Stephen Bamfylde mailed a very positive response about Kwase-kwaza which was good for my hangover. Peter C and I have been exchanging e-ms about what still needs to be done/what might be done - I guess we need a measured approach. When I saw Stephen I asked him to make sure that Lynne�s boss is happy to do a video interview with Peter C next Friday when he visits Gfd.

At Nicola�s farewell a few weeks back I was talking to a colleague - Derek - about the Doors. It transpired that we had both seen them play on the same occaision in London at the beginning of time. Derek spoke about a live album he had just got - and I thought to myself that there probably wasn�t a lot of point in listening to it. Paul W sometimes asks incredulously why for example I listed to old Steely Dan records.

Just last week I was sorting out my office and I came across The Doors Companion which I bought a while ago in a remaindered bookshop - and never really got round to reading. I have read John Densmore�s book on the band's history and there is (for example) a really good section on the formative impact of his listening to the Coltrane quartet. That book also gives a view of Jim�s collapse - enough of a view I thought for one to get the general idea.

But looking through the Companion I came across an Oliver Stone quote:

�I think he was a Dionysian figure. Remember Dionysus was a god who came to earth to play and tease to seduce and drive women mad. Many of Morrison�s performances resemble the bachannals�so I would associate Jim with some pagan spirit. I think he had a problem with the Christian-god concept. I think he knew God. He read and adored Nietzsche�.�

This got my interest. Yesterday there was an article in the Guardian about the only mass murderer I have ever knowingly met. Not a loud person at all. Of course when I met him in the DTI I didnt know he was going to be a mass murderer.

Jon Cole used to have a lot to say about Dionysus in the olden days.

This week Yvonne and Vita went to see a classic piece from the Theatre of Cruelty - Marat/Sade . I saw the original RSC production when I was in the sixth form. When we all landed in LA a couple of years ago the whole family was unanimous that Venice Beach was the place we had to spend the morning. I think we had different reasons but mine was to do with The Doors - I wanted to see where it came from.

I am not a great Nietzsche fan. I think he was onto something of course. All kinds of people were terribly taken with him - H G Wells, D H Lawrence for example- maybe even Bernard Shaw. There�s even some N-exploration in Brave New World - the Savage, Mexico etc. One of the things N was onto was a gap in the culture which was the space that rock moved into easily. From the point of view of cultural history rock has been amazingly successful - some push but also some pull as well.

From this distance it looks as if Jim was quite strongly aware of a lot of these connections eg from his film school studies. I mentioned a couple of weeks back that it wasn�t an accident that the Doors homed in on an early Kurt Weil song.

One of the journos in the Companion looks back on interviewing Jim as he was becoming famous - and comments to the effect that he was one of the most �theoretical� rockstars he�d ever met. There were ideas and ideology in there along with and maybe also fuelling the excess. Someone else writes that its no surprise that through Apocalypse Now the Doors have become the soundtrack to the Vietnam war. (I mentioned that between A level exams James would lie in bed watching the director�s cut that Vita bought him for his eighteenth birthday?) So Jim had set the controls for the Heart of Darkness.

The vision is locked into an incredible musical underpinning - pared down blues and psychedelia. Maybe its the left hand of the keyboards playing bass achieving an integration with the drums that doesn�t usually happen. But Jim never quite bonded with the three instrumentalists as a team.

Nico apparently got the lyrics for Lawns of Dawns from a shared peyote vision with Jim. (I am told ) that in my era the psychedlics of choice in Newnham Gardens used to be organic. (No Hewitt connection there I don�t suppose.)

Nico is one of those people who gets more and more interesting the more you know about her. I nearly bought a compilation with her version of These Days on it - but maybe I should get the whole album. Whats the connection between Heidegger and Jimi Hendrix? One possible answer is Derrida the demon deconstructionist who was friends with Nico on the Left Bank in the 50s and of course Nico couldnt resist the Master of the Stratocaster.

I listened tp Lawns of Dawns on the hill with Jake this afternoon - nice work Mr Cale.

I am pretty bowled over with Mark�s take on Fifths. I loaded it into Traktor and looped around the point where the beats kick in and ran another copy on the other turntable from the beginning taking the output as a WAV into Cubase. This thing could go on and on.

I have been listening to the first arrangement I did of one of Robin�s songs - Married To the Muse. My first idea about it was that it ought to sound like a hard-bop Blue Note session from 1962 - say recorded in Hackensack New Jersey with R Van Gelder at the console (I should be so lucky). But something else happened to it.

My office is opposite the Central Music Library for London who at one point had a barmy disposals policy. So I have an original 1920s copy of Vaughan Williams three settings of Chaucer. I got the idea that it would be possible to arrange MTTM with elements from the first of these three songs. (I think its true that VW didnt write any songs between these three and the set of eight done in the early 1950s that Cathy sings one of on Plundafonix.) Anyway Robin said she quite liked the idea of MTTM being treated so contrapunctally.

There is a link between MTTM and the Plundafonix VW song in terms of the disappearing muse. In fact to be honest I put the opening riff of the VW song onto the little mix of of the remix of Fifths. (I have a sample of Cathy doing the riff in the library - now there�s a thought - in fact thought into action - a bit of BPM matching and we are away.)

Also ended up doing yet another remix of one of Schoenbergs Little Piano Pieces. The more I mess with this one the less freely atonal it gets.