Dennis Jakob's "My Summer with Morrison"

In times gone by there used to be small books about writers, not quite biographies, more like biographical meditations on the writer, his work and his life; the best known example of this may be Henry Miller’s book on French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud, a book that Jim Morrison and Dennis Jakob surely knew. In “Summer With Morrison”, Dennis Jakob, a UCLA film school friend of Morrison’s, does the favor to Morrison in writing a small book of meditations, it isn’t a throwback or even an homage to the form, but the best way to present Morrison to the reader, and Jakob tells us stories we may not have heard before and a view of Morrison few others would be able to provide.

“Summer With Morrison” is divided up into two sections, the first Jakob’s stories, anecdotes, and adventures with Jim Morrison the summer Morrison had his vision quest on top of the building Jakob was living in. Apparently, it wasn’t as much of an exile as legend has it, Jakob has Morrison coming off the roof to discuss a variety of subjects. Jakob also was there when Morrison burnt his old journals in a furnace before embarking on the notebooks that would contain the poems that would become the genesis of The Doors.

Read full article at The Doors Examiner.