Michael C Ford, Lisa Thayer and Stephen Kalinich ©Jill Jarrett
Stephen John Kalinich introduces his friend the poet Michael C Ford
Is a great living poet we have done many shows together like “Waiting For Jack” with John Densmore. Michael and John were two of the producers and kindly asked me to play poet Jack Micheline and John played Gary Synder.
Michael went to Film school with these guys and knew them much better that I did.
He has many books an albums out and has recorded with John, Densmore and Ray Manzarek and Robbie Krieger. He is a great guy and his voice is incredible and he coud read the phone book and bring you to tears or indignation.
I love this guy, Michael and I are doing an abum together with Bil Duke and Lisa Thayer called Quartets.
Here is Michael on Jim Morrison.
Michael C Ford
Excerpted paragraphs from as essay by Michael C Ford
A mid-60/s seminal theatre rock band known as The Doors greased
the American pop-culture engine, with a theorem implying that music
luminaries allowing themselves to be bartered, in a way, bought and sold in the commercial marketplace, are in danger of being destroyed by whatever they despise most. This band, however, managed to dodge the daggers from thugs of the Hollywood music mafia.
I remember being in an Elektra recording booth with Jim, during
one of the Soft Parade sessions. I was eyeballing this enlarged studio space with streamlined state-of-the-art sound equipment which looked (in retrospect) like something out of Star Wars. Mentioning this aggrandized version of what I’d only remembered from The Doors genesis recordings,
Morrison replied: “Yeh. 12 acid trips built this room!” Well sure, it’s
easy to imagine that LSD ingestion might have fueled his lyric writing,
but it’s also, veryimportant to realize it might have, also, amp’d a literary
sensibility he’d been courting in previous years of self-education; while
most clueless rockers who dropped equivalent amounts of acid weren’t
capable of writing anything but contrived gibberish.
Ray Manzarek’s Poet In Exile book, in a way, poses the question to Jim’s
psyche (not, necessarily, the playing out of prophecy, but , maybe, more
making physio- biochemical “observations”).
People remember many different Morrison’s. Just before I left for
Idaho and Jim was about to escape to France, I told him about this
projected chapbk anthology I was editing.
It was designed to honor one of my teachers: Kenneth Patchen for
whom Morrison always expressed a great fondness & whose life was
lost only 6 months after Jim took his fall. Anyway, the edition was, also,
designed to continue sending $$ into the, then, extant Patchen Surgery
Fund. Now, feeling the necessity to push this rather slender volume into
print, Morrison asked “How much do you need to market the
anthology?” That’s the Jim I remember and that aspect of his nature,
somehow, conspicuously, hasn’t always been considered by his
“biographers” as being worthy of recognition.
Indeed, it almost seemed like a form of censorship of that
information, possibly because it didn/t really address Morrison’s more
scandalous nature which would rake-in a greed-head load of book
publishing profiteering. © Michael C Ford
Stephen John Kalinich Official site
Stephen has just put out a brand new cd of 23 tracks!!!! featuring some of the greats of the California music scene if you wish to check out his cd you can purchase it on either Amazon or on Itunes here:

