27: Jim Morrison (5 page)

‘I remember thinking, WHAT? What is he saying? What is he doing? I don't get it. And then he said something about “Awkward instant / And the first animal is jettisoned / Legs furiously pumping / Their stiff green gallop” and I went, “This guy is completely out of his mind.” But I was moved by it, I could feel it. It was the first time poetry had been a movie to me, the images were so strong that they came to mind in a photo form. I could see the horses jumping off the boat. I could see them drowning.

‘So what was my first impression of Jim? He scared me to death.'
⁴⁵

That same month of May, The Doors began to tentatively record their second album. The majority of the sessions would take place in August that year, however.

In New York, meanwhile, on Saturday 12 August, The Doors supported the adored Simon and Garfunkel at the Forest Hills Tennis Club before 13,000 people. It was entirely the wrong audience, as the crowd were predominantly there to watch the revered folkie duo. The Doors only played four songs, on borrowed equipment, and Ray Manzarek felt it was the worst show they had ever performed. While in the city Jim Morrison had a fling with Gloria Stavers, the editor of
16
, the teen magazine. He also brought Nico, already a member of The Velvet Underground, back to his hotel room. ‘Ja, Jim ist crazy,' she later declared.
⁴⁶

In Manhattan on 11 June 1967 The Doors played a full theatre date at the Village Theater. All seemed to be going extremely well for the band, yet four days later, Jim Morrison was
in a furious frame of mind. Reports were filtering in of huge crowds at the Monterey Pop Festival in California, and not only of the event's great success but of its cultural significance. Jim Morrison was incensed that they had not been invited to the festival, believing it indicated the creation of a snobbish gap between San Francisco and Los Angeles acts. Was this, as Ray Manzarek suspected, Lou Adler's revenge for the way Jim had spoken to him at their meeting at his label?

In Los Angeles in August 1967 they recommenced recording their second album. Jim Morrison had already declared in a radio interview that it would be called
Strange Days
. There was already an advance order of 500,000 for the as yet unrealized record.

In an article written while they were making the album, the celebrated writer Joan Didion observed, with considerable prescience, that Jim Morrison was suggesting ‘some range of the possible just beyond a suicide pact'.
⁴⁷

There were lighter moments. Like the Manhattan photo shoot for
Vogue
in September 1967. The pictures were taken by 24-year-old Baron Alexis Alfonse von Gecman Waldeck in his Chelsea loft for that December's edition of the upmarket fashion magazine. ‘In Jim Morrison I saw a peasant,' Waldeck told
Crawdaddy
magazine. ‘He could be a Russian peasant. I would love to photograph him in a wheat field in a wagon, with an open shirt. There's similarity between Nureyev and Morrison. There's that pride – you know, very much Self. They both like to see themselves. Morrison loves himself.'

The photographer's shots were complemented by words from the New York writer Albert Goldman in which he waxed lyrical about Jim Morrison as ‘the one authentic sex hero of the current generation … the most admired figure on the American rock scene.' (In
Feast of Friends
, the documentary about The Doors directed by – among others – Jim Morrison, Goldman, a great champion of the group, is in the very first scene, in footage showing The Doors singer speaking with him in a limousine. Goldman would go on to write hugely successful – and controversial – biographies of Lenny Bruce, Elvis Presley and John Lennon, and at the time of his death was working on a biography of Morrison.)

More than anything, it was these unexpectedly dignified
Vogue
images that led to the transmogrification of Jim Morrison, singer with The Doors, into Jim Morrison the Sex Symbol. ‘If my antenna are right he could be the biggest thing to grab the mass libido in a very long time. I have never seen such an animalistic response from so many different kinds of women,' wrote
Village Voice
columnist Howard Smith.
⁴⁸

‘The quality Morrison has got,' considered Gloria Staver, the editor of the million-selling
16
magazine, with whom Jim had already had a fling. ‘The teenagers see their thing, the secretaries in my office have become entranced by him, the New York hippies at the Fillmore dig him. There's something for everybody. But it's still Whole. He walks through the fire and he comes out Whole.'
⁴⁹

On that same visit to New York, on 17 September 1967, The Doors appeared on the almost mythical
Ed Sullivan Show
. They were to perform ‘People Are Strange' from the imminent Strange Days album, and ‘Light My Fire', their number one hit single from the first LP. Minutes before their performance, a producer came to their dressing room: the ‘Light My Fire' line ‘Girl, we couldn't get much higher' would need to be changed to ‘Girl, we couldn't get much better'. The Doors appeared to agree to this. Except that when Jim Morrison sang the song live on national television, he stuck to the original version of the lyrics. Afterwards the production staff informed the group that they had been ready to book them on a further six shows. Now, however, they were banned from
The Ed Sullivan Show
, seemingly forever.

Strange Days
, for which the
Vogue
photo shoot and the
Ed Sullivan Show
performance had served as promotion, was in the stores in the United States on 25 September, less than nine months after the group's first LP had been released. Put out as a single, ‘People Are Strange' scraped the Top 10, but failed to emulate the number one status of ‘Light My Fire'. ‘Love Me Two Times', the second single off
Strange Days
, only made 25 – although we will come to the curious circumstances behind this. The lack of a smash hit 45 was used as an explanation for why
Strange Days
never made it higher than the number three album slot. Memorable for its distinctive cover – featuring none of the group and shot in a New York alley – if anything, the record was even better than
The Doors
. As though it was competing with the eleven-minute version of ‘The End' that concluded the first album,
Strange Days
had another eleven minute final tune. ‘When the Music's Over' was an early pro-ecology epic of considerable insight:

But does ‘When the Music's Over' possess the majesty of the impossible-to-emulate ‘The End'? Perhaps not.

On Sunday 27 August 1967, The Doors had played at the Cheetah, a venue on Santa Monica Pier. Before an audience of 2,000, Jim Morrison had deliberately fallen off the stage, to be caught by the audience. Towards the end of 1967 in live shows he was moving much more spontaneously on stage as he performed his visionary, shamanic act. At the beginning of December, however, a far darker force moved into his life.

On Saturday 9 December 1967 The Doors played in New Haven, Connecticut. While making out with an 18-year-old local girl in a backstage shower stall prior to the show, Jim was interrupted by a cop who opened the door. Seeming to believe the singer was a member of the audience who had somehow snuck backstage, the officer ordered him to leave the room. As he would, Jim told the cop to fuck off. For this response, the policeman sprayed mace into the singer's eyes. In pain, Jim Morrison ran screaming to the group's dressing room. Bill Siddons then emerged to inform the cop of his error. The officer apologized, although such regret begs the question as to why he would have felt entitled to mace a member of the audience? As a metaphor for a jagged schism in an egregiously conflicted nation, in which lines were distinctly being drawn between ‘straight' and ‘non-straight' society, it is compelling. (Might one also not muse on Jim Morrison's awkward relationships with uniformed authority? Did such figures in any way trigger nerves that reminded him of his naval officer father?)?

As though in some absurdist cartoon of precisely how not to behave at such events, local police hovered on the edge of the New Haven stage. During The Doors' last number, ‘Back Door Man', Jim Morrison – who had performed the concert with stinging red eyes – told the audience the tale of what had happened backstage prior to the show. Now he taunted the police. Thrusting his mike under the nose of one of them, he commanded: ‘Say your thing, man!' Almost immediately, the house lights were switched on. Police stepped forward, arresting the singer and dragging him offstage – the first time this had ever happened to an artist in the United States. The hall erupted with fury. In the ensuing riot by the audience, many fans were also arrested.

Taken to a local police station, Jim Morrison was charged with ‘breach of the peace, resisting arrest and indecent or immoral exhibition'. Further arrests were made as angry protesters gathered outside the police station. At two in the morning, The Doors singer was released from the station on a bail bond of $1,500. A trial was set for the next month.

They had started the year on the high of the release of their first album,
The Doors
. By the end of 1967, The Doors' singer seemed briefly to have become Public Enemy Number One.

After the New Haven incident, and despite the fact that all charges against the singer were very quickly dropped, the FBI opened a file on Jim Morrison. Like the actions of the mace-spraying patrolman, the fallout from this incident further highlighted the cultural schism in the United States. And that New Haven drama had another down side; although Jim Morrison should have been deemed innocent until found guilty, this was not the response of the nation's radio schedulers. ‘Love Me Two Times', the second single off the
Strange Days
album, was heading up the charts, only to stumble and be held at no higher than the number 25 slot – in the wake of the onstage arrest, The Doors were temporarily banned from further AM radio play. And there was a nasty fallout within the group itself. Robby Krieger expressed to John Densmore
⁵⁰
the extreme dislike that he now felt for Jim Morrison and how it seemed as though the group's other three members had now become his babysitters. As though to achieve a clearer perspective on their lives, Robby Krieger and John Densmore took a month's leave of absence from The Doors. They decided to undertake an advanced Transcendental Meditation course of some rigour in the presence of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Around the same time they enrolled in Los Angeles's newly opened Ravi Shankar Kinara School of Indian Music.

Were The Doors' drummer and guitarist readying themselves for the group's next phase? For there was no time for hanging around – within the space of a year The Doors had become the biggest American group, and their workload was becoming more relentless. Yet the by now familiar brouhahas in which the group's singer seemed to become snared showed little sign of abating. In Las Vegas on 29 January 1968, in the parking lot of the Pussy Cat A Go Go, Jim Morrison feigned smoking a joint in front of a security guard. The guard called over colleagues and Morrison and Bob Grover, a
New York Times
journalist who was with him, were given a beating. Police were called and the singer was charged with ‘vagrancy, public drunkenness and failure to possess sufficient identification'. In an article subsequently written by Grover, he remarked of Jim Morrison: ‘His charisma was such that your ordinary upholder of the established order could be infuriated merely by the sight of Morrison strolling down the street – innocent to all outward appearances but … well there was that invisible something about him that silently suggested revolution, disorder, chaos.'
⁵¹

On Monday 19 February 1968, the group went into Hollywood's TTG recording studios, at the junction of Sunset and Highland, to begin sessions for their next album. An entire side of the album was to be filled with Jim's poem ‘The Celebration of the Lizard'. Yet the group's three principal musicians paid such attention to the instrumental pieces that much of the desired cohesion between them and the vocals became lost. Ultimately the notion of recording ‘The Celebration of the Lizard' was abandoned.

When sessions resumed at the beginning of March, Jim Morrison showed a clear disinclination to participate in the recording process. One day he arrived in the pink Jaguar E-type of actress Sable Sperling. He was clutching a bottle of Wild Turkey and they were both on downers, the singer claiming to have swallowed some twenty Quaaludes. Jim Morrison was supposed to be there to perform the vocals on ‘Love Street' and ‘Summer's Almost Gone'. Unfortunately Jim could barely stand. He declared that he didn't want to sing those songs and would perform ‘Five to One' instead.
⁵²
Although everyone – especially Rothchild – expected him to keel over at any moment, he nailed the take. Ray Manzarek had noticed what seemed to be a birthmark on Sable Sperling's shapely thigh; perusing it more closely, he saw it was a long, swollen bruise. What had happened? he asked her. Oh, she replied, Jim had hit her with a plank of wood.

This was by no means the only occasion that Jim Morrison turned up drunk at TTG. He was frequently accompanied by other extremely odd people. One day he arrived with a woman who looked like the as yet unknown Charles Manson; Jim's friends pulled up her skirt and offered the assembled company the opportunity to enjoy themselves in her anus.
⁵³
Such incidents made John Densmore declare his intention to quit the group. Paul Rothchild told him he was worried that Jim Morrison would not last long.