Mr Mojo, page 12
With Morrison gone, the remaining Doors were unsure about what to do next. At first they were going to call it a day, but soon realised that this would cast Morrison as the only creative element in the group. ‘We were insecure,’ said Ray Manzarek, ‘but we decided to keep on. There was no sense letting it fold up and fall apart. We had too many ideas.’
But, on the strength of their post-Morrison work, this was obviously an untruth.
There was also an air of desperation about the band. Robby Krieger said at the time: ‘The reason we’re doing it over again is not for the money. It’s because what else could we do? It’s what we like to do and what we’ve always done and it’s our life. It’s just a question of figuring out how to do it.’
So the husk of the band staggered on, releasing two mediocre LPs – Other Voices and Full Circle – and touring to support them. But without Morrison the music was lifeless. Shocked by his death, Manzarek, Krieger and Densmore turned their back on the dark side of life, and their material became light-hearted and sloppy, as though they were telling themselves that they were human after all. The band shook off their perpetual cloak of fatigue and began smiling in their publicity pictures. ‘We’ve all been down there in the darkness with the heebie-jeebies for the last few years,’ said Manzarek, ‘and now we finally see the light.’ The mood of a Doors concert had previously been intense and austere, but not any more; now the band wore manic, inane grins, as they merrily sauntered through their new material.
It seemed impossible that these were the same men who had been responsible for all that dark, satanic rock – the new music was a strange hybrid of ineffectual jazz-rock and jaunty rock and roll, with no spark. On Other Voices and Full Circle the band were shown to be the bunch of flyweights they really were, emphasising once again how essential Morrison had been. The public felt the same way, as by themselves, the remaining Doors couldn’t get arrested, and their records languished in the lower reaches of the charts. At the end of 1972, inspiration eluding them, and deprived of their single most important element, the band broke up, perhaps finally realising the absurdity of their task.
‘We were over in England when we decided to pack in the group,’ Manzarek told Melody Maker in October 1973. ‘Everybody just decided they wanted to pursue their own musical ideas instead of staying together. We went over to England to try and get some new ideas and new blood into the band, be it a new singer, new bass player, new guitarist or whatever, but it didn’t happen. It just wasn’t right.’
Krieger and Densmore then formed the relatively successful Butts Band, while Manzarek immersed himself in solo work. The Doors once said that trying to replace Morrison would be like trying to replace Jesus: ‘It wouldn’t have been right. The four of us were so close, the vibrations wouldn’t have been right.’ But this is what effectively happened when Manzarek drafted Iggy Pop into the ranks.
In 1974 Iggy was in a state of flux; he had moved to Los Angeles after finishing the third and last Stooges album Raw Power, and because of his drug problems had split with David Bowie’s management company, Mainman. He was alone in LA with no home, no money and no group. Manzarek’s manager, Danny Sugerman, openly wooed Iggy, becoming his manager and convincing him he should work with Manzarek, and eventually the rest of the band. Because of his financial situation, Iggy didn’t have a lot of choice, and anyway, Jim Morrison was his hero, the reason he became a singer in the first place. ‘Jim Morrison was my idol – if he were alive today, I’d die for him,’ he said at the time.
Nothing much came of their collaboration apart from a few impromptu concerts, notably at the LA Palladium and the Whisky a Go Go. At the Whisky gig, on 3 July, the third anniversary of Morrison’s death, Iggy went onstage with his hair dyed black, wearing a Jim Morrison T-shirt, and a pair of Morrison’s black leather trousers supposedly given to him by Manzarek. He performed a perfunctory set of Doors songs, including ‘LA Woman’, to which Iggy added these lyrics: ‘Jim Morrison died today, Jim Morrison was more beautiful than any girl in this town, and now he’s dead, now I cry.’
Iggy once said he was given a trunk full of Morrison’s clothes, including many pairs of trousers and the hat Morrison wore at the fatal Miami concert. He showed how much he cared about the Morrison legacy by apparently selling the lot for methadone.
On 25 April 1974 Pamela Courson Morrison died from a heroin overdose, shortly after becoming the legal heir to the Morrison fortune. It probably came as a welcome relief to her: since Morrison’s death her days had been overloaded with pain and despair, full of drugs and one-night stands, and she stalked the nightclubs of Los Angeles lost in a twilight world of narcotics and distorted reverie. People were warned not to talk about Morrison in her presence, as she would cry at the very mention of his name. She never seemed to recover from the nightmare of Paris.
‘I went to stay with Pamela right after she came back from Paris,’ said Danny Fields, ‘and she was convinced Jim was living in the dog, she thought his spirit had transferred. The dog would jump up and slobber all over you and she’d say, “Sshhh, Jim’s trying to tell you something.” I knew then that he was really dead; she wouldn’t have been saying that if he was hitchhiking in Arizona. She was in terrible shock, it was so sad.’ And when Courson died, the truth about Morrison’s death went with her.
The Doors’ music would be repackaged and resold throughout the seventies, but it took until 1978 for the legend really to begin to take shape. Since the mid-seventies Manzarek, Krieger and Densmore had been working on the tapes of Morrison’s 1970 poetry recitals, providing musical backing for the words; and, along with snippets of original live performances, the results were eventually released as An American Prayer. The album was structured as a metaphor for Morrison’s life, and, although the verses were more impressive than anything contained in either The Lords or The New Creatures, it was still less than a vindication of his poetry.
Paul Rothchild told BAM magazine’s Blair Jackson in 1981, ‘That album is a rape . . . To me, what was done on An American Prayer is the same as taking a Picasso and cutting it into postage-stamp-sized pieces and spreading it across a supermarket wall . . . It was the first commercial sell-out of Jim Morrison.’
Patti Smith, talking about the record with Cynthia Rose in January 1979, said, ‘His intensity seems dated. Dated in its passion and innocence, like West Side Story . . . But he was always dated, even when he was around . . . He was bigger than life, and so he was laughable. Where does a guy like him fit in?’
In 1979 ‘The End’ finally got its own video: Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam epic Apocalypse Now. Coppola originally asked Manzarek to score an entire soundtrack, but eventually decided instead to feature Morrison’s most controversial song over the opening and closing credits (with the vocal substantially remixed by Paul Rothchild). In one scene, not used in the final version, Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando, teaches his private army the words to ‘Light My Fire’. The Doors’ music was appropriate, not only because it was popular again, but also because it offered an allegorical twist to Coppola’s depiction of the war. The movie itself was largely based on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, one of Morrison’s favourite books.
As the Jim Morrison legend gained momentum, 1980 saw the release of the exhaustive but sycophantic biography No One Here Gets Out Alive – a compelling but ultimately unsatisfying hagiography, written by Rolling Stone contributor Jerry Hopkins and the Doors’ energetic manager, Danny Sugerman. Hopkins had tried to get his Morrison biography published for years – it was turned down by over thirty publishers but it took Sugerman’s overhaul to make it a viable proposition. It was eventually published by Warner Brothers, who had already turned it down twice, and ended up selling millions.
Former Elektra boss Jac Holzman was less than impressed: ‘The book was nothing but a repackaging job – not serious. It was too monumental . . . The death rumours? Not sick but unbelievable. Danny Sugerman – how can I phrase this tactfully – wasn’t as tight with Jim as you’d think from the book. I doubt if anyone knew Jim that well.’
‘Hopkins and Sugerman’s book is primarily interesting for what it apparently inadvertently reveals,’ wrote Lester Bangs. ‘In the foreword, on the very first page of the book, Sugerman lets go two sentences which have stopped more than one person of my acquaintance from reading any farther: “I just wanted to say I think Jim Morrison was a modern-day god. Oh hell, at least a lord.”
‘It was never revealed whether Hopkins shares this assessment, but the authors then go on for almost four hundred pages, amassing mountains of evidence almost all of which can for most readers point to only one conclusion: that Jim Morrison was apparently a nigh-complete asshole from the moment he was born until he died in that bathtub in Paris.
‘If Jim Morrison cared so little about his life, was so willing to make it amount to one huge alcoholic exhibitionistic joke, why should they or we or anybody finally care, except insofar as the seamy details provide trashy entertainment?’
By the following year, the tenth anniversary of Morrison’s death, the revival was in full swing. In July Manzarek, Krieger and Densmore led fans in a graveside tribute ceremony at Père-Lachaise; in September the compilation LP The Doors’ Greatest Hits went platinum in the USA; and Rolling Stone was one of seven magazines to put the dead Door on their front cover. (‘He’s Hot, He’s Sexy, And He’s Dead’, screamed the cover line.) This was the fourth time Morrison had made the cover of Rolling Stone, the second time posthumously. In 1981 more Doors records were sold than in any year since they were first released. Teenagers discovered the band for the first time, their records went into heavy rotation on college-radio stations all over America, and they soon became as popular as the Rolling Stones or Van Halen. Big Jim had risen again, creeping into every suburban bedroom with his dirty lyrics and unsettling white-man’s blues. The youth of America again asked Morrison to carry the black flag for them, and he was powerless to resist. Morrison’s death took on a life of its own, and the Doors, with Danny Sugerman marketing the myth, experienced an extraordinary renaissance.
In the years since then there have been more records, more books, more videos, Oliver Stone’s movie, more discoveries of lost poetry, and more posthumous deification. Now, over forty years after his death, Morrison fever is everywhere. Documentaries are being edited, records being compiled, T-shirts and posters still being printed in their millions. The Morrison industry is thriving. Jim Morrison’s image is stronger than ever, and, no matter what comes to light, nothing seems able to tarnish that image. Wherever you go in the world, there will always be a screenprinted image of the tortured icon staring out at you from the front of a T-shirt, trapped for ever in a freeze-framed grimace.
Morrison was the sexiest bookworm to ever pick up a microphone, he was an inspired lyricist and one of the most celebrated pop icons of the sixties. But he was also a wilfully enigmatic, pretentious loudmouth, a self-proclaimed poet who wore the mask of the drunk. He was the impotent alcoholic, the scarred idol. He was the King of Corn, the consummate showman, the petulant clown. He was too clever for his own good, and often too stupid to care. Masochist, emotional sadist, incurable romantic – Morrison was all these things. But the T-shirts don’t have room for any of them, instead promoting only the image of the gaunt, all-conquering sex beast, the Crawling King Snake, the Killer on the Road, the Lord of the Dance, the Lizard King, Mr Mojo Risin’.
‘Towards the end he had complete contempt for his audience,’ said Patricia Kennealy, ‘because they couldn’t see what he wanted to do. He had this idea that he could lead them after him like a pig on a stick, but they weren’t really following. He became disillusioned when they only picked up on the sensationalist stuff, the stuff he used to gain their attention. They didn’t understand him, and it was partly his fault.’
As a role model for pop stars, Morrison has been enormously influential, and in the last forty years his legend has been interpreted by hundreds of performers, both good and bad. His whole persona – his passion, his intellect, his pretensions and his cynicism – quickly became a rock and roll blueprint, one that’s been relentlessly copied. As Steve Harris said, ‘He really did invent a way of looking back at the world.’ He not only inspired a generation of delinquents, he also provided them with a game plan. If, during his life, he had become a mirror for his audience, after his death he became a mirror for his mimics. Many have been inspired by Morrison’s poetic visions and tormented make-up, while others have abused his ironic stage mannerisms – particularly Alice Cooper, who exploited Morrison’s uneasy, cathartic performances and cold-heartedly formularised them, turning himself into a moneymaking freak show in the process.
David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, Julian Cope, Echo and the Bunnymen’s Ian McCulloch and Joy Division’s Ian Curtis are among the most pertinent imitators, though Curtis is one of the few to have taken his role to its tragic conclusion, killing himself in 1980. His death also created its own absurd mythology, his fans interpreting personal torment as artistic frustration and futility.
But for many rock stars, the problem of what to do when they turn thirty remains a huge problem. If you start out angry and alienated, what’s the point of growing old gracefully? What kind of a legacy is that? Shouldn’t you just kill yourself through overindulgence?
‘In a way, Jim Morrison’s life and death could be written off as simply one of the more pathetic episodes in the history of the star system,’ said Lester Bangs, ‘or that offensive myth we all persist in believing which holds that artists are somehow a race apart and thus entitled to piss on my wife, throw you out the window, smash up the joint and generally do whatever they want. I’ve seen a lot of this over the years, and what’s most ironic is that it always goes under the assumption that to deny them these outbursts would somehow be curbing their creativity, when the reality, as far as I can see, is that it’s exactly such insane tolerance of another insanity that also contributes to their drying up as artists. Because how can you finally create anything real or beautiful when you have absolutely zero input from the real world, because everyone around you is catering to and sheltering you?’
Morrison is now considered to be one of the few genuine rock and roll archetypes, whose behaviour has been copied remorselessly by at least two generations of equally obnoxious but uniformly less talented frontmen – mere chimps to Morrison’s eight-hundred-pound gorilla. Using Jim Morrison as a role model is ultimately unsuccessful because those who do are ever reliant on their six-gear anti-social tendencies disguising their creative shortcomings (actions trumping language). Whereas Morrison’s absurdity blossomed into majesty, attempts to mimic him are always belittled by cliché.
Jim Morrison got out before he was found out. Because he disappeared when he was only twenty-seven, he left no clues as to how today’s dark stars should spend their thirties, let alone the rest of their lives. What would he have done? Would he have deteriorated like Elvis Presley, or found God like Bob Dylan? Or would he have become a parody of himself – something he was already in danger of doing – like John Lydon, Mick Jagger or Pete Townshend?
Perhaps he would have faded into obscurity, like so many other stars of the sixties. It is impossible to say whether poetry – Morrison’s first love and second career – would have granted him the dignity he desired, the dignity he had lost through the Doors’ success.
Possibly he would have been disgusted by his own shortcomings. Steve Harris, at least, was convinced about what would have happened: ‘He would have split the group, and become a down-and-out alcoholic. He would have tried to sober up, he would have lost his hair and gotten a paunch. It would have been downhill all the way. He would have tried directing movies, but they would have been marginal. He would never have been able to star in a movie, his looks just wouldn’t have allowed it.’
But, had he lived, and had he been able to come to terms with his previous success, it’s possible that Morrison would have been a much happier, far more complete person; for his fans, though, this would have been a disaster, as he would have grown up in public. Rock and roll obsessives don’t want career plans, they want starbursts and crash landings . . . and with Jim Morrison they got exactly that. For them, the singer will always be twenty-something; he’ll never denounce the booze, or give up the good life. Morrison will never change, and that’s just the way they like it.
Ultimately Jim Morrison’s blueprint is incomplete, being no more than the distillation of an impassioned, violent, misspent youth.
Which is why he remains a hero, a pop deity: time didn’t allow Morrison to grow old in public, and so his life remains a prototype of immaturity. We worship Jimi Hendrix, Sid Vicious, Jim Morrison, Ian Curtis and Kurt Cobain because they didn’t allow time to interfere with their ambitions; in death they are, to quote Morrison himself, ‘stoned, immaculate’. In rock and roll, it seems, the dead will always have the edge on the living.
7
Père-Lachaise Redux
And alien tears will fall for him,
Pity’s long broken urn,
For his mourners will be outcast men
And outcasts always mourn
Inscription on Oscar Wilde’s tomb at Père-Lachaise
On a bright and sunny but deceptively cold winter afternoon, a crowd of mourners are standing beside Jim Morrison’s grave. They are here because today is a special day – Morrison’s birthday. Six miniature champagne bottles sit atop his tombstone, as do a few handwritten letters and about a dozen bouquets of flowers. On the surrounding graves there is some new graffiti, though nothing radically different from what’s already scrawled there: ‘Yo, Lizard King’, ‘Free dope for ever’, ‘You are stoned, do you feel your limbs? You are dead’, ‘Nico loved you, but she died’, ‘Girls! Girls! Girls!’, ‘Wine, best you want’, ‘The door in the West is closed’, ‘Sex and drugs and Doors’, ‘It’s better to burn out than fade away’, ‘Hotel Morrison, occupied’, ‘Burn both ends!’.
