memory like an old flame; the type that makes you grin mischievously whenever you think of her. "Riders" is more like that one night stand that was so bad it reaffirmed your atheism.

I am not a Morrison hater. When I was an adolescent, I was an obnoxious junior Lizard King. I bought Jim’s poetry books. Read the poems. Resisted the nagging suspicion that they were as tedious as the bad teen poems I was writing.

Each year when The Doors rolled out their annual FINAL BEST OF NEW UNDISCOVERED OUTTAKE DEMOS LIVE FROM MORRISON'S CRYPT!(MONEYGRAB REMIX), I was the moron who actually bought it. I didn’t stop there. I even owned An American Prayer; the posthumous album featuring Mr. Morrison reading his poems over a score played by the surviving Doors. I had it on CD and cassette. True story.

Would you still be my friend if I confessed to once hanging a Doors poster in my room?

The first two Doors albums are so good that if aliens ever land here, they should be presented as peace offerings. That being the case, maybe it's unfair to use their early work as a watermark for judging the rest of their career. Still, I wouldn't call “Riders” one of their finer hours. The song was once used in an English tire commercial, and as far as I’m concerned, it should spend the rest of its days providing the soundtrack for flattened squirrels.


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Practical Love Songs Part 2

When people think about songs of hardship, a name that comes to mind is John Mellencamp. He was born in a small town, he’s going to die in that small town, and along the way, he’s going to chronicle every loose lug nut that befalls the forsaken folk who inhabit that small town.

But many neglect to learn from John Cougar’s ultimate hard luck anthem: “I Need A Lover.” I’ll let Mr. Mellencamp tell it:

I need a lover that won't drive me crazy
Some girl to thrill me and then go away
I need a lover that won't drive me crazy
Some girl that knows the meaning of a
Hey hit the highway

A very biting and perceptive lyric. One reason so many couples are a mess is because they have obscene expectations of each other. When describing what their future mate MUST BE LIKE, it seems no whim is too absurd. Tell me this doesn’t sound familiar:

I want someone who knows when I’m happy. I want someone who knows when I’m sad. I want someone who knows when I need to be hugged and when I need to be bear-hugged. I want someone who knows when the muffins are done without having to look at the timer. Someone who can whittle a chair with one hand while massaging my back with the other. Someone who knows I like to be bitten on that little bump of skin behind my right earlobe that I’ve never bothered telling him is an erogenous zone and that not even my dermatologist can find…

Gee, with such simple requests, hard to imagine why the divorce rate is so high.

Mellencamp knows that all you need and all you should dare to expect is someone to thrill you…and then go away. You have heard that distance makes the heart grow fonder. You have heard that familiarity breeds contempt. John Cougar subtly reminds us of the accuracy of these sayings and throws in a pop hook for good measure.

What I’m proposing friends is that you manage your expectations. If you expect everything from a lover, you’ll be left with nothing. That is something both Jack and Diane can agree on.

Frequently Answered Questions

Those who electrify millions frequently find themselves stomped by a ceaseless march of questions. I have found the same thing happens when you electrify two people. The fans never stop sniffling about how you owe them your innermost thoughts. Like Tom and Jerry, the public and private sides of me are forever sparring for rank. Cosmo says vulnerability is a turn-on, so I’m going to answer some of the common ones:

Are you really only 5’5”?

Yes, but when you’re under 5’8”, it is best to go with centimeters, so I prefer to say I’m 165.1 cm. Fee fi fo fum. With just a slight adjustment of the measurement terms, I make Yao Ming look like a snapped dandelion. Height is in the eye of the rulerholder.

Is your height the reason you are so bitter?

“Bitter” or not, I’ve been this way all my life, even when I was 5-years-old and everyone around me was short too. Then they grew and I didn’t. Through it all, my “bitterness” never fluctuated. I never changed. I’m pretty sure there was a Springsteen song about this.

Why do you hate everything?

I have a very wide range of interests. If I wrote about them all, no one would care. Especially not me. Plus my life contains only three or four tales of triumph and they are boring enough to be comedy chloroform. Seriously, almost all triumph is boring. I admit to hating everything about triumph.

Why aren’t you famous?

Fame is mostly random, and the roulette wheel hasn’t stopped on my number. It never will. Sure, actions I could have taken to tempt that randomness, like constantly network with bookers/comics, I have not pursued with enough vigor. I couldn’t network my way into headlining a brown paper bag. I also don’t have a face that inspires long term investment.

Okay, you’re not famous, so when are you going to quit?

I’m held hostage by the psychology of previous investment. I’ll give up when it is time. Hopefully “time” is this year.

Why aren’t you writing for a show like Letterman?

Because he wanted to pay me in soiled million dollar bills and I have a thing about germs. Writing jobs like Letterman are hyper-coveted and a wee tricky to come by. You don’t just find them on Monster.com. People often spend years bouncing around with titles like “contributing writer” before they land a steady gig on a solid show. A better question would be, given all the crap on television, shouldn’t some of these guys be called “subtracting writers?”

Have you ever won any awards?

No, but I was recently nominated for the “Distinguished Achievement in Not Trying to Be Bill Hicks, Jim Norton, or Mitch Hedberg” award. It was an honor just to be nominated.

After a show I saw you standing near me and you didn’t say hi. What did that mean?

It meant you weren’t a hot chick I was trying to have sex with.

Do you get lots of chicks after shows?

No. And my chances are only slightly better before the show.

He's Only Human...

The Human Torch extinguished

In the latest issue of Marvel Comics' the 'Fantastic Four,' Johnny Storm - aka the Human Torch - is doused for the last time.

Every couple years a superhero "dies" to much to-do and just a few years later...KA-POW!...the dead crime fighter is brought back to life. And each time, comic book fans wonder; will we ever see him again?!?!?! Apparently, they’re not all superstar brainiacs.

The characters in question are superheroes, as in superhuman, so why all the shock when they rise from the dead? You accept that Above Average Man can leap above average buildings in a single bound, but you expect him to say “uncle” over six feet of graveyard mulch?

They Shun Pulp Writers, Don't They?

People know They Shoot Horses, Don't They? as a classic 60s film. Few know it was based on a book by Horace McCoy, which has been called America's first work of existential fiction.

The book came out in 1935, before existential fiction was a widespread topic. And the book had a murder, so it was called a crime novel, making it a candidate for genrecide. Of course, were it not for the "classic crime novel" stamp, it might have drifted offscreen altogether. Being lumped in with the high end of the crime fiction world at least allowed They Shoot Horses to find its way into esteemed compilations like Library of America's Crime Novels: American Noir of the 30s and 40s.

I just finished reading this bleak and very entertaining book, and can’t help but think if Mr. McCoy had been from Toulouse rather than Tennessee, his novel would be given more attention by the snootier Guardians of Taste. They Shoot Horses would have Sartre-obsessed hipsters poring over it, plumbing its depths for the meaning of its lack of meaning. Ironically, had McCoy been from Toulouse, he probably wouldn’t have found such a warm reception in France.

Practical Love Songs

You don’t have to wait for Valentine’s Day to hear your radio upchuck a mushy mix of musical malarkey. As you flip from station to station, you’ll recognize one dominant theme; love. Money is an obsession on country and hip-hop radio (country about lacking it, hip-hop about rolling in it), but coinage jingles seldom journey beyond these two formats. Hard to imagine a soft rock single with a chorus about cash: “This dollar in my pocket says ‘In God We Trust,’ like I trust in you-U-U (cue artificial horn section).”

Not only do all stations pump love themes, they tend to be the same types of love themes; new love, dying love, unrequited love, loveboat. You rarely hear a song about practical love. I’m still waiting for a track that sings, “I hate ya girl, but I can’t pay both halves of the rent.“

A practical love song wouldn’t have to be that cynical, though. It could just describe authentic love encounters; the pointy logistics of real relationships rather than the Shakespearean, pie-in-the-sky portraits standard love songs paint for us.

Men with bruised egos often come to me seeking advice. Rather than give them rubber-stamped sympathy about “plenty of fish in the sea” or “those cankles portended bad things down the road,” I prescribe practical romance songs to help them through their troubles. A particularly educative tune is “B.B.D. (I Thought It Was Me)?” by Bell Biv Devoe:

I went out, last night
See, that's when I met a sexy girl
She was lookin' so right
She said, "I wanna take you for a trip around the world"

(I thought it was me) - I thought it was me who makes the girl this way
(I thought it was me) - I came to find out she's like that every day
(I thought it was me) - I thought it was me that makes that girl so wild
(I thought it was me) – I found out she's like that with all the guys

This New Jack fable says it all. Too many young men believe they possess a unique ability to ignite “the crazy” in women. They strut around convinced that each girl they seduce is normally a specimen of immovable frigidity. But when this godsend touches her, blind instinct takes over and l-o-o-k o-u-t…she can’t help but do crazy things! He then confidently reports back to his idiot pals about how he magically transformed her from “I don’t think so” to “Ay Papi!” You occasionally catch 40-year-olds spewing similar garbage, but their tone is transparent. It is the same wounded inflection they use when pretending to like coaching their daughter’s soccer team. They only recite the lie because they know if they don’t try to believe it, they’ll retreat to the shed with a fifth of Jack and a barrel of sleeping pills.

The vast majority of men cannot comprehend that it is every girl’s M.O. to convince you she doesn’t do “this” all the time. Why might that be? So she won’t seem like a whore who does “this” all the time. Of course she wants to downplay her experience. Of course she wants to make it seem like she is usually hyper-inhibited. And the best way to make her story stick is to wrap it up in effusive praise of her lover’s supposed one of a kind prowess.

When I was 19 and 20, I probably had similar delusions, and probably believed the delusions of my friends. I have now tiptoed past 30, but because 28 is the new 19, I am still hearing guys my age share sex tales with that same chunkhead bravado they should have outgrown long ago.

Gentlemen: You are embarrassing yourselves, your friends, the sex acts you are describing, and the ancient tradition of storytelling. Remember:

(I thought it was me) - I thought it was me that makes that girl so wild
(I thought it was me) – I found out she's like that with all the guys

Too bad post-sex chats aren’t conducive to speaking plainly. This is the one time a man might actually learn something from hearing a woman say, “It’s not you, it’s me.”

Bemis and the Buttheads

One of the first "Twilight Zone" episodes I ever saw was the renowned “Time Enough At Last.” It is the one where Burgess Meredith plays Henry Bemis, a time-constrained bank teller who is always being “conspired against” by his wife and boss in his quest to find time for reading. Bemis survives an H-bomb blast (because he is sneaking in some book time in the bank’s vault), and in the resulting solitude finally finds enough time to read, read, read. That is, until his glasses break. “Time Enough” is one of the show’s best remembered episodes, and whenever there is a TZ marathon, I try to catch it.

For some viewers, one takeaway from “Time Enough” seems to be that it is a condemnation of anti-intellectualism; the tyranny of the anti-book rabble. After all, poor Burgess is callously denounced by his wife and boss for reading. Sounds like an open-and-shut moral.

The tirades of Mrs. Bemis are one thing (women live to corrode what little joy can be mined on this accursed rock). But as far as work goes, remember, Henry Bemis is a bank teller who reads on-the-job. An early scene shows how this on-the-job reading causes him to miscount change. Bemis’s hammy ogre of a boss summarily roasts him for being “a reader.” Bemis’s boss is right. Bemis works as a bank teller. That means cashing checks and taking deposits. It does not mean assailing short-changed patrons with lines from David Copperfield.

Calling Mr. Bemis on this dereliction of duty does not make Bemis’s boss an anti-intellectual or any other brand of villain. It makes him a guy who does his job, which is to supervise bank employees to ensure they perform their tasks and provide adequate customer service. A bank supervisor’s sole literary focus should be reading the riot act to bums like Bemis.

Had Henry Bemis been reading on his lunch break, and been accosted for being a reader, then yes, you could make the case that he is surrounded by anti-intellectuals. But being kept from reading the classics while being paid for work that has nothing to do with reading the classics hardly makes you a victim of those "illiterate," "unwashed" whatevers. Not in the 5th dimension or anywhere else.