Before His Last Concert Jim Morrison Said One Sentence to John Densmore — Densmore Has Been Trying t D
John Densmore has told the story many times, not the same way twice. This is the detail that matters. The fact that the person who was in the room has never managed to tell it in exactly the same form on any two occasions, which is itself the most honest thing about it. If the story were simple, it would have stabilized by now.
It would have found its shape the way stories find their shape when they are told enough times. The words settling into the most efficient arrangement. The pauses landing in the same places. The ending arriving with the practiced weight of something that has been delivered before and knows how to land.
John Densmore’s story about the dressing room at the warehouse in New Orleans on December 12, 1970 has not found that shape. 40 years of interviews and it is still shifting, still being turned over, still revealing different aspects, depending on the angle at which it is held. This is not a failure of memory.
It is the accurate report of something that contained more than the telling has yet been able to hold. The warehouse was a converted warehouse. The name was literal, which was typical of New Orleans, a city that tended to use its buildings for exactly what they looked like, and to find a certain pride in the directness of that.
The venue held a few thousand people. It was not the largest room the Doors had played in 1970, not by a significant margin. By December of that year, the band had been filling arenas for 3 years, had played to the kind of crowds that required logistics and security, and the full apparatus of large-scale commercial touring.
The warehouse was smaller than that. It had the feeling that December night of a band that was returning to something not quite to beginning not to the small clubs of 1966, but to something more human in scale than the arena circuit had permitted. Jim Morrison had been in New Orleans for several days before the show.
He had arrived early without the specific urgency of the pre-show preparation that usually governed his movements in touring cities and had spent the days doing what he did in cities when the schedule allowed. Walking, reading, sitting in cafes, being in the city without the city knowing who he was. New Orleans was good for this.
It was a city with its own profound self-absorption, its own deep internal life, its own relationship to performance and music, and the particular quality of attention that cities generate when they have been making art for a very long time. New Orleans did not require Jim Morrison to be famous.
It required him to be present. This was a distinction he had learned to appreciate. Over four years of touring, John Densmore arrived in New Orleans on the day of the show. He found Jim in the dressing room of the warehouse in the early afternoon, several hours before the doors would open.
The dressing room was the standard backstage space, functional, impersonal, a mirror on one wall, a couch along another, the particular smell of old buildings that have held many performers and absorbed something of all of them. Jim was sitting in the chair in front of the mirror, not looking at his own reflection.
He was looking at something past the mirror, at whatever it is that people look at when their eyes are directed at a surface, but their attention is directed elsewhere. He did not immediately acknowledge J’s arrival. This was not unusual. Jim Morrison acknowledged arrivals in his own time. Jon sat down on the couch.
He was used to these silences, had been used to them since the London Fog residency in 1966, when he had first understood that the silences before shows were not emptiness, but preparation. the specific interior gathering that Jim Morrison required before he was able to do what he did on a stage. You did not fill those silences.
You sat in them or you left the room and either was acceptable. Jon sat in it. What was different about this particular silence? What John noticed and filed in the way he noticed and filed things from his position behind the drums, which was both the most attentive and the most removed position in the band’s spatial arrangement, was its quality.
It was not the usual pre-show silence. The usual pre-show silence had a direction to it, an orientation toward what was coming, a gathering energy. Even when it was still, the silence in the New Orleans dressing room had a different quality, less directed, more complete. The silence of someone who is not preparing for something, but simply being in a moment without particular agenda or orientation.
Jim Morrison was in the dressing room at the warehouse in New Orleans and he was not particularly pointed at anything. After perhaps 20 minutes, Jon has given different estimates of the duration in different interviews, ranging from 10 minutes to half an hour, which is itself evidence of how time moved in that room.
Jim Morrison turned in his chair and looked directly at John Densmore. not through him, not past him, but at him with the specific directness that Jim reserved for the moments when he wanted to say something that the oblique approach would not carry. He said, “I’m not sure I know how to do this anymore.
” John Densore has described his response to this statement differently in different accounts. Sometimes he says he said nothing. Sometimes he says he asked what Jim meant. Sometimes he says he made a sound of acknowledgement that was not quite words. What all versions agree on is that he did not ask the obvious follow-up question.
did not ask what specifically Jim was referring to, what the this was that he was no longer sure he knew how to do. John understood from four years of interpreting Jim Morrison’s statements in the specific way that close collaborators developed for interpreting each other that the this was not one thing.
It was several things at once and the statement was true of all of them simultaneously. The this was the performance. that this was the being Jim Morrison, the maintenance of the version of himself that the career had built and that the audiences required and that Jim had been delivering with decreasing ease and increasing cost for 4 years.
Though this was the continuation of the project, the ongoing commitment to the idea that what they were making was worth the making, that the distance between the interior life and the audience was still worth attempting to close, even when the closing was harder than it had ever been, and the cost was higher than he had anticipated when he was standing on a Venice beach pier with a notebook in the summer of 1965.
But to understand what Jim Morrison meant by that sentence, what John Densmore heard in it, and why he has been trying to accurately account for what he heard ever since, you have to understand what the year 1970 had been and what December had become. The Doors had been working on L a woman through the fall of 1970.
The sessions at the Santa Monica Boulevard rehearsal space had been by every account that exists the most concentrated and most genuine recording work they had done. Jim Morrison on a stool singing in the voice that was closest to the thing the poems came from. The band stripped of professional studio constraints and making music in the direct way that music gets made when the apparatus is removed.
And what remains is the essential question. The sessions had been good. Jim had been present for them in a way he had not always been present for the earlier recordings, and the music had heard his presence and had responded to it. And yet the Paris plan was already formed. The notebooks were already accumulating the poems that had no commercial destination.
The conversations with Pamela Corson about the apartment on Rubilles had become less speculative and more logistical. Jim Morrison had been in the process through all of the L a woman’s sessions and through the New Orleans tour dates that followed of winding something down, not abandoning it, not repudiating it, but completing it, arriving at the natural end of what it had been in preparation for whatever came next.
The New Orleans show was the last show. Jim Morrison knew this, or knew something adjacent to this, in the specific way that people know the endings of things before the endings have been formally announced. He had not told Ray Manzer or Robbie Creger or Bill Siddens that this was the last show. He had not told John Densmore.
He had not said this is it. He had said something else in a dressing room at the warehouse to the person who had been watching him from the back of the stage for 4 years. He had said I’m not sure I know how to do this anymore. John Densmore went out and played the drums that night.
He played them the way he had always played them from the elevated position at the back of the stage, watching the front, watching Jim Morrison move through the set with the particular quality of attention and presence that had characterized the shows in the Santa Monica sessions. The same quality of someone who is in the work rather than performing the work.
Jim sang well. The audience received what it came to receive. The show was by external measure a good show. What John was watching from behind the drums was something that the external measure did not capture. He was watching the sentence from the dressing room being enacted. Watching a person move through a set with genuine commitment and genuine presence and genuine care, but moving through it with the particular quality of someone who is doing something for the last time and knows it. Not performing a farewell, not making the ending visible for the audience, just knowing in the interior way that you know the last time of things that this was the last time and giving it everything the knowing allowed. After the show, Jim Morrison went out into New Orleans. He walked. He came back. He flew to Lowe’s Angels and finished the L a woman’s sessions. He flew to Paris in March 1971. He died on July 3, 1971 in the apartment on Rubillies. He was 27 years old. John
Densmore heard the news in Lowe’s Angels. He sat with it in the way that you sit with news that has been in some way you could not have articulated expected without being anticipated the way you sit with the arrival of something that a sentence in a dressing room in new. Orleans had been describing without fully describing it on a December afternoon 14 months before it happened.
He has talked about the sentence many times. The telling shifts. The duration of the silence before it was spoken shifts. 10 minutes 2030. The exact words shift slightly at the edges. What does not shift is the quality of what John heard when Jim Morrison turned from the mirror and said it. The exhaustion that was not physical, the honesty that was not performed, the specific weight of someone saying a true thing to the one person in the room who would receive it as a true thing rather than as a problem to be managed. I’m not sure I know how to do this anymore. John Densmore has said that for years. When he heard that sentence in his memory, he heard it as sadness, as the statement of someone who was losing the capacity for something that had once been natural to him, who was at the end of a resource that he had been drawing on for 4 years. But as the years passed, his hearing of it shifted. He began to hear something different in it. Not sadness or not only
sadness, but clarity. The specific clarity of someone who has understood what the this requires and has assessed honestly and without drama whether they can continue to meet the requirement. Not despair. Honesty, the particular honesty of a person who has been doing something real at great cost for a long time and is arriving at an honest account of where they are.
I’m not sure I know how to do this anymore. It was John Densore has said the most honest sentence he ever heard Jim Morrison say. not because the others were dishonest. Jim Morrison had a gift for honesty that was consistent throughout his life and that was visible in the music and in the conversations of the people who knew him.
But because this sentence had none of the mediation that even honesty sometimes carries. It was not framed as poetry. It was not articulated as philosophy. It was not the honesty of a person who has found the right form for a true thing. It was the honesty of a person sitting in a chair in front of a mirror in a dressing room in New Orleans, saying what was actually true to another person who was actually present.
And John Densmore, sitting on the couch, had received it, and had not had the vocabulary in that moment for what to do with it, and had gone out and played the drums that night holding the sentence, not knowing then that he would spend the rest of his life trying to find the accurate account of what it had contained.
The rest of his life has been long enough to tell him this. The sentence was not about losing something. It was about finding the end of something that had been fully lived. Jim Morrison had done what he had come to do, had followed the poetry into the music and the music into the performances and the performances into the culture, and had given each of them everything the giving required.
He was not sure he knew how to do it anymore because the doing had been done, not abandoned, not failed, completed. And the sentence was the completion said to the person who had been there from the beginning and would understand eventually what it meant. John Densmore understood it eventually.
He is still understanding it. This is perhaps the most accurate thing that can be said about it, that the sentence has been large enough and true enough to continue yielding meaning for as long as the person who received it has continued to carry it, which is the exact quality of the best things Jim Morrison made, which means the sentence was in the end of a piece with everything else.
It was the last thing he made before the last show. What Ray Manzer knew about that New Orleans show and about the sentence which John Densour told him about in the weeks following Jim’s death was filtered through his particular relationship to Jim Morrison which was the relationship of the musician who had been there first who had heard the poems on the pier before they were songs who had sat on the floor of a Venice apartment and played beneath the voice that would become famous.
Ry heard the sentence and understood it the way he understood most things Jim said, as a musical statement, which is to say as something that was more about direction than about complaint more about navigation than about loss. He heard it as Jim saying, “I am at the end of the particular range this instrument has been playing in, and I can feel the edge of the range, and I am not sure what comes next.
” Not, “I am finished.” Not, “I cannot do this.” The particular musician’s precision of I am not sure I know how to do this. This being the specific form, the specific range, the specific version of the thing that has been the thing for the past four years. Rey would not have heard sadness in it. Ry heard recalibration.
The musicians signal that a recalibration was needed, that the instrument had been played at the edge of its current range for long enough that a new range was necessary, and that the finding of the new range required acknowledging honestly the limits of the current one. This was not failure.
This was the condition of creative development, the specific acknowledgement that the available form has been taken as far as it can go, which is the prerequisite for finding the form that comes next. Jim Morrison had been heading for Paris for months. The notebooks were filling with work that had no immediate commercial destination, poems that were not songs, pros that was not lyric, the writing of a person who was pressing towards something that the band’s form could not contain, and that required a different container. Rey understood this. He had watched the notebooks accumulate all year. He had watched Jim’s engagement with the sessions at Santa Monica Boulevard carry a quality of conclusion as well as creation. The feeling of a person giving everything to a form they are completing. Knowing that the completion is what makes the departure possible. The New Orleans sentence was the moment that knowledge became spoken not to Rey but to John Densmore which was itself significant. John was the one who had watched from
behind, who had seen both sides of every performance, who had been the most consistent witness to the distance between what Jim Morrison was on stage and what he was in the moments before and after. If the sentence was going to be said to anyone in the band, it would be said to the person who had been watching carefully enough to receive it.
Robbie Creger processed the sentence the way Robbie processed most things quietly through time through the long accounting that playing music with someone for four years produces. He heard it from John and sat with it without immediate interpretation. Years later he would say that what he heard in J’s account was not the end of something but the beginning of something not Jim saying the performance was over but Jim beginning the conversation about what came after the performance.
The sentence was not a conclusion. It was the first sentence of a new question. The question that Paris was supposed to answer and that Jim had not quite had enough time to answer before the dying arrived.
