“Expose yourself to your deepest fear; after that, fear has no power, and the fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free.”
~Jim Morrison (1943-1971)

This week we’ll get a little better acquainted with the short life of rock star, poet, and icon Jim Morrison with the help of a beautiful radio documentary called Artist in Hell, produced by Clare Spark in 1971. Of course, it would be easy to focus on Morrison’s wild antics and excess, as that kind of behavior always leaves a high water mark on someone’s life for the ages to see, but instead, we’ll hear his closest friends describe the life of a tortured genius, a man with not nearly enough names for all of the colors he wished to paint. The Doors band members Robbie Krieger and Ray Manzarek speak candidly about their close friend, as do producer Paul Rothchild; while David Birnie, Digby Deal, Harvey Purr and others read from Morrison’s poetry and his Lord’s Notes On Vision.

In the second half of From the Vault, we’ll hear The Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek speaking at The Midnight Special Bookstore in Santa Monica on September 12, 1998. Manzarek speaks on The Doors and Morrison, reading selections of Morrison’s poetry, and sharing his insights and recollections on the transformation of four normal guys who met in Venice, hung out on the beach, and became one of the most legendary rock-n-roll bands the genre has yet seen.

From the Vault is presented through the Pacifica Radio Archives Preservation and Access Project, funded in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, past grants from the Grammy Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the American Archive funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, along with the generous support of Pacifica Radio Listeners.

PURCHASE a copy of this program or learn more about the historic recordings used within this episode. To purchase a CD copy of this program by phone, please call Pacifica Radio Archives at 800.735.0230 x 262.

Click here to send an email to From the Vault.

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This week on From the Vault we feature poet Robert Duncan. As a contemporary of Charles Olson, Robert Creely, Denise Levertov, and Jack Spicer, Duncan wrote poetry that became the artistic bridge spanning between the generation of artists like Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Dylan Thomas to the generation of Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, DiPrima, Keroac, and the Beat Poets. We present this October 28, 1960 recording of Robert Duncan reading dozens of his classic poems at the University of California, Berkeley with the excitement and reverence commanded by this rare and important document of 20th Century writing.

From the Vault is presented through the Pacifica Radio Archives Preservation and Access Project, funded in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, past grants from the Grammy Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the American Archive funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, along with the generous support of Pacifica Radio Listeners.

PURCHASE a copy of this program or learn more about and purchase copies of the historic archival recordings used within this episode. To purchase a CD copy of this program by phone, please call Pacifica Radio Archives at 800.735.0230 x 262.

Click here to send an email to From the Vault.