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Scream

Greg G. Zaino

    After attending a school dance in ’67, and hearing them for the first time, I walked to the record aisle at Grant’s department store in East Providence shortly thereafter and bought their first 45rpm record. I decided to purchase the entire album shortly thereafter. ‘Waiting for the Sun’ its title, and it blew our minds.
    It was fresh, raw, utterly Californian, emerging like a Monarch from its chrysalis. Had a resonance I’d previously not experienced from anything west coast. Completely on its own. Fiery, radical, the Doors collectively mounted their attack.
    A far cry from the hot rodding, beach, and surf tunes, or that of the previously unrivaled British bands. It held none of the folk overtones we’d come to know that popularized the airways. And definitely wasn’t that lifeless bubble gum music, that at the time, produced a strong following from young teens. We weren’t remotely part of that crowd.
    The Doors music, Jim’s poetry, was haunting, like some new language, exciting, mesmerizing, evocative. We tuned in to watch and listen getting our first look at the outrageous poet that defied Ed Sullivan. We watched him on stage, the magician behind the curtain. Wearing long wavy hair, he stood there in distinctive black leather pants, a black shirt open at the neck, and a silver concho waist belt. The look became decidedly his, and his alone.
    We heard of his arrest in New Haven in the neighboring state of Connecticut. Indecent exposure, the uptight cops claimed. A mild display by today’s standards. His lifestyle and performances clashed with the norm; those uptight standards handed down to us from a generation totally out of sync with our own.
     Jim was precisely the drug we craved. We were seeing firsthand the artist making love to his cradled mic, to us. His voice, rich, desolate, beautiful. The deal was sealed. We were young, the vocal youth, heated in seasoned anger.
    Jim represented what so many longed for. We yearned to be like him, waiting for the sun, and our day in it. America was rife with discontent. Ripe for the picking. The war, established rule, inequality, assassinations, and a felonious president; we were ready for a 2nd revolution.
    Your verse swayed us. You wrote of death, didn’t mind dying caressed it, some claim desired it; crossing over and opening that mysterious door to the other side. The music was over just four short years later. I remember well on route to the city. Over a 1963 Chevy Corvair’s AM radio, the news emerged like a cobra strike, jolted us awake.
    You were found dead. Our jaws dropped; eyes widened. Jay, Rick, and I looked one to the other. Shock in the absolute. You were gone... you were fucking gone.
    Jones in 1969 - Hendrix and Joplin in ’70, now, just one year later, you, James Douglas Morrison, left this incarnation. Remember thinking; It just couldn’t be. It must have been some kind of a mistake. But it wasn’t. You were discovered in a bathtub. An apparent overdose.
    I envisioned the horrible scene. The indignity. To be found like that. No man, not you... In that far land under Parisian soil, they filed you away in a cemetery with Proust and Wilde. Sadly, dejectedly, we drove on in silence.
    Having heard the last from you, we finally understood, I understood, what it felt like, tasted like. We’d all heard, the final scream, of the butterfly...

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