Post by TheWallsScreamedPoetry on Jun 24, 2011 8:24:25 GMT
Jim Morrison: Death On The Instalment Plan
Jim Morrison lay in a bathtub full of water drawn from the same mystic spring that fed Brian Jones's swimming pool. The flesh over his heart was disfigured by a massive purple bruise, his cock was raw from violent masturbation.
A well-known English singer, her own fabled beauty trashed by a habit of elephantine proportions, leaned forward and shot a syringe full of the purest China White into his arm. Someone else plucked out his eyeballs to release his soul from torment. An ocean away in New York, a spurned lover blasted a broken-heartful of Wicca magic into his psyche. A lifetime away, the inexorable wheels of commerce and fame which had driven him here in the first place wondered how they were going to get out of this one.
Then he got up and dried off, went to the movies, caught a cab to the airport, and today he's in the Australian outback, nursing a broken leg. Send me $1,500 and I'll go and get him.
That last one still makes Ray Manzarek smile. It proves that his old friend's fans are still on the cutting edge of inventiveness.
Morrison and Manzarek go back a long way. They met in late 1964, two teenaged UCLA cinematography students united by their love of rock'n'roll. After a year of fervent planning, the pair formed their own band – co-conspirators John Densmore and Robby Krieger were discovered in the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's meditation class.
The five years which followed saw The Doors embark on a heady ride – while their singer underwent a mortifying transformation. Danny Sugerman, the one-time gopher who is now the band's manager (and co-author of the still-definitive No One Here Gets Out Alive biography), is not exaggerating when he states that, at one point, The Doors were the biggest band in America. But he is aghast at the cost of the success. "If you want to know what fame did to Jim Morrison, look at a photograph of him at 22, then look one at 27. The coroner thought he was 56 years old."
He had a punctured left lung, sustained in a fall at his cottage at the Chateau Marmont. His hair was turning grey. His voice was crumbling. Alcohol and excess had left him flabby and dishevelled. He smelled bad.
Spiritually, too, he was shattered, exhausted by the effort of trying to live up to his legend – the Lizard King, Mr Mojo Rising, Dionysus reborn and Oedipus wrecked. That was why, when Morrison announced he intended taking himself off to Paris for a sabbatical, his bandmates thought it was his smartest decision in years. Pamela Courson, his long-time girlfriend, lifelong soulmate, was already in Paris hunting down an apartment for them.
Morrison arrived in Paris on March 11, 1971, settling into a suite at the Hotel Georges V. A week later, he and Courson took over a spare bedroom at model Elisabeth Lariviere's apartment at 17 Rue Beautreillis, and Morrison slipped into a routine, spending hours simply walking around Paris. The shaggy beard was gone, rendering him all but unrecognisable and he revelled in the unaccustomed anonymity.
Refusing to broadcast his presence in the city, he made friends selectively, mostly via another old UCLA buddy Alain Ronay, and French journalist Herve Muller. When Nico, a former labelmate and lover, glimpsed him, she was stunned. Seated in a Tottenham Court Road sandwich bar a decade after Morrison's death, Nico recalled how she had relocated to Paris around a year before Morrison, "and I never even heard it rumoured that he was in the city." But one day as she walked down l'Avenue de l'Opera, she saw him seated in the back of passing black car, staring straight ahead. She was the last of Morrison's old friends to see him alive. It was July 3, 1971. "I remembered the date because it was the anniversary of Brian Jones's death, and I had been thinking about Brian. Now I could only think about Jim and that evening, they say, he died as well. But people say a lot of things they don't really know anything about." She smiled. "Me included."
Later in the day, Morrison and Courson went to the cinema to see Death Valley, then returned to the flat. They spent the evening watching Super 8 films of a recent Moroccan holiday before Courson went to bed. Morrison stayed up, listening to old Doors albums, and trying to suppress a coughing fit which had come on during the evening. The last album he played was the band's debut. The final cut, of course, is 'The End'.
Pamela fell straight to sleep, but Morrison awoke her when he came to bed, complaining of feeling unwell. He was up again a little later, wracked by a violent bout of vomiting. He was throwing up blood. When Courson suggested she call a doctor, Morrison instead asked her to run a bath. While he stretched out in the tub, she went back to sleep. The last words she heard Morrison speak, possibly his last words ever, were, "Are you there, Pam?" And again, "Pam? Are you there?"
About a year after Morrison's death, Manzarek ran into Courson in a Sausalito cafe. "I hugged her and she completely fell apart. I was going to cross-examine her, OK, let's have the full story, and she just started weeping. The last thing I could do was question her, this girl I'd known since 1966. She's sobbing in my arms, I'm crying too." She had lost the man she loved, he his closest friend. Manrarek never had another chance to talk to her, Courson died from a heroin overdose in April, 1974. But as he tells the story now, you sense that at that moment Manzarek realised Courson was telling the truth about Morrison's death.
Courson awoke sometime after 6am and immediately realised Morrison was not beside her. She tried the bathroom door – locked from the inside – and called his name. No reply. In 1991, Alain Ronay wrote a piece for Paris Match remembering Courson calling him around 6.30am to say that Morrison was dead, and asking him to hurry over. Another friend, the self-styled Count Jean De Bretiuiel, received a similar call. A former lover of the late Talitha Getty (wife of John Paul Jr), he was currently dividing his attentions between Courson and Marianne Faithfull. Faithfull recalls, "He was a horrible guy. [But] he had a lot of dope. Jean saw himself as dealer to the stars." That was what attracted Faithfull to him; Courson as well. And he told Faithfull, as they fled to Morocco that morning, that was what killed Morrison. (It killed him as well, in 1973.)
Morrison had never done heroin before. He had what Manzarek – with only a hint of irony – calls a deathly fear of needles. "He knew junkies and didn't like them," Sugerman says. "Pam had been doing heroin and lying to him that it was coke and downers. It's easy to hide heroin when you're not living with someone but now they were living together and...you find out. It's very common for the mate of an addict to join in the drug they're doing." They ate supper, watched some home movies and snorted some smack. Courson hated hypodermics almost as much as Morrison. The problem was, Morrison never did anything in moderation. "I saw Jim do cocaine, he'd take a gram, make two lines and do it," says Sugerman. Cocaine, however, is not heroin – and it certainly isn't the unfeasibly pure China White which was doing the rounds in Paris that summer and which had already claimed dozens of lives. If seasoned addicts were having problems adjusting to the potency, what chance did an absolute novice stand?
"That's all there was to it," Sugerman concludes. "It's not unusual, when someone does heroin for the first time, for them to feel ill. He was sick, he took a bath, he died. There was no more mystery than that."
But, of course, in the 30 years since, every possible permutation of known and imagined facts has been floated as 'the truth' behind Morrison's demise. Indeed, the lack of substantiation only confirms their validity within the web of conspiracy which now stretches from the American government (the FBI was on Morrison's trail) to the dingiest corner of Parisian nightlife – a persistent variation on Morrison's last evening places him at the notorious Rock'n'Roll Circus hang-out, scoring smack for Courson and sampling some himself in the lavatory.
Researching No One Here Gets Out Alive, Sugerman's co-author, Jerry Hopkins, encountered several Paris junkies who insist they witnessed Morrison's final collapse and its aftermath as somebody, possibly the Count, delegated a couple of roues to get him home and into a bath, traditionally the best environment in which to revive an OD. On this occasion, however, they were too late.
Patricia Kennealy, the American rock critic who wed Morrison in a Wiccan ceremony on June 24, 1970, read that a spurned New York occultist sent a long-distance hex to dispatch him, and has no doubt who the wicked witch was believed to be. Voodoo mysteries, orphic death rituals, every option was explored. French doctor Max Vasille's conclusion that Morrison died of "natural causes" fell open to interpretation. By the mid-'70s, a popular revision had Morrison masturbating his heart to a standstill, while 1991 saw the avant-garde Mondo 2000 magazine unearth what purported to be a secret medical file documenting the many sexual diseases for which Morrison was undergoing treatment. Among them was a form of penile cancer, commonly associated with repeated bouts of gonorrhea. Only two remedies are known – total castration or sudden death.
These thoughts were first laid out for inspection with the 1981 publication of No One Here Gets Out Alive; more, doubtless, would have come to light in the Morrison biography which legendary myth-buster Albert Goldman was researching when he himself died.
Wrapped in plastic and packed in dry ice, Morrison's body remained in the apartment while Courson and Ronay made the necessary funeral arrangements – according to Kennealy, she slept alongside it for the next three nights. Finally the undertakers delivered the coffin she had ordered, a "cercueil chene verni" model priced at 366 old francs, the cheapest model available. The coffin was then sealed. By the time Doors manager Bill Siddons arrived in Paris, there was no chance of him seeing the body. Indeed, aside from Courson and the authorities, Agnes Varda is the only person to have seen Morrison's corpse, quoted in Ronay's Paris Match story as saying he looked pale and peaceful, immersed in the bloody water.
Several days before his death, Morrison had visited Pere-Lachaise cemetery remarking that when he died, that was where he wished to be buried. In haste, on July 7, Morrison was laid to rest. A handful of mourners attended – Courson, Ronay, Varda, Siddons and Robin Wertle, a young Canadian, hired a few weeks earlier as Morrison's translator/secretary. The service lasted eight minutes. One Mine Colinette, a local woman visiting her husband's grave, described the affair in the German TV documentary James Morrison – Quiet Days In Paris as "piteous and miserable. There was no priest, everything was done in a hurry."
Confirmation of Morrison's death seeped out slowly. The rest of Doors were kept in the dark until Siddons returned to LA, and even he had no hard evidence to back up what he believed he had witnessed. Manzarek immediately demanded, "How do you even know he was in the coffin? How do you know it wasn't 150lbs of fucking sand? We'll never know the real truth. It's all gonna be rumours and stories from hereon."
The first sightings were reported within days. Morrison appeared in a San Francisco Bank Of America cashing cheques. He hung around LA gay bars in full black leather. He was spotted in Tibet, living the life of a monk, and limping around the Australian outback with a badly broken leg. He was in Africa, Israel, and the American Mid-west, dropping in on local radio stations in the early hours, broadcasting to a handful of insomniac truckers. "The stories that Jim was alive didn't surprise us at all," Sugerman admits, "because while he was alive, we kept hearing he was dead. A car crash on Mulholland, or some sexual whatever with a plastic bag on his head. Jim was the only person any of us knew who would actually stage their own death and then disappear."
He recalls how Morrison had been discussing vanishing some four years before his death, heading off to Africa. He was fascinated by the French poet Rimbaud, who wrote all his poetry by age 19, then went off to become a mercenary. Or maybe he would buy a suit, cut his hair and become a respectable businessman. Or maybe he would just lie low for a few years, burst back on the scene with a brand new album.
Released in America in 1974, Phantom's Divine Comedy Part One album is to The Doors what Klaatu is to The Beatles (interestingly, both are on the same label, Capitol), a dramatic, and utterly convincing recapitulation of Morrison at his peak. Even Morrison's own associates were taken aback – "it was weird," remembers Sugerman, "Ray and I heard it on the radio and just went, Fuck!"
The Phantom, Manzarek remembers, was "a guy named Ted something-or-other, from Detroit, and he sounded like Jim." Manzarek met him in LA in July 1974, when the Phantom guested at the Jim Morrison Memorial concert at the Whisky, to perform a spine-chillingly perfect 'Riders On The Storm' with Manzarek on keyboards. "He was a weird guy, he dressed in black and would only wear silver jewellery"
Wherefore Jim Morrison today? Had he lived, he would now be 58 – at best, one can envision him living in the California hills somewhere, still writing poetry occasionally reconvening with his old bandmates to record a new album. At worst, a body which never truly tolerated the abuse to which he subjected it would have finally rebelled, and old age would prove a harsher burden than a young death ever could. "I don't think Jim would ever have been happy" Danny Sugerman muses. "He would be thrilled to know that his art now means more than his antics but Jim wanted to die young, he wanted to be a shooting star."
Dave Thompson, Mojo, September 2001
Jim Morrison lay in a bathtub full of water drawn from the same mystic spring that fed Brian Jones's swimming pool. The flesh over his heart was disfigured by a massive purple bruise, his cock was raw from violent masturbation.
A well-known English singer, her own fabled beauty trashed by a habit of elephantine proportions, leaned forward and shot a syringe full of the purest China White into his arm. Someone else plucked out his eyeballs to release his soul from torment. An ocean away in New York, a spurned lover blasted a broken-heartful of Wicca magic into his psyche. A lifetime away, the inexorable wheels of commerce and fame which had driven him here in the first place wondered how they were going to get out of this one.
Then he got up and dried off, went to the movies, caught a cab to the airport, and today he's in the Australian outback, nursing a broken leg. Send me $1,500 and I'll go and get him.
That last one still makes Ray Manzarek smile. It proves that his old friend's fans are still on the cutting edge of inventiveness.
Morrison and Manzarek go back a long way. They met in late 1964, two teenaged UCLA cinematography students united by their love of rock'n'roll. After a year of fervent planning, the pair formed their own band – co-conspirators John Densmore and Robby Krieger were discovered in the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's meditation class.
The five years which followed saw The Doors embark on a heady ride – while their singer underwent a mortifying transformation. Danny Sugerman, the one-time gopher who is now the band's manager (and co-author of the still-definitive No One Here Gets Out Alive biography), is not exaggerating when he states that, at one point, The Doors were the biggest band in America. But he is aghast at the cost of the success. "If you want to know what fame did to Jim Morrison, look at a photograph of him at 22, then look one at 27. The coroner thought he was 56 years old."
He had a punctured left lung, sustained in a fall at his cottage at the Chateau Marmont. His hair was turning grey. His voice was crumbling. Alcohol and excess had left him flabby and dishevelled. He smelled bad.
Spiritually, too, he was shattered, exhausted by the effort of trying to live up to his legend – the Lizard King, Mr Mojo Rising, Dionysus reborn and Oedipus wrecked. That was why, when Morrison announced he intended taking himself off to Paris for a sabbatical, his bandmates thought it was his smartest decision in years. Pamela Courson, his long-time girlfriend, lifelong soulmate, was already in Paris hunting down an apartment for them.
Morrison arrived in Paris on March 11, 1971, settling into a suite at the Hotel Georges V. A week later, he and Courson took over a spare bedroom at model Elisabeth Lariviere's apartment at 17 Rue Beautreillis, and Morrison slipped into a routine, spending hours simply walking around Paris. The shaggy beard was gone, rendering him all but unrecognisable and he revelled in the unaccustomed anonymity.
Refusing to broadcast his presence in the city, he made friends selectively, mostly via another old UCLA buddy Alain Ronay, and French journalist Herve Muller. When Nico, a former labelmate and lover, glimpsed him, she was stunned. Seated in a Tottenham Court Road sandwich bar a decade after Morrison's death, Nico recalled how she had relocated to Paris around a year before Morrison, "and I never even heard it rumoured that he was in the city." But one day as she walked down l'Avenue de l'Opera, she saw him seated in the back of passing black car, staring straight ahead. She was the last of Morrison's old friends to see him alive. It was July 3, 1971. "I remembered the date because it was the anniversary of Brian Jones's death, and I had been thinking about Brian. Now I could only think about Jim and that evening, they say, he died as well. But people say a lot of things they don't really know anything about." She smiled. "Me included."
Later in the day, Morrison and Courson went to the cinema to see Death Valley, then returned to the flat. They spent the evening watching Super 8 films of a recent Moroccan holiday before Courson went to bed. Morrison stayed up, listening to old Doors albums, and trying to suppress a coughing fit which had come on during the evening. The last album he played was the band's debut. The final cut, of course, is 'The End'.
Pamela fell straight to sleep, but Morrison awoke her when he came to bed, complaining of feeling unwell. He was up again a little later, wracked by a violent bout of vomiting. He was throwing up blood. When Courson suggested she call a doctor, Morrison instead asked her to run a bath. While he stretched out in the tub, she went back to sleep. The last words she heard Morrison speak, possibly his last words ever, were, "Are you there, Pam?" And again, "Pam? Are you there?"
About a year after Morrison's death, Manzarek ran into Courson in a Sausalito cafe. "I hugged her and she completely fell apart. I was going to cross-examine her, OK, let's have the full story, and she just started weeping. The last thing I could do was question her, this girl I'd known since 1966. She's sobbing in my arms, I'm crying too." She had lost the man she loved, he his closest friend. Manrarek never had another chance to talk to her, Courson died from a heroin overdose in April, 1974. But as he tells the story now, you sense that at that moment Manzarek realised Courson was telling the truth about Morrison's death.
Courson awoke sometime after 6am and immediately realised Morrison was not beside her. She tried the bathroom door – locked from the inside – and called his name. No reply. In 1991, Alain Ronay wrote a piece for Paris Match remembering Courson calling him around 6.30am to say that Morrison was dead, and asking him to hurry over. Another friend, the self-styled Count Jean De Bretiuiel, received a similar call. A former lover of the late Talitha Getty (wife of John Paul Jr), he was currently dividing his attentions between Courson and Marianne Faithfull. Faithfull recalls, "He was a horrible guy. [But] he had a lot of dope. Jean saw himself as dealer to the stars." That was what attracted Faithfull to him; Courson as well. And he told Faithfull, as they fled to Morocco that morning, that was what killed Morrison. (It killed him as well, in 1973.)
Morrison had never done heroin before. He had what Manzarek – with only a hint of irony – calls a deathly fear of needles. "He knew junkies and didn't like them," Sugerman says. "Pam had been doing heroin and lying to him that it was coke and downers. It's easy to hide heroin when you're not living with someone but now they were living together and...you find out. It's very common for the mate of an addict to join in the drug they're doing." They ate supper, watched some home movies and snorted some smack. Courson hated hypodermics almost as much as Morrison. The problem was, Morrison never did anything in moderation. "I saw Jim do cocaine, he'd take a gram, make two lines and do it," says Sugerman. Cocaine, however, is not heroin – and it certainly isn't the unfeasibly pure China White which was doing the rounds in Paris that summer and which had already claimed dozens of lives. If seasoned addicts were having problems adjusting to the potency, what chance did an absolute novice stand?
"That's all there was to it," Sugerman concludes. "It's not unusual, when someone does heroin for the first time, for them to feel ill. He was sick, he took a bath, he died. There was no more mystery than that."
But, of course, in the 30 years since, every possible permutation of known and imagined facts has been floated as 'the truth' behind Morrison's demise. Indeed, the lack of substantiation only confirms their validity within the web of conspiracy which now stretches from the American government (the FBI was on Morrison's trail) to the dingiest corner of Parisian nightlife – a persistent variation on Morrison's last evening places him at the notorious Rock'n'Roll Circus hang-out, scoring smack for Courson and sampling some himself in the lavatory.
Researching No One Here Gets Out Alive, Sugerman's co-author, Jerry Hopkins, encountered several Paris junkies who insist they witnessed Morrison's final collapse and its aftermath as somebody, possibly the Count, delegated a couple of roues to get him home and into a bath, traditionally the best environment in which to revive an OD. On this occasion, however, they were too late.
Patricia Kennealy, the American rock critic who wed Morrison in a Wiccan ceremony on June 24, 1970, read that a spurned New York occultist sent a long-distance hex to dispatch him, and has no doubt who the wicked witch was believed to be. Voodoo mysteries, orphic death rituals, every option was explored. French doctor Max Vasille's conclusion that Morrison died of "natural causes" fell open to interpretation. By the mid-'70s, a popular revision had Morrison masturbating his heart to a standstill, while 1991 saw the avant-garde Mondo 2000 magazine unearth what purported to be a secret medical file documenting the many sexual diseases for which Morrison was undergoing treatment. Among them was a form of penile cancer, commonly associated with repeated bouts of gonorrhea. Only two remedies are known – total castration or sudden death.
These thoughts were first laid out for inspection with the 1981 publication of No One Here Gets Out Alive; more, doubtless, would have come to light in the Morrison biography which legendary myth-buster Albert Goldman was researching when he himself died.
Wrapped in plastic and packed in dry ice, Morrison's body remained in the apartment while Courson and Ronay made the necessary funeral arrangements – according to Kennealy, she slept alongside it for the next three nights. Finally the undertakers delivered the coffin she had ordered, a "cercueil chene verni" model priced at 366 old francs, the cheapest model available. The coffin was then sealed. By the time Doors manager Bill Siddons arrived in Paris, there was no chance of him seeing the body. Indeed, aside from Courson and the authorities, Agnes Varda is the only person to have seen Morrison's corpse, quoted in Ronay's Paris Match story as saying he looked pale and peaceful, immersed in the bloody water.
Several days before his death, Morrison had visited Pere-Lachaise cemetery remarking that when he died, that was where he wished to be buried. In haste, on July 7, Morrison was laid to rest. A handful of mourners attended – Courson, Ronay, Varda, Siddons and Robin Wertle, a young Canadian, hired a few weeks earlier as Morrison's translator/secretary. The service lasted eight minutes. One Mine Colinette, a local woman visiting her husband's grave, described the affair in the German TV documentary James Morrison – Quiet Days In Paris as "piteous and miserable. There was no priest, everything was done in a hurry."
Confirmation of Morrison's death seeped out slowly. The rest of Doors were kept in the dark until Siddons returned to LA, and even he had no hard evidence to back up what he believed he had witnessed. Manzarek immediately demanded, "How do you even know he was in the coffin? How do you know it wasn't 150lbs of fucking sand? We'll never know the real truth. It's all gonna be rumours and stories from hereon."
The first sightings were reported within days. Morrison appeared in a San Francisco Bank Of America cashing cheques. He hung around LA gay bars in full black leather. He was spotted in Tibet, living the life of a monk, and limping around the Australian outback with a badly broken leg. He was in Africa, Israel, and the American Mid-west, dropping in on local radio stations in the early hours, broadcasting to a handful of insomniac truckers. "The stories that Jim was alive didn't surprise us at all," Sugerman admits, "because while he was alive, we kept hearing he was dead. A car crash on Mulholland, or some sexual whatever with a plastic bag on his head. Jim was the only person any of us knew who would actually stage their own death and then disappear."
He recalls how Morrison had been discussing vanishing some four years before his death, heading off to Africa. He was fascinated by the French poet Rimbaud, who wrote all his poetry by age 19, then went off to become a mercenary. Or maybe he would buy a suit, cut his hair and become a respectable businessman. Or maybe he would just lie low for a few years, burst back on the scene with a brand new album.
Released in America in 1974, Phantom's Divine Comedy Part One album is to The Doors what Klaatu is to The Beatles (interestingly, both are on the same label, Capitol), a dramatic, and utterly convincing recapitulation of Morrison at his peak. Even Morrison's own associates were taken aback – "it was weird," remembers Sugerman, "Ray and I heard it on the radio and just went, Fuck!"
The Phantom, Manzarek remembers, was "a guy named Ted something-or-other, from Detroit, and he sounded like Jim." Manzarek met him in LA in July 1974, when the Phantom guested at the Jim Morrison Memorial concert at the Whisky, to perform a spine-chillingly perfect 'Riders On The Storm' with Manzarek on keyboards. "He was a weird guy, he dressed in black and would only wear silver jewellery"
Wherefore Jim Morrison today? Had he lived, he would now be 58 – at best, one can envision him living in the California hills somewhere, still writing poetry occasionally reconvening with his old bandmates to record a new album. At worst, a body which never truly tolerated the abuse to which he subjected it would have finally rebelled, and old age would prove a harsher burden than a young death ever could. "I don't think Jim would ever have been happy" Danny Sugerman muses. "He would be thrilled to know that his art now means more than his antics but Jim wanted to die young, he wanted to be a shooting star."
Dave Thompson, Mojo, September 2001