Babe Hill Remembers His Friend Jim!

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Babe Hill has remained pretty much dead silent about his friendship with Jim except for a chat he had with another good friend of Morrison, Frank Lisciandro for the excellent book Morrison: A Feast of Friends.
here are a few snippets.

"Of all the people who knew Jim and spent time with him in the last years of his life no one was closer to him than Babe Hill. Babe worked on both Jim's films and he delighted Jim with his carefree manner, quick verbal wit and keen intelligence."
Frank Lisciandro

Babe:Jim was on a path of destruction.
Frank: Wait a minute. What do you mean? From the very beginning?
Babe: Yeah...We all knew that. Not from the very beginning, but early on. Why else would he drink like that and get so drunk where he knew that he was going to kill himself. Like those death rides we use to go on in the car. He knew the day after what he had done and he knew that he was going to get that drunk, do it again. And he knew it was either going to end in a fiery James Dean death, or not. Frank, you know this!Frank: I don't know that Jim had a death wish.
Babe:Not a wish. Not a wish. That's a cliche that does not apply to this man. Rather say an apathy toward future life. He was exploring drunkenness. Look at it this way: when he got all tied up into that Doors stuff and he became a national hero, that all became ashes,right? And then he had no true goal after that excep this poetry, but he could never be taken seriously as a poet. He was always going to be considered as this maverick rock star, that's all they were going to think about it, that he was another crazy rock star.Plus his alienation from his family, deep down inside we were all children, hugging our mothers and sucking their tits. With love and everything. That alienation is not natural.
Frank: Did he know where all this was leading?
Babe: Oh, yeah, he was courageous. He had the intelligence to know that madness leads to more madness. And it had no constructive end to it, that he could not come out the other side andsay, "I proved something, or I did something." That would be courageous to know that at the end of it was just madness, death, and destruction.
Frank: If he was so damn bent on self-annihilation why did he go to Paris? Wasn't it to perfect his art and reform his life?
Babe: Just a change, get away from everything here.
Frank: In the weeks immediately before leaving for Paris Jim seemed to be making positive changes.
Babe: He was very sober, he was very sober. He hadn't been hanging around with me that much. We hadn't been getting drunk together. He seemed like he was trying to divorce himself from everything in a kinda sober, final way. And I was going, "Hey, that's great, man. All the luck." He was concentrating more and more and more on his poetry and his publishing and that's all he wanted to do was get away from here and get it all behind him. Towards the end he was starting to take a longer view of things. He knew that whole phenomenon of The Doors was over. He was burnt out, certainly, on concerts, and on records, being in the studio, all that stuff. He was going to get away but by that time, when that alcohol disease has got ya, you can't get away from it and it's just so easy to go down to the pub and you have a bunch of people around buying you drinks, you love to do it, and you love that feeling of being drunk and the next thing you know you've been doing it for all those years.
Frank: Did he recognise that?
Babe: I'm sure he did. The guy was too intelligent, I mean knowing about the disease and doing something about it is two different things. You know it's like trying to quit smoking only a lot harder.
Frank mentioned to Babe that in several of Jim's songs and poems he uses the same two lines: "The hitchiker stood by the side of the road... And leveled his thumb in the calm calculus of reason"
Babe laughedsoftly....
Babe: That's the whole thing of life. I don't know,man. That's just too beautiful to define. You define it within yourself, but to try to describe it, you can't. He saw himself as the ultimate hitchhiker with no future and no past, and no present, no hope of any ofthese things. The ultimate existential moment or whatever.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Jim and I were so different our backgrounds so different. Being rowdy to me was going to a bar playing pool and getting into fights. Jim could come along and watch that stuff but he could not really join in with it.
When we’d go to San Francisco and hang out with Michael McClure and go to his plays and things like that, we’d just get loud and joyous and all kinds of stuff in the theatre. Jim didn’t hold back when he wanted to. He could be all the way loud and happy. He had a good sense of humour; he had a great sense of humour. He loved to laugh. He laughed all the time. I remember if something humorous happened around the office he’d get a big guffaw out of it. I would say that he was an exuberant personality. He was not morose.

I remember one night in The Blue Lady we went racing down some street. He just took off and the street ended, it dead ended. Jim was dead drunk and we had Violet (one of our cocaine queens) with us. I was just holding on to her, man, I said ‘we’re going to die’. And he hit the brakesd and we went over the curb and went up on the lawn and dead ended against a tree. It just so happened we were in the back of the Beverly Hills Police Department.
It didn’t wreck the car but it more or less wiped out the undercarriage. We hit the curb straight on but it was a pretty high curb.
So we sent Violet in and she called a cab and we left. The cops never even knew we were involved.


FL. In popular rock and roll mythology Jim was reputed to have been in numerous fight and bar smashing incidents.
BH.I never saw him do anything violent Other than maybe drive a car. I never saw him choose anybody off, or swing at anybody, or even yell at anybody.
Violence was totally not part of his personailty of any kind.
Babe Hill:Feast Of Friends

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Caribbean fishing trip with Babe Hill & Max Fink

FL: Pam had very little use for Jim's friends and would cut us off most times with a steely stare. I asked Babe why she didn't like us.

Babe: Well you would have to know Pam to know that and we didn't know Pam that well...

FL: Did Jim ever say why she didn't like us?

Babe: No. He never made excuses for her, did he. Or try to explain her. I got along with Pam when they went to London or somewhere and Pam had that little place in Topanga. I went down there and took care of Sage (Pam's dog) and the place for a month or two and we drove down there and we just got along famously. She thought everybody was taking advantage of Jim and riding on his coat-tails and we just hit it off as if me and Jim didn't have that kind of relationship. That was her whole thing with the other Doors and the office and everything. It didn't have to do with they weren't making money it was just they were wasting his creativity. I figure she was a very supportive influence on his poetry and never missed a chance to rag on him when he went off track. And when he went off fucking around she was always on his ass to get back on the track of his poetry.
Lets face it none of us knew what went on behind that closed door. It was a stormy love-filled relationship full of everything...acrimony, making up, the whole deal.
And he definitely didn't love another woman anywhere as near as much. He was with her from the beginning to the end.

FL: As secretive as he was about his past he was even more gaurded about his notebooks never showing anyone but Pam thier contents. And rarely did he recite a poem except on stage where his poetic gifts often went unappreciated by audiences waiting to hear a medley of The Doors greatest hits.

Babe: I think he felt frustration at being born at the wrong time. Like the time we were in San Diego for an arts syposium in the summer of 1969. He'd look at poets like Creeley and Brautigan and he'd look and say.... 'These guys aren't known. I'm better known than these guys and they have more talent than I do. I look up to these people and nobody even knows them."
I just think he was trapped in a persona that he did not envision for himself. From only his perspective could you understand the depth and implications of this. I don't think he really had anything to live for.
Whats a guy going to do? His poetry was going to be totally overshadowed by his name for the rest of his life. Whenever poetry circles got together and invited Jim Morrison they were inviting him not for his poetry but for his name.

FL: I remember when we were playing pool and two drunken Chicanos wanted us off the table and you didn't quite see it that way.....

Babe: Jim was great man. I cracked that pool cue in half and I had a spear and I was going after the big fat guy in th corner and Jim just jumped up in the middle and goes 'Babe...the cops...the cops'.......

FL: Jim's shouting sent our two large adversaries out the door in a hurry. He might bnot have been much of a bar-room brawler but he could think quick on his feet.....

Babe Hill:Feast Of Friends