Mr Mojo, page 8
For Morrison, the rest of the European tour was a blur, a litany of alcohol and drug abuse, the singer spending most of his free time either drunk, or asleep, sometimes in a hotel bedroom, but other times sprawled out on the pavement. Give or take the odd debacle, the group’s performances were usually up to scratch, though they were already performing on autopilot. Manzarek, Krieger and Densmore were merely going through the motions, while Morrison often had trouble remembering what those motions were. In the interviews he gave during this period, you can hear the timidity in his voice, as if he didn’t really care whether or not he made himself understood.
Jefferson Airplane’s lead singer Grace Slick remembers Morrison vividly. She said he reminded her of ‘a rabid Johnny Depp, perfectly formed and possessed by abstraction’. She also remembers what she describes as his ‘colourful non sequiturs’, but which in print simply looks like Morrison’s attempts to make himself appear more interesting.
‘“Jim,” I’d say, “did you see that broken chair by the speaker system?”
‘With a pleasant smile and pupils dilated to the very edges of the iris, he’d respond with something like, “Lady in smoke shop, nobody for broken, chair broken, chair broken.”’
Even though he was fond of talking gibberish, Slick seduced him on the tour. ‘He was a well-built boy, his cock was slightly larger than average, and he was young enough to maintain the engorged silent connection right through the residue of chemicals that can threaten erection.’
Slick described their time in Holland: ‘Both bands were walking down this street in Amsterdam, one of the main streets . . . and the kids would offer us drugs. We’d say, “Thanks very much,” [and] put it in [our] pockets . . . but you wouldn’t take everything you would be given otherwise you’d be dead.
‘Jim, on the other hand, took everything that was given to him, on the spot.’
The European tour also introduced both groups to ‘poppers’ (amyl nitrate), and Morrison was such a fan of the drug that he used to come running on to the stage like a pinwheel. One night, when Jefferson Airplane were performing, he invaded the stage and started dancing along to one of their songs, blitzed out of his mind. He then collapsed, and was rushed to hospital in a portable oxygen tent. Later that night the Doors played as a three-piece, Ray Manzarek filling in for Morrison on vocals. It was not one of their most successful performances.
5
Aping the Changeling
By the end of 1968 the Doors were the most popular group in America, as well as the most controversial. Because they were so popular, their exploits were blown out of all proportion. Larger than life, and twice as ugly, the Doors represented the mood of the nation, the Zeitgeist incarnate. Morrison himself was still considered to be the sexiest man in rock and roll, in spite of the fact that he spent most of his time stupefied by alcohol and benzedrine, and in spite of being labeled the ‘Mickey Mouse de Sade’ by many of those who worked for him.
Danny Fields regularly felt the brunt of Morrison’s sadistic personality: ‘He really was a terror – he was the epitome of the old-fashioned concept of a brat, a big, brilliant, sexy brat. They don’t make them like that any more, people who have that way of reacting to the world. These days pop stars are different when you try and talk to them about the realities of the business, or about what’s required of them as a human being; they stop being bad boys. Morrison, he was an original. Of course it was all contrived – the macho pose thing – but he lived it, and underneath he didn’t give a damn. Didn’t give a damn about money, property, obsessions . . . he was one of the few people from that period who was genuinely anti-bourgeois. I suppose the hedonism got in the way.’
‘His life, such as it was, was an open book,’ said Steve Harris. ‘This was the first time a pop performer had been so explicit in public, and he left nothing to the imagination. He lived his image to the hilt.’
The new tour got under way in November, the biggest the Doors had yet undertaken, and their fans reacted with an unexpected fervour. The group caused pandemonium almost everywhere they played, and there were riots in Phoenix, Cleveland, St Louis and Chicago. They had become satanic beat messiahs, a carnival freak-show, and the crowds came baying for blood, expecting some kind of unholy resurrection. Seeing the Doors was now a real experience, what with the unruly crowds, the band’s increasingly sinister sound, and the performance of Morrison himself crawling around the stage dishevelled and drunk, sneering, swearing and hurling abuse at the audience. Unbeknown to the rest of the band, Morrison was deliberately courting violence at these concerts, manipulating the crowds into a frenzy.
‘I was less theatrical, less artificial when I first began performing,’ said Morrison of his stagecraft. ‘But now the audiences are much larger and the rooms we play much bigger, it’s necessary to project more – to exaggerate – almost to the point of grotesqueness.’
A big influence on Morrison at this point was a drama group called the Living Theatre – disciples of one of Morrison’s heroes, the radical French dramatic theorist Antonin Artaud. Morrison had been infatuated with the group’s activities for years, but now that the Doors’ stage shows were becoming predictable and perfunctory, he began trying to incorporate the Living Theatre’s ideas of confrontation and shock into his own performances.
If there is one event which led to Morrison’s ultimate demise, it was the performance at the University of Southern California on 28 February 1969 by the Living Theatre. Here, Morrison saw the group enact their pièce de résistance, Paradise Now, an exercise in crowd manipulation. Including the repetition of several key phrases meant to drive the audience into a frenzy, Paradise Now was a guerrilla theatre performance, an aggressive spectacle, a serious art statement about censorship and freedom of speech. At the climax of the show the performers stripped off their clothes to the legal limit, though the police moved in and stopped the display before any of them got very far. Morrison was transfixed.
The next day the Doors were due to play Miami, their first ever concert in Florida. After a fight with Pamela which delayed him in LA, Morrison followed the rest of the band east, missing his connecting flights and drinking heavily. He arrived so late in Miami that the band went onstage an hour late. The rest of the band were already furious because the promoter had crammed far too many people into the auditorium, making the atmosphere hot and uncomfortable. The crowd themselves were hot and hungry: they were crushed together like animals, the band were late and the stories of earlier riots were passing around the auditorium like wildfire. Everyone felt the same: tonight was going to be special, tonight was going to be real.
Manzarek, Krieger and Densmore eventually crept onstage and began playing, hoping Morrison would join them. Eventually he did, but it was plain to all three of them that he was far drunker than he usually was when he fell onstage. The trip from Los Angeles had obviously taken its toll, as he could hardly stand up. The band ploughed through the material, making it more than obvious when they expected Morrison to come in with a vocal, but the singer was more interested in swearing at the audience, and muttering obscenities to himself. He’d start joining in with the band, then stop after a verse and a half to berate the audience some more. Here was the vulgar poet in all his drunk and disorderly glory, wrapping himself around the mike stand, belching, grabbing his crotch, gobbling the microphone like it was a rapidly melting ice cream.
‘Anybody here from Tallahassee?’ he enquired. After an affirmative response he hit back with, ‘Well, I lived there once. I lived there until I got smart and went to California.’
From there it was downhill all the way: ‘You’re all a bunch of fucking idiots, how much longer are you going to let them push you around? You love it, you’re all a bunch of slaves, what are you going to do about it? I’m not talking about getting out on the streets, I’m talking about having some fun, I’m talking about dancing, I’m talking about love your neighbour, till it hurts, I’m talking about grab your friend, I’m talking about love, love, love, love. Hey! Listen, I’m lonely, I need some love, y’all. Ain’t nobody gonna love my ass? Come on, I need you. There’s so many of you out there, ain’t nobody gonna love me? Sweetheart, come on. Hey! How about fifty or sixty of you people come up here and love my ass? Come on!’
And with that, Morrison began taking off his clothes, throwing his shirt over his shoulder and unbuttoning his trousers. The drunken gibberish over with, he wanted to show the crowd what he was really made of. The Living Theatre’s Situationist striptease was being acted out by a paralytic pop star in front of thousands of screaming fans in a concert hall in Miami. Morrison imagined himself under the Klieg lights now, giving the finger to the world.
There are wildly conflicting reports about the subsequent exposure, and there have never been any photographs which show Morrison with his penis out. Yet he is supposed to have opened his leather trousers, displayed his partially erect penis and feigned masturbation. If true, it was hardly out of character.
Underwear and empty bottles were thrown at him during the striptease, but the debacle was cut short by a security guard who eventually pushed Morrison offstage. The concert had lasted just forty-five minutes.
Though this was the most explosive concert the band had so far performed, the press took a while to respond. But within a few days it was evident that Morrison had not got away with it. When the news of Morrison’s exposure was substantiated, the police department and the state attorney’s office came down heavily on the band, and Morrison was charged with everything from lewd and lascivious behaviour to indecent exposure, drunkenness and profanity. This sent terror through the Doors camp: if found guilty he could be sent down for seven years, effectively ending their career.
The press went crazy: exaggerated reports of the concert appeared all over the country, and the Doors became the bête noire of American rock and roll. The Miami Herald wrote: ‘Included in the audience were hundreds of unescorted junior and senior high girls . . . It was not meant to be pretty. Morrison appeared to masturbate in full view of his audience, screamed obscenities, and exposed himself. He also got violent, shrugged off several officials and threw one of them off the stage before he himself was hurled into the crowd.’
In Florida a decency rally was organised, and across the nation all manner of public servants came out of the woodwork, denouncing Morrison as the devil himself. In a fit of moral panic, even the FBI got in on the act, issuing a warrant for Morrison’s arrest and charging him with ‘unlawful flight’, even though he had left Miami three days before the warrants were issued. Before the concert Morrison had worried that the band were becoming public property; now they were public enemies – and he was Public Enemy Number One.
In Miami Morrison purposely tried to start a riot, but only succeeded in drawing attention to himself. Like many performers, he was unable to harness his own stardom, and because of this, began lampooning himself. Morrison couldn’t cope with being a star because he didn’t believe in what his fans believed in: himself. So he took it out on the rest of the group, then the audience, and then himself. He was dismissive of his audience because he held them in contempt. They treated him like a god, yet he knew he was only a puppet of the crowd; they weren’t interested in his literary allegories, they wanted him to make a spectacle of himself. Morrison had now failed on two counts. First, he had been unsuccessful in killing off his creation. Secondly, the whole affair was an embarrassment: he was being persecuted for perhaps exposing himself. In Britain a few years previously, P. J. Proby’s career had been cut short by a succession of trouser-splitting performances, but in America Morrison’s performance in Miami was the first time since Elvis that indecent exposure by a pop star had caused so much controversy. It would become commonplace, with many rock stars exposing their private parts for public consumption, but in 1969 it was heresy.
As a sign of defeat, after Miami Morrison put away the leather trousers, swapping them for black jeans and baggy cotton pants. Because of his stomach, his shirts changed too, and he took to wearing white muslin Mexican shirts which he let hang down outside his belt. He also let his beard grow, and his hair began to turn grey.
The band needed to tour, but found this almost impossible – they immediately lost thirty concerts because of Miami. At the few concerts they managed to organise they had to put up a $5,000 bond – a ‘fuck clause’, as they called it – in case Morrison disgraced himself. And the audiences came expecting the very same, and were disappointed when he let them down. His trousers safely zipped up, Morrison roamed the stage, hamming it up, contemptuously singing ‘Light My Fire’ while sneering at the audience. But if he appeared angry, inside he was sad. Interviewed for Rolling Stone by Jerry Hopkins soon after Miami, Morrison showed a new maturity and even voiced a few regrets. He was tired and frustrated, wounded and scared. Was a new Jim Morrison emerging? More contemplative, and extremely paranoid, the new Jim Morrison suddenly looked like the unhappiest rock star in the world.
In one of his last interviews, with Bob Chorush of the Los Angeles Free Press in 1971, Morrison said, ‘The Doors never really had any riots. I did try and create something a few times just because I’d always heard about riots at concerts, and I thought we ought to have [one]. So I tried to stimulate a few little riots, and after a few times I realised it’s such a joke. It doesn’t lead anywhere. You know what, soon it got to the point where people didn’t think it was a successful concert unless everybody jumped up and ran around a bit.’
While in London Morrison had met the poet Michael McClure, who was extremely excited by the singer’s poetry, and urged him to get it published. Back in Los Angeles, with time on his hands, Morrison set to work, determined to make his poetry public. But McClure was one of the few who had faith in Morrison’s poems: ‘I was always disappointed that the poetry didn’t measure up to the songs,’ said Patricia Kennealy, the girl Morrison would soon marry. ‘They weren’t much. I think he would have possibly gotten better at it as he went along, but I found the ones he did write very self-indulgent and self-referential. But he was young.’ While the Doors were on hold, Morrison threw himself into his poetry, eventually persuading Simon and Schuster to publish two volumes.
During February 1969 a new Doors single ‘Touch Me’ climbed to number three in the American charts, becoming a million seller. The band must have thought themselves lucky, as the song was not only their weakest single so far, but it also featured plenty of brass as well as a string ensemble. Fans were shocked, though not quite enough to ignore the record. But the worst was yet to come. If Waiting for the Sun had been a disappointment, then The Soft Parade, the Doors’ fourth album, was little short of a tragedy. Originally planned as the band’s Sgt. Pepper, it turned out to be the worst record they ever made, taking over a year to record and costing nearly $100,000. For the first time the songs bore individual writing credits, with Robby Krieger responsible for over half the album and most of the lacklustre compositions.
Because Morrison had not written many songs – he was concentrating on his poetry – he wanted to distance himself from those of Krieger, and insisted on the individual credits.
Everything on The Soft Parade was well below par: ‘Wishful Sinful’, another single from the LP, only reached number 44, while ‘Tell All the People’ and its follow-up, ‘Runnin’ Blue’, did even worse. All were written by Krieger.
Morrison washed his hands of the affair, and as he didn’t really care about the music any more it was no surprise when the group started to deteriorate. Morrison was experiencing his own decline and fall and, suffering the onslaught of the press, retreated into himself.
The Soft Parade is still viewed as the Doors’ nadir: ‘Tell All the People’ is a ridiculous Pied Piper overture, the kind of paint-by-number ditty that could have been produced by any number of bands. ‘Touch Me’ is an unsuccessful rerun of ‘Light My Fire’ (throughout their career the group would continue to rework the ‘Light My Fire’ formula, with songs like ‘Touch Me’, ‘Hello I Love You’ and ‘Love Me Two Times’); while ‘Runnin’ Blue’ is simply bizarre. This song, a tribute to the recently deceased Otis Redding, features completely inappropriate bluegrass fiddles and mandolins.
Interviews from the time, in which he would ramble more than usual, reflected Morrison’s general malaise: ‘It used to seem possible to generate a movement – people rising up and joining together in a mass protest – refusing to be represented any longer – like, they’d all put their strength together to break what Blake calls “the mind-forged manacles” . . . The Love Street times are dead. Sure, it’s possible for there to be a transcendence – but not on a mass level, not a universal rebellion. Now it has to take place on an individual level – every man for himself, as they say. Save yourself. Violence isn’t always evil. What’s evil is the infatuation with violence.’
Except for a few rare occasions, Morrison didn’t come across well in interviews. While he was certainly outgoing, and talked a lot about his work, in print he always seemed to be reciting lines. He gave good copy, but never appeared to give much of himself, even when explaining some deep and obviously personal philosophical point. He would talk for hours about shamanism, or his role as an idol, and then deflate it with a sarcastic and often self-deprecating remark. When journalists saw that he could turn his soul-searching monologues on and off like a light switch, it made them wary. Even the writers who went on bar crawls with him, who spent days in his company, never felt much warmth. They couldn’t crack the code.
