The White Album (3 page)

“Hey listen,” the engineer said
.
“I was listening to an FM station on the way over here, they played three Doors songs, first they played ‘Back Door Man’ and then ‘Love Me Two Times’ and ‘Light My Fire
.
’”

“I heard it,”Densmore muttered
.
“I heard it
.
”

“So what’s wrong with somebody playing three of your songs?”

“This cat dedicates it to his family”

“Yeah? To his family?”

“To his family
.
Really crass
.
”

Ray Manzarek was hunched over a Gibson keyboard
.
“You think
Morrison’s
going to come back?” he asked to no one in particular
.

No one answered
.

“So we can do some
vocals’?”
Manzarek said
.

The producer was working with the tape of the rhythm track they had just recorded
.
“I hope so,” he said without looking up
.

“Yeah,” Manzarek said
.
“So do I
.
”

My leg had gone to sleep, but I did not stand up; unspecific tensions seemed to be rendering everyone in the room catatonic
.
The producer played back the rhythm track
.
The engineer said that he wanted to do his deep-breathing exercises
.
Manzarek ate a hard-boiled egg
.
“Tennyson made a mantra out of his own name,” he said to the engineer
.
“I don’t know if he said ‘Tennyson Tennyson Tennyson’ or ‘Alfred Alfred Alfred’ or ‘Alfred Lord Tennyson,’ but anyway, he did it
.
Maybe he just said ‘Lord Lord Lord
.
’”

“Groovy,” the Clear Light bass player said
.
He was an amiable enthusiast, not at all a Door in spirit
.

“I wonder what Blake said,” Manzarek mused
.
“Too bad
Morrison’s
not here
.
Morrison
would know
.
”

It was a long while later
.
Morrison arrived
.
He had on his black vinyl pants and he sat down on a leather couch in front of the four big blank speakers and he closed his eyes
.
The curious aspect of Morrison’s arrival was this
: no one acknowledged it
.
Robby
Krieger continued working out a guitar passage
.
John Densmore tuned his drums
.
Manzarek sat at the control console and twirled a corkscrew and let a girl rub his shoulders
.
The girl did not look at Morrison, although he was in her direct line of sight
.
An hour or so passed, and still no one had spoken to Morrison
.
Then Morrison spoke to Manzarek
.
He spoke almost in a whisper, as if he were wresting the words from behind some disabling aphasia
.

“It’s an hour to West Covina,” he said
.
“I was thinking maybe we should spend the night out there after we play
.
”

Manzarek put down the corkscrew
.
“Why?” he said
.

“Instead of coming back
.
”

Manzarek shrugged
.
“We were planning to come back
.
”

“Well, I was thinking, we could rehearse out there
.
”

Manzarek said nothing
.

“We could get in a rehearsal, there’s a Holiday Inn next door
.
”

“We could do that,” Manzarek said
.
“Or we could rehearse Sunday, in town
.
”

“I guess so
.
”
Morrison paused
.
“Will the place be ready to rehearse Sunday?”

Manzarek looked at him for a while
.
“No,” he said then
.

I counted the control knobs on the electronic console
.
There were seventy-six
.
I was unsure in whose favor the dialogue had been resolved, or if it had been resolved at all
.
Robby Krieger picked at his guitar, and said that he needed a fuzz box
.
The producer suggested that he borrow one from the Buffalo Springfield, who were recording in the next studio
.
Krieger shrugged
.
Morrison sat down again on the leather couch and leaned back
.
He lit a match
.
He studied the flame awhile and then very slowly, very deliberately, lowered it to the fly of his black vinyl pants
.
Manzarek watched him
.
The girl who was rubbing Manzarek’s shoulders did not look at anyone
.
There was a sense that no one was going to leave the room, ever
.
It would be some weeks before The Doors finished recording this album
.
I did not see it through
.

4

Someone once brought Janis Joplin to a party at the house on Franklin Avenue: she had just done a concert and she wanted
brandy-and-Benedictine in a water tumbler
.
Music people never wanted ordinary drinks
.
They wanted sake, or champagne cocktails, or tequila neat
.
Spending time with music people was confusing, and required a more fluid and ultimately a more passive approach than I ever acquired
.
In the first place time was never of the essence: we would have dinner at nine unless we had it at eleven-thirty, or we could order in later
.
We would go down to U
.
S
.
C
.
to see the Living Theater if the limo came at the very moment when no one had just made a drink or a cigarette or an arrangement to meet Ultra Violet at the Montecito
.
In any case David Hockney was coming by
.
In any case Ultra Violet was not at the Montecito
.
In any case we would go down to U
.
S
.
C
.
and see the Living Theater tonight or we would see the Living Theater another night, in New York, or Prague
.
First we wanted sushi for twenty, steamed clams, vegetable vindaloo and many rum drinks with gardenias for our hair
.
First we wanted a table for twelve, fourteen at the most, although there might be six more, or eight more, or eleven more: there would never be one or two more, because music people did not travel in groups of “one” or “two
.
”
John and Michelle Phillips, on their way to the hospital for the birth of their daughter Chynna, had the limo detour into Hollywood in order to pick up a friend, Anne Marshall
.
This incident, which I often embroider in my mind to include an imaginary second detour, to the Luau for gardenias, exactly describes the music business to me
.

5

Around five o’clock on the morning of October 28, 1967, in the desolate district between San Francisco Bay and the Oakland estuary that the Oakland police call Beat 101 A, a 25-year-old black militant named Huey P
.
Newton was stopped and questioned by a white police officer named John Frey, Jr
.
An hour later Huey Newton was under arrest at Kaiser Hospital in Oakland, where he had gone for emergency treatment of a gunshot wound in his stomach, and a few weeks later he was indicted by the Alameda County Grand Jury on charges of murdering John Frey, wounding another officer, and kidnapping a bystander
.

In the spring of 1968, when Huey Newton was awaiting trial, I went to see him in the Alamed
a County Jail
.
I suppose I went
because I was interested in the alchemy of issues, for an issue is what Huey Newton had by then become
.
To understand how that had happened you must first consider Huey Newton, who he was
.
He came from an Oakland family, and for a while he went to Merritt College
.
In October of 1966 he and a friend named Bobby Seale organized what they called the Black Panther Party
.
They borrowed the name from the emblem used by the Freedom Party in Lowndes County, Alabama, and, from the beginning, they defined themselves as a revolutionary political group
.
The Oakland police knew the Panthers, and had a list of the twenty or so Panther cars
.
I am telling you neither that Huey Newton killed John Frey nor that Huey Newton did not kill John Frey, for in the context of revolutionary politics Huey Newton’s guilt or innocence was irrelevant
.
I am telling you only how Huey Newton happened to be in the Alameda County Jail, and why rallies were held in his name, demonstrations organized whenever he appeared in court,
let’s spring huey,
the buttons read (fifty cents each), and here and there on the courthouse steps, among the Panthers with their berets and sunglasses, the chants would go up:

Get your
M-
31

‘Cause baby we gonna

Have some fun
.

BOOM BOOM
.
BOOM BOOM
.

“Fight on, brother,” a woman would add in the spirit of a good-natured amen
.
“Bang-bang
.
”

Bullshit bullshit

Can’t stand the game

White man’s playing
.

One way out, one way out
.

BOOM BOOM
.
BOOM BOOM
.

In the corridor downstairs in the Alameda County Courthouse there was a crush of lawyers and CBC correspondents and cameramen and people who wanted to “visit Huey
.
”

“Eldridge doesn’t mind if I go up,” one of the latter said to one of the lawyers
.

“If Eldridge doesn’t mind, it’s all right with me,” the lawyer said
.
“If you’ve got press credentials
.
”

“I’ve got kind of dubious credentials
.
”

“I can’t take you up then
.
Eldridge
has got dubious credentials
.
One’s bad enough
.
I’ve got a good working relationship up there, I don’t want to blow it
.
”
The lawyer turned to a cameraman
.
“You guys rolling yet?”

On that particular day I was allowed to go up, and a
Los Angeles Times
man, and a radio newscaster
.
We all signed the police register and sat around a scarred pine table and waited for Huey Newton
.
“The only thing that’s going to free Huey Newton,” Rap Brown had said recen
tly
at a Panther rally in Oakland Auditorium, “is gunpowder
.
”
“Huey Newton laid down his life for us,” Stokely Carmichael had said the same night
.
But of course Huey Newton had not yet laid down his life at all, was just here in the Alameda County Jail waiting to be tried, and I wondered if the direction these rallies were taking ever made him uneasy, ever made him suspect that in many ways he was more useful to the revolution behind bars than on the street
.
He seemed, when he finally came in, an extremely likable young man, engaging, direct, and I did not get the sense that he had intended to become a political martyr
.
He smiled at us all and waited for his lawyer, Charles Garry, to set up a tape recorder, and he chatted softly with Eldridge Cleaver, who was then the Black Panthers’ Minister of Information
.
(Huey Newton was still the Minister of Defense
.
) Eldridge Cleaver wore a black sweater and one gold earring and spoke in an almost inaudible drawl and was allowed to see Huey Newton because he had those “dubious credentials,” a press card from
Ramparts
.
Actually his interest was in getting “statements” from Huey Newton, “messages” to take outside; in receiving a kind of prophecy to be interpreted as needed
.