Hunting The Lizard King-NME-Sep 27/Oct 4 1975

[darkstar]

The Hunting Of The Lizard King by Mick Farren
September 27 and October 4 1975
New Musical Express







I only saw Jim Morrison twice.
Each time, even off stage, he gave the appearance of a
man performing his own private movie. Maybe in some
secluded place he was able to drop the self-inflicted
role; maybe the Morrison movie occupied his waking
hours.

Certainly all the evidence shows that while there was even
one person around to watch, Morrison performed. The
first time I was him was at the Roundhouse. It was a
Middle Earth all-night spectacular that starred the
Doors and the Jefferson Airplane - the most ambitious
project yet tackled by the flower punks and the
psychedelic wheeler-dealers who rode herd on what was
laughingly called London's underground rock
business.

It was clear right from the first that there was no
love lost been the Doors and the Airplane. In the
first wave of back-stage gossip came the news that a
high-level tactical battle had been raging all afternoon
over who should go on first. The Doors had won - by
the strategic use of stage lighting. Their roadies
had arranged the Doors' 20-odd Acoustic speakers,
meticulously matched black, rexine-covered monoliths crowned
by baby-blue high frequency horn, like the pillars
at a Nuremburg rally. The Airplane had little
choice, with their somewhat ragbag assortment of
hippie-built cabinets, to work around the Doors' fait accompi.
Both bands had obviously approached the London concert
determined to emerge as The Stars. The Airplane had brought
the entire Joshua Light Show from the Fillmore West.
The Doors simply had Jim. They did, however, have one
other advantage. Granada TV was making a film of the
Doors and Granada TV's money was intrumental in the
staging of the show. This was the Doors ultimate answer.
If anyone didn't give them what they wanted, they
could cause a great deal of trouble.

It was typical of Morrison's public personna that, as the Doors
performance got under way, he slowly began to turn on the
camera crew. At first he posed for the three big
cumbersome outside broadcast cameras, then his narcissism
started to plunge over the edge. He dodged them nimbly,
jumping out of range each time they tried to focus on
him. Finally, with a grand gesture of childish
petulance, he flung out a dramatic arm and demanded the TV
lights should be shut off. He pulled the audience in
behind as he warmed to the role of the star punk giving
the finger to the old folks' medium. A storm of
catcalls and booing broke out. The lights were finally
extingished, and the rest of the film had to be shot in murky
half darkness.

During the second performance Morrison went a stage further. He
actually turned on the audience, interrupting the music with a
stream of random obsenities until it seemed that he produced what he
considered a postive reaction from the crowd. Once that was
achieved, he got back to business as usual. It was then
that the idea first occured to me that there was
something inside Morrison that forced him to push any
relationship to the ultimate. With both individuals and
audience he appeared to need to see how much they could
take. To define, by practical experiment, how much
abuse anyone would put up with before they ceased to
adore him. It was this willingness to go to the limit
that set Morrison apart from the commond herd of
posing, macho rock frontmen. It also created what was
possibly the greatest problem. As he discovered the
depth's of public masochism, just how much abuse these
people were willing to accept without revolting, he
became disgusted.

The second time I saw Jim Morrison it became
clear that his major victim was himself. It was
backstage at the Isle Of Wight Festival. He looked a mess.
A full beard and a cossack style smock couldn't
disguise the fact that he was grossly overweight. He had
been herded into a corner by John Sebastian and was
clutching a brandy, grunting responses, and looking for a
way to escape the tie-dyed collection of platitudes
as Sebastian gushed on about how "far out it all
was." Morrison looked desperate. Not just to get away
from the current situation. He seemed to have the
desperation of someone who knows his control is slipping
away.

The feeling was reinforced when he came out on the
stage. He was a shamling parody of himself. It was as
though he knew his performance wasn't worthy of the huge
crowds ritual adulation, that if they applauded so
easily their devotion could only be worthy of
contempt.

Over the years the memory becomes shaky. I can't quite
remember if Jimi Hendrix followed the Doors or the Doors
followed Hendrix. I was certainly drunk. Two things are
clear, however, they both played during the evening,
when the campfires of that particularily strife-torn
festival blazed across the hillside. They both play badly,
by their own standards, and they both seemed
sickened when the crowd received a medicore set as though
it was a triumph. In a matter of months, both men
were dead.

JAMES JAMES MORRISON MORRISON
COMMONLY KNOW AS JIM.

In the Jim Morrison Story, whom
would they get to play Jim as a boy? Whom for that
matter would they get to play Jim as a man? In the
magazine story there is hardly enough space for the
interviews with old school chums. That has o be left to He
Who Writes The Book. The Morrison early life has to
be presented as one of those continous dissolve
montages, like the News on the March sequence from "Citizen
Kane." No sooner has one scene appeared before it
dissolves for the next.

It's a boy, Mrs. Morrison, it's
a boy. The baby cradled by proud parents, mother
adoring, father dignified by gold braid. The child grows
into a sensitive, large eyed Freddy Bartholomew kind
of brat with dark curly hair. We see him playing
baseball, running through the fields. The picture darkens.
He gazes pensively at the rain on the window. Fights
with father, confrontation, running again, this time
through the rain. This isn't joy, now it's
flight.

[darkstar]

(VOICE OVER)

James Douglas Morrison was born on
December 8, 1943, in Melborne, Florida. He was the son of
Rear Admiral Morrison in a family that had a long
history of career militarists. In later life he often
made claim that his parents were both dead. He
graduated from George Washington High School in Alexandria,
Virginia in 1961. He spent a year at the St. Petersburg
Jonior College in Florida and then switched to Florida
State University for alittle over a year. In spring
1964 he blah blah blah blah blah.....

WAIT! There's been a slaughter here. Whoever told you that he was
the Freddy Bartholomew proto-faggot? He might have
been a strapping Little League Pitcher, or even a fat,
Pepsi guzzling kid who wet the bed and never got down
to date weight until after puberty. The fantasy is
always tidier than the reality.

Morrison after all, chose the simplest tale of all. He was just a
po'orphan. It's a lie, but what do we lose? As far as the
Morrison movie is concerned the only flashback is to a
hazy gothic orphanage. Hardly Boys' Town though. No
Father Flotsky patiently trying to bring out the
potential in the withdrawn, hostile punk. "My son, we're
just trying to help you." Jim - Why can't you all
leave me alone? You're tearing me apart."

Fantasy can be funny, but speculation sometimes scores.

After all, somewhere as an adolescent, Morrison
must have turned his back on every one of the US upper
middle class soft rat traps. The military tradition, the
black maid, the Diners Club and Master Charge, TV
dinner by the pool.

He must have revolted against the whole fifties, cold war, Pentagon
better-off-dead-than-red mentality where the hyperdrive
competetiveness went hand in hand with being a good neighbor. Where
noble euphemisms were used for the kind of nuclear mass
murder that could make Attila the Hun, Caligula and
Adolf all look like pussycats. At some point Morrison
did flee from the security, the naval college, the
commission and the cradle to grave security. That at least,
we know for sure.

BLOODY RED SUN OF FANTASTIC L.A.

Morrison's flight took him to the streets of Los Angeles. He was
enrolled in the theatre arts department of U.C.L.A. Some ten or
tweleve years before, a student called Byron James Dean had attended
the selfsame establishment. Where Dean studied
acting, Morrison majored in film technique. After the
intital novelty of the film school wore off, Morrison
seems to have started to drift. Although his interest
in film stayed with him, his interest in formal
study of it waned. Most accounts place him living on
the beach and playing games with his inner mind. At
his own admission:

"In those days I was eating acid like candy. If you do it right you
can stay in a permanently heightened state. This is possible in L.A.
The society produces so much garbage that it provides enough
for a whole lot of people to live on."

Not only did L.A. provide a material surplus for the likes of
Jim to live on, it also provided him with the
backdrop to act out his own fantasies.

Los Angeles, or, more particularily, Hollywood is more of a movie
set than a city. A large proportion of its population
came here hoping for that ultimate western dream, to
find fame and fortune on the silver screen. By
necessity the majority of these never managed to adapt to
the humdrum lite of a shop assistant or
stenographer.

It was in Hollywood that Morrison began to gravitate
towards the freaks and monsters. He developed a
fascination for winos, bums, the street hustlers, the tired
hookers and unclassified weirdos that inhabit the shadows
of the hot, polluted nights. Some of the people who
knew him in his U.C.L.A. days suggested that Morrison
was acting out some strange kind of James Dean role.
Certainly Dean had the same morbid interest in society's
cripples and mutants, but, whether or not it was self
induced in Morrison, it stayed with him for the rest of
his life and was a constant motif in all of his
work.

WHEN
THE MUSIC IS YOUR ONLY FRIEND

During the summer of 1965 Ray Manzarek ran into Jim Morrison on the
beach at Venice, one of the hundred suburbs that make
up greater Los Angeles. Manzarek had been friendly
with Morrison at UCLA, but for a while they had
drifted apart. It was a "what's happening, what are you
doing?" conversation until Morrison told him that he had
started writing songs.

Manzarek had been forced by his parents to play the piano from an
early age. "I hated it for the first four years, until I learned how
to do it." His introduction to black music came at
the age of twelve. "I used to listen to R&B radio
stations out of Chicago. My piano playing changed. I
learned to play stride piano with my left hand. I knew
that was it. I was hooked.

Today Ray Manzarek is a very tall, mild mannered individual with a
short sighted, friendly expression and the air of a
college professor or elder statesman. Like the other
x-Doors, he is reluctant to talk about Morrison. When the
conversation moves to events in the past he is only referred
to obliquely. You get the impression that there is
something deep and traumaic in the relationship between the
band and the singer. Manzarek's work with his new band
does make one thing very clear. Of all the Doors he
was certainly the most involved with Morrison in the
creation of their overall sound and philosophy. The
mysticism and the eerie gothic structures are still with
him today.

On the beach in 1965, Morrison went on to describe to Manzarek the
lyrics he was working on. "He sang 'Moonlight Drive'. "When he sang
those lines, 'Let's swim to the moon/Let's climb
through the tide/Penetrate the evening that the city
sleeps to hide,' I said, that's it. We talked for a
while. It seemed as though, if we got a group together
we could make a million dollars."

In pursuit of the million dollars, Manzarek recruited a drummer
called John Densmsore and a guitar player named Robby Krieger. Of all
the unlikely places to discover the other half of the
Doors, he found them at the maharishi's Third Street
meditation centre. Manzarek was an early devotee of the
giggling guru, as were Densmore and Krieger. After
rehearsing in a L.A. garage for a while the Doors made their
debut at the London Fog Club on Sunset Blvd. They
stayed at the London Fog for three months, doing four
hours a night, seven days a week. The wage for this was
$45 a week. From the London Fog they moved on to the
Whisky A Go-Go which was at the time the prestige rock
showcase on the Sunset Strip. It had been one of the
jumping off spots for the Byrds a few years earlier. The
Doors expected to go the same way. They even had a
record deal with Columbia. It looked as though the
million dollars was just around the corner.

Things didn't quite work out as planned.

On the plus side, Jac Holzman, president of Elektra
Records, saw their act at the Whisky and freaked. He spent
three months trying to persuade the Doors to spearhead
what was then a small folk label's push into rock and
roll.

For a start no one at Columbia seemed willing to activate the Doors'
contract. They'd cut a number of tracks, but the tapes only gathered
dust. Initially Elektra didn't seem as attractive as the Columbia
deal, but it did, atleast, guarantee that their records
would get released. The Doors finally relented and
signed.

They completed their first album under the guidance of producer Paul
Rothchild. Rothchild described the recording of "The End" to
Crawdaddy magazine:

"I have never been as moved in a recording studio as
I was when that take went down. It was one of the
very first times in rock and roll history that sheer
drama had taken place on tape....at one point during
the recording session he was very emotionally moved,
and he shouted in the studio, 'Does anybody
understand me?' and I said, 'Yes, I do,' and right then and there we got into a long discussion about what does it mean, this section...What he says at the end of the 'Father I want to kill you' Oedipal section is
essentially what the classic says, he is saying 'kill the
alien concepts and get back to reality....get to your
own in-touch-with-yourself situation."

This was about the first time that the Doors were
surrounded by a cloud of pseudo-psychological jive. From
then on, the cloud would grow denser until it obscured
any kind of in-touch-with-yourself reality as far as
Jim Morrison was concerned. Paul Rothchild may have
been emotionally moved by the Doors' performance of
'The End.' The management of the Whisky A Go-Go took a very different attitude when they did the song live.
They decided Morrison was mad and threw him out of the club.

[darkstar]

".....factoids, that is, facts that have no
existence before appearing in a magazine...or...newspaper."
~ Norman Mailer

While the Doors were going through their early struggles, Jim
Morrison was getting another act together the mystique that was
eventually to transform the L.A. rock and roll bum into the Freudian
nightmare figure the Lizard King.

Danny Sugarman was a 13 year old runaway when the Doors first rose to
fame. He idolized Morrison and began hanging around the
Doors' office. He was virtually adopted by Morrison as a
kind of mascot and sound board. "We found we had a
great deal in common. We were both the kids of high
ranking naval officers, we both revolted against the
authority of our fathers. The more I talked to Jim I
discovered we shared very similar attitudes. Basically Jim
operated more like a scientist than an artist. He
experimented with everyone around him. In someone else it
would have been called running games on people. In
Jim's case, it was taken to such extremes that it
superceded games and became a huge experiment. <br>That was
basically what a Doors performance was about. It was a vast
experiment. The only person he didn't subject to this kind of
thing to was me."

Danny Sugarman moved on to be both Ray Manzarek's and Iggy Pop's
manager. He may be thought of in L.A. as an uppity punk, but he is
by no means stupid. He, nonetheless, seems to fall for the
basic trick that Morrison used to introduce mystery in
all his personal relationships.

It is impossible really to get close to the essential Jim
Morrison. The man himself is after all dead. His wife,
Pamela died in April 1974 and the musicians who worked
with him seem blankly unwilling to talk about his
personality. The people who are most willing to talk are those
who knew him in a more peripheral manner: the casual
girls, the drinking companions, the parasites. These,
outside his actual audiences are the ones who bore the
full brunt of his experimentation. Everyone of them
was presented with a different facet of the man,
seemingly tailored to maxium effect. Morrison created
dramas wherever he went. He appeared to sow the seeds,
and the imagination of his subject/victim/audience
did the rest. Each one was shown a single facet of
the Lizard King persona, and then left to invent the
rest. To one person, he would display himself as the
ultimate, brawling, drunk in black leather. Another would
swear that he was a doomed poet straight out of Edgar
Allan Poe, hag-ridden by his own genius.

One particular lady I had talked to had based a
scenario of Morrison on a single conversation. He had seen
a cat mewing to get into a boarded up building and
he'd invented a maudlin story around the observation.
Although he was probably drunk at the time (Morrison's
alcoholism is one of the few consistent factors in most of
the stories about him)she fondly believed that she
had been given the sole, exclusive view of Morrison's
inner gentleness and sensitivity.

A number of other L.A. women claim that Jim was impotent. They
weave deep, and often dopey, satanic or psychiatric
reasons for his incapability. Others don't even mention
it. The truth of the matter is probably painfully
simple. The contacts he made with the impotentcy school
happened when he was too drunk to get it up. Unfortunately
such a mundane answer didn't fit in with the image of
the Lizard King, and lurid tales of the sex symbol's
dark secret just begged to be invented.

In almost every case even his most casual acquaintances
firmly believe that they alone were privileged to see
"the real Jim." Just like Danny Sugarman, they all
claim that Morrison subjected everyone else but them to
the games and experiments. Only with them did he shed
the Lizard King armour.

We have no way of telling if Morrison, in fact, ever dropped the
role. All those in a position to know are either silent or dead.
The only thing that's certain is that he took a
spolied childs delight in feeding the fantasies of
everyone he met. In so doing he may have lost a great deal
of his own personality.

When the Doors began to break and the media
started to cluster around, Morrison found they provided
limitless opportunties to indulge himself in petulance and
planting fantasies. It seems as if a new Jim was whipped
up for every new journalist.

Joan Didion who later wrote a best seller called "Play It As It Lays"
was invited to a Doors recording session. Instead of
coherent comments she was treated to the spectacle of
Morrison slumped on a control room couch slowly striking
matches, and then extinguishing them on the crotch of his
leather pants.

Writer Tom Nolan was set up with a petulant complaint that nobody
ever asked Morrison about the things he was interested in. When
Nolan called his bluff, Jim responded with a metaphysical double
talk. "A while ago I became aware that there were
spirits, other beings in the space around me. They have
spirit but they don't manifest themselves physically.
They are aware of us, but we do not like to admit that
they exist. I think they envy us, our
lives."

This corn was delivered with a air of vulnerable
innocense that he turned on when he knew he was being
totally preposterous. Strangely, it always seemed to
work, both on individuals and audiences, at least while
he remained calm and pretty.

He appears to have hypnotised Richard Goldstein, writing for a New
York magazine in 1967, into taking every thing he said
absolutely seriously. "the shaman...he was a man who would
intoxicate himself. See, he was probably already an, uh,
unusal individual. And he would put himself in a trance
by dancing, whirling around, drinking, taking drugs.
However, then he would go on a mental travel and...uh,
describe his journey to the rest of the
tribe."

This was pretty much the standard Doors interview
during the formative years. A mixture of Nietzsche, de
Sade and great chunks of Amerindian lore. The game
didn't stop at interviews. Throughout his career, the
Jim Morrison stories were a blessing to every rock
paper gossip columnist.

Every week they would flow from the office of
publicist Danny Fields, a New York sixties whizz kid, who
later hyped Elektra into signing both the MC5 and the
Stooges.

Jim had run into a pet shop, bought the entire stock
and then released them on the street. Jim had been
sitting entertaining guests in an open restaurant when a bug had flown by. He'd caught it in the air and eaten
it. Jim had bad mouthed Janis Joplin to her face and
had been slugged with a Southern Comfort bottle. Jim
had risked death by dancing on a ledge eighty feet
above the pavement. The stories went on and on. They
were genuine factoids. It became irrelevant whether
they were true or not. They could have happened. They
could have been invented by Morrison or come from the
head of Danny Fields.

[darkstar]

Fields claims they were, for the most part, fabricated, but others
swear blind they were present when some of the incidents took
place. One possible version of the truth is that
Morrison felt under some twisted obligation to act out his
own press stories, after they had been in print.

In the subworld of rumor that extends beneath the
media, Morrison was the biggest thing since Elvis
Presley. Alarmist tales circulated constantly without the
slightest foundation.

Jim was dead.
Jim was disfigured.
Jim was insane, and he had returned to a monastery/asylum/cabin in
the desert.
Jim had shaved his head.
Jim was a sadist.
Jim was a homosexual.
Jim did it with dogs.
Jim was a necrophile and grave robber.

Only the homosexual rumor ever received anything like
serious denial. The others just served to fan the flames
of morbid fascination that were so much a part of
the Doors appeal.

Occasionally he would even hold up the image and demonstrate just
how hollow it was. This was more often in front of an audience than
the press. At a 1969 Madison Square Garden concert he
pointed dramatically to one half of the audience.
"You are life!" He pointed to the other half.
"You are death! I straddle the fence and my balls
hurt." These flashes were few and far between to stop the
unhealthy obsessions that seemed to affect the hardcore
fans.

One French photographer became convinced that
Morrison would be killed if he appeared in Mexico City.
When manager Bill Siddons refused to cancel the tour
the photographer attacked him, beating on him,
screaming, and pulling his hair.

IN THIS DESPERATE LAND

In another time and another place, Jim Morrison might have been
content to be Frank Sinatra or Elvis Presley. He had a pleasant,
resonant voice, he was pretty and went down well with the
girls. It was however, 1967 and California. Dylan, the
Beatles and the Rolling Stones had driven rock and roll a
long way from innocent entertainment. The wide eyed
optimism of the flower power acid freaks was giving way to
the confusion of abortive youth revolution.

A year earlier, the fires in Watts had been clearly
visable in the Hollywood hills. Young men were being
dragged off to Vietnam to die in a scarecly understood
war. Detroit had exploded. A year later Paris would
all but fall to an unhappy alliance of Stalinist
unions and Maoist students, and in Chicago the police
would prove the accuracy of the title pig by attacking
unarmed yippies.

Unrest was spreading across the western world and Morrison, if not
offering himself, was ready made to be a symbol of the upheaval. If
he didn't go out and seek the role he certainly didn't resist
it.

The Doors declared themselves "sexual politicans" and
expressed an interest in "all that was anarchic, chaotic
and against authority." The Lizard King became
totally identified with the romantic ideal of revolution
and in so doing, about summed up the built-in
contradictions that dogged the sixties.

Hollywood is very fond of revoluntionaries provided they don't
disturb the status quo. In Hollywood, the rebel is not the
individual who changes society. He is the one who gloriously
destroys himself in the attempt. He is the nobelist
suicide of them all.

These were the postures that Morrison adopted. His revolution was
acid, sex and death, a terminal revolt that ignored Lenin, Eukonin or
Chairman Mao. The highest act was dying rather than living
for the new society. Of course, Morrison wasn't taken
seriously, in a political sense, on anything but the most
comic book level. Few actually believed he would
personally lead them into the promise land. What he did was
present the rheoric and mime that exactly typified the
thoughtless, emotive confusion of the sixties youth revolt.

On record, Jim moved from the sinster Oedipal
rage of "The End" to the demands of "When The Music's
Over" and on to the premature victory of "Five To One."

"We're gonna win. We're taken over."

On stage, for the first few moments Morrison had total control,
objectivity was suspended, His histrionics, the prowling, the
long insolent stares, the ludges at the mike, and the
spasmodic twitch leaps ceased to be absurd. He took the
audience to a high plane.

He was arrested at an airport after a disturbance on a plane. He was
arrested at the Trobadour after forcing himself on stage and
indulging in a drunken political harangue.

In New Haven, Connecticut, he came his closet to real
confrontation (apart from the Miami incendent). It was
December. He came on stage in a brooding rage and told the
audience how he had been maced, along with a girl in a
backstage dressing room.

"We started talking and wanted some privacy and so we went into this
little shower room. We weren't doing anything. You know, just
standing there talking and then this little man in a
little blue suit and little blue cap came in there. He
said, 'Watcha doin' there?' Nothing. But he didn't go
away, he stood there and then he reached behind him and
brought out this little black can of something. It looked
like shaving cream. And then he sprayed it in my eyes.
I was blinded for about 30 minutues."

As Morrison finished, three policemen walked ontstage. He
held out the mike. One of them took it. The other two
grabbed Morrison. Bill Siddons tried to seperate them. As
the police tried to drag him away, Morrison's sense
of theatre deserted him. Photographers in the pit
were quick to respond. The photo became an icon of the
rock revolution.

Morrison was charged with causing a breach of peace, giving an
indecent and immoral exhibition and resisting arrest. Fights started
to break out between the audience and the cops. Of course when you
get down to it, it was just another mutual fantasy.

At best Morrison's revolution was just a bunch of
crazy kids being urged on by a drunken clown in a
leather suit. Heady times, but hardly in touch with
reality.

[darkstar]

HUNTING OF THE LIZARD KING - NEW MUSICAL EXPRESS - OCTOBER 4, 1975
(Part 2 of the article appeared in the next issue of NME)

It had to be said, in his favor, that Jim Morrison lived the part
that he played. He wasn't the kind of star who
preached revolution and then sunk the profits in I.T.T.
stock and chains of laundromats. Danny Sugarman
explains, "Fame may have made Jim crazier and more
outrageous, but the money hardly affected him at all. All it
meant was that he was able to buy more booze, for
himself and for all the people who hung around
him."

Most afternoons, when he wasn't either recording or
touring, Morrison could be found drinking in a bar close
to the Whisky A Go Go. It was a small sleazy place,
the hang out of winos during the day until it turned
topless and striptease during the night.

Morrison rarely had a permanent home, and was often without a
car. For long periods of time he was content to sleep
at the Tropicana Motel on Santa Monica Blvd. The
Tropicana is a Spanish style clapboard motel, slightly
dignified by a couple of palm trees in the car park and
small kidney shaped swimming pool. It's used by roadies
and second division bands when they're passing
through L.A. This and his favored bar were the places
Morrison hung out in preference to the jet set joints
frequented by most of the rock elite.

It was common for Morrison to vanish for days on end, often to the
consternation of Bill Siddons and the rest of the Doors. He
frequently slept on the beach, or holed up with a set of
bizarre people whom he had met in his wanderings. This
could be in a strange way Morrison's most tangible
revoluntionary act. He was one of the few stars who have ever
been totally uninterested in the lavish material
trappings of success.

CHAOS AND DISORDER

The Doors and the youth revolt seemed to run out of energy
and falter at just about the same time. This is not
to say that there was a direct cause and effect
relationship. The Doors' audiences didn't melt away. But at the
same time the revoluntionary kids' first rush of
violent discontent ran out of steam and left them totally
unprepared for the solid grinding work of real political
consolidation. The Doors' symbolic fury dissipated and the
shaman turned into a bellowing drunk. Although there
wasn't a direct connection, the two events were more
than coincidence.

They were both the result of the romantic death preoccupied view of
the revolution that was shared by both the Doors and a majority of
the youth rebels.

It became clear after Chicago that the time pranks and rehetoric was
past. Some romantics glazed over into psychosis. The fascination for
violence became overpowering. It gave birth to the
Weatherpeople, the Angry Brigade and the Bader Meinhof gang.
Others threw off their romanticism and grimly took on
the tasks of grassroots organisation and education
that are the hard graft of any social change. Others
simply drifted, looking for a base to restore their
energies.

It was a time of disillusionment. The viability
of spontaneous, media fed gestures was gone. Nixon
and his Orange County mafia were in control of the
White House. Even death hadn't come in the way it had
been promised in the myths. It hadn't appeared
gloriously on the bayonets of the oppressor. It had come
squalidly in pills, capsules and down no. 9 disposable
needles. The Doors were hardly immune to the
disillusionment.

In some respects they had become redundant. The
revolutionaries who remained with their ideas intact had no need
of shamans and purple poetry. The Doors image had so
far out-stripped their art that they were left
floundering around in a vacuum that held no new
ideas.

On "The Soft Parade", the album that was the product
of this period, they sounded confused,
directionless, almost a parody of themselves. The gothic turned
to baroque as Morrison seemed to embrace a weird,
convoluted, black anti-Catholicism. The stage shows also
became confused. Morrison's behavior became erratic and
flagrantly exhibitionist. His audiences seemed no longer to
excite him. He screamed abuse and obsenities.

"Celebration Of The Lizard", the long song cycle that takes
up a whole side on the "Absolutely Live" album, became
a vehicle for increasingly over-the-edge excesses.
One of his favorite tricks was to encourage a crowd
of girls in the front of the audience to rush the
stage. Even at this point, Morrison would stand
perfectly still and just let them climb all over him. The
act would be disrupted beyond saving. Off stage,
Morrison also began to create major problems.

His drunkness made him more difficult and unreliable. John
Densmore, who had threaten to quit during the early part of
the Doors' career had been talked out of it by Robby
Krieger. Manzarek and Krieger again found themselves
holding the band together by an effort of
will.

When on tour, Bill Siddons and Vince, the chief
roadie, found themselves in the postion of having to
treat Morrison like a recalcitrant child. Vince even
went to the absurd lengths of taking away Morrison's
personal, gold plated microphone if he behaved badly, and
substituting one with a dull crackle finish body. Siddons
began appointing one of the road crew to the unenviable
post as Jim's personal mentor who was charged with the
responsibility of making sure that Morrison didn't drink himself
into a state where he'd be unable to appear.

[darkstar]

Steve Spakes, a jovial, unflappable ex-mod, at the time
assistant to Fairport/Incredible String Band producer Joe
Boyd was hired to perform exactly this role on a
European tour. "It was a virtually impossible job. Jim
totally resented anyone checking up on him or his
drinking. All it achieved was that it made him worse. He
deliberately got paralytic because Siddons tried to prevent
it. It got to be a game. One afternoon, before the
show in Amsterdam, I had to follow him around to maybe
a dozen bars. He was drinking brandies and nibbling
on a lump of hash.

"He must have had 14 doubles before I could persuade him that maybe
it'd be a good idea if we went back to the concert hall. When we
got there, the Jefferson Airplane ahd already gone
on. Jim started raving about how he wanted to sing
with the Airplane. Before anyone could stop him he'd
plunged on to the stage. He danced maybe three lunmbering
steps and fell flat on his face. Grace Slick and Marty
Balin broke up. Jim didn't get up, so a couple of the
Airplane's roadies carried him backstage. We tried to sober
him up. I think Siddons called an ambulance. Anyway,
Jim was carted off to the hospital and the Doors went
on as a three piece. Needless to say, I got the
blame."

Morrison's greatest excess was at the infamous
Miami concert when, with an exaltant bellow of, "Yah
wanna see my prick?" In Miami they don't like things
like that. He was arrested, charged and released on
bond. If convicted, he faced three and a half years in
Railford penitentiary. He confided to his secretary, "I
don't think I could hack three and a half years in that
place. Maybe three and half weeks, just for
kicks...."

I WOKE UP THIS MORNING AND I'D GOT MYSELF A BEARD

The Miami incident seemed, for a while to set
Morrison back on the tracks. About nine months before the
Isle Of Wight festival the Doors completed "Morrison
Hotel." After the debacle of "The Soft Parade" this
seemed to be the Doors reaching for solid ground. Jim
even appeared to have grown up. He was portly,
sporting a beard and was singing hard rock and roll again.
Had he finally matured?

The Doors were, like a great many more of us, groping back to their
roots, trying to learn how to live once the dream was over. The
capricious macho cherub had finally become a man. Or had he?
At the Isle Of Wight I was confronted not by a man,
but a ruin.

The power of the "Absolutely Live" album took some of that bad taste
away. This document of 1969/70 tours is living proof that the Doors
had been a force to be reckoned with. The arrogant macho
was there. So was the towering, cathedral rock and
roll. All the familiar songs were on it, plus Diddley's
"Who Do You Love?", and the full version of
"Celebration Of The Lizard", something we in England had only
seen before as a sleeve note. Although we didn't know
it at the time, it was the last glorious flare
before burn-out. Yet each man kills the thing he
loves.

"L.A. Woman" was a strange disturbing album. On the
surface it was a throwback to the classic Doors formula,
but beneath that there was a great sadness and lack
of energy. It seemed to be the Doors in defeat.
Nixon had taken over, not the kids. It was a record
that sounded as though it was dedicated to the lost
children, the outlaws hiding in the hills, and the gentle
ladies, who'd been twisted in Charlie's snuff squadron.
The fair, the wise, the strong had turned into
beggers and junkies. Morrison no longer even sounded
desperate, simply resigned.

Then the word came. He had left the Doors. Like so many other
renegade royalty, the Lizard King had dragged himself to exile in
Paris. The grapevine was almost silent. Few stories came
out about him. Danny Sugarman's version pictures
Morrison as a helpless alcoholic who has reached the point
where it's ceased to be fun and has started to be
frightening. "He was unable to work out what he wanted to do
with the rest of his life. He was still anxious to
launch a film career, but he knew that his looks had
gone. The problems of booze and weight had got on top
of him to such an extent that he could see no way
out."

Jim Morrison died on July 3, 1971. That is fact. The official story
says that he suffered a heart attack while taking a bath. The
strongest underground legend claims that he OD'ed in a nightclub and
was smuggled back to his apartment to avoid a scandal.

His grave has no permanent marker, although it's
littered with all kinds of mawkish garbage by the morbid,
the second hand sensation seekers and the hippie
tourists. It's close to the magnificent edifice erected
over the mortal remains of Oscar Wilde.

In L.A. they still talk about Jim as a long lost,
wayward, but dearly loved son. They liken Patti Smith's
debut at the Whisky unto the early days of the Doors.
Lightweight punks squabble over who rightfully owns his old
clothes and the head shops sell romantic souvenir posters
and t-shirts.

It has yet to occur to anyone to raise a collection to place a
monument on his last resting place. The world has failed to grant
Jim Morrison that ultimate kind favor and see that his grave is
kept clean. Maybe that, after all, is the final
measure of what stardom really means.

THE END

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Was an avid reader of NME around that time and remember this one....The Doors were featured several times in Sounds, NME & Melody Maker between Jims death and 1981. Roy Carr, Max Bell, Mick Farren, Chris Welch to name but a handful were all Doors fans and NME did a great spread on the band in 1981 thanks to Max (who was Doors daft) and who is pally with Michelle Campbell and hopefully will turn up in Paris one year....
I used to have aall the Doors cuttings from about 70 to the early 80s but lost them all after I got divorced....

[jym]

TheWallsScreamedPoetry said:

I used to have aall the Doors cuttings from about 70 to the early 80s but lost them all after I got divorced....

Part of the settlement?

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

jym said:

Part of the settlement?

Nah she was Zeppelin daft.....I was more concerned about some of the other things I lost to worry too much about The Doors...