The Devil wins when we wait for Superman

On April 10, 1996, Layne Staley, Jerry Cantrell, Mike Inez, and Sean Kinney (with Scotty Olson in support) reunited Alice In Chains for the first time in two and a half years for a live acoustic performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Majestic Theater. The music recorded that evening has been in heavy rotation in my personal catalog for almost 28 years and remains as fresh as the first time I heard it, perhaps even more so if that’s possible.  The album opens with a slow burn intro of the song Nutshell, as each band member takes the stage and picks up their instrument adding layers to it. The song ends and after a brief pause, the unique chords that open the song Brother can be heard, and after several minutes of the most beautifully hypnotic sounds I’ve ever heard, Layne breaks the spell that the audience is under with a very simple “thanks.”  6 years later, Layne Staley would die alone in his apartment, and his body not be discovered for days. His bank would trigger the discovery when his account had been inactive for two weeks. It’s one thing to die alone. It’s another level of alone when your accountant is the first to notice your absence. What’s so hard to accept is this is the way he “wanted” it. And for this reason, to this day, I cannot listen to Alice In Chains without feeling profound sadness. But I love the way their music sounds way too much to not listen. Listening to tracks like Them Bones, Man In the Box, and Would? Instantly transports me back to my dorm during my freshman year of college to the point that I can remember the way that building smelled. Seattle grunge music was blowing up in 1992, but each of the bands that were a part of this revolution had very unique sounds. Unique from other rock bands, and unique from each other as well. Of the four main pillars, the other three being Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden; the band with the most unmistakably distinctive sound was Alice In Chains. Their voices and heavy reliance on tritone harmony was instantly recognizable, yet nearly impossible to categorize even from song to song. It’s equally present when you listen to the sweet pain in the acoustic performance of Brother that I linked to above as it is in the raw contempt for drug abuse in the song Junkhead. Staley isn’t advocating for drug use in this song at all, though it would be easy to make that mistake. He’s mimicking the arrogance of those who are in the early stages of addiction, thinking they are in complete control and feeling superior to the squares who look down on them. And the thing that amazes me to this day is the specific way they employ three part tritonal harmony in the chorus; making a song about something so ugly sound like the most beautiful music in the world to me. What I didn’t know back then was that the lyrics Staley delivered in those incredibly gorgeous and equally tense sounding tritones were the contents of a note he could have written to be found with his already decomposing body in his apartment. He didn’t write most of the lyrics for Alice In Chains songs, that was Jerry Cantrell. But he wrote plenty of them and the ones he didn’t write he sang as though he were living them. The tragedy of Layne Staley is that he knew he was self destructing and was unable to stop it. 

Two years prior to Alice In Chains appearance on Unplugged, I was in my sophomore year of college. Grunge music still dominated my imagination. Then in April, Kurt Cobain died, and Nirvana released its final album which was their iteration of Unplugged. Nirvana’s swan song is that album and the video of that performance. Nirvana didn’t get together to play their greatest hits that night. They played a set that paid tribute to what inspired them to be musicians, with a few songs of their own sprinkled in. 

The musical pioneers of our generation were already leaving us, but doing so with the kind of farewell that ensured they would live forever. 

That summer I went to a movie theater to see Wyatt Earp. While many were gushing over Tombstone, I hadn’t seen it yet, and I was introduced to the story of the Earps and Doc Holliday via Kevin Costner and Dennis Quaid instead of Kurt Russel and Val Kilmer. I don’t know when I was introduced to the concept of nihilism, but this movie laid it out plain for me. You know how sometimes folks say “explain it to me like I’m in 3rd grade.”  

Costner’s Earp is a teetotaler; having exorcised demons that came to him in the aftermath of his first wife’s sudden passing. His “breaking the fast” moment here is brought on by his guilt over his inability to love his 2nd wife the way she needs to be, and it’s driving her to destroy herself. Despair is the door the devil uses to whisper poisonous thoughts into our consciousness. If they take root, you get to become a helpless witness to your own self destruction. Wyatt flirted with such a fate in the first act of the movie, and now even considering that he is driving Maddie to the same place has him contemplating a return to the abyss for himself. Doc’s version of consoling someone in such a place is to assure him that little of it matters or has any meaning and he shouldn’t be burdened by it. 

He’s not in Hell, but he can see it from here. 

~2000 years ago in Capernaum, a troubled Jewish woman named Lil told her bartender that she was in Hell.  At least this is how it is portrayed in the first episode of The Chosen which I started watching last year.  Earlier in the episode, Lil shows a palpable fear of Roman soldiers, strongly implying she’s been assaulted, possibly sexually. Her behavior is at times normal, and at other times unpredictable….sometimes violent toward others, sometimes more self destructive. She’s caused such a disturbance that religious leaders are implored to perform an exorcism that fails. Lil’s demons speak directly to the exorcist telling him there is nothing he can do for her.   She wants to die just to put a stop to her suffering and views any attempt to help her as misguided. To Lil, those who intend to help would only prolong her suffering.  Then she meets someone who changes it all. 

Superman was born in comic books as a pop culture surrogate for Jesus. Superman has a problem that is often talked about for all superheroes, but never really solved.  There’s too much disaster going on in the world for any Superhero to save everyone.  Follow that through to its logical conclusion and what you end up with is a world divided between those who love the hero for being there and those who hate the hero for not making it on time. What if Superman could save everyone?  Follow that through to its logical conclusion and you have a world that sees no need to be good because Superman will take care of everything.  It’s easy to envision humanity questioning its own worth when they need Superman just to get through the day. This is fertile soil for the devil’s poisonous seeds to take root in the hearts and minds of humanity. 

This, I suspect is at the root of why so many might struggle with what Jesus is shown doing for Lil when he calls her by her real name, Mary Magdalene and redeems her from the grip of demonic thoughts. 

It’s fitting that Superman, the crusader for truth, justice and the American Way is a complete misinterpretation of the Gospel. But such errors are as American as the Kent’s from Smallville, Kansas are the “American Gothic” image personified. 

We struggle with what it means for Jesus to be our savior. He’s not Superman. He won’t swoop in to save Lois Lane from a helicopter falling off the roof of the Daily Planet building. It might look like he’s doing a variation of that for Lil/Mary. But for her that is only the beginning. She’s been redeemed so that she can become an apostle, someone capable of doing for others what Jesus was able to do for her. 

Just a few months after Alice In Chains Unplugged performance, Layne Staley lost his girlfriend to a heroin overdose. Staley had already been deep in the throes of his own struggles with addiction, but the part of him that wanted to overcome it still inhabited enough of his psyche to keep him engaged with the world. Until this happened. Staley’s heart and mind died that day, and what followed was six years of him waiting alone in his apartment for his body to catch up. 

Former Alice In Chains bass player Mike Starr was the last to see him alive, the night before he died. Starr begged him to let him call 911. His dying friend became angry and threatening. They fought and Starr left. Superman wasn’t coming to save the day, and the dying musician would have told him to fuck off if he did.  

Despair is the door the devil uses to dump poisonous thoughts into our brains.  Waiting for Superman gives him the time and space to do such work. What I see in The Chosen is not to wait for Jesus as a surrogate for Superman either. It’s that Jesus is waiting for me. The tragedy of Layne Staley is submitting to the belief that nobody could have done anything for him. Maybe that is true, but that doesn’t mean we are freed from the obligation to try. It doesn’t mean that Mike Starr’s attempts to save Layne from himself were in vain. What was in vain was that Starr didn’t learn how to save himself either as he suffered a similar fate several years later.  

All of this leads people to draw conclusions about those in a place like Staley. Just as silly as seeing Superman as a cool Jesus in tights, it is equally off base to see Layne Staley as the sum of his mistakes, robbing his legacy of the humanity that made music that was never imagined before and will never be done again. There is so much we can learn about ourselves from trying to see that humanity in everyone suffering such a fate, whether they have already passed on or are still here.  

Everything Must BE This Way....Alternatively...why my 2nd favorite movie will never win a Big Empty Award

 

The scene depicted in this picture is everything at once....showing a flawed, highly sensitive, intelligent artist fighting inner demons that are winning the battle for his soul.  He's recording lyrics that are authentic commentary on humanity, set to a stunningly beautiful intro on a harpsichord that sounds like it would belong either in a gothic horror film or a sad sweet opera......it then suddenly transitions to a bluesy rhythmic bassline that matches up flawlessly with a jazzy organ riff that dances with guitar picking that is precise.  The music and the mood it creates is so intentional it can only be described as perfect.  The singer is recording his track over the music that has already been recorded by bandmates who watch in the studio in a state of ambivalence, not sure whether to feel awe, hope, disgust, or betrayal.  Some make their choice and walk out of the studio.  It portrays the protagonist as pure, beautiful, vulnerable, horrible, ugly and worthy of contempt all at once.  And like so much of what Hollywood creates, it is wrong for a lot of the right reasons without ever really being right for any reason.  What you are seeing is NOT Jim Morrison and his Doors bandmates in a studio, but a talented yet overly ambitious artist telling on himself.  That artist is Oliver Stone, and what we are seeing is the product of how Jim Morrison and The Doors affected his imagination.  We the audience are supposed to feel just like the shadowy blurry background figures, the other three members of The Doors and producer Paul Rothchild watching Jim and trying to decide if the figure in the booth is a genius that will never realize his potential or a narcissistic sociopathic on a collision course with disaster that will hurt everyone within his blast radius when he blows up.

This scene and many others is how I was really introduced to The Doors in 1991.  I was born two years after Jim Morrison passed away and never heard his name until I was in high school.  I had heard songs like Hello, I Love You, Touch Me, and Riders on the Storm such that I was mildly familiar with their music, but I doubt that I could name the band that performed them.  So my first deep dive into a band took place when I was 17, and it was a band I knew almost nothing about.  For that, I think Oliver Stone gave me a gift.  There is no other movie before or after that attempts to do this for any band the way he did it for The Doors.  That alone is worth the price of admission, which I paid multiple times.  The first time I bought a ticket, I wanted to know what it was about The Lizard King that was so captivating to so many people.  I came away confused and even a little angry.  What was I supposed to learn from this other than this guy that is so revered was really a dangerous self-absorbed asshole?  AND yet, I was mesmerized by this hypnotic music and how the effect that it was depicted to have on people in the movie simultaneously had on me while I watched it.  This is where I still to this day can't decide whether the movie fails or succeeds.  If we want to know who Jim Morrison and The Doors were, the movie fails tremendously to give much real insight into that.  If we want to know what it might feel like to be affected by The Doors music without really knowing them at all, it succeeds.  And that might connect us authentically to people who were present for the Doors whether they were fans, bystanders, or passionately opposed to everything the Doors and their generation represented.

Unfortunately, we will not get to see Jim the way people who believed in him saw him.  What we'll see is something magnificent in performance mode, and some person backstage that doesn't seem to square up at all with the person who could inspire such alchemy.  No scene better depicts this than a performance of Not To Touch The Earth that is so fraught with inaccuracy that modern day Twitter (X) trolls could only sit back and admire.  This is a scene that had a profound effect on me when I first saw The Doors.  I was drawn into the performance, with sounds and rhythms so ominous I thought something significant and scary was about to occur during the show.  It did, but not in the performance.  The concert portion of the scene was an intense example of Jim Morrison's ability to form an unspoken bond with his audience so powerful that they would all trust him to take them on a journey that transcended their collective existence.  BUT, the scene is intertwined with a montage of Jim engaging in acts of immense cruelty to those who love him and the consequences of debauchery and excess.  It is the epitome of the conflict that I felt about the entire affair when walking out of the theater after the first viewing.  

Take a minute, and then I'll be back to debrief:

"I am the Lizard King, I can do anything."  At that moment I wanted to believe that, except I just saw this character try to burn his girlfriend alive in a closet, crash into a police car while driving drunk with a naked groupie on his lap, and engage in some pagan marriage ritual with a witch.  It kind of undermines the case for the whole thing.  Also, none of it is true.  Where shall I start.....

1. The scene is meant to convey authenticity by captioning this as some sort of concert that took place in San Francisco in 1968 YET:
• The Doors rarely played outdoor concerts as they liked more intimate indoor settings where they could better connect with their audience
• The Doors didn't play any outdoor evening concert in San Francisco in 1968
• The Doors never opened a concert with Not To Touch The Earth
• Drummer John Densmore was quoted as saying of this scene (and many others in The Doors) that Doors concerts were not filled with people dancing naked, and not once did he ever witness that occurring
2. Jim did not try to burn Pamela Courson alive in a closet by any account from anyone who knew him and if he did in the manner depicted, the whole house would have burned to the ground which there would be plenty of evidence of.
• Those who knew him well readily admit that Jim had a bad temper when drunk, but his temper did not manifest itself in the form of becoming violent toward others, just angry and provocative in ways that got people to be violent toward him.....usually resulting in some type of physical altercation, where he was a punching bag that didn't fight back.
3. Did Jim crash his Bullitt edition Mustang Cobra into a moving police car?  The Big Empty will not think you crazy to assume that there would be a public record of an arrest should that happen to a driver in a car with naked women and booze.  Yet no such record exists.  Nobody knows what happened to Jim's Mustang, some say he crashed it into a tree behind a police station and others say it was crashed into an unoccupied police car and abandoned.  But his very rare Bullitt Cobra edition vehicle is the kind of specimen where car enthusiasts can account for every single model.  Yet what ever became of this car is not known.
4. Jim did not have a Celtic handfasting ceremony with Patricia Keneally until 1970, after many of the events depicted as the climax of The Doors have occurred. Strangely enough, the woman performing the ritual in this scene is the actual Patricia Keneally. She described Stone as giving off vibes that were visionary and brilliant, but also ‘sleazy.’

I could provide evidence all night but why bother.  Big Empty fairly concludes that when watching The Doors, we are seeing what Jim Morrison has inspired in Oliver Stone's imagination.  And that's fair, to Stone.  Morrison is a mystery, gone before anyone could really know or begin to understand him.  But the real footage of him depicts someone who connects with people, not the self-absorbed, self-destructive manipulative maniac that Stone shows.  So while I'm being fair to Stone, I must say that Stone has not given Morrison equal treatment in any way, nor did he even attempt to.  He saw an opportunity to boil down the complex Morrison to equal parts God and The Joker. 

In many ways, The Doors was an opportunity to be rock music's Amadeus.  Instead it was an exploitation film that chooses to show us a one-dimensional binary protagonist the way the most extreme and irrational elements of 60’s culture viewed him.  I suspect what we’re seeing is Oliver Stone projecting his own self loathing onto the image of Jim Morrison and viewing that as some sort of kinship he feels as a fellow artist and lover of moviemaking. The Big Empty cannot award such a movie, yet we here will always love it for drawing us into the real story and helping us to see the kind of magic that such a band could implant in the imagination of a generation in their very short tenure as a band.  And with that, I'll give you the scene described in the opening paragraph....fraught with inaccuracies to the point that significant portions of the actual song being played are totally skipped over.  Yet in my mind, this is the first way I ever heard The Soft Parade, and it is my favorite way to hear it, and the real version sounds wrong to me (but also very very right in an authentic and different way).  Go figure.

(If you're not a fan of this song or just not familiar with it, consider taking a moment to contrast that scene with the actual studio version and consider the differences.....beautiful, absurd, bluesy, and poetic.  It is a commentary on the state of humanity where the music accompanies the lyrical intentions so well.  Nobody attempts art like this right now in any kind of medium.)