Post by darkstar3 on Apr 12, 2011 14:53:59 GMT
What follows is a few passages from the book, "The Doors" by John Tobler and Andrea Doe. John Tobler interviewed Jim at the Isle Of Wight festival in August of 1970. John Tobler was at the time a journalist for the rock magazine, Zig Zag. This interview survives today on CD.
This "Doors" book was written in 1984 so it was published just a few short years after "No One Here Gets Out Alive."
The Doors
By: John Tobler & Andrew Doe
1984
Page 90-95
Herve Muller
“He (Jim) was drunk a lot…that’s not to say I never saw him sober, but it usually didn’t last,” a condition due to the profusion of sidewalk cafes open around the clock. It was in one of these, the Astroquet, that Phil Trainer, who later wrote a song about him called Beautiful Jim. Interestingly, Trainer failed to recognize Jim straight away, which rather contradicts Danny Sugerman’s opinion that
“He (Jim) was almost as famous in Paris as he was in Los Angeles, and he really couldn’t get away from being Jim Morrson, rock star, singer of the Doors.”
Strange, then, that an American in Paris took some time to register who he was drinking with…Herve Muller noted
“Sometimes he was recognized, sometimes not, and he didn’t really mind either way.”
Not surprisingly, the object of the Parisian trip – to concentrate on his poetry – suffered accordingly, with little, if any, new material forthcoming. In Herve Muller’s opinion:
“I don’t think he was doing anything. I didn’t have a lot to do with that side, but while he was in Paris, I don’t think he was doing much. He had his notebooks and things with him and he was making notes, but I didn’t see him working. Maybe he did, but…”
The situation had the makings of a classic vicious circle; because of the drinking the poetry suffered, which depressed Jim, some thing he fought with drink…and so on. To break out of this apparently downward spiral, Jim and Pam took a couple of longish side trips, spending three weeks in April and May touring France, Spain and Morrocco and a further ten days at the end of May in Corsica.
Jim apparently phoned back to Los Angeles twice, once to tell the Doors manager, Bill Siddons that he needed a little while longer before coming back, and once to ask John Densmore how things were going. His surprise at learning how well L.A. Woman and the singles from it were doing could well be related to Herve Muller’s recollection of Jim’s musical attitude at the time;
“He’d left the band, as far as he was concerned, at that point. That doesn’t mean he might not have recorded with them again – he wasn’t the kind of guy who would think ahead too much.”
Throughout the month of June, it appears that Jim worked in a somewhat desultory manner on his extra musical concerns; he’d brought copies of Feast Of Friends and HWY to Paris with him and tried on odd occasions to arrange screenings, but without success. As ever, there were talks concerning varied and nebulous film projects and attempts at producing something worthwhile in the poetry line, but again with little apparent success.
It wasn’t that Jim had lost interest – in fact, his last communication with the United States was a request to his publishers, asking that they drop the intended cover photograph for the paperback edition of The Lords & The New Creatures (taken in the last 1960s) and use a more recent shot – but that the words simply wouldn’t come, despite Jim’s attempts to clear his head by going on the wagon.
The last time anyone reliable, (that is anyone apart from Pam) saw Jim alive was on the evening of Friday. July 2nd, when he, Pam and Alain Ronay met for a meal close by Jim’s residence at the time. Ronay remembers Jim being exceedingly depressed and recommended a Robert Mitchum film, Pursued, knowing that Jim admired the actor. Jim apparently decided to go and see the movie, took Pam back home and set off for the cinema alone. From this point on hard facts become a rare commodity whist rumors abound…and by Monday morning, the rumors were that Jim had died at some unspecified time over the weekend. For reasons never adequately explained, it was the British national press who first broke the story, phoning Elektra Records in London for confirmation who, in turn contacted the company’s Paris offices, only to learn that Elektra, France, hadn’t even known of Jim’s presence in the city! Calls to the US Embassy and Paris police revealed that no American named Morrison had shown up at any city morgue.
In the interim. However, a couple of the UK Rock Weeklies had also called Elektra for news concerning the Morrison rumors implying that if the rock press, with their widespread and deep rooted contacts, were taking the matter seriously…
When the phone woke Bill Siddons and he’d digested the essence of the call, his initial reaction was probably, “not again”, for during the late 60s, Jim passed on with monotonous regularity almost each weekend. It had become something of a standing joke about the Doors Office, Bill greeting Jim on Monday with, “Your suppose to be dead, you know,” to which Jim’s stock reply was “Again – how’d I go this time?” Nonetheless, if a transatlantic call had been considered necessary, it might not hurt to check with the man himself, so Siddons dialed Jim’s Paris number, fully expecting to hear him at the other end. What he actually got was Pam, telling him he’d best come right over, but apparently refusing to be more explicit. The possibility of a long distance leg pull crossed his mind – Pam had never been that fond of Siddons – but he took the next available flight, reasoning that if she wanted him Paris, something had to be up.
Upon arriving on Tuesday the 6th, Siddons went straight to the flat, where he discovered Pam, a sealed coffin and a death certificate giving the cause of death as a heart attack induced by respiratory problems. The following afternoon, the coffin was interred in Pere Lachaise cemetery. On the Thursday, Siddons and Pam returned to Los Angeles and on Friday, Siddons issued a press release, detailing the events of the weekend as related to him by Pam.
According to her, Jim had returned to the flat early on Saturday morning, (presumably after seeing the movie) and, after coughing up a small amount of blood, said he felt like a bath. After dropping off to sleep, Pam woke at five, to find Him still in the bath, apparently asleep. Her initial thought that Jim was staging a black joke vanished when she failed to rouse him and called the Parisian equivalent of a para-medic unit, who apparently arrived with the police and a doctor in tow, the latter pronouncing Jim dead. That was all.
For a statement presumably designed to quash any incipient rumors that must inevitably accompany such an event, it was wholly unsuccessful, one major bone of contention being that it had taken some six days for the “official” story to be made public, ample time for a cover story to be concocted.
A glaring inconsistency is Pam’s assertion that the police were in attendance on the Saturday Jim’s death allegedly took place. That was July 3rd, yet when Elektra UK phoned the Paris police two days later, they were told that no one answering Jim’s name or description had died over the weekend. It may appear suspicious, or at the very least strange that, some forty-eight hours after Jim’s alleged time of death, his demise hadn’t been filed somewhere, especially as the police were alleged to have been involved from the beginning – but it must be remembered that, no matter where it happened, the wheels of bureaucracy tend to grind exceedingly slow. The cause of death was similarly held up for examination and generally found to be wanting. The overwhelming feeling was that the last thing Jim might die of would be either old age or a heart attack. The vague mention of a respiratory factor being a problem also baffled; true he had twice suffered from pneumonia (which apparently went untreated), but that was some two years previously and, according to those who knew him in Paris, Jim was – drinking aside – enjoying rather better health than he had for some time. Phil Trainer had observed that Jim suffered from a heavy smoker’s cough…but then so do many people in worse shape than Jim was but they didn’t croak in the bath.
The lack of an autopsy – strange in the case of so sudden and apparently unexpected a demise – and the continuing anonymity of the attending doctor also serve to raise the collective eyebrow at the ‘Official’ account. Needless to say, underground rumors abounded, some – if not most – of which strained creditability to its limits.
One however, holds water better than most and supposes that Jim, either instead of, or after, seeing the movie Ronay suggested, visited the Circus, a Paris club where he had become a regular, which also doubled as a the local heroin center, and accidentally overdosed on the drug in an effort to shake off his increasing depression.
A flaw in this notion is that it’s highly unlikely that Jim injected the drug as he had an almost pathological fear of hypodermic needles. On the other hand, if he’d snorted the drug and had been drinking ( a not unlikely supposition), the facts fit. The quantity of ingested heroin reckoned to be lethal is considerably lowered by the presence of alcohol in the bloodstream, the two drugs combining to knock out the nervous and breathing mechanisms to bring about a quick and pain free death…and a bath is the usual place for the attempted revival of a heroin overdose, though why is something of a poser; there appears to be no sound medical reason for such treatment. Another generally accepted rumor is that Pam wasn’t with Jim that weekend and only discovered him when she returned on the Monday; this is more plausible as it accounts for the delay in issuing the statement and the inconsistencies therein.
The fact of the matter is that no-one can be certain how Jim died; as Herve Muller says:
“There’s a mystery about the way he died, but there’s no mystery about his being dead.”
This second observation moves the Morrison Death Mystery into its secondary and less believable phase, the one that holds that Jim isn’t dead but had staged everything in order to drop out of being a public figure. The central piece of evidence for this theory is the admittedly undeniable fact that nobody who can be traced actually saw the body, nor does it appear that any accounts of what happened to Jim’s corpse over the weekend (assuming he did die on the Saturday), have come to light. This, however, tends to throw more doubt on his time of death than anything else, but he must have been kept in reasonably cold conditions somewhere and, if Pam is to believed over the police presence, the police morgue would be the logical answer…But there’s apparently no record.
***One ingenious theory, put forward by a noted rock writer who should really know better, postulated that Jim had dropped out of sight in order to let any statue of limitations pertaining to the Miami trial expire, after which time he would return a free man and pick up the threads (and royalties…). The surviving Doors have always presented a unified front when questioned and a 1977 interview with John outlines the “party-line” as neatly as any;
“I saw Pamela a few months afterwards and when I looked into her eyes I felt pretty much that Jim was dead…on the other had, he’s just about the only person I’ve met in my whole life who was wild enough to pull a fast one like that – he was wild enough to go the Greek Islands and not tell anybody.”
Except Pam, of course, for if there was any plot to vanish she must have been party to it. As she succumbed to a fatal overdose herself in the spring of 1974, having said nothing decisive one way or the other, the possibility is always there, however faint. There is however, one tiny thing, she said which could be used to counter the “still alive” protagonists.
“Jim’s spirit often left his body and he returned from magical cities with strange tales to tell”, she said, the added, “This time he didn’t come back…that’s all.”
Needless to say, there have been sightings of “Jim” down the years, centering in the main around San Francisco and, as John noted, the Greek Islands. There’s the story of “Jim” suddenly appearing at the doorstep of an obscure Mid West radio station in the dead of night and doing a long interview explaining it all before vanishing into the darkness again. Needless to say, no tapes were made and no-one can remember hearing the show, hence the whole tale has a more than dubious ring to it…
There’s Phantoms Divine Comedy, an LP released in 1974 on Capital Records with the enigmatic credits “drums & percussion, X: bass, Y & W; piano & Organ, Z: vocals, guitar and piano, Phantom”. The front slick was an out of focus color negative shot which suggested that if it was Jim, he’d had radical bone surgery on his cheeks. Certainly, the vocal on the first song was close enough to make even a skeptic think twice, but those claiming it was Jim obviously hadn’t listened any further, for the voice soon assumes the tone and phrasing of any competent American hard rock vocalist.
Perhaps the most interesting point about this bizarre release is that never once was it claimed by anyone actually connected with the disc that it was Jim; it was just released and the listeners made up their own minds.
When someone attains Jim’s popularity and notoriety, there will always be those who will elevate the object of their adulation above mere mortal status.
The only answer is open the grave at Pere Lachaise with a copy of Jim’s dental charts to hand. Until then, there will always be adherents to the “he’s still around” cause but taking into account all the evidence, facts and plausible rumors, there’s little doubt there was a body in the coffin interred on July 7th, 1971, in Paris and equally little doubt that the body was that of James Douglas Morrison, would be film maker, published poet, on his night an amazing front man and, ultimately, one of a string of rock n roll causalities.
The Doors
By: John Tobler & Andrew Doe
1984
Page 97-98
Ray Manzarek (1971)
“The important thing was always music, and there were so many things fighting against it that we decided to…quit for a while, lay low. Jim was fed up with everything and just wanted to go away and write. So effectively, by the time he went to Paris, the Doors were not talking in group terms anymore…we were kinda all tired of being Doors.”
Page 111
1977 – The first album from Nite City.
Of the nine songs (including one instrumental by Ray which would have fitted nicely on The Golden Scarab), the most interesting – though not in strictly musical terms – was Angel W/ No Freedom, a track which immediately attracted the attention of Morrison fanatics as a possible clue to Jim’s death. Admittedly, the lyric is sufficiently vague to allow such an interpretation, with reference to a “wild child” and the final line, “Heroin killed my best friend” supplying apparent confirmation of the most widely excepted “means of death” rumor, but the overall impression is either of some wishful thinking on the fans’ behalf, or someone having a somewhat cheap joke – and with Ray and Danny Sugerman involved, the latter seems most improbable.
END.
This "Doors" book was written in 1984 so it was published just a few short years after "No One Here Gets Out Alive."
The Doors
By: John Tobler & Andrew Doe
1984
Page 90-95
Herve Muller
“He (Jim) was drunk a lot…that’s not to say I never saw him sober, but it usually didn’t last,” a condition due to the profusion of sidewalk cafes open around the clock. It was in one of these, the Astroquet, that Phil Trainer, who later wrote a song about him called Beautiful Jim. Interestingly, Trainer failed to recognize Jim straight away, which rather contradicts Danny Sugerman’s opinion that
“He (Jim) was almost as famous in Paris as he was in Los Angeles, and he really couldn’t get away from being Jim Morrson, rock star, singer of the Doors.”
Strange, then, that an American in Paris took some time to register who he was drinking with…Herve Muller noted
“Sometimes he was recognized, sometimes not, and he didn’t really mind either way.”
Not surprisingly, the object of the Parisian trip – to concentrate on his poetry – suffered accordingly, with little, if any, new material forthcoming. In Herve Muller’s opinion:
“I don’t think he was doing anything. I didn’t have a lot to do with that side, but while he was in Paris, I don’t think he was doing much. He had his notebooks and things with him and he was making notes, but I didn’t see him working. Maybe he did, but…”
The situation had the makings of a classic vicious circle; because of the drinking the poetry suffered, which depressed Jim, some thing he fought with drink…and so on. To break out of this apparently downward spiral, Jim and Pam took a couple of longish side trips, spending three weeks in April and May touring France, Spain and Morrocco and a further ten days at the end of May in Corsica.
Jim apparently phoned back to Los Angeles twice, once to tell the Doors manager, Bill Siddons that he needed a little while longer before coming back, and once to ask John Densmore how things were going. His surprise at learning how well L.A. Woman and the singles from it were doing could well be related to Herve Muller’s recollection of Jim’s musical attitude at the time;
“He’d left the band, as far as he was concerned, at that point. That doesn’t mean he might not have recorded with them again – he wasn’t the kind of guy who would think ahead too much.”
Throughout the month of June, it appears that Jim worked in a somewhat desultory manner on his extra musical concerns; he’d brought copies of Feast Of Friends and HWY to Paris with him and tried on odd occasions to arrange screenings, but without success. As ever, there were talks concerning varied and nebulous film projects and attempts at producing something worthwhile in the poetry line, but again with little apparent success.
It wasn’t that Jim had lost interest – in fact, his last communication with the United States was a request to his publishers, asking that they drop the intended cover photograph for the paperback edition of The Lords & The New Creatures (taken in the last 1960s) and use a more recent shot – but that the words simply wouldn’t come, despite Jim’s attempts to clear his head by going on the wagon.
The last time anyone reliable, (that is anyone apart from Pam) saw Jim alive was on the evening of Friday. July 2nd, when he, Pam and Alain Ronay met for a meal close by Jim’s residence at the time. Ronay remembers Jim being exceedingly depressed and recommended a Robert Mitchum film, Pursued, knowing that Jim admired the actor. Jim apparently decided to go and see the movie, took Pam back home and set off for the cinema alone. From this point on hard facts become a rare commodity whist rumors abound…and by Monday morning, the rumors were that Jim had died at some unspecified time over the weekend. For reasons never adequately explained, it was the British national press who first broke the story, phoning Elektra Records in London for confirmation who, in turn contacted the company’s Paris offices, only to learn that Elektra, France, hadn’t even known of Jim’s presence in the city! Calls to the US Embassy and Paris police revealed that no American named Morrison had shown up at any city morgue.
In the interim. However, a couple of the UK Rock Weeklies had also called Elektra for news concerning the Morrison rumors implying that if the rock press, with their widespread and deep rooted contacts, were taking the matter seriously…
When the phone woke Bill Siddons and he’d digested the essence of the call, his initial reaction was probably, “not again”, for during the late 60s, Jim passed on with monotonous regularity almost each weekend. It had become something of a standing joke about the Doors Office, Bill greeting Jim on Monday with, “Your suppose to be dead, you know,” to which Jim’s stock reply was “Again – how’d I go this time?” Nonetheless, if a transatlantic call had been considered necessary, it might not hurt to check with the man himself, so Siddons dialed Jim’s Paris number, fully expecting to hear him at the other end. What he actually got was Pam, telling him he’d best come right over, but apparently refusing to be more explicit. The possibility of a long distance leg pull crossed his mind – Pam had never been that fond of Siddons – but he took the next available flight, reasoning that if she wanted him Paris, something had to be up.
Upon arriving on Tuesday the 6th, Siddons went straight to the flat, where he discovered Pam, a sealed coffin and a death certificate giving the cause of death as a heart attack induced by respiratory problems. The following afternoon, the coffin was interred in Pere Lachaise cemetery. On the Thursday, Siddons and Pam returned to Los Angeles and on Friday, Siddons issued a press release, detailing the events of the weekend as related to him by Pam.
According to her, Jim had returned to the flat early on Saturday morning, (presumably after seeing the movie) and, after coughing up a small amount of blood, said he felt like a bath. After dropping off to sleep, Pam woke at five, to find Him still in the bath, apparently asleep. Her initial thought that Jim was staging a black joke vanished when she failed to rouse him and called the Parisian equivalent of a para-medic unit, who apparently arrived with the police and a doctor in tow, the latter pronouncing Jim dead. That was all.
For a statement presumably designed to quash any incipient rumors that must inevitably accompany such an event, it was wholly unsuccessful, one major bone of contention being that it had taken some six days for the “official” story to be made public, ample time for a cover story to be concocted.
A glaring inconsistency is Pam’s assertion that the police were in attendance on the Saturday Jim’s death allegedly took place. That was July 3rd, yet when Elektra UK phoned the Paris police two days later, they were told that no one answering Jim’s name or description had died over the weekend. It may appear suspicious, or at the very least strange that, some forty-eight hours after Jim’s alleged time of death, his demise hadn’t been filed somewhere, especially as the police were alleged to have been involved from the beginning – but it must be remembered that, no matter where it happened, the wheels of bureaucracy tend to grind exceedingly slow. The cause of death was similarly held up for examination and generally found to be wanting. The overwhelming feeling was that the last thing Jim might die of would be either old age or a heart attack. The vague mention of a respiratory factor being a problem also baffled; true he had twice suffered from pneumonia (which apparently went untreated), but that was some two years previously and, according to those who knew him in Paris, Jim was – drinking aside – enjoying rather better health than he had for some time. Phil Trainer had observed that Jim suffered from a heavy smoker’s cough…but then so do many people in worse shape than Jim was but they didn’t croak in the bath.
The lack of an autopsy – strange in the case of so sudden and apparently unexpected a demise – and the continuing anonymity of the attending doctor also serve to raise the collective eyebrow at the ‘Official’ account. Needless to say, underground rumors abounded, some – if not most – of which strained creditability to its limits.
One however, holds water better than most and supposes that Jim, either instead of, or after, seeing the movie Ronay suggested, visited the Circus, a Paris club where he had become a regular, which also doubled as a the local heroin center, and accidentally overdosed on the drug in an effort to shake off his increasing depression.
A flaw in this notion is that it’s highly unlikely that Jim injected the drug as he had an almost pathological fear of hypodermic needles. On the other hand, if he’d snorted the drug and had been drinking ( a not unlikely supposition), the facts fit. The quantity of ingested heroin reckoned to be lethal is considerably lowered by the presence of alcohol in the bloodstream, the two drugs combining to knock out the nervous and breathing mechanisms to bring about a quick and pain free death…and a bath is the usual place for the attempted revival of a heroin overdose, though why is something of a poser; there appears to be no sound medical reason for such treatment. Another generally accepted rumor is that Pam wasn’t with Jim that weekend and only discovered him when she returned on the Monday; this is more plausible as it accounts for the delay in issuing the statement and the inconsistencies therein.
The fact of the matter is that no-one can be certain how Jim died; as Herve Muller says:
“There’s a mystery about the way he died, but there’s no mystery about his being dead.”
This second observation moves the Morrison Death Mystery into its secondary and less believable phase, the one that holds that Jim isn’t dead but had staged everything in order to drop out of being a public figure. The central piece of evidence for this theory is the admittedly undeniable fact that nobody who can be traced actually saw the body, nor does it appear that any accounts of what happened to Jim’s corpse over the weekend (assuming he did die on the Saturday), have come to light. This, however, tends to throw more doubt on his time of death than anything else, but he must have been kept in reasonably cold conditions somewhere and, if Pam is to believed over the police presence, the police morgue would be the logical answer…But there’s apparently no record.
***One ingenious theory, put forward by a noted rock writer who should really know better, postulated that Jim had dropped out of sight in order to let any statue of limitations pertaining to the Miami trial expire, after which time he would return a free man and pick up the threads (and royalties…). The surviving Doors have always presented a unified front when questioned and a 1977 interview with John outlines the “party-line” as neatly as any;
“I saw Pamela a few months afterwards and when I looked into her eyes I felt pretty much that Jim was dead…on the other had, he’s just about the only person I’ve met in my whole life who was wild enough to pull a fast one like that – he was wild enough to go the Greek Islands and not tell anybody.”
Except Pam, of course, for if there was any plot to vanish she must have been party to it. As she succumbed to a fatal overdose herself in the spring of 1974, having said nothing decisive one way or the other, the possibility is always there, however faint. There is however, one tiny thing, she said which could be used to counter the “still alive” protagonists.
“Jim’s spirit often left his body and he returned from magical cities with strange tales to tell”, she said, the added, “This time he didn’t come back…that’s all.”
Needless to say, there have been sightings of “Jim” down the years, centering in the main around San Francisco and, as John noted, the Greek Islands. There’s the story of “Jim” suddenly appearing at the doorstep of an obscure Mid West radio station in the dead of night and doing a long interview explaining it all before vanishing into the darkness again. Needless to say, no tapes were made and no-one can remember hearing the show, hence the whole tale has a more than dubious ring to it…
There’s Phantoms Divine Comedy, an LP released in 1974 on Capital Records with the enigmatic credits “drums & percussion, X: bass, Y & W; piano & Organ, Z: vocals, guitar and piano, Phantom”. The front slick was an out of focus color negative shot which suggested that if it was Jim, he’d had radical bone surgery on his cheeks. Certainly, the vocal on the first song was close enough to make even a skeptic think twice, but those claiming it was Jim obviously hadn’t listened any further, for the voice soon assumes the tone and phrasing of any competent American hard rock vocalist.
Perhaps the most interesting point about this bizarre release is that never once was it claimed by anyone actually connected with the disc that it was Jim; it was just released and the listeners made up their own minds.
When someone attains Jim’s popularity and notoriety, there will always be those who will elevate the object of their adulation above mere mortal status.
The only answer is open the grave at Pere Lachaise with a copy of Jim’s dental charts to hand. Until then, there will always be adherents to the “he’s still around” cause but taking into account all the evidence, facts and plausible rumors, there’s little doubt there was a body in the coffin interred on July 7th, 1971, in Paris and equally little doubt that the body was that of James Douglas Morrison, would be film maker, published poet, on his night an amazing front man and, ultimately, one of a string of rock n roll causalities.
The Doors
By: John Tobler & Andrew Doe
1984
Page 97-98
Ray Manzarek (1971)
“The important thing was always music, and there were so many things fighting against it that we decided to…quit for a while, lay low. Jim was fed up with everything and just wanted to go away and write. So effectively, by the time he went to Paris, the Doors were not talking in group terms anymore…we were kinda all tired of being Doors.”
Page 111
1977 – The first album from Nite City.
Of the nine songs (including one instrumental by Ray which would have fitted nicely on The Golden Scarab), the most interesting – though not in strictly musical terms – was Angel W/ No Freedom, a track which immediately attracted the attention of Morrison fanatics as a possible clue to Jim’s death. Admittedly, the lyric is sufficiently vague to allow such an interpretation, with reference to a “wild child” and the final line, “Heroin killed my best friend” supplying apparent confirmation of the most widely excepted “means of death” rumor, but the overall impression is either of some wishful thinking on the fans’ behalf, or someone having a somewhat cheap joke – and with Ray and Danny Sugerman involved, the latter seems most improbable.
END.