Post by TheWallsScreamedPoetry on Sept 22, 2007 18:51:11 GMT
The Doors of the twenty first century…….
Growing up with The Doors….Alex Patton recalls what a hard road its always been to call yourself a Doors fan….
40 Years on…..was the journey worth it?
Just to clarify before you begin dear reader this is in no way at all an article exploring some idiot tribute act with a guy from The Cult.
Growing up in the 60s was odd as I was too young to be part of the peace and love thing but old enough to see my sister go from mod hanger on to hippy chick and get some fallout from the music of the time which made me appreciate the music I actually liked rather than the music I was force fed as a child by parents and peers…...which is why I never liked The Beatles I guess….my mum and my sister loved the Mop Tops but they never did much for me…...true I was only seven when they appeared with ‘Love Me Do’ and sent teenagers dippy with delight all across the UK. I recall my sister coming back from Beatles gig at Stockton ABC cinema and looking like she had been visited by Christ himself…...when asked what they had played she could not recall ONE song as the audience had screamed throughout so nobody heard a note…..not my scene (although at that age I did not say things like that)….luckily her boyfriend Paul Boland was a bit more discerning and he was always giving me stuff to listen to …...Yardbirds, Who, Cream and loads of weird stuff….he was a guitar player in a band called Stinky Pete and a huge fan of Clapton and later Hendrix.
Thankfully he helped save me from the musical mediocrity around me and inadvertently got me into The Doors. Because of him I listened to late night radio and the rock shows that never bothered music fans with serious thought during the day…...Radio Luxembourg was a favourite and after the French service (which played some great music) the English programmes presented by guys like Paul Gambuchini and Dave ‘Kid’ Jensen (the only two I remember unfortunately) would begin. I had just started Senior School and was subjected to a myriad of musical tastes but was pleased to find that most of my peers were not pop fans but instead into the more interesting music that was just starting to make an impact in 1967…..true there were many a Beatles fan but I was pointed in several interesting directions during my 5 years at Roseworth Secondary School. It was during one of my late night under the bedclothes excursions into the world of Radio Luxy that I first noticed The Doors….
Lets face it at that time they were nothing here….they might have taken the US by storm but here they were zeroes…..Light My Fire certainly lit no ones fire here except for Jose Feliciano’s salsa version and at the time I thought HE had written that not Robby Krieger (who I had never heard of in 1968)…..
Luxy had a feature called ‘Hit Pick’ and ‘Power Play’ where they gave a decent plug to album tracks and singles the DJ’s particularly liked…..
I got into several bands in the 70s because of this little gem of an idea….but one night the weeks favourite was a new song called ‘Hello I Love You’ by some Yank band called The Doors which was becoming popular in Europe. It was hardly earth shattering but it piqued my interest as it had an edge that I could not put a finger on….of course I did not think like that at the time as I was only 12 years old but having been brought up on Stones, Beatles, Kinks, Hollies and Freddie & The Dreamers it had something that interested me so I kept an eye out for it…..
Shortly after it became a hit here and the band even made an appearance on the countries major rock/pop show...Top Of The Pops which was compulsory viewing for any kid my age at the time and was basically total crap but it was all we had at the time…….I cannot claim to recall the performance with any clarity as they were just a band I liked along with many others but there are some good photos of the show so I know Jim looked cool and lip synched the song as well as all the others…..funny but at the time we kids thought our heroes were all actually singing during these kinds of shows….I wonder what we would have thought if we’d known what we all know now?
A short Euro tour followed and The Doors made a few new friends but sold little in the way of albums and talk in the school playground was certainly not of Jim Morrison ‘Electric Poet’ or the new Yankee sensation….. The Doors.
Not being blessed with having rich parents I depended on my sister Lea to provide the Patton record collection so ‘Hello I Love You’ became a tiny part of all the Beatles and Stones singles that had pride of place next to our rather crap record player that sat in the dining room of our house….
The Miami incident passed un-remarked here in Stockton and the rebellious Stones were always bigger news than Morrison’s antics.
It was not until 1970/71 that I began to get the chance to listen to Doors albums and realised that these guys were becoming my favourite band.
Of course they were not in the same sales league as some of the bands my mates liked but for me they had a power bands like Sabbath, ELP, Purple and Zepp could only dream of but were derided by all my peers and largely ignored by anyone in the rock music know……...they might well have scared Mr & Mrs America but my mum never lost any sleep due to Jim Morrison…..
‘Love Her Madly’ and ‘Riders On the Storm’ were Hit Picks and Power Plays on radio Luxy and then a pal asked me if I had seen the cover of Sounds and everything sorta changed for me……
Bit of a bugger really as I had hoped to witness a Doors gig for myself now I was getting a bit older but that avenue was closed forever and even though I was beginning to hear Doors albums and really ‘getting into’ (I had now started talking like that) rock music in a huge way I thought The Doors story was pretty much over now and they would just become a minor part of music history and Morrison a footnote to the ‘Rock Stars who could have been something’ section of some rarely read music book…..Boy was I WRONG on that one!
LA Woman was released here just after Jim died and as most of the record shops round here were pretty crap anyway I bought my first albums via Melody Maker and a mail order service it had in its classified section.
I think that was the album that sealed it for me really…….I had been listening to ‘Riders On The Storm’ and ‘Love Her Madly’ avidly on Luxy and the album lived up to expectations like nothing I could have imagined…...even my mum liked it surprisingly which disturbed me somewhat but I persevered and began to plough, what to me anyway, was a lone furrow as a Doors fan here in Stockton on Tees…….
I was lucky enough to get an unusual perspective of my fave band by the end of 1971 when Other Voices wended its way to my house and I realised just how important Jim Morrison actually WAS to the Doors….if I am honest it had not really crossed my mind up till then…..It was odd listening to Ray and Robby SING Doors songs and even though I liked (still do like actually) Other Voices Jim was an element that the band was lost without and that was apparent to this 16 year old back then in 1971.
1972s Full Circle would confirm that beyond any doubt left in my mind and I began to think (wrongly of course as I would realise later in life) that Jim WAS The Doors.
I had a chance to see the Jim-less Doors at Newcastle City Hall (a local bus outfit Beggs ran buses to gigs there from Stockton Town Hall) but foolishly passed as I thought without Jim the band was irrelevant. Of course they were not but they WERE lost without him…...I read a review and knew someone who went (they were NOT a Doors fan they just liked gigs) who told me it was a very good show. I wish in hindsight I had gone but in a strange way am glad I did not…..I never claimed being a Doors fan was ever straightforward….
By this time I had also read Jim Morrison’s poetry volume The Lords & The New Creatures which had appeared in paperback here in 1971. Not being into poetry I thought it was a load of old bollocks…..took me 30 years to actually ‘get’ it….
Also I had discovered the level of animosity The Doors seemed to generate among rock fans of my generation…..
Also by this time I had completed my Doors collection and had heard the acid rock anthems many American fans had been absorbed into the fold with back in the 60s. Being a kid with no money it was not easy to hear albums unless an older brother or sister was into the band and my sister was NOT a Doors fan at all….
One favourite at the time for me was my cherished copy of Absolutely Live which blew me away at the power this lot seemed to have as a live band and made me realise what I had missed. I had tried to wangle a trip to the IOW with my sister and her bloke as there were a lot of bands I wanted to actually see and as I’d never been to a live gig I fancied the adventure. My mum was OK with it but her and her guitar playing hubby were not keen on babysitting me at what turned out to be Britain's defining festival event and the end of the really great rock extravaganzas here. So I missed out on ever seeing The Doors. The previously mentioned 1972 trip to Newcastle City Hall was pooh poohed by me as I thought a Jim less band not worthy of my time…..silly me!
Anyway back to the animosity thing….
It sometimes seems like a hundred years ago but I can just about remember being seventeen years old and recall once how I took a copy of Absolutely Live to a party at a friends house in Rimswell which was then a posh suburb of Stockton on Tees. I remember putting my contribution on the turntable and was rather chuffed as Jim began reading ‘The Celebration Of The Lizard’ the bit of Jim poetry I liked as it had a great musical backing. I had thought as my friends were all into a myriad of rock, prog rock, blues, glam and God alone knows what else they would appreciate the power of this The Doors most ambitious work…...
Only to have my aspirations shattered as the host of the party (a bit of a knob who was into Mott The Hoople) literally ripped the disc from his record player (something we old folks used before I-Pods appeared) screaming ‘get this fucking shit off’………
I was a bit put out. Even more so when someone put ‘Piledriver’ by Status Quo on and they were all bopping away to their crap version of ‘Roadhouse Blues’.
Its odd as most of my friends were pretty cool when it came to rock music...my best mates Paul Gatenby was a huge Alice Cooper fan long before ‘Killer’ made an appearance and got me into Johnny and Edgar Winter and Geoff Wilberforce was massively into Purple and later Yes….
I had mates who were into all manner of rock from ELP to Tull to Heep to Zeppelin and dozens of bands in between most of you will never even have heard of. 1973 was a hotbed of rock music but I did not know ONE single person who had a good word to say about The Doors.
Oddly enough ‘Riders On The Storm’ was popular with rock fans and the Morrison Death Myth was a topic of conversation from time to time but when it came to owning an album or professing to actually ‘liking’ The Doors I was in a minority of ONE!
Apart from ‘Hello’ which made number #15 and ‘Riders’ that got to #25 The Doors had not enjoyed any real chart success and album sales here were poor but I had began to notice that record shops (that I now frequented with worrying regularity) always seem to have Doors albums in their racks….which confused me as I did not know a single person who even listened to The Doors either from school at work or from my many mates around Teesside. I was at this time selling bootlegs around the globe with my mate Geoff and had started a search for live gigs of The Doors….futile back then but improved a bit in the last few decades…...
My first was The Matrix album ‘Scream Of the Butterfly’ and ‘Weird Triangle’ an LP of the ‘bloody carnivore’ set from The Roundhouse…..I was also given a piss poor copy (though I was extremely grateful for it) of ‘LA Woman/Changeling’ from Dallas by a contact pal Roger Scott who was Europe's biggest bootlegger who me and Geoff had become pally with. It later turned up on a bootleg LP with slightly better quality. But apart from that Doors boots were rarer than penguin shit in the Sahara desert.
1978 saw a rare treat for Doors fans with the release of American Prayer but it hardly set the world alight and was for fans rather than an attempt to break The Doors anew. I remember getting a copy on my way home from work at Stockton HMV on the day of its release and sitting with headphones in our living room listening to it repeatedly much to the annoyance of my wife Debbie who I had been married to since September that year….she was a Zeppelin fan….
But that apart Doors were not on the lips of the nation and just when it seemed like The Doors story was pretty much over in the 70s a sea change came with Coppola’s masterpiece ‘Apocalypse Now’ and everybody was talking about the power of ‘The End’ at the opening of the film. Still today the best introduction to a movie ever committed to celluloid.
But still Doors fans were something slightly less common than your average Dodo!
Then all sorts of strange things started to happen.
True The Doors had still been around as the solo work of Ray Manzarek still gave some of us fans an interest in the band. Golden Scarab and The Butts Band were highlights of the early 70s and Nite City whilst cheesy was a competent band from that era. I did find Robby’s stuff a tad dull but that’s because I was not greatly into instrumentals.
But all of a sudden it began to get a bit out of control……
Coppola had opened a door (pardon the pun) as Danny Sugerman (former Doors limpet and child gopher) managed to get someone interested in Jerry Hopkins gargantuan manuscript and eventually helped trim it to a sensible size and we got ‘No One Here Gets Out Alive’ which ended up as the biggest rock bio in history….although we also know now its one of the crappiest as well…..
I had Mike Jahn’s excellent book and a couple of Door songbooks that had articles but never had seen anything like THIS……..so at the time it blew me away and for the next decade was the benchmark to measure Doors history by.
The Doors were news again and hot on the heels of NOHGOA we saw the Granada documentary make it to my region...albeit in the early hours and as I had not got a video (such things were not easily available at the time) I had to sit up and watch it …...I was amazed I can tell you…A new ‘Greatest Hits’ package appeared…. (not a patch on my copy of ‘Weird Scenes Inside the Goldmine’ which for me is the BEST ever of that much maligned genre...the music press became interested again and friends I had grown up with who hated The Doors began to buy their records and talk about them over beer in pubs.. I was rather astounded by this turn of events.
In no time at all Jim was Ten Years Gone and once more on the cover of magazine and rock papers. NME did a superb spread from Max Bell (my fave rock critic as he was a Doors, Blue Öyster Cult, Pavlov Dog fan just like ME) and highlighted the gig where Jim came back on stage and berated the DJ for introducing the band as Jim Morrison and The Doors……
‘it’s The Doors man OK. Go back on and do it properly’
...and the DJ did.
Amazing…...I liked this guy more and more.
I was gathering tons of information on Jim and the band and it was like finding King Tuts tomb to me as every month brought some new treasure.
The 10th anniversary was celebrated by the rock media and The Doors visited their meal tickets grave for the first time as a unit on July 3rd 1981 which was reported far and wide.
Growing up with The Doors….Alex Patton recalls what a hard road its always been to call yourself a Doors fan….
40 Years on…..was the journey worth it?
Just to clarify before you begin dear reader this is in no way at all an article exploring some idiot tribute act with a guy from The Cult.
Growing up in the 60s was odd as I was too young to be part of the peace and love thing but old enough to see my sister go from mod hanger on to hippy chick and get some fallout from the music of the time which made me appreciate the music I actually liked rather than the music I was force fed as a child by parents and peers…...which is why I never liked The Beatles I guess….my mum and my sister loved the Mop Tops but they never did much for me…...true I was only seven when they appeared with ‘Love Me Do’ and sent teenagers dippy with delight all across the UK. I recall my sister coming back from Beatles gig at Stockton ABC cinema and looking like she had been visited by Christ himself…...when asked what they had played she could not recall ONE song as the audience had screamed throughout so nobody heard a note…..not my scene (although at that age I did not say things like that)….luckily her boyfriend Paul Boland was a bit more discerning and he was always giving me stuff to listen to …...Yardbirds, Who, Cream and loads of weird stuff….he was a guitar player in a band called Stinky Pete and a huge fan of Clapton and later Hendrix.
Thankfully he helped save me from the musical mediocrity around me and inadvertently got me into The Doors. Because of him I listened to late night radio and the rock shows that never bothered music fans with serious thought during the day…...Radio Luxembourg was a favourite and after the French service (which played some great music) the English programmes presented by guys like Paul Gambuchini and Dave ‘Kid’ Jensen (the only two I remember unfortunately) would begin. I had just started Senior School and was subjected to a myriad of musical tastes but was pleased to find that most of my peers were not pop fans but instead into the more interesting music that was just starting to make an impact in 1967…..true there were many a Beatles fan but I was pointed in several interesting directions during my 5 years at Roseworth Secondary School. It was during one of my late night under the bedclothes excursions into the world of Radio Luxy that I first noticed The Doors….
Lets face it at that time they were nothing here….they might have taken the US by storm but here they were zeroes…..Light My Fire certainly lit no ones fire here except for Jose Feliciano’s salsa version and at the time I thought HE had written that not Robby Krieger (who I had never heard of in 1968)…..
Luxy had a feature called ‘Hit Pick’ and ‘Power Play’ where they gave a decent plug to album tracks and singles the DJ’s particularly liked…..
I got into several bands in the 70s because of this little gem of an idea….but one night the weeks favourite was a new song called ‘Hello I Love You’ by some Yank band called The Doors which was becoming popular in Europe. It was hardly earth shattering but it piqued my interest as it had an edge that I could not put a finger on….of course I did not think like that at the time as I was only 12 years old but having been brought up on Stones, Beatles, Kinks, Hollies and Freddie & The Dreamers it had something that interested me so I kept an eye out for it…..
Shortly after it became a hit here and the band even made an appearance on the countries major rock/pop show...Top Of The Pops which was compulsory viewing for any kid my age at the time and was basically total crap but it was all we had at the time…….I cannot claim to recall the performance with any clarity as they were just a band I liked along with many others but there are some good photos of the show so I know Jim looked cool and lip synched the song as well as all the others…..funny but at the time we kids thought our heroes were all actually singing during these kinds of shows….I wonder what we would have thought if we’d known what we all know now?
A short Euro tour followed and The Doors made a few new friends but sold little in the way of albums and talk in the school playground was certainly not of Jim Morrison ‘Electric Poet’ or the new Yankee sensation….. The Doors.
Not being blessed with having rich parents I depended on my sister Lea to provide the Patton record collection so ‘Hello I Love You’ became a tiny part of all the Beatles and Stones singles that had pride of place next to our rather crap record player that sat in the dining room of our house….
The Miami incident passed un-remarked here in Stockton and the rebellious Stones were always bigger news than Morrison’s antics.
It was not until 1970/71 that I began to get the chance to listen to Doors albums and realised that these guys were becoming my favourite band.
Of course they were not in the same sales league as some of the bands my mates liked but for me they had a power bands like Sabbath, ELP, Purple and Zepp could only dream of but were derided by all my peers and largely ignored by anyone in the rock music know……...they might well have scared Mr & Mrs America but my mum never lost any sleep due to Jim Morrison…..
‘Love Her Madly’ and ‘Riders On the Storm’ were Hit Picks and Power Plays on radio Luxy and then a pal asked me if I had seen the cover of Sounds and everything sorta changed for me……
Bit of a bugger really as I had hoped to witness a Doors gig for myself now I was getting a bit older but that avenue was closed forever and even though I was beginning to hear Doors albums and really ‘getting into’ (I had now started talking like that) rock music in a huge way I thought The Doors story was pretty much over now and they would just become a minor part of music history and Morrison a footnote to the ‘Rock Stars who could have been something’ section of some rarely read music book…..Boy was I WRONG on that one!
LA Woman was released here just after Jim died and as most of the record shops round here were pretty crap anyway I bought my first albums via Melody Maker and a mail order service it had in its classified section.
I think that was the album that sealed it for me really…….I had been listening to ‘Riders On The Storm’ and ‘Love Her Madly’ avidly on Luxy and the album lived up to expectations like nothing I could have imagined…...even my mum liked it surprisingly which disturbed me somewhat but I persevered and began to plough, what to me anyway, was a lone furrow as a Doors fan here in Stockton on Tees…….
I was lucky enough to get an unusual perspective of my fave band by the end of 1971 when Other Voices wended its way to my house and I realised just how important Jim Morrison actually WAS to the Doors….if I am honest it had not really crossed my mind up till then…..It was odd listening to Ray and Robby SING Doors songs and even though I liked (still do like actually) Other Voices Jim was an element that the band was lost without and that was apparent to this 16 year old back then in 1971.
1972s Full Circle would confirm that beyond any doubt left in my mind and I began to think (wrongly of course as I would realise later in life) that Jim WAS The Doors.
I had a chance to see the Jim-less Doors at Newcastle City Hall (a local bus outfit Beggs ran buses to gigs there from Stockton Town Hall) but foolishly passed as I thought without Jim the band was irrelevant. Of course they were not but they WERE lost without him…...I read a review and knew someone who went (they were NOT a Doors fan they just liked gigs) who told me it was a very good show. I wish in hindsight I had gone but in a strange way am glad I did not…..I never claimed being a Doors fan was ever straightforward….
By this time I had also read Jim Morrison’s poetry volume The Lords & The New Creatures which had appeared in paperback here in 1971. Not being into poetry I thought it was a load of old bollocks…..took me 30 years to actually ‘get’ it….
Also I had discovered the level of animosity The Doors seemed to generate among rock fans of my generation…..
Also by this time I had completed my Doors collection and had heard the acid rock anthems many American fans had been absorbed into the fold with back in the 60s. Being a kid with no money it was not easy to hear albums unless an older brother or sister was into the band and my sister was NOT a Doors fan at all….
One favourite at the time for me was my cherished copy of Absolutely Live which blew me away at the power this lot seemed to have as a live band and made me realise what I had missed. I had tried to wangle a trip to the IOW with my sister and her bloke as there were a lot of bands I wanted to actually see and as I’d never been to a live gig I fancied the adventure. My mum was OK with it but her and her guitar playing hubby were not keen on babysitting me at what turned out to be Britain's defining festival event and the end of the really great rock extravaganzas here. So I missed out on ever seeing The Doors. The previously mentioned 1972 trip to Newcastle City Hall was pooh poohed by me as I thought a Jim less band not worthy of my time…..silly me!
Anyway back to the animosity thing….
It sometimes seems like a hundred years ago but I can just about remember being seventeen years old and recall once how I took a copy of Absolutely Live to a party at a friends house in Rimswell which was then a posh suburb of Stockton on Tees. I remember putting my contribution on the turntable and was rather chuffed as Jim began reading ‘The Celebration Of The Lizard’ the bit of Jim poetry I liked as it had a great musical backing. I had thought as my friends were all into a myriad of rock, prog rock, blues, glam and God alone knows what else they would appreciate the power of this The Doors most ambitious work…...
Only to have my aspirations shattered as the host of the party (a bit of a knob who was into Mott The Hoople) literally ripped the disc from his record player (something we old folks used before I-Pods appeared) screaming ‘get this fucking shit off’………
I was a bit put out. Even more so when someone put ‘Piledriver’ by Status Quo on and they were all bopping away to their crap version of ‘Roadhouse Blues’.
Its odd as most of my friends were pretty cool when it came to rock music...my best mates Paul Gatenby was a huge Alice Cooper fan long before ‘Killer’ made an appearance and got me into Johnny and Edgar Winter and Geoff Wilberforce was massively into Purple and later Yes….
I had mates who were into all manner of rock from ELP to Tull to Heep to Zeppelin and dozens of bands in between most of you will never even have heard of. 1973 was a hotbed of rock music but I did not know ONE single person who had a good word to say about The Doors.
Oddly enough ‘Riders On The Storm’ was popular with rock fans and the Morrison Death Myth was a topic of conversation from time to time but when it came to owning an album or professing to actually ‘liking’ The Doors I was in a minority of ONE!
Apart from ‘Hello’ which made number #15 and ‘Riders’ that got to #25 The Doors had not enjoyed any real chart success and album sales here were poor but I had began to notice that record shops (that I now frequented with worrying regularity) always seem to have Doors albums in their racks….which confused me as I did not know a single person who even listened to The Doors either from school at work or from my many mates around Teesside. I was at this time selling bootlegs around the globe with my mate Geoff and had started a search for live gigs of The Doors….futile back then but improved a bit in the last few decades…...
My first was The Matrix album ‘Scream Of the Butterfly’ and ‘Weird Triangle’ an LP of the ‘bloody carnivore’ set from The Roundhouse…..I was also given a piss poor copy (though I was extremely grateful for it) of ‘LA Woman/Changeling’ from Dallas by a contact pal Roger Scott who was Europe's biggest bootlegger who me and Geoff had become pally with. It later turned up on a bootleg LP with slightly better quality. But apart from that Doors boots were rarer than penguin shit in the Sahara desert.
1978 saw a rare treat for Doors fans with the release of American Prayer but it hardly set the world alight and was for fans rather than an attempt to break The Doors anew. I remember getting a copy on my way home from work at Stockton HMV on the day of its release and sitting with headphones in our living room listening to it repeatedly much to the annoyance of my wife Debbie who I had been married to since September that year….she was a Zeppelin fan….
But that apart Doors were not on the lips of the nation and just when it seemed like The Doors story was pretty much over in the 70s a sea change came with Coppola’s masterpiece ‘Apocalypse Now’ and everybody was talking about the power of ‘The End’ at the opening of the film. Still today the best introduction to a movie ever committed to celluloid.
But still Doors fans were something slightly less common than your average Dodo!
Then all sorts of strange things started to happen.
True The Doors had still been around as the solo work of Ray Manzarek still gave some of us fans an interest in the band. Golden Scarab and The Butts Band were highlights of the early 70s and Nite City whilst cheesy was a competent band from that era. I did find Robby’s stuff a tad dull but that’s because I was not greatly into instrumentals.
But all of a sudden it began to get a bit out of control……
Coppola had opened a door (pardon the pun) as Danny Sugerman (former Doors limpet and child gopher) managed to get someone interested in Jerry Hopkins gargantuan manuscript and eventually helped trim it to a sensible size and we got ‘No One Here Gets Out Alive’ which ended up as the biggest rock bio in history….although we also know now its one of the crappiest as well…..
I had Mike Jahn’s excellent book and a couple of Door songbooks that had articles but never had seen anything like THIS……..so at the time it blew me away and for the next decade was the benchmark to measure Doors history by.
The Doors were news again and hot on the heels of NOHGOA we saw the Granada documentary make it to my region...albeit in the early hours and as I had not got a video (such things were not easily available at the time) I had to sit up and watch it …...I was amazed I can tell you…A new ‘Greatest Hits’ package appeared…. (not a patch on my copy of ‘Weird Scenes Inside the Goldmine’ which for me is the BEST ever of that much maligned genre...the music press became interested again and friends I had grown up with who hated The Doors began to buy their records and talk about them over beer in pubs.. I was rather astounded by this turn of events.
In no time at all Jim was Ten Years Gone and once more on the cover of magazine and rock papers. NME did a superb spread from Max Bell (my fave rock critic as he was a Doors, Blue Öyster Cult, Pavlov Dog fan just like ME) and highlighted the gig where Jim came back on stage and berated the DJ for introducing the band as Jim Morrison and The Doors……
‘it’s The Doors man OK. Go back on and do it properly’
...and the DJ did.
Amazing…...I liked this guy more and more.
I was gathering tons of information on Jim and the band and it was like finding King Tuts tomb to me as every month brought some new treasure.
The 10th anniversary was celebrated by the rock media and The Doors visited their meal tickets grave for the first time as a unit on July 3rd 1981 which was reported far and wide.
