Dexter Zirkle as Jim Morrison

My first exposure to the music of the Doors was as a child sitting in an old rusty Suburban on a summer day. My father had run inside to grab something and there I sat with the radio on, my young mind ready to absorb sounds that couldn’t totally be understood by my age. I heard Light My Fire and People Are Strange in that succession and as I sat there I wasn’t sure if I had audibly witnessed a grand celebration or a grand funeral…it was somehow both…both in a way that no other music before it was able to capture. I was excited, haunted, curious and even a little scared. Those particular radio waves changed my life forever. Although it would remain several years before I learned who I had heard on the radio that day, it never left me. It was there, it stuck. I was subconsciously always on a mission to hear that music again, to find its creators.

Some years had passed and I began to hear the music again and by now had found the source. As the first keyboard notes started and the initial round of poetry began, I knew this was a band that spoke to a part of the brain that all other music did not. It was special. It was primal. It was a drug of sorts. I always felt the Doors knew something the rest us did not. Jim, playing the part of the great "knower" who shared with his tribe (the audience) tiny morsels of these ancient secrets with every song, every poem, and every show. The band was powerful, virile, somewhat renaissance, sexual, mysterious and at times, quite dangerous. The more I learned, the more I loved.

Being an avid reader of poetry, I was struck by the poetics in their music. Jim was pulling from people and sources I admired…Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, Jack Kerouac, William Blake, Greek Tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche, Aldous Huxley, Antonin Artaud and the like. It was a musical/poetic/theatrical hybrid that existed with the Doors. They were going places no one else chose to go. I was hooked. I spent some time reading Jim’s work and began secretly taking his poetry books out of the "Music Section" of the chain bookstores and putting them into the "Poetry Section". I was on a personal trek to give him proper respect, respect that was not available to him from the grave. After about a year or so of doing this, the bookstores started shelving his work in the "Poetry Section" right along with those that he admired. The bookshelves now resembled Pere Lachaise Cemetery. Jim was now alongside his fellow poets and playwrights as he had wanted. I felt that I had done a good thing. Although the action went completely unspoken, my pure free-will made it happen. I felt I had given a tiny piece back to a man and to a band that gave so much to me.

After this I began thinking what other ways I could pay my respect to the man and to the band that influenced me so much in my creativity, journey for knowledge, curiosity, and poetry. I happened upon singing probably much like Jim had…neither one of us could fluently play an instrument; we were both writers, both poets, both dreamers. It just so happened that I could faithfully reproduce his vocals and I decided that what better way to give back to the Doors but to "Tribute" them properly with other guys who were as into it as I was. Enter Mojo Risin. With Jim being gone, I took it upon myself to give the music of the Doors to the younger generations who were not familiar with it and also to the generation who were around when the Doors were but haven’t seen their music since a concert they may have attended in 1968 or 1969...music they loved but may have thought was completely lost. I studied all the audio, video, and written work of Jim and the Doors to truly "know" the music, not just play it, not just sing it. That’s the difference with Mojo Risin. I studied Jim’s mannerisms, voice, moves, inflections, gestures, and his work to fully understand him as best I could so that I could give my best rendition of the live Doors experience. I do NOT think I’m Jim Morrison; I am a really big fan who does my best to give to the audience my most sincere tribute to a poet that I admire so much. My hope is that by seeing our performance, someone is moved enough to buy the Doors CD/record they never owned, to listen to the more obscure (and often best) cuts of the Doors music, to be moved the way we have been moved, to pick up Jim’s poetry and give it a chance, to read other poetry and philosophy the way Jim did in order to round out one’s "soul" with words, knowledge, creativity, music…life. I welcome you.

"Is everybody in? The ceremony is about to begin…"

Truly,

Dexter "J" Zirkle.

Stage Gear

Electro-Voice 676 Microphones

Contact • Dex@doorstribute.com