| T O P I C R E V I E W |
| lemonade kid |
Posted - 31/07/2013 : 16:09:02
An engrossing Vanity Fair writeup that the starts with Gidget and that crazy beach bum scene with beach parties, Surf rock to folkrock and the Byrds, Jackson Brown, David Crosby, to Jim Morrison hanging at Malibu and his UCLA surfer days, and witnessing a grizzly accident which he used in a stage improv of THE END...thx to rw
Here is a short bit about the Morrison times--nothing else about Jim but a really great read....then read it all below--about the surf scene heydaze. Pretty cool write up
Jane Fonda and her husband, Roger Vadim, would sometimes have the new group the Byrds—the State Beach kids’ band of choice—perform at their posh beach parties. The surfers liked to go to Ciro’s, the club on the Sunset Strip—which had been completely made over, from swank Old Guard to anti-Establishment, cutting-edge hip—and dance in the free-floating style pioneered by a dancer and sculptor named Vito Paulekas. The new dancing was as sensual as the waves.
There was a new guy at State Beach that summer of ‘65, a U.C.L.A. film-school student named Jim Morrison. “He was always there, almost every day,” remembers his then best friend, Robbie Freeman, a pal of Larry Shaw’s. Freeman and Morrison were going to be in a band together, but Morrison couldn’t play a single instrument, so by default he became lead singer, in spite of his unsteady and unproven voice. “Jim believed he was a poet,” Freeman remembers. “He wanted to reach people. He thought he had a profound message to communicate.” Miki Dora and Jim Morrison were like rival messianic ships passing each other in the surf-sparked night.
During one party at the designer’s house, Morrison, on acid, started to gleefully, methodically tattoo his girlfriend’s bare skin with a lit cigarette, but Nader confronted him and tried to talk him out of it. Another night, there was a head-on collision on Pacific Coast Highway right outside the house, and surfers in woodies were killed and injured. During one live performance, Morrison would use his acid-enhanced witnessing of that accident in an improvised lyric for his hoary “The End.”
MALIBU"S LOST BOYS
Sur#64257;ng was still a strange and exotic art in 1961, when Mike Nader, Duane King, and Larry Shaw escaped their troubled homes for the beach at Malibu. Becoming acolytes to the dashing, lawless Miki Dora, the three boys found themselves at the crest of a craze sparked by one of the girl surfers on the scene, whose father wrote the novel Gidget about her obsession. Sheila Weller revisits an underground culture of big waves and wild times, which ended in a blaze of Hollywood decadence, drugs, and death.
Enjoy...
http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/features/2006/08/malibu-surf-scene-200608
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Old hippies never die, they just ramble on.
-lk |
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