Post by darkstar3 on Jun 10, 2011 18:55:38 GMT
Ben Fong Torres Interview With Jim Morrison
February 1971
Audio
01 - A conversation with Jim Morrison
www.youtube.com/watch?v=clrpcZ6IfXE
02 - A conversation with Jim Morrison
www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFcruql2zNE
03 - A conversation with Jim Morrison
www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNfIx5GJH84
04 - A conversation with Jim Morrison
www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJ2TmWcPdGY
05 - A conversation with Jim Morrison
www.youtube.com/watch?v=71-dR5go2KE
Tone Audio Magazine
The E-Journal Of Analog and Digital Sound
No.16 - 2008
More On The Doors: Ben Fong-Torres and The Last Interview With Jim Morrison
It’s been said – Oh, all right, I’ve said it myself once or twice – that I was the last American journalist to interview Jim Morrison before he took off to Paris, on March 12th 1971, to join his girlfriend, Pam Courson, who’d found a spacious Beaux Arts apartment for them in the lower Marais district. And it was there, in the early morning hours of July 3rd, that he died at age 27.
I do know that no other reporter – American or otherwise – has claimed to have spoken with him before he left, or in the three months he spent in and around Paris.
But I didn’t exactly interview him. We did talk, for more than an hour, and I got to know him a little. But I hadn’t planned on it, and it was only out of habit that I turned on a tape recorder, captured our visit, and turned part of it into a short news item for Rolling Stone.
Here’s what happened.
One afternoon in February, I was hanging out with Diane Gardner in her apartment in West Hollywood. Diane worked for a big PR company, and her specialty was rock. Her clients included Jefferson Airplane and the Doors. Coincidentally, her apartment was just downstairs from Pam Courson’s, and they were buddies.
There was a rap on the door. It was Jim Morrison, and was looking for Pam. She wasn’t home, Diane said, and invited Jim to stick around and wait for her.
I hadn’t met Morrison before – Our L.A. correspondent, Jerry Hopkins, had done most of our coverage of the band – and I didn’t know much about what was going on with the Doors, aside from the fact that they were working on the album that would become L.A. Woman, and some gossip that he was heading for France. With his full beard and the beginnings of a beer belly, he didn’t look much like the rock star of old. Almost reflexively, I invited him to chat, perhaps for an article. We hit it off right away; even got into this parody of a TV talk show. I played the part of Dick Cavett, who had a show on ABC, opposite Johnny Carson Jim played – well, a rock star named Jim Morrison.
We set up a couple of chairs. No sooner did Jim sit down than he told an obscene joke that would’ve knocked Cavett right off the air.
But, soon, we settled into a pretty sober conversation – or reasonably sober, considering that, about 15 minutes into it, when Pam showed up, he got up and ordered gin and potato chips from a nearby store. We continued our chat, and Pam joined in too. Despite his reputation as a wild man, and his busts for obscenity and for exposing himself on stage in Miami, Morrison had struck me, in interviews, as an intelligent, thoughtful guy who just happened to be at home on the stage.
Here, in a modest apartment in West Hollywood, on the eve of leaving the country, he lived up to my expectations. He was reasoned. He was realistic about rock, and about ebbs and flows of fan worship. He was relaxed.
And hey why not? We were just doing a TV talk show.
Here are a few excerpts:
How much longer do you have with Elektra?
Well, we’re at work on our last album for them.
Do you see far beyond that?
I can’t see too much beyond that. You know, it’s a day-to-day thing. I think with this album we’re kind of at a crossroads in our career. So, we’ll know within the next five or six months what the future will be.
What’s in the immediate future? Any concerts?
No, were kind of off playing concerts; somehow no one enjoys the big places anymore, and to go into clubs more than just a night every now and then is kind of meaningless.
A few years ago, we were probably right on for the age of people who would go to large concerts, whereas now we may appeal to an older audience, maybe still the Fillmore crowds. But I would say it would be an anachronism for the younger people.
Do you think you’d be classified among the young people who signify what some people insist is the “death of rock”?
Well, I was saying rock is dead years ago. Twenty or thirty years ago, jazz was the kind of music people went to, and large crowds danced to, and moved around to. And then rock and roll replaced that, and then another generation came along in a few years, swarm together, and have a new name for it. It’ll be the kind of music that people like to go out and get it on to.
Each generation wants new symbols, new people, and new names. They want to divorce themselves from the preceding generation, and so they won’t call it rock, they’ll invent some new name for it.
How about Miami? Will that whole thing affect whether you’ll play any more concerts?
I think that was the culmination, in a way, of our mass performing career. Subconsciously, I think I was trying to get across in that concert – I was trying to reduce it to absurdity, and it worked too well.
When did it stop getting to be fun?
I think there is a certain moment when you’re right in time with your audience, and then you both grow out of it and you both have to realize it; It’s not that you’ve outgrown your audience; it has to go on to something else.
You see blues fitting in with this?
No. It’s just getting back to more of what we enjoy. What we actually, personally enjoy. Not that we’ve ever played music that we didn’t like. When we were playing clubs, I’d say over half of what we did was blues, and we used our own material on records, but I think the most exciting things we did were basic blues. I like them mainly cause they’re fun to sing.
(While Jim was on the phone ordering refreshments, Diane, Pamela and I chatted.)
Why have you gotten fat, Jim? That was the question we were discussing.
Pamela: Who says he’s fat! I like it.
Jim: I guess it’s just a natural aging process…Maybe it’s not being as physically active. I think it’s mainly just filling out. Some people have that kind of build.
Does touring and running around doing a lot and sweating make you lose a lot of weight?
Jim: I would say if you performed a lot and sweated a lot and moved around.
Pam: It’s mainly drinking.
Jim: I drink a lot of beer. While I’m recording, especially. If you drink hard liquor when you’re recording pretty soon you’re so out of it, you can’t do anything anymore. But beer – it gives you a little energy and you can keep going all night. Beer puts on the pounds.
What did you do in Miami during your spare time? Weren’t you sort of captive in the city?
Jim: Yeah, sometimes it would be two days, sometimes three days a week. I had a chance to do a little water skiing. I learned how to scuba dive. I went to Nassau for a weekend. They have beautiful underwater natural parks. Have you ever scuba dived? It’s a beautiful trip. You’re just floating. It’s an intrauterine experience.
One thing I was interested to observe: Every day we would rush home to watch ourselves on TV; they couldn’t film in the courtroom, but going and leaving they’d film it, and we’d hear the reporters views of what happened.
The first few days it was kinda the old-line policy, what people had been thinking for a year and a half, but as the trial wore on, the reporters themselves, from just talking to me and the people involved in the case – the tone of the news articles – and even the papers – became a little more objective as each day went on.
(Later, the talk turned to the Beatles. Jim had been reading Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner’s two part interview with John Lennon.)
Jim: In a way, we came along at a weird time, at the tail end of the rock revival from England. You know, they’d already done it. I think it was the success of those English groups that gave hope to a lot of musicians over here, saying, “Sheee-it, we can do the same thing!”
And so they did. The shock is how long they managed to do it for, considering Morrison was acting up and out even before they finished their first album.
But when Jim told me that he didn’t see much beyond L.A. Woman, and that he felt done with touring, it was news to the rest of the band – keyboardist Ray Manzarek, guitarist Robby Krieger, and drummer John Densmore.
As Manzarek told me for my book, The Doors By The Doors, the three of them stayed busy while Morrison was in Paris. “Robby and I and John are working on songs,” he said, “getting together and rehearsing two times a week. Nobody’s heard from Jim.”
In the end, Morrison had the last word – without even having to say anything.
END.
Read more: newdoorstalk.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=calendarview&thread=1327#ixzz1Otv4rsDK
JIM MORRISON
By: Ben Fong-Torress
Date Unknown
When I bumped into Jim Morrison in West Hollywood in early 1971, I had no idea that we’d wind up doing the last interview he’d ever give to an American publication.
The bump-in took place at an apartment building where a publicist friend, Diane Gardiner, lived. One of her neighbors was Pamela Courson, who, despite Morrison’s liaisons with various other women, considered herself his main companion. One February afternoon, Jim came by, looking for Pamela. She wasn’t home, so he came downstairs to Gardiner’s apartment, where I was visiting.
I hadn’t met Morrison before, and soon after Diane introduced us, I asked for an interview. He had nothing better to do, he said, and I grabbed my cassette recorder.
And then things got weird. For some reason, he was feeling playful. Having done no research, and with no questions in mind, I was happy to play along. We decided to pretend as though we were doing a talk show on TV, and he kicked things off with a decidedly lewd riddle or two.
While he joked, I searched through my memory for the latest news on Morrison’s never-dull life, and we settled into a pretty serious interview. He got into it enough that when Pamela showed up, he continued with our conversation, one that turned out to be his last with the press before he left, in March, for Paris.
Four months after settling into Paris with Pamela, Jim Morrison died, and I was dispatched to Hollywood to write his obituary. A few non-stop days and nights later, the article was complete, except for a headline. Jim had considered himself as serious a poet as he was a rock musician and stage performer. By and large, his poetic interests had been dismissed. In fact, one reason Morrison gave for going to France was that the people there would give him his poetic due.
That’s why the headline on Page One of our 88th issue, dated August 5, 1971, read: James Douglas Morrison, Poet: Dead at 27.
benfongtorres.com/my_back_pages_2.html
Jim Morrison: Last Meeting With a Fallen Star
Ben Fong-Torres
San Francisco Chronicle
1991
Near the end of his 27-year life, was Jim Morrison – as depicted in Oliver Stone's new movie, The Doors – a fat, abusive, alcoholic, drugged-out, deluded, self-obsessed, self-destructive, humorless, haunted, wasted, washed-up symbol of the death of rock 'n' roll?
The first and last time I visited with Morrison, he was, and he wasn't.
Certainly, he was either slowing down, or he was weighed down.
His band was in decline; bookings had fallen off sharply since his arrest for indecent exposure at a concert in Miami in 1969; and he'd been mired in that trial for nearly two years. And when I saw him in early spring of 1971, he'd been convicted and was out on bail while his case was being appealed. The Doors were still working on an album, but Morrison was thinking about the next stage of his life. If he could snake out of his six-month jail sentence, he was going to Paris, where he'd pursue two longtime interests: poetry and film making.
I happened onto him because his common-law wife, Pamela Courson, knew and lived near a friend of mine, Jefferson Airplane publicist Diane Gardiner, in West Hollywood.
As a writer for Rolling Stone magazine, one of my jobs was to hang out, and that's what I was doing with Gardiner and Earl McGrath, a Rolling Stones associate-turned-screenwriter, when Morrison bounded into her apartment. He was looking for Pamela. We said hello and, of course, I asked for an interview. Once he figured out Pamela wasn't around, he agreed.
He had aged dramatically since his arrest. At 27, his face's sometimes pouty, girlish beauty had given way to a full, dark, leonine beard, and he'd begun to build a paunch.
This afternoon, he seemed to be in a silly mood. Used to toying with the media, he fell into a talk-show rhythm. I'd be Dick Cavett, he decided; he'd be Jim Morrison. And with Gardiner and McGrath serving as the studio audience, he began by asking a riddle that would never have made it on network television. Something about a women's track team.
And then we settled down, and in the course of an hour or so of serious talk, he spoke at first about his bust.
"I think that was the culmination of our mass performing career," he said. "Subconsciously, I think I was trying to reduce it to absurdity, and it worked too well."
Early on, he said, he had hoped to turn his trial – he was charged with lascivious behavior (a felony), profanity, simulating masturbation and public drunkenness – into a freedom-of-speech issue. As his lawyer argued, there was nudity in the film of the Woodstock Festival; there was frontal nudity in Hair. His actions on stage in Miami, he said, amounted to "a theatrical performance." The judge didn't see it that way.
The Doors Would Split
Morrison expected that, after a couple more albums, the Doors would split and he would work in films.
"I'd like to write and direct a film of my own," he said. "There's one that's all in my head. But I have a film I made, called Hiway, that hasn't been seen very much."
I reminded him that San Francisco hadn't been very kind to it. He offered a tight smile.
"Feast of Friends (a self-produced 40-minute documentary of life on stage, on the road, and on vacation) was shown there a year or so ago to a lot of boos," Morrison said. "I think they were reacting to personalities rather than film...."
The 15-minute Hiway, he said, "was more poetic, more of an exercise for me, kind of a warm-up. There's no story in it. Just a hitchhiker who steals a car and drives into town and checks into a motel or something, and it just kind of ends like that."
Morrison talked about getting back to the blues – the kind of music the early Doors used to play in clubs – and about poetry, about how his calling himself the "Lizard King" was actually "half tongue-in-cheek."
"I just thought everyone knew it was ironic, but apparently they thought I was mad!"
I liked Morrison. Whatever his excesses, they were moderated that spring day, and he seemed more self-deprecating than destructive.
He No Longer Dazzled
He was no longer the rock star who dazzled me one night at the Berkeley Community Theater in 1967 – I remember thinking that he'd single-handedly taken rock 'n' roll and turned it into theater. He had now traversed to the edge of self-parody. But he was still the man who gave us some of the greatest songs we ever danced to – or puzzled over.
We shook hands, and, taking his leave, he invited me to come and see him in Paris sometime.
Death makes angels of us all
and gives us wings
where we had shoulders
smooth as raven's claws
– Jim Morrison, ‘An American Prayer’
A month after our chat, Morrison, having finished his last album with the Doors, L.A. Woman, left with Pamela for Paris, and in July I wrote my next story about him. It was his obituary.
I ended it with quotes from two close friends of his, Frank Lisciandro, a film maker, and his wife, Kathy, once Morrison's secretary.
"He expected to live a long time, even if he was self-destructive," Frank explained. His wife said, "He'd be surprised to find out he was dead at age 27."
Nine years later, I finally got to Paris, where Morrison was buried in one of the world's most famous cemeteries, Pere-Lachaise, final stop for Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, Frederic Chopin and Edith Piaf.
By 1980, Morrison was riding a new wave of popularity. Books, videos, proposed movies and the inspired use of Morrison's disturbingly provocative ‘The End’ in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now thrust the Doors back into the public eye.
A Silent Vigil
After wandering around lost for a half-hour in the 100-square block cemetery, a young fan with a map led our party to Morrison's burial site. Graffiti – all about Jim – littered nearby headstones and monuments, and at his grave, a dozen young people stood and sat around silently.
Morrison's grave, a concrete-framed plot of dirt, had no headstone – whenever someone tried to install one, it'd be stolen – but surrounding graffiti left no doubts about who was buried here. As I took notes – "I LOVE YOU JIM"..."JIM IS NOT DEAD" – a young man pointed to a spray-painted exclamation: "God doesn't exist but JIM will exist FOREVER!"
"People here in France thought he was crazy," he told me, "but you Americans understood."
As with everything about Jim Morrison, it wasn't that simple. We understood, and we didn't.
END.
February 1971
Audio
01 - A conversation with Jim Morrison
www.youtube.com/watch?v=clrpcZ6IfXE
02 - A conversation with Jim Morrison
www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFcruql2zNE
03 - A conversation with Jim Morrison
www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNfIx5GJH84
04 - A conversation with Jim Morrison
www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJ2TmWcPdGY
05 - A conversation with Jim Morrison
www.youtube.com/watch?v=71-dR5go2KE
Tone Audio Magazine
The E-Journal Of Analog and Digital Sound
No.16 - 2008
More On The Doors: Ben Fong-Torres and The Last Interview With Jim Morrison
It’s been said – Oh, all right, I’ve said it myself once or twice – that I was the last American journalist to interview Jim Morrison before he took off to Paris, on March 12th 1971, to join his girlfriend, Pam Courson, who’d found a spacious Beaux Arts apartment for them in the lower Marais district. And it was there, in the early morning hours of July 3rd, that he died at age 27.
I do know that no other reporter – American or otherwise – has claimed to have spoken with him before he left, or in the three months he spent in and around Paris.
But I didn’t exactly interview him. We did talk, for more than an hour, and I got to know him a little. But I hadn’t planned on it, and it was only out of habit that I turned on a tape recorder, captured our visit, and turned part of it into a short news item for Rolling Stone.
Here’s what happened.
One afternoon in February, I was hanging out with Diane Gardner in her apartment in West Hollywood. Diane worked for a big PR company, and her specialty was rock. Her clients included Jefferson Airplane and the Doors. Coincidentally, her apartment was just downstairs from Pam Courson’s, and they were buddies.
There was a rap on the door. It was Jim Morrison, and was looking for Pam. She wasn’t home, Diane said, and invited Jim to stick around and wait for her.
I hadn’t met Morrison before – Our L.A. correspondent, Jerry Hopkins, had done most of our coverage of the band – and I didn’t know much about what was going on with the Doors, aside from the fact that they were working on the album that would become L.A. Woman, and some gossip that he was heading for France. With his full beard and the beginnings of a beer belly, he didn’t look much like the rock star of old. Almost reflexively, I invited him to chat, perhaps for an article. We hit it off right away; even got into this parody of a TV talk show. I played the part of Dick Cavett, who had a show on ABC, opposite Johnny Carson Jim played – well, a rock star named Jim Morrison.
We set up a couple of chairs. No sooner did Jim sit down than he told an obscene joke that would’ve knocked Cavett right off the air.
But, soon, we settled into a pretty sober conversation – or reasonably sober, considering that, about 15 minutes into it, when Pam showed up, he got up and ordered gin and potato chips from a nearby store. We continued our chat, and Pam joined in too. Despite his reputation as a wild man, and his busts for obscenity and for exposing himself on stage in Miami, Morrison had struck me, in interviews, as an intelligent, thoughtful guy who just happened to be at home on the stage.
Here, in a modest apartment in West Hollywood, on the eve of leaving the country, he lived up to my expectations. He was reasoned. He was realistic about rock, and about ebbs and flows of fan worship. He was relaxed.
And hey why not? We were just doing a TV talk show.
Here are a few excerpts:
How much longer do you have with Elektra?
Well, we’re at work on our last album for them.
Do you see far beyond that?
I can’t see too much beyond that. You know, it’s a day-to-day thing. I think with this album we’re kind of at a crossroads in our career. So, we’ll know within the next five or six months what the future will be.
What’s in the immediate future? Any concerts?
No, were kind of off playing concerts; somehow no one enjoys the big places anymore, and to go into clubs more than just a night every now and then is kind of meaningless.
A few years ago, we were probably right on for the age of people who would go to large concerts, whereas now we may appeal to an older audience, maybe still the Fillmore crowds. But I would say it would be an anachronism for the younger people.
Do you think you’d be classified among the young people who signify what some people insist is the “death of rock”?
Well, I was saying rock is dead years ago. Twenty or thirty years ago, jazz was the kind of music people went to, and large crowds danced to, and moved around to. And then rock and roll replaced that, and then another generation came along in a few years, swarm together, and have a new name for it. It’ll be the kind of music that people like to go out and get it on to.
Each generation wants new symbols, new people, and new names. They want to divorce themselves from the preceding generation, and so they won’t call it rock, they’ll invent some new name for it.
How about Miami? Will that whole thing affect whether you’ll play any more concerts?
I think that was the culmination, in a way, of our mass performing career. Subconsciously, I think I was trying to get across in that concert – I was trying to reduce it to absurdity, and it worked too well.
When did it stop getting to be fun?
I think there is a certain moment when you’re right in time with your audience, and then you both grow out of it and you both have to realize it; It’s not that you’ve outgrown your audience; it has to go on to something else.
You see blues fitting in with this?
No. It’s just getting back to more of what we enjoy. What we actually, personally enjoy. Not that we’ve ever played music that we didn’t like. When we were playing clubs, I’d say over half of what we did was blues, and we used our own material on records, but I think the most exciting things we did were basic blues. I like them mainly cause they’re fun to sing.
(While Jim was on the phone ordering refreshments, Diane, Pamela and I chatted.)
Why have you gotten fat, Jim? That was the question we were discussing.
Pamela: Who says he’s fat! I like it.
Jim: I guess it’s just a natural aging process…Maybe it’s not being as physically active. I think it’s mainly just filling out. Some people have that kind of build.
Does touring and running around doing a lot and sweating make you lose a lot of weight?
Jim: I would say if you performed a lot and sweated a lot and moved around.
Pam: It’s mainly drinking.
Jim: I drink a lot of beer. While I’m recording, especially. If you drink hard liquor when you’re recording pretty soon you’re so out of it, you can’t do anything anymore. But beer – it gives you a little energy and you can keep going all night. Beer puts on the pounds.
What did you do in Miami during your spare time? Weren’t you sort of captive in the city?
Jim: Yeah, sometimes it would be two days, sometimes three days a week. I had a chance to do a little water skiing. I learned how to scuba dive. I went to Nassau for a weekend. They have beautiful underwater natural parks. Have you ever scuba dived? It’s a beautiful trip. You’re just floating. It’s an intrauterine experience.
One thing I was interested to observe: Every day we would rush home to watch ourselves on TV; they couldn’t film in the courtroom, but going and leaving they’d film it, and we’d hear the reporters views of what happened.
The first few days it was kinda the old-line policy, what people had been thinking for a year and a half, but as the trial wore on, the reporters themselves, from just talking to me and the people involved in the case – the tone of the news articles – and even the papers – became a little more objective as each day went on.
(Later, the talk turned to the Beatles. Jim had been reading Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner’s two part interview with John Lennon.)
Jim: In a way, we came along at a weird time, at the tail end of the rock revival from England. You know, they’d already done it. I think it was the success of those English groups that gave hope to a lot of musicians over here, saying, “Sheee-it, we can do the same thing!”
And so they did. The shock is how long they managed to do it for, considering Morrison was acting up and out even before they finished their first album.
But when Jim told me that he didn’t see much beyond L.A. Woman, and that he felt done with touring, it was news to the rest of the band – keyboardist Ray Manzarek, guitarist Robby Krieger, and drummer John Densmore.
As Manzarek told me for my book, The Doors By The Doors, the three of them stayed busy while Morrison was in Paris. “Robby and I and John are working on songs,” he said, “getting together and rehearsing two times a week. Nobody’s heard from Jim.”
In the end, Morrison had the last word – without even having to say anything.
END.
Read more: newdoorstalk.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=calendarview&thread=1327#ixzz1Otv4rsDK
JIM MORRISON
By: Ben Fong-Torress
Date Unknown
When I bumped into Jim Morrison in West Hollywood in early 1971, I had no idea that we’d wind up doing the last interview he’d ever give to an American publication.
The bump-in took place at an apartment building where a publicist friend, Diane Gardiner, lived. One of her neighbors was Pamela Courson, who, despite Morrison’s liaisons with various other women, considered herself his main companion. One February afternoon, Jim came by, looking for Pamela. She wasn’t home, so he came downstairs to Gardiner’s apartment, where I was visiting.
I hadn’t met Morrison before, and soon after Diane introduced us, I asked for an interview. He had nothing better to do, he said, and I grabbed my cassette recorder.
And then things got weird. For some reason, he was feeling playful. Having done no research, and with no questions in mind, I was happy to play along. We decided to pretend as though we were doing a talk show on TV, and he kicked things off with a decidedly lewd riddle or two.
While he joked, I searched through my memory for the latest news on Morrison’s never-dull life, and we settled into a pretty serious interview. He got into it enough that when Pamela showed up, he continued with our conversation, one that turned out to be his last with the press before he left, in March, for Paris.
Four months after settling into Paris with Pamela, Jim Morrison died, and I was dispatched to Hollywood to write his obituary. A few non-stop days and nights later, the article was complete, except for a headline. Jim had considered himself as serious a poet as he was a rock musician and stage performer. By and large, his poetic interests had been dismissed. In fact, one reason Morrison gave for going to France was that the people there would give him his poetic due.
That’s why the headline on Page One of our 88th issue, dated August 5, 1971, read: James Douglas Morrison, Poet: Dead at 27.
benfongtorres.com/my_back_pages_2.html
Jim Morrison: Last Meeting With a Fallen Star
Ben Fong-Torres
San Francisco Chronicle
1991
Near the end of his 27-year life, was Jim Morrison – as depicted in Oliver Stone's new movie, The Doors – a fat, abusive, alcoholic, drugged-out, deluded, self-obsessed, self-destructive, humorless, haunted, wasted, washed-up symbol of the death of rock 'n' roll?
The first and last time I visited with Morrison, he was, and he wasn't.
Certainly, he was either slowing down, or he was weighed down.
His band was in decline; bookings had fallen off sharply since his arrest for indecent exposure at a concert in Miami in 1969; and he'd been mired in that trial for nearly two years. And when I saw him in early spring of 1971, he'd been convicted and was out on bail while his case was being appealed. The Doors were still working on an album, but Morrison was thinking about the next stage of his life. If he could snake out of his six-month jail sentence, he was going to Paris, where he'd pursue two longtime interests: poetry and film making.
I happened onto him because his common-law wife, Pamela Courson, knew and lived near a friend of mine, Jefferson Airplane publicist Diane Gardiner, in West Hollywood.
As a writer for Rolling Stone magazine, one of my jobs was to hang out, and that's what I was doing with Gardiner and Earl McGrath, a Rolling Stones associate-turned-screenwriter, when Morrison bounded into her apartment. He was looking for Pamela. We said hello and, of course, I asked for an interview. Once he figured out Pamela wasn't around, he agreed.
He had aged dramatically since his arrest. At 27, his face's sometimes pouty, girlish beauty had given way to a full, dark, leonine beard, and he'd begun to build a paunch.
This afternoon, he seemed to be in a silly mood. Used to toying with the media, he fell into a talk-show rhythm. I'd be Dick Cavett, he decided; he'd be Jim Morrison. And with Gardiner and McGrath serving as the studio audience, he began by asking a riddle that would never have made it on network television. Something about a women's track team.
And then we settled down, and in the course of an hour or so of serious talk, he spoke at first about his bust.
"I think that was the culmination of our mass performing career," he said. "Subconsciously, I think I was trying to reduce it to absurdity, and it worked too well."
Early on, he said, he had hoped to turn his trial – he was charged with lascivious behavior (a felony), profanity, simulating masturbation and public drunkenness – into a freedom-of-speech issue. As his lawyer argued, there was nudity in the film of the Woodstock Festival; there was frontal nudity in Hair. His actions on stage in Miami, he said, amounted to "a theatrical performance." The judge didn't see it that way.
The Doors Would Split
Morrison expected that, after a couple more albums, the Doors would split and he would work in films.
"I'd like to write and direct a film of my own," he said. "There's one that's all in my head. But I have a film I made, called Hiway, that hasn't been seen very much."
I reminded him that San Francisco hadn't been very kind to it. He offered a tight smile.
"Feast of Friends (a self-produced 40-minute documentary of life on stage, on the road, and on vacation) was shown there a year or so ago to a lot of boos," Morrison said. "I think they were reacting to personalities rather than film...."
The 15-minute Hiway, he said, "was more poetic, more of an exercise for me, kind of a warm-up. There's no story in it. Just a hitchhiker who steals a car and drives into town and checks into a motel or something, and it just kind of ends like that."
Morrison talked about getting back to the blues – the kind of music the early Doors used to play in clubs – and about poetry, about how his calling himself the "Lizard King" was actually "half tongue-in-cheek."
"I just thought everyone knew it was ironic, but apparently they thought I was mad!"
I liked Morrison. Whatever his excesses, they were moderated that spring day, and he seemed more self-deprecating than destructive.
He No Longer Dazzled
He was no longer the rock star who dazzled me one night at the Berkeley Community Theater in 1967 – I remember thinking that he'd single-handedly taken rock 'n' roll and turned it into theater. He had now traversed to the edge of self-parody. But he was still the man who gave us some of the greatest songs we ever danced to – or puzzled over.
We shook hands, and, taking his leave, he invited me to come and see him in Paris sometime.
Death makes angels of us all
and gives us wings
where we had shoulders
smooth as raven's claws
– Jim Morrison, ‘An American Prayer’
A month after our chat, Morrison, having finished his last album with the Doors, L.A. Woman, left with Pamela for Paris, and in July I wrote my next story about him. It was his obituary.
I ended it with quotes from two close friends of his, Frank Lisciandro, a film maker, and his wife, Kathy, once Morrison's secretary.
"He expected to live a long time, even if he was self-destructive," Frank explained. His wife said, "He'd be surprised to find out he was dead at age 27."
Nine years later, I finally got to Paris, where Morrison was buried in one of the world's most famous cemeteries, Pere-Lachaise, final stop for Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, Frederic Chopin and Edith Piaf.
By 1980, Morrison was riding a new wave of popularity. Books, videos, proposed movies and the inspired use of Morrison's disturbingly provocative ‘The End’ in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now thrust the Doors back into the public eye.
A Silent Vigil
After wandering around lost for a half-hour in the 100-square block cemetery, a young fan with a map led our party to Morrison's burial site. Graffiti – all about Jim – littered nearby headstones and monuments, and at his grave, a dozen young people stood and sat around silently.
Morrison's grave, a concrete-framed plot of dirt, had no headstone – whenever someone tried to install one, it'd be stolen – but surrounding graffiti left no doubts about who was buried here. As I took notes – "I LOVE YOU JIM"..."JIM IS NOT DEAD" – a young man pointed to a spray-painted exclamation: "God doesn't exist but JIM will exist FOREVER!"
"People here in France thought he was crazy," he told me, "but you Americans understood."
As with everything about Jim Morrison, it wasn't that simple. We understood, and we didn't.
END.