27: Jim Morrison (3 page)

Their film course concluded in May 1965. Jim Morrison received his bachelor's degree in cinematography despite the faculty's rejection of the short film it was compulsory for all students to make. As though exemplifying Nietzsche's aphorism that that which does not kill you will only make you stronger, Jim Morrison was the only student in his year to fail this area of his course. Ray Manzarek felt the faculty's examiners simply did not get it: ‘It was cinematic poetry. It was a juxtaposition of images that really didn't have any relationship to one another in a linear, narrative form. But after five minutes went by, it became a collective ‘whole'. It became a poetic piece. I thought it was excellent.'
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At the end of their film course, Jim Morrison told Ray Manzarek he was intending to move to New York. Manzarek, however, told Jim his plan was to remain in LA, to make a career as a filmmaker. Gradually it dawned on Manzarek, however, that – despite his time studying – he knew no one who was actually making a living in the Hollywood movie business and had no idea how to get started. For the time being, finances were not too tight for him. Dorothy Fujikawa, his girlfriend, had basic employment, cleaning computer tape. In that post-UCLA comedown, Ray Manzarek was undergoing something of an existentialist crisis about his future. He sought to heal this by working on his tan at Venice beach.
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Down on the sand one day, he suddenly saw what appeared to be a vision walking towards him: Jim Morrison, dressed only in cut-off jeans, looking like a Greek god. The chubby boy from UCLA had lost thirty pounds and now looked tremendous. He had achieved this weight loss by the simple expedient of not eating and, instead, ingesting LSD. And he had been living on the roof of an abandoned Venice office block. To Manzarek's surprise, Morrison declared he been ‘writing some songs'.
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Responding to Manzarek's cajoling, Jim Morrison sang him one of these, ‘Moonlight Drive', a song of death, as expressed in its final lines: ‘Baby, gonna drown tonight / Goin' down, down, down.' In other words, the first song of his that Morrison performed for Ray Manzarek anticipated his own end. And then he sang him a second song, ‘My Eyes Have Seen You'. Then a third: ‘Summer's Almost Gone'.

It was an inspirational burst of songwriting. Immediately, Manzarek told him they were going to form a group together, but Morrison wondered at first who would be doing the singing; clearly he lacked any belief in his own vocal abilities. Reassured by the keyboard player of his talent, Morrison was persuaded to move into the tiny Ocean Park apartment in which Manzarek and his girlfriend lived.

Both former film students were serious consumers of LSD and marijuana – major pot-heads. After Morrison had told Manzarek what the name of their group should be – The Doors, taken from the title of Aldous Huxley's book
The Doors of Perception
, in turn taken from William Blake's poetic line ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is … infinite' – they decided that the sound of their group should be psychedelic, a new concept at that time. What they needed was more musicians – as yet they lacked a guitar player and drummer. For a guitarist, Ray Manzarek wanted a player who was a rocker but with a knowledge of jazz – ‘Les Paul/Chuck Berry by way of Charlie Christian.'
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A principal reason that Jim Morrison had wanted to study at UCLA was because it was in California, renowned since the Second World War for the most cutting edge, and sometimes downright eccentric, thinking in the United States. It was where the most extreme elements of Western culture and philosophy collided with that of the East, the next stop across the Pacific.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of Transcendental Meditation, arrived in Los Angeles in 1965 on his proselytizing world tour. Attracted by what he had learned about the Maharishi's simple meditation techniques, Ray Manzarek attended his series of lectures in Pacific Palisades, in west Los Angeles. There he encountered drummer John Densmore and guitarist Robby Krieger, who had already played together in a group, the Psychedelic Rangers. (Long before the Beatles' interest in the Maharishi's philosophy, therefore, The Doors' three instrumental musicians became followers of Transcendental Meditation, and continued to be so.) At first it was only John Densmore who joined up with Ray Manzarek and Jim Morrison. He suggested they rehearse together and see what happened.

In addition to being the closest geographical point in the mainland USA to Eastern philosophy, California was also the nearest American location to Vietnam, where Jim Morrison's father was stationed, soon to be an admiral in the burgeoning undeclared war. Now no longer a student, Jim Morrison was automatically eligible for the draft. (Ray Manzarek had already served his spell in the US military.) Although the assorted drugs Jim had consumed prior to his physical had little effect, when he declared (as Jimi Hendrix had done to escape the service in which he had already enlisted) that he was a homosexual, he was immediately excused from serving.
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Jim Morrison's future was now clear. Early rehearsals took place at Ray Manzarek's parents' Manhattan Beach home: initially they were also working with the keyboard player's brothers, Rick Manzarek (guitar) and Jim Manzarek (harmonica).

Before the four piece had ever played a live date they recorded a demo tape, in three hours, at World Pacific Studios on Third Street in downtown Los Angeles. The demo contained several songs, notably a tune called ‘Hello, I Love You', which Jim had dreamed up when a gorgeous black girl had walked past Ray Manzarek and himself on Venice Beach. Then there were ‘Moonlight Drive', ‘Summer's Almost Gone' and ‘My Eyes Have Seen You' – the three songs Jim had sung the keyboard player when they met on Venice Beach – as well as a couple of new numbers: ‘End of the Night', and ‘A Little Game (Go Insane)'.

Together they shopped their demo around the record labels of Los Angeles, largely encountering utter indifference or downright disdain. They went for a meeting with Lou Adler at ABC Dunhill; as he had signed The Mamas and the Papas, they had great respect for him. But he was dismissive of their work: ‘Nothing here I can use.' ‘That's okay, man. We don't want to be used, anyway,' Jim Morrison immediately punched back.
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(Ray Manzarek felt they later paid for that remark by Jim. Lou Adler became one of the promoters of 1967's legendary Monterey Pop Festival – although by then a major break-out act in the United States, The Doors were never invited to play the event.)

At Columbia Records, however, the four musicians fared far better. Newly appointed to the A&R department, with a brief to develop new acts, Billy James at Columbia gave them a deal of sorts. ‘They had a quality that attracted me to them immediately. I guess they appealed to the snob in me because they were UCLA graduates and I thought, “Great, here are some intellectual types getting involved with rock 'n' roll.” … The music was so raw, so basic, so simplistic, so unlike anything I was familiar with.'
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As Columbia owned Vox, the instruments manufacturer, James gave his newly signed musicians carte blanche at Vox's warehouse in the San Fernando Valley. Ray Manzarek kitted himself out with a free Vox organ and amplifier.

Yet nothing more seemed to happen at Columbia for The Doors. Unbeknownst to them, Billy James had run into difficulties at the label. Newly promoted to A&R from Columbia's publicity department, he felt he lacked sufficient production experience to do credit to his new signings, and the company's more seasoned producers were all tied up with their own projects. Losing faith with the label, Ray Manzarek's brothers quit the group. This was when the guitarist Robby Krieger, whom the keyboard player had also met at the Transcendental Meditation centre, was pulled in. Trained in both classical and jazz guitar, he had experienced an epiphany when he saw Chuck Berry perform at Santa Monica Civic, immediately trading in his classical instrument for a Gibson SG, the identical guitar played by Berry. Not unconnected to his fondness for Eastern mysticism, he had also become an adept on the sitar, courtesy of lessons at the Los Angeles Ravi Shankar school.

They found space for practising in Santa Monica, in a garage behind the bus depot. Soon Ray Manzarek took a small apartment in nearby Venice, where they could rehearse all day. A cloud of marijuana smoke hung over their rehearsals. Permanently high on powerful weed, The Doors found their sound quickly. ‘Robby's bottleneck guitar was snake-weaving us into the fourth dimension, into a higher, expanded state of consciousness. We had gone primordial and cosmic at the same time,' wrote Manzarek.
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Then Robby Krieger came up with the structure of a simple song that soon turned into a tune called ‘Light My Fire'.

Of these times, Jim Morrison later recalled: ‘In the beginning we were creating our music, ourselves, every night … starting with a few outlines, maybe a few words for a song. Sometimes we worked out in Venice, looking at the surf. We were together a lot and it was good times for all of us. Acid, sun, friends, the ocean, and poetry and music.'
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They auditioned for a bass player, but then Ray Manzarek discovered the Fender-Rhodes keyboard bass. The instrument also gave great freedom to John Densmore's drumming.

In January 1966 Jim Morrison, his UCLA friend Felix Venable, and Philip O'Leno, whom they both knew from the same college, declared their intention to drive to Mexico, only 100 miles distant, where they would commune with Native American sages and consume peyote. It is more likely that they only got as far as New Mexico, however. Somewhere along the way, while pulled up at a red stop light, Jim Morrison jumped out of their vehicle, ran over to a Mexican-American girl, kissed her on the mouth, and then leapt back into the car. Returning to Los Angeles, Jim Morrison and Felix Venable were covered in bruises; Jim told a patently untrue story of how they had beaten Phil O'Leno to death, leaving him in a riverbed. On hearing this, O'Leno's father had Jim Morrison arrested and slung into jail. He was soon bailed, and the case fell apart when O'Leno surfaced in Los Angeles. Later, it was suggested that all three had been beaten by police in New Mexico, or that O'Leno and Jim Morrison had come to blows over a girl.

In February 1966 The Doors auditioned for an utterly undistinguished club on the Sunset Strip, the London Fog. It had virtually no audience, apart from local hookers and alcoholic lowlife. But they got the gig, beginning later that month. Playing from Thursday to Sunday, The Doors performed five sets a night, for ten dollars each. (A go-go dancer, one Rhonda Lane, would dance in a cage as they played.) As had the Beatles' similar stints in Hamburg nightclubs, the rigour of these sets honed The Doors into a fine rock 'n' roll machine, especially Jim Morrison, whose initially weak vocals were becoming far stronger. He was also losing his nervousness over performing – at first he would sing with his back to the audience. ‘All that singing was exercising his throat muscles and they were getting strong and thick,' wrote Ray Manzarek.
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About a month after The Doors had begun their London Fog residency, redheaded Pamela Courson walked into the club, having driven the thirty or so miles up from Orange County where she lived with her parents. After they had finished their set, John Densmore began to chat her up, believing he had got off with her. But then it was time for the next Doors' set. By the time they had come off stage, she had disappeared.

Some days later, at a UCLA party, Jim Morrison saw her again. She was with a man. When he finally got to speak with her, she told him she was studying art at Los Angeles Community College. Before he could ask for her number, she was distracted and disappeared.

The next weekend, however, she turned up again at the London Fog. Again, John Densmore steamed in on her. Then Jim Morrison sat down beside the pair of them in a booth at the club and leaned over and bit her on the neck. This unorthodox courting gesture caused her to become immediately smitten with him.

Early in May, however, the London Fog ran into financial difficulties and The Doors were fired. It was a time of changes for the group: realizing that nothing whatsoever seemed to be going on with their Columbia deal, they asked for the label to release them, not appreciating they were about to be dropped anyway. But a new opportunity appeared almost straight away.

Before they had finished their final week at the London Fog, Ronnie Harran, the booker for the far more prestigious Whisky A Go Go, came to the venue on Thursday 5 May 1966 and saw them play. She immediately signed The Doors as house band for the nearby Whisky, booking them to play a pair of sets a night for $135 a week each.
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As the Whisky house band, The Doors supported the headline act. The first week at the Whisky A Go Go, the tremendous headliner was Them, with the ‘possessed Celt', as Manzarek described Van Morrison, as front man. Invariably drunk, Van the Man, as he would become known, would pound the stage floor with his microphone stand. Jim Morrison would soon be emulating this element of his stage-craft. But, Ray Manzarek observed, that was not the only aspect of the Ulsterman that Jim Morrison, enamoured of his namesake, endeavoured to emulate: another attraction was his considerable consumption of alcohol. ‘The thing that was so interesting to me was to learn how much chaos there was inside the group Them,' said Paul Rothchild, who would go on to produce The Doors. ‘It's almost as if Jim studied their chaos and brought it into The Doors.'
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Having befriended each other, on the last night Van and Jim Morrison jammed together on stage, Jim joining in with Van on the classic ‘Gloria'.
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(Among the other acts that The Doors supported that summer were The Animals, Buffalo Springfield, The Byrds, Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band, and the Mothers of Invention.)