Every October, artists and art studios open their doors throughout the Joshua Tree region for the Highway 62 Open Studio Art Tours, allowing people to take a closer look at the creativity scattered across the Mojave Desert.
Local musician and events promoter Lisa Rae Black recently joined the board behind the Highway 62 Open Studio Art Tours—and she wanted to do something special for the tour’s 25th anniversary, while raising much-needed funds.
Enter the Lizard King.
“The Lizard King Immersive” is a special event honoring the local organization’s quarter-century of promoting arts in the desert—and the multi-faceted creativity of rock-music icon Jim Morrison and The Doors. A crop of local talent will celebrate the musical, lyrical and visual outputs of Morrison through song, spoken word and media presentations on Wednesday, Feb. 18, at Mojave Gold. Half of the ticket proceeds will go to the Art Tours.
The event is slated to feature an all-star cast of desert musicians including Bingo Richie, Bobby Furgo, Sean Wheeler, Kevin Bone, Brad Parker, Lisa Moncure, Jesika Von Rabbit, DJ Gray, Paul Forrester, madame harlequin, and Lisa Rae and Blue Ladies—all singing different Doors classics.
Black and Forrester, under their booking name JT City Limits, have been producing shows featuring a revolving door of local musicians paying tribute to a music icon, similar to the nature of “The Lizard King Immersive.”
“Gathering together people who are super-talented, that’s what we do as musicians,” Black said during a recent interview. “That’s how I learned jamming, by playing with people in the community, so it’s been easy. It wasn’t even very thought out. It just was sort of natural to do that.”
Black said the idea for events with multiple musicians stemmed from her involvement with Dylanfest in Torrance. For three decades, Black and dozens of other performers have paid tribute to the legendary Bob Dylan by each performing two or three songs. This, alongside her history of tribute bands, led to one of her latest projects, David Bowie-focused act the Jean Genies.
“Besides doing Dylan, I’ve been in Black Sabbath and AC/DC tribute bands that have toured all over,” she said. “I always wanted to sing, and David Bowie was the artist I chose, and the Jean Genies is basically that.”
Beyond the music, “The Lizard King Immersive” will celebrate the other sides of Morrison’s artistic vision. Black said the “Immersive” portion of the show will include visual projections of videos starring and shot by Morrison.
“These are videos that Jim Morrison shot while he was in college at UCLA,” she said. “These videos were made available from the UCLA film vault, and they’re on YouTube, so we’re going to be showing portions of those really cool videos of Jim Morrison … in Joshua Tree. He shot these videos himself.”
Morrison’s connection to the desert goes further than Joshua Tree being the subject of his film. One of The Doors’ most memorable lyrics is “Indians scattered on dawn’s highway bleeding,” a poetic line from the song “Peace Frog.” Black said the lyric actually stems from one of Morrison’s experiences in the Mojave.
“Jim Morrison came here when he was 6 years old with his parents, and what happened was he saw an Indian on the road, allegedly, as a child, and then he came back and had a hallucination,” she said. “Joshua Tree plays a big role in his life.”
“The Lizard King Immersive” includes narration, poetry and art, and it’s commenting on the human condition in the same way Jim Morrison did in his music.
Natasha Beranek, music writer at Yucca Brevifolia Magazine, will be narrating the event, sharing stories and tidbits about Morrison’s wildly creative life.
“My narration of this event is a culmination of a 5-year-long streak of research into the music of The Doors and the writings of Jim Morrison,” Beranek said via email. “In 2021, I published an essay on Medium exploring the philosophical leanings of Jim Morrison. I intended it to be a test run for a paper I later hoped to submit to a peer-reviewed journal on posthumanism, a relatively new field of study that asks what it is to be human in an age when the boundaries between nature, technology and humans are being challenged by artificial intelligence and biotechnological innovations. … Morrison was an extremely bright individual. Not only did he possess a very sharp insight into the societal effects of TV, visual media, and the ideology of American liberalism in the second half of the 20th century, but he was also remarkably forward-thinking about how technological innovations would unfold, especially in the music industry. My narration of ‘The Lizard King Immersive’ will touch on these themes, as well as Morrison’s spiritual/philosophical connection to the desert and the American West.”
“The Lizard King Immersive” includes narration, poetry and art, and it’s commenting on the human condition in the same way Morrison did in his music.
“He arrived at certain existential questions about the modern condition that he wanted to relay to others, and he seemed to think The Doors’ music an ideal starting point for sparking philosophical reflection within their listeners,” Beranek said. “‘A Doors concert is a public meeting called by us for a special dramatic discussion,’ he explained to one journalist, and at a later date, adding, ‘For me, it was never really an act, those so-called performances. It was a life-and death thing; an attempt to communicate, to involve many people in a private world of thought.’ Unfortunately, Jim realized that this was mostly lost on his audiences, who were most drawn to the sensationalism and his hype as sex idol.”
After Beranek moved to the desert, she felt a strong urge to listen to The Doors
“Why do I hear the Mojave Desert in The Doors when the mythos of The Doors—its cultural legacy—has been nothing if not that of a quintessential L.A. rock band?” she wrote. “At the same time, it also got me thinking about ‘the desert’ as a concept that has a philosophical history, as an idea that has mostly been understood as something ‘other’ or fundamentally different from ‘the city’ (L.A.). What I mean is, when people say, ‘Let’s drive out to the desert this weekend,’ they don’t just want to visit an arid climate or view a stunning landscape; they are enacting a specific set of ideas about what ‘the desert’ has stood for in the Western imagination for the past 200-300 years—a limit (‘frontier’) to conquer, a terrifyingly barren space, or a place of spiritual pilgrimage.
“Perhaps most often, you hear people say that they come to ‘the desert’ to get in touch with their ‘true selves’ rather than the selves that have been molded by societal pressures or expectations. I have heard a lot of (high desert) artists and musicians express something along these lines. It’s very romantic—the notion that the desert (nature) will remedy the societal and technological ills from which we seemingly cannot escape.”
“The Lizard King Immersive” will take place at 6 p.m., Wednesday, Feb. 18, at Mojave Gold, at 56193 Twentynine Palms Highway, in Yucca Valley. Tickets are $21.40. For tickets and more information, visit jtcitylimits.com.
““Jim Morrison came here when he was 6 years old with his parents, and what happened was he saw an Indian on the road, allegedly, as a child, and then he came back and had a hallucination,” she said. “Joshua Tree plays a big role in his life.”
That didn’t happen in Joshua Tree. It was in the New Mexico desert.
Wikipedia:
Around 1947, a young Jim Morrison witnessed a horrific car accident in the New Mexico desert involving a truckload of Native Americans, which became a defining, traumatic moment of his childhood. The incident, where he saw people lying on the highway, deeply influenced his poetry and lyrics.