Post by darkstar3 on Jan 17, 2011 21:55:57 GMT
New Muscial Express
October 4 1975
By Mick Farren
Incident In Miami
It has to be said, in his favor, that Jim Morrison lived the part that he played. He wasn’t the kind of star who preached revolution and then sunk the profits in I.T.&T. stock and chains of Laundromats.
Morrison confidante Danny Sugerman explains: “Fame may have made Jim crazier and more outrageous, but the money hardly affected him at all. All it meant was that he was able to buy more and more booze, for himself and for all the people who hung around him.”
Most afternoons, when he wasn’t either recording or touring, Morrison could be found drinking in a bar close to the Whisky A Go Go. It was a small sleazy place; the hang out of winos during the day until it turned over to topless and striptease during the night. At that point the drunks, including Jim, were tossed out to make room for the cover-charge paying punters who wanted to look at tits.
Morrison rarely had a permanent home, and was often without a car. For long periods he was content to sleep at the Tropicana Motel on Santa Monica Blvd.
The Tropicana is a Spanish style clapboard motel slightly dignified by a couple of palm trees in the car park and small kidney shaped swimming pool. It’s used by roadies and second division bands when they’re passing through LA. This and his favored bar were the places Morrison hung out in preference to the jet set joints frequented by most of the rock elite.
It was common for Morrison to vanish for days on end, often to the consternation of Bill Siddons and the rest of The Doors. He frequently slept on the beach or holed up with a set of bizarre people whom he had met in his wanderings.
This could in a strange way be Morrison’s most tangible revolutionary act. He was one of the few stars who have ever been totally uninterested in the lavish material trappings of success.
CHAOS & DISORDER
The Doors and the youth revolt seemed to run out of energy and falter at just about the same time. This is not to say that there was a direct cause and effect relationship. The Doors’ audiences didn’t melt away. But at the same time as the revolutionary kids’ first rush of violent discontent ran out of steam and left them totally unprepared for the solid grinding work of real political consolidation, the Doors’ symbolic fury dissipated and the shaman started to turn into a bellowing drunk.
Although there wasn’t a direct connection, the two events were more than coincidence. They were both a result of the romantic, death preoccupied view of revolution that was shared by both the Doors and a majority of the youth rebels.
It became clear after Chicago that the time for pranks and rhetoric was past. Some romantics glazed over into psychosis. The fascinating for violence became over-powering. It gave birth to the Weatherpeople, the Angry Brigade and the Baader-Meinholf gang. Others threw off their romanticism and grimly took on the tasks of grass roots organizations and education that are the hard graft of any social change.
Others simply united, looking for a base to restore their energies.
It was a time of disillusionment. The visibility of spontaneous, media fed gestures was gone. Nixon and his Orange County mafia were in control of the White House. Even death hadn’t come in the way it had been promised in the myths. It hadn’t appeared gloriously on the bayonets of the oppressor. It had come squalidly in pills, capsules and down no. 9 disposable needles.
The Doors were hardly immune to the disillusionment. In some respects they had become redundant. The revolutionaries who remained with their ideas intact had no need of shamans and purple poetry.
Morrison woke up one morning with the makings of a weight problem and the kind of hangover that is exclusive to a full blown alcoholic.
The Doors’ image had so far outstripped their art that they were left floundering around in a vacuum that held no new ideas. On The Soft Parade, the album that was the product of this period, they sounded confused, directionless, almost a parody of themselves. The gothic turned to baroque as Morrison seemed to embrace a weird, convoluted, black anti-Catholicism.
The stage shows also became confused. Morrison’s behavior became erratic and flagrantly exhibitionist. His audiences seemed no longer to excite him. He screamed abuse and obscenities. ‘Celebration of the Lizard,’ the long song cycle that takes up a whole side on the Absolutely Live album became a vehicle of increasingly over the edge excesses.
One of his favorite tricks was to encourage a crowd of girls in the front row of the audience to rush the stage. Even at this point, Morrison hadn’t lost his almost hypnotic power of audience manipulation. Eventually he’d work them up so much that they’d break through the security barriers. Morrison would stand perfectly still and just let them climb all over him. He’d vanish in a heap of flailing teenage bodies. The act, would be disrupted beyond saving.
Off stage, Morrison also began to create major problems.
His drunkenness made him more difficult and unreliable. John Densmore, who had threatened to quit during the early part of the Doors career and had been talked out of it by Robby Krieger in a couple of all night sessions, again made rumblings of resignation. Manzarek and Krieger again found themselves holding the band together by an effort of will.
When on tour, Bill Siddons and Vince, the chief roadie, found themselves in the position of having to treat Morrison like a recalcitrant child. Vince even went to the absurd lengths of taking away Morrison’s personal, gold plated microphone if he behaved badly, and substituting one with a dull crackle finish body.
Siddons began appointing one of the road crew to the unenviable post as Jim’s personal mentor who was charged with the responsibility of making sure that Morrison didn’t drink himself into a state where he’d be unable to appear. Steve Sparkes, a jovial, unflappable ex-mod, at the time assistant to Fairport/Incredible String Band producer Joe Boyd, was hired to perform exactly this role on the European tour.
“It was a virtually impossible job. Jim totally resented anyone checking up on him or his drinking. All it achieved was that it made him worse. He deliberately got paralytic because Siddons was trying to prevent it.”
“It got to be a game. One afternoon, before the show in Stockholm, I had to follow him around maybe a dozen bars. He was drinking brandies and nibbling on a lump of hash. He most have had 14 doubles before I could persuade him that maybe it’d be a good idea if we went back to the concert hall.”
“When we got there, the Jefferson Airplane had already gone on. Jim started raving about how he wanted to sing with the Airplane. Before anyone could stop him he’d plunged on to the stage. He danced maybe three lumbering steps and fell flat on his face. Grace Slick and Marty Balin just broke up.
“Jim didn’t get up, so a couple of the Airplanes’ roadies carried him back stage. We tried to sober him up. I think Siddons called an ambulance. Anyway, Jim was carted off to the hospital, and the Doors went on as a three piece.
“Needless to say, I got the blame.”
Morrison’s greatest excess was at the infamous Miami concert when, with an exultant bellow of “Yah wanna see my prick?” he exposed himself right there on the stage. In Miami they don’t like that kind of thing. He was arrested, charged and released on bail.
If convicted, he faced a possible three and a half years in Raiford Penitentiary. He confided to his secretary, “I don’t think I could hack three and a half years in that place. Maybe three and a half weeks, just for kicks…”
I Woke Up The Morning And I’d Got Myself A Beard
The Miami incident seemed, for a while, to set Morrison back on the tracks. Although he only, in the end, pulled a suspended sentence. The thought of prison sobered him. About nine months before the Isle Of Wight festival the Doors completed Morrison Hotel. After the debacle of The Soft Parade this record seemed to be the Doors reaching for solid ground. Jim even appeared to have grown up.
He was portly, sported a curly beard and was singing hard rock and roll again. Had he finally matured?
The Doors were, like many more of us, groping back to their roots trying to learn how to live once the dream was over. The capricious macho cherub had finally become a man. Or had he?
At the Isle Of Wight I was confronted not by a man, but by a ruin. A fat uncertain thing that could hardly be approached.
The power of the Absolutely Live album took some of the bad taste away. This document of 1969/70 tours was living proof that the Doors had been a fore to be reckoned with. The arrogant macho was there. So was the towering, cathedral rock and roll. All the familiar songs were on it, plus Diddley’s satantic “Who Do You Love’ a full version of ‘Celebration of the Lizard” something we in England had only seen before as a sleeve note.
Although we didn’t know it at the time, it was the last glorious flare before burn out.
Yet each man kills the thing he loves.
L.A. Woman was a strange disturbing album. On the surface it was a throwback to the classic Doors formula, but beneath that there was a great sadness and lack of energy.
It seemed to be the Doors in defeat. Nixon had taken over, not the kids. It was a record that sounded as though it was dedicated to the lost children, the outlaws hiding in the hills, and the gentle ladies who’d been twisted in Charlie’s snuff squadron. The fair, the wise and the strong had turned into beggars and junkies. Morrison no longer even sounded desperate, simply resigned.
Then the word came. He had left The Doors.
Like so many other, renegade royalty, the Lizard King had dragged himself to exile in Paris. The grapevine was almost silent. Few stories came out about him. A bloated x-roc star is no source of romantic tales. Danny Sugerman’s version pictures Morrison as a helpless alcoholic who has reached the point where it’s ceased to be fun and has started to be frightening.
“He was unable to work out what he could do with the rest of his life. He was still anxious to launch into a film career, but he knew that his looks had gone. The problems of booze and weight had got on top of him to such an extent that he could see no way out. He was also drinking so much that he was virtually impotent.”
Jim Morrison died on July 3 1971. That is fact.
The official story says that he suffered a heart attack while taking a bath. The strongest underground legend claims he od’d in a night club and was smuggled back to his apartment to avoid a scandal.
His grave has no permanent marker, although it’s littered with all kinds of mawkish garbage by the morbid, the second hand sensation seekers and the hippie tourists. It’s close to the magnificent edifice erected over the mortal remains of Oscar Wilde.
In L.A. the still talk about Jim as a long lost, wayward, but dearly loved son. They liken Patti Smith’s debut at the Whisky unto the early days of the Doors. Lightweight punks squabble over who rightfully owns his old clothes and the head shops still sell romantic souvenir posters and T-shirts.
It has yet to occur to anyone to raise a collection to place a monument on his last resting place. The world has failed to grant Jim Morrison that ultimate kind favor and see that his grave is kept clean.
Maybe that, after all, is the final measure of just what stardom really means.
END.
October 4 1975
By Mick Farren
Incident In Miami
It has to be said, in his favor, that Jim Morrison lived the part that he played. He wasn’t the kind of star who preached revolution and then sunk the profits in I.T.&T. stock and chains of Laundromats.
Morrison confidante Danny Sugerman explains: “Fame may have made Jim crazier and more outrageous, but the money hardly affected him at all. All it meant was that he was able to buy more and more booze, for himself and for all the people who hung around him.”
Most afternoons, when he wasn’t either recording or touring, Morrison could be found drinking in a bar close to the Whisky A Go Go. It was a small sleazy place; the hang out of winos during the day until it turned over to topless and striptease during the night. At that point the drunks, including Jim, were tossed out to make room for the cover-charge paying punters who wanted to look at tits.
Morrison rarely had a permanent home, and was often without a car. For long periods he was content to sleep at the Tropicana Motel on Santa Monica Blvd.
The Tropicana is a Spanish style clapboard motel slightly dignified by a couple of palm trees in the car park and small kidney shaped swimming pool. It’s used by roadies and second division bands when they’re passing through LA. This and his favored bar were the places Morrison hung out in preference to the jet set joints frequented by most of the rock elite.
It was common for Morrison to vanish for days on end, often to the consternation of Bill Siddons and the rest of The Doors. He frequently slept on the beach or holed up with a set of bizarre people whom he had met in his wanderings.
This could in a strange way be Morrison’s most tangible revolutionary act. He was one of the few stars who have ever been totally uninterested in the lavish material trappings of success.
CHAOS & DISORDER
The Doors and the youth revolt seemed to run out of energy and falter at just about the same time. This is not to say that there was a direct cause and effect relationship. The Doors’ audiences didn’t melt away. But at the same time as the revolutionary kids’ first rush of violent discontent ran out of steam and left them totally unprepared for the solid grinding work of real political consolidation, the Doors’ symbolic fury dissipated and the shaman started to turn into a bellowing drunk.
Although there wasn’t a direct connection, the two events were more than coincidence. They were both a result of the romantic, death preoccupied view of revolution that was shared by both the Doors and a majority of the youth rebels.
It became clear after Chicago that the time for pranks and rhetoric was past. Some romantics glazed over into psychosis. The fascinating for violence became over-powering. It gave birth to the Weatherpeople, the Angry Brigade and the Baader-Meinholf gang. Others threw off their romanticism and grimly took on the tasks of grass roots organizations and education that are the hard graft of any social change.
Others simply united, looking for a base to restore their energies.
It was a time of disillusionment. The visibility of spontaneous, media fed gestures was gone. Nixon and his Orange County mafia were in control of the White House. Even death hadn’t come in the way it had been promised in the myths. It hadn’t appeared gloriously on the bayonets of the oppressor. It had come squalidly in pills, capsules and down no. 9 disposable needles.
The Doors were hardly immune to the disillusionment. In some respects they had become redundant. The revolutionaries who remained with their ideas intact had no need of shamans and purple poetry.
Morrison woke up one morning with the makings of a weight problem and the kind of hangover that is exclusive to a full blown alcoholic.
The Doors’ image had so far outstripped their art that they were left floundering around in a vacuum that held no new ideas. On The Soft Parade, the album that was the product of this period, they sounded confused, directionless, almost a parody of themselves. The gothic turned to baroque as Morrison seemed to embrace a weird, convoluted, black anti-Catholicism.
The stage shows also became confused. Morrison’s behavior became erratic and flagrantly exhibitionist. His audiences seemed no longer to excite him. He screamed abuse and obscenities. ‘Celebration of the Lizard,’ the long song cycle that takes up a whole side on the Absolutely Live album became a vehicle of increasingly over the edge excesses.
One of his favorite tricks was to encourage a crowd of girls in the front row of the audience to rush the stage. Even at this point, Morrison hadn’t lost his almost hypnotic power of audience manipulation. Eventually he’d work them up so much that they’d break through the security barriers. Morrison would stand perfectly still and just let them climb all over him. He’d vanish in a heap of flailing teenage bodies. The act, would be disrupted beyond saving.
Off stage, Morrison also began to create major problems.
His drunkenness made him more difficult and unreliable. John Densmore, who had threatened to quit during the early part of the Doors career and had been talked out of it by Robby Krieger in a couple of all night sessions, again made rumblings of resignation. Manzarek and Krieger again found themselves holding the band together by an effort of will.
When on tour, Bill Siddons and Vince, the chief roadie, found themselves in the position of having to treat Morrison like a recalcitrant child. Vince even went to the absurd lengths of taking away Morrison’s personal, gold plated microphone if he behaved badly, and substituting one with a dull crackle finish body.
Siddons began appointing one of the road crew to the unenviable post as Jim’s personal mentor who was charged with the responsibility of making sure that Morrison didn’t drink himself into a state where he’d be unable to appear. Steve Sparkes, a jovial, unflappable ex-mod, at the time assistant to Fairport/Incredible String Band producer Joe Boyd, was hired to perform exactly this role on the European tour.
“It was a virtually impossible job. Jim totally resented anyone checking up on him or his drinking. All it achieved was that it made him worse. He deliberately got paralytic because Siddons was trying to prevent it.”
“It got to be a game. One afternoon, before the show in Stockholm, I had to follow him around maybe a dozen bars. He was drinking brandies and nibbling on a lump of hash. He most have had 14 doubles before I could persuade him that maybe it’d be a good idea if we went back to the concert hall.”
“When we got there, the Jefferson Airplane had already gone on. Jim started raving about how he wanted to sing with the Airplane. Before anyone could stop him he’d plunged on to the stage. He danced maybe three lumbering steps and fell flat on his face. Grace Slick and Marty Balin just broke up.
“Jim didn’t get up, so a couple of the Airplanes’ roadies carried him back stage. We tried to sober him up. I think Siddons called an ambulance. Anyway, Jim was carted off to the hospital, and the Doors went on as a three piece.
“Needless to say, I got the blame.”
Morrison’s greatest excess was at the infamous Miami concert when, with an exultant bellow of “Yah wanna see my prick?” he exposed himself right there on the stage. In Miami they don’t like that kind of thing. He was arrested, charged and released on bail.
If convicted, he faced a possible three and a half years in Raiford Penitentiary. He confided to his secretary, “I don’t think I could hack three and a half years in that place. Maybe three and a half weeks, just for kicks…”
I Woke Up The Morning And I’d Got Myself A Beard
The Miami incident seemed, for a while, to set Morrison back on the tracks. Although he only, in the end, pulled a suspended sentence. The thought of prison sobered him. About nine months before the Isle Of Wight festival the Doors completed Morrison Hotel. After the debacle of The Soft Parade this record seemed to be the Doors reaching for solid ground. Jim even appeared to have grown up.
He was portly, sported a curly beard and was singing hard rock and roll again. Had he finally matured?
The Doors were, like many more of us, groping back to their roots trying to learn how to live once the dream was over. The capricious macho cherub had finally become a man. Or had he?
At the Isle Of Wight I was confronted not by a man, but by a ruin. A fat uncertain thing that could hardly be approached.
The power of the Absolutely Live album took some of the bad taste away. This document of 1969/70 tours was living proof that the Doors had been a fore to be reckoned with. The arrogant macho was there. So was the towering, cathedral rock and roll. All the familiar songs were on it, plus Diddley’s satantic “Who Do You Love’ a full version of ‘Celebration of the Lizard” something we in England had only seen before as a sleeve note.
Although we didn’t know it at the time, it was the last glorious flare before burn out.
Yet each man kills the thing he loves.
L.A. Woman was a strange disturbing album. On the surface it was a throwback to the classic Doors formula, but beneath that there was a great sadness and lack of energy.
It seemed to be the Doors in defeat. Nixon had taken over, not the kids. It was a record that sounded as though it was dedicated to the lost children, the outlaws hiding in the hills, and the gentle ladies who’d been twisted in Charlie’s snuff squadron. The fair, the wise and the strong had turned into beggars and junkies. Morrison no longer even sounded desperate, simply resigned.
Then the word came. He had left The Doors.
Like so many other, renegade royalty, the Lizard King had dragged himself to exile in Paris. The grapevine was almost silent. Few stories came out about him. A bloated x-roc star is no source of romantic tales. Danny Sugerman’s version pictures Morrison as a helpless alcoholic who has reached the point where it’s ceased to be fun and has started to be frightening.
“He was unable to work out what he could do with the rest of his life. He was still anxious to launch into a film career, but he knew that his looks had gone. The problems of booze and weight had got on top of him to such an extent that he could see no way out. He was also drinking so much that he was virtually impotent.”
Jim Morrison died on July 3 1971. That is fact.
The official story says that he suffered a heart attack while taking a bath. The strongest underground legend claims he od’d in a night club and was smuggled back to his apartment to avoid a scandal.
His grave has no permanent marker, although it’s littered with all kinds of mawkish garbage by the morbid, the second hand sensation seekers and the hippie tourists. It’s close to the magnificent edifice erected over the mortal remains of Oscar Wilde.
In L.A. the still talk about Jim as a long lost, wayward, but dearly loved son. They liken Patti Smith’s debut at the Whisky unto the early days of the Doors. Lightweight punks squabble over who rightfully owns his old clothes and the head shops still sell romantic souvenir posters and T-shirts.
It has yet to occur to anyone to raise a collection to place a monument on his last resting place. The world has failed to grant Jim Morrison that ultimate kind favor and see that his grave is kept clean.
Maybe that, after all, is the final measure of just what stardom really means.
END.