Post by darkstar3 on Mar 4, 2011 14:46:20 GMT
The Telegraph UK
January 9 1987
Jim Morrison Works Surface In California
By: Barbara Shulgasser
For Scripps Howard News Service
San Francisco – A treasure chest of 15 unpublished songs by 1960s rock star Jim Morrison, as well as his unpublished poetry and diaries, is being offered by two San Francisco entrepreneurs.
Representatives from Putnam, MacMillian and Villard/Random House are examining the material, found in a strong box marked, “127 Fascination.”
The box contains several versions of Morrison’s songs, a 24 page poem called “An American Night,” diaries and other writings in the singers hand.
Villard offered $150,000 for the rights. Robert Stricker, an agent for the partners trying to sell the material, said other publishing houses had since expressed interest and that no deal had been made.
Morrison, who reportedly died of a drug and alcohol overdose (the death certificate said “heart attack”) in 1971 I Paris at the age of 27 developed a fanatical following.
His druggy, sexually suggestive lyrics, sung in a hoarse, dark baritone, including “Light My Fire,” the biggest hit he recorded with his group, The Doors.
How Grant Jacobs and his unnamed partner came into possession of the box is a murky tale that no one connected with the transaction will divulge. Jacobs, whose name was provided by several people familiar with the case, could not be reached for comment.
But two sources familiar with the situation who requested anonymity sad that the box had belonged to Pamela Courson, Morrison’s common law wife, who died in 1974, reportedly of a drug overdose.
According to the sources Ms. Courson left the box to a boyfriend with whom she lived for 10 months after Morrison’s death. The sources said he had later sold it for an undisclosed amount to Grant Jacobs and his partner.
“There is substantial interest in it now,” said Stricker, who has worked in the publishing industry and owns a local bookstore called Ku’’cha. He has invited several publishers to view the more than 200 pages of writings.
Brian Rohan, a San Francisco attorney who has worked in the record industry, is representing the box’s owners in their bid to cash in on Morrison’s eerily enduring popularity.
One of Morrison’s poetry volumes, “The Lords and the New Creatures,” sold more than 120,000 copies since it’s 1971 publication. All the Doors’ albums are still in release. A 1980 Morrison biography by Jerry Hopkins and former Doors’ manager Dan Sugerman, “No One Here Gets Out Alive,” sold 270,000 copies in its trade paperback edition and nearly 1 million in the mass market publication.
Rohan is said to be exploring the possibility of releasing the unpublished songs and has approached the remaining Doors to write music for the unpublished lyrics. Rohan, when reached in New York, declined comment.
“In my opinion, it’s a completely ridiculous concept,” said Bill Siddons, who was the Doors’ manager from 1968 “until the end,” as he puts it. Siddons, who has examined the cache of memorabilia, said the works are authentic, but he added, “If Jim wanted these turned into songs, he would have done it. I’d consider it exploitive to have it done this way.
“The gentlemen involved in this are essentially coming from the right place in terms of Jim but also have a vested financial interest, and the potential for abuse is there,” Siddons said. “I think there’s some question about who it belongs to.”
Nicholas Clainos, president of Bill Graham Enterprises, which is planning a film with Columbia Pictures about Morrison, agrees.
Clainos, who has also seen the writings said, “I think it’s pretty exciting stuff,” But added that the ownership was in doubt.
“Pam (Courson) met a guy, lived with him for 10 months, moved out and left this box there,” Clainos said. “I think Corky (her father, Columbus Courson) is going to say, “’Wait a minute that’s my daughters stuff.’”
Columbus Courosn could not be reached for comment, but a source close to the Courson family said, “Pam would never give away any of Jim’s things. Jim had a will leaving everything to Pam, and Pam died in testate. Anything that belonged to Jim would be part of the estate. Anyone (who would try to sell any of it) is opening themselves up for a suit.
A lawsuit over the disposition of Morrison’s and Pamela’s Courson’s materials was settled 10 years ago, dividing the estate between the two sets of parents, the Coursons and Morrisons. But the existence of the strong box appears to have been unknown at that time.
END.
Spin Magazine
April 1987
Missed Information Column
Page 22
A black box marked 127 Fascination believed to contain Jim Morrison’s final works, has surfaced in San Francisco. The Doors, as usual, cliam the writings belong to them. In a rare show of largesse they’ve decided that they will not reunite to perform the works.
END.
Chicago Tribune
March 22 1989
By Wayne A. Saroyan
The Twisted Tale Of How Late Rocker Jim Morrison`s Poetry Found
A Public Stage
There are things that are known and things that are unknown; in between are doors.
- William Blake
Eighteen years ago Jim Morrison, private poet and tumultuously public lead singer for the Los Angeles rock band The Doors, was found dead in a Paris apartment.
Since then, the licentious Lizard King has become a cult hero, venerated by many who are too young to have ever seen him on stage. The songs he wrote and performed with The Doors remain a staple of FM radio; Elektra Records continues to sell more than 100,000 Doors albums, compact discs and cassettes every year.
Morrison`s modest grave in an obscure corner of the celebrated Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris is covered with flowers and graffiti left by devoted fans, despite the bizarre theories of rock conspiracists who claim that Morrison, inspired by the reclusive French poet Rimbaud, simply walked away from rock stardom for an anonymous life writing poetry in Africa.
The intrigue and controversy that followed Morrison through life pursued him even into death. But the battle over the gray metal strongbox labeled
``127 Fascination,`` in which he left his unpublished poems, songs, notebooks and journals, has finally come to an end.
``The whole point of The Doors was poetry,`` recalled the band`s keyboardist, Ray Manzarek, who met Morrison in 1965 when they were students at the University of California at Los Angeles. ``There were four musicians in the band; one of us, Jim, played words.``
In the drug-fueled heyday of psychedelic rock, The Doors took L.A.`s nightclubs in a firestorm of music driven by Morrison`s passion and eroticism. Backstage, Morrison preferred to be considered an intellectual and a poet. He studied crowd psychology along with romantic literature and the 18th- Century poetry of William Blake, who had counseled, ``The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.`` Morrison was inclined, he told friends, to exaggerate his stage antics ``almost to the point of grotesqueness.``
``He was as well read as anybody I`ve ever met,`` said longtime friend and Doors associate Frank Lisciandro, who photographed Morrison and The Doors through the late 1960s.
Into Morrison`s whirlwind came Pamela Susan Courson, a young, red-haired art-school dropout from Orange County, Calif., who stumbled into one of The Doors` earliest nightclub gigs on Hollywood`s Sunset Strip and promptly fell in love.
Despite his continued romances and one-night drunken debauches with other women, he soon was introducing her to friends as his ``cosmic mate.`` She soon staked out exclusive terrain in Morrison`s world by appointing herself custodian and champion of his poetry.
In 1969, Simon & Schuster published ``The Lords & the New Creatures,``
Morrison`s first volume of prose and poetry. The poems were cinematic, sexual and menacing, crowded with reptilian imagery.
Pamela set up a meeting with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Michael McClure; she bought Morrison a new hand-tooled brown leather satchel to carry his poems, notebooks and journals.
But the first meeting with McClure went poorly, and Morrison grew skeptical that his poetry would ever be taken seriously.
NOTHING PROCEEDS LIKE EXCESS
After back-to-back obscenity busts during a U.S. concert tour in 1969 and a long trial for indecent exposure and lewd behavior following an infamous Doors performance in Miami, Morrison was exhausted. The accelerated lifestyle of excess encouraged in Blake`s poetry had mushroomed into a destructive binge of sex, drugs and booze.
In `71 Morrison went to Paris ``to write his notes on the Miami concert bust and simply get away from rock stardom,`` Manzarek said.
In Paris Morrison and Pamela made the rounds of the city`s hip underground rock clubs-particularly the Rock `n` Roll Circus, a popular gathering point for the notoriously decadent Parisian heroin subculture. Morrison was writing almost every day.
But the music stopped on July 3, 1971.
After a night of carousing at the Circus, Pamela found Jim in the bathroom, immobile, arms resting on the porcelain rim of the bathtub. A doctor and the local fire department were summoned; resuscitation efforts failed. No autopsy was performed, and though Parisian authorities suspected that drugs were involved, the official cause of death was listed as a heart attack.
After Morrison`s burial in Paris, Pamela flew back to Los Angeles. But memories of Morrison seemed to haunt the city itself.
In early 1972, Pamela flew north to stay with a friend in Sausalito, Calif., carrying with her Morrison`s satchel. She hailed a cab in San Francisco for the trip to Sausalito. During the 45-minute ride, she talked with the taxi driver, a good-looking Merchant Marine named Michael Vejraska, 23, and unloaded her problems. She and Vejraska soon began a love affair that would last six months.
On the night before she moved in with Vejraska, she gave her new lover a box of Morrison`s writings, which she had removed from the satchel and placed in a 12- by 17-inch gray metal strongbox. A thin adhesive label near the handle read "127 Fascination."
In San Francisco, Pamela again contacted poet Michael McClure and asked him to read some of Morrison`s poems and edit them for future publication.
"There were thousands of sheets of unpublished poetry, all of it neatly typed," McClure recalled. "It was a beautiful piece of poet`s work. I kept the material for six or eight weeks, but I was very busy at the time, I didn`t have time to work with (it)."
McClure returned the poems to Pamela, and insisted that she edit them for publication herself. That fall, however, she returned home to Los Angeles. She was depressed, living on a modest stipend provided by The Doors while Morrison`s will moved through Probate Court.
SHE FOLLOWS HIM IN DEATH
On April 25, 1974, Pamela was found dead in her Hollywood apartment of a heroin overdose; this was a month before the settlement of Morrison`s will, which affirmed Pamela as Morrison`s sole heir. Like Morrison, she was 27 when she died.
Scattered throughout her apartment were photocopies of Morrison`s poems and journals. Her parents quietly took them home, and Vejraska, who had heard the news of her death over the radio, now found himself the caretaker of the rest of Morrison`s unpublished writings in San Francisco.
Vejraska kept the strongbox 12 years. His only contact with the Coursons came less than a month after Pamela`s death, when he returned her VW bus, record collection and a box of Morrison`s photocopied poems and journals.
Then, in the summer of 1986, Grant Jacobs, a longtime Doors fan and veteran of the psychedelic glory days of San Francisco`s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, was approached at a party in San Francisco by someone who knew Vejraska.
Flashing a red-and-white TransWorld Airlines luggage label with Morrison`s name on it, he excitedly told Jacobs that there was a lot more Morrison stuff to be had, including the Lizard King`s journals from Paris and Los Angeles and a number of unpublished poems. Jacobs, who had boasted of a few connections in the rock world, might just be the guy to handle the material, which was now owned by a cab driver named Mike.
Jacobs left the party that night and called an old friend and fellow Doors fan, Reed Prior. The two men decided this was their big chance. Late in the summer of 1986, Prior and Jacobs made their pitch to Vejraska: They wanted to buy into "127 Fascination" and claimed they knew the right people to publish the Morrison poems.
Vejraska needed money. He asked Prior and Jacobs for $30,000 in exchange for a two-thirds share in the manuscripts. Shokrollah Farhadi, an acquaintance of Jacobs`, was brought in to finance the purchase. Farhadi, an Iranian immigrant and former UC Berkeley student with a history of drug and weapons convictions, had the cash. According to federal prosecutors, Farhadi and his sister had been smuggling money and family jewelry out of Iran for five years. The deal to buy the "127 Fascination" manuscripts went down on Wednesday, Oct. 1, 1986. Then Prior and Jacobs showed the manuscripts to former Doorsman Manzarek and veteran record producer Paul Rothchild.
`THIS AMAZING COLLECTION`
"We sat down in their apartment and in the next six hours read through this amazing collection of Jim`s poems. . . . There were songs Jim had worked on for years. Some of it was quite valuable: different versions of very early Doors classics-`Break on Through` and `Soul Kitchen`-that even the band had never seen."
Jacobs and Prior also showed the manuscripts to Doors manager Bill Siddons and the other two band members, Robbie Krieger and John Densmore. Later they displayed the manuscripts to Prior`s girlfriend, his mother, Doors biographer Danny Sugerman and musicians David Crosby and Graham Nash.
And they contacted Robert Stricker, a Berkeley literary agent, to help them sell the manuscripts. Stricker in turn called the San Francisco Chronicle, which reported in an article on Nov. 20, 1986, that a mysterious collection of Morrison`s unpublished poetry had surfaced in San Francisco. The article also reported that Villard Books, a Random House imprint, had offered $150,000 to publish the poems.
In Palm Desert, a community in southern California, Pamela`s parents, Columbus B. "Corky" Courson and his wife, Pearl Marie, were stunned by a second report of the lost writings in Rolling Stone magazine. After their daughter`s death in 1974, Courson had gone to court and claimed Morrison`s percentage of title and royalties to all The Doors` music. Courson, a former Navy bombardier and retired high school principal, also petitioned the court to designate him Pamela`s legal heir and thus executor of Morrison`s estate as well. (Courson later went to court to split the income from Morrison`s estate with Morrison`s parents.)
"Corky has files of Jim`s poems that he`s been working on for years," said Doors associate Frank Lisciandro, who helped Courson sort through 1,600 manuscript pages collected from Vejraska and Pamela`s apartment. Some of the poems had as many as 50 different versions.
In 1982, according to Lisciandro, Courson submitted a manuscript of poems to Morrison`s former publisher, Simon & Schuster, in New York, but the manuscript was rejected.
When news of Morrison`s "lost writings" surfaced, Courson contacted Vejraska in San Francisco and demanded the return of the "127 Fascination"
materials, claiming Vejraska should have given him all of Morrison`s writings back in 1974.
Vejraska declined. He argued that Pamela had given him the original
"127" manuscripts as a gift and that he wasn't bound to return them after she died.
In December, 1986, Farhadi, who financed the purchase of the manuscripts for Jacobs and Prior, was arrested by federal Drug Enforcement Administration agents on charges of dealing heroin and marijuana.
The next month, Prior was sentenced for possession of cocaine. He fled California with the key to the safe deposit box where the "127" materials were stored, leaving Jacobs to fend off the Coursons, who were now demanding to see the manuscripts.
Meanwhile, the Coursons filed suit against Vejraska, Stricker, Prior and Jacobs in San Francisco Superior Court in May, 1987. They demanded the return of the original manuscripts and asked for $1 million in damages. They also copyrighted all of Morrison`s writings they had in their possession and began actively compiling their own manuscript of poems for Villard Books.
Meanwhile, a Doors/Morrison movie was in the works, to be coproduced by promoter Bill Graham, who had booked The Doors at the Fillmore Auditorium and Winterland during the `60s.
On Dec. 12, 1987, Farhadi brought the "127 Fascination" manuscripts and the strongbox to Graham`s South of Market headquarters so the screenwriter could take a look. At the meeting`s end that night, Farhadi, who was free on bail, took home the empty strongbox and a handful of postcards and pictures-collateral on his $30,000 loan to Jacobs and Prior.
Two days later, Farhadi was arrested again by federal officers on drug charges. (He is serving a nine-year sentence in federal prison.)
The day after Farhadi`s arrest, Musa Fari, an Iranian friend of Farhadi`s, entered his suburban home in Novato, Calif., and took the strongbox. Nobody knows where the strongbox is now. The last report had Fari living back in Iran.
Morrison`s notebooks and journals were placed in a safe-deposit box, where they remained until Jacobs transferred them to his attorney`s law offices.
The Coursons, together with Frank and Kathleen Lisciandro, published
"Wilderness: The Lost Writings of Jim Morrison, Volume One" with Villard Books in November, 1988. Two of the poems in that volume" Cassandra at the Well" and "The Anatomy of Rock" also appeared in the "127 Fascination" inventory compiled by Manzarek.
"Wilderness" is now in its third printing and has become a brisk seller. Courson and Lisciandro are compiling a second volume of Morrison`s writings, and Lisciandro recently tracked down two more of Morrison`s notebooks in Los Angeles.
Manzarek believes Morrison would resent the Coursons` profiting from his writing. "Corky had nothing to do with Jim or his writing while he was alive," Manzarek said. "Jim only met Courson four or five times, maybe, but out of obligation."
Finally, in February, a settlement in the legal battle over the "127 Fascination" manuscripts was reached among the attorneys representing the Coursons, Prior, Jacobs, Vejraska and Stricker.
"Essentially," explained Stricker, who still represents Jacobs and Prior, ``we`ve given up our claims for publication rights to the poetry in exchange for keeping the original manuscript material and the right to sell them as memorabilia.``
Stricker believes the "127" manuscripts eventually will end up in the Rock `n` Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.
"It`s been exciting and time-consuming and not profitable at all,"
Stricker lamented. "We haven`t made any money, and the book (`Wilderness`) is doing very well. But I don`t think we got (cheated). I feel that, ultimately, everybody will get his own reward."
Death makes angels of us all
and gives us wings.
Where we had shoulders
smooth as raven`s claws.
-from "An American Prayer,"by Jim Morrison; (copyright) 1981 by Columbus & Pearl Courson
articles.chicagotribune.com/1989-....-morrison-doors
January 9 1987
Jim Morrison Works Surface In California
By: Barbara Shulgasser
For Scripps Howard News Service
San Francisco – A treasure chest of 15 unpublished songs by 1960s rock star Jim Morrison, as well as his unpublished poetry and diaries, is being offered by two San Francisco entrepreneurs.
Representatives from Putnam, MacMillian and Villard/Random House are examining the material, found in a strong box marked, “127 Fascination.”
The box contains several versions of Morrison’s songs, a 24 page poem called “An American Night,” diaries and other writings in the singers hand.
Villard offered $150,000 for the rights. Robert Stricker, an agent for the partners trying to sell the material, said other publishing houses had since expressed interest and that no deal had been made.
Morrison, who reportedly died of a drug and alcohol overdose (the death certificate said “heart attack”) in 1971 I Paris at the age of 27 developed a fanatical following.
His druggy, sexually suggestive lyrics, sung in a hoarse, dark baritone, including “Light My Fire,” the biggest hit he recorded with his group, The Doors.
How Grant Jacobs and his unnamed partner came into possession of the box is a murky tale that no one connected with the transaction will divulge. Jacobs, whose name was provided by several people familiar with the case, could not be reached for comment.
But two sources familiar with the situation who requested anonymity sad that the box had belonged to Pamela Courson, Morrison’s common law wife, who died in 1974, reportedly of a drug overdose.
According to the sources Ms. Courson left the box to a boyfriend with whom she lived for 10 months after Morrison’s death. The sources said he had later sold it for an undisclosed amount to Grant Jacobs and his partner.
“There is substantial interest in it now,” said Stricker, who has worked in the publishing industry and owns a local bookstore called Ku’’cha. He has invited several publishers to view the more than 200 pages of writings.
Brian Rohan, a San Francisco attorney who has worked in the record industry, is representing the box’s owners in their bid to cash in on Morrison’s eerily enduring popularity.
One of Morrison’s poetry volumes, “The Lords and the New Creatures,” sold more than 120,000 copies since it’s 1971 publication. All the Doors’ albums are still in release. A 1980 Morrison biography by Jerry Hopkins and former Doors’ manager Dan Sugerman, “No One Here Gets Out Alive,” sold 270,000 copies in its trade paperback edition and nearly 1 million in the mass market publication.
Rohan is said to be exploring the possibility of releasing the unpublished songs and has approached the remaining Doors to write music for the unpublished lyrics. Rohan, when reached in New York, declined comment.
“In my opinion, it’s a completely ridiculous concept,” said Bill Siddons, who was the Doors’ manager from 1968 “until the end,” as he puts it. Siddons, who has examined the cache of memorabilia, said the works are authentic, but he added, “If Jim wanted these turned into songs, he would have done it. I’d consider it exploitive to have it done this way.
“The gentlemen involved in this are essentially coming from the right place in terms of Jim but also have a vested financial interest, and the potential for abuse is there,” Siddons said. “I think there’s some question about who it belongs to.”
Nicholas Clainos, president of Bill Graham Enterprises, which is planning a film with Columbia Pictures about Morrison, agrees.
Clainos, who has also seen the writings said, “I think it’s pretty exciting stuff,” But added that the ownership was in doubt.
“Pam (Courson) met a guy, lived with him for 10 months, moved out and left this box there,” Clainos said. “I think Corky (her father, Columbus Courson) is going to say, “’Wait a minute that’s my daughters stuff.’”
Columbus Courosn could not be reached for comment, but a source close to the Courson family said, “Pam would never give away any of Jim’s things. Jim had a will leaving everything to Pam, and Pam died in testate. Anything that belonged to Jim would be part of the estate. Anyone (who would try to sell any of it) is opening themselves up for a suit.
A lawsuit over the disposition of Morrison’s and Pamela’s Courson’s materials was settled 10 years ago, dividing the estate between the two sets of parents, the Coursons and Morrisons. But the existence of the strong box appears to have been unknown at that time.
END.
Spin Magazine
April 1987
Missed Information Column
Page 22
A black box marked 127 Fascination believed to contain Jim Morrison’s final works, has surfaced in San Francisco. The Doors, as usual, cliam the writings belong to them. In a rare show of largesse they’ve decided that they will not reunite to perform the works.
END.
Chicago Tribune
March 22 1989
By Wayne A. Saroyan
The Twisted Tale Of How Late Rocker Jim Morrison`s Poetry Found
A Public Stage
There are things that are known and things that are unknown; in between are doors.
- William Blake
Eighteen years ago Jim Morrison, private poet and tumultuously public lead singer for the Los Angeles rock band The Doors, was found dead in a Paris apartment.
Since then, the licentious Lizard King has become a cult hero, venerated by many who are too young to have ever seen him on stage. The songs he wrote and performed with The Doors remain a staple of FM radio; Elektra Records continues to sell more than 100,000 Doors albums, compact discs and cassettes every year.
Morrison`s modest grave in an obscure corner of the celebrated Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris is covered with flowers and graffiti left by devoted fans, despite the bizarre theories of rock conspiracists who claim that Morrison, inspired by the reclusive French poet Rimbaud, simply walked away from rock stardom for an anonymous life writing poetry in Africa.
The intrigue and controversy that followed Morrison through life pursued him even into death. But the battle over the gray metal strongbox labeled
``127 Fascination,`` in which he left his unpublished poems, songs, notebooks and journals, has finally come to an end.
``The whole point of The Doors was poetry,`` recalled the band`s keyboardist, Ray Manzarek, who met Morrison in 1965 when they were students at the University of California at Los Angeles. ``There were four musicians in the band; one of us, Jim, played words.``
In the drug-fueled heyday of psychedelic rock, The Doors took L.A.`s nightclubs in a firestorm of music driven by Morrison`s passion and eroticism. Backstage, Morrison preferred to be considered an intellectual and a poet. He studied crowd psychology along with romantic literature and the 18th- Century poetry of William Blake, who had counseled, ``The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.`` Morrison was inclined, he told friends, to exaggerate his stage antics ``almost to the point of grotesqueness.``
``He was as well read as anybody I`ve ever met,`` said longtime friend and Doors associate Frank Lisciandro, who photographed Morrison and The Doors through the late 1960s.
Into Morrison`s whirlwind came Pamela Susan Courson, a young, red-haired art-school dropout from Orange County, Calif., who stumbled into one of The Doors` earliest nightclub gigs on Hollywood`s Sunset Strip and promptly fell in love.
Despite his continued romances and one-night drunken debauches with other women, he soon was introducing her to friends as his ``cosmic mate.`` She soon staked out exclusive terrain in Morrison`s world by appointing herself custodian and champion of his poetry.
In 1969, Simon & Schuster published ``The Lords & the New Creatures,``
Morrison`s first volume of prose and poetry. The poems were cinematic, sexual and menacing, crowded with reptilian imagery.
Pamela set up a meeting with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Michael McClure; she bought Morrison a new hand-tooled brown leather satchel to carry his poems, notebooks and journals.
But the first meeting with McClure went poorly, and Morrison grew skeptical that his poetry would ever be taken seriously.
NOTHING PROCEEDS LIKE EXCESS
After back-to-back obscenity busts during a U.S. concert tour in 1969 and a long trial for indecent exposure and lewd behavior following an infamous Doors performance in Miami, Morrison was exhausted. The accelerated lifestyle of excess encouraged in Blake`s poetry had mushroomed into a destructive binge of sex, drugs and booze.
In `71 Morrison went to Paris ``to write his notes on the Miami concert bust and simply get away from rock stardom,`` Manzarek said.
In Paris Morrison and Pamela made the rounds of the city`s hip underground rock clubs-particularly the Rock `n` Roll Circus, a popular gathering point for the notoriously decadent Parisian heroin subculture. Morrison was writing almost every day.
But the music stopped on July 3, 1971.
After a night of carousing at the Circus, Pamela found Jim in the bathroom, immobile, arms resting on the porcelain rim of the bathtub. A doctor and the local fire department were summoned; resuscitation efforts failed. No autopsy was performed, and though Parisian authorities suspected that drugs were involved, the official cause of death was listed as a heart attack.
After Morrison`s burial in Paris, Pamela flew back to Los Angeles. But memories of Morrison seemed to haunt the city itself.
In early 1972, Pamela flew north to stay with a friend in Sausalito, Calif., carrying with her Morrison`s satchel. She hailed a cab in San Francisco for the trip to Sausalito. During the 45-minute ride, she talked with the taxi driver, a good-looking Merchant Marine named Michael Vejraska, 23, and unloaded her problems. She and Vejraska soon began a love affair that would last six months.
On the night before she moved in with Vejraska, she gave her new lover a box of Morrison`s writings, which she had removed from the satchel and placed in a 12- by 17-inch gray metal strongbox. A thin adhesive label near the handle read "127 Fascination."
In San Francisco, Pamela again contacted poet Michael McClure and asked him to read some of Morrison`s poems and edit them for future publication.
"There were thousands of sheets of unpublished poetry, all of it neatly typed," McClure recalled. "It was a beautiful piece of poet`s work. I kept the material for six or eight weeks, but I was very busy at the time, I didn`t have time to work with (it)."
McClure returned the poems to Pamela, and insisted that she edit them for publication herself. That fall, however, she returned home to Los Angeles. She was depressed, living on a modest stipend provided by The Doors while Morrison`s will moved through Probate Court.
SHE FOLLOWS HIM IN DEATH
On April 25, 1974, Pamela was found dead in her Hollywood apartment of a heroin overdose; this was a month before the settlement of Morrison`s will, which affirmed Pamela as Morrison`s sole heir. Like Morrison, she was 27 when she died.
Scattered throughout her apartment were photocopies of Morrison`s poems and journals. Her parents quietly took them home, and Vejraska, who had heard the news of her death over the radio, now found himself the caretaker of the rest of Morrison`s unpublished writings in San Francisco.
Vejraska kept the strongbox 12 years. His only contact with the Coursons came less than a month after Pamela`s death, when he returned her VW bus, record collection and a box of Morrison`s photocopied poems and journals.
Then, in the summer of 1986, Grant Jacobs, a longtime Doors fan and veteran of the psychedelic glory days of San Francisco`s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, was approached at a party in San Francisco by someone who knew Vejraska.
Flashing a red-and-white TransWorld Airlines luggage label with Morrison`s name on it, he excitedly told Jacobs that there was a lot more Morrison stuff to be had, including the Lizard King`s journals from Paris and Los Angeles and a number of unpublished poems. Jacobs, who had boasted of a few connections in the rock world, might just be the guy to handle the material, which was now owned by a cab driver named Mike.
Jacobs left the party that night and called an old friend and fellow Doors fan, Reed Prior. The two men decided this was their big chance. Late in the summer of 1986, Prior and Jacobs made their pitch to Vejraska: They wanted to buy into "127 Fascination" and claimed they knew the right people to publish the Morrison poems.
Vejraska needed money. He asked Prior and Jacobs for $30,000 in exchange for a two-thirds share in the manuscripts. Shokrollah Farhadi, an acquaintance of Jacobs`, was brought in to finance the purchase. Farhadi, an Iranian immigrant and former UC Berkeley student with a history of drug and weapons convictions, had the cash. According to federal prosecutors, Farhadi and his sister had been smuggling money and family jewelry out of Iran for five years. The deal to buy the "127 Fascination" manuscripts went down on Wednesday, Oct. 1, 1986. Then Prior and Jacobs showed the manuscripts to former Doorsman Manzarek and veteran record producer Paul Rothchild.
`THIS AMAZING COLLECTION`
"We sat down in their apartment and in the next six hours read through this amazing collection of Jim`s poems. . . . There were songs Jim had worked on for years. Some of it was quite valuable: different versions of very early Doors classics-`Break on Through` and `Soul Kitchen`-that even the band had never seen."
Jacobs and Prior also showed the manuscripts to Doors manager Bill Siddons and the other two band members, Robbie Krieger and John Densmore. Later they displayed the manuscripts to Prior`s girlfriend, his mother, Doors biographer Danny Sugerman and musicians David Crosby and Graham Nash.
And they contacted Robert Stricker, a Berkeley literary agent, to help them sell the manuscripts. Stricker in turn called the San Francisco Chronicle, which reported in an article on Nov. 20, 1986, that a mysterious collection of Morrison`s unpublished poetry had surfaced in San Francisco. The article also reported that Villard Books, a Random House imprint, had offered $150,000 to publish the poems.
In Palm Desert, a community in southern California, Pamela`s parents, Columbus B. "Corky" Courson and his wife, Pearl Marie, were stunned by a second report of the lost writings in Rolling Stone magazine. After their daughter`s death in 1974, Courson had gone to court and claimed Morrison`s percentage of title and royalties to all The Doors` music. Courson, a former Navy bombardier and retired high school principal, also petitioned the court to designate him Pamela`s legal heir and thus executor of Morrison`s estate as well. (Courson later went to court to split the income from Morrison`s estate with Morrison`s parents.)
"Corky has files of Jim`s poems that he`s been working on for years," said Doors associate Frank Lisciandro, who helped Courson sort through 1,600 manuscript pages collected from Vejraska and Pamela`s apartment. Some of the poems had as many as 50 different versions.
In 1982, according to Lisciandro, Courson submitted a manuscript of poems to Morrison`s former publisher, Simon & Schuster, in New York, but the manuscript was rejected.
When news of Morrison`s "lost writings" surfaced, Courson contacted Vejraska in San Francisco and demanded the return of the "127 Fascination"
materials, claiming Vejraska should have given him all of Morrison`s writings back in 1974.
Vejraska declined. He argued that Pamela had given him the original
"127" manuscripts as a gift and that he wasn't bound to return them after she died.
In December, 1986, Farhadi, who financed the purchase of the manuscripts for Jacobs and Prior, was arrested by federal Drug Enforcement Administration agents on charges of dealing heroin and marijuana.
The next month, Prior was sentenced for possession of cocaine. He fled California with the key to the safe deposit box where the "127" materials were stored, leaving Jacobs to fend off the Coursons, who were now demanding to see the manuscripts.
Meanwhile, the Coursons filed suit against Vejraska, Stricker, Prior and Jacobs in San Francisco Superior Court in May, 1987. They demanded the return of the original manuscripts and asked for $1 million in damages. They also copyrighted all of Morrison`s writings they had in their possession and began actively compiling their own manuscript of poems for Villard Books.
Meanwhile, a Doors/Morrison movie was in the works, to be coproduced by promoter Bill Graham, who had booked The Doors at the Fillmore Auditorium and Winterland during the `60s.
On Dec. 12, 1987, Farhadi brought the "127 Fascination" manuscripts and the strongbox to Graham`s South of Market headquarters so the screenwriter could take a look. At the meeting`s end that night, Farhadi, who was free on bail, took home the empty strongbox and a handful of postcards and pictures-collateral on his $30,000 loan to Jacobs and Prior.
Two days later, Farhadi was arrested again by federal officers on drug charges. (He is serving a nine-year sentence in federal prison.)
The day after Farhadi`s arrest, Musa Fari, an Iranian friend of Farhadi`s, entered his suburban home in Novato, Calif., and took the strongbox. Nobody knows where the strongbox is now. The last report had Fari living back in Iran.
Morrison`s notebooks and journals were placed in a safe-deposit box, where they remained until Jacobs transferred them to his attorney`s law offices.
The Coursons, together with Frank and Kathleen Lisciandro, published
"Wilderness: The Lost Writings of Jim Morrison, Volume One" with Villard Books in November, 1988. Two of the poems in that volume" Cassandra at the Well" and "The Anatomy of Rock" also appeared in the "127 Fascination" inventory compiled by Manzarek.
"Wilderness" is now in its third printing and has become a brisk seller. Courson and Lisciandro are compiling a second volume of Morrison`s writings, and Lisciandro recently tracked down two more of Morrison`s notebooks in Los Angeles.
Manzarek believes Morrison would resent the Coursons` profiting from his writing. "Corky had nothing to do with Jim or his writing while he was alive," Manzarek said. "Jim only met Courson four or five times, maybe, but out of obligation."
Finally, in February, a settlement in the legal battle over the "127 Fascination" manuscripts was reached among the attorneys representing the Coursons, Prior, Jacobs, Vejraska and Stricker.
"Essentially," explained Stricker, who still represents Jacobs and Prior, ``we`ve given up our claims for publication rights to the poetry in exchange for keeping the original manuscript material and the right to sell them as memorabilia.``
Stricker believes the "127" manuscripts eventually will end up in the Rock `n` Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.
"It`s been exciting and time-consuming and not profitable at all,"
Stricker lamented. "We haven`t made any money, and the book (`Wilderness`) is doing very well. But I don`t think we got (cheated). I feel that, ultimately, everybody will get his own reward."
Death makes angels of us all
and gives us wings.
Where we had shoulders
smooth as raven`s claws.
-from "An American Prayer,"by Jim Morrison; (copyright) 1981 by Columbus & Pearl Courson
articles.chicagotribune.com/1989-....-morrison-doors
