Post by TheWallsScreamedPoetry on Apr 14, 2010 8:13:39 GMT
More On The Doors: Ben Fong-Torres and The Last Interview With Jim Morrison
It’s been said – Oh, all right, I’ve said it myself once or twice – that I was the last American journalist to interview Jim Morrison before he took off to Paris, on March 12th 1971, to join his girlfriend, Pam Courson, who’d found a spacious Beaux Arts apartment for them in the lower Marais district. And it was there, in the early morning hours of July 3rd, that he died at age 27.
I do know that no other reporter – American or otherwise – has claimed to have spoken with him before he left, or in the three months he spent in and around Paris.
But I didn’t exactly interview him. We did talk, for more than an hour, and I got to know him a little. But I hadn’t planned on it, and it was only out of habit that I turned on a tape recorder, captured our visit, and turned part of it into a short news item for Rolling Stone.
Here’s what happened.
One afternoon in February, I was hanging out with Diane Gardner in her apartment in West Hollywood. Diane worked for a big PR company, and her specialty was rock. Her clients included Jefferson Airplane and the Doors. Coincidentally, her apartment was just downstairs from Pam Courson’s, and they were buddies.
There was a rap on the door. It was Jim Morrison, and was looking for Pam. She wasn’t home, Diane said, and invited Jim to stick around and wait for her.
I hadn’t met Morrison before – Our L.A. correspondent, Jerry Hopkins, had done most of our coverage of the band – and I didn’t know much about what was going on with the Doors, aside from the fact that they were working on the album that would become L.A. Woman, and some gossip that he was heading for France. With his full beard and the beginnings of a beer belly, he didn’t look much like the rock star of old. Almost reflexively, I invited him to chat, perhaps for an article. We hit it off right away; even got into this parody of a TV talk show. I played the part of Dick Cavett, who had a show on ABC, opposite Johnny Carson Jim played – well, a rock star named Jim Morrison.
We set up a couple of chairs. No sooner did Jim sit down than he told an obscene joke that would’ve knocked Cavett right off the air.
But, soon, we settled into a pretty sober conversation – or reasonably sober, considering that, about 15 minutes into it, when Pam showed up, he got up and ordered gin and potato chips from a nearby store. We continued our chat, and Pam joined in too. Despite his reputation as a wild man, and his busts for obscenity and for exposing himself on stage in Miami, Morrison had struck me, in interviews, as an intelligent, thoughtful guy who just happened to be at home on the stage.
Here, in a modest apartment in West Hollywood, on the eve of leaving the country, he lived up to my expectations. He was reasoned. He was realistic about rock, and about ebbs and flows of fan worship. He was relaxed.
And hey why not? We were just doing a TV talk show.
Here are a few excerpts:
How much longer do you have with Elektra?
Well, we’re at work on our last album for them.
Do you see far beyond that?
I can’t see too much beyond that. You know, it’s a day-to-day thing. I think with this album we’re kind of at a crossroads in our career. So, we’ll know within the next five or six months what the future will be.
What’s in the immediate future? Any concerts?
No, were kind of off playing concerts; somehow no one enjoys the big places anymore, and to go into clubs more than just a night every now and then is kind of meaningless.
A few years ago, we were probably right on for the age of people who would go to large concerts, whereas now we may appeal to an older audience, maybe still the Fillmore crowds. But I would say it would be an anachronism for the younger people.
Do you think you’d be classified among the young people who signify what some people insist is the “death of rock”?
Well, I was saying rock is dead years ago. Twenty or thirty years ago, jazz was the kind of music people went to, and large crowds danced to, and moved around to. And then rock and roll replaced that, and then another generation came along in a few years, swarm together, and have a new name for it. It’ll be the kind of music that people like to go out and get it on to.
Each generation wants new symbols, new people, and new names. They want to divorce themselves from the preceding generation, and so they won’t call it rock, they’ll invent some new name for it.
How about Miami? Will that whole thing affect whether you’ll play any more concerts?
I think that was the culmination, in a way, of our mass performing career. Subconsciously, I think I was trying to get across in that concert – I was trying to reduce it to absurdity, and it worked too well.
When did it stop getting to be fun?
I think there is a certain moment when you’re right in time with your audience, and then you both grow out of it and you both have to realize it; It’s not that you’ve outgrown your audience; it has to go on to something else.
You see blues fitting in with this?
No. It’s just getting back to more of what we enjoy. What we actually, personally enjoy. Not that we’ve ever played music that we didn’t like. When we were playing clubs, I’d say over half of what we did was blues, and we used our own material on records, but I think the most exciting things we did were basic blues. I like them mainly cause they’re fun to sing.
(While Jim was on the phone ordering refreshments, Diane, Pamela and I chatted.)
Why have you gotten fat, Jim? That was the question we were discussing.
Pamela: Who says he’s fat! I like it.
Jim: I guess it’s just a natural aging process…Maybe it’s not being as physically active. I think it’s mainly just filling out. Some people have that kind of build.
Does touring and running around doing a lot and sweating make you lose a lot of weight?
Jim: I would say if you performed a lot and sweated a lot and moved around.
Pam: It’s mainly drinking.
Jim: I drink a lot of beer. While I’m recording, especially. If you drink hard liquor when you’re recording pretty soon you’re so out of it, you can’t do anything anymore. But beer – it gives you a little energy and you can keep going all night. Beer puts on the pounds.
What did you do in Miami during your spare time? Weren’t you sort of captive in the city?
Jim: Yeah, sometimes it would be two days, sometimes three days a week. I had a chance to do a little water skiing. I learned how to scuba dive. I went to Nassau for a weekend. They have beautiful underwater natural parks. Have you ever scuba dived? It’s a beautiful trip. You’re just floating. It’s an intrauterine experience.
One thing I was interested to observe: Every day we would rush home to watch ourselves on TV; they couldn’t film in the courtroom, but going and leaving they’d film it, and we’d hear the reporters views of what happened.
The first few days it was kinda the old-line policy, what people had been thinking for a year and a half, but as the trial wore on, the reporters themselves, from just talking to me and the people involved in the case – the tone of the news articles – and even the papers – became a little more objective as each day went on.
(Later, the talk turned to the Beatles. Jim had been reading Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner’s two part interview with John Lennon.)
Jim: In a way, we came along at a weird time, at the tail end of the rock revival from England. You know, they’d already done it. I think it was the success of those English groups that gave hope to a lot of musicians over here, saying, “Sheee-it, we can do the same thing!”
And so they did. The shock is how long they managed to do it for, considering Morrison was acting up and out even before they finished their first album.
But when Jim told me that he didn’t see much beyond L.A. Woman, and that he felt done with touring, it was news to the rest of the band – keyboardist Ray Manzarek, guitarist Robby Krieger, and drummer John Densmore.
As Manzarek told me for my book, The Doors By The Doors, the three of them stayed busy while Morrison was in Paris. “Robby and I and John are working on songs,” he said, “getting together and rehearsing two times a week. Nobody’s heard from Jim.”
In the end, Morrison had the last word – without even having to say anything. END.
Tone Audio Magazine
The E-Journal Of Analog and Digital Sound
No.16 - 2008
It’s been said – Oh, all right, I’ve said it myself once or twice – that I was the last American journalist to interview Jim Morrison before he took off to Paris, on March 12th 1971, to join his girlfriend, Pam Courson, who’d found a spacious Beaux Arts apartment for them in the lower Marais district. And it was there, in the early morning hours of July 3rd, that he died at age 27.
I do know that no other reporter – American or otherwise – has claimed to have spoken with him before he left, or in the three months he spent in and around Paris.
But I didn’t exactly interview him. We did talk, for more than an hour, and I got to know him a little. But I hadn’t planned on it, and it was only out of habit that I turned on a tape recorder, captured our visit, and turned part of it into a short news item for Rolling Stone.
Here’s what happened.
One afternoon in February, I was hanging out with Diane Gardner in her apartment in West Hollywood. Diane worked for a big PR company, and her specialty was rock. Her clients included Jefferson Airplane and the Doors. Coincidentally, her apartment was just downstairs from Pam Courson’s, and they were buddies.
There was a rap on the door. It was Jim Morrison, and was looking for Pam. She wasn’t home, Diane said, and invited Jim to stick around and wait for her.
I hadn’t met Morrison before – Our L.A. correspondent, Jerry Hopkins, had done most of our coverage of the band – and I didn’t know much about what was going on with the Doors, aside from the fact that they were working on the album that would become L.A. Woman, and some gossip that he was heading for France. With his full beard and the beginnings of a beer belly, he didn’t look much like the rock star of old. Almost reflexively, I invited him to chat, perhaps for an article. We hit it off right away; even got into this parody of a TV talk show. I played the part of Dick Cavett, who had a show on ABC, opposite Johnny Carson Jim played – well, a rock star named Jim Morrison.
We set up a couple of chairs. No sooner did Jim sit down than he told an obscene joke that would’ve knocked Cavett right off the air.
But, soon, we settled into a pretty sober conversation – or reasonably sober, considering that, about 15 minutes into it, when Pam showed up, he got up and ordered gin and potato chips from a nearby store. We continued our chat, and Pam joined in too. Despite his reputation as a wild man, and his busts for obscenity and for exposing himself on stage in Miami, Morrison had struck me, in interviews, as an intelligent, thoughtful guy who just happened to be at home on the stage.
Here, in a modest apartment in West Hollywood, on the eve of leaving the country, he lived up to my expectations. He was reasoned. He was realistic about rock, and about ebbs and flows of fan worship. He was relaxed.
And hey why not? We were just doing a TV talk show.
Here are a few excerpts:
How much longer do you have with Elektra?
Well, we’re at work on our last album for them.
Do you see far beyond that?
I can’t see too much beyond that. You know, it’s a day-to-day thing. I think with this album we’re kind of at a crossroads in our career. So, we’ll know within the next five or six months what the future will be.
What’s in the immediate future? Any concerts?
No, were kind of off playing concerts; somehow no one enjoys the big places anymore, and to go into clubs more than just a night every now and then is kind of meaningless.
A few years ago, we were probably right on for the age of people who would go to large concerts, whereas now we may appeal to an older audience, maybe still the Fillmore crowds. But I would say it would be an anachronism for the younger people.
Do you think you’d be classified among the young people who signify what some people insist is the “death of rock”?
Well, I was saying rock is dead years ago. Twenty or thirty years ago, jazz was the kind of music people went to, and large crowds danced to, and moved around to. And then rock and roll replaced that, and then another generation came along in a few years, swarm together, and have a new name for it. It’ll be the kind of music that people like to go out and get it on to.
Each generation wants new symbols, new people, and new names. They want to divorce themselves from the preceding generation, and so they won’t call it rock, they’ll invent some new name for it.
How about Miami? Will that whole thing affect whether you’ll play any more concerts?
I think that was the culmination, in a way, of our mass performing career. Subconsciously, I think I was trying to get across in that concert – I was trying to reduce it to absurdity, and it worked too well.
When did it stop getting to be fun?
I think there is a certain moment when you’re right in time with your audience, and then you both grow out of it and you both have to realize it; It’s not that you’ve outgrown your audience; it has to go on to something else.
You see blues fitting in with this?
No. It’s just getting back to more of what we enjoy. What we actually, personally enjoy. Not that we’ve ever played music that we didn’t like. When we were playing clubs, I’d say over half of what we did was blues, and we used our own material on records, but I think the most exciting things we did were basic blues. I like them mainly cause they’re fun to sing.
(While Jim was on the phone ordering refreshments, Diane, Pamela and I chatted.)
Why have you gotten fat, Jim? That was the question we were discussing.
Pamela: Who says he’s fat! I like it.
Jim: I guess it’s just a natural aging process…Maybe it’s not being as physically active. I think it’s mainly just filling out. Some people have that kind of build.
Does touring and running around doing a lot and sweating make you lose a lot of weight?
Jim: I would say if you performed a lot and sweated a lot and moved around.
Pam: It’s mainly drinking.
Jim: I drink a lot of beer. While I’m recording, especially. If you drink hard liquor when you’re recording pretty soon you’re so out of it, you can’t do anything anymore. But beer – it gives you a little energy and you can keep going all night. Beer puts on the pounds.
What did you do in Miami during your spare time? Weren’t you sort of captive in the city?
Jim: Yeah, sometimes it would be two days, sometimes three days a week. I had a chance to do a little water skiing. I learned how to scuba dive. I went to Nassau for a weekend. They have beautiful underwater natural parks. Have you ever scuba dived? It’s a beautiful trip. You’re just floating. It’s an intrauterine experience.
One thing I was interested to observe: Every day we would rush home to watch ourselves on TV; they couldn’t film in the courtroom, but going and leaving they’d film it, and we’d hear the reporters views of what happened.
The first few days it was kinda the old-line policy, what people had been thinking for a year and a half, but as the trial wore on, the reporters themselves, from just talking to me and the people involved in the case – the tone of the news articles – and even the papers – became a little more objective as each day went on.
(Later, the talk turned to the Beatles. Jim had been reading Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner’s two part interview with John Lennon.)
Jim: In a way, we came along at a weird time, at the tail end of the rock revival from England. You know, they’d already done it. I think it was the success of those English groups that gave hope to a lot of musicians over here, saying, “Sheee-it, we can do the same thing!”
And so they did. The shock is how long they managed to do it for, considering Morrison was acting up and out even before they finished their first album.
But when Jim told me that he didn’t see much beyond L.A. Woman, and that he felt done with touring, it was news to the rest of the band – keyboardist Ray Manzarek, guitarist Robby Krieger, and drummer John Densmore.
As Manzarek told me for my book, The Doors By The Doors, the three of them stayed busy while Morrison was in Paris. “Robby and I and John are working on songs,” he said, “getting together and rehearsing two times a week. Nobody’s heard from Jim.”
In the end, Morrison had the last word – without even having to say anything. END.
Tone Audio Magazine
The E-Journal Of Analog and Digital Sound
No.16 - 2008