Post by darkstar3 on Feb 1, 2011 13:42:25 GMT
JIM MORRISON
ROCK ‘N’ ROLL’S ULTIMATE VICTIM
By: Mike Olszewski
Masters Of Rock
Issue No. 9 - 1992
It’s been twenty years since the music industry lost one of its most brilliant and tortured souls. There are new reports about the Door’s lead singer…and they point to a life and a senseless end far more tragic than we ever thought.
It was the summer of 1971. The music world had already seen a number of its brightest talents fall victim to the excesses of the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle. Hendrix, Joplin, Brian Jones…all at the top of their form and each with an impressive body of work to show at a very young age. They were also extremely vulnerable and their lives flickered out before their true impact could be felt. Another dark page in music history was about to turn.
Jim Morrison had gained a reputation as a brilliant poet and performer as the front man for one of L.A.’s most prominent new acts. The Doors got immediate attention, and their rise up the charts came quickly. In just a few years Morrison had achieved incredible artistic success, with major album releases and concert appearances of legendary proportions. He also was beset by legal problems, alcoholism, and eventually death in a Paris flat. Few people saw Morrison in those final days, and that helped fuel the speculations about what might have happened. That were our story begins.
Morrison wasn’t an easy person to know, and the select few who did have that access will readily admit that he was a man of many faces. Jerry Hopkins is one of those people. He co-authored No One Here Gets Out Alive, regard by many as the definitive Morrison book. He has a new release about Morrison that’s equally provocative, and in many ways even more disturbing than his first book. The newly released The Lizard King: The Essential Jim Morrison (Scribners 1992) is a collection of conversations and interviews in which Morrison interprets himself.
Something should be made clear right from the start. This book analyzes and celebrates the life of Jim Morrison and not just his death…though there is disturbing information about his end. I spoke to Jerry recently and mentioned how some people, particularly artists, can often become known more for their deaths than the work they left behind. “There’s an old line about somebody’s death being a good career move,” he responded. “There’s also the line about living fast, dying young and leaving a good looking corpse. It’s from a book called ‘Knock On Any Door,’ as I recall. That same sort of strange fascination applies not only to Jim, but to just about anyone else who died young. There seems to be some sort of macabre fascination with people who go out young, and it isn’t limited to rock n’ roll. I really feel it’s not overly important.
“When No One Here Gets Out Alive was first written I had two ending chapters. In the first one Jim died of an overdose, and in the second it was all an elaborately staged hoax where Jim disappeared into North Africa (like his idol, the poet Rimbaud) to gain the freedom that anonymity brings. What I suggested to the publisher was that if they were going to publish, lets say 10,000 copies, they should do 5,000 with the other, and just distribute them without saying anything. I thought it was an interesting notion and I still do. As it happened, the publisher didn’t go for it and the two endings were blended into one ambiguous last chapter that served the same purpose, but it helped fuel the fire about Jim possibly being alive. I felt it was appropriate at the time. I didn’t honestly know exactly how he died. A lot of people weren’t talking. There weren’t too many who knew. Probably only Pamela knew for sure, so it wasn’t for some time after the first book was published that I decided to go back and re-interview people who were probably, in the best position to have learned from Pam what happened that night. In the course of that research and more recent research I think I’ve managed to piece together as complete a picture as anyone is ever going to get. I spoke at length with a close friend of Pam’s who lived in California when she returned from Paris.
I spoke with others who knew Pam during that same period who had pledged to her their silence. At the time she was still alive, and those I interviewed held close to their pledges and didn’t share with me what they knew. They have subsequently done so. Two of the five individuals who were present at the funeral and who were in fact in the apartment only hours after Jim died have also given interviews.”
It’s an ambitious work. Hopkins has also managed to obtain all of the French Police and medical documents regarding Morrison’s death, so between those documents and the new interviews he assembles the most cohesive picture yet of the artists demise. But again, Hopkins doesn’t dwell on the importance some people place on the way he died other than in the sense that it ended a career far too young. “It’s sort of like arguing over the caliber of a pistol to his head. It was self abuse…and I want to leave it at that for now.
The music industry has gained a reputation as a business that “eats its young,” allowing young artists to indulge themselves in every whim and desire in the hope of getting maximum creative output…at whatever cost. Some industry leaders are said to have provided those dangerous perks for that same reason. Might this have happened to Morrison? Or was he simply one of those self destructive geniuses who would have spontaneously combusted in any profession he chose?
“Well, I think all of the above is true. I’m reminded of something that Bill Graham once told me. (I guess he made it to middle age, at least.) Bill was talking about these kids, young performers generally, and what he said was they were superstars…major figures…idols, if you will, before they even had calluses on their fretting fingers. That was the phrase he used in many cases. They suddenly were nobodies by the time they did get their calluses! The point of that really is that incredible attention and pressure, came to these people when they were really quite immature. They certainly weren’t fully formed. They were teenagers, or maybe only in their early twenties, and I think the pressures that are inherent in that kind of popularity, and the pace and demands that were made on them in terms of performance and recording and so forth, took its toll.
“I think unfortunately that most of those who died had excessive lifestyles of a self destructive kind. If you’re talking about people in the ‘60’s and ‘70s (and I guess in music this started with jazz), drugs and alcohol were basically associated with the musician’s lifestyle, and they readily available. In fact, in the ‘60s and ‘70s, drugs and alcohol were not only readily available, they were cool. They have become less so since then. But there were other factors. Yeah, the music business eats its young, but so does the public eat its idols. We’re very quick to raise somebody up and then tear them down again.”
Danny Sugerman becomes an important part of the conversation. He was associated with the Doors camp as a teenager and offers a perspective on Morrison and the group that few others are qualified to do. He co-authored No One Here Gets Out Alive with Jerry Hopkins, and he adds his opinion:
“I don’t know if Morrison was doomed by success. It was, in many ways, success on his terms. I mean, be careful what you ask for, because you might just get it! Jim wanted to be a shooting star. He wanted to trade intensity for longevity, and that was his choice, and he lived and died by that. It was too late for him to turn around and welch out of the deal. By the time he went to Paris he had already gone too far too fast, and I think that’s an occupational hazard for an artistic personality where the line between genius and madness becomes hazy. That’s what happened to Morrison. That’s what happened to a lot of his heroes. His heroes were writers and poets, not other rock n’ roll stars. Up until Hendrix, Joplin and Morrison, most of the deaths in rock n’ roll were from plane accidents or car crashes. For better or worse, other people now worship them the way they worshipped their heroes.”
“Without Ray, Robby and John, Jim would have been another drunken poet on Venice Beach. Very talented, very brilliant, with girlfriends supporting him and taking care of him. He wasn’t interest in the financial side of it. He wasn’t motivated enough to get it together on his own, but with Ray and Robby and John to carry him, he succeeded. Jim lived and died as he would regardless of whether he had gold records or not. I never saw Morrison as someone who was putting on an act for anybody.”
We all have our own personal demons, and Morrison was a man ravaged by those demons. But Morrison also had a reputation as one who controlled his image for his own purposes. Jerry Hopkins says Morrison set to create that image, and points out in his first book that even as a teenager Morrison was deliberately staging events and creating a personal myth for himself.
“I believe that’s very revealing. Of course anyone’s childhood is in terms of what they become as adults, but in Jim’s case I think it was very apparent from very early on in his life that this was a man who may have been out of control in some ways, but was totally out of control in the image he was putting together.”
Morrison’s death continues to be the topic of great controversy, and both Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman offer a unique and frightening look at his last hours. Danny says Morrison’s final hours were consumed in a haze of mistrust, anger and alcohol, and the consequences can only be described as sickening.
“Jim was the kind of person you could see possibly staging his own death or overdosing. Those are the two most popular misconceptions of what probably happened. But, however Jim died, the bottom line is self abuse. To find out what drug or combination of drugs on what night could do what? He did it to himself, and the particulars are most irrelevant. He self destructed.” There are new reports that Jim found Pam’s stash of heroin in their Paris flat. Danny Sugerman wrote about similar reports in Wonderland Avenue, and says those stories continue to nag those who knew Morrison best.
“It was Pam’s dope, and Jim did it like he would do coke or acid, by the handful. If you haven’t taken heroin before, it’s real easy to overdose, and junkies don’t overdose. It’s people that have just cleaned up or people who haven’t done it before who do too much. The reason nobody wanted to come out and talk about heroin back in 1971 when Jim died was because if somebody OD’d on heroin they were any addict. Jim wasn’t. I was determined and Ray was determined, and I guess Robby and John were determined not to let that happen to Jim. We didn’t want people to talk about him as a drug addict, but look at him as a poet first.
To look at his lyrics first rather than to think he was addicted. I don’t want people to think “Horse Latitudes” is about heroin or “Crystal Ship” is about shooting speed. People do anyway. I’m sure Jim was drunk and depressed over in Paris, and it’s hard for anyone who doesn’t speak French there under the best of circumstances. Jim was a real impasse in terms of his life and career, and he was trying to write. He was writing fairly well, actually, as we found out later with the missing poetry that came up.”
“It was most likely Pam’s heroin and he either got a hold of it or she gave it to him, or he thought it was cocaine or something. The official story was that Jim said he didn’t feel well and he went in to take a bath. I’m sure he didn’t feel well. Anyone who’s done the drug knows the first time you do it you get real nauseous. You snort it and it goes to your stomach, and your stomach rebels. ‘I don’t want this in here. I’m getting out!’ I’m sure Jim didn’t feel well, went in to take a bath and never came out.”
“It’s hard to know what happened over there, but before they went to Paris I know that Pam was terrified that Jim would find out about her doing heroin. He knew she did it. She had told him, and gave him the impression that it wasn’t a problem and that she didn’t do it all the time. When they were in L.A. and there were all these distinctions between the two of them, it was pretty easy for Pam to do it without Jim knowing it. When they got to Paris and were living together 24 hours a day, seven days a week, it’s a little hard to hide something like a heroin habit. It was much easier in L.A. There they spent two or three days a week together, mainly nights. When he went out into the city, she went her way and then they would hook up later. I don’t know if Jim found out she was doing heroin and said, ‘Give me some,’ or if she said, ‘Why don’t you try it?’ At that point in his career, I don’t think Jim was the experimenter that he was earlier in his life. On the other hand, he wanted to do everything at least once. If you knew Jim and were influenced at all by his personal life, that was the philosophy you maintained. And with that philosophy its’ easy to get in trouble. It’s a hard kind of drug to do just to see what it’s like. You don’t know if you’re going to be the person that does it and dies, or does it and falls in love with it, or does it and gets sick and hates it.”
The most disturbing story I’ve heard and Jerry Hopkins touches on this as well, concerns a story that Jim found the heroin and Pam allowed him to think it was coke, despite knowing what the possible effects could be. It’s a story that Danny Sugerman is painfully familiar with.
“If he did it, he snorted it. I can’t see Jim shooting up for the first time. That doesn’t sound like him at all to me. I can see him finding it and Pam saying, “It’s coke.’ And Jim saying, ‘Are you sure? Why should I believe you?’ She’d say he should believe her and Jim would say, “I’ll do it then’ and put down two five inch lines waiting for Pam to say , ‘No Jim! Don’t! It’s heroin!’ They would get into scenes like that, scenes of death defying behavior. Something like that probably happened. Jim found something and Pamela tried to lie her way out of it, like junkies are inclined to do. Jim must have confronted her and killed himself in the process.”
“Of course, Jim was a hard person to talk out of anything. There is a scene in No One Here Gets Out Alive where Jim’s getting drunk in the recording studio and Pam steals the bottle and drinks it so Jim can’t drink it. The two are then whacked out in the studio crying and singing. I can imagine a similar scene with the heroin. ‘I’m going to do it unless you tell the truth’ Jim would say, and the Pam might say ‘What? You’re calling me a liar’ I don’t know. All I can do is speculate. But I know that no one could have stopped Jim from doing anything, You couldn’t do it. First, he was smarter than everyone else, and you just didn’t tell people not to do something back in 1969. It was like, ‘You do your thing and I’ll do mine.’ You didn’t lay a judgment trip on anybody back then. We know much more about addiction and intervention and confrontation today than we did back then. I was addicted by 1973, and there is no place to go.
The only place for an addict to get help was Synanon where you checked in, gave them everything you had, and spent the rest of your life there. It’s impossible to hold people then to the standards that we have today.”
It’s hard to imagine someone as complex as Jim Morrison meeting his end in such a senseless manner. I mentioned earlier that some people tend to be self destructive, perhaps because they have a poor assessment of themselves, their talent, or their contributions. Jerry Hopkins thinks Morrison had a far better understanding of himself than that.
“I think he was amused. One of the many things about Jim that didn’t come across in Oliver Stone’s movie, which I thought was a very narrow portrait, was the fact that the man had a sense of humor. I remember when I was interviewing him once that at one point he just chuckled and said, ‘Isn’t this a strange way to make living?’ I think that that, as much as anything else, captures how he felt about it. I think he regarded rock ‘n roll as a platform from which he could project his poetry more readily than if he started out by trying to submit poems to esoteric magazines and trying to get a book of poetry published, or self publishing, as he eventually did. I think that he grew tired of it after a while, and I don’t think that took too long.”
“I think he had other goals. He wanted to be a poet. He wanted to be a filmmaker and rock ‘n roll served his purpose. He wanted to move on.”
I asked Danny Sugerman why so much information keeps trickling out so many years after Morrison’s death. He said he doesn’t believe that information is being suppressed. Not at this point, anyway. “I think at one time there was suppression, but not on the Doors’ part or on my part. In Paris, when Jim died, Pam had to cover her tracks. She didn’t want to be thrown in jail. I think the cover up started, not to deceive anybody, but to protect Pam, which probably would have been the way Jim wanted it. She had to lie her way out of it. When Jim was buried in France, no one knew he was a rock star. A friend of Jim’s and Pam’s came up with a story of how he died. They said he was older than he was! All this had to come to light since these people have decided to talk. They weren’t talking back in the 70’s. Jerry Hopkins tried to talk to them. I tried to talk to them. There were these two or three people that Pam called to come over and help after Jim died, and they were the only people who knew what happened. They weren’t talking. As fate would have it, the Oliver Stone movie got several people who were once unwilling to talk to share some of their information. Jerry and I felt that we did our job reporting what we could of Jim Morrison’s story, and we decided to just sit back and let people find out whatever they could. I’m sure there was information suppressed, but not in order to deceive anybody as to how Jim died, rather in order to protect Pamela from going to jail, as Cathy Smith did years earlier when John Belushi died,”
You can’t help but wonder how Morrison himself would have felt about the way his image was being kept alive. He shied away from the false pop idol image, but that’s exactly the way many people see him today. We look at Him as one of the select group of rock n’ roll victims, and Jerry Hopkins believe, “Partially, he’d be amused. He did not wish people to use him as any kind of a role model. Early on, the Doors decided song writing credits should always be given to ‘The Doors,’ and not individual band members. Only on the third and fourth album, when there was a song that Robby wrote called ‘Follow Me Down,’ did Jim break ranks and say to Robby, ‘I want your name on that song. I don’t want it to say ‘The Doors’ because I don’t want people to think they should follow me..’ I really think Jim would be appalled by the kind of attention he’s gotten. But, at the same time I think he’d be amused.”
Danny Sugerman agrees, “Jim was the most aware person I ever met. Nobody did anything to this guy that he was not willing to have done. Jim was not the reactor. Jim took the action and other people reacted. The only way to make Jim react was to say no to him, and that intrusion of authority and negativity would cause a reaction. You didn’t say no to Jim because he would explode! He’d say, ‘You’re not my father! Don’t tell me what to do! I’m the reason you’re here!’ Nobody influenced Jim that Jim didn’t want to be influenced by.”
Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman are in the unenviable position of trying to make sense of a life that in many ways defies analysis. It has never been easy, and even though Morrisons’ senseless demise came too quickly, it still left us with a valuable legacy. Jerry Hopkins says the obvious focal point will always be the music.
“It’s very difficult and frustrating to write about musicians and singers and songwriters. Radio is a much more effective medium to describe them because you can shut up and play the music. You can’t do that in a book. I’ve always regarded all the rock biographies that I’ve done, or any of the writing about music that I’ve done, as a kind of companion piece that perhaps would assist the music fan in knowing the creators a little bit better, and perhaps understanding Morrison and the Doors better. At the same time, I really do hope that I’ve cleared away a lot of the lies and the mythology and crap that has accumulated over the years. I hope people will go away with a better understanding of Jim Morrison through his own words.”
Danny Sugerman adds, “One of the reasons that we’re as aware of drugs and alcohol today as we are is because of Jimis’ and Janis’ and Jims’ deaths. It’s surprising that it’s taken us so long to begin to think more clearly about what happened to them. Some people still don’t learn. There are still people out there who confuse drug use with talent, and they shoot heroin because Keith Richards and Charlie Parker did. They drink Chivas Regal because Jim drank it, and think they’ll be able to write and create and appear as powerful as those people did. A lot of people just don’t learn.”
But some of us have learned a lot from the life of Jim Morrison. He exemplified, in many ways, the struggle all creative persons must engage in; the need to find a balance between wanting to tear down inhibiting limits, boundaries and rules while still recognizing the need to maintain limits, boundaries and rules. Without balance, not only does the artist suffer, but the entire world suffers the loss of a genius. Perhaps this lesson will be the true legacy of Jim Morrison.
END.
ROCK ‘N’ ROLL’S ULTIMATE VICTIM
By: Mike Olszewski
Masters Of Rock
Issue No. 9 - 1992
It’s been twenty years since the music industry lost one of its most brilliant and tortured souls. There are new reports about the Door’s lead singer…and they point to a life and a senseless end far more tragic than we ever thought.
It was the summer of 1971. The music world had already seen a number of its brightest talents fall victim to the excesses of the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle. Hendrix, Joplin, Brian Jones…all at the top of their form and each with an impressive body of work to show at a very young age. They were also extremely vulnerable and their lives flickered out before their true impact could be felt. Another dark page in music history was about to turn.
Jim Morrison had gained a reputation as a brilliant poet and performer as the front man for one of L.A.’s most prominent new acts. The Doors got immediate attention, and their rise up the charts came quickly. In just a few years Morrison had achieved incredible artistic success, with major album releases and concert appearances of legendary proportions. He also was beset by legal problems, alcoholism, and eventually death in a Paris flat. Few people saw Morrison in those final days, and that helped fuel the speculations about what might have happened. That were our story begins.
Morrison wasn’t an easy person to know, and the select few who did have that access will readily admit that he was a man of many faces. Jerry Hopkins is one of those people. He co-authored No One Here Gets Out Alive, regard by many as the definitive Morrison book. He has a new release about Morrison that’s equally provocative, and in many ways even more disturbing than his first book. The newly released The Lizard King: The Essential Jim Morrison (Scribners 1992) is a collection of conversations and interviews in which Morrison interprets himself.
Something should be made clear right from the start. This book analyzes and celebrates the life of Jim Morrison and not just his death…though there is disturbing information about his end. I spoke to Jerry recently and mentioned how some people, particularly artists, can often become known more for their deaths than the work they left behind. “There’s an old line about somebody’s death being a good career move,” he responded. “There’s also the line about living fast, dying young and leaving a good looking corpse. It’s from a book called ‘Knock On Any Door,’ as I recall. That same sort of strange fascination applies not only to Jim, but to just about anyone else who died young. There seems to be some sort of macabre fascination with people who go out young, and it isn’t limited to rock n’ roll. I really feel it’s not overly important.
“When No One Here Gets Out Alive was first written I had two ending chapters. In the first one Jim died of an overdose, and in the second it was all an elaborately staged hoax where Jim disappeared into North Africa (like his idol, the poet Rimbaud) to gain the freedom that anonymity brings. What I suggested to the publisher was that if they were going to publish, lets say 10,000 copies, they should do 5,000 with the other, and just distribute them without saying anything. I thought it was an interesting notion and I still do. As it happened, the publisher didn’t go for it and the two endings were blended into one ambiguous last chapter that served the same purpose, but it helped fuel the fire about Jim possibly being alive. I felt it was appropriate at the time. I didn’t honestly know exactly how he died. A lot of people weren’t talking. There weren’t too many who knew. Probably only Pamela knew for sure, so it wasn’t for some time after the first book was published that I decided to go back and re-interview people who were probably, in the best position to have learned from Pam what happened that night. In the course of that research and more recent research I think I’ve managed to piece together as complete a picture as anyone is ever going to get. I spoke at length with a close friend of Pam’s who lived in California when she returned from Paris.
I spoke with others who knew Pam during that same period who had pledged to her their silence. At the time she was still alive, and those I interviewed held close to their pledges and didn’t share with me what they knew. They have subsequently done so. Two of the five individuals who were present at the funeral and who were in fact in the apartment only hours after Jim died have also given interviews.”
It’s an ambitious work. Hopkins has also managed to obtain all of the French Police and medical documents regarding Morrison’s death, so between those documents and the new interviews he assembles the most cohesive picture yet of the artists demise. But again, Hopkins doesn’t dwell on the importance some people place on the way he died other than in the sense that it ended a career far too young. “It’s sort of like arguing over the caliber of a pistol to his head. It was self abuse…and I want to leave it at that for now.
The music industry has gained a reputation as a business that “eats its young,” allowing young artists to indulge themselves in every whim and desire in the hope of getting maximum creative output…at whatever cost. Some industry leaders are said to have provided those dangerous perks for that same reason. Might this have happened to Morrison? Or was he simply one of those self destructive geniuses who would have spontaneously combusted in any profession he chose?
“Well, I think all of the above is true. I’m reminded of something that Bill Graham once told me. (I guess he made it to middle age, at least.) Bill was talking about these kids, young performers generally, and what he said was they were superstars…major figures…idols, if you will, before they even had calluses on their fretting fingers. That was the phrase he used in many cases. They suddenly were nobodies by the time they did get their calluses! The point of that really is that incredible attention and pressure, came to these people when they were really quite immature. They certainly weren’t fully formed. They were teenagers, or maybe only in their early twenties, and I think the pressures that are inherent in that kind of popularity, and the pace and demands that were made on them in terms of performance and recording and so forth, took its toll.
“I think unfortunately that most of those who died had excessive lifestyles of a self destructive kind. If you’re talking about people in the ‘60’s and ‘70s (and I guess in music this started with jazz), drugs and alcohol were basically associated with the musician’s lifestyle, and they readily available. In fact, in the ‘60s and ‘70s, drugs and alcohol were not only readily available, they were cool. They have become less so since then. But there were other factors. Yeah, the music business eats its young, but so does the public eat its idols. We’re very quick to raise somebody up and then tear them down again.”
Danny Sugerman becomes an important part of the conversation. He was associated with the Doors camp as a teenager and offers a perspective on Morrison and the group that few others are qualified to do. He co-authored No One Here Gets Out Alive with Jerry Hopkins, and he adds his opinion:
“I don’t know if Morrison was doomed by success. It was, in many ways, success on his terms. I mean, be careful what you ask for, because you might just get it! Jim wanted to be a shooting star. He wanted to trade intensity for longevity, and that was his choice, and he lived and died by that. It was too late for him to turn around and welch out of the deal. By the time he went to Paris he had already gone too far too fast, and I think that’s an occupational hazard for an artistic personality where the line between genius and madness becomes hazy. That’s what happened to Morrison. That’s what happened to a lot of his heroes. His heroes were writers and poets, not other rock n’ roll stars. Up until Hendrix, Joplin and Morrison, most of the deaths in rock n’ roll were from plane accidents or car crashes. For better or worse, other people now worship them the way they worshipped their heroes.”
“Without Ray, Robby and John, Jim would have been another drunken poet on Venice Beach. Very talented, very brilliant, with girlfriends supporting him and taking care of him. He wasn’t interest in the financial side of it. He wasn’t motivated enough to get it together on his own, but with Ray and Robby and John to carry him, he succeeded. Jim lived and died as he would regardless of whether he had gold records or not. I never saw Morrison as someone who was putting on an act for anybody.”
We all have our own personal demons, and Morrison was a man ravaged by those demons. But Morrison also had a reputation as one who controlled his image for his own purposes. Jerry Hopkins says Morrison set to create that image, and points out in his first book that even as a teenager Morrison was deliberately staging events and creating a personal myth for himself.
“I believe that’s very revealing. Of course anyone’s childhood is in terms of what they become as adults, but in Jim’s case I think it was very apparent from very early on in his life that this was a man who may have been out of control in some ways, but was totally out of control in the image he was putting together.”
Morrison’s death continues to be the topic of great controversy, and both Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman offer a unique and frightening look at his last hours. Danny says Morrison’s final hours were consumed in a haze of mistrust, anger and alcohol, and the consequences can only be described as sickening.
“Jim was the kind of person you could see possibly staging his own death or overdosing. Those are the two most popular misconceptions of what probably happened. But, however Jim died, the bottom line is self abuse. To find out what drug or combination of drugs on what night could do what? He did it to himself, and the particulars are most irrelevant. He self destructed.” There are new reports that Jim found Pam’s stash of heroin in their Paris flat. Danny Sugerman wrote about similar reports in Wonderland Avenue, and says those stories continue to nag those who knew Morrison best.
“It was Pam’s dope, and Jim did it like he would do coke or acid, by the handful. If you haven’t taken heroin before, it’s real easy to overdose, and junkies don’t overdose. It’s people that have just cleaned up or people who haven’t done it before who do too much. The reason nobody wanted to come out and talk about heroin back in 1971 when Jim died was because if somebody OD’d on heroin they were any addict. Jim wasn’t. I was determined and Ray was determined, and I guess Robby and John were determined not to let that happen to Jim. We didn’t want people to talk about him as a drug addict, but look at him as a poet first.
To look at his lyrics first rather than to think he was addicted. I don’t want people to think “Horse Latitudes” is about heroin or “Crystal Ship” is about shooting speed. People do anyway. I’m sure Jim was drunk and depressed over in Paris, and it’s hard for anyone who doesn’t speak French there under the best of circumstances. Jim was a real impasse in terms of his life and career, and he was trying to write. He was writing fairly well, actually, as we found out later with the missing poetry that came up.”
“It was most likely Pam’s heroin and he either got a hold of it or she gave it to him, or he thought it was cocaine or something. The official story was that Jim said he didn’t feel well and he went in to take a bath. I’m sure he didn’t feel well. Anyone who’s done the drug knows the first time you do it you get real nauseous. You snort it and it goes to your stomach, and your stomach rebels. ‘I don’t want this in here. I’m getting out!’ I’m sure Jim didn’t feel well, went in to take a bath and never came out.”
“It’s hard to know what happened over there, but before they went to Paris I know that Pam was terrified that Jim would find out about her doing heroin. He knew she did it. She had told him, and gave him the impression that it wasn’t a problem and that she didn’t do it all the time. When they were in L.A. and there were all these distinctions between the two of them, it was pretty easy for Pam to do it without Jim knowing it. When they got to Paris and were living together 24 hours a day, seven days a week, it’s a little hard to hide something like a heroin habit. It was much easier in L.A. There they spent two or three days a week together, mainly nights. When he went out into the city, she went her way and then they would hook up later. I don’t know if Jim found out she was doing heroin and said, ‘Give me some,’ or if she said, ‘Why don’t you try it?’ At that point in his career, I don’t think Jim was the experimenter that he was earlier in his life. On the other hand, he wanted to do everything at least once. If you knew Jim and were influenced at all by his personal life, that was the philosophy you maintained. And with that philosophy its’ easy to get in trouble. It’s a hard kind of drug to do just to see what it’s like. You don’t know if you’re going to be the person that does it and dies, or does it and falls in love with it, or does it and gets sick and hates it.”
The most disturbing story I’ve heard and Jerry Hopkins touches on this as well, concerns a story that Jim found the heroin and Pam allowed him to think it was coke, despite knowing what the possible effects could be. It’s a story that Danny Sugerman is painfully familiar with.
“If he did it, he snorted it. I can’t see Jim shooting up for the first time. That doesn’t sound like him at all to me. I can see him finding it and Pam saying, “It’s coke.’ And Jim saying, ‘Are you sure? Why should I believe you?’ She’d say he should believe her and Jim would say, “I’ll do it then’ and put down two five inch lines waiting for Pam to say , ‘No Jim! Don’t! It’s heroin!’ They would get into scenes like that, scenes of death defying behavior. Something like that probably happened. Jim found something and Pamela tried to lie her way out of it, like junkies are inclined to do. Jim must have confronted her and killed himself in the process.”
“Of course, Jim was a hard person to talk out of anything. There is a scene in No One Here Gets Out Alive where Jim’s getting drunk in the recording studio and Pam steals the bottle and drinks it so Jim can’t drink it. The two are then whacked out in the studio crying and singing. I can imagine a similar scene with the heroin. ‘I’m going to do it unless you tell the truth’ Jim would say, and the Pam might say ‘What? You’re calling me a liar’ I don’t know. All I can do is speculate. But I know that no one could have stopped Jim from doing anything, You couldn’t do it. First, he was smarter than everyone else, and you just didn’t tell people not to do something back in 1969. It was like, ‘You do your thing and I’ll do mine.’ You didn’t lay a judgment trip on anybody back then. We know much more about addiction and intervention and confrontation today than we did back then. I was addicted by 1973, and there is no place to go.
The only place for an addict to get help was Synanon where you checked in, gave them everything you had, and spent the rest of your life there. It’s impossible to hold people then to the standards that we have today.”
It’s hard to imagine someone as complex as Jim Morrison meeting his end in such a senseless manner. I mentioned earlier that some people tend to be self destructive, perhaps because they have a poor assessment of themselves, their talent, or their contributions. Jerry Hopkins thinks Morrison had a far better understanding of himself than that.
“I think he was amused. One of the many things about Jim that didn’t come across in Oliver Stone’s movie, which I thought was a very narrow portrait, was the fact that the man had a sense of humor. I remember when I was interviewing him once that at one point he just chuckled and said, ‘Isn’t this a strange way to make living?’ I think that that, as much as anything else, captures how he felt about it. I think he regarded rock ‘n roll as a platform from which he could project his poetry more readily than if he started out by trying to submit poems to esoteric magazines and trying to get a book of poetry published, or self publishing, as he eventually did. I think that he grew tired of it after a while, and I don’t think that took too long.”
“I think he had other goals. He wanted to be a poet. He wanted to be a filmmaker and rock ‘n roll served his purpose. He wanted to move on.”
I asked Danny Sugerman why so much information keeps trickling out so many years after Morrison’s death. He said he doesn’t believe that information is being suppressed. Not at this point, anyway. “I think at one time there was suppression, but not on the Doors’ part or on my part. In Paris, when Jim died, Pam had to cover her tracks. She didn’t want to be thrown in jail. I think the cover up started, not to deceive anybody, but to protect Pam, which probably would have been the way Jim wanted it. She had to lie her way out of it. When Jim was buried in France, no one knew he was a rock star. A friend of Jim’s and Pam’s came up with a story of how he died. They said he was older than he was! All this had to come to light since these people have decided to talk. They weren’t talking back in the 70’s. Jerry Hopkins tried to talk to them. I tried to talk to them. There were these two or three people that Pam called to come over and help after Jim died, and they were the only people who knew what happened. They weren’t talking. As fate would have it, the Oliver Stone movie got several people who were once unwilling to talk to share some of their information. Jerry and I felt that we did our job reporting what we could of Jim Morrison’s story, and we decided to just sit back and let people find out whatever they could. I’m sure there was information suppressed, but not in order to deceive anybody as to how Jim died, rather in order to protect Pamela from going to jail, as Cathy Smith did years earlier when John Belushi died,”
You can’t help but wonder how Morrison himself would have felt about the way his image was being kept alive. He shied away from the false pop idol image, but that’s exactly the way many people see him today. We look at Him as one of the select group of rock n’ roll victims, and Jerry Hopkins believe, “Partially, he’d be amused. He did not wish people to use him as any kind of a role model. Early on, the Doors decided song writing credits should always be given to ‘The Doors,’ and not individual band members. Only on the third and fourth album, when there was a song that Robby wrote called ‘Follow Me Down,’ did Jim break ranks and say to Robby, ‘I want your name on that song. I don’t want it to say ‘The Doors’ because I don’t want people to think they should follow me..’ I really think Jim would be appalled by the kind of attention he’s gotten. But, at the same time I think he’d be amused.”
Danny Sugerman agrees, “Jim was the most aware person I ever met. Nobody did anything to this guy that he was not willing to have done. Jim was not the reactor. Jim took the action and other people reacted. The only way to make Jim react was to say no to him, and that intrusion of authority and negativity would cause a reaction. You didn’t say no to Jim because he would explode! He’d say, ‘You’re not my father! Don’t tell me what to do! I’m the reason you’re here!’ Nobody influenced Jim that Jim didn’t want to be influenced by.”
Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman are in the unenviable position of trying to make sense of a life that in many ways defies analysis. It has never been easy, and even though Morrisons’ senseless demise came too quickly, it still left us with a valuable legacy. Jerry Hopkins says the obvious focal point will always be the music.
“It’s very difficult and frustrating to write about musicians and singers and songwriters. Radio is a much more effective medium to describe them because you can shut up and play the music. You can’t do that in a book. I’ve always regarded all the rock biographies that I’ve done, or any of the writing about music that I’ve done, as a kind of companion piece that perhaps would assist the music fan in knowing the creators a little bit better, and perhaps understanding Morrison and the Doors better. At the same time, I really do hope that I’ve cleared away a lot of the lies and the mythology and crap that has accumulated over the years. I hope people will go away with a better understanding of Jim Morrison through his own words.”
Danny Sugerman adds, “One of the reasons that we’re as aware of drugs and alcohol today as we are is because of Jimis’ and Janis’ and Jims’ deaths. It’s surprising that it’s taken us so long to begin to think more clearly about what happened to them. Some people still don’t learn. There are still people out there who confuse drug use with talent, and they shoot heroin because Keith Richards and Charlie Parker did. They drink Chivas Regal because Jim drank it, and think they’ll be able to write and create and appear as powerful as those people did. A lot of people just don’t learn.”
But some of us have learned a lot from the life of Jim Morrison. He exemplified, in many ways, the struggle all creative persons must engage in; the need to find a balance between wanting to tear down inhibiting limits, boundaries and rules while still recognizing the need to maintain limits, boundaries and rules. Without balance, not only does the artist suffer, but the entire world suffers the loss of a genius. Perhaps this lesson will be the true legacy of Jim Morrison.
END.