Post by darkstar on Jan 26, 2005 14:38:17 GMT
ROLL OVER ELVIS
THE SECOND COMING OF JIM MORRISON
ESQUIRE MAGAZINE MARCH 1991
Jim Morrison Is Alive And Well And Living In Hollywood
By: Eve Babitz
I know why I loved him. I know why lots of women loved him. But what I want to know is this: Why now, does Oliver Stone love him? A survivors report.
J.D. Souther once told me he spent his first years in L.A. learning how to stand. Jim knew how to stand. He stood pigeon-toed, filled with poetry against a mike with that honky tonk Berlin organ in the background, and sang about “another kiss.”<br>
And there is something to be said for singing in tune. Jim not only sang in turn, he sang intimately – as Doors producer Paul Rothchild once pointed out to me, “Jim was the greatest crooner since Bing Crosby.”<br>
He was Bing Crosby from hell.
In those days, in the 60’s, people in L.A. with romantic streaks who knew music went for the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, Paul Butterfield – and for clubs like the Troubadour and the Trip and the Ash Grove. The Whisky, where the Doors flourished, was the kind of place where the headliner would be Johnny Rivers, a white boy who covered Chuck Berry’s “Memphis.” By the 60’s, white boys weren’t suppose to cover soul anymore, but at the Whisky it was still groovy. The Carpenters played at the Whisky.
At the Whisky, the bouncers were bouncers, the management was from New York City and the women wore beehive hairdos long after it was cool. Rock groups who went to college and actually got degrees were not only uncool, they were unheard of.
Jim went to college and he graduated. My friend Judy Raphael, who went to film school, too, remembers Jim as this pudgy guy with a marine haircut who worked in the library at UCLA and who was supposed to help her with her documentary term paper one night but ended up talking drunkedly and endlessly about Oedipus, which meant she had to take the course over that summer.
The Doors were embarrassing, like their name. I dragged Jim into bed before they’d decided on the name and tried to dissuade him; it was so corny naming yourself after something Aldous Huxley wrote. I mean, The Doors Of Perception….what an Ojaigeeky-too-L.A.-pottery-glazer kind of uncool idea.
The Beatles were desperate criminals compared with them. The Beatles only had one leg to stand on – rock ‘n roll. The Doors, though were film majors. If you wanted to make a movie, even if you went to UCLA like Francis Coppola and then to the Rodger Corman School of Never Lost a Dime Pictures, you still weren’t cool. Even Jack Nicholson wasn’t cool in the 60’s. Being an actor wasn’t cool in the 60’s, because all movies did was get everything all wrong. At least until Easy Rider, being in the movie business was a horrible thing to admit.
Of course, Oliver Stone was so uncool he voluntarily went to Vietnam instead of prowling around the Sunset Strip with the rest of his generation. Oliver Stone was such a nerd he became a soldier, a Real Man. He didn’t understand that in the 60’s real men were not soldiers. A real man was Mick Jagger in Performance, in bed with two women, wearing eye makeup and kimonos. Or John Phillip Law, with wings, in Barbarella. Of course, Bob Dylan was even cooler than Mick Jagger, so cool he couldn’t sing. He didn’t bother, and he was so skinny, with those narrow little East Coast shoulders and that face. And he was mean.
Like everyone back then, Jim hated his parents, hated home, hated it all. If he could have gotten away with it, Jim would have been an orphan. He tried lying about having parents, creating his life anew – about what you’d expect from someone who’d lost thirty pounds in one summer (the summer of ’65, from taking drugs instead of eating, and hanging out on the Venice boardwalk). I mean he awoke one morning and was so cute, how could ge have parents?
According to some statistics I recently heard about, the ‘50’s was the decade when the American diet contained its highest percentage of fat – over 50 percent. And these 50’s children, overfed, repressed and indignant, waited in the wings lurking and praying to get nig enough to get the fuck out. Jim Morrison had it worse than a lot of kids. He was fat. And his father was a naval officer.
Then the ultimate dream of everyone who weights too much and gets thin happened to Jim. He lost the weight and turned into a Prince. Into John, Paul, George, and Ringo. Into Mick. I met Jim early in ’66 when he’d just lost the weight and wore a suit made of gray suede lashed together at the seams with lanyards, and no shirt. It was the best outfit he ever had, and he was so cute that no woman was safe. He was twenty-two, a few months younger than I.
He had the freshness and humility of someone who had been fat all his life and now suddenly a morning glory. I met Jim and propositioned him in three minutes even before he so much as opened his mouth to sing. This great even took place not at the Whisky but at a now forgotten club just down on the Strip called the London Fog, the first bar there the Doors played. And there were only about seven people in the room anyway. “Take me home,: I demurely offered when were introduced. “You’re not really going to stay here playing, are you? “Uh,” he replied, “we don’t play. We work. I suggested the next night. And that’s when it happened (finally!) Naturally, I dressed the part – black eye makeup out to there, a miniskirt up to here – but the truth was that I did, in fact, have parents. On our first date I even confessed to Jim that my ridiculous father was on that very night playing violin in a program of music by Palestrina. To my tremendous dismay, Jim immediately expressed his desire to drive to Pasadena. I packed him into my ’52 Cadillac and off we went, but by intermission I had had enough. He whined that he wanted to stay for the second half, but I put my foot down. “You just can’t be here,” I said. “Listening to this. You just can’t.”<br>
Being in bed with Jim was like being in bed with Michelangelo’s David, only with blue eyes. His skin was so white, his muscles were so pure, he was so innocent. The last time I saw him with no shirt on, at a party up in Coldwater, his body was so ravaged by scars, toxins and puffy pudginess, I wanted to kill him.
He never really stopped being a fat kid. He used to suggest, “Let’s go to Ships and eat blueberry pancakes with blueberry syrup. “It’s so fattening,” I would point out. I mean really. Jim was embarrassing because he wasn’t cool, but I still loved him. It was his mouth, of course, which was so edible. Just so long as he kept his James Dean smolder, it worked. But it takes a lot of downers to achieve that on a full time basis. And no fat.
Just so long as he stood there in the leather clothes my sister had hand made for him, the ones lined with turquoise satin, trimmed with snakeskin and lizard. The black leather pants, the leather jackets. My sister never thought Jim was that cute, but then my sister was one of his girlfriend Pamela’s friends, and it was in her best interest to ignore Jim, even though, for a month, my sister and her boyfriend lived with Jim and Pamela, and it was almost impossible. “He was always a very dark presence in a room,” she said, “In fact if you asked me today the feeling I got, I’d say it was of a person who was severely depressed. Clinically depressed.” She’s now a psychologist, so she knows.
“He thought he was ugly,” she said. “He’d look at himself in he mirror trying on those clothes, but he hated looking at himself, because he thought he was ugly.”<br>
My sister and Pamela had to fight to persuade him to leave his hair long, because left to his own devices he’d get it cut preppy-short and break everyone’s heart. Even his voice was embarrassing, sounding so sudden and personal and uttering such hogwash in a time when, if you were going to say words, they were to be ironic and a little off center. Jim just blurted things the fuck out. My artist friends found him excruciating, too but my movie friends *who were, by definition, out of it and behind the times and got everything all wrong) loved him. He said what they meant. They might not have understood Dylan – they thought he couldn’t sing – but in Hollywood they loved Jim.
Jim as a sex object and the Doors as a group were two entirely different stories. The whole audience would put up with long, tortured silences and humiliation and just awful schmuck stuff Jim did during performances. He could get away with it because his audience was all college kids who thought the Doors were cool because they had lyrics you could understand about stuff they learned in Psychology 101 and Art History. The kids who liked the Doors were so misguided they thought – “Crystal Ship” was for intellectuals.
THE SECOND COMING OF JIM MORRISON
ESQUIRE MAGAZINE MARCH 1991
Jim Morrison Is Alive And Well And Living In Hollywood
By: Eve Babitz
I know why I loved him. I know why lots of women loved him. But what I want to know is this: Why now, does Oliver Stone love him? A survivors report.
J.D. Souther once told me he spent his first years in L.A. learning how to stand. Jim knew how to stand. He stood pigeon-toed, filled with poetry against a mike with that honky tonk Berlin organ in the background, and sang about “another kiss.”<br>
And there is something to be said for singing in tune. Jim not only sang in turn, he sang intimately – as Doors producer Paul Rothchild once pointed out to me, “Jim was the greatest crooner since Bing Crosby.”<br>
He was Bing Crosby from hell.
In those days, in the 60’s, people in L.A. with romantic streaks who knew music went for the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, Paul Butterfield – and for clubs like the Troubadour and the Trip and the Ash Grove. The Whisky, where the Doors flourished, was the kind of place where the headliner would be Johnny Rivers, a white boy who covered Chuck Berry’s “Memphis.” By the 60’s, white boys weren’t suppose to cover soul anymore, but at the Whisky it was still groovy. The Carpenters played at the Whisky.
At the Whisky, the bouncers were bouncers, the management was from New York City and the women wore beehive hairdos long after it was cool. Rock groups who went to college and actually got degrees were not only uncool, they were unheard of.
Jim went to college and he graduated. My friend Judy Raphael, who went to film school, too, remembers Jim as this pudgy guy with a marine haircut who worked in the library at UCLA and who was supposed to help her with her documentary term paper one night but ended up talking drunkedly and endlessly about Oedipus, which meant she had to take the course over that summer.
The Doors were embarrassing, like their name. I dragged Jim into bed before they’d decided on the name and tried to dissuade him; it was so corny naming yourself after something Aldous Huxley wrote. I mean, The Doors Of Perception….what an Ojaigeeky-too-L.A.-pottery-glazer kind of uncool idea.
The Beatles were desperate criminals compared with them. The Beatles only had one leg to stand on – rock ‘n roll. The Doors, though were film majors. If you wanted to make a movie, even if you went to UCLA like Francis Coppola and then to the Rodger Corman School of Never Lost a Dime Pictures, you still weren’t cool. Even Jack Nicholson wasn’t cool in the 60’s. Being an actor wasn’t cool in the 60’s, because all movies did was get everything all wrong. At least until Easy Rider, being in the movie business was a horrible thing to admit.
Of course, Oliver Stone was so uncool he voluntarily went to Vietnam instead of prowling around the Sunset Strip with the rest of his generation. Oliver Stone was such a nerd he became a soldier, a Real Man. He didn’t understand that in the 60’s real men were not soldiers. A real man was Mick Jagger in Performance, in bed with two women, wearing eye makeup and kimonos. Or John Phillip Law, with wings, in Barbarella. Of course, Bob Dylan was even cooler than Mick Jagger, so cool he couldn’t sing. He didn’t bother, and he was so skinny, with those narrow little East Coast shoulders and that face. And he was mean.
Like everyone back then, Jim hated his parents, hated home, hated it all. If he could have gotten away with it, Jim would have been an orphan. He tried lying about having parents, creating his life anew – about what you’d expect from someone who’d lost thirty pounds in one summer (the summer of ’65, from taking drugs instead of eating, and hanging out on the Venice boardwalk). I mean he awoke one morning and was so cute, how could ge have parents?
According to some statistics I recently heard about, the ‘50’s was the decade when the American diet contained its highest percentage of fat – over 50 percent. And these 50’s children, overfed, repressed and indignant, waited in the wings lurking and praying to get nig enough to get the fuck out. Jim Morrison had it worse than a lot of kids. He was fat. And his father was a naval officer.
Then the ultimate dream of everyone who weights too much and gets thin happened to Jim. He lost the weight and turned into a Prince. Into John, Paul, George, and Ringo. Into Mick. I met Jim early in ’66 when he’d just lost the weight and wore a suit made of gray suede lashed together at the seams with lanyards, and no shirt. It was the best outfit he ever had, and he was so cute that no woman was safe. He was twenty-two, a few months younger than I.
He had the freshness and humility of someone who had been fat all his life and now suddenly a morning glory. I met Jim and propositioned him in three minutes even before he so much as opened his mouth to sing. This great even took place not at the Whisky but at a now forgotten club just down on the Strip called the London Fog, the first bar there the Doors played. And there were only about seven people in the room anyway. “Take me home,: I demurely offered when were introduced. “You’re not really going to stay here playing, are you? “Uh,” he replied, “we don’t play. We work. I suggested the next night. And that’s when it happened (finally!) Naturally, I dressed the part – black eye makeup out to there, a miniskirt up to here – but the truth was that I did, in fact, have parents. On our first date I even confessed to Jim that my ridiculous father was on that very night playing violin in a program of music by Palestrina. To my tremendous dismay, Jim immediately expressed his desire to drive to Pasadena. I packed him into my ’52 Cadillac and off we went, but by intermission I had had enough. He whined that he wanted to stay for the second half, but I put my foot down. “You just can’t be here,” I said. “Listening to this. You just can’t.”<br>
Being in bed with Jim was like being in bed with Michelangelo’s David, only with blue eyes. His skin was so white, his muscles were so pure, he was so innocent. The last time I saw him with no shirt on, at a party up in Coldwater, his body was so ravaged by scars, toxins and puffy pudginess, I wanted to kill him.
He never really stopped being a fat kid. He used to suggest, “Let’s go to Ships and eat blueberry pancakes with blueberry syrup. “It’s so fattening,” I would point out. I mean really. Jim was embarrassing because he wasn’t cool, but I still loved him. It was his mouth, of course, which was so edible. Just so long as he kept his James Dean smolder, it worked. But it takes a lot of downers to achieve that on a full time basis. And no fat.
Just so long as he stood there in the leather clothes my sister had hand made for him, the ones lined with turquoise satin, trimmed with snakeskin and lizard. The black leather pants, the leather jackets. My sister never thought Jim was that cute, but then my sister was one of his girlfriend Pamela’s friends, and it was in her best interest to ignore Jim, even though, for a month, my sister and her boyfriend lived with Jim and Pamela, and it was almost impossible. “He was always a very dark presence in a room,” she said, “In fact if you asked me today the feeling I got, I’d say it was of a person who was severely depressed. Clinically depressed.” She’s now a psychologist, so she knows.
“He thought he was ugly,” she said. “He’d look at himself in he mirror trying on those clothes, but he hated looking at himself, because he thought he was ugly.”<br>
My sister and Pamela had to fight to persuade him to leave his hair long, because left to his own devices he’d get it cut preppy-short and break everyone’s heart. Even his voice was embarrassing, sounding so sudden and personal and uttering such hogwash in a time when, if you were going to say words, they were to be ironic and a little off center. Jim just blurted things the fuck out. My artist friends found him excruciating, too but my movie friends *who were, by definition, out of it and behind the times and got everything all wrong) loved him. He said what they meant. They might not have understood Dylan – they thought he couldn’t sing – but in Hollywood they loved Jim.
Jim as a sex object and the Doors as a group were two entirely different stories. The whole audience would put up with long, tortured silences and humiliation and just awful schmuck stuff Jim did during performances. He could get away with it because his audience was all college kids who thought the Doors were cool because they had lyrics you could understand about stuff they learned in Psychology 101 and Art History. The kids who liked the Doors were so misguided they thought – “Crystal Ship” was for intellectuals.