There’s a couple in Pennsylvania who’ve channeled Big Jim (or some reasonable facsimile) through a Ouija board and have at least one book of poetry to show for it. Whatever else it may be, that material at least occasionally manages to sound like Morrison...though I’d have expected Jimbo (rather than bitching about Oliver Stone) to take the opportunity to spill the beans about what his daily routine is like up in R&R Heaven, maybe a little gossip on what’s up with Jimi and Janis, maybe a claim that he whispered the line “champagne supernova in the sky” into Oasis’ ear, something like that. You’d think, having managed to land such a gig, he’d find a way to have a little fun with it.

But no...gotta keep up that mystique. Especially odd since he’d spent the last year or two of his life on earth doing everything he could to puncture it (the mystique, that is). Maybe the intervening years have granted him...what, nostalgia? No matter. My point: that little weejee book had genuine Mojo vibes to it, and Phantom’s Divine Comedy doesn’t, or rather it does for brief snatches, only when it remembers to; The Phantom then sinks back into his own operatic obsessions, and fine ones they were. They simply weren’t Jim’s obsessions. The songs concerned themselves with black magick, white magick, Merlin trapped inside of a tree, and spiders dancing on your face as you sleep.

Honestly now, would you really want for Jim not to have died if it meant he’d have spent the 70s singing crap like that? Apparently somebody did, because an urban legend arose that the FBI had fed the vocals into a voiceprinting machine and they came out identical. Which is nonsense, because the vocals had an even lower Mojo-consistency than the lyrics. The Phantom could do an excellent Morrison when he bothered, but he only bothered 50% of the time. So if anyone had an ear, it was obvious that there was no Jimbo to hear. Besides, the cover photo was an overexposed shot of somebody else entirely. Gregg Allman as a werewolf, perhaps.

The local rock critic had a “what-if” piece in the paper the other day, on the subject of what various R&R Heaven types would be like if they had survived into the 90s. He had Janis and Jimi clean-’n’-sober, playing small blues and jazz clubs, walking the walk and talking the talk. When he got to Morrison, things got weirder, and far more interesting. As he saw it, the Doors split in the mid-70s for the usual reasons; the 60s were over and Morrison’s habits had made him impossible to work with anyway. There was one monster solo album in 1977, Lord Jim, and then the decline into obscurity. Searching for “deeper meaning,” Morrison found The End in the Heaven’s Gate cult: “Never fear,” he assured his fans in the final videotape, “the Lizard will always walk the earth.”

I don’t know about you, but I almost prefer to remember him that way; at least he’d have died happy. As for The Phantom, he eventually played a gig with Ray Manzarek and Iggy Pop, and probably did quite well. (There’s a photo of them in Creem circa 1974.) True to the Legend, he then had no choice but to vanish as mysteriously as did Morrison himself.

The album survives. It’s available on CD, so one could even say it thrives. It’s a positive pleasure to hear, and I’ve done so at least a dozen times. Every so often you need a few songs about black magick, white magick, Merlin trapped inside of a tree, and spiders dancing on your face as you sleep--just so long as you don’t try to pretend it’s really Jim Morrison singing them to you under cover of darkness. Once you get past the hype and listen to it for what it is, it’s enjoyable in the same way Klaatu is enjoyable--as an occasionally brilliant pastiche with internal merit and a secret, guilty pleasure all its own.