Post by darkstar3 on Mar 12, 2011 15:18:59 GMT
Crawdaddy Magazine
Issue No. 21
April 1969
The Morrison Mirage
Michael Horowitz
It was kind of a crisp cool day in September when you’d swear pollution was strictly a problem for Pittsburgh. New York seemed so shiny and clean, so busy and bright, that you were likely to blame the stench in the air on sympathy pains for your grandmother’s asthma. All through the morning the weathermen talked sunny and mild and traffic was moving on the Long Island Expressway. P.S. 14 let the kids romp outside, the Village Square Newstand forewent the cellophane, and Albert’s Authentic French Restaurant kept the tables out just another day longer.
Up on Forty-fourth Street a lithe, lanky youth, twenty three and anxious, stepped out of the stately somnambulance of the Hotel Warwick into the dissonant din of Six Avenue. One gesture of his hand and Morris Schwartz’s air conditioned taxi was whizzing down to Twenty Third and Sixth. All was perfection. It was September, the sun was shining, and James Douglas Morrison was about to pose for page eighty four of Vogue Magazine.
It had to be his greatest moment. A club debut in ’65, a recording contract in ’66, a gold record in ’67 – these were earthly pleasures in the terrestrial world of Rock. But Vogue suggested Recognition with a capital R, and that meant attention, not from just from Crawdaddy and the East Village Other, but from Christopher Sykes, Penelope Tree, and the Earl of Lichfield as well.
Not that Morrison hadn’t had his qualms about the session. The rock star had seen too many authentic faces drowned in the kinky ocean of New York fashion photography. “I want it to be me,” he told a friend. “They’re not going to put me in the background just like a model.”
Others had sought to assure Morrison that his fears were groundless. Vogue would have some hip photographer straight out of Antonioni waiting at the doorstep. The pictures would be groovy, the layout would be tasteful, the reaction would be profound. Not that you could be sure, but you expect Vogue to be Vogue.
“You’re home, sonny boy!” announced Morris Schwartz.
Jim Morrison alighted from his cab, over tipped the driver and climbed one brisk flight of a raunchy Chelsea loft. He was ready for fantasy. The rest was up to Vogue.
Baron Alexis Alfonse von Gecman Waldeck is a paragon of international hip. Born in Prague, bred in Vienna, schooled in Bavaria and apprenticed in Paris, the twenty four year old Austrian uses New York as a business address. Dressed in the finest London boutiques, Baron Waldeck drives a rolls Royce, skis in St Mortiz and vacations in Sardina. That was who Vogue had waiting for Jim Morrison. But of course, darling.
“I amuse myself with photography,” smiles the Baron. “I take it seriously, of course, but…” Occasionally the Baron does not finish a sentence.
The Waldeck studio reflects the photographer’s playful approach to his art. On one wall hangs a huge, unfinished collage of newspaper and wrapping ribbon. The rest of the studio is covered with outlandish Waldeck photographs, including one of Sonny Bonna and Salvador Dali comparing moustaches. The loft, an ample 2500 square feet, also boasts a velvet sleeping balcony , a fully equipped laboratory, and a dressing room filled with the last word in hip fashion.
Morrison immediately began to groove on the vast quantity of exotic clothes at his disposal. Quickly he began to improvise, turning belts into necklaces, scarves into shirts. “Oh, a live one! Whispered Vogue’s Carrie Donovan to an assistant.
After allowing just enough time for freaking out, Alexis Waldeck took command. "I let him do completely what he wanted in the beginning," Waldeck said later, "but the pictures were directed by me." Hoisting his Nikon 105 lens and mumbling about his own special flimic formula, Waldeck circled Morrison snapping ferociously. Although it was fast and furious, the baron claimed he knew exactly what he wanted. "In Jim Morrison I saw a peasant," he later stated. "He could be a Russian peasant. I would love to photograph him in a wheat field in a wagon, with an open shirt. There's similarity between Nureyev and Morrison. There's that pride - you know, very much Self. They both like to see themselves. Morrison loves himself."
After the shooting, the party was feasted to liverwurst sandwiches and the Baron’s finest Gumpoldskirchner wine. “How’d it go?” a friend asked Morrison later that evening. “Great,” replied the singer. “It’s going to be all right.” Confided the Baron to his assistant, “I got exactly what I wanted.”
Two months later Jim Morrison was in Vogue. Eyes closed, head bowed, hair flowing, Morrison conveyed an image of dignity rarely seen in a rock star. Chest bared brazenly, the vocalist seemed to be brusquely challenging The Moment with pride and self-assurance. Said Aileen Talmey’s knowledgeable caption: “Jim Morrison is at twenty two one of the most shaken loose, mind shaking and subtle agents of the new music.”
Reaction was swift. From the Village Voice to the assignment desk of Life Magazine, Jim Morrison was studied, not as a rock star, but as a sexual symbol. “If my antenna are right he could be the biggest thing to grab the mass libido in a very long time,” wrote Voice columnist Howard Smith. “I have never seen such an animalistic response from so many different kinds of women.”
But does he sell records? Cash Box wants to know.
Rock is hip but it’s also capitalist, and you do Vogue and not the Top Twenty. Billboard couldn’t care less. They wanted stars who are “dynamic,” and in the curious world of pop commerce, eros is a commodity and dynamism is spelt in dollars and cents.
But prices are hard to read these days and you’re bound to need the help of an expert. If you’re in New York, ride no further than Grand Army Plaza, for while Merrill Lynch Pierce Fenner & Smith lie a few blocks ahead, the Queen of Teen is lurking above.
Gloria Staver sits high above Fifth Avenue overlooking Central Park, if not the world. Her gig is editing a fan magazine for teenage girls. Small potatoes? Not quite. For through the mesmeric medium that is Sixteen, Gloria Euphoria is able to open and shut the portals of the Top Twenty as if it were her own private filing cabinet.
It’s a matter of arithmetic. Seventy five percent of all singles and forty five percent of all LPs are bought by girls between the ages of twelve and seventeen. Sixteen Magazine has a paid circulation of one million teenboppers and four million friends for free. And so when Eye Magazine got around to listing the Makers and Breakers, they included Bill Graham as well as Murray the K, but Gloria Stavers was first on the list. God and Gloria would have it no other way.
“The quality Morrison has got,” Gloria will tell you, “is that anybody can read what they want into him. The teenagers see their thing, the secretaries in my office have become entranced by him, the New York hippies at the Fillmore dig him. There’s something for everybody. But it’s still Whole. He walks through the fire and he comes out Whole.”
Phone call interruption number one. A photographer promising fan shots from Tokyo. “They better be from Japan,” Gloria snaps, “ and not from around the block!” Gloria Stavers on the phone is a New York legend in itself. While Carolina charming in person, there is something about Western Electric that can transform the stylish editor into a vinyl vampire.
“Where was I?” She asks a bit dazed after hanging up.
“The Morrison Mystique.”
“Yes…I remember one concert in Stony Brook, he was really going to jive their heads. The audience was just to enthusiastic, you know what I mean? They were just too clapping. So in the middle of one number – I think it was ‘The End,’ it either ‘The End,’ or ‘Light My Fire’ – he just stopped. Cold. You could feel the tension building up. I thought there was gonna be an exploh-sion! And then, when it was totally silent, he made that sound – I don’t know the sound he makes, a sound from the abyss, it’s just a shriek! Later, he told me, ‘You have to have them. They can’t have you. And if you don’t have them. You have to stop and get them.”
“Whether he has it or not,” Gloria concludes, “I don’t know. But he can make me feel it. Things happen. He’s left impressions on me that are lasting.”
All of which is to say: Rest easy, Cash Box. This boy is pretty enough for Vogue and “dynamic” enough to make you money. Already he’s worth one gold single, two gold albums, and $15,000 at the gate. He’s an All’Round Star and he can play first base in a pinch.
What’s the formula?
“I’m looking for people who are Possessed,” says Elektra publicist Danny Fields. “Morrison’s Possessed. Nico’s Possessed. Tiny Tim says ‘There are not just voices I sing. These spirits that live within me.’”
What’s Possessed?
“this is a dream Jim had,” reveals Gloria Stavers. “He told it to me and I don’t think he’ll mind me telling you. Now, don’t write anything. Lis-ten to it first:
I’m a baby on this beach, he said, this beautiful beach, and there are all these grown-ups around. Only I’ve never seen any of them before. And two of them pick me up and play with me. And I want them to be my mother and father, they’re so beautiful! And when I wake up I’m always looking at a motel ceiling…
It comes out of the Virginia swamps
Cool and slow
With plenty of precision
And a back beat narrow
And hard to master
Some call it heavenly
In its brilliance
Others mean and rueful
Of the western dream
-Poem
Jim Morrison
They’ll tell you Alexandria, Virginia was once destined for greatness. With graceful access to the sea, Alexandria was to be the port de grandeur for the Middle Atlantic. To be sure, the accoutrements of significance still abound – quaint, colonial merchant houses, stately yacht basins on the Potomac, and, looming over the entire city, the apocalyptic phallus, the George Washington Masonic Memorial.
But, as it happened, Thomas Jefferson had something else in mind and Alexandria was forced to swallow its pride and become an egregious suburb to – of all things – a nations capital. Alexandria’s more ambitious sons moved to where the action was and, even today, if you don’t make the White House, you can go no further south than Arlington.
Consequently, Alexandria, like its northern counterpart Salem, echoes the eerie din of past failure. It’s façade is disgruntled and grim and one suspects that it longingly awaits in some Pirate Jenny of the Mind its chosen Black Freighter.
Whereas Arlington can offer its children the suburban glitter of a sprawling high school split level that looks not an erg less efficient on the educational relic that is George Washington High School. Complete with dreary hallways, vindictive disciplinarians and endless up and down staircases hued in Detention Yellow, George Washington High is enough to set the cause of progressive education back a century, and many a Good Soul has chosen to switch rather than fight.
Yet, at times, G.W. has managed to transcend its cadaverous karma. In the spring, the school’s spacious lawn comes up a lush green and the leaves of numerous oak trees have been known to scrape the very windows of the remedial reading room. And while the student body is not the world’s most dynamic, in the late fifties G.W. housed three rock celebrities to be: Mama Cass of the Mamas and the Papas, Zal Yanovsky of the Lovin’ Spoonful, and Scott, “If Your Going To San Francisco” MacKenzie. Not that the natives necessarily felt all that privileged at the time. “Mama Cass used to chase me down the halls,” recounts Dave MacCarthy, now a rather funky organist with a D.C. group, The Warlocks. “If I knew what she’d become, I’d’ve married her.” Mama Cass eventually gave up chasing to team up with Zally and a local Jaguar salesman, John Phillips, and their group, The Mugwamps, kept Alexandria joyous at a time when joy was subversive.
So if hell is other people, you couldn’t really call George Washington High School Hades. True, it looked like hell, but you could always ask Zal to play “This Land Is Your Land” in the lavatory or beg Cass to sing “I’ve Got A Mean Machine” in the girls locker room. Any high school offering an act like that couldn’t be all bad. And God knows what Scott MacKenzie could do for you.
It was in this eclectic morass of the dreary and the, uh, beautiful that James Douglas Morrison assumed his first public attitude. As a student at George Washington High School at the turn of the decade, Morrison is remembered as a sullen youth with little interest in the pep rally trinity of athletics, milkshakes, and the cheerleader next door. His build was small and slight, and although his expression was intense, a sensitive face was not, at the time, an adolescent’s Ticket to Ride.
Not that George Washington High School didn’t offer opportunities for the lyrical at heart. Virginia after all, once gave the world Edgar Allen Poe, and it would hardly be like the Old Dominion to turn its back on the poetic pulse of its creative sons. It was only fitting, then, that Deucalion Gregory’s English class should become a focus of consciousness for the verbally talented. Gregory urged his brighter students to read widely in the classics, Shakespeare, and Americana, and commended those who did so. In addition, students were encouraged to recite selections in class. As a result, Gregory’s classroom became a kind of stage on which the school’s literati competed for recognition. Alexandria’s answer to Max’s Kansas City.
Certainly the Gregory Arena should have been the ideal place for young James Douglas to nurture a sensitive temperament. Yet apparently there were complications.
Hilton Davis, reputed to be on of Mr Gregory’s favorites, recalled Morrison’s behavior is a vis the English Establishment quite vividly. He recounted events to his hip younger brother who rattled them off to us with amphetamine intensity:
My brother said Morrison was the kind of kid – like his mother would give him $5 to buy a shirt and he’d buy a shirt for a quarter at the Salvation Army and spend the rest somewhere else.
My brother said if Morrison was sitting in class and he saw anybody he knew in the hall, he’d just yell out “Hey, Man!” or “Hey, you motherfucker!”
Just yell it out in the middle of class.
My brother said Morrison was a genius – he knew all about the poets, he knew all about poetry and all about books, he knew more than the teacher even, like sometimes someone would ask a question and the teacher wouldn’t know the answer, and Morrison would just blurt it out. Without raising his hand or anything…
His yearbook caption reads only “Honor Roll (2).” No clubs. No sports. The mark of raw but uncooperative intelligence. A brilliant brat who didn’t necessarily work and play well with others.
Although Morrison was known to many, he doesn’t seem to have developed any close friends at G.W. High school was for performing not for socializing. Yet the lanky loner was capable of forging relationships outside the school. And the story of one in particular is likely to take us to the Southern side of town.
You might as well call it a new century when you to Jefferson Davis Highway. Whereas the center of Alexandria couldn’t be a day younger than 86 years, three months, J.D. Highway is as postwar crass as a Levittown shopping center. Stretching south from Hunting(ton) Creek, the plastic pike boasts a dynamic arcade of barbecue, steak houses, dial a mistress motels, AMF Bowling alleys, and grab a gang bang discotheques. Hardly a month goes by when Suburban Virginia isn’t sizzling with scandal about the Sins Of Route One. In April, Fairfax lawyers were telling you the story about the eighteen year old secretary who underwent coitus without consent in the parking lot of a leading ‘roadhouse.’ The defense was renowned for its brevity. “If she was out on Jefferson Davis, she got what was coming to her.” By the end of the month, a local rock group had turned the admonition into a country and western ditty.
Somewhere south of Penn Daw lies the highway’s main attraction, a roadside rock tavern that bears a number as its name. The 1320 Club is where Alexandria’s proletarian young go to dance, drink, and dilate in the ars erotica. Boasting an elevated dance floor, a stroberrific light show, wonder waitresses in black tights, and live rock entainment, 1320 is just the thing after a hard day at the fertilizer factory.
Bound to be digging the sounds in the back room are owner “Monk” Reynolds and his friend, Sonny. Sonny, as it happens was a former student at George Washington and recalled Jim Morrison. “Jim Morrison?” asked Sonny in a native drawl. “Yeah, Morrison used to go out drinking beer, with us in the old days. What? Yeah, mostly in D.C. ‘Course the only sounds there were the Kingston Tro and black music.”
Just what sort of rock and soul Sonny and the boys used to groove on can be heard whenever Little Willie Downing and the Handjives decide to visit the 1320. Short, black and beefy, Little Willie calls to mind the unforgettable Fats Domino as he pounds out double octave triads on his Wurlitzer electric organ.
We’d been told that Wil Downing may have been an early musical influence on Jim Morrison. Sonny averred that his gang had known Little Willie but didn’t elaborate.
And as a cautious Southern spade, Little Willie wasn’t about to sock it to us.
We caught Wil Downing during a beak in the back room of the 1320.
“Hiya. Glad y’all could come down,” grinned Wil in what to be the most sugary salutation we received in Washington. “How ya all been?”
“Come on,” smiled Constance Companion. “You don’t even know us!”
“That’s ok!” protested Willie. “That’s okay!”
There is a certain uneasiness that can come over you when you’re talking to an old style Southern Negro. Somehow you feel you’re being treated too nicely, that you’re being doted on rather than dealt with.
We got down to tacks. “Willie did you know Jim Morrison?”
“Jim Morrison…Jim Morrison of The Doors? Wow. The Doors! When they came out with that record I just said to myself ‘They did it! They did it! Wasn’t that fine, though?”
Willie wasn’t coming clean. Rather than force the issue we chatted with Willie about his plans, the riots in D.C., and a certain music store in the Northeast.
“I hear Chuck Levin’s is the place to go,” I offered.
“Yeah, it was…’fore we burned it down, heh, heh,” he laughed, slapping my knee with mock sympathy.
It was Willie who brought up the subject of Jim Morrison again.
“Who did you say you’re with?” he asked.
“Crawdaddy. Crawdaddy magazine.”
Willie turned to one of the young black kids in this entourage. “Do you know it?” he inquired sharply.
“Sure,” the kid answered. “Crawdaddy. Yeah, they’re big.”
Willie turned on us. “Can I take the magazine?”
I assumed ‘take’ referred to a guest subscription.
“Oh, by all means,” I assured him. “Later you can give us your address and we’ll send it right along.” (There’s always a price.)
(Note: The author is Whitey. – ed.)
There was a short silence.
“Jim Morrison…Jim Morrison,” Willie reflected. “Course I didn’t know him real well, you understand. Nobody really knew him. I don’t think anybody could tell you much about him.
“You know, he was the kind of cat who used to run around with everybody else. He did what everybody else did – as long as it was bad, heh, heh,” added Willie with conspiratorial glee.
“I saw him one day when he was back in D.C.”
“You mean when his hair was much longer?” I asked.
“Yeah, that’s right!” laughed Wil. Pause, “He’s happy now. I think he’s happy. He’s where he wants to be.”
And then Wil Downing got up to play another set of music. He dedicated his song song to “the folks from Crawdaddy Magazine.” It was “Who Do You Love?” a Morrison rhythm and blues favorite. Was Willie trying to tell us something?
We never did find out the whole story. Little Willie could have been indulging in a little ex post facto memory, enjoying the rare Virginia commodity of national attention. But it is possible that he really had known Morirson in the days before the days – Morrison, hungry for defiant modes, Downing, The Great Black Father, introducing the youth to the surly sounds of black blues.
It all seemed plausible. At school, Jim Morrison was a brilliant recluse, exploding erudition rather than working it on through. Outside, he was “one of the boys” wild and restless, though, apparently, an ambitious apprentice of spade sound. Yet one could ask “Why the brilliance?” “Why the explosions?” “Why the reclusion?” “Why the ambition?” And the answer could take you all the way home.
There are times in Braddock Heights when you’d swear you were in Arlington. You’re not, you’re in Alexandria, but the lawns are Arlington large and the trees are Arlington thick. The homes are modern colonial, boasting flagstone facades, and pine paneled pantries. And the streets are purposely disfigured to reduce the riff raff to a helpless crawl.
You wouldn’t want to exaggerate but you’d have to say 310 Woodland Terrace was one of the most impressive homes on the block. Sitting proudly on a huge, wooded, corner plot, the house is an august colonial collage of brick, stone, and pine. It could have housed an Under Secretary, the Irish Ambassador, or the Vice President of Old Dominion Bank. Instead, it served as the residence of a superstar to be.
For it was here that Captain G.S. Morrison and his wife brought their two sons, Jim and Andy, on their return to Washington in the late fifties. Friends remember Captain Morrison as a charming guest, always ready with a witty toast, a literary remark, and a delightful piano accompaniment. “I remember on the cruise down the Potomac,” recalls one Navy wife, “the Captain sat down and played “Swannee River” and we all sang along.”
Although the father of two teenage sons, Captain Morrison could not have been much older that forty at the time. Physically, he was small but apparently took pains to keep in shape. Typical of his callisthenic zeal was the Captain’s favorite exercise at the turn of the decade. Morrison, who began his career as a Navy Pilot, would rise extra early to fly fifty miles before settling down to a day of deskwork. For some Wheaties isn’t quite enough.
Clara Morrison, the Captain’s wife, was a Captain’s Wife. Warm, gracious, and just a bit plump, Mrs. Morrison was always to be found pleasantly in the background. “She was one of the nicest women you’d ever want to meet,” recounted a neighbor. “Thoughtful, considerate, you name it. She’d do anything for you.”
Between Clara and the Captain, one would have thought Jim and Andy had a good thing going. But there were difficulties. While the Captain could be affable enough in public, he evidently, like many officer fathers, could treat his offspring as if they were so many green recruits. Jim and Andy got a steady diet of strict discipline and, after a while, came to deeply resent it.
“Navy dads,” explained one Navy mother, “are accustomed to giving orders and having their orders obeyed. You know, you’re used to cracking the whip.”
Does Mother stand by and watch the induration? “She has her hands full of course. It’s difficult for a Navy mom. You may have your reservations but you must keep order in the family. Most of the time you just along with your husband.”
Eventually Jim Morrison broke loose. His father looked on with increasing consternation as Jim became unruly in high school, intellectually avant-garde in college, and, finally, an explosive rock singer in Los Angeles. “You could say,” Morrison once reflected, “it’s an accident that I was ideally suited for the work I’m doing; it’s the feeling of a bow string being pulled back for twenty two years and suddenly being let go.”
Mrs. Morrison took Jim’s success in stride, “Well, I’m glad he’s a success,” she told a personal aide, “but I don’t exactly approve of the way he did it.” While she enjoys reading magazine publicity about Jim, she reportedly became upset about an article in The Saturday Evening Post. The piece alleged that Junior was foregoing underwear.
When Jim performed in Alexandria two summers ago, two of Clara’s sisters surreptitiously attended the concert. “While they enjoyed it all right,” reports a neighbor, “they just couldn’t believe Jim was the same little blond-haired boy they used to know.”
Andy Morrison, Jim’s younger brother, was rooting for his brother all the way. When Andy and Jim were kids they used to compete for affection, but later, like all brothers, they teamed up against parental authority. After Jim left for college, Andy, too, because a discipline problem, wrecking cars, flunking exams, and drinking his way to a few disorderly conduct raps. But his temperament is markedly different from his brother’s. Whereas Jim was always lean and intense, Andy’s never gone in much for artistic rebellion and friends say he much prefers casual California dress to pretentious hippy garb.
Two summers ago, Andy went to visit Jim in New York. “Jim was real nice to him,” recalls a friend. “He showed him around New York, took him to all his concerts – you know, backstage and all.” Five years Jim’s junior, Andy was at the time, having to think about college. “Jim offered to pay Andy’s way through college, living expenses and all, if Andy wanted to be on his own.”
Andy turned down the offer, deciding in the end to let his mother enroll him in an obscure Florida junior college that somehow met the family’s standards. “I think he’s given up,” Jim recently confided in an associate, “He’s younger than me yet I feel younger than him. In some ways, he’s like an old man.”
Ever since Jim broke with his family as a college sophomore, his father rarely refers to him at home or with friends. Public comment on the subject has always been out of the question, depriving the press of vital insight into Morrison’s enigma. Yet a face to face encounter with the father of all the frenzy promised to be a Freudian feast and I resolved to wend my way into Morrison’s office by hook or by crook.
It was by crook. Obtaining press credentials from a local university, I arranged a professional interview with Rear Admiral G.S. Morrison on the pseduo-subject of “The New Navy.” Morrison had recently been promoted to executive status by the Naval Air Systems Command and could be presumably kept busy answering questions about submarines while I sized up his character.
I, meanwhile, prepared my on conversion from a grubby New York hippy into a clean cut Virginia collegian.
“Did you really come in here for a haircut?” taunted my friend neighborhood Virginia barber.
“Look,” I pleaded. “I’ve got this interview with an Admiral tomorrow. What can you do for me?”
The barber smiled wryly. “There ain’t nothin’ I can do that’s ever gonna get you by an Admiral.” Wise guy.
The night before the confrontation, Connie Companion dictated to me a suitable collegiate costume: “low shoes, plastic eye frames, thin tie…” I confided to her my qualms about interrogating the Admiral under false pretenses. “Listen,” she hissed, handing me the nail clippers, “you’re Chutzpah Horowitz and you’re got to do your thing!”
I arrived at the Admiral’s office at dusk, to find him still busily at work. Two junior officers awaited in the anteroom. “They say the Admiral doesn’t leave his desk until 1830, 1900,” said one to the other with official awe. “I’m surprised at his patience,” added another, with a look in my direction. “All sorts of people wandering in to see him.”
Captain Suerstad escorted me into the Admiral’s office. The Admiral was standing behind his desk, looking tight and trim as a young Napileon. He seemed to recoil a bit, however, when I approached in my corduroy jacket. “Captain Suerstead,” he invited nervously in a light Virginia drawl, “why don’t you pull up a chair and sort of help me along? I’m a little new at this sort of thing.”
Meet the fearless Navy! Ready to bomb the Russians but chicken to face a New York hippy alone! For this I got my hair cut?
I began by asking the Admiral if officer standards had remained constant. “The same basic characteristics that made success in the past,” came the traditional reply, “would hold true today.” Were young officers encouraged to debate Navy policy? “Young officers are encouraged to do that – but within the Navy fraternity.”
The Admiral answered slow and easy but his replies were always to the Navy letter. It was a strange combination of lax pace and rigid text.
Did the Admiral regard himself as a “traditional” or “new breed” officer? “You like to feel you’re a part of a long tradition; on the other hand, you like to feel you’re doing things that are up to date.” Navy true, Navy blue.
Eventually, the script called for the Admiral to talk about his celebrated son. I decided to lead into it slyly. “Are the sons of officers expected to enter the Academy as in the old days?
“This question,” the Admiral replied, “can only be answered on purely personal terms. I have never pressured by (pause) family and as it turns out neither one of them has shown any interest in a military career.
“I’ll say this, though. If my boys wanted to go into the service, they’d chose Navy. But they’re just not interested in a military life altogether.”
At the time, I did not let on that I knew that one the “boys” Admiral Morrison was referring to was the nation’s leading rock personality. Yet the Admiral couldn’t be so sure of my innocence. It must have been unnerving for him to speak of his sons, uncertain of how much information I possessed.
After I thanked him for his time, the Admiral rose politely and smiled, “Well, thank you very much, Mr Horowitz,” he said as we shook hands. “Nobody’s ever asked what I thought about the Navy before.” It was a generous remark. Despite sufficient cause for uneasiness, the Admiral remained thoughtful and courteous. It was Navy chivalry all the way.
As Captain Suerstead and I exited, however, the Admiral’s curiosity got the better of him.
“Mr Horowitz,” he barked.
It was a stern, rigid call that awoke the adolescent in me. I suddenly had an irresistible urge to defy it – to shout “Drop dead! Or better still just walk on. Suddenly I was Young Jim Morrison and Daddy was yelling “Jim! Come back here and…”
“Yes Sir,” I answered automatically.
“Just one more thing,” resumed the Admiral, lowering his voice to official gentility. “How’d you happen to pick on me?”
How did I indeed? “Well,” I improvised hastily, “we were especially interested in the opinions of young officers…recently promoted…who might conceivably attain the Full Admiralty.”
“All right then,” concluded the Admiral and I was dismissed.
In the spring of 1968 the world expected The Doors’ third album. They didn’t get it. What they got instead was a three minute sound tracked film called “The Unknown Soldier.”
The work is typical later Morrison, revealing fully his current potential. The film opens at the breakfast table, an archetypical family scene. The action switches to a California Beach, Morrison’s favorite setting. Our Hero is tied to a tree by ropes, command orders are given, and he is shot to death. After his burial, the whole world celebrates wildly, while Morrison sings hysterically on the sound track: “It’s all over, baby! The war is over!”
When the film played at the Fillmore East, a young audience brimming with anti-war frustration broke into pandemonium. “The War Is Over!” cried teenyboppers in the aisles. “The Doors ended the fucking war!” The Doors’ little passion play had grabbed the audience. Jimmy and the boys had done it again.
But what about that dead soldier? Morrison attains a bizarre duality in The Unknown Soldier. He is killed on the screen but survives triumphantly in sound. His is both victim and victor, martyr and apostle.
Unfortunately, this is a danger combination. It implies that for every part of ecstasy, we mush have one part death. You wanna end the war, boys and girls? Kill your favorite rock singer first.
For the sensitive listener, the Unknown Soldier is crude and depressing. Its juxtaposition of liberation and death is erotic heresy. Its repetitive martial strains resemble, not sophisticated rock symphonics , but the sophomoric musicality of “The Ballad Of The Green Berets.” Indeed, just at the point when one would expect The Doors to make profound contributions to the Life Force, we are presented with guns and hysteria. Has Morrison decided to saddle us with his authority hang up rather than treat us to “Nirvana Now?”
“It’s a little early to be disillusioned,” suggests Dr Albert Goldman. “But my hunch is that The Doors are stalling. And they’re slipping – as you must in this business when you stall – into the teenybopper circuit. Their audiences are getting younger. They’ll be getting more mechanically repetitive. And it may end up with Morrison sort of peeling off and becoming a movie star.
As Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature At Columbia University, Albert Goldman brings an erudition to pop culture analysis equaled only by Marshall mCLuhan. After completing a critical study of Thomas DeQuincey, the English opium eater, Goldman turned to Americana, serving as jazz critic for The New Leader. Last spring, the professor stunned the literati by writing the definitive study of Jim Morrison, accenting the demonic, solitary, and sexually ambivalent aspects of the celebrities personality.
“I worry about the militarism in the Unknown Soldier,” Goldman complains. “Morrison has an authoritarian personality. When The Doors sit down to dinner, he sits at the head of the table. I think he’s more like his father than he realizes. In the Unknown Soldier there is an inversion. Instead of the officer, he’s the deserter. But it’s the same thing.”
Not that Goldman isn’t sympathetic to Morrison’s current artistic problem. Having posed as the rebel, the vocalist now finds himself with a measure of victory. But it is difficult to transcend rebellion and it comes as no surprise to see Morrison rehashing the theme of authority rather than following through.
“The initial vision was essentially a vision of breakthrough,” Goldman recounts. “What they offered you was a coal with blue-black embers on the outside and a ferocious center leaping through. Occasionally they gash the outside of the ember and the real frenzy in the core breaks through.
“That was the spirit of their first album. That’s what got us all excited. That’s what raised all the sunken continents in everybody’s mind, you see.
“They evangelically converted everyone. Then came the moment of truth. You’ve got the world on your side. But where are you at, baby? What are you going to do about it? You made the girl love you. Now, do you love the girl? Do you want to marry her?
“At that moment they really began to go into their problem. The flip side of breakthrough is estrangement. Once you’ve broken away, it’s pretty bleak out there. The rebel cuts himself off. It’s Christ in the garden.
Goldman gets out of his Kings Highway easy chair and shuffles his grey Hindu slippers to his intricate Sony amplifier. He removes an Electra 45 from the jacket, bows his balding head, and places the recording nervously on the spindle. Tipping his red rimmed glasses back against his nose, he stands pensively in front of his mammoth electrosonic speakers. Morrison enters singing “We Could Be So Good Together,” a recent Doors release.
“You’ll notice in all his songs today,” observes the professor, “he sings like a lonely crooner. He sounds lonely, man. Soft. Blue. A little boy blue.”
I asked for Resolution.
“Listen, they only thing you can predict about these guys is that they’ll die someday,” Goldman replies sardonically. He speaks with the resignation of one who has seen them all rise and fall. “The trouble with these guys is that they stumble into art. They don’t bring the character and education of a full fledged artist into their work.”
It is a rainy day in May. Hilton Davis’ brother has run away from home, the Morrison’s are in London, and Jim Morrison is living in a motel room on Sunset Strip. Elektra says there’ll be a new, fun single out next week but fidgets nervously when you talk about the third album. The Doors aren’t satisfied.
“Groups struggle to the top,” notes Rock producer Bill Graham. “When they get there, that’s when professional attitude must take over. I look for more creative singing, more visual effects, a more professional quartet.
Yet a polished vaudeville act is hardly enough to satisfy Jungle Jim. Morrison’s out to play Metaphysical Roulette and, when you’re bitten by that bug, even the stage of the London Palladium can give you claustrophobia. Lately he’s been singing:
We’re getting tired of waiting around
Waiting around
With our heads
To the ground
We want the world and we want it
Now!
Will Morrison inherit the world? Through the memory of a strange Virginia past, the vocalist has managed to learn mysterious presence through mysterious being. But cultural leadership requires something more. Dr Goldman calls it “character and education.” S. Clark Pearlman calls it “the requisite technical knowledge.” It is gained through study, tempered by introspection. But when it is attained a man is truly prepared – in Plato’s words – “to look upwards and lead us from one world to another.”
END.
Issue No. 21
April 1969
The Morrison Mirage
Michael Horowitz
It was kind of a crisp cool day in September when you’d swear pollution was strictly a problem for Pittsburgh. New York seemed so shiny and clean, so busy and bright, that you were likely to blame the stench in the air on sympathy pains for your grandmother’s asthma. All through the morning the weathermen talked sunny and mild and traffic was moving on the Long Island Expressway. P.S. 14 let the kids romp outside, the Village Square Newstand forewent the cellophane, and Albert’s Authentic French Restaurant kept the tables out just another day longer.
Up on Forty-fourth Street a lithe, lanky youth, twenty three and anxious, stepped out of the stately somnambulance of the Hotel Warwick into the dissonant din of Six Avenue. One gesture of his hand and Morris Schwartz’s air conditioned taxi was whizzing down to Twenty Third and Sixth. All was perfection. It was September, the sun was shining, and James Douglas Morrison was about to pose for page eighty four of Vogue Magazine.
It had to be his greatest moment. A club debut in ’65, a recording contract in ’66, a gold record in ’67 – these were earthly pleasures in the terrestrial world of Rock. But Vogue suggested Recognition with a capital R, and that meant attention, not from just from Crawdaddy and the East Village Other, but from Christopher Sykes, Penelope Tree, and the Earl of Lichfield as well.
Not that Morrison hadn’t had his qualms about the session. The rock star had seen too many authentic faces drowned in the kinky ocean of New York fashion photography. “I want it to be me,” he told a friend. “They’re not going to put me in the background just like a model.”
Others had sought to assure Morrison that his fears were groundless. Vogue would have some hip photographer straight out of Antonioni waiting at the doorstep. The pictures would be groovy, the layout would be tasteful, the reaction would be profound. Not that you could be sure, but you expect Vogue to be Vogue.
“You’re home, sonny boy!” announced Morris Schwartz.
Jim Morrison alighted from his cab, over tipped the driver and climbed one brisk flight of a raunchy Chelsea loft. He was ready for fantasy. The rest was up to Vogue.
Baron Alexis Alfonse von Gecman Waldeck is a paragon of international hip. Born in Prague, bred in Vienna, schooled in Bavaria and apprenticed in Paris, the twenty four year old Austrian uses New York as a business address. Dressed in the finest London boutiques, Baron Waldeck drives a rolls Royce, skis in St Mortiz and vacations in Sardina. That was who Vogue had waiting for Jim Morrison. But of course, darling.
“I amuse myself with photography,” smiles the Baron. “I take it seriously, of course, but…” Occasionally the Baron does not finish a sentence.
The Waldeck studio reflects the photographer’s playful approach to his art. On one wall hangs a huge, unfinished collage of newspaper and wrapping ribbon. The rest of the studio is covered with outlandish Waldeck photographs, including one of Sonny Bonna and Salvador Dali comparing moustaches. The loft, an ample 2500 square feet, also boasts a velvet sleeping balcony , a fully equipped laboratory, and a dressing room filled with the last word in hip fashion.
Morrison immediately began to groove on the vast quantity of exotic clothes at his disposal. Quickly he began to improvise, turning belts into necklaces, scarves into shirts. “Oh, a live one! Whispered Vogue’s Carrie Donovan to an assistant.
After allowing just enough time for freaking out, Alexis Waldeck took command. "I let him do completely what he wanted in the beginning," Waldeck said later, "but the pictures were directed by me." Hoisting his Nikon 105 lens and mumbling about his own special flimic formula, Waldeck circled Morrison snapping ferociously. Although it was fast and furious, the baron claimed he knew exactly what he wanted. "In Jim Morrison I saw a peasant," he later stated. "He could be a Russian peasant. I would love to photograph him in a wheat field in a wagon, with an open shirt. There's similarity between Nureyev and Morrison. There's that pride - you know, very much Self. They both like to see themselves. Morrison loves himself."
After the shooting, the party was feasted to liverwurst sandwiches and the Baron’s finest Gumpoldskirchner wine. “How’d it go?” a friend asked Morrison later that evening. “Great,” replied the singer. “It’s going to be all right.” Confided the Baron to his assistant, “I got exactly what I wanted.”
Two months later Jim Morrison was in Vogue. Eyes closed, head bowed, hair flowing, Morrison conveyed an image of dignity rarely seen in a rock star. Chest bared brazenly, the vocalist seemed to be brusquely challenging The Moment with pride and self-assurance. Said Aileen Talmey’s knowledgeable caption: “Jim Morrison is at twenty two one of the most shaken loose, mind shaking and subtle agents of the new music.”
Reaction was swift. From the Village Voice to the assignment desk of Life Magazine, Jim Morrison was studied, not as a rock star, but as a sexual symbol. “If my antenna are right he could be the biggest thing to grab the mass libido in a very long time,” wrote Voice columnist Howard Smith. “I have never seen such an animalistic response from so many different kinds of women.”
But does he sell records? Cash Box wants to know.
Rock is hip but it’s also capitalist, and you do Vogue and not the Top Twenty. Billboard couldn’t care less. They wanted stars who are “dynamic,” and in the curious world of pop commerce, eros is a commodity and dynamism is spelt in dollars and cents.
But prices are hard to read these days and you’re bound to need the help of an expert. If you’re in New York, ride no further than Grand Army Plaza, for while Merrill Lynch Pierce Fenner & Smith lie a few blocks ahead, the Queen of Teen is lurking above.
Gloria Staver sits high above Fifth Avenue overlooking Central Park, if not the world. Her gig is editing a fan magazine for teenage girls. Small potatoes? Not quite. For through the mesmeric medium that is Sixteen, Gloria Euphoria is able to open and shut the portals of the Top Twenty as if it were her own private filing cabinet.
It’s a matter of arithmetic. Seventy five percent of all singles and forty five percent of all LPs are bought by girls between the ages of twelve and seventeen. Sixteen Magazine has a paid circulation of one million teenboppers and four million friends for free. And so when Eye Magazine got around to listing the Makers and Breakers, they included Bill Graham as well as Murray the K, but Gloria Stavers was first on the list. God and Gloria would have it no other way.
“The quality Morrison has got,” Gloria will tell you, “is that anybody can read what they want into him. The teenagers see their thing, the secretaries in my office have become entranced by him, the New York hippies at the Fillmore dig him. There’s something for everybody. But it’s still Whole. He walks through the fire and he comes out Whole.”
Phone call interruption number one. A photographer promising fan shots from Tokyo. “They better be from Japan,” Gloria snaps, “ and not from around the block!” Gloria Stavers on the phone is a New York legend in itself. While Carolina charming in person, there is something about Western Electric that can transform the stylish editor into a vinyl vampire.
“Where was I?” She asks a bit dazed after hanging up.
“The Morrison Mystique.”
“Yes…I remember one concert in Stony Brook, he was really going to jive their heads. The audience was just to enthusiastic, you know what I mean? They were just too clapping. So in the middle of one number – I think it was ‘The End,’ it either ‘The End,’ or ‘Light My Fire’ – he just stopped. Cold. You could feel the tension building up. I thought there was gonna be an exploh-sion! And then, when it was totally silent, he made that sound – I don’t know the sound he makes, a sound from the abyss, it’s just a shriek! Later, he told me, ‘You have to have them. They can’t have you. And if you don’t have them. You have to stop and get them.”
“Whether he has it or not,” Gloria concludes, “I don’t know. But he can make me feel it. Things happen. He’s left impressions on me that are lasting.”
All of which is to say: Rest easy, Cash Box. This boy is pretty enough for Vogue and “dynamic” enough to make you money. Already he’s worth one gold single, two gold albums, and $15,000 at the gate. He’s an All’Round Star and he can play first base in a pinch.
What’s the formula?
“I’m looking for people who are Possessed,” says Elektra publicist Danny Fields. “Morrison’s Possessed. Nico’s Possessed. Tiny Tim says ‘There are not just voices I sing. These spirits that live within me.’”
What’s Possessed?
“this is a dream Jim had,” reveals Gloria Stavers. “He told it to me and I don’t think he’ll mind me telling you. Now, don’t write anything. Lis-ten to it first:
I’m a baby on this beach, he said, this beautiful beach, and there are all these grown-ups around. Only I’ve never seen any of them before. And two of them pick me up and play with me. And I want them to be my mother and father, they’re so beautiful! And when I wake up I’m always looking at a motel ceiling…
It comes out of the Virginia swamps
Cool and slow
With plenty of precision
And a back beat narrow
And hard to master
Some call it heavenly
In its brilliance
Others mean and rueful
Of the western dream
-Poem
Jim Morrison
They’ll tell you Alexandria, Virginia was once destined for greatness. With graceful access to the sea, Alexandria was to be the port de grandeur for the Middle Atlantic. To be sure, the accoutrements of significance still abound – quaint, colonial merchant houses, stately yacht basins on the Potomac, and, looming over the entire city, the apocalyptic phallus, the George Washington Masonic Memorial.
But, as it happened, Thomas Jefferson had something else in mind and Alexandria was forced to swallow its pride and become an egregious suburb to – of all things – a nations capital. Alexandria’s more ambitious sons moved to where the action was and, even today, if you don’t make the White House, you can go no further south than Arlington.
Consequently, Alexandria, like its northern counterpart Salem, echoes the eerie din of past failure. It’s façade is disgruntled and grim and one suspects that it longingly awaits in some Pirate Jenny of the Mind its chosen Black Freighter.
Whereas Arlington can offer its children the suburban glitter of a sprawling high school split level that looks not an erg less efficient on the educational relic that is George Washington High School. Complete with dreary hallways, vindictive disciplinarians and endless up and down staircases hued in Detention Yellow, George Washington High is enough to set the cause of progressive education back a century, and many a Good Soul has chosen to switch rather than fight.
Yet, at times, G.W. has managed to transcend its cadaverous karma. In the spring, the school’s spacious lawn comes up a lush green and the leaves of numerous oak trees have been known to scrape the very windows of the remedial reading room. And while the student body is not the world’s most dynamic, in the late fifties G.W. housed three rock celebrities to be: Mama Cass of the Mamas and the Papas, Zal Yanovsky of the Lovin’ Spoonful, and Scott, “If Your Going To San Francisco” MacKenzie. Not that the natives necessarily felt all that privileged at the time. “Mama Cass used to chase me down the halls,” recounts Dave MacCarthy, now a rather funky organist with a D.C. group, The Warlocks. “If I knew what she’d become, I’d’ve married her.” Mama Cass eventually gave up chasing to team up with Zally and a local Jaguar salesman, John Phillips, and their group, The Mugwamps, kept Alexandria joyous at a time when joy was subversive.
So if hell is other people, you couldn’t really call George Washington High School Hades. True, it looked like hell, but you could always ask Zal to play “This Land Is Your Land” in the lavatory or beg Cass to sing “I’ve Got A Mean Machine” in the girls locker room. Any high school offering an act like that couldn’t be all bad. And God knows what Scott MacKenzie could do for you.
It was in this eclectic morass of the dreary and the, uh, beautiful that James Douglas Morrison assumed his first public attitude. As a student at George Washington High School at the turn of the decade, Morrison is remembered as a sullen youth with little interest in the pep rally trinity of athletics, milkshakes, and the cheerleader next door. His build was small and slight, and although his expression was intense, a sensitive face was not, at the time, an adolescent’s Ticket to Ride.
Not that George Washington High School didn’t offer opportunities for the lyrical at heart. Virginia after all, once gave the world Edgar Allen Poe, and it would hardly be like the Old Dominion to turn its back on the poetic pulse of its creative sons. It was only fitting, then, that Deucalion Gregory’s English class should become a focus of consciousness for the verbally talented. Gregory urged his brighter students to read widely in the classics, Shakespeare, and Americana, and commended those who did so. In addition, students were encouraged to recite selections in class. As a result, Gregory’s classroom became a kind of stage on which the school’s literati competed for recognition. Alexandria’s answer to Max’s Kansas City.
Certainly the Gregory Arena should have been the ideal place for young James Douglas to nurture a sensitive temperament. Yet apparently there were complications.
Hilton Davis, reputed to be on of Mr Gregory’s favorites, recalled Morrison’s behavior is a vis the English Establishment quite vividly. He recounted events to his hip younger brother who rattled them off to us with amphetamine intensity:
My brother said Morrison was the kind of kid – like his mother would give him $5 to buy a shirt and he’d buy a shirt for a quarter at the Salvation Army and spend the rest somewhere else.
My brother said if Morrison was sitting in class and he saw anybody he knew in the hall, he’d just yell out “Hey, Man!” or “Hey, you motherfucker!”
Just yell it out in the middle of class.
My brother said Morrison was a genius – he knew all about the poets, he knew all about poetry and all about books, he knew more than the teacher even, like sometimes someone would ask a question and the teacher wouldn’t know the answer, and Morrison would just blurt it out. Without raising his hand or anything…
His yearbook caption reads only “Honor Roll (2).” No clubs. No sports. The mark of raw but uncooperative intelligence. A brilliant brat who didn’t necessarily work and play well with others.
Although Morrison was known to many, he doesn’t seem to have developed any close friends at G.W. High school was for performing not for socializing. Yet the lanky loner was capable of forging relationships outside the school. And the story of one in particular is likely to take us to the Southern side of town.
You might as well call it a new century when you to Jefferson Davis Highway. Whereas the center of Alexandria couldn’t be a day younger than 86 years, three months, J.D. Highway is as postwar crass as a Levittown shopping center. Stretching south from Hunting(ton) Creek, the plastic pike boasts a dynamic arcade of barbecue, steak houses, dial a mistress motels, AMF Bowling alleys, and grab a gang bang discotheques. Hardly a month goes by when Suburban Virginia isn’t sizzling with scandal about the Sins Of Route One. In April, Fairfax lawyers were telling you the story about the eighteen year old secretary who underwent coitus without consent in the parking lot of a leading ‘roadhouse.’ The defense was renowned for its brevity. “If she was out on Jefferson Davis, she got what was coming to her.” By the end of the month, a local rock group had turned the admonition into a country and western ditty.
Somewhere south of Penn Daw lies the highway’s main attraction, a roadside rock tavern that bears a number as its name. The 1320 Club is where Alexandria’s proletarian young go to dance, drink, and dilate in the ars erotica. Boasting an elevated dance floor, a stroberrific light show, wonder waitresses in black tights, and live rock entainment, 1320 is just the thing after a hard day at the fertilizer factory.
Bound to be digging the sounds in the back room are owner “Monk” Reynolds and his friend, Sonny. Sonny, as it happens was a former student at George Washington and recalled Jim Morrison. “Jim Morrison?” asked Sonny in a native drawl. “Yeah, Morrison used to go out drinking beer, with us in the old days. What? Yeah, mostly in D.C. ‘Course the only sounds there were the Kingston Tro and black music.”
Just what sort of rock and soul Sonny and the boys used to groove on can be heard whenever Little Willie Downing and the Handjives decide to visit the 1320. Short, black and beefy, Little Willie calls to mind the unforgettable Fats Domino as he pounds out double octave triads on his Wurlitzer electric organ.
We’d been told that Wil Downing may have been an early musical influence on Jim Morrison. Sonny averred that his gang had known Little Willie but didn’t elaborate.
And as a cautious Southern spade, Little Willie wasn’t about to sock it to us.
We caught Wil Downing during a beak in the back room of the 1320.
“Hiya. Glad y’all could come down,” grinned Wil in what to be the most sugary salutation we received in Washington. “How ya all been?”
“Come on,” smiled Constance Companion. “You don’t even know us!”
“That’s ok!” protested Willie. “That’s okay!”
There is a certain uneasiness that can come over you when you’re talking to an old style Southern Negro. Somehow you feel you’re being treated too nicely, that you’re being doted on rather than dealt with.
We got down to tacks. “Willie did you know Jim Morrison?”
“Jim Morrison…Jim Morrison of The Doors? Wow. The Doors! When they came out with that record I just said to myself ‘They did it! They did it! Wasn’t that fine, though?”
Willie wasn’t coming clean. Rather than force the issue we chatted with Willie about his plans, the riots in D.C., and a certain music store in the Northeast.
“I hear Chuck Levin’s is the place to go,” I offered.
“Yeah, it was…’fore we burned it down, heh, heh,” he laughed, slapping my knee with mock sympathy.
It was Willie who brought up the subject of Jim Morrison again.
“Who did you say you’re with?” he asked.
“Crawdaddy. Crawdaddy magazine.”
Willie turned to one of the young black kids in this entourage. “Do you know it?” he inquired sharply.
“Sure,” the kid answered. “Crawdaddy. Yeah, they’re big.”
Willie turned on us. “Can I take the magazine?”
I assumed ‘take’ referred to a guest subscription.
“Oh, by all means,” I assured him. “Later you can give us your address and we’ll send it right along.” (There’s always a price.)
(Note: The author is Whitey. – ed.)
There was a short silence.
“Jim Morrison…Jim Morrison,” Willie reflected. “Course I didn’t know him real well, you understand. Nobody really knew him. I don’t think anybody could tell you much about him.
“You know, he was the kind of cat who used to run around with everybody else. He did what everybody else did – as long as it was bad, heh, heh,” added Willie with conspiratorial glee.
“I saw him one day when he was back in D.C.”
“You mean when his hair was much longer?” I asked.
“Yeah, that’s right!” laughed Wil. Pause, “He’s happy now. I think he’s happy. He’s where he wants to be.”
And then Wil Downing got up to play another set of music. He dedicated his song song to “the folks from Crawdaddy Magazine.” It was “Who Do You Love?” a Morrison rhythm and blues favorite. Was Willie trying to tell us something?
We never did find out the whole story. Little Willie could have been indulging in a little ex post facto memory, enjoying the rare Virginia commodity of national attention. But it is possible that he really had known Morirson in the days before the days – Morrison, hungry for defiant modes, Downing, The Great Black Father, introducing the youth to the surly sounds of black blues.
It all seemed plausible. At school, Jim Morrison was a brilliant recluse, exploding erudition rather than working it on through. Outside, he was “one of the boys” wild and restless, though, apparently, an ambitious apprentice of spade sound. Yet one could ask “Why the brilliance?” “Why the explosions?” “Why the reclusion?” “Why the ambition?” And the answer could take you all the way home.
There are times in Braddock Heights when you’d swear you were in Arlington. You’re not, you’re in Alexandria, but the lawns are Arlington large and the trees are Arlington thick. The homes are modern colonial, boasting flagstone facades, and pine paneled pantries. And the streets are purposely disfigured to reduce the riff raff to a helpless crawl.
You wouldn’t want to exaggerate but you’d have to say 310 Woodland Terrace was one of the most impressive homes on the block. Sitting proudly on a huge, wooded, corner plot, the house is an august colonial collage of brick, stone, and pine. It could have housed an Under Secretary, the Irish Ambassador, or the Vice President of Old Dominion Bank. Instead, it served as the residence of a superstar to be.
For it was here that Captain G.S. Morrison and his wife brought their two sons, Jim and Andy, on their return to Washington in the late fifties. Friends remember Captain Morrison as a charming guest, always ready with a witty toast, a literary remark, and a delightful piano accompaniment. “I remember on the cruise down the Potomac,” recalls one Navy wife, “the Captain sat down and played “Swannee River” and we all sang along.”
Although the father of two teenage sons, Captain Morrison could not have been much older that forty at the time. Physically, he was small but apparently took pains to keep in shape. Typical of his callisthenic zeal was the Captain’s favorite exercise at the turn of the decade. Morrison, who began his career as a Navy Pilot, would rise extra early to fly fifty miles before settling down to a day of deskwork. For some Wheaties isn’t quite enough.
Clara Morrison, the Captain’s wife, was a Captain’s Wife. Warm, gracious, and just a bit plump, Mrs. Morrison was always to be found pleasantly in the background. “She was one of the nicest women you’d ever want to meet,” recounted a neighbor. “Thoughtful, considerate, you name it. She’d do anything for you.”
Between Clara and the Captain, one would have thought Jim and Andy had a good thing going. But there were difficulties. While the Captain could be affable enough in public, he evidently, like many officer fathers, could treat his offspring as if they were so many green recruits. Jim and Andy got a steady diet of strict discipline and, after a while, came to deeply resent it.
“Navy dads,” explained one Navy mother, “are accustomed to giving orders and having their orders obeyed. You know, you’re used to cracking the whip.”
Does Mother stand by and watch the induration? “She has her hands full of course. It’s difficult for a Navy mom. You may have your reservations but you must keep order in the family. Most of the time you just along with your husband.”
Eventually Jim Morrison broke loose. His father looked on with increasing consternation as Jim became unruly in high school, intellectually avant-garde in college, and, finally, an explosive rock singer in Los Angeles. “You could say,” Morrison once reflected, “it’s an accident that I was ideally suited for the work I’m doing; it’s the feeling of a bow string being pulled back for twenty two years and suddenly being let go.”
Mrs. Morrison took Jim’s success in stride, “Well, I’m glad he’s a success,” she told a personal aide, “but I don’t exactly approve of the way he did it.” While she enjoys reading magazine publicity about Jim, she reportedly became upset about an article in The Saturday Evening Post. The piece alleged that Junior was foregoing underwear.
When Jim performed in Alexandria two summers ago, two of Clara’s sisters surreptitiously attended the concert. “While they enjoyed it all right,” reports a neighbor, “they just couldn’t believe Jim was the same little blond-haired boy they used to know.”
Andy Morrison, Jim’s younger brother, was rooting for his brother all the way. When Andy and Jim were kids they used to compete for affection, but later, like all brothers, they teamed up against parental authority. After Jim left for college, Andy, too, because a discipline problem, wrecking cars, flunking exams, and drinking his way to a few disorderly conduct raps. But his temperament is markedly different from his brother’s. Whereas Jim was always lean and intense, Andy’s never gone in much for artistic rebellion and friends say he much prefers casual California dress to pretentious hippy garb.
Two summers ago, Andy went to visit Jim in New York. “Jim was real nice to him,” recalls a friend. “He showed him around New York, took him to all his concerts – you know, backstage and all.” Five years Jim’s junior, Andy was at the time, having to think about college. “Jim offered to pay Andy’s way through college, living expenses and all, if Andy wanted to be on his own.”
Andy turned down the offer, deciding in the end to let his mother enroll him in an obscure Florida junior college that somehow met the family’s standards. “I think he’s given up,” Jim recently confided in an associate, “He’s younger than me yet I feel younger than him. In some ways, he’s like an old man.”
Ever since Jim broke with his family as a college sophomore, his father rarely refers to him at home or with friends. Public comment on the subject has always been out of the question, depriving the press of vital insight into Morrison’s enigma. Yet a face to face encounter with the father of all the frenzy promised to be a Freudian feast and I resolved to wend my way into Morrison’s office by hook or by crook.
It was by crook. Obtaining press credentials from a local university, I arranged a professional interview with Rear Admiral G.S. Morrison on the pseduo-subject of “The New Navy.” Morrison had recently been promoted to executive status by the Naval Air Systems Command and could be presumably kept busy answering questions about submarines while I sized up his character.
I, meanwhile, prepared my on conversion from a grubby New York hippy into a clean cut Virginia collegian.
“Did you really come in here for a haircut?” taunted my friend neighborhood Virginia barber.
“Look,” I pleaded. “I’ve got this interview with an Admiral tomorrow. What can you do for me?”
The barber smiled wryly. “There ain’t nothin’ I can do that’s ever gonna get you by an Admiral.” Wise guy.
The night before the confrontation, Connie Companion dictated to me a suitable collegiate costume: “low shoes, plastic eye frames, thin tie…” I confided to her my qualms about interrogating the Admiral under false pretenses. “Listen,” she hissed, handing me the nail clippers, “you’re Chutzpah Horowitz and you’re got to do your thing!”
I arrived at the Admiral’s office at dusk, to find him still busily at work. Two junior officers awaited in the anteroom. “They say the Admiral doesn’t leave his desk until 1830, 1900,” said one to the other with official awe. “I’m surprised at his patience,” added another, with a look in my direction. “All sorts of people wandering in to see him.”
Captain Suerstad escorted me into the Admiral’s office. The Admiral was standing behind his desk, looking tight and trim as a young Napileon. He seemed to recoil a bit, however, when I approached in my corduroy jacket. “Captain Suerstead,” he invited nervously in a light Virginia drawl, “why don’t you pull up a chair and sort of help me along? I’m a little new at this sort of thing.”
Meet the fearless Navy! Ready to bomb the Russians but chicken to face a New York hippy alone! For this I got my hair cut?
I began by asking the Admiral if officer standards had remained constant. “The same basic characteristics that made success in the past,” came the traditional reply, “would hold true today.” Were young officers encouraged to debate Navy policy? “Young officers are encouraged to do that – but within the Navy fraternity.”
The Admiral answered slow and easy but his replies were always to the Navy letter. It was a strange combination of lax pace and rigid text.
Did the Admiral regard himself as a “traditional” or “new breed” officer? “You like to feel you’re a part of a long tradition; on the other hand, you like to feel you’re doing things that are up to date.” Navy true, Navy blue.
Eventually, the script called for the Admiral to talk about his celebrated son. I decided to lead into it slyly. “Are the sons of officers expected to enter the Academy as in the old days?
“This question,” the Admiral replied, “can only be answered on purely personal terms. I have never pressured by (pause) family and as it turns out neither one of them has shown any interest in a military career.
“I’ll say this, though. If my boys wanted to go into the service, they’d chose Navy. But they’re just not interested in a military life altogether.”
At the time, I did not let on that I knew that one the “boys” Admiral Morrison was referring to was the nation’s leading rock personality. Yet the Admiral couldn’t be so sure of my innocence. It must have been unnerving for him to speak of his sons, uncertain of how much information I possessed.
After I thanked him for his time, the Admiral rose politely and smiled, “Well, thank you very much, Mr Horowitz,” he said as we shook hands. “Nobody’s ever asked what I thought about the Navy before.” It was a generous remark. Despite sufficient cause for uneasiness, the Admiral remained thoughtful and courteous. It was Navy chivalry all the way.
As Captain Suerstead and I exited, however, the Admiral’s curiosity got the better of him.
“Mr Horowitz,” he barked.
It was a stern, rigid call that awoke the adolescent in me. I suddenly had an irresistible urge to defy it – to shout “Drop dead! Or better still just walk on. Suddenly I was Young Jim Morrison and Daddy was yelling “Jim! Come back here and…”
“Yes Sir,” I answered automatically.
“Just one more thing,” resumed the Admiral, lowering his voice to official gentility. “How’d you happen to pick on me?”
How did I indeed? “Well,” I improvised hastily, “we were especially interested in the opinions of young officers…recently promoted…who might conceivably attain the Full Admiralty.”
“All right then,” concluded the Admiral and I was dismissed.
In the spring of 1968 the world expected The Doors’ third album. They didn’t get it. What they got instead was a three minute sound tracked film called “The Unknown Soldier.”
The work is typical later Morrison, revealing fully his current potential. The film opens at the breakfast table, an archetypical family scene. The action switches to a California Beach, Morrison’s favorite setting. Our Hero is tied to a tree by ropes, command orders are given, and he is shot to death. After his burial, the whole world celebrates wildly, while Morrison sings hysterically on the sound track: “It’s all over, baby! The war is over!”
When the film played at the Fillmore East, a young audience brimming with anti-war frustration broke into pandemonium. “The War Is Over!” cried teenyboppers in the aisles. “The Doors ended the fucking war!” The Doors’ little passion play had grabbed the audience. Jimmy and the boys had done it again.
But what about that dead soldier? Morrison attains a bizarre duality in The Unknown Soldier. He is killed on the screen but survives triumphantly in sound. His is both victim and victor, martyr and apostle.
Unfortunately, this is a danger combination. It implies that for every part of ecstasy, we mush have one part death. You wanna end the war, boys and girls? Kill your favorite rock singer first.
For the sensitive listener, the Unknown Soldier is crude and depressing. Its juxtaposition of liberation and death is erotic heresy. Its repetitive martial strains resemble, not sophisticated rock symphonics , but the sophomoric musicality of “The Ballad Of The Green Berets.” Indeed, just at the point when one would expect The Doors to make profound contributions to the Life Force, we are presented with guns and hysteria. Has Morrison decided to saddle us with his authority hang up rather than treat us to “Nirvana Now?”
“It’s a little early to be disillusioned,” suggests Dr Albert Goldman. “But my hunch is that The Doors are stalling. And they’re slipping – as you must in this business when you stall – into the teenybopper circuit. Their audiences are getting younger. They’ll be getting more mechanically repetitive. And it may end up with Morrison sort of peeling off and becoming a movie star.
As Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature At Columbia University, Albert Goldman brings an erudition to pop culture analysis equaled only by Marshall mCLuhan. After completing a critical study of Thomas DeQuincey, the English opium eater, Goldman turned to Americana, serving as jazz critic for The New Leader. Last spring, the professor stunned the literati by writing the definitive study of Jim Morrison, accenting the demonic, solitary, and sexually ambivalent aspects of the celebrities personality.
“I worry about the militarism in the Unknown Soldier,” Goldman complains. “Morrison has an authoritarian personality. When The Doors sit down to dinner, he sits at the head of the table. I think he’s more like his father than he realizes. In the Unknown Soldier there is an inversion. Instead of the officer, he’s the deserter. But it’s the same thing.”
Not that Goldman isn’t sympathetic to Morrison’s current artistic problem. Having posed as the rebel, the vocalist now finds himself with a measure of victory. But it is difficult to transcend rebellion and it comes as no surprise to see Morrison rehashing the theme of authority rather than following through.
“The initial vision was essentially a vision of breakthrough,” Goldman recounts. “What they offered you was a coal with blue-black embers on the outside and a ferocious center leaping through. Occasionally they gash the outside of the ember and the real frenzy in the core breaks through.
“That was the spirit of their first album. That’s what got us all excited. That’s what raised all the sunken continents in everybody’s mind, you see.
“They evangelically converted everyone. Then came the moment of truth. You’ve got the world on your side. But where are you at, baby? What are you going to do about it? You made the girl love you. Now, do you love the girl? Do you want to marry her?
“At that moment they really began to go into their problem. The flip side of breakthrough is estrangement. Once you’ve broken away, it’s pretty bleak out there. The rebel cuts himself off. It’s Christ in the garden.
Goldman gets out of his Kings Highway easy chair and shuffles his grey Hindu slippers to his intricate Sony amplifier. He removes an Electra 45 from the jacket, bows his balding head, and places the recording nervously on the spindle. Tipping his red rimmed glasses back against his nose, he stands pensively in front of his mammoth electrosonic speakers. Morrison enters singing “We Could Be So Good Together,” a recent Doors release.
“You’ll notice in all his songs today,” observes the professor, “he sings like a lonely crooner. He sounds lonely, man. Soft. Blue. A little boy blue.”
I asked for Resolution.
“Listen, they only thing you can predict about these guys is that they’ll die someday,” Goldman replies sardonically. He speaks with the resignation of one who has seen them all rise and fall. “The trouble with these guys is that they stumble into art. They don’t bring the character and education of a full fledged artist into their work.”
It is a rainy day in May. Hilton Davis’ brother has run away from home, the Morrison’s are in London, and Jim Morrison is living in a motel room on Sunset Strip. Elektra says there’ll be a new, fun single out next week but fidgets nervously when you talk about the third album. The Doors aren’t satisfied.
“Groups struggle to the top,” notes Rock producer Bill Graham. “When they get there, that’s when professional attitude must take over. I look for more creative singing, more visual effects, a more professional quartet.
Yet a polished vaudeville act is hardly enough to satisfy Jungle Jim. Morrison’s out to play Metaphysical Roulette and, when you’re bitten by that bug, even the stage of the London Palladium can give you claustrophobia. Lately he’s been singing:
We’re getting tired of waiting around
Waiting around
With our heads
To the ground
We want the world and we want it
Now!
Will Morrison inherit the world? Through the memory of a strange Virginia past, the vocalist has managed to learn mysterious presence through mysterious being. But cultural leadership requires something more. Dr Goldman calls it “character and education.” S. Clark Pearlman calls it “the requisite technical knowledge.” It is gained through study, tempered by introspection. But when it is attained a man is truly prepared – in Plato’s words – “to look upwards and lead us from one world to another.”
END.
