of their own excesses. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if Morrison had lived. Would he have achieved a more significant kind of musical or literary greatness beyond mere rock-star status? In the light of my brief encounter with him, I doubt it: Morrison seemed like a nihilist who wanted to merely kick life in the balls. (But then again, most of us have a bit of that in our souls.) b r e a k on throug h When my son Ben was a teenager, we had our differences, but one day he had a few friends over and wanted me to tell them about my knowing Jim Morrison. I decided I would; after all, I think my son thought the only thing cool about me was that I had known Morrison. I told some of the above story and said that Morrison wasn’t any role model, but rather emblematic of a wasted life and that the drug and alcohol scene was a dead end. At the time, Ben and his buddies were disappointed to hear me say that. But the thing about that 1969 show is that Morrison’s disheveled appearance — the beard, the gut — made me remember myself on a ferry back to Gibraltar from Tangiers in 1965. I had barely gotten out with my mind intact after smoking hash laced with I’ll never know what, but my brain had been disintegrated into a trillion molecules and beamed out into the cold universe. Somehow, I got to the American consulate, where a kind official loaned me enough money for passage back to Spain, my own money having been spent on (you guessed it) partying. When I got back to Madrid, where I was hanging out with the movie crowd doing extra work, I was offered LSD. I turned it down. Another Tangiers or LSD experiment would have slam-dunked my soul for sure. I split back to America, to Vegas as always. Many times during my 40-year career as a blackjack dealer, I’d crack to patrons, “I gave up drugs at the end of the ’60s while I still had enough brain cells left to be able to add to 21 — and I’ve been making a living ever since.” In spring 2011, pulsating above the tourists on the electronic canopy of the Fremont Street Experience was a Doors montage titled, “The Doors: Strange Days In Vegas.” One of the highlights? Of course, it was “Break on Through”:
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The Contest is back!
You know the day destroys the night Night divides the day Tried to run Tried to hide Break on through to the other side!
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