This is not a new story, but it's a welcome one. Many VU-related articles contained contradictory information about Morrison's post-VU life, but this one seems to set the record straight. No bombshells, no real surprises, just a charming mini-bio of a man who wanted to change his career path and quit being a semi-celebrity.
His academic career still raises a few questions. Besides playing occasionally in Austin-area bar bands and holding court over a succession of beers in student bars, what exactly was Morrison doing for fifteen years? Did he turn more to teaching once he started a family? Besides financial reasons, why did he become slowly disillusioned with academia not unlike the way he had with rock and roll? The story is familiar to grad students today, who still tend to take on larger and larger teaching loads to support themselves while finishing their theses, which leaves them with fewer hours for doing research, which brings them no closer to finishing their theses, so they keep taking on a high teaching load to continue to make a living, and so on. Is this what happened with Morrison?
And somehow I never realized that Galaxie 500's "Tugboat" was written as a tribute to him, although it all seems so obvious now.
No comments:
Post a Comment