Our Love Becomes a Funeral Pyre

7

Sexy Motherfucker in Black Pants


At the end of 1965, just after his twenty-second birthday, Jim Morrison wrote a letter home to his father, a kind of end-of-year summary in which he explained how hard he had tried to get a job in the movie industry following his graduation from UCLA but that it was nigh on impossible. How it had left him poverty-stricken and sleeping on a friend’s rooftop. There was, however, a ray of hope on the horizon, in the shape of the very talented musical friends he had made and how they had now started a band, in which Jim was the singer. He ended by asking, respectfully, if his father could see his way to extending his son a loan, just to get the band on its feet, and how he would pay him back once they’d “made it.”
Speaking with Jerry Hopkins for his superb 1991 book, The Lizard King, Jim’s brother, Andy, well recalled his father’s reaction. “Dad wrote back and said he’d paid for college and Jim never did anything musically before in his life, never showed any musical ability, and ‘now you’re telling me after I paid for four years of college you’re starting a band! I think it’s a crock!’ Jim never took kindly to criticism and he never wrote again.”
Instead Jim took out his frustrations on his other “father”—Ray Manzarek. As Robby Krieger would relate, “He fucked their house up—trashed it on more than one occasion—and took advantage of them in many ways.” He even began to doubt the Doors. As Robby told me, “Jim was the kind of guy who would subconsciously try to sabotage anything that we were trying to do. Even from the earliest days. I remember the second rehearsal we had—over at my parents’ house—and Jim doesn’t show up. That was the second rehearsal. Where is he? Where is he? Made some phone calls. Found out he was in jail, out in the desert, out in Bryce, California. He’d took a trip with a couple of his buddies and got in a fight with some bikers and got thrown in jail. That was our second rehearsal. It was all downhill after that …”
Most of Jim’s sudden disappearances were down to the same thing. He’d simply found something better to do that night, often involving Felix Venable, whom he still looked up to as the ultimate night tripper. Not all of these adventures ended well. Early in January 1966, one of Jim’s impromptu “road trips,” heading off to the desert in search of peyote, this time with Felix Venable and Phil O’Leno, led to a bizarre situation in which Felix and Jim were later investigated for the murder of O’Leno.
It was nearly five in the morning when Jim called up a girl he’d recently been seeing named Carol Winters. Calling from a phone booth out on the highway, he said the three of them had been mooching around a golf course tripping, but now they were lost and exhausted and could Carol drive over and rescue them? By the time Carol picked them up and drove them back to Phil’s parents’ place they were all raring to go again and decided to “borrow” one of the O’Lenos’ cars and drive out to the desert in search of peyote and UFOs. Or something. It didn’t really matter. Jim just wanted to drive. As they headed out of town Jim pulled the car to a screeching halt while he jumped out and French-kissed a beautiful Mexican American girl he’d spotted on a street corner, the morning sun streaming through her dress. That was the last anybody saw of them for the next forty-eight hours.
In the intriguing Frank Lisciandro memoir, Morrison: A Feast of Friends, O’Leno recalls that Venable had scored some pure LSD-25 reputedly direct from a Sandoz laboratory batch, and that the three of them had dropped it in a motel somewhere out near the California-Arizona state line. At which point Phil decided his destiny lay farther down the road into Arizona and then on into Mexico. Jim and Felix decided it would be better to turn around and hitchhike back home.
According to O’Leno, Jim would later claim that some miles down the road he and Felix had been set upon by a truckload of passing rednecks, who gave them “a pretty good beating.” In fact, Jim later said, it was a car full of Mexican American guys—friends of the girl he had kissed—that had followed them down the highway, in search of vengeance. Bedraggled, bruised, and bloodied by the time they finally got back to Venice Beach, rather than confess to the prosaic truth—that they had been the victims of a beating because of some thoughtless act of Jim’s—he and Felix concocted a story in which they had been transformed out in the desert into reckless, cold-hearted killers, murdering Phil and burying him by the dry banks of an old riverbed. Not even the credulous Ray believed them, though. Jim was always coming up with these preposterous stories that no one was ever sure were true. But in an ironic twist, when O’Leno failed to return or send word of his whereabouts for weeks, his worried father, a powerful attorney, somehow located the girl Jim had kissed and convinced her to press charges for assault. When Jim was arrested two weeks later, police wasted no time in questioning him about the disappearance of Phil O’Leno and reports that he had claimed to have murdered him. Utterly freaked out, Jim told them what had really happened, but the cops didn’t believe him. Fortunately for Jim, Phil reappeared back in Los Angeles the same week, and the charges were dropped.
Jim came out of the police station dazed but weirdly inspired. He would revisit the tale of the hitchhiker killer on the road several times throughout his career.
It was the kind of behavior the rest of the Doors had already resigned themselves to putting up with. They knew they wouldn’t be the musical force on the scene they needed to be without Jim’s strange, druggy charisma, without his sepulchral words and intonated voice. At the same time, they knew Jim needed them just as much. Without their smoldering music, with its bruising, gothic rhythms and snaking, indelicate melodies, Jim would be back to being the notebook-toting roof-dweller.
“Yeah and, you know, I think we all realized that and that’s the reason we did stick together,” agreed Robby. “If the music wasn’t great, we wouldn’t have. After that second rehearsal, that would have been it. But we knew we had something, and that was better than anything we’d heard, and we wanted people to hear it, and we would go to any lengths.”
And they really would.
With Jim still staying at Ray and Dorothy’s, it was the keyboard player who bore the brunt of his behavior. But he did so, cheerfully enough, in the hope of making that million dollars he still saw as theirs for the taking on those nights when Jim did surrender himself to the Doors. Whatever else he did, Jim was constantly writing, not always songs, but enough scraps of lyrics and verses for Ray to be able to fuse them into the kind of “music noir” the Doors were now building together.
John tended to look up to Jim and his weird pals like Dennis Jakob and Felix Venable, as they were a couple years older, still a big deal when you’re only twenty. John got that Jim was a deep reader and didn’t really get half the references Jim would casually include in his generally stoned ramblings, chain-smoking the immaculate joints he rolled one after the other. The rest of his behavior John dealt with by simply thrashing at his drums. It was hardly in the same league as the musical dialogue between Elvin Jones and John Coltrane, but John was determined to take it as close to that flame as he could, learning to give Jim space when he wanted to take off into some stoned monologue midsong, his drums chattering percussively behind, around, and with him.
In the meantime, they began to find gigs, to begin with the same sort of seven-day weekend parties where the crowd didn’t come to see the band but to dance to it. That was OK; the band used them to essentially rehearse. Encouraged by how quickly their novice front man took to showing off in front of a crowd, his reedy voice growing stronger with each lung-bursting performance, the band began to musically space out, to surf the waves of energy that were beginning to go back and forth between them and the crowd.
They thought they’d made it when a talent scout from Columbia named Billy James decided to do something crazy and sign them. Billy was a failed actor who had become a publicist at Columbia in New York before moving on to A&R. Billy was no musician, but he was young and hip enough to get along with Bob Dylan at a time when Dylan refused to talk to anyone else at the label. Moving out to the West Coast offices in 1965, Billy had performed a similar role for the Byrds, writing the liner notes to their debut album, Mr. Tambourine Man, and establishing his presence in L.A. as one of the few young record label gunslingers who really dug the scene coming together on the Strip.
Billy’s office was one of the last places Ray and Jim had managed to talk their way into with their six-track demo tape. They’d seen a picture of Billy in Cashbox magazine, saw he had a beard, and figured he was “hip.” They were right. Like every other label guy who’d sat through the tape, Billy didn’t jump for joy at the music. But he liked the look of these guys. They wore the same psychedelic garb as other L.A. street freaks, but they clearly had a little more going for them intellectually.
“I guess they appealed to the snob in me,” he later joked. “Because they were UCLA graduates and I thought, ‘Great, here are some intellectual types getting involved with rock ’n’ roll.’ ”
Billy offered them a deal on the spot—a six-month contract to record four sides’ worth of music, with a guarantee from the label to release two of them. Jim was ecstatic, Ray even more so when James arranged the “gift” of a free Vox organ. In reality it was no big deal, as Columbia owned Vox at the time, but Ray took it as a good omen. The organ was red and black, with the keys inverted so that the whites were black and vice versa, and the chrome legs formed into a Z. “I said, ‘All right! A Vox organ! Like the Dave Clark Five!’ ”
The enthusiasm was short-lived, however, when it transpired that none of the house producers at Columbia liked the demo enough to want to work with the band. By the start of 1966, with some months left on their contract but clearly nothing happening for them at the label, the Doors considered themselves unsigned again.
Their real break came at the end of February when they landed a gig at one of the hip new clubs on Sunset Strip, a dive named the London Fog. With swinging London and the Beatles now epitomizing everything that was cool and far out about the sixties, an L.A. club with “London” in its name was sending out a very clear message: this is where it’s at, baby. In reality, however, the Fog, as it was known, was a dirty, dark little cavern, owned by one Jesse James, that barely anybody went to. Situated next door to the much better liked Galaxy club and less than a hundred yards from the Whisky a Go Go, then the most popular, coolest nightspot in Hollywood, other than its name there was very little that was cool about the Fog. The stage stood ten feet high—above the wooden, indoor shack that served as the bathrooms—which the band had to climb a ladder to get to.
Offered the job as the regular house band for forty dollars a night, playing Thursday through Sunday doing five sets a night, starting at 9 PM and finishing at 2 AM, when the club closed, the place was so bad the rest of the band hesitated over taking the gig. But Jim was adamant. It would be great. They would get a lot of exposure. And that’s exactly what happened. Eventually.
Where the Fog gigs really worked in the Doors’ favor, though, was in the opportunity they offered Jim to learn his stagecraft. Unlike the private parties they had played so far, where they could goof off and no one knew or cared as long as they kept bashing out “Louie Louie,” the Fog residency was all about repertoire, about performance. It may have been a dive, but it was a dive with a name, and as such it would become Jim Morrison’s and the Doors’ first real proving ground.
Playing five sets a night, four nights a week, the band not only got tighter, they were able to stretch out fully and experiment with their own material. For the first few weeks barely anybody came to the shows anyway, so whatever they did, it didn’t really matter. To fill up the time, they began taking newer material and extemporizing around it, making new two-minute ballads like “The End” into lengthy Indian ragas. There was another new tune still in its infancy that Robby had written—after Jim had castigated the others for not coming up with some material of their own to help him and Ray out—called “Light My Fire.” They had the bossa nova rhythm, the swirling Bach-like filigree intro, and Jim’s deceptively innocent-sounding swoon. Now, though, it stretched to seven, eight, twelve minutes a go. Not only would the songs thin out into endless improvisations, but new songs would start to emerge from the quagmire of the fourth-set jams, Jim ranting his made-up-on-the-spot lyrics to them. Hence “When the Music’s Over,” which came into being over several nights.
The group’s becoming musically bolder and more competent with each set also allowed Jim to find himself onstage as a performer. Still insecure about his voice, the great imposter, as he saw it, standing mostly with his back to the crowd for the first few gigs, Jim would throw himself around largely in an effort to deflect attention away from the fact he was never going to be a musician. Other groups, real musicians, who came by to check them out, didn’t get it. “Jimmy’s antics were considered extreme even then,” recalled Mirandi Babitz, whose fashionable new clothing store on Sunset Jim had begun to visit. “It made him so nervous he had to get totally looped … I used to wonder what was holding him up.”
It was Mirandi’s sister, Eve Babitz, who took the full measure of the young pretender. “He had the freshness and humility of someone who had been fat all his life and now was suddenly a morning glory,” she later wrote. “I met Jim and propositioned him in three minutes even before he so much as opened his mouth to sing.” This had been at an early London Fog gig, “where there were only about seven people in the room anyway. ‘Take me home,’ I demurely offered when we were introduced.”
Eve, who says she wasn’t speaking to her sister at the time, “because I hated her husband,” only found out later that Jim had been visiting Mirandi’s store. “She sold leather clothes. Other rock stars came in there [too].” The night Eve met Jim, “he was wearing this suede grey outfit—leather sewn together with white lanyards … I promised I’d get him LSD and I didn’t do it. He told me he’d lost all that weight by taking LSD. Well, I mean, it will keep you from eating.”
His disappointment lasted only as long as it took for him to figure out who Eve actually was: the daughter of Sol Babitz, first violinist for the L.A. Philharmonic and a Fulbright scholar who once got into a brawl over the correct way to play the dotted notes in Bach; her mother was Mae, a stunningly beautiful artist in her own right; her godfather was Igor Stravinsky. When she was growing up, family friends included Charlie Chaplin, Jelly Roll Morton, Greta Garbo—and Aldous and Laura Huxley. Jim could not let that one go!
At nineteen, Eve had been the subject of a notorious Marcel Duchamp photograph in which she is pictured playing chess, completely nude, against the great conceptualist. Since then she had glided effortlessly through art and music circles. Later in life she would arrange for Frank Zappa to meet Salvador Dalí, put Steve Martin in his first white suit, discover Brett Easton Ellis, and write a series of shameless and amusing L.A. novels and memoirs of her own, including, famously, one titled L.A. Woman.
A dreadful fire in 1997—the result of ash from her cigar falling onto her dress—left her with the lower half of the “body of a mermaid,” as she drolly puts it. Since then she has lived in Hollywood largely as a recluse. But she is happy to share her memories of Jim Morrison, if less of the Doors—she tinkles with laugher as she describes them as “awful, I mean, really.”
She didn’t even like the name the Doors, she says, and tried to get Jim to change it “before it was too late.” As she once wrote, “I dragged Jim into bed … and tried to dissuade him; it was so corny naming yourself after something Aldous Huxley wrote.” She described sleeping with Jim as “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 [in 1971], his body was so ravaged by scars, toxins, and puffy pudginess, I wanted to kill him.”
These, though, were still Jim’s “Young Lion” days, and Eve, though a year younger, found herself acting as cultural chaperone. “I took him over to see my father play in Pasadena,” she recalls in her teasing voice. “My father was a baroque musician. He was a musicologist. He had this weird little group of, like, harpsichord and, you know. And they were playing at Cal Tech for the old ladies. I dragged Jim upstairs and he watched my father. Dressed in this outfit.” She laughs. “I don’t know what [the old ladies] thought. But he loved it! The whole thing. He wanted to meet my father, but I said no. ‘You can’t do this.’ And to his dying day he was pissed off because I didn’t introduce him to my father.”
Other female fans also began to congregate around Jim during the long London Fog residency, which eventually stretched into May. There was the go-go girl. Then one of the dancers from the TV show Shindig. He also had a fling with Pamela Zarubica, then working as a cleaner at the Whisky, whom Frank Zappa would later take on tour as one of several young women who performed under the name Suzy Creamcheese. “It was wonderful,” Zarubica told Jerry Hopkins. “He didn’t know much about what was going on and neither did I.” In fact, Jim’s lack of sophistication in the sack got him into trouble with one conquest, Gay Blair, who bawled him out for being “the worst” lover she’d ever had. Jim was so infuriated he smashed a lamp, then pinned her down and ripped her clothes off, before spitting in her face. Then made it up by taking her to Barney’s Beanery and being “so lovey dovey.”
One girl in particular, though, a too-cute redhead with huge green eyes, cinnamon freckles, and creamy white skin, named Pamela Courson, was about to change the course of Jim Morrison’s life in a way no other woman, after his mother, could ever do.
Pamela was a nineteen-year-old student studying art at Los Angeles City College. Born in Weed, California, a tiny town (motto: “Weed like to welcome you!”) ten miles north of Mount Shasta, the second-tallest volcano in the Cascade Range and once regarded as a holy place by Native Americans, Pamela Susan Courson came from a military family. Like Jim’s dad, her father, Columbus “Corky” Courson, was a commander and former pilot in the US Navy. Unlike Morrison, Corky had left the service behind and become a teacher, then principal, at Orange High, where Pam was also a student. But if the Courson family did not move around as much as the Morrisons, they were equally estranged from their surroundings, mixing uneasily within the small-town community. Embarrassingly for her father, Pam was far from an A student, saying she hated school and getting in trouble for truancy. Things did not improve during her time at Orange High School, and she was just sixteen when she and a friend left home and rented a cheap apartment in West Hollywood.
She and a friend had wandered into the London Fog on an otherwise uneventful night in April. The place was even less packed than usual. But even in a crowd Pamela would have stood out. Slim, boyish figure, just the way Jim liked them, but with a heightened sense of Hollywood chic, dressed to the nines in hippie couture, all pretty handmade shifts, sexy low-cut tops, teeny-weeny miniskirts, exotic and elfin. Her dominating character, hard-as-nails interior, and river-deep psychological problems were completely undetectable beneath her beguiling aura of life-affirming warmth and bright, incense-burning nights.
During a break that night, John Densmore had been the first to try his luck, going over and inviting himself to sit at the same table as Pamela and her friend. Ray and Dorothy, seated at an adjoining table, looked on amused as John gave it his best shot. Jim, standing at the bar chatting to Jesse, the owner, paid no attention.
John thought his luck was in, but when he went to look for Pam at the end of the night she was already gone. Two days later, however, she and her friend were back—and John resumed his courtship, joining them again between sets and putting on the charm. And just as before she was gone again before the end of the final set—a pattern that continued right through that fateful week. Except now Pam started to come to the club on her own, and she and John would sit in a booth together, more private, intimate, while they talked between sets. Until, on the fourth night, Jim slipped into the booth alongside Pam and bit her neck—and that was it. Their eyes remained locked for so long neither of them even noticed John getting up and walking away. They spent their first night together.
Jim later rhapsodized about the experience, saying it was the first time he’d ever really made love. This time it really wasn’t just about the sex, Jim getting turned on by the fact that Pam was born in the same month as him—December—that her father was in the US Navy like his, and, most far out of all, mama, that the place where she came from was steeped in occult Indian rites. When Pam told him of the old Indian legend of the Lizard People, who had lived there originally, in a mystical underground city, Jim almost came in his pants.
They would both continue to see other lovers over the next few weeks, until they took the plunge and actually moved in together. But, as Ray would tell me years later, “She was his and he was hers. It was the start and end of everything—for both of them.”
It was just two weeks later that the start of something else came to an end. “Guys, this is gonna be your last weekend,” Ray recalled Jesse James telling them. “I’ve got to get a new band in here. You’re not drawing flies.” Jesse gave them a fighting chance of finding a new gig, giving them two weeks’ notice. But when Jim managed to start a bar brawl the very next night, for which Jesse was forced to call the cops, that was it, they were told not to come back. The band was abject. Ray, in particular, thought they’d never find another gig as good. Not one on the Strip. Which is when Jim’s philandering came in useful again. Ronnie Haran was blonde and beautiful, but she was no groupie. She worked at the Whisky a Go Go, doing promotion and helping book bands. Jim had been working on her to come and check out the Doors, to see if he could get them into the Whisky too. As luck would have it, Ronnie had come, without fanfare, to see their earlier set that final night and was impressed enough by what she saw to wheedle her bosses at the Whisky into giving them a shot. The band was good, said Ronnie, but it was Jim’s “major star quality” that sealed the deal—at least for her.
Just to make sure, though, when the band auditioned for the Whisky’s owner, Elmer Valentine, forty-eight hours later—romping hopefully through three of their newest songs, “Break on Through,” “Light My Fire,” and “The Crystal Ship”—Ronnie secretly arranged for some of her friends to phone Valentine and ask for “that sexy motherfucker in the black pants.”
Yet when Ronnie drove over to see them the next day with the great news that they’d got the gig, Jim put on his best poker face and told her they’d get back to her. They would need to think it over. Frantic, Ray nearly killed him. “I didn’t want her to think we were easy,” Jim drawled. They needn’t have worried. By the end of that week not only were the Doors the new house band at the Whisky, but Jim was also living at Ronnie’s, and she’d agreed to become the band’s de facto manager—at least while they remained at the Whisky. Unlike the liaison with Pamela Courson, though, this was not an affair that inspired either party to any great declarations of love. Ronnie’s main memory, she later told Jerry Hopkins, was of Jim lolling about her apartment all day, rolling one enormous fat joint after another, smoking himself into an engorged oblivion.
It was that kind of summer. Bob Dylan was in the charts with his single “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35,” with its payoff line, “Everybody must get stoned!” The Beach Boys—a kind of California photosynthetic opposite of the menacing L.A. noir sound the Doors were perfecting—were revolutionizing pop with their enormous hit “Good Vibrations” (“Oom, bop, bop, excitation!”), the Mamas & the Papas, though not an actual L.A.-based group, were nevertheless living their Hollywood highs with another of the summer’s major anthems, “Monday, Monday” (“Feels so good to me!”), and in addition to the Doors, the Whisky was now playing host to a veritable menagerie of willfully out-there new groups, from Zappa and the Mothers to Van Morrison and Them—with whom Jim got up and sang “Gloria.” From Buffalo Springfield to Love, the Byrds, Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, even Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, just as they were riding the charts with “Going to a Go-Go.” The scene at the Whisky in the summer of 1966 epitomized a fast-paced cultural melting pot where the music business was midway through its transformation from single-oriented pop to album-oriented rock. It also coincided with what became known as the Sunset Strip curfew riots, a.k.a. the “hippie riots.” Local residents, infuriated with the sight and sound of several hundred hippie freaks spilling out onto the street outside the Whisky and similar clubs each night, had managed to push through new bylaws that restricted movement along the Strip after 10 PM. When the freaks protested, the law moved in, nightsticks and batons swinging, resulting in dozens of needless arrests and many more injuries. (Buffalo Springfield immortalized the scene with their breakthrough hit “For What It’s Worth,” often mistaken for an antiwar protest song but in fact a direct commentary on the 1966 riots outside the Whisky.)
But if the Doors were the house band at the forefront of an increasingly radical scene, their next move was so beyond the realms of what was considered right on, even by the new chemically enhanced social and musical culture of the summer of 1966, that it nearly ended their career overnight.
It began, as so many of their stories did in those days, with Jim being so out of it on acid he couldn’t function. After Jim missed the first set one night—Ray filling in at the keyboards with his remarkably accurate copycat Morrison voice—Elmer Valentine reminded them he wasn’t paying for a trip and told them to find Jim or not bother coming back. When they did, though, he was crawling around on his hands and knees drooling and mumbling about “ten thousand mics, ten thousand mics …” He had swallowed ten thousand micrograms’ worth of LSD, enough to send most grown men to a psychiatric ward, assuming it hadn’t killed them first. Jim, though, was Jim, and the only thing that really bothered Ray and the guys as they tried to get him on his feet was how he was going to finish a set back at the club. In the end, they could only hope for the best. At the very least, he would be there with them onstage, thus fulfilling their contractual obligation to Valentine.
“We were going great, the last thing we wanted was to blow it because our great shamanic front man had partaken too heartily of the blessed sacrament,” Ray told me in his typically heady apologia. Practically carrying Jim back to the Whisky, when Elmer began ranting at Jim for being late, he reached up and grabbed the startled club owner by either side of his head and kissed him on the mouth. That shut him up, though not for long.
By now the Doors’ live set had evolved way beyond the limited musical ambitions of their weeks at the Fog. Some of the jams they’d used to fill out their endless sets—the longest and most frequent of which they’d labeled “Latin Shit No. 1” and “Latin Shit No. 2”—had evolved into full-blown future classics like “Light My Fire” and “Break on Through (To the Other Side),” both of which betrayed Ray and John’s recent fetishization of the Getz/Gilberto bossa nova album, and increasingly “When the Music’s Over,” built off the back of Herbie Hancock’s “Watermelon Man” riff.
Tonight, though, they would unveil—albeit unwittingly—a new magnum opus. Originally begun as a minor three-minute ballad—“a short good-bye love song to Mary [Werbelow]” was how Ray put it—“The End” had grown through repeated performances into a lengthy Indian raga but, just like a traditional raga, one seemingly without climax or end. Even as Jim would launch into his roaring “Ride the snake!” mantra, the band would eventually merely blink out. And when he then added the long, “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” rant to the finale, although the swearing nearly drove Valentine and his club manager, Phil Tanzini, crazy—the club’s go-go dancers twirling ridiculously in an effort to try and dance to the tirade emanating from the stage—the crowds always erupted at the end, partly through shock perhaps, but always with applause and whistling and calls for more.
That was all about to change as the monumentally tripped-out Jim Morrison held on to the mike for balance and launched into a stream of consciousness that ended with him adding a new piece of theater to the finale of “The End” that nearly proved to be just that.
As if channeling his recurring hitchhiker fantasies, Jim began to intone something about the killer waking before dawn, putting on his boots, and, thrillingly, taking “a face from the ancient gallery,” walking down the hall to his parents’ bedroom, where he goes inside and utters the soon-to-be-immortal lines: “Father … Yes, son … I want to kill you … Mother … I want to … FUCK YOU!”
The number came clamoring to its end, but this time there was no eruption of stoned applause; instead, hoots from some in the crowd, shocked silence from others. Even the go-go dancers ceased to move a muscle. The only person in the club who knew exactly what to do was Phil Tanzini, who followed the band into the dressing room and went berserk, yelling that they must be out of their fucking minds. He didn’t wait for an answer, just told them to get their things and get the fuck out. Now! Pronto. Go. They were fired. They would never play the Whisky again.
Fortunately for Jim Morrison and the Doors, there was already a new savior waiting in the wings to carry them off to safety. Not another uptight club owner, or another drug freak or groupie. Nothing like that. But a dapper-looking gentleman from New York with no particular interest in rock ’n’ roll but an unfailingly keen sense for what he now calls “music that’s on the edge.”
His name was Jac Holzman, and though nobody in the Doors had yet heard of him, he was about to make all their dreams come true—even as Jim was making their worst nightmares come true too.

 8

Driver, Where You Taking Us?


Jac Holzman was nearly thirty-five, had run his own record label, Elektra, for more than fifteen years, had recently signed Love—whose debut album he also produced—and had absolutely no interest whatsoever in signing another psychedelic rock band. But when Love’s leader, Arthur Lee, hipped him to these new cats, the Doors, Jac felt obliged to at least give them the once-over. When it turned out the two bands were appearing the same night at the Whisky in the summer of 1966, Jac felt he had no choice anyway. But his head was gone. A perennial New Yorker in those days, he’d arrived on the red-eye into LAX at 11 PM—2 AM New York time. By the time he’d driven to the Whisky, stood through Love’s senses-blurring set, then watched the Doors, he’d been awake for nearly twenty-four hours and traveled nearly twenty-five hundred miles. He was in no mood to mess around.
Predictably then, as he later recalled, “Morrison made no impression whatsoever. I was more drawn to the classical [influences] of keyboardist Ray Manzarek, and was attracted to the leanness of the music. The lead singer seemed reclusive and tentative, as if preserving himself. There was nothing that tagged him as special, but there was a subtle invitation to ‘play,’ if you were willing to do so on his terms. It was only later that I sensed Jim’s ‘game.’”
Speaking now for the first time in years (“I get asked all the time to speak about the Doors. I say, read my book, Follow the Music!”), Holzman recalls being so underwhelmed he had virtually made up his mind not to pursue any interest, when, just as he was leaving mid-set, Ronnie Haran stopped him and insisted he come back the following night. Jim was acting up, she said, refusing to put on a show for the record company “suit” Arthur Lee had told him was in the audience. Which is how Holzman found himself back at the Whisky the following night, watching the Doors all over again. But still no eureka moment. Just a band bashing out a terse form of blues with vague classical and jazz leanings. Nevertheless, everyone he talked to in L.A. seemed to have a bead on the Doors. When Barry Friedman, a genuinely out-there record producer and former Beatles publicist who had recently begun managing one of L.A.’s hottest new bands, Buffalo Springfield (and who would soon be appointed Elektra’s West Coast head of A&R), started babbling about them too, Holzman went back to the Whisky the next night—and the next.
Says Jac now, “The question I ask myself when I look at any artist is: is this music something I haven’t heard before? Well, it wasn’t the first two or three nights, but it was the last night, where suddenly all the Doors songs that had been hidden while Jim … Jim loved to do sets that involved long blues. Now I didn’t need Jim Morrison to do that. I had the Butterfield Blues Band to do that. What I wanted was something odd but interesting that people could get, viscerally. Sometimes there are songs that are like Rosetta Stones, and once I heard [their version of “Alabama Song (Whisky Bar)”], I got the rest of it. Everything just filled in. The gaps just filled in. And I went back and listened to the songs again and I heard the stuff that I had glossed over before and didn’t get.” Because the Doors “had taken something that was so off the wall”—a 1927 Bertolt Brecht poem set to music by Kurt Weill—“and converted it into a song that could appear on a rock album,” Holzman finally got it, what the rest of their monochromatic, mock-Weimar cabaret sound was all about. This was rock but with a major difference. Where every other major band in 1966 was extolling a wide-eyed gambol through the psychedelic prism of love-love-love, the Doors appeared as the antithesis to all that, the dark angel come to eat its own children. Fuck its own mother, kill its own father.
A calculated risk-taker whose modus operandi had always been to ponder long, then, once his decision had been made, move fast, Holzman approached the band in their dressing room at the Whisky that same night. “When I heard that fourth night I knew this was a great band,” he says. “I wanted to be where nobody else was yet. The beauty of being an independent is you make your mind up and you just go for it.”
According to Ray, Jac made them an offer on the spot: $2,500 up front (less than he gave Love and others, they later discovered) against a 5 percent royalty and with Elektra holding on to the song publishing. “Like a Brill Building deal,” Ray dismissively described it in his memoir, a claim Holzman bristles at. “I offered what was slightly on the generous side of a standard deal in 1966 for an unproven group,” he wrote in Follow the Music, adding that Elektra would advance all recording costs plus $5,000 cash to the band against a 5 percent royalty with a separate advance against publishing, “of which the Doors would own 75 percent and Elektra 25 percent.” He added that “as a show of faith” he committed to a three-album deal.
In truth, the band could not believe their luck. Whatever claims they might have later made, the Doors had been turned down by every meaningful record company on the West Coast, their only deal, with Columbia, had petered out, and though they didn’t know it yet they were mere days away from being fired—again—from the only steady gig they had. If Jac Holzman had walked into their dressing room wearing a Santa Claus outfit and carrying a sackful of cash, he could not have made a more welcoming impression. Nevertheless, true to form, Jim urged the others to play it cool. With his smart, dark clothes and elegant New York talk, Holzman presented himself to Jim as yet another father figure, and Jim was not going to be won over that easily. As a result, Holzman recalled, he was forced to go “through the agony of a summer trying to nurse them toward signing [the deal], which did not occur until several months later.”
Billy James at Columbia told them to sign to Elektra without delay. But Billy was on his way to working at Elektra’s soon-to-be-opened Los Angeles office. Ronnie Haran told them to get a good lawyer, suggesting they use hers—but they turned down the offer. This caused bad blood, and Jim was forced to move out of Ronnie’s apartment. As he was leaving, he told her, “I’ll be dead in two years.” But Jim was always saying stuff like that.
In the end they followed the advice of Robby’s father, Stu Krieger, who put them together with the deliciously named Max Fink, a big-cigar and bigger-desk Hollywood attorney who looked like he knew his way around the blood-smeared back alleys of L.A. as well as he did its glitzy, tits-first front offices. Max Fink ate out-of-town New York suits like Jac Holzman for breakfast—or told the Doors he did—and set about his work with relish. Jac, in his customary hurry to get the act signed and set up to record, was forced to think again when Max came back to him with practically every page of the contract covered in red ink in which he’d noted his various questions, amendments, and straight deletions—it looked like the deal might never get done. But the wily Max drafted a letter of agreement that everybody signed on August 20, allowing the Doors and Elektra to proceed with recording an album but delaying any long-term legal obligations until the contract was finally agreed on in November.
Any other record company chief would have walked away. Fortunately for the Doors, Jac Holzman was not any other record company chief. The eldest son of a Park Avenue doctor, Jac was a supersmart boy who studied Descartes at college, who would bring his gift for minute analysis and almost geometrical calculation to all his future dealings, philosophically and in business. Jac was nineteen when he started Elektra—named after the mythological Greek princess, Electra (with the c replaced by a k—“To make it seem more intriguing”), who plotted revenge against her mother, Clytemnestra, for murdering her father, King Agamemnon. Within a few years, Jac had grown the label from a tiny mail-order company run from his St. John’s College dorm to a storefront Greenwich Village operation where he delivered his ten-inch LPs—Elektra didn’t do singles—personally to other stores on the back of a secondhand motor scooter. (He would carry old parking tickets and place them on the scooter’s tiny mirror in order to fool traffic cops and park wherever he liked.)
To begin with, Elektra specialized in specific folk idioms, bringing out limited-edition runs of LPs by Cynthia Gooding (Sings Turkish and Spanish Folk Songs, 1953) and Theodore Bikel (Israeli Folk Songs, 1955)—what would today be described as world music. The label also released homegrown American folk stars like Ed McCurdy, whose antiwar classic “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream” would eventually be recorded in seventy-six languages.
The big difference between Elektra and the leading independent label in the 1950s, Atlantic, was that the Ertegun brothers, who had started their label just three years before Elektra, were expansionist. Quality music was what drove their label, but they were on a mission from day one to turn their vanity label into a major player in the mainstream market. They produced singles as well as albums, looked to create a worldwide network of distribution outlets, and aimed to have hits. Holzman was coming from the other direction. Small was beautiful, and Elektra remained essentially a boutique label right up until it signed the Doors. Releasing records with limited runs, Elektra did not create music for the mass market but concentrated instead on making their LPs deluxe propositions; each came with its own booklet—unheard of until then—featuring the work of top photographers of the day like George Pickow and, later, Pompeo Posar, with detailed, evocative liner notes by star writers such as Studs Terkel and, down the line, Shel Silverstein. If Atlantic was for hip swingers, Elektra was for the knowledgeable elite.
One of Holzman’s most significant early signings had been that of Josh White, a country blues singer who first came to prominence in the 1930s with “race records” intended solely for the rural black population. He became one of the first black artists to successfully cross over to a white audience with his Depression-era hit “One Meat Ball,” which became the first million-selling record by a black artist. From there he was able to launch a lucrative career in the 1940s, working in supper clubs and cabarets. He also used his more elevated position to become a leading voice against social injustice suffered by blacks in the United States. So successful were his various speeches and interviews he was targeted as a communist sympathizer. In 1950 he was called before a hearing of the House Un-American Activities Committee, leading to a virtual ban of his records and live appearances.
By the time Holzman met him, playing back rooms in Greenwich Village in the mid-fifties, White’s career was in stasis. Jac, an iron-willed young man who resented any outside involvement in his decisions, business or musical, decided to make the point by signing White for a series of albums in the late fifties that would redraw the lines of both White’s career and that of Elektra Records. White’s first album, produced by Holzman in 1955, also happened to be Elektra’s last ten-inch release, The Story of John Henry. White’s second, Josh at Midnight, in 1956, became Elektra’s first twelve-inch release and went on to become one of the label’s biggest sellers up to that point.
“Having someone like Josh White on the label said something beyond just the music,” Holzman explains. “It raised the stature of the artist and the label. I don’t want to be where everybody else is, in the center. Because by the time you make an album from the center, the center has moved on and then you’re stuck with this record. I don’t want anything that anybody else is doing. I wanted people to think of Elektra as different from the others.”
Well, they certainly did that. By the time he met the Doors ten years later, Holzman’s Elektra had expanded to become one of the leading independent record labels in the world. An electronics expert, Jac had commissioned a series of sound effects LPs with a view to licensing the various tracks—a car crashing, a window breaking, a radio signal, a machine grinding its gears, anything and everything—to TV and film companies for use in their shows, movies, and commercials. They proved to be among the most consistently lucrative releases for Elektra throughout the sixties. In 1964 he also started a subsidiary label, dubbed None-such Records, whose remit—to produce “fine records at the same price as a trade paperback [book]”—saw the label focusing initially on licensing European recordings of baroque and chamber music, which Nonesuch made available in distinctive new LPs for half the price of normal albums. Ray Manzarek would later claim it was the Nonesuch catalog that had really attracted the Doors to Holzman.
By 1966, however, Holzman had bigger fish to fry. Having successfully ridden the folk revival of the early sixties, releasing the first albums of groundbreaking new folk artists like Judy Collins, Phil Ochs, and Tom Paxton, Jac had narrowly missed out on signing L.A.’s Byrds—the first successful folk-rock hybrid group—and had been outmaneuvered trying to sign New York’s Lovin’ Spoonful—another destined-to-be-huge, proto-folk-rock outfit that Jac had nurtured, then had snatched from him when he discovered a previous production deal the band had not told him they’d signed. However, he had managed to sign the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, whose eponymous 1965 debut is now ranked by Downbeat as one of the Top 50 blues albums of all time, and by Rolling Stone as one of the Top 500 rock albums.
Now his full focus was on Southern California. “I had given up on New York because of the Lovin’ Spoonful incident, and because everybody in New York was going to hear everything and I didn’t want to be in a bidding war against Columbia. That was not a winner,” he says now. “I mean, there were record companies out [in L.A.], but remember the Los Angeles offices or the away-from-the-center offices, either in London or Los Angeles, don’t get paid as much attention to. So when stuff is sent back to New York for consideration, they don’t take it seriously. They don’t get back right away.”
Jac decided he and Elektra would be on the spot to pounce quickly. Hence what he calls his “twenty-minute deal” with Love. “That’s all it took to sign them.” Holzman felt sure the Doors would come around eventually. “Well, it wasn’t happening fast for them,” he says. “They had been rejected by every label in town. Columbia threw them off the label. That’s what made it easy for me, because I knew the key to signing the band was to say, ‘I’m going to give you a home, and you and I are going to be working together for three albums that I promise I will release.’ ”
Holzman was looking to expand Elektra’s New York–based operation down to the West Coast, specifically L.A., where he planned to open an office, and when it became clear that would also serve as a de facto office for the Doors, the band could not pretend to be aloof any longer. The deal was signed at the start of August. Three weeks later the Doors were ensconced in Sunset Sound Recorders, a bare-knuckles recording facility in Hollywood—purpose-built by Walt Disney in 1958 to record the soundtracks to Disney classics like Bedknobs and Broomsticks, Mary Poppins, and 101 Dalmatians—which would become the go-to studio for all Elektra’s West Coast artists until it built its own studio.
Originally, Holzman had considered producing the Doors’ album himself, as he had done for Love. But he had second thoughts after meeting Jim and turned the job over to his right-hand man at Elektra, producer Paul A. Rothchild. “I loved the studio, but I thought Paul knew more than I did about how to do this kind of band,” says Jac. “He had a lot to learn as a producer, but he had deep musical knowledge. And you’re talking about a band where the guys were all very smart and frequently about different things. Ray and Jim were supersmart, and you needed a guy who was as well read as they were, and Paul was that. So I thought he was the ideal person. I thought he could really whip them into shape.”
At thirty-one, Paul Rothchild was just old enough to exert authority over the group, just young enough to be hip to their trip. A classically trained musician who had grown up in New Jersey, where he was groomed for success by his mother, who had sung with the Metropolitan Opera, Paul had trained in the fifties under the tutelage of the great conductor Bruno Walter. Swept up by the folk revival, he found himself in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on the board of Club 47, the small but significant folk club in the Harvard Square area of Cambridge where Joan Baez gave her very first concert, barefoot, in 1958. The next few years found Rothchild working as a Boston-area record distributor while also trying to make his mark as a producer. In 1962 he talked some Harvard student friends, the Charles River Valley Boys, into letting him produce their second album, Bluegrass and Old Timey Music, released on Prestige Records, where Paul was working. This was followed in 1964 by a second album with the Valley Boys, Blue Grass Get Together, but by then Bob Dylan had taken folk into the rock arena and Rothchild had relocated to New York, where he first hooked up with Jac Holzman and produced his first albums for Elektra.
Clad in regulation skintight jeans, even tighter T-shirt or often as not no shirt at all, his long hair tied in a ponytail to distract attention from the fact that he was already going bald on top, Rothchild would come striding through the studio door, avoiding all eye contact until he was settled behind the console, where he would snap open his briefcase. “The briefcase was famous,” Jac recalled. “It held everything he might possibly need: pitch pipe, the latest gadgets, cigarettes, whatever drug was up for the evening.”
Paul was a loner, seriously focused, as self-absorbed as any artist, even Morrison and the Doors. “He could do a ‘Hey man’ to the artist, though he didn’t say ‘Hey man’ to me,” as Holzman put it. His only drawback: he was a perfectionist. A year before, and against Holzman’s better judgment, Rothchild had insisted his original production of the debut Paul Butterfield Blues Band album be scrapped because it “didn’t sound quite right.” He rerecorded the whole thing, and though the album had a huge impact, when the original was finally released nearly thirty years later, critics, including Jac, lamented it had not been released in 1965 as originally intended.
Since then, he’d coproduced—with Holzman’s longer-serving production lieutenant Mark Abramson—the second Butterfield album, East-West, another neo-blues classic that prefigured some of the acid-flayed, improvisatory blues the Doors were also now meddling with, and worked directly with Holzman on the production of the startling debut album by the latest Elektra signing, Tim Buckley. Buckley’s first album was recorded in only three days at Sunset Sound just prior to the arrival of the Doors in August 1966.
Only snag: Paul just didn’t see it. After Butterfield and Buckley and the other great artists like Tom Paxton he had worked with for Elektra, being brought in to hold the hands of what Rothchild then thought of as little more than a rowdy club act seemed beneath him. Besides, he had already decided who he wanted to work with next—a Canadian psychedelic outfit named the Paupers. But Jac disagreed, thought the Paupers “a crappy band … not a band that was an Elektra signing,” and put his foot down about the Doors. (Holzman’s view was later vindicated when the Paupers’ debut 1967 album, released on MGM-Verve, promptly sank without a trace.)
Plus, Paul owed Jac big—and gave in when Jac reminded him of it. Rothchild had just gotten out of prison after serving eight months of a two-year sentence for possession of marijuana. And not just a pocket full of spliffs but several suitcases full of the stuff, which he later swore had just turned up on his doorstep one morning, the act, he suggested, of a disgruntled musician he had crossed. It seemed a tall tale, but though the cops didn’t believe him, most crucially Jac did. And while Paul had been incarcerated, Holzman had offered his wife part-time work at the label, to help her pay the bills.
“I had been very supportive of [Paul] when he went to jail, and took care of his family,” says Jac. “I kept Paul on half-salary and … gave [his wife] some work a couple of days a week.” So when Paul initially balked at producing the Doors, “I finally said to him, ‘Look, you’re the only guy who can do this band that I trust.’ Paul was very smart and knew how to adjust to the temperament of the artist for the most part. He could become a martinet, and if he was a martinet he was kind of miserable to be around. No, he was not impressed by the Doors. But I said, basically, ‘You kind of owe me. I stayed by you, and now I’m asking you to stick by me on something I feel is going to be very important.’ He said, ‘Put it that way, absolutely.’ There was no discussion after that.”
First, though, Rothchild insisted he work with the band at some serious preproduction rehearsals, “because,” says Jac, “the songs had not been shaped by the addition of anybody else’s intelligence. They had been shaped totally by themselves. The arrangements and the way things went were a lot Paul Rothchild.” The prime example was “Light My Fire,” which the stickler-for-detail producer sculpted from the musical miasma of its sprawling live incarnation into something with real shape and gravitas. “So as [Paul] got into it he realized how good the music was. And we talked about how long they should be in the rehearsal studio, and we figured ten days maximum, because we didn’t want to get them totally there. We wanted them to put the last 20 percent of energy and whatever magic was going to come directly into the songs in the studio. The fact they were in the studio doing it would give them a boost. [Paul] was on board by that time. And then as we were putting the album together he got it. Because there were these certain magic moments, when he would turn and say, ‘God, this is great!’ And they occurred in many, many different songs.”
Even though they were there with Rothchild and his usual sidekick, the engineer Bruce Botnick, for less than a week, the Doors “owned Studio B” at Sunset Sound. At the end of every session the doors would be double-locked so their sound could not be altered. Often a studio will be broken down for other acts to use after a session is over. Not with the Doors. Dropping in on the sessions, Holzman was already convinced this was precious cargo.
“It was for Elektra Records, so I knew it was going be different,” says Botnick now, speaking from his home in Los Angeles. “I had already recorded Tim Buckley’s first album with Paul. This was the first album he did when he got out of jail, because he had been busted for pot, which in those days was a pretty bad thing. He told me he was lucky that he didn’t get raped in prison. He said some massive black guy took pity on him and protected him. Until Jac was able to finally get him out of jail.”
While Rothchild had the “vision thing”—converting what was at the time an extremely functional four-track facility into a late-night netherworld where Jim and the band could let their spirits fly, even as he obliged them to do different takes, try it more this way, less that way, teasing the best performances out of them, his joints competing with Jim’s for perfection—the twenty-three-year-old Botnick’s job was to be Mr. Fixit, getting the setup right, keeping the tape rolling, placing bafflers and mikes, helping Paul fly the faders, coming up with the little extras that might make the difference.
“Jim was in the vocal booth. The guys were in the studio itself. It’s ten feet apart at the most. They could see one another. I always kept the lights dark in the studio for certain acts. You know, they needed to have that. Down to screwing in some red light bulbs in the studio that glowed like that.
“At that time I was still working for the studio,” he recalls, “and in the early morning, I was recording radio commercials. For muffler companies and things like that. Then around lunchtime I would be doing a children’s album for Disney. Or doing a jazz project. And I loved doing all these things at the same time, because I would get something from one and I would try to put it into the next one then put it into the next one. It was just constantly feeding and it’s a good, very healthy atmosphere. Or we’d do Mexican Week. We’d do everything from Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, perhaps, to totally indigenous [music] with harps and everything. And it was the greatest learning experience I’ve ever had! I brought some of that into the Doors and I brought it into Love, for Forever Changes.”
The first day the band arrived in the studio, Bruce recalls, “they had everything down. They had pretty much the first two albums ready to go. The thought that Paul had, and which I agreed [with], is that we were to be invisible—to allow them to capture their performance, to capture the magic of the Doors as you went to hear them.” He adds, “They were totally different than anything else I was recording. I was recording the Beach Boys, the Turtles, the Ventures, and a lot of pop music as well—and [the Doors] were totally different, it was the beginning of that era of American sixties music.”
Bassist Larry Knechtel, from the top L.A.-based session outfit, the Wrecking Crew, who had played on dozens of hit records throughout the sixties, was hired to play on six of the album’s eventual eleven tracks, with Ray handling the others on his keyboard bass. Only three of the studio’s four tracks were actually used—drums and bass on one, guitar and keyboards on another, and Jim’s vocals on the third—with the fourth track kept back for overdubs.
Apart from the album’s two cornerstone tracks—the seven-minute-plus “Light My Fire” and the nearly twelve-minute “The End”—most of the tracks were less than three minutes long. But then, in truth, despite regularly being hailed since as one of the all-time great rock debuts, the first Doors album was a mixed bag of disposable sixties pop and a truly gothic form of rock, with layers of Indian raga, jazz stylings, and neoclassical pretensions. So while tracks like the rousing, call-to-arms opener “Break on Through (To the Other Side)” and the genuinely spaced-out “The Crystal Ship,” with its, for the times, outlandish opening couplet, “Before you slip into / Un-con-scious-ness … ,” suggested a very different, far more advanced, into-the-night type of rock band than any seen before, certainly out on the West Coast, others like “Soul Kitchen”—inspired by the band’s fondness for a cheap and cheerful Venice Beach joint called Olivia’s that sold soul food—and “Twentieth Century Fox”—a droolingly stoned play on words, geddit?—are so wincingly à la mode they would have struggled to get on the first Monkees album, also being made that summer.
While the painfully peacocking “I Looked at You” sounds like a Rick & the Ravens throwback, tracks like “End of the Night”—another self-consciously spooky interlude with only its Céline-inspired title to guide it—and the deliriously vacuous “Take It as It Comes”—even if the organ solo, as Ray claims, was lifted from J. S. Bach—sound like what they are, side salads for the real steaks on the plate: “Light My Fire,” with its grandiose Bach-fugue intro and swirling instrumental middle section inspired by John Coltrane’s “Olé,” and “The End,” the only truly riveting musical journey into the mystic they make, which, fittingly, closes the album.
Given the inclusion also of two cover songs—their admittedly inspired live reading of “Alabama Song (Whisky Bar)” and Jim’s thinly veiled reference to his growing obsession with anal sex, Willie Dixon’s “Back Door Man” (every groupie on Sunset was now privately complaining about how Jim was pestering them for it)—it seems strange that they didn’t consider including some of the other tracks they already had completed, specifically, the truly trippy “Moonlight Drive” and the equally ethereal “Indian Summer”—or at the very least, if they were looking for a hit, “Hello, I Love You.” All of which were recorded during the sessions—and would be included on future Doors albums—but passed over when it came to the final sequencing of their debut.
According to Robby Krieger, the beautiful “Indian Summer,” though it would not be released for another four years, was the first song the band ever fully completed, with “Moonlight Drive” coming after. But Paul Rothchild had decided they needed more upbeat numbers, so “Indian Summer” got nixed in favor of “Back Door Man,” and the original version they cut of “Moonlight Drive” they simply didn’t think was good enough. (Listening to the cut on the contemporary remastered CD version of the album, released after Rothchild’s death in 1995, it’s hard to disagree.)
“Every day we got something great,” Rothchild later told Jerry Hopkins. “Jim was out of control on some days, but that was just another aspect of that phenomenon: the Jim Morrison spirit! Because we were recording when Jim was at one of his most insane points, when he was deep into acid.” They would try various different songs, do a few takes, then move on to another. They even tried having a go at “The End” on the first night, but it just wasn’t happening. So they got it on the second night instead, said Rothchild.
In fact, the recording of “The End,” which eventually rolled out to almost twelve minutes in length—unheard of for a rock song at that time—precipitated one of the most oft-told yet always exaggerated stories from the making of the first Doors album. According to legend, the band was two-thirds of the way through playing the track, just after Jim had turned his onstage announcement of wanting to fuck his mother into an incoherent yowl, and as he began to dervish around the studio he noticed—oh, the insult!—that Bruce Botnick was watching a small black-and-white TV tuned to a baseball game, which Jim, absolutely furious, smashed to the floor before picking it up and hurling it through the studio glass into the control room, where Botnick and Rothchild sat shocked.
Speaking now, however, Botnick sighs and claims it was a far less dramatic moment. “I don’t know why I did this but I had this Sony TV, a little one, on a stool looking into the control room.” The Los Angeles Dodgers were playing the St. Louis Cardinals with baseball legend Sandy Koufax pitching. As far as Bruce, who had no idea who the Doors were, or thought they were, was concerned, he’d simply brought the TV into work with him to catch the game—with the sound off. “And in [Jim’s] flying around he knocked it off. It did not explode. It did not catch on fire. He did not pick it up and throw it through the glass as Ray Manzarek said that he did. None of that happened. But he knocked it off, and yes it went on the floor, and the tape continued. In between takes I walked out into the studio and got it and turned it off. And then we did a second take. ‘The End’ comprises two takes and we edited it together—the first half and the second half. For the performance aspect we made the cut. Because everything that happened on that album was based on performance.”
The other flashpoint story from those sessions that has since gone down in history has also been exaggerated, according to Botnick: the one in which a fiercely tripping Jim—on the same night they completed splicing the two best performances of “The End” together—returned alone to Sunset Sound and trashed the studio, throwing ashtray sand over the floor and emptying a fire extinguisher into the mixing console.
According to Botnick, though, this was not merely an act of acid-crazed petulance but a genuine attempt, albeit with lid flapping open, to avert what Morrison saw as a disaster. “The way that Sunset Sound studios was, it was an old garage [that had] been converted. It was absorption, brick, absorption, brick … but inside each brick was a light, and that’s where I screwed the red lightbulbs.” After everyone had left the studio that night, Jim had “gone across the street to the Blessed Sacrament, a Catholic Church, and he had an epiphany over there. He came back to the studio and the gate was locked. He climbed over the gate, got in, but he couldn’t get in the control room. That was locked. But the studio was open and the red lights were on and he thought it was on fire, so he grabbed a fire extinguisher and knocked over the ashtrays that were full of sand and tried to put out the fire.”
Recalling the incident at the time, however, Rothchild said he’d received a phone call from the chick Jim had left the session with, saying Jim had jumped out of her car and was headed back to the studio. When Paul got there Jim was shoeless and shirtless, almost naked. When Paul asked him what the fuck, he just grinned that slow-burn grin and said, “I want to record.” Paul talked him down, and they retired to Jim’s pad and spent the rest of the night digging the Stones, Donovan, Howlin’ Wolf … Paul finally escaped around dawn. As he walked through the door of his Laurel Canyon home his phone was ringing. It was studio owner Tutti Camarata, apoplectic with rage, saying the studio had been trashed—fire extinguisher foam all over the mixing console, sand from a stand-up ashtray hurled across the room. Also a pair of Jim’s old stinky boots … did Paul know who they belonged to? Paul said he did not. Then wearily told him to send the bill to Elektra.

 PART TWO

UNLOCKED



 9

Suck My Mama


According to Bruce Botnick, the first Doors album—simply titled The Doors—took just five days to make, from start to finish. “Because it was performance, capturing performance, editing, doing overdubs if we needed to double his voice or whatever. But it took five days.”
It took five months, though, for Elektra to finally release the album. This was almost entirely because Holzman didn’t even know if Elektra would have the Doors under contract until November, when after interminable contractual wrangling Max Fink finally approved the deal with the company. Jim and Ray had pushed at that point for the album to be released immediately, so that it would be out in time for Christmas. But Jac, the wise old label head, knew better and tried to talk them into allowing Elektra to hold back release until the New Year.
Ray and the rest of the band acquiesced, realizing they had no choice in the matter anyway. But Jim threw a tantrum and needed to be talked down. As Holzman later wrote, even then Jim and the other three members of the Doors were “really two entities: Ray Manzarek–Robby Krieger–John Densmore, and Jim Morrison, separate and apart.” Jim was now living in a nine-dollar-a-night room at the Tropicana (“the Trop,” as Jim called it), the rundown West Hollywood motel where the black-tiled pool had no water and the guests festered alongside each other, sharing their drugs and cheap wine bottles, bed-hopping and stealing from each other, the kind of low-rent dive where all the musicians who hadn’t yet made it stayed, the actors out on loan, dogs without a bone, all scavenging after each other, hoping someone’s luck might change and, when it did, would carry the rest of them along too. Sure. This, though, while the other three Doors still lived in either the comfort of their parents’ houses (John and Robby) or with their live-in partners out by the beach (Ray and Dorothy). There was Jim and there were the Others. Holzman got this immediately and discerned early on that the key to working successfully with the Doors would be to always keep Jim happy.
Speaking now, Jac recalls he told Jim, “We’ve got something very special here, and I don’t want it to get lost in pre-Christmas, and this is what I’ll do if you agree to that.” His first move was to book the Doors their first New York shows, a monthlong residency at Ondine’s, the ultrafashionable East Side discotheque on East 59th Street that had lately become the hangout for the Andy Warhol Factory crowd and satellite hangers-on like Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, and the Velvet Underground. Jim, who read all the music and film magazines, gazing at all the celebrity pictures in Vogue and Time as avidly as any fan, was aware that the status a residency at Ondine’s would confer on the Doors would help them become part of that scene.
Jac also painted Jim a picture of the kind of campaign Elektra would build around the album when it was finally released. “I said, ‘We’ll have more time to prepare for you, and I’ll release no other album that month, which means you’ve got Elektra working 100 percent on your album for the first month. And by the way, I have this idea about putting a billboard up on Sunset Strip …’ Well, that caught Jim. He loved that idea. He said, ‘Where’d you come up with that?’ ” kahpu
True to his word, Holzman didn’t release any other album in January 1967, got his Elektra staff so cranked up on The Doors they could talk of nothing else right through the Christmas holidays, then added the promised cherry of making the Doors the first rock band ever to feature on one of Hollywood’s giant billboards overlooking the Strip.
By then, though, the Doors were starting to feel a sense of entitlement that very soon would outgrow a dozen billboards on Sunset Boulevard. Their November 1966 residency in New York had seen to that. Before Jim and the Doors took over the joint, Ondine’s had belonged to the Warhol crowd. When it opened in 1965, Edie Sedgwick became one of its first celebrity patrons, showering the dozens of guests she brought with her each night in endless bottles of champagne, endless vials of speed, orgies of fun, fun, fun. And sex, lots of sex. It was the first place in New York where the prettiest girls wore the shortest miniskirts, though they weren’t called that yet. When eighteen-year-old Marisa Berenson, then the world’s highest-paid teenage model, went there she was immediately spotted by Gerard Malanga—the college dropout poet-actor-scenester who had latterly become Warhol’s most outré assistant, appearing in five of Andy’s celebrated “art movies” before he was twenty-two, and who insisted Andy screen-test her for his next planned movie, Chelsea Girls. Marisa had other ideas, but that was OK. Gerard was already starring in his own movie anyway, the reels constantly rolling in his head. Some said he was the real star of the early Velvet Underground shows, the band Andy managed and built his Exploding Plastic Inevitable (EPI) multimedia experiences around, standing there in his leather pants and brandishing a whip, dancing like a cross between Nureyev and Twiggy.
Warhol later recalled walking into Ondine’s with his entourage the first night the Doors played there. “Gerard took one look at Jim Morrison in leather pants just like his and he flipped. ‘He stole my look!’ he screamed, outraged.” It was true. When Warhol’s EPI, as it was dubbed, set up at the Trip in Los Angeles in May, Jim had been there to see them do it and had been so impressed by Malanga’s macho, crotch-bulging, leather-trousered presence, dancing in a Marlon Brando T-shirt, lifting toy barbells and pretending to shoot up with lit candles, he immediately set about appropriating the look for his own purposes.
It was another of Jim’s acquisitions from the EPI, though, that would later cause him the most trouble: the German actress and model Nico. Born in Cologne in 1938, Christa Päffgen had been “discovered” as a model when she was sixteen by photographer Herbert Tobias, who nicknamed her “Nico” after his friend, filmmaker Nikos Papatakis. Her career had immediately taken off: the face of Chanel at seventeen; by twenty, a well-traveled actress with parts in Alberto Lattuada’s La Tempesta and Rudolph Maté’s For the First Time, and, most famously, in 1959, while visiting Cinecittà studios in Rome, where Federico Fellini was shooting La Dolce Vita, she so intoxicated the renowned director he immediately wrote in a small part for her—playing herself. In 1962, she’d given birth to a son, Christian Aaron “Ari” Päffgen, whose father was the French screen star Alain Delon.
When she arrived at the Factory in 1965, as the new girlfriend of the Rolling Stones’ guitarist Brian Jones, the homosexual Warhol was equally smitten by the tall, ice-blonde woman with the voice of a doomed siren, her heavy German accent inflected with narcoleptic traces of English, Spanish, and French. He was beside himself with glee at the prospect of casting such an obvious bird-of-paradise-lost in his deeply transgressive movies. Nico had been taking Method Acting lessons at Lee Strasberg’s class, had appeared on the cover of jazz pianist Bill Evans’s 1962 album Moon Beams, and had starred, two years earlier, in Jacques Poitrenaud’s Strip-tease—for which she had also sung the title song of the soundtrack, written by Serge Gainsbourg. Becoming a leading light of Andy Warhol’s Factory scene was merely the next step toward her own supernova-bursting superstardom, she felt sure.
When Warhol decided to push her to the front of the Velvet Underground, insisting they write some songs especially for her to sing, the singer, Lou Reed, was at first affronted, then mollified when the two began sleeping together. What Jim Morrison saw the first time the EPI performed at the Trip—a tiny venue also owned by the Whisky’s Elmer Valentine—was a rock band as just one element in a much greater theatrical performance, combining art, film, lights, music … exactly the kind of concept he and Ray had raved about constructing for the Doors in their early Venice Beach daze. The band, all in shades, played almost without moving as Warhol’s films were projected across them, interspersed with full-spectrum psychedelic lights, while Gerard Malanga lashed his whip, improvising dance moves to “illustrate” the songs. And fronting the whole spectacle, Nico—no shades, just those deep swimming pool eyes defying the gaze. A living Warhol sculpture dressed in a white leather catsuit, Nico had only sung three songs, but Jim had not been able to take his own heavily tripped-out eyes off her.
Yet despite the largely apocryphal tales of people fainting during the shows while others became so spaced out they didn’t even bother going home, just slept on the floor and kept going the next night and the next, the show closed on the fourth night after local cops moved in to shut down the club, reacting to the endless reports of drug dealers operating openly inside and complaints about couples having sex in the street outside. In truth, it was probably for the best. While future Velvet Underground classics like the heart-pounding “I’m Waiting for the Man” and the psychotic “Run Run Run” were recognizably accurate portrayals of New York’s rancid underbelly, paeans almost to Lower East Side sensibilities, in L.A., where the sun always shone and the local freak scene was predicated more on weed and wine and LSD-25—on reaching for the stars, man, inviting the universe and its vast mysteries to seep into our souls, man—this shit just didn’t play. Or, as Cher put it, after walking out on the much-hyped opening show at the Trip—along with the crème de la crème of West Hollywood scenesters like Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Roger Vadim, Jane and Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Natalie Wood, Michelle and John Phillips, and Julie Christie—“It will replace nothing, except maybe suicide.”
When the EPI entourage was forced to take an extended break while they waited to begin the next leg of their West Coast tour in San Francisco, Jim had begun a brief but blitzkrieged affair with Nico that would be rekindled—and nearly burn them both alive—again and again over the coming year. When he discovered Nico was staying at John Phillip Law’s concrete “Castle” in Los Feliz, south of the Santa Monica Mountains, waiting for Warhol’s Chelsea Girls, which she starred in as herself, he drove straight over to see her—and stayed. And how.
“He spent that whole night sort of dancing for her,” says Danny Fields. “It was like one of those birds in New Guinea. He was just climbing around the roof naked and standing on the edge of the precipice. Then he would come down, he would beat her up. And I mean not violently. Shove her around and pull her hair. And then go back up. I presume they ended up doing it, though he was so stoned, I don’t know. I can’t visualize it. I think they saw each other a few more times, but one is more aware of the first time with people.” “I see her as kind of an equal,” Jim would tell Ray. But Ray didn’t believe him. Even then, for Ray, Jim simply had no equal. This girl would soon vanish like all the others, Ray hoped. But things never did happen quite so easily for Jim, who now ditched West Coast thrift-store cool for Greenwich Village chic. Before leaving for New York, he’d been to Mirandi Babitz’s far-out new store on Sunset and ordered a bespoke leather suit with a zipless sailor front on the pants. Très butch, this would be Jim’s hip new look for the next two years, until he ditched it for good, disgusted by the copyists, the Steppenwolfs and Iggy Pops, the imitators and backdoor fakers. Out of love with himself, just as his millions of followers were leaping exultantly through the doors he’d unlocked.
By the time the Doors arrived in New York six months later, Jim Morrison’s new leather pants and shirt open to the navel were an established part of his act—and an immediate hit with all the women at Doors shows, who were now starting to outnumber the men. On their first night in New York, Jim had taken the beautiful groupie Devon Wilson—a future lover of Jimi Hendrix’s, who would write “Dolly Dagger” for her—back to the band’s hotel. Word was already out on the Doors, though, with Elektra—the hot and happening label that had already brought us the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and Love that year—pushing the Doors as “the American Rolling Stones.” This was a masterly piece of PR equating the recent hit Stones album, Aftermath—a glowering, almost gothic work that had been a turning point for the Stones, their first to feature only original material, their first recorded entirely in the United States, their first to make a clear distinction between singles and albums—with the crazy, head-spinning trip the Doors were about to take you on.
Ray Manzarek: “As Jim once said, ‘We perform a musical séance.’ Not to raise the dead, but to palliate the dead, to ease the pain and the suffering of the dead and the living. And, in doing that, we dove into areas that were deeply, deeply Freudian, and psychologically deeply Jungian at the same time. So we were a merging of both Freud and Jung, which might seem impossible, but it happened onstage, and really upset the establishment. There was just something about the power in the music, and that insane sexuality of Jim Morrison, that drove the establishment right over the edge.”
One convert, though she would never have described herself as being in any way part of the establishment, was a thirty-nine-year-old former model, Gloria Stavers. Then editor of 16 magazine, at the time the biggest-circulation teen music magazine in the United States, Stavers had once been Lenny Bruce’s girlfriend, had had a well-publicized affair with baseball legend Mickey Mantle, and was said to have helped, through her patronage, turn Herman’s Hermits into bigger stars in the United States than both the Beatles and the Stones. Gloria liked to photograph the bands herself, inviting them over to her New York loft apartment, where if all went well the session would conclude in her bedroom. When the freelance writer turned ad hoc Elektra publicist Danny Fields arranged for Jim and the Doors to spend an afternoon being shot at Gloria’s apartment, the band was quickly dismissed while Gloria got down to her real work, photographing—then seducing—Jim.
Fields was one of the new hip young gunslingers who helped define the mid-sixties New York spirit. One week he was a pop writer for Datebook, asking singers what their favorite color was, the next he was sitting at the feet of the Beatles’ publicist, Derek Taylor, learning everything there was to know about how to hype a rock ’n’ roll band. The week after that he’d be hanging out with “the early Warhol scene, which was a mixture of people from Harvard and others I knew in New York.” In the autumn of 1966 he found himself doing PR for an all-girl group called the UFOs. “They got a booking at the Whisky in L.A. I rang [Ronnie Haran], who did the club’s publicity, and told her they were going out and asked if she could look after them, get them press and so on. And I asked if there was anything I could do in return and she said, ‘Yes, as a matter of fact I have a group coming to New York …’ ”
The group was the Doors. Picking them up from the airport, Danny took one look at Jim Morrison and knew exactly what he should do—call Gloria. According to Fields, speaking from his home in New York, Gloria Stavers was “one of the most brilliant people who ever lived, invented 16 magazine single-handedly. I mean, there was the publisher and the paper and the ink, but she invented it. She used to boast of her blow jobs. That she could give the best blow jobs in town. And she was giving [Jim] a blow job—and she loved her skill and was proud of it—and she swears he vanished; he dematerialized and was sitting on the other side of the room. Now I attribute this to feminine folly, or the girl got carried away. But she was no girl! Hello, she’d been around the block big-time, like with important people. You know, quite an arsenal there. OK, so then he came back on the other side of the room and there he was, sort of smirking. OK. Yes, Gloria, I’m sure that was wonderful!” He laughs. “She says it straight-faced, you know, you didn’t go into it. She was a very spiritual person.” However implausible Jim’s dematerialization mid–blow job may be, the fact is that when The Doors was released in January 1967, it would be Jim’s image on the cover of 16 that month, under the headline Morrison Is Magic!
Andy Warhol, meanwhile, who became as love-struck at the twenty-two-year-old Morrison visage as Nico (who also showed up at Ondine’s to begin their fiery liaison again), plotting to get Jim to star in his next movie project, simply called Fuck, begged Jim to let him film him having sex with Nico. When Jim laughed in his face and told him to fuck off, Andy wheedled: would he at least allow him to film Nico giving Jim a blow job? “Fuck off, Andy,” Jim smiled. “No.” Jim, though, was not above considering the outer reaches of his star potential, certainly in Warhol terms if nothing else, and now seriously considered changing his name to James Phoenix, going so far as to request that Elektra alter his credits on the forthcoming Doors album sleeve. The rest of the band assumed he wanted to sound more like a Warholian rock star, but secretly Jim was more concerned that his growing reputation for debauchery might eventually impinge on his estranged father’s career in the US military. When the others talked him out of it—“It just sounded dumb, even for a warrior poet,” explained Ray disingenuously—he settled instead for merely being an orphan.
Back in L.A. for Christmas, when Elektra requested biographical information from the four band members so that they could assemble a press package in readiness for the album’s release in January, Jim claimed his whole family was dead. He went along with the rest, fairly standard stuff for 1966, like, “Who are your favorite singers?” “Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley.” He added that his favorite color was “turquoise” and his favorite food “meat.”
When asked for his personal philosophy, however, Jim couldn’t help himself and gave it both barrels. “You could say it’s an accident that I was ideally suited for the work I am doing,” he began earnestly. “It’s the feeling of a bowstring being pulled back for 22 years and suddenly being let go. I am primarily an American; second a Californian; third, a Los Angeles resident. I’ve always been attracted to ideas that were about revolt against authority. I like ideas about the breaking away or overthrowing of established order. I am interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos—especially activity that seems to have no meaning.”
Elektra, though, had its own ideas about the “meaning” some people might take from Doors songs and to the band’s dismay decided unilaterally to edit the first single from the album, “Break on Through (To the Other Side),” so that the line “She gets high,” which Jim sings four times, on the single version played as “She gets … she gets … she gets … she gets …” This became the version they were forced to mime to in their first-ever television appearance, on Shebang, on January 1, 1967. You can see the frustration in Jim’s wincingly subdued performance, barely bothering to move his lips, eyes wide shut, as he stands there, all gussied up for the cameras in fawn-colored pants tapered at the ankles, black shirt, and dark hunting jacket, but with an attitude as sullen as a teenage punk girl forced to wear a pretty dress for the prom. This performance stands in marked contrast to the film clip that Jac Holzman commissioned Mark Abramson to shoot—a suitably noirish color clip defined by its stark, black tones, no one but a snarling Jim seen for the first minute, and then only the heavily silhouetted form of Ray Manzarek stooped over his keyboards, the priest at his lectern, Robby not getting a look in until the song is almost over. Yet it was this dark, somnambulant quality—the antithesis of the bright Californian mien of the Byrds and the Beach Boys—that helped define the Doors as different. Special. So that when the clip aired on the L.A. Channel 9 show Boss City, it resulted in the band’s first serious plays on local radio.
None of this gave the single the impetus it needed to “go national,” as the saying went, that is, give the Doors their first recognizable countrywide hit. Jac Holzman, though, insists that was not his plan anyway. “I was not a person who made singles. I felt that singles should be calling cards for albums, because that was a greater impact of the artist. A hit single tells you a lot about the song and nothing about the artist, or not much about the artist. I’ve always felt that way.” Nevertheless, if Elektra was going to get involved in the singles market, which Jac knew it had to if it wished to promote the Doors to the potential audience that awaited them, he insisted that at the very least the “calling card” should be of a standard that said more than “I love you.” The result, he says, was that while “Break on Through (To the Other Side)” was not a hit, it demonstrated “a level of intellect not usually heard in rock bands.”
The Doors, however, would never be seen as a singles-reliant act. Unlike the Beatles and the Stones, who’d begun that way, then evolved into album-oriented groups, the Doors would always be about the albums, recording epic rock suites double-digit minutes long before Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd or even Jimi Hendrix had considered it viable. The Doors may or may not have been the beginning of rock as art, but they were about to become the most authentic, most successful end product of that idea.
Holzman claims it was for this reason that he deliberately avoided releasing an edited version of “Light My Fire” as the first single from the album. “I didn’t want to go with ‘Light My Fire’ and not have it happen, and I didn’t think we knew enough about how to promote singles [yet]. We learned a lot on ‘Break on Through.’ The other thing I was counting on was the crush of interest from FM radio forcing AM radio [to play it], and that takes a little time. So I bought two to three months, meanwhile, the album is selling ten thousand copies a month in Southern California, which was a lot of records back then. Then we grafted it onto the state and the album began selling across the country because of FM play. So I had all of that stuff going for us,” long before “Light My Fire” was eventually released. “Because [of] the impulse hearing on FM where the stuff sounded good and you could hear it in stereo, which you couldn’t do on AM radio, made a difference. That was the avant-garde. Once you get the avant-garde [the rest of] that stuff flows down.”
The Doors hadn’t made any money yet; the living wage their $5,000 advance from Elektra had helped provide them with was barely augmented by the low-tide fees they were picking up for live performances. But Jim had promised Pamela Courson that once the money did come in, as they both fervently dreamed it would, they would live together in their own little place in Laurel Canyon, every hippie couple’s desire in those dreamy, incense-lit days. By the mid-sixties what had been a rundown, overgrown semi-wilderness had been transformed by musicians looking for cheap places to hang out and get high, to play their music beneath the bird of paradise plants, thickets of pepper trees and pines, and reinvent themselves as the love generation. The place where Elektra Records exec Barry Friedman would famously phone all his neighbors and get them to drop the needle on the new Stones album, all at the same time, until the Canyon rang out with their groovacious sounds.
It was here, in a green one-bedroom wooden shack, that Jim and Pam now set up home—high up in the Canyon, where the rent was cheap, on the street Jim later immortalized in song as “Love Street.” Jerry Hopkins, who knew them well, recalls now how “Jim called her his ‘cosmic mate,’ and I believe he meant it, although neither of them even came close to exclusivity; they had their secrets and they respected—or ignored—them, just as most ‘committed’ couples do. Why did he stay with her? You’re asking me to guess. I suspect it was not because she was some sort of family substitute, but because she was so much like him, a mirror image with tits. I also think she may have reminded him of his mother.” A point the astute Eve Babitz also made when she wrote, “A friend of mine once said, ‘You can say anything about a woman a man marries, but I’ll tell you one thing—it’s always his mother.’ ” It was Eve’s sister, Mirandi, who got a closeup view of the relationship in those early days, when she and her then boyfriend and fellow clothes designer, Clem, stayed with the newly made couple. In Jac Holzman’s book, Follow the Music, she recalls the endless fights between the two, then the making up, then the fighting again. “I don’t think Jim was ever the greatest guy. I think he was a morose, depressed, moody, violent person.” According to Eve, though, Jim had finally met his match in Pam. “Whereas all he had previously brought to the moment was morbid romantic excess, he now had someone looking at him and saying, ‘Well, are you going to drive off this cliff, or what?’ ” Jac in his book describes them as “Hurricane Jim and Cyclone Pam,” recalling one occasion when “Pam has thrown all Jim’s books out the window. She has shredded his clothes. She has scrawled FAG on the mirror. Jim has put a knife to her throat. The two of them have dropped acid and are playing chicken on the railroad track … again and again.”
On those nights when things got too much, Jim would simply take off, checking in back at the Trop or swinging by to visit one of his growing army of girlfriends. For all her self-knowledge and insight into the increasing malaise surrounding Morrison, Eve Babitz, for one, could never resist his call. “If the phone rang at night [and] there was a long pause after I said hello, I knew it was Jim. He and I had a lot of ESP in some kind of laser-twisted, wish fulfillment kind of way. I always wished he were there, and every so often he zoomed in.”
Another California-beautiful, Hollyweird-crazy chick Jim now zoomed in on was also named Pam—Pamela Ann Miller, a.k.a. Miss Pamela, a.k.a. Pamela Des Barres (as she became better known in the mid-seventies after marrying the rock singer Michael Des Barres). Miss P, as she would also soon become known, sometimes babysat for Frank and Gail Zappa, who also had a house in the Canyon. By the end of the sixties, she would be widely recognized as one of the upper-echelon groupies on the L.A. scene—at a time when the term groupie had yet to acquire the stigma it has now. Groupies then were, as Elton John sang in “Tiny Dancer,” the song he and Bernie Taupin wrote specifically about Pamela, the “Blue jean baby / L.A. lady / Seamstress for the band”—the beautiful angel with a broken wing every music man dreamed of and wrote songs about, before the tide of cynicism that arrived with bones-into-dust seventies bands like Led Zeppelin killed such faraway notions at birth.
Just as Elton’s song suggests, Pamela Miller made handmade shirts for her boyfriends and “was too romantic for one-night stands.” If she was with you, it was “for the whole tour—at least, locally!” Remembered now by Alice Cooper as “a smiling open-faced girl who looked like Ginger Rogers” with her strawberry blonde hair, freckles, and goofy, flower-child smile, Pamela was the epitome of the California Girl the Beach Boys had earlier eulogized. Although she was still only eighteen when she met Jim Morrison, her conquests would later include Iron Butterfly’s singer Darryl De Loach, Noel Redding of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Chris Hillman of the Byrds, and the actor turned country rock singer Brandon de Wilde. She would also meet and spend time with the Rod Stewart incarnation of the Jeff Beck Group. To name a few.
As a firsthand witness to the L.A. scene of the time, they don’t come any more insightful than Miss Pamela. Speaking now from her little casita near the Boardwalk in Venice, decorated with paintings of Elvis and James Dean and a huge photographic portrait of Walt Whitman, just a bike ride away from the apartment building where Jim used to sleep on the roof, she laments how “mythologized” that world has now become to those who weren’t there, “to a degree where [it’s] almost become unreal. Like, people imagine Jim as that picture of him with the beads—that famous image from 16 magazine—and also the various images of him onstage, clutching the microphone when he was young and beautiful—as opposed to how he later became.” Pamela first saw the Doors play Bido Lito’s, another tiny club on the Strip, in September 1966. “It was a new band that I hadn’t heard of and I always wanted to see any new band that was in town. At that time I was indulging in this strange drug that was short-lived called Trimar that I got from [someone who used to work in the] hospital during the day and he must have gotten a sniff of it somehow and he started smuggling it out of the hospital and selling it on the street for ten dollars a vial. But I was very close with him, so he just gave me quart jars of it. I later found out that it was liquid PCP. It was terrible stuff. At the time, I wasn’t even smoking pot yet. What it did to you was that everything got huge and glorified and shimmering and throbbing, so the Doors stood out even more that evening,” she laughs.
She would go and see the Doors several more times over the following months. Her main impression was that they were “very edgy because of Jim; he was doing things that white boys weren’t doing in California. He was literally almost having sex with the mike stand, rolling around … Mick Jagger was doing some of those things, but L.A. boys were not. It was a much more laid-back, almost countrified scene at that point, musically, and Jim was just pulling all the stops out and cutting loose and letting go. He sort of became the music, and let it just go through him from head to toe, and whatever happened inside him, he just let it come out. I don’t think he knew what he was doing, part of the time. I just loved them. Jim was someone you wanted to touch. He would lay down on the floor and you could just go right up to the stage and caress him, touch his hair. He didn’t notice. He was in thrall. He was wrapped up in his music … his muse, his words … he didn’t notice. He was just out there. He was a poet. To him, the music part of it was a side note.”
It was a few months after the Bido Lito’s gig that Pamela met Jim for the first time. “I was staying with a friend of mine in Laurel Canyon; I spent a lot of time up there. It’s the house behind the Canyon store with the big picture window. All kinds of stuff went on in there, but I was visiting there one afternoon—I was waking up, I’d spent the night—and I heard the Doors record being played, and it hadn’t been released yet. I’d seen them play many times already, and I wondered who had it, and I was high enough to just go in and see who it was. I went down these rock stairs, a long bunch of steps, and I peeked in through these Dutch doors—the top was open—and it was Jim. He was playing his own record and he was digging through the refrigerator, singing along with ‘The End.’ I just went, ‘Ooh, my God!’ ”
She was so surprised she ran back upstairs, told her friend what—who—she had just seen downstairs. “She said, ‘Are you kidding? Go be a neighbor! Go say hello.’ I wasn’t high enough, so I sniffed some more of this crazy Trimar stuff, and I went back down there and he kicked the door open for me. He used to always growl this, ‘Get it on …’ ” She does an impression of his low, raspy voice. “He always used to say that, that was one of his phrases that he used a lot. So I went in there and got it on. I had just learned how to do a back bend, so I proceeded to go into a back bend for Jim. I was so high …” As she was midbend, she saw another pretty red-haired girl named Pam coming in. Uh-oh. “She looked down at me and said, ‘Get the fuck out of my house!’ He was just in the corner, going, ‘Get it on! Suck my mama!’ He said that a lot, too. ‘Suck my mama!’ ”
That infectious happy-go-lucky laugh again. “I scrambled up and said, ‘Oh, sorry!’ and I offered her some Trimar. She said, ‘No,’ and I went running back up to where I was. A few minutes later I heard a big commotion down there and she was yelling and screaming and there were these crashes and these crazy noises, and pretty soon he knocked on the door. He wanted to know what I was sniffing. He was interested. I invited him in, and he spent a bunch of time with us girls. There was my friend staying there and we just snorted this stuff and rolled around and laughed and made out and all this. He invited me to see him play the next day at the Hullabaloo Club.” She adds how later when she went back downstairs, she saw what Pamela had been throwing at Jim. “It was these Doors demos that were all over the steps. She was throwing them at his head when he was coming up. She was going, ‘Don’t you dare go up there!’ She was intense.”
Over the next few years, though they could never be friends, Pamela Miller formed a strong, more favorable impression of Pamela Courson. “She was a fiery, wild-spirited, free-spirited, intense girl, who never gets enough credit for being his equal. She was his equal.” She pauses, then adds, “It was a tempestuous relationship, but he never left her. It was a karmic link that was not going to be severed, except by death. That’s how I saw it.”
But not before Miss P had her own little tryst with Jim. Accepting his invitation to join him at the Hullabaloo Club, she recalls how he had led her up “this rickety ladder, up to this place where there was this old equipment in there and we laid down on my muskrat jacket and we just started making out. Now God knows how long we made out for. In those days, we didn’t have full sex or anything. I was a virgin at the time. So we were just making out and making out, and we heard ‘Light My Fire’ starting to play. That’s how the Doors already were starting to get him onstage. They didn’t know where he was half the time, so they would start playing the song and he would just show up from wherever he was. He went, ‘Whoa …’ ”
Pam had brought her quart jar of Trimar along and “we were so high on this stuff,” Jim was disoriented, nearly fell down the ladder. “It’s short-lived, though; it only lasts a few minutes unless you keep inhaling it. So he clambered down the ladder and went onstage, and I was so high, I just followed him, and I was onstage with them, just right at the edge of the stage where he was. He was already clutching the microphone and I was going, ‘Whoa …’ Then a roadie came and gently took me off. We met afterward and that’s when he drove my car all over Hollywood and threw away the Trimar.”
Though they never did become lovers, they did become friends for a while. “He was easy to talk with. He was a very sweet guy in those days. He did change, but in the very early days, he read me poems out of his poetry book and was very caring, and he didn’t want me to get all fucked up on this weird drug.” Mainly, she recalls, “the conversations I had with him were about his poetry and how he believed that the musical thing—the rock thing—was a very temporary thing for him. He basically said that it was a lark. He was almost, in a way, putting it over on people, because he was going through the motions. But believe me, it didn’t look like it.
“I think he got caught up in it. But I think it had a lot to do with the words he was saying and the feeling those evoked in him, because he did say that this was temporary. He always carried his poetry book with him, he was always writing and he said that [the Doors] was really a short-term thing because he was really a poet and everyone would know it someday and this was really just a side thing.”
Or so he hoped.

 13

Dog Without a Bone


Sal Bonafede and Asher Dann did not go quickly or quietly. For a while, at the start of 1968, it looked like they might not go at all. In legal terms, they had broken their contract with the Doors, but on paper they had done nothing except fulfill their obligations, and spectacularly so. The two Doors albums had gone gold in the United States and had become significant hits in other parts of the world. Meanwhile, “Light My Fire” was the only million-seller single by a new group in 1967. By the end of the year, by Ray Manzarek’s reckoning, their share of combined record sales and publishing royalties enabled the four members of the Doors each to walk away with around $50,000—around $350,000 in today’s money. There were other perks too. When “Light My Fire” went to No. 1 Jac Holzman told the band they could have anything they liked as a gift. Robby and Ray opted for expensive new tape decks. John asked for and got a thoroughbred horse. Jim, that emblem of possessionless free-spiritedness, got a Gulfstream Aqua Blue Ford Mustang Shelby GT 500 with all-black interior, known as the King of the Road.
What, then, did the Doors have to complain about? Apart from the fact that B&D had offered to make Jim Morrison an even bigger, richer star as a solo artist but that the singer was needlessly afraid Sal was in the Mafia and would have him “rubbed out” if he failed to comply? When it was next revealed that another Hollywood power broker had offered Jim a $250,000 “advance,” a Rolls-Royce, and a house in Beverly Hills to break his ties with the Doors and Elektra and start him off on his own solo career, the Doors’ case for mismanagement became even more undermined. Big, successful rock groups were breaking up and reconfiguring into supergroups all the time in the late sixties.
As far as Sal and Asher saw it, says Vince Treanor now, from his home in Singapore, “They had brought the Doors to public knowledge and fame, and they felt they were guiding them along the right path. But the guys were told, you will have this news event, you will have these photo events, you will have these different things. They were just told to do it. There was no ‘Would you like to do it?’ Or ‘Do you think we should?’ That was the real basis of the problem. But as far as [Sal and Asher] were concerned, they put those boys on top. There was never an argument, never disagreement or anything like that, just this undercurrent of too much control.”
On another day in court, the judge might easily have told the Doors to quit bitching and get on with their work, just be thankful they still had a contract with B&D. Fortunately for the Doors they found their case being treated sympathetically by a judge well versed in the entertainment business, who recognized that a contract was worth no more than the paper it was written on if one side was so unhappy it was unwilling to work with the other. In the end, the judge decreed the contract null and void. Sal and Asher were awarded $50,000 in compensation and a share in royalties on all future Doors recordings, plus all their commissions and fees due. The Doors were free to do what they wanted—at a price that was climbing steadily higher with every move they made.
The early months of 1968 were similarly confused, the band apparently on a winning streak while privately floundering. Two shows at the Carousel Theater in West Covina, California, were booked for January 19 and 20. Jim was amazing the first night, bounding with energy after a three-week layoff from the road; the second night he was out for the count as he struggled to beat an almighty hangover. Backstage at a Doors show was no longer a happy place, with the two sides now clearly defined: Jim alone on the one hand, the big boozer who still liked to drop acid occasionally, chain-smoke anything that he could roll and light, and never get out of bed before 3 pm; the other three opposite him, nondrinkers, meditators, musicologists, whose only drive was to perform to the utmost of their abilities, who didn’t need to “challenge” authority or fuck anything in a skirt, whose moods did not ebb and flow like the tides of the moon. They had to hand it to him that he didn’t abandon them when he could. They must have resented him for it too, though—knowing he was not a Janis Joplin, not an Eric Clapton or a Jimi Hendrix, could not have carried the show alone, could not have created new material with the meaning he invested in it, personally, without the Doors to alchemize it into musical silver and gold.
They were complicit in other ways too. Jim may have been the overindulged child, but the other three also liked having things done just the way they wanted, were easy with none of the “uptight” obligations Sal and Asher had imposed on them. Which is why when really big-name rock managers presented themselves to the Doors in early 1968 as the natural heirs to the shaky B&D throne, heavy biz cats like Bill Graham, who Vince Treanor rightly characterizes as “one of the pioneers of the theatrical rock performance,” Ray and Robby and John were just as happy to deny them access as Jim was. It didn’t matter that these people might boost their career; all four Doors were so intimidated by their presence they shrank from the idea like a dysfunctional family that refuses professional help because it means throwing open the blinds on problems they consider too dark to face.
So it was that the new Doors manager—nineteen-year-old Bill Siddons, upgraded overnight from his gig as surfer-dude-with-brain road manager to Doors office overlord—would not be a manager at all but a facilitator. According to Bruce Botnick, “There was just something about [Bill], about his smarts, about dealing with other people, being able to talk to them, with hall managers … getting things done without any drama, and being able to handle Jim. And they just went, ‘You know what? We don’t want a manager, or managers, per se, to tell us what to do and to take a large portion of our performance monies. Hire him.’ ” Jac Holzman offers a similar uncomplicated view. “They had other people hanging around, but Siddons was a good choice. He was a kid, but he was wise beyond his years. He was very smart and he was very good to work with. He was hired to keep things together. Not as a conventional manager, because the band realized they would have to make the choices themselves. He would present the choices. They would sit and discuss them. He would make his recommendation, and they’d vote on them.”
John Densmore, however, writing in his 1990 memoir, Riders on the Storm, claimed there were doubts over the wisdom of appointing someone so young and inexperienced right from the start. “Bill [Siddons] was a great guy … but Jim was destroying himself, and who was going to stop it?” According to Vince Treanor, though, “The one key factor, in twenty-two-point type, was HE WILL DO WHAT WE TELL HIM. And the best of the best of the best were vying to become the Doors’ manager, making all sorts of concessions to the usual fees and percentages and all sorts of things. To become part of that Doors organization. But they chose Bill because he was nineteen years old, because he was a kid.
“They promised to get him out of the draft, which they did. And he was beholden to them, in that sense. But his contract was, ‘When we say jump, you simply say how high.’ That was the final and most critical point. They could control Bill where they couldn’t control some of the big boys who were gunning for the job. They did not want to replace Sal and Asher with somebody that might be worse.”
In the end, it proved a recipe for disaster, says Vince. “Bill made a lot of enemies [including] the one guy who broke his back to help the Doors to success, and that was Bill Graham. Once Bill [Siddons] got to be the manager of the group he treated Bill [Graham] like he was just another puppy dog in the street. And I felt shame over a thing like that, but that’s the way he was. Bill [Siddons] did and said a lot of things that alienated a lot of people. And eventually it caught up with him.”
Bill Siddons was a bright, good-looking, level-headed boy then attending California State University in Long Beach. After his high school buddy Rich started helping with the Doors’ equipment, he dragged Bill to a Doors show in San Francisco in May 1967, just as “Light My Fire” was starting its ascent to the top of the charts. Blown away by what he saw, when helping out Rich for a couple weeks turned into the offer of a full-time gig, Bill didn’t have to think twice.
A hard man to pin down who rarely speaks about the Doors these days, Bill Siddons still lives in Los Angeles, where he is now one of the most respected rock managers in the business. Back in 1968, though, being thrown into the deep end like that, becoming manager of what was at that moment the biggest American group in the world, he says the only way he could deal with it was by simply taking things as they came.
“Whatever you threw at me, I figured out how to handle. And that was what made it possible for me to succeed, because when crazy stuff happened, it didn’t make me crazy. It just made me go, OK, I know where we’re going. I know we’ve got to get to this show or make the studio happen, or whatever it was. I had some idea of what needed to really happen, and then I started steering things toward doing that. I was raised a middle child with a five-years-older sister and a five-years-younger brother and a kind of crazy father, so I had to learn to mediate. And with the Doors there was a lot of mediating because they were very different personas.”
It wasn’t until he began working directly for the Doors in his new day-to-day capacity, Bill says, that he discovered how much people in a band like the Doors “could want to kill each other!” Bill was instantly caught in the middle. “John was holding on very tightly to the things that made life predictable and stable, and Jim was trying to break everything. So it was two very different personas, and to a large degree Ray was the business guy more than Robby and John. He was the one who knew where we were going, and so it was … most of the strife in the band was really just about how hard it was to plan your life, control anything, have shows that worked, etc., because Jim was such …” He pauses and allows himself a small, ironic chuckle. “… an extraordinary person.”
He goes on: “There wasn’t that much yelling and screaming and melodrama, because they were all adults. It’s just Jim was impossible to control, and that made it emotionally really challenging for everybody, because the unpredictability of what would happen today was very hard to deal with, especially for John. I think Robby and Ray coped a little better than John. John took it more personally. But they all did. They all had … ah … they all knew they were holding on to the tail of the tiger and, well, we roll with it. We see what happens.”
With more control over their business affairs at least, the Doors instructed Bill to find them an office and rehearsal space, which he did immediately, renovating an old antiques store at 8512 Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood. Upstairs was the office, run by Kathy Lisciandro, wife to Jim and Ray’s UCLA buddy Frank, and with Siddons installed “to take calls, book gigs, deal with Elektra, then sit down with us every Friday and talk it through,” as Ray put it. Downstairs was where “the art” took place. The Doors asked Bill to formalize their new financial arrangements, paying themselves equal salaries of a few thousand dollars a month, then splitting end-of-year profits after deducting expenses. Bill would also be on a good salary, but not commission. The new Doors office would come to serve as another of Jim’s impromptu crash pads on those nights when he was too wasted to make it back to Pamela’s or one of his other girlfriends’. Or he couldn’t remember where he was supposed to be staying, the Alta Cienega around the corner or the Tropicana up the street or the Beverly Terrace, also just up the street. Or he just couldn’t be woken from his stupor, so his friends would leave him to sleep it off on the office couch.
Not far from the Doors’ office was the Phone Booth, a topless bar. There was also a bar called the Extension, both of which Jim would go to. Soon the new Doors office became a target hangout for every deadbeat who’d ever sat on a barstool next to Jim or passed him a joint at the Whisky. Freaks began showing up every day—characters like Cigar Pain, who wanted to be Jim so badly he would shove lit cigars down his throat to make his voice more gravelly, chicks like Crazy Nancy, who would show up at all hours on the off chance of meeting Jim, even broke in a couple of times and slept there … Bill handled Nancy with special care. Others even more weirded out would randomly show up so that Bill or Kathy would simply call the cops. Other times real-life Jim girls would come by, chicks he had fucked once or twice then forgotten about. The semifamous Plaster Casters tried to get in once, but neither Jim nor the Doors were interested in having molds made of their erect penises. One day Bill had finally had enough and had iron gates fitted outside the office entrance.
The new Doors office was also conveniently just a walk away from Elektra’s own new premises, at 962 North La Cienega Boulevard, just south of Santa Monica Boulevard. Eighteen months before, just as he was readying his staff for the release of the first Doors album, Jac had paid $69,000 for “a nondescript building and some land in the heart of West Hollywood.” By 1967, as the first monies from The Doors and “Light My Fire” began rolling in, Elektra was buying contiguous lots in order to build its own studio. By the time the company had tricked it out, says Holzman in Follow the Music, it had cost $120,000 (almost $1 million in today’s money). “I didn’t care,” wrote Jac. “It was the fulfillment of a dream.”
Seated like a guard at the gates of heaven was Suzanne Helms, a married woman unimpressed by long-haired rock-and-rollers; she would make them wait for their appointments like anybody else, on a wooden bench in reception. Even Jim, whom she would berate for not sitting up straight. “He liked to hunch his shoulders,” she recalled, “and I hate that.” Mostly, Jim would do as he was told, settled in a chair in front of the little refrigerator drinking a beer and reading one of his heavyweight books, The Red and the Black by Stendhal, one visitor recalls.
But drunk Jim would turn up at Elektra sometimes too and terrorize the secretaries, or start an argument with one of the Doors, there would be pushing and shoving, raised voices. Drinks would be spilled on people’s desks. When Jim poured a malted drink all over Mrs. Helms’s typewriter, she was furious with him and complained to Jac. He told her to buy a new typewriter and charge it to Morrison’s royalties. Another observer swears Jim wore the same clothes every time he visited—for a year. Jim’s shambolic appearances at Elektra became such a regular occurrence that when staff arrived for work one morning and found Jim unconscious, collapsed in the bushes outside, they just ignored him. Sure enough, he eventually came to, promptly dusted himself off, and went on his way again.
According to Robby Krieger, there was often a serious purpose behind Jim’s always being at Elektra or the Doors office. “The music was all he lived for. A lot of times he was at the office when we weren’t. He’d even live there sometimes, because that was his whole life. We all had lives other than the Doors, but he didn’t, and he kind of resented that. He felt like he was living it twenty-four hours a day, and we weren’t. And he was right.”
By the time the Doors were ready to go into the studio again with Paul Rothchild and Bruce Botnick, in February, Jim Morrison’s life was an ever more complicated, ever more drunken mess, the balance between Jim and Jimbo increasingly tilting to the latter. “They were enjoying the fruits of their labors,” says Bruce Botnick dryly. “They were starting to get money. Jim was actually enjoying his celebrity, I think, to the point of getting polluted all the time. You know, drinking lots of booze and taking … you know, if somebody came up to him and said, ‘Hey, Jim, take this,’ he’d open his mouth and—bam!—not knowing what it was. So you never knew who was going to walk into the studio, whether it was Jim or Jimbo—the one who went crazy.”
As far as Jim was concerned, though, he had everything under control. He had “dodged a bullet” by narrowly avoiding marrying Pam, who, inspired by Ray and Dorothy’s nuptials, such as they were, had used a New Year’s Eve Doors show in Denver to obtain a Colorado marriage license, which she filled out for both Jim and her—but which Jim pointedly failed to have legally endorsed or properly registered. Pam still returned to L.A. convinced she was Mrs. Morrison, even if she had neither the ring nor the marriage certificate to prove it. To keep her cool, though, Jim agreed to Pam’s great new idea about “lending” her the money to open her own La Cienega fashion boutique, which she named Themis—after the ancient Greek goddess known as the personification of “divine law.” Certainly there would be nothing ordinary about Pam’s new shop. She would stock it, she told Jim, with her own taste in far-out, trippy gear—snakeskin leathers, ostrich feathers, Afghan coats, Indian trinkets, fiery beads, moon crystals, blood incense, floaty dresses. And she would travel the world to unearth such luxuries. To Morocco, Paris, London, India … buying handmade clothing, rugs, jewelry. And Jim would pay for it—or else. Jim duly instructed his new office to allow Pam access to his bank account. He had his divine orders. It was later estimated by his office that Pam eventually sank around $250,000 (nearly $2 million today) of Jim’s money into the shop over the next few years. But while it became a cool Hollywood hangout—Miles Davis went there, as did several other high-profile musicians, including the wives of the other Doors, whom Pam would take great delight in overcharging—the shop never once turned a profit.
Meanwhile, Jim was spending so much time fucking other people, he was just glad Pam had something to take her mind off things. There were the usual groupies, of course, the one-offs whose names he never even asked for. And the more upscale numbers like Eve Babitz, whom he would still call on occasionally, even though he knew he’d have to be on his best behavior. “He knew in his worst blackouts to put my diaphragm in and take my contact lenses out,” as Eve amusingly put it. And then there were girls like Judy Huddleston, neither full-blown groupie nor old and smart enough for him to feel he had to play fair with.
Judy was a pretty eighteen-year-old girl from Newport Beach, Orange County, who would drive with her girlfriend Linda up Sunset Boulevard every weekend to seek out bands. Her parents had recently divorced, and she was in her final year of high school, studying art, living with her mother alone, just the two of them. Soon she would enroll at the Chouinard Art Institute in L.A. (now known as the California Institute of the Arts), where the breakthrough artist Ed Ruscha had studied.
Judy and Linda had managed to say hello long enough at the Whisky one night to Bill Siddons and his pal Rich, along with Robby Krieger’s twin brother, Ronnie, for Judy to feel confident enough to try talking her way into getting backstage at a Doors show at the Shrine in L.A. the previous Christmas. Unable to get near Jim because of all the other girls surrounding him, Judy had hung on a little longer in the parking lot afterward on the off chance that Jim might wander by. Stoned on grass, she thought she was imagining it at first when Jim actually appeared—surrounded by the same gaggle of eager chicks, all of whom crowded into his blue Mustang. But there was an exchange, and Jim told Judy to follow in her car. One thing led to another and within a couple hours Judy was alone with Jim in his squat little motel room at the Alta Cienega. Jim had been so sweet, so vulnerable almost, taking it slowly, playfully, a tender lover. When the next morning Judy asked him about the other Doors, he told her, “The other guys in the band are like brothers, you know, brothers … I mean, I like them, we work well together, but we’re not really alike.” It was a Sunday morning, Christmas Eve, and Judy was sure she would see Jim again soon.
The next time they met, again at his motel room, in January, after Judy had taken a chance and just shown up at the Alta Cienega one afternoon, Jim had been surprised but pleased. He had to run an errand, told her to wait for him in his room. Then when he returned he kissed her passionately, pulled off her clothes and his, in a tremendous hurry suddenly, and threw her down on the bed. And then raped her. Anally.
She recalls the scene in her astonishing memoir, Love Him Madly. They were on the bed, naked, about to make love, but this time there was something different about Jim, something menacing. “Have you ever been fucked in the ass?” he demanded. “I want to fuck you in the ass.”
Alarmed, she pretended to be aloof, told him she had but that she hadn’t liked it. “I don’t really want to. Don’t, OK?” Jim ignored her. She wrote, “ ‘I want to,’ he hissed, hollowing me to the marrow. He had snapped. Jim’s eyes looked black, blazing with hatred or defiance. I was afraid he was going to hit me, slap me, shake me. He pinned down my arms, flat against the bed. I was watching a movie I was acting in, but he was directing. He seemed so crazy that I realized he could kill me. And something died, dropped out of me. The surroundings blurred, my boundaries were lost, and nothing was left but his brutal need driving out of control, until I realized he was raping me.”
Judy then describes “lashing out for survival” and yelling for Jim to stop, which he reluctantly did. She lay there stunned while Jim went to take a shower, whistling as he went. When Pam turned up a little later Jim taunted her about having another girl in the room and refused to let her in. Pam called Jim by her pet name for him, Sapphire, which only made Judy squirm more. Pam pleaded to be let in. Jim just continued taunting her. Eventually he told Judy to lock herself in the bathroom while he dealt with Pam. Judy heard angry voices, then the door slamming as they went off somewhere together. When Judy crept out she noticed her own blood, “bright on the clean bedspread, and hoped it would make a nice conversation piece when they returned.” She never told anyone what had happened. “I was too ashamed.”
It’s a disturbing memory Judy says she still remembers every detail of, all these years later. Now a lecturer at California State University in Monterey Bay, she spent years in therapy getting over the battle scars, physical, mental, emotional, that the sixties left on her—much like many other young women of her generation.
She begins by pointing out how powerfully attractive the twenty-four-year-old Jim Morrison was, how almost impossible to resist. “Just his physical presence. I mean he didn’t pretend he wasn’t a rock star. But if he wasn’t you’d still go, ‘Oh,’ when you saw him. Particularly a woman would go, ‘Wow, who is that?’ He could sometimes cover it up. He could try to look anonymous, but it was a little hard. He definitely had something that made him … you just gravitated toward him.”
Judy feels strongly that his rape of her was about more than just being an oversexed, overindulged rock star. She thinks Jim was “a borderline personality, or that thing that everybody is now—bipolar! I think he was probably a borderline, and once he did too much alcohol he was … it really, really fucked him up. I’ve heard stories. … He got to be mean to me but I heard he would get really, really mean [with others]. … Like that rape in the beginning, it was almost like he was possessed. It wasn’t at all like a normal mood swing. It was like, ‘What the hell was that?’ It wasn’t a normal change of consciousness. It was like really extreme. I don’t know what the mental diagnosis was, but it wasn’t that he was just a little neurotic. He had a real thing there, and I think the alcohol or whatever drugs, though he was more of an alcoholic, that that could push him into probably what I would call psychotic episodes. Not that he wasn’t also an asshole. But there were underlying things, yeah … that’s the thing that you can’t forget. It’s like a weird domination.”
Judy says the fact that he raped her anally was also significant. “I believe there was a problem with Pam on that, that she resented. But I’m not the authority on that. But I think that was like the possessive ownership God only knows [thing]. … There was definitely rage in it, let’s put it that way.
“And the other thing, I don’t know if it comes through, but it was very desperate. So even though it was like a command to do that, it was like, ‘If you don’t, I’ll die!’ It was like really so desperately needy that that was almost scary. So that urgency—I mean, beyond urgency!—where is that coming from? I don’t know if there’s a latent homosexual thing to it. To me it seemed like a real act of aggression. ‘I own you. This is all for me. It’s not for you. I win. You don’t.’ ”
At one point in her book, when Judy assumes Jim is bisexual, he reacts angrily. “He rolls his eyes like, ‘How could you possibly think such a thing?’ It’s like, well, because it’s sort of common and that’s happening. I think I had another boyfriend who said, ‘Oh, for sure, [Jim’s] been with other guys.’ You just kind of go, ‘Oh, never mind.’ But Jim was very defensive …”
The question of whether Jim Morrison was gay has never gone away—whether he was closeted at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in the United States—hence also his aggression toward women, or perhaps he was just bisexual, still then a verboten subject among even the most liberal-minded of people, unless of course they were bi or gay too. This may have been another reason he was so drawn to the arts. He could be more his true self. By 1968 he was certainly becoming a gay icon, with his tight black leather pants, ruffled white master-of-the-hall shirt, pouty mouth, and kissy waterfall curls. Some nights Ray would see Jim posing fitfully not just for the screaming girls in the audience, but focusing his whole persona on some handsome young stud in the front row too. Other times he would stand in front of Robby as he was soloing and pretend to jerk him off, forming his left hand into a broken circle. “Jim was the beautiful boy,” as Ray put it to me disingenuously. “He offered all possibilities to all people with eyes open enough to see them.”
As Pamela Des Barres points out, “In those days, everyone was experimenting. Supposedly Mick Jagger slept with [men]. It doesn’t mean he was bisexual or gay in any way; people were experimenting in the sixties with drugs, with sex, with spiritual things, with religion … everything. We were expanding ourselves. I’m not in the least bisexual, and I had a couple of girl experiences, and if Jim did, he was either really, really drunk, or experimenting.” Sexual experimentation was more than just accepted, she says. “It was expected in our culture.” She laughs. “Everybody was doing it. In our sphere, in our reality, in the trippy-hippie, peace-and-love, flower child love-in days, yes, everybody was experimenting with it, and doing it didn’t at all mean that you were bisexual. I think we all are to a degree, but that’s another whole story …”
Pamela Courson certainly thought she knew what Jim was. “Why do you think she was in a bad mood all the time?” says Eve Babitz. Pam hated anal sex, yet that was all Jim seemed to want to do. After another big bust-up, she went into his wardrobe and took one of his new tailor-made waistcoats and wrote “FAGGOT” in big letters across the front. Eve Babitz later wrote of Pam rampaging through Rodeo Drive’s most expensive appointment-only stores. “Yves Saint Laurent, Rive Gauche, piling her arms higher and higher with more stuff, muttering under her breath, ‘He owes it to me, he owes it to me, he owes it to me.’ ”
If Jim relied on women, from his disapproving, shaming mother to his disapproving, shaming girlfriend, Pamela, and every groupie-stop between, that didn’t stop him from wanting to mess with them whenever he could, to draw outside the lines and throw darts at them. Lately Jim had even begun to use “Back Door Man” as a way of defiantly projecting those fantasies in public. Taking the usual emphasis away from the line “The men don’t know, but the little girls understand” and obliterating it with his own insinuating improvisation, “Come on, baby, be my man. Be my man! You understand! Yeeaaahhhh!”
“Music is so erotic,” Jim told one interviewer. “One of its functions is a purgation of emotion, which we see every night when we play. To call our music ‘orgasmic’ means we can move people to a kind of emotional orgasm through music and words. A concert only clicks when the musicians and audience reach a kind of united experience. For me it’s stirring, satisfying …”
Offstage, however, Jim’s men friends now outnumbered his women companions. Lately he had become fixated on Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra, the singing alpha males of their respective generations. Like every young American boy growing up in the 1950s, the legend of Elvis loomed large in Jim’s mind. The controversy, the outrage, the attempts at censorship—they were Jim’s first glimpse of just how exciting, righteous even, it could be bending the rules so far back upon themselves that the world of rights and wrongs, of old folks telling young folks what to do, began to break. Sinatra was a more recently acquired taste. Jim’s dad had liked Sinatra. That meant he was off Jim’s radar completely—until he got to be a singer himself, and began to understand just how incredibly powerful yet sweet Sinatra’s voice was. Two of Frank’s big hits in 1966, “Strangers in the Night” and “That’s Life,” showed Jim just how indelibly Sinatra could imprint his vocal on a song, going from fierce yet sexy growl one moment to coal-fire warmth and reassurance the next. Jim began to unconsciously mimic Frank’s low-slung crooning style, most obviously on tracks like “People Are Strange” and “Light My Fire.” It is said that every time Sinatra heard “Light My Fire” on the radio, he was so convinced Jim was deliberately ripping off his style, he snapped, “We ought to let that guy have an accident.” (What Frank thought of his daughter Nancy’s later cover of the song is not known but can be easily guessed.)
Now, though, Jim was taking his emulation of the two men he still saw as “the true greats” a step further by surrounding himself with his very own entourage.
Frank had bodyguards, yes-men, and regular payroll friends like Pat Henry, the comedian who used to open Frank’s Las Vegas shows, George Schlatter, who would secretly fill a vodka bottle with water in order to keep up with Frank, Leo Durocher, Frank’s broad-shouldered PR man and minder, Brad Dexter, a TV actor who had become part of the inner circle after saving Sinatra from drowning on a Hawaiian vacation, and several others. For all of them Sinatra was the Boss, and they lived under the protective spell of Il Padrone at the Las Vegas home Frank named the Compound. Similarly Presley surrounded himself with good old boys like his high school friend Red West, a Texan musician, Sonny West, who’d written hits for Buddy Holly, Billy Smith, who stuck with Elvis from start to finish, and several others, all sequestered at Elvis’s version of the Compound—Graceland, the eyesore mansion with the white-columned portico that Elvis turned into his own Memphis palace.
Jim now aspired to do the same with his own good buddies, forming a coterie of like-minded “free spirits” silently sworn to protect and serve him, to laugh at his jokes and egg him on in his most reckless and stupid moments. In Jim’s case there would never be a Compound or Graceland for them to congregate in, only a series of cheap motel rooms and titty bars, apartment floors and Doors-sponsored travel expenses. Self-consciously like Paul Ferrara, another UCLA moth drawn to the Doors’ flame, initially as their official photographer ($275 a week, plus 15 percent royalty on all the posters and tour books that would feature his pics, plus any side money he could make selling his Doors shots to magazines), but in reality more as one of Jim’s regular drinking buddies. Trailing after Paul came Babe Hill, yet another UCLA underachiever now shacked up in a small shed at the back of Paul’s beach pad.
When Paul expanded his role into Doors film archivist, Babe became Paul’s assistant, operating the Nagra tape recorder for sound. Mainly, though, Babe was bagman, car trunk loader, and hangout artist. Jim valued his company most for the fact that Babe could drink even him under the table. No trouble. Prior to this Babe had been married to Diane, with whom he’d fathered two little girls. Babe left them, according to Paul in his book, because “he wanted to learn about LSD. He was ready to turn on.”
Frank Lisciandro, whose wife, Kathy, worked front of office for the Doors, had known both Jim and Ray long before the Doors’ success and had his own career as a photographer and filmmaker to think about. He was a far less corrosive influence but still could not prevent himself from becoming an enabler to Jim’s endless moods and drunken misadventures.
“I was not one of Jim Morrison’s ‘drinking buddies,’ ” Lisciandro insisted in a 2002 interview, drawing a distinction it was hard for anyone else to divine. “Babe Hill and I went to bars and clubs with Jim because we were his friends, and that’s what friends do, they hang together. We didn’t lead him to bars; we didn’t encourage him to drink. He went to bars and clubs because he was young and he enjoyed it. He drank because he was an alcoholic. There were many nights that either Babe or I, or both of us, carried Jim to his car and drove him wherever he was staying, and put him to bed. It’s what friends do for each other; they look out for each other. I won’t claim that we protected him or that we kept him out of trouble. Jim did what he wanted to do. But when there was trouble, Babe and I did what we could to get Jim out of its way. And that is the absolute truth.”
And there was Tom Baker, the one friend of Jim’s that Danny Fields now says he feels Jim might have consummated a homosexual relationship with. “There were these rumors about Morrison and Tom Baker.” He says that if there were “any nominees for what men” Jim perhaps had sex with, he thinks Tom Baker “would be the one.” Certainly Baker was another who liked to think he could match Jim drink for drink, line for line, toke for toke. And like Jim he would die too young of a heroin overdose, in 1982, his stiffened body eventually found by cops in a shitty flophouse on New York’s Lower East Side.
Jim and Tom and Babe were of Scotch Irish descent. Paul and Frank were both Italian American. That was a lot of hot blood boiling over on the Strip the nights they would be out there raising hell, which was most nights in 1968. Ferrara recalls a typical occasion in his fascinating memoir of the period, Flash of Eden. At the opening night of a Blood, Sweat & Tears show at the Troubadour, they were sitting in the balcony: Jim and Pam, and Paul and his new girlfriend, Georgia, and Babe and Tom. Already plastered, Jim started causing such a ruckus, yelling “Yeah! Yeah!” at the top of his voice, screaming almost, that the club called in security to have him removed. When they lifted him out of his seat by his hair, Ferrara writes, “We were all embarrassed for him but tried to act like we didn’t know him so we weren’t ejected also.” So much for looking out for Jim.
As Bruce Botnick puts it, “[Jim] wasn’t drinking his own Kool-Aid, let’s put it that way. But I mean, you’re spending time with the Andy Warhol crowd in New York. He’s getting introduced to all kinds of exotic, intellectual things. It’s gotta change your thinking. Especially if you’re chemically enhanced or you’re drinking a lot. It’s just a wonderful, fun world, you know? But then after a while it gets to be too much. And later on, that became too much.”
Like the night Tom Baker took them to a party in the San Fernando Valley, where Jim played pool with Janis Joplin, the latter another of Baker’s occasional “squeezes.” Next thing they are found fighting in the front seat of a Mercedes, Jim grabbing her by the hair and not letting go. The Animals’ singer, Eric Burdon, another party-hearty figure then on the Hollywood rock scene, recalls seeing Jim getting up onstage at the Whisky with some small-time young band and taking over, reciting poetry, before descending into a vile drunken rant: “You’ve all had your revolution, and it’s all over. And there’ll never be another revolution, cos you’re all niggers.” He looked out at the shocked crowd and repeated the line. “You’re all niggers!” No one applauded. A deeply uncomfortable silence fell over the club. Until an old black cop, moonlighting that night as club security, came out and told him, “I’ll give you niggers, you son of a bitch. Get off the fucking stage!” The cops were called, and they dragged him outside, but he escaped and ran off, bouncing off the hoods of cars. Robby later bemoaned the fact that Jim was always getting into trouble with cops. “I’m amazed he never got shot by a cop, because he used to taunt them so.”
Or the time Jim, drunk out of his mind again, insisted on putting Babe and Paul and a chick named Violet, “one of our cocaine queens,” into his Mustang and racing the “blue lady” so fast down Sunset that Babe cried out, “We’re going to die!” The car skidded up onto someone’s lawn and collided with a tree, at which point a drunk Jim crawled from the wreckage to find he’d crashed into the backyard of the Beverly Hills Police Department. “So we sent Violet in and she called a cab and we left,” Babe later told Frank Lisciandro. “The cops never even knew we were involved.”
But Jim would pull others into his orbit too. Visited on tour in Las Vegas for a magazine article by New York Times journalist Bob Grover, Jim had instigated a brawl in the parking lot with the venue’s security guards after cupping his hand around a cigarette pretending to smoke it like a joint, and was knocked down by a blow to the head. When the cops arrived they arrested Jim on the spot for vagrancy, public drunkenness, and failure to possess sufficient identification. They also arrested his “accomplice,” Grover. In his subsequent article, titled A HELL OF A WAY TO PEDDLE POEMS, Grover wrote of Jim’s uncanny ability to attract trouble wherever he went now. “His charisma was such that your ordinary upholder of the established order could be infuriated merely by the sight of Morrison strolling down the street … that invisible something about him that silently suggested revolution, disorder, chaos.”
Whatever it was, it was about to cause Jim and everyone around him, most especially the Doors, a whole lot of trouble. “Jim attracted the lowest of the low, like flies on garbage,” says Vince Treanor. “Jim asked for everything he got. He surrounded himself with people who were nothing more than sycophants. As long as he had money in his pocket, was paying the bar tab or the restaurant tab or the travel fees or whatever the hell was going on, they were there. But the minute Jim ran out of money in his pocket, that was the end of it, they all went home. ‘Gee whiz, the party’s over, Jim’s broke for the night.’
“And I hated that, and so did the other guys [in the Doors]. They realized it was people from the outside who were doing this, who were creating this myth, that were creating this god. Putting Jim up on the ivory tower, which was cracking while they did it.”
Sometimes they would even try to muscle in on Jim’s songs. In Flash of Eden, Paul Ferrara recalls one night at the beach cabin he shared with Georgia and Babe, when Jim spent the night with them tripping, seeing the dawn break, making music and singing, just crazy shit off the tops of their heads, acid babble mostly, but how Jim suddenly got inspired, reached out for the purple light, and began running around on the sand, coming up with bits that later found themselves in the Doors song “Waiting for the Sun.” Jim was so high on the moment, the sun, no longer keeping them waiting, rising like a bubbling stew in the sheet metal sky, that he thanked Paul for his inspiration for the melody, which Jim could hear clear as bells under the moment where he began to shriek about “First flash of Eden!”
When, sometime later, the band came to record the track, which they would not yet use, simply borrowing its title for their next album, and Jim tried to clue them in on Paul’s cowriting credit, Robby nearly bit his head off. Robby had seen Jim try to pull this shit too many times. Jim who couldn’t play a lick telling the band where the music came from, the melody, how he’d already had the whole thing worked out in his charred mind weeks ago, man, you should’ve been there, baby …
Jim tried to insist, but Robby put his foot down, insisted that he had replaced Paul’s melody with one of his own. Jim, who could never remember exactly what had gone on with the music, not really understanding anything about it, finally acquiesced, leaving Paul to bitch about it for years after.

18

The Witching Hour


The beginning of 1970, the start of a whole new decade, was supposed to have been a time of renewal for the Doors, for Americans, for the entire free world. Instead it just felt like the sixties gone bad. The United States was still waging war in Southeast Asia. Britain was still crumbling while Europe remained aloof. In rock, the dream as personified by Woodstock in August 1969—an event from which the Doors were pointedly absent, because, according to Bill Siddons now, “They exclusively headlined and did not want to be one of many,” but which Robby Krieger once explained away as being because they thought it would be a “second-class repeat of Monterey Pop Festival,” a decision they came to regret—had turned into the nightmare of the Rolling Stones’ free outdoor show at Altamont Racetrack in December, where an eighteen-year-old, Meredith Hunter, was hideously stabbed and clubbed to death by Hells Angels.
In the same period, the Manson murders and subsequent arrests had turned L.A. from fun-loving and free into a paranoiac’s paradise. People—affluent music and movie people especially—now carried guns in their cars. With cocaine and heroin replacing weed and acid as the drugs du jour, the new “heavy manners” under which the country in general and L.A. in particular operated made Jim Morrison’s antics in Miami and elsewhere seem suddenly, weirdly, in tune with the times. Blood on the streets of fantastic L.A., baby …
Nevertheless, the signs, at least for the Doors, were encouraging. When Henry Diltz shot the photographs that would be used on the cover of the new Doors album, he at least had a for once clean-shaven Jim to shoot and try to make look pretty. By now the working title of Hard Rock Café had been passed over in favor of the much more obviously commercial Morrison Hotel. Side one would still be billed on the sleeve as Hard Rock Café—and side two as Morrison Hotel. The band had found a real-life Morrison Hotel, in the skid row section of downtown L.A. (1246 Hope Street, to be precise), to go with the real-life Hard Rock Café at 300 East 5th Street, and Diltz photographed them at both locations, going “guerrilla” to get the shots when the owner of the actual Morrison Hotel refused permission for them to shoot inside his hotel, getting the band to hurriedly pose when the manager’s back was turned.
In fact the real reason why Jim had taken to shaving again—albeit temporarily—was because his lawyer, Max Fink, had talked him into it, so that he would look the part of the successful, clean-cut young musician when the trial for “interfering” with the flight to Phoenix came up in February. As it transpired, this nearly put the nail in the coffin of the case when a clean-shaven Jim turned up in court with Tom Baker—who had recently grown a full-length beard—and the flight attendant got the two of them mixed up, with the result that Jim was the one found guilty of all charges, rather than Baker, who had been the real perpetrator. It took several weeks for Fink to persuade the court of the mistaken identity, during which time Jim and Tom fell out after Baker refused to stand up and admit the truth to the court. It all came to a predictably drunken head during a party at Elektra celebrating the opening of a new office in West Hollywood, when Tom accused Jim of being a hypocrite for “financing the very authority you claim interest in overthrowing.” Jim’s response was to shove Baker over a desk and proceed to start smashing up the new office. Eventually bundled into the back of a limo, Steve Harris yelled at the driver, “Get him the hell away from here!” Jim and Tom rarely spoke again.
With the Miami trial now put back until August, the Doors were relatively free to roam the country again. By the time Morrison Hotel was released to their best reviews since their first album three years before, the Doors had announced their arrival back onto the American concert stage with four shows over two sold-out nights at the Felt Forum in New York. A four-thousand-capacity adjunct to Madison Square Garden, chosen because of its resemblance to the more “intimate” feel of the Aquarius Theater in L.A., where they had turned in such great shows the previous summer—rather than the colossal chasm of the Garden itself, deemed too reminiscent of the faceless Miami show for comfort—these shows would again be taped by Rothchild, still searching for the perfect Doors performances for their projected live album.
It was billed as the Roadhouse Blues Tour—a shrewd move designed to signal the new, bolder, hard-assed direction the Doors were now moving in, as far away as possible from the flatulent overproduced mélange of The Soft Parade and much more in tune with the born-to-be-wild mood of American rock in the wake of the game-changing success of the movie Easy Rider, the surprise success story of the year, and the gimlet-eyed take-no-prisoners-style seventies rock, as best exemplified by Led Zeppelin and other willfully wrongheaded road warriors. The Felt Forum shows were, like the Aquarius shows six months before, a seeming triumphal return to form, at least while the party mood lasted. Which, for Jim, was never quite long enough anymore.
Jim now traveled with his own entourage separately from the rest of the band, and when his mood altered from set to set, no one was sure anymore what the cause was, though Ray and John and Robby could always hazard a pretty accurate guess, depending on just how fucked up their singer was. On coke he could still be a defiant presence, ready to play for longer than contracted to, making with the jokes and the moves, giving it his all, or what was left of it. On booze and downers he would be verging on the incoherent, “just holding on to the mike some nights,” as Ray later recalled.
Reviews were varied. “Mr. Morrison has had trouble before when the police of other cities found his performances variously lewd, lascivious, indecent, and profane,” began the piece in the New York Times. “But by the standards of the Off-Broadway stage, Mr. Morrison’s performance is fairly tame. Saturday he kept his clothes on and made no gestures that could offend.” But the Village Voice, early adopters of the Morrison mystique, went for the kill, describing an offstage sighting of Jim a few nights later at a John Sebastian gig at the Bitter End club as “a shadow of himself, with his face grown chubby, his body showing flab, his once shoulder-length hair receding into his forehead.”
It was also in New York that Jim renewed his relationship with Patricia Kennealy, the pretty red-haired occultist he had become fascinated by the previous year. Patricia had made sure to stay in touch, but as with all Jim’s women, no matter how significant, he was not a consistent presence in her life. But when he was with her, she felt like he was all hers. Pam had joined Jim in New York, which meant getting together with Patricia was difficult, but, of course, Jim found a way, grabbing her at the after-show party in the Penthouse Suite at the Hilton, whispering into her hair, as she later put it, “I want to fuck you.” Patricia looked at him. “Well, call.”
He did, the very next afternoon, begging to come over to her apartment. When he arrived, recalls Patricia, he ripped her clothes off and dragged her to the bedroom, where they spent the rest of the day making love and talking. The next time Patricia saw Jim was later that night, at a party at Jac Holzman’s apartment, where Pam was also in attendance and where, to Jim’s mounting horror, she and Patricia spent most of the time talking. Jim’s witchy affair was about to take a sharp turn, something he seemed to welcome, almost as if it were a dare. Suddenly, without even the perceptive Patricia expecting it, two nights later, after Pam had left for L.A., Jim turned up at Patricia’s door very excited. His boots covered in snow, he took her into the living room and gave her a little box. When she opened it she was stunned to find a small, exquisitely beautiful antique ring. Overcome, Patricia found the finger it fit the best and put it on. Then, as she recalls, the two lovers sat on pillows and sang to each other, at Jim’s bidding. Shyly at first, then with mounting gusto, Patricia sang for Jim a sixteenth-century love song: “Westron wynde, when wilt thou blow / The small raine down can raine / Cryst, if my love were in my armes / And I in my bedde again …”
Jim, enthralled, enchanted, relieved to be out of the rock ’n’ roll maelstrom and into something far, far away, spent the rest of the night there. And the next night and the next …
There were six more Roadhouse Blues shows in February, all around the release of Morrison Hotel. Much better received than its two predecessors—Creem’s editor, Dave Marsh, described it as “the most horrifying rock and roll I have ever heard. When they’re good, they’re simply unbeatable,” while Circus announced it as “possibly the best album yet from the Doors … good hard, evil rock”—it had gone gold within three weeks, reaching No. 4 in the United States, their best chart position for two years. This was despite the lack of a recognizable hit single from the album. “You Make Me Real” was issued to US radio stations, but in an era when singles were becoming increasingly frowned on by “serious” rock fans, the stations hardly played it, favoring instead deep cuts from the album like “Peace Frog” and “Roadhouse Blues,” which only made the band prouder. They were hip again and resisted suggestions that “Waiting for the Sun” was a hit waiting to happen.
There were thirteen more Doors shows around the United States throughout the spring and early summer, with Paul Rothchild turning up to record several of them. Quality varied so much, not just between shows but between numbers in the set, that the band could go from world-conquering giants for half a set in Boston to teetering on the brink of self-destruction again in Baltimore, where Jim was so drunk he could barely bring himself to move his lips. Even when they were good there were problems. At Cobo Arena in Detroit, on May 8, they played brilliantly for more than four hours—the encore of “The End” alone lasted almost an hour, with Jim improvising madly—yet found themselves banned from ever playing there again because they had overrun the curfew time set by the Teamsters union. A promoter canceled a show in Salt Lake City less than twenty-four hours before showtime after he attended the previous show, in Boston, where the promoters had pulled the plug when the band overran and Jim could be heard loudly describing them as “cocksuckers.”
Even the publication by the notable New York publishing house Simon & Schuster of Jim’s first book of poetry—an amalgamation of his two self-published volumes from the previous year, with the conjoined title, The Lords and the New Creatures—was overshadowed, at least for the singer, by the fact that no one—no one—outside Rolling Stone even mentioned it in passing. Jim bemoaned his lot to Michael McClure, saying he knew this would happen, that no one in the poetry community would take it seriously because it was by him, a rock singer. McClure could only concur. “He was right,” he said, shrugging.
Maybe Jim should have stuck to his vanity publications. His original self-published volume, The Lords: Notes on Vision, comprising mostly his UCLA journal jottings—“all games contain the idea of death,” ran one typically epigrammatic line—came in eighty-two cream-colored parchment paper pages, enclosed in an azure blue box held together by red string, with the title embossed in gold leaf. His second privately published edition, The New Creatures, came in a more orthodox forty-two pages of pale yellow, glossy paper, bound between hard brown covers, the title again in gold leaf. Much to Jim’s dismay, the amalgamated edition produced by Simon & Schuster used one of the “Young Lion” shots—whereas the originals bore more recent fully bearded portraits. The originals also gave the author’s name as James Douglas Morrison and referred to him as a poet and filmmaker, while the new single-volume edition listed him more recognizably as Jim Morrison, made clear reference to the fact that he was the singer in the Doors, and called his fans “kids.” Only the dedication remained true: “To Pamela Susan.”
The poems themselves are in that late-sixties, underground L.A. style that echoed the Beats yet contained all the snapshot buzzwords of the counterculture—the kind of thing that, on the one hand, his fellow Hollywood lowlife Charles Bukowski really did lift to new heights of charismatic maleficence, with his stark, unpunctuated poems and broken-bottle prose, and which, on the other, Beat survivors like Michael McClure had a tendency to overplay into nothingness, just more weed-blown head music. Jim’s poems stumble between the two, sometimes from one line to the next. Yet there is something there, just out of reach—in one so young, for a poet—enticing enough to warrant further investigation. Had he lived and written more …
The other area Jim was still intent on breaking into was film. HWY had given him some cachet, even if it was clear to serious moviemakers that this was more UCLA student polemic than accomplished film art. He was also still hoping it would entice mainstream Hollywood into casting him in starring roles, in the kind of vehicles that had just made Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper such huge stars in Easy Rider. It looked like his wishes had all come true when Jim Aubry, former head of programming at CBS TV, now president of MGM, decided, after just one meeting, that “Jim Morrison’s going to be the biggest motion picture star of the next ten years. He’s going to be the James Dean of the seventies.”
A development deal had been done and Jim had worked off and on with McClure throughout March and early April on a shooting script for his still-unpublished novel The Adept. The film would star Jim in the title role and would be coproduced between his own new company, HiWay Productions, and St. Regis Films, run by Aubry’s trusted lieutenant, Bill Belasco. McClure told Jerry Hopkins, “We turned out a script that was longer than the novel. It looked like somebody shot the manuscript of Moby-Dick out of a cannon.”
Meanwhile, Jim met with film directors to discuss possible mainstream acting roles, such as Sam Fuller, a heavy-drinking maker of low-budget genre pictures whose own career had begun to falter—he’d made just one movie in the past five years, the execrable Shark! starring Burt Reynolds—but after he and Jim got on just a little too well, MGM wisely decided against green-lighting any further collaboration. Next up was Ted Flicker, who’d enjoyed a run of innovative for the times TV hits—including The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Andy Griffith Show, and I Dream of Jeannie— and had made his debut as a movie writer with the 1966 Elvis Presley vehicle, Spinout, and as a director in 1967 with the satirical cult hit The President’s Analyst. But by the end of April, the Doors were back on the road, going out for two weeks at a time, returning to L.A. just long enough for Jim to come down again, then heading off once more. This went on until June, by which time the heat had gone from the project and everyone involved was doing something else. No one came out of it happy. Aubry, who thought he was getting the new James Dean, was now talking to a pudgy guy with a huge unkempt beard and permanent midnight eyes; McClure saw his and Jim’s Moby-Dick-sized masterpiece cut down to ninety thin pages and retitled Saint Nicholas, after the lead character; and Jim … well, Jim was into something else.
And so were the rest of the Doors.
“The boys did not hate Jim,” insists Vince Treanor. “The boys did not dislike Jim. The boys wanted Jim to be part of the group, but they couldn’t take the trouble that Jim was causing. They couldn’t take the loss of [so many] performances as a result of his behavior. They couldn’t take the loss of all the record sales. They couldn’t deal with the loss of radio time. The censure that went down, the newspaper articles, the pastors and the righteous ministers with their boyfriends in the closet that got up and were saying how terrible the Doors was and how perverted Morrison was. The whole thing. They didn’t want to deal with that kind of bad, negative, horrible publicity.
“As Jim got more out of control … the roomful of gunpowder waiting for somebody to light a match, Ray himself became more alienated and isolated from him. Now Ray never disowned him, but he never did what we all should have done, which was to say, ‘Look, asshole, smarten up, you’re wrecking everything!’ But in the end, Ray never stood up to Jim and said, ‘OK, man, toe the line, or else! Because let me tell you, fella, we don’t need you. Remember Amsterdam?’ That’s all he had to say.” Vince says that Jim once told him, “ ‘People wanna see me drunk onstage.’ I said, ‘Nobody wants to see you do that. They want to see a Doors performance. They do not want to see you lumbering around the stage drunk, forgetting your words and putting on a show where you stand there babbling nonsense. Put on a Doors show, sing Doors music, stop the nonsense because it’s only gonna hurt!’ ”
Others also tried to help, but it seemed futile. When Bob Greene, the band’s accountant, tried to talk Jim into buying a property—just as the others had already done two years before—in order to offset the huge tax bill hovering over his head and also, though it was never spelled out, to offer him some place of his own away from the seedy environs of the Alta Cienega motel or Pam’s angry bed, he eventually agreed, and a substantial property was purchased on Kings Road, a lush locale just a short drive into the hills above the Sunset Strip. But Jim rarely stayed there. Speaking to the online magazine Doors Collectors, Jim’s bodyguard, Tony Funches, recalled, “The one time I was there with him to pick up some books he wanted before we went on a concert road trip, the place was virtually empty except for the usual ‘bachelor’ fruit crates, and a lamp here and there. Put simply and bluntly, Jim liked living the life of an avant-garde writer-poet, and the simplicity of the Alta Cienega provided that kind of Beat Generation atmosphere. The trappings of ‘a home’ such as Kings Road were not the atmosphere Jimbo saw for himself as a ‘serious writer.’ ”
There was, however, one place that did seem to offer Jim a more acceptable form of sanctuary, even if no one took him seriously on those rare occasions when he actually spoke about it. Which is where he found himself one auspicious day in the summer of 1970.
It was Wednesday, June 24, just after the summer solstice. In Washington, DC, the US Senate had just voted overwhelmingly in favor of repealing the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, made after the incident in which Jim’s father, Admiral Morrison, had fired on North Vietnamese torpedo ships, thus sparking the Vietnam War. The TV news, though, was more focused on the escalating situation in Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, were still running rampant, sending American soldiers home, either dead or wounded, by the hundreds.
Around 10 PM that night in New York, a different kind of force was about to be joined together. Patricia held Jim’s hand fast as they stood before the carved oak table serving as the altar. Surrounded by glowing gold-colored candles and pink and white peonies streaked bloodred, having been “purified” with drops of salt water and anointed with consecrated oil, and a special prayer having been said, Jim and Patricia, in their black, floor-length robes, were at last ready to begin their handfasting ceremony—the ancient Wiccan term for their wedding.
Patricia, a twenty-four-year-old former go-go dancer and Mensa member, then the editor-in-chief of Jazz & Pop magazine, was born in New York City and had lived there all her life. She attended St. Bonaventure University, where she majored in journalism, and graduated from Harpur College (now Binghamton University) with a BA in English literature; she also studied at NYU, Parsons School of Design, and later Christ Church College, Oxford.
Since Patricia and Jim had begun their on-off affair nearly eighteen months before, though, her life had changed. So had his. Now she hoped to rescue him. One of the first significant women rock critics, Patricia had met and written about almost all the great artists of the time. Later, as an advertising copywriter and director at RCA and CBS Records, working personally with musicians like David Bowie, Billy Joel, and Paul and Linda McCartney, she would become a two-time CLIO nominee.
But what really singled Patricia out from the herds of other young women who had crowded into Jim Morrison’s life these past three years was the fact that she was a Celtic pagan high priestess and a minister of the Universal Life Church. Twenty years later she would be knighted at Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland as a Dame of the Sovereign Military Order of the Temple of Jerusalem (the ancient Knights Templar). This was not another crazy rock chick. No druggie groupie giving blow jobs to get backstage. This was the most well-read and learned woman Jim had ever met. She was also the most genuinely far out. As she was about to prove …
Writing in her astonishing 1992 memoir, Strange Days: My Life With and Without Jim Morrison, Patricia recalled the night of her and Jim’s wedding in breathtakingly vivid detail, save for the most secret elements, such as the specific prayers recited. The rest of the picture she paints, though, is remarkably clear—of the small cast-iron cauldron set up to burn incense, the goddess candle and goddess statue, the athame (a ritual black dagger usually employed in invocations, but on this occasion for another purpose), the sword, water, salt, censer, and god statue. She even gives the coven names of the two adepts who officiated at the ceremony: Lady Maura and Lord Brân. Then Patricia describes “the special things for this particular rite”: the quaich—a broad, shallow, two-handed silver bowl to hold the consecrated wine; an ornate silver chalice; braided red silk cord; Patricia’s own wand of willow wood, “bound with silver and sealed with a bloodstone”; and two Claddagh rings, one silver, one gold.
A circle forms—“A sphere of blue light not quite visible to the eye, stretching from floor to ceiling along the line of the candle flames”—Jim and Patricia enter and the ritual begins in earnest—the invocation of the goddess and the god, the censing of the couple, the anointing of consecrated oils, the sprinkling of water and smudging of foreheads with rowan ash, the slipping of the rings onto the point of the black sword.
At which point, Patricia relates in her book, she went to Jim and spoke to him softly so that only he could hear. “These rings symbolize the Sacred Marriage, the union of the King and Goddess. When we put them on—and later—that’s who we’ll be for each other, in this circle and after.” She advised him he could still stop if he wanted to, that he was under no obligation at this point, legal or otherwise, that he could even marry someone else in future if he wished to, but that it was “a valid religious ceremony, and it will create a real bond between us.” She finished by explaining that there would be no until-death-do-us-part. “Death doesn’t part,” she told him. “Only lack of love.”
It was now-or-never time. Did he want to stop? “No,” Jim told her. “Oh, no! I’m sure.” So the ceremony continued through its most intense moments, not least the taking of the athame and making small cuts in the wrists of each party, allowing three or four drops of blood to fall into the wine-filled quaich. Patricia went first, but Jim blanched when it came to his turn. So Lady Maura did it for him, then held their two wrists together while Lord Brân bound them with the red silk cord as Patricia recited the handfasting vow. The rest of the ceremony proceeded quickly—the placing of the rings, the unbinding of the wrists, and finally the drinking from the blood-tinted quaich, then the stepping over the sword, at which point Jim fainted. When Jim came around, Patricia cradling his head and shoulders in her arms, he told her, “I felt … I felt something bigger than anything I ever felt in my life.” As he rested more comfortably now, his head in Patricia’s lap, she explained that “coming into the presence of the Goddess for the first time” was “a very physical thing.”
“You’re telling me,” Jim responded. “I never felt anything like it, not even acid.”
“You felt the presence of the Lady,” said Patricia.
Over the years since then, Patricia, Celtic pagan wife of Jim Morrison, has been ridiculed, marked out as a psychologically damaged fantasist, or simply called an outright liar. The only thing no one of note has done until now is actually believe her story. And yet it happened as surely as Miami, and is as real as Jim’s other affairs with redheaded women of remarkable power. Anyone versed in occult lore or, specifically, the rites of Celtic pagan ceremonies will vouch for the accuracy of her description of the ceremony she and Jim went through on that long midsummer’s night in 1970. More challenging, perhaps, are the descriptions she gives of how “in the candlelight” he looked “very beautiful and ridiculously young”—this at a time when the ravages of his years of overdoing it had begun to show so much that people he knew well, like Danny Fields, now describe him as by this point “almost unrecognizable” from the “Young Lion” portraits of three years before. When Patricia goes on to describe how many times they made love that night—“with a kind of violent urgency”—it’s a statement that stands in stark contrast to claims by others that throughout this period Jim was in fact largely impotent because of his drinking.
Yet none of this is really that hard to understand. Jim Morrison may have become a drunken, floundering fool when it came to the teenage groupies and drug sluts of the Whisky in L.A., but he was still only twenty-six years old. At that age, a couple of days not binge-drinking and a couple of good nights’ sleep can work wonders. As for the bearded, increasingly overweight Jim appearing “beautiful and ridiculously young” by candlelight to his adoring bride on the night of their wedding, it seems ridiculously churlish not to allow her the benefit of the doubt. Beauty, even to witches, is in the eye of the beholder. Why would the fiercely intelligent, sharply observant Patricia Kennealy be any different?
That Jim Morrison’s followers—including, of course, his biggest, most ardent fan, Ray Manzarek—found Jim’s latest adventure so far beyond their own imaginings says more about them than about whatever it was Jim and Patricia felt they were doing together in 1970. Jim Morrison, the great, self-proclaimed shaman, a man who invited his audiences again and again to “let the ceremony begin,” who told anyone who would listen in 1970 that he intended to “start a new religion,” who was more widely read than most literary figures twice his age, and certainly more daring in just how far he was prepared to push himself and the mindless thousands who leaped to proclaim him wherever he had walked these past three years—surely it’s no stretch of the imagination at all that he might at the very least be intrigued by the invitation to take part in something as deep and meaningful as a Celtic pagan wedding with a high priestess? This was the same Jim Morrison, lest we forget, who just then was facing jail time in Miami, was being roundly rejected by his own band, had fled his family, and may still have been concealing his bisexual urges, a prisoner to his own blighted fate, as he saw it at that precise moment. Might he not be more than willing to accept the kind of unreserved love and protection Patricia Kennealy was now offering him—as well as the promise of his being assisted to some magical higher reality too? Why wouldn’t Jim Morrison, fighting just to breathe in so many other areas of his life, seek some shelter from the storm?
“I think jealousy and envy come into it too a little bit,” says Patricia, who changed her name legally to Kennealy-Morrison after Jim’s death. “And also people trying to protect their own self-interests … ‘The Ballad of Jim and Pam,’ you know?” She doesn’t give many interviews anymore, having been ridiculed too many times and had her real-life role in the Doors’ story reduced to one of loony-chick sidebar. Speaking by phone from her home in New York, she sounds remarkably sane, though. Far more so, it might be pointed out, than Ray Manzarek, with his endless Jim-might-still-be-alive ravings, before he died.
Patricia reserves a special loathing for writers like Danny Sugerman—who started as a thirteen-year-old fanboy in the Doors’ office, opening mail and answering phones, and was just sixteen when Jim died, yet who leveraged a career out of his supposed close relationship with Jim Morrison, co-opting Jerry Hopkins’s original No One Here Gets Out Alive manuscript and turning it into the Gospel According to Jim.
“I think in a way, without sounding completely corny and ridiculous, [Jim] was an avatar of sorts,” says Patricia. “I really do believe that. I mean, people like Sugerman go on about ‘Jim was a god!’ but … I think in some respects he really was. He really was something beyond being a normal human person. That, I think, is where the problem lay, because, of course, he was a human person, not a normal one perhaps, but certainly human. And the dichotomy between Jim Morrison and Jim, I think, was what ultimately killed him in the end. The fact he could not bring those two halves together. I think if he’d had more time and if he’d been with me, as he was supposed to be when he came back from Paris, and we had been allowed to work that out, I think that would have been … certainly a tremendous help in resolving that fatal dichotomy.”
She also understandably resents those who assume she somehow coerced Jim into the wedding ceremony. Jim knew exactly what he was doing, she says. Partly because she had talked him through the whole thing first, partly because “he was so learned and so informed and so well read about that sort of thing. I mean I had never met anybody who’d read the kind of stuff that he had, and I was always quite proud of myself when I could point out something to him that he hadn’t thought about before necessarily, consciously, anyway. Or a book that really bore upon the situation that he hadn’t read and that I could bring to his attention. I think that was one of the things that he really liked about the relationship. That we could communicate on that kind of a level.”
She points out that Jim—and Ray, as he would tell me—saw Doors concerts “as rituals. And [Jim] consciously strove to make them so. If you read stuff that he said about this, he’s really open about it when he gave interviews in those days and talked about what he was trying to do. And I think, by and large, he succeeded, except that it just began to consume him and hurt him and he didn’t … because he was an addict, because he was an alcoholic, he couldn’t manage to get away from it all. It was just coming after him and bringing him down from behind and basically ripping him to pieces.”
As a result, she says, “he was really after bigger game than that. He was involved in soul politics. The politics of the spirit, something higher … I think, too, that is one of the things that drew him to me, because I have this thing going on in my life, and also the fact that it was Celtic in nature and he being a Scot by genetic descent. I mean, I think this really spoke to him. He had a poem [‘As I Look Back’] about it where he calls it mystery Christianity: the snake in the glen. And the first time we met I had told him a lot of stuff about this. The fact that one of the family symbols of the Morrisons is a serpent, in fact. He thought that was just really cool.
“So, yeah, I think that really kind of opened a whole new view to him. He hadn’t really ever considered all this before as being anything real. He’d read about it obviously. He was so well informed about just about everything, really. So he knew a little bit about it. But then I was able to tell him so much more about it and I think, you know, to make it real on a very, very personal level. Here’s somebody not entirely unattractive who he can have these amazing conversations with about all this really good stuff, and I think that was a big draw for him.”
She puts down his obvious physical decline to “the pain. It was the pain he was having to deal with. He really had put on a mask—you know, Jim Morrison: the Mask. It began as a mask, something that he was doing consciously onstage as a dramatic theatrical sort of thing, which he was very much into. But then I think what happened was the mask got stuck to his face. And he couldn’t get out from behind it. And that was what he was trying to escape from with the alcoholism and the stupid Jim tricks and all the other nonsense. He really wasn’t a jerk, basically. What makes me so angry is that so many of the biographies just continue to paint him as an absolute moron. I mean, the guy had an IQ of 149. I mean, mine is higher but still …” She chuckled and you felt for her as her own pain revealed itself. “Back there … there were no maps. It’s like, ‘Here be Dragons!’ These were people doing this kind of thing for the very first time. Nobody really had a clue as to how it was going to affect them and how it was going to affect the people around them who cared about them. It was all new and strange and different. And quite dangerous and scary, as well.”
One scary thing Patricia did not tell Jim before he left her a few days after the wedding, to return to L.A. in preparation for his trial in Miami, was that she was pregnant with his child. In what she calls his “cosmic stupidity” he had pulled out her diaphragm one night while they were making love, as if—yet again—daring the universe to punish him with the direst consequences; the universe, yet again, obliging him. It would be months before Patricia felt able to tell him.
Meanwhile, rather than return to L.A., Jim flew to Paris with the Doors’ publicist, Leon Bernard, ostensibly to begin promotion for what was to be the band’s second European tour, in September, in reality because Jim badly needed a change of scene. Things had gotten too heavy in L.A. Whereas just months before he saw his future in books and film, now he spent time alone, reading, drinking, getting fatter and lonelier and more desperate, dreading the thought of going back on the road with the Doors, all of whom now barely made eye contact with him whenever they were together.
Jim loved Paris in the summer. The city and its long history of art and literature, of bohemian bistros and civilized café society, of wine and poetry and long dissolute nights among opium eaters and absinthe addicts, whores and intellectuals, all spoke deeply to the romantic in him, that soft-eyed boy who still lurked somewhere beneath the layers of fat and cynicism, who still thought there might be a place for someone like him, someone other, somewhere. Surely. Not that Jim was ready to rent a garret and starve for his art. He and Leon had checked into the George V, the city’s most luxurious hotel, from which Jim could safely survey his alcoholic dreams without having to resort to anything really nasty or street-level.
He was also expecting to meet up with Pam, who had left for Europe on another of her “shopping trips” weeks before. But Pam was not in Paris; she was busy enjoying her own befuddled reveries, hanging out with her heroin-dealing boyfriend, the Count de Breteuil, at a villa in Tangiers owned by Paul and Talitha Getty. Instead, Jim reacquainted himself with Agnès Varda and her husband, Jacques Demy, real-life Left Bank filmmakers who were as passionate about art and film, about life, as Jim longed to be. Visiting the set of Demy’s latest film, Peau d’Âne, starring Catherine Deneuve and Jean Marais, Jim reveled in the opportunity to spend time in such illustrious, strictly non–rock ’n’ roll company. François Truffaut was also visiting the set that day, out in the Loire Valley, and Jim lived it up in style over lunch, downing three bottles of wine and exalting in the company.
Days later, Jim and Leon flew down to Tangiers, still looking for Pam. But she and the Count had already fled to de Breteuil’s own family villa in Marrakech. While Pam was permanently smacked out, she couldn’t care less where Jim was or what he was doing. Just as long as she had the smack, and she knew she always would while she was with the Count. Never mind that he would slap her around sometimes, treat her like a cheap junkie whore and tell her so. Just as long as she had the smack …
Back in Paris, Jim’s credit cards were starting to fail and he was forced to check out of the George V and settle for a cheap room in a mice-infested slum hotel in the Latin Quarter. One of the British music papers reported seeing Jim backstage at the Pink Floyd show in Hyde Park on July 18. But Jim was no longer enthralled by London, finding its streets suddenly dark and gray, its people unfriendly to young Americans, and he was no fan of rock festivals anymore, either. And with his money running out and his trial in the United States looming, he flew back to L.A. at the end of July and tried to prepare himself for what he knew would be the debacle of Miami.
Jim knew something was up when Judge Hoffman denied Max Fink’s petition to introduce the concept of “contemporary community standards” as the major plank of Jim’s defense. A sixty-three-page document that Fink had taken weeks to piece together, drawing on sources as disparate as the 1968 Swedish art-house melodrama I Am Curious (Yellow) to Midnight Cowboy, John Schlesinger’s powerful drama about the misadventures of a male prostitute in New York, which had just won three Oscars in 1970; taking in the art of Michelangelo and Gauguin; and citing the First, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments of the US Constitution. Jim later said he knew he was done for when the judge simply disallowed that any of it could be used in his defense.
What discouraged Max Fink even more was when he discovered the good judge was readying himself for a difficult reelection campaign later that year and was clearly intent on making the Jim Morrison case an example of his strong leadership qualities. In his book, Jerry Hopkins relates that when Max Fink discovered that all seventeen of the prosecution’s witnesses were either employees of or related to someone who worked for the prosecutor’s office or local police department, Fink suspected the cards Jim was being dealt came from a stacked deck.
The trial began on August 6 and consisted of twenty-three days’ worth of court appearances spread over the next two months. There was surprisingly little publicity about it in the US press. Even Rolling Stone declined an invitation from the Doors’ office to attend the trial and write about the case. The fans, too, seemed to lose interest fast. According to Mike Gresham, then working as a trial publicist for the Doors, “The first day, a hundred kids showed up at nine in the morning. Second day it was forty. Third day it was twelve.”
None of the other members of the Doors showed up either. Nor did Pam, who was back in L.A. but still hanging on the Count’s every word. In the United States illegally, Jean de Breteuil was busy dealing heroin to the Sunset Strip in-crowd. It was a whole new downered-out drug scene, and everyone seemed to be in for the long haul. According to Eve Babitz, writing in Esquire years later, Pam’s “idea of the diet to be on while Jim was in Miami going to court was ten days of heroin. Every time she woke up she did some, so she just sort of slept through …” Meanwhile Jim sat passively, drawing sketches of the jurors or openly reading a book, as if he were above it all. As if he already knew what the outcome would be and was ready for it. (He did, and he wasn’t.)
In the middle of the trial, on August 28, Jim was required to fly to England to get ready for the Doors’ appearance at the Isle of Wight Festival the following night. Inspired by the “happenings” at Monterey Pop and most recently Woodstock, the Isle of Wight Festival was Britain’s version of the same, except it was not free—a fact that angered hundreds of radical hippies, who proceeded to tear down the fences that surrounded the site and turn the event into a logistical fiasco. A year earlier Bob Dylan had headlined the show, making his first live appearance in three years, dressed in an all-white suit and looking and sounding like he’d aged ten years since his last public appearance. Members of both the Beatles and the Stones had attended that show. The 1970 follow-up was supposed to be equally right on, brother. There was a huge sense of anticipation about the appearance of the Doors, who had not played in Britain since their London shows exactly two years before and were coheadlining with Jimi Hendrix. The fact that they had been forced to cancel the rest of their European tour dates—which were to have included the prestigious Montreux festival on August 31—when Judge Hoffman refused to reschedule Jim’s court appearances around the tour only added to the sense of occasion. For the Doors, having the tour blown out was an almighty bummer, forcing them to stake all they had on this one show. For the fans it simply meant this really was something not to be missed. Also on the feel-good bill were such equally significant members of the rock cultural elite as the Who, Miles Davis, Free, James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, and many others. Everything was set for this to be another do-or-die Doors show. As far as the other members of the band were concerned, all they needed was for the real Jim Morrison to show up, and all would be well in their world again.
Only Jim didn’t show. Nor, inexplicably, did the other Jim—the one called Jimbo who everyone hated. Instead the Jim Morrison who appeared onstage at the Isle of Wight Festival that night was someone only previously glimpsed through the gloom long after the show was over. Not the Jim who ranted and raved at audiences, offering to get naked for them and start a revolution, nor even the Jim who hung on to the mike for support as he slurred his way through songs, forgetting the words. This was … a dead man. It wasn’t a help that the Doors didn’t get to go onstage until almost two o’clock in the morning. Nor that the experimental moviemaker Murray Lerner was filming the event. Jim barely even responded to the music, sleepwalking his way through a funereal performance in which his eyes remained almost constantly closed and his mouth barely moved, a performance that so angered the rest of the band when they came offstage that John threw down his sticks—not for the first time—and stormed off.
Robby Krieger later called it “one of the worst shows that I remember. Jim was so bummed about his trial and he was just going through the motions.” It hardly helped that the Doors were followed onto the stage by the Who, who performed the set of their lives, all too aware of the lasting significance the event was likely to have.
Vince Treanor describes the Isle of Wight nonperformance as “probably one of the worst shows” he’s ever seen. “Joni Mitchell was there, and God knows how many other brilliant performers, and here’s Jim standing up there like a bloody limp dishrag, hanging over that mike stand, with his foot on the mike base. It was like he was glued in place. Somebody had poured a poultice on him and it froze, you know? There was no emotion in the singing. There was no movement of his body. Terrible, terrible! Shameful …”
It was the beginning of the end for the Doors. “After the Isle of Wight,” Vince now reveals, “the decision was, ‘We’ll never play onstage with you again.’ So the question was, how are we gonna get income? And the answer was, we are going to perform. We don’t need Jim. So the specter of the future was already hanging over them. You know? He just blew it.”
Forty-eight hours later Jim was back in court in Miami, even less animated or apparently interested in what was going on around him. When Mike Gresham told him he’d found a girl who said she had overheard the judge tell friends at lunch he was going to “throw him in jail,” he barely responded. Gresham made a last-ditch attempt to track the girl down and persuade her to come back and give evidence about what she had heard, thus triggering an application for a mistrial, but the young woman in question didn’t want to help. Instructed not to offer her money for her assistance, or try and persuade her on moral grounds, he tried the only other thing he could think of. “I asked, ‘Want to meet Jim Morrison?’ She said no—and that’s the last we saw of her.”
Jim returned, horribly depressed, to the Miami courthouse on October 30 to receive Judge Hoffman’s verdict. Bizarrely, Jim was found innocent of the charges of public drunkenness and of lewd and lascivious behavior but guilty of the charges of indecent exposure and open profanity. The judge gave him the maximum punishment he was allowed to under state law: a $500 fine—and six months in Raiford prison, one of the hardest jails in the country. Jim was put on $5,000 bail and ordered back for sentencing in November.
Patricia had visited Jim during the latter stages of the Miami trial and told him she was pregnant with his child. He told her he didn’t intend to become a husband or father but that he would pay for and hold her hand through the abortion. Patricia says she expected that reaction, but it’s hard not to feel for her. Then Jim turned to her and said, “You know, it’d really be an incredible kid.”
But Patricia was wise to Jim’s games. His self-delusions. They spent a drunken night together, then she went home to New York and had the abortion, alone, without Jim, in November.

 19

Killer on the Road


Time was short. Jim was scared. The Doors had already decided to go on without him. Even Elektra was now hedging its bets. The question was how. When. No longer, why.
Max Fink had immediately launched an appeal against the verdict in the one-sided Miami case. He felt Jim still had a chance of escaping jail time. At the end of the trial, the prosecution had not been able to secure even one eyewitness account of Jim actually exposing his penis onstage, not even one photograph. They only had the outrage of the “solid citizens” who had testified against Jim to go on. Nevertheless, a guilty verdict had been reached and the fear was that the appeal would merely grant Jim more time to get his things in order, to prepare himself for the ordeal ahead. One of the state of Florida’s biggest prisons, Raiford was where death row prisoners went to get the electric chair. This was no candy-ass correctional facility, this was the real deal. Jim’s head would be shaved, he would have to share a cell with at least one other inmate, and he would be in for a crime considered beneath contempt by the more hardcore prisoners—indecent exposure. In their eyes, that made him either a fag or a near-rapist, maybe both. The fact he was a rock musician would not have helped either. Long-haired degenerate, pretty boy, Jim was a cell-block bitch in the making.
Everyone else, meanwhile, was also naturally looking at it from his or her own point of view. For the three other members of the Doors, Jim had single-handedly fucked their career for more than eighteen months. It wasn’t just Miami. It was everything. If Miami had been a one-off, or just symptomatic of a bad patch, they could have rallied around Jim, seen it through with him, all for one and one for all. But it was never one for all with Jim. There was only ever him. And us. Unable to tour for most of 1969, now things had eased up, promoters’ paranoia overcome by dollar signs in the wake of the renewed success of their recording career with Morrison Hotel, the Doors still suffered from Jim’s lack of engagement, from his apparent determination to sabotage their comeback with a pathetic, indifferent performance one night, followed by a raucous, over-the-top, pathologically unsound display the next. The Isle of Wight fiasco had been the last of many last straws. Now the son of a bitch was going to jail and the band was supposed to do what? Hang on? Still? Hadn’t they just done that for nearly two years? If they didn’t do something now, maybe they’d never get another chance. Jim would go to jail, get beaten and butt-fucked, and come out even worse than before. Even worse? Are you fucking kidding me, man? How much worse could this shit actually get?
Jac Holzman at Elektra, for so long the cool head, the smart cookie, the one with the vision thing who could see around corners and always knew what move the Doors should make next, even Jac was now thinking of a Plan B. The long-labored-over double album Absolutely Live had been released in July and despite being a fascinating trawl through the more together aspects of the Doors’ live shows—including “Celebration of the Lizard” and extended firecracker versions of gemstones like “When the Music’s Over” and “Break on Through (To the Other Side)”—had become the worst-selling Doors album yet. Less than a quarter of a million copies sold, just enough to scratch the US Top 10 for one week, then nosedive out of the charts again. Paul Rothchild, who had spent so long running around the country taping Doors shows—at least ten by the end of his marathon jaunt—then burning the candle at both ends in the studio trying to make it work, now disowned the album completely. The band simply wasn’t strong enough musically to hold up an entire double live album, he complained. They weren’t really about the music, not onstage, where he had no control over the takes, but a theatrical experience, a rock ’n’ roll cabaret. “It should have been a movie,” he concluded bitterly.
With the Doors’ contract with Elektra set to expire, and Jim making no secret of the fact that he was ready to talk to other record labels, even though he seemed to have little or no interest left in salvaging the Doors’ career anyway, Holzman acted quickly. He put together an unprecedented deal that gave them back Elektra’s share to their song publishing, plus a hefty advance for one final album for the label.
“It was an enormous gamble financially because their lawyer, who was not my favorite guy, he tried to see if he could sign the band to Columbia also, but [the band] wouldn’t let him. Because they recognized that they had an obligation to me. But he, the lawyer, said, ‘They’re not entitled to it, but we’ll let Jac have it if he gives back the 25 percent of the publishing he has.’ They had 75, I had 25. And I gave it back. He said, ‘He’ll never do it,’ and I did it. I made a calculation in my mind that was not a mathematical one. That is, if the album is a bomb I gave away the publishing and I don’t have all the records on one label. If the album is great and I give away the publishing, I’ve got all of the albums for the foreseeable future, and if it’s a success I will have no problem re-signing them.”
In need of money and a deep-down reassurance that their careers as rock stars weren’t quite over yet, Jim and the rest of the Doors were happy to sign, and rehearsals for a new album began fitfully as the Miami verdict came in and threw the whole thing into a tailspin again.
Meanwhile, to give Elektra a safety net, Holzman elected to roll the dice again and put out the first Doors greatest-hits collection in time for Christmas. It was entitled simply 13, to denote the number of tracks on the album but also, cleverly, as a coded message to the young “heads” out there that the Doors were still hip, the number 13 being a favorite way at the time for denoting weed and pot—the thirteenth letter of the alphabet is M, for marijuana—and had become a popular denim patch to sew onto jackets or jeans. Containing all the chart hits plus all the tracks now considered Doors must-haves, 13 did what it was supposed to and gave the Doors another million-seller. It didn’t happen overnight—the album only reached No. 25 in the charts that Christmas, but it remained in the Top 40 for another six months.
Looking back now, Holzman is surprisingly upbeat about this period in the band’s story. “I think once Miami happened, Miami happened. The only thing is a hangover from the fallout. And it was going to go on, unless he was acquitted, it was gonna go on for years. But then there were lots of appeals and stuff. I don’t think he ever thought he was really gonna go to jail.” Then he adds, somewhat astonishingly, “But I think he would have loved going to jail.”
I asked why he thought that. “Because it [would have been] a different experience. There’s a kind of righteousness about going to jail for your art. I mean, who’s gonna screw over a person everybody is looking at? He was probably not in physical danger there, and he would have … I don’t think he would have been sentenced to more than a year and he would have been out in seven months. But he would have had an adventure.”
I was momentarily speechless. Considering the state of mind Jim now appeared to be in, at the end of 1970—he had moved into the Chateau Marmont, the same hotel where comedian John Belushi would overdose and die a decade later, and begun doing so much coke he gave an ounce to a friend and told him to only dole out a gram at a time to him, otherwise he would snort the lot in one go—I found it hard to believe he was anything but terrified at the prospect of going to jail.
“But no,” says Jac, “I think Jim … in some ways it got too much for him. There were too many expectations of him by so many people, and he didn’t want to be responsible for those expectations.” Hence the physical transformation into the growling hulk with the big boozer’s gut and the skid row beard? “Yeah, I think absolutely. Well, I think that was … he was just letting go. And not being what people expected of him, and he thought they’d pay less attention to him. I mean, he loved it at the beginning. He loved it. I remember Steve Harris saying when [Jim] got out of a limousine for the first time he looked like he had done it all his life. Which was a great line, and it was true. It was … he loved it until they began … the adulation and stuff and what they expected of him … got a little crazy and he was out testing the limits.”
Jim, though, had reached his limit long before then. Sitting in the Miami courtroom one morning, a couple weeks after returning from the Isle of Wight, he had been told of the death of Jimi Hendrix, causes as yet unknown, though Jim didn’t need to wait for the TV news to figure it out. He had stood at the side of the stage and watched Jimi do his stuff at the Isle of Wight, as drawn to the thunderstorm of his music as he had been distant from his own with the Doors. He had just gotten back to L.A. in early October when he learned of Janis Joplin’s death, for almost identical reasons. Too much booze, too much dope, too much, too soon, of every damn thing, man. Jimi and Janis had both been just twenty-seven years old. Coming so soon after the death that summer—found facedown in his swimming pool—of the Rolling Stones’ guitarist Brian Jones, also twenty-seven, when Jim turned twenty-seven on December 8 that year, he began telling people, “Brian, Janis, Jimi? You’re drinking with number four.” But those around him, including Vince Treanor, had been listening to Jim talking about how he was going to die young for too long to pay attention. “Jim said a lot of shit, you know? Who listens! When a cow is taking a shit, you don’t listen to them moo! But as it turned out, we should have …”
When Larry Marcus, a veteran scriptwriter, hooked up with Jim at Jim’s bungalow at the Chateau, Marcus tried to pitch him an idea for a movie about a rock star who causes a huge outrage onstage at London’s Royal Albert Hall, based on Jim’s Miami incident. Jim, coked out and in fear for his future, nearly threw him out. He didn’t want to have anything more to do with rock ’n’ roll, he told him. But Marcus, being a canny Hollywood operator, kept pitching ideas to Jim until one finally hit home. As Marcus told Jerry Hopkins, it was to be a movie about “a human being who wanted to vanish from the world and become zero.” Marcus added, “I had a feeling that was a very crucial metaphor for how he felt about himself.”
Danny Fields says he feels Jim’s depression was self-perpetuating, blaming his outburst and mean-spiritedness on the fundamental fact of being, as he puts it, “A fat kid who was gorgeous for two years. And then, don’t forget, and I’ve said this a thousand times, when the drinking started going into his cheeks, on his face, when the beer was showing up in body fat, he was losing the looks, and he knew it. And he was pissed off when people would shove a picture of him … you know that Adonis picture of him? He didn’t look like that anymore. He hated that picture as much as he hated anything in his life, I’m sure.”
Eve Babitz recalls seeing Jim around this time at a party at the Los Angeles abode of Atlantic Records’ chief, Ahmet Ertegun. It was the night of the November 1970 moon landing. She recalls reacting badly to “a rather gross story about midgets in India” that Ahmet was telling. “Jim rose to his feet and bellowed, ‘You think you’re going to win, don’t you?! Well, you’re not, you’re not going to win. We’re going to win, us—the artists. Not you capitalist pigs!’ ” The room instantly descended into embarrassed silence. Until Eve piped up, “But Ahmet is an artist, Jim!” then ran to the bathroom and locked herself in. She recalls Jim following her there and telling her, “You know, I’ve always loved you.” She also recalls how Jim then went back to Ahmet and apologized profusely. “But it was too late; by then he was too fat to get away with it.”
Years later, John Densmore would wax lyrical to me about how “we wanted to be successful but we wanted to make a statement too, about the times we were living in, and if that took breaking the mold and doing things different we were up for it. We were excited by it. We were kind of like pushing the envelope artistically.” But he was thinking of earlier times. As Bruce Botnick put it when we spoke, “[John] loved the music, he loved being a part of the Doors, and what the message was. [But] it got convoluted. It got changed by circumstances and what people came to see. You know, it became a sideshow rather than an event to go hear the Doors.”
A sideshow Paul Rothchild, for one, was no longer prepared to deal with. He was sitting at the control desk at Sunset Sound, in November, the band gathered again in the same room where they made their first two incredible albums, but instead of feeling perhaps like they’d come full circle and were ready to do some good work again, Paul put his head in his hands in despair. With Jim and the band barely speaking anymore, ideas for new material had been slow to hatch. There were some unformed blues jams, which Rothchild hated, the more so since he realized they were there because Jim’s voice was now so shot he could no longer sing anything without growling; a sketch for a song called “L.A. Woman,” another blustering blues that in its early stages sounded so hammy Rothchild could hardly bear to listen to it; a few basic electric-piano chords overlaid by Robby’s gimmicky take on “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” a kitschy old yarn about a cowboy who has visions of red-eyed, steel-hoofed cattle thundering across the sky, being chased by the spirits of damned cowboys, “trying to catch the Devil’s herd across these endless skies,” which the band had half-jokingly dubbed “Riders on the Storm” but that Paul had already dismissed out of hand as “cocktail jazz”; and a couple of demos even the band was unconvinced by—an early, acoustic “Hyacinth House,” which sounded like second-rate Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and one track titled “Latin America,” originally written for inclusion on the soundtrack to Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1970 film Zabriskie Point but that had been rejected in favor of music from Pink Floyd and the Grateful Dead.
Hitting the playback button, Rothchild told them, “You know what? I can’t do this anymore. This isn’t working. This music is … awful. You produce it. I can’t.” “We were giving Paul a preview, and he was bored,” Ray later recalled. “We played the songs very badly—no chi, no energy. We didn’t want to be back in Sunset, and Paul couldn’t bring us back to life. In that instant he was right.”
Speaking now, Bruce Botnick reveals for the first time an additional factor behind Paul Rothchild’s decision to bow out that has never been written about before. The producer had just completed making Janis Joplin’s last album, Pearl, and was still devastated by her death (the singer had actually died the night before she was to complete her final vocal performance on the track eventually released as an instrumental, “Buried Alive in the Blues”)—not just because he knew Janis as a friend but because the two had become lovers during the making of the album.
Says Bruce: “He had just come off of making Pearl and he was in love with [Janis]. I mean, really, physically and emotionally, he was deeply in love. They had a really great thing and she had just died, and that was too much for him. And he just didn’t have the strength to go in to try to save it one more time. Maybe if he was still on a high with Pearl and Janis was still alive. … I have a lovely picture of the two of them, arms around one another, smiling. He said the greatest producer line I’ve ever heard. Where he realized he was really falling in love with her. I mean, just off the deep end. And he said, ‘Janis, I can’t tell you how much I love you and all I want to do is be with you. But if we do that we’re not gonna get a record. So it’s best if we fuck on tape.’ That’s the greatest producer line ever. And they did. They fucked on tape. Then when the album was done and then she died, it just destroyed him. So that’s one of the reasons, I think, that he had a very difficult time getting into this.”
It hardly helped, adds Bruce, “when Paul would go to the rehearsals [and] Jim wasn’t there at all, in spirit. You know, he didn’t want to know. He couldn’t get himself up for it. Paul thought, well, maybe the best way to get them into it would be to take them into the studio and see what happens. I convinced them to go back to Sunset Sound, where we did the first two albums. And we got set up. The first song they started playing was ‘Riders on the Storm,’ and within a few minutes of it being played Paul put his head on his hands and said, ‘I can’t do this anymore. It’s gonna be too hard. I can’t do it.’ ” Looking at Bruce, he said, “You should make the record with them. You know what to do.”
They all went out for dinner to talk about it. “We went down the street to this Chinese restaurant, the Moo-Ling, and [Paul] proceeded to lay it out. That he didn’t have the strength anymore or the desire. Then after dinner we all went back to Sunset Sound and they said, ‘What are we gonna do?’ And I thought to myself, well, why the hell don’t we do this ourselves? I said, ‘Where do you feel the most comfortable?’ They said, ‘In our rehearsal studio.’ I said, ‘Great. I’ll get some recording equipment from across the street at Elektra and we’ll do it.’ And that was it. Plain and simple.”
All these years later, Jac Holzman makes another startling admission. “When Paul Rothchild quit, I was secretly pleased. I never would have fired him. But I would have … I don’t know what I would have done. But when Paul quit, that meant they were free. And I just let them figure it out for themselves. I mean, my God, they had six albums with a master, and Paul got better and better and better, but Paul needed something fresh himself. He did Pearl with Janis, and the two of them fell madly in love with each other. And that would have been an interesting relationship to watch. But he was ready for something different.”
With the addition of Elvis Presley’s regular bass player, the sublimely skilled Jerry Scheff, and Leon Russell’s rhythm guitarist, Mark Benno, work on the new album, now titled L.A. Woman, suddenly kicked into gear and the whole thing was completed in a week. As a result, John Densmore would later describe it as “the first punk album,” mistakes and all. It was certainly unlike anything the Doors could have produced under Paul Rothchild.
Bruce set up his eight-track mobile equipment on Bill Siddons’s desk in the first-floor office, with a specially rigged-up intercom microphone over his head to communicate with the band, playing in the basement, and he recalls the sessions with greater fondness than any since Strange Days. “Because it was just the five of us, plus the addition of a bass player and guitar player, we didn’t have any bones to pick with one another. Just let them be them, capture the performance, and say, ‘That’s good, come on up the stairs and hear it.’ Do one take, you know, two takes. And then if they hear it and go, ‘I think we can do another,’ go down and do another one. ‘Great. That’s good, guys. Let’s move on,’ until we’d finish a song or two in a day. Finish them! It was a great experience.”
Even John Densmore began to enjoy himself. “I used the same drum kit I had on the first record,” he later told Classic Rock magazine. “It was like going back to the metaphorical garage in Venice where we started. I told Ray I wanted to get the feeling Miles Davis had on Live at Carnegie Hall, where you could make a mistake, but you went for passion.”
There was certainly plenty of that evident in the finished grooves. Passion and a genuine sense of spontaneity on record, at last. Bruce: “I remember Ray going into Jim’s book and seeing ‘Texas Radio’ and going, ‘I think we can do something now.’ The four of them talked about it. Jim went away for a couple of hours, and in that couple of hours the guys came up with that arrangement and created the music, and we recorded it. Jim came back and he overdubbed it, and that was it. Probably five, six hours altogether, from nothing to something. … They were very good at doing something like that because they still had that spark. It was good. It was fun.”
Jerry Scheff: “I can still see Jim standing at his microphone. A little heavy in his ‘fade into the background’ clothes, hair and beard enveloping his face. He didn’t want to be there. He didn’t want the spotlight anymore.” Jim, he says now, was simply one of “the most unassuming and easy to be around” singers Jerry had ever worked with. “He had an almost invisible ego without being standoffish, almost unaffected. Ray had a good strong sense of who he was, what he had to contribute musically. I never felt any kind of power trip from him. Easy to work with. Same thing with Robby. John was almost passive-aggressive. He showed that by hardly communicating with me at all. Hello and good-bye were pretty much the extent of our dealings with one another …”
Mark Benno’s main recollection, he said, was of a band and singer “on a roll. [Jim] reminded me of a wild gorilla at the sessions. One day he stopped the session and took me to lunch. He ordered oxtails and drank Jack Daniel’s out of the bottle. When we got back Jim had me show Robby a lick I was playing, and we used it on ‘L.A. Woman.’ From there, it was a jam right through the album. We worked the tunes up on the spot, and did very few takes. We never saw anyone but each other, which kept distractions to a minimum, and kept Jim from feeling inhibited, which I don’t think was a problem for him anyway!”
Whereas Rothchild had winced at the decline in Jim’s voice, Botnick saw it more as “kind of a maturity. I remember when Sinatra got to that place and point with his voice, and Jim used to talk about Sinatra a lot because he loved Sinatra, and he noticed the change in his voice as well, when he became a man, with some experience. You can hear in Jim the spark that inspired him initially, and you can hear the tired old man. Because he lived in three years more than most people lived in thirty years.”
Jim was already “talking the whole time” about going to Paris when the album was finished, says Bruce. Consequently, there was a real sense that this might actually be the last Doors album. “This could have been it. We knew that. But we didn’t expect it to happen the way it happened.”
Singing into his stage mike, a gold Electro-Voice 676G, Jim did most of his vocals facing a sign he’d hung on the wall that read A CLEAN SLATE IS AN EMPTY SLATE. For other takes, he crouched in the doorway of the bathroom, having already pulled the door off its hinges. Said John in 2010, “If he kept his alcoholism out of the studio everything worked great. He was in trouble, yeah, he was, but without the world around him, everything else went away.”
Not quite everything. Interviewed halfway through the sessions by a writer from the Village Voice, Jim admitted that these days, “I don’t read or write much. I don’t do much of anything. But I will get back in the saddle. I’ve just been kind of lazy. I go through cycles of nonproductiveness, and then intense periods of creativity.” When asked about his weight gain, he jived, “Why is it so onerous to be fat? Fat is beautiful. I feel great when I’m fat, I feel like a tank, you know? I feel like a large mammal, a big beast. When I move through the corridors or across the lawn, I just feel like I could knock anybody out of my way. It’s terrible to be thin and wispy—you could get knocked over by a strong wind.”
Knocking back vodka and orange juice, he went on, “You gotta get smashed and make a fool of yourself in a public place. You gotta get eighty-sixed [barred] from seven nightclubs. That’s the Irish thing. I hang around mostly with the Irish and the Italians.” He then offered to arm wrestle the journalist.
He was more serious, though, when interviewed the same week by the L.A. Free Press. “There seem to be a lot of people shooting smack and speed now. Alcohol and heroin and downers—these are painkillers. Alcohol for me, because it’s traditional. Also, I hate scoring. I hate the kind of sleazy sexual connotations of scoring from people, so I never do that. I like alcohol; you can go down to any corner store or bar and it’s right across the table.” In reality, though, Jim’s consumption of cocaine and, latterly, occasional snorts of Pam’s heroin were competing with the alcohol for ultimate control of his metabolism. In the end, they would fight it out to the death.
The finished L.A. Woman was a similar patchwork of inspired, truthful beauty and poisoned-chalice nihilism and despair made over to appear more like wonder. The opening track, “The Changeling,” came directly from another of Jim’s old journals, and seemed like a possible hit single. As it turned out, it was Robby who again came up with the goods in that department, with his romping sing-along, “Love Her Madly,” another of his my-chick-is-crazy numbers. “Hyacinth House” was a much improved, less dainty version of the demo Rothchild had rejected. Jim and Robby had first come up with the idea while tripping at Robby’s beautiful new beachfront house in 1969, eyes rolling like pinwheels at the sight of the hyacinths blooming around the swimming pool.
“Latin America” was now retitled “L’America,” though no further work was done on the original track, save for some phasing Bruce did on the drums and Jim insisting on overdubbing a single word—a lustily bellowed “Fuck!”
One evening, after burning their way through John Lee Hooker’s “Crawling King Snake,” a number they had been slinging around in their live set for years, chosen here primarily as a filler track, just to keep the vibe going, Jim then led the band through an almost entirely improvised new jam he called “Been Down So Long,” a run-of-the-mill blues holler in anybody else’s hands—title lifted from the American folk singer Richard Fariña’s 1966 novel, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me—here elevated into a defiant, eyes-slitted yell in the darkness, as the threat of jail time in Miami came crawling back to the forefront of Jim’s mind … “I said, warden, warden, warden / Won’t you break the lock and key!”
Also recorded at the same heady session—what came to be known by Bruce Botnick as “blues day”—was the most impressive of the lot, Jim’s low-slung cat-mewling groover, “Cars Hiss by My Window.” Ray recalled, “Jim said it was about living in Venice [Beach], in a hot room, with a hot girlfriend, and an open window, and a bad time. It could have been about Pamela Courson. Certainly, the lines ‘Can’t hear my baby, though I call and call’ seemed to reference Pam, who was now living in Paris, hopelessly embroiled in heroin.”
Incredibly, an even better song was recorded at the same session, the title track, “L.A. Woman.” Ostensibly another blues, this time revved up to the max, with added jazz flourishes on the keyboard to add another time-space dimension to it, “L.A. Woman” was in many ways the ultimate Jim Morrison road song, with both the man at the wheel and the lights of his “city of night flashing by like bullets just missing his head.” Lyrically, this was another of Jim’s typically literate inspirations, though he wasn’t just riffing on the titles of old books now, he was distilling the voices of some of his favorite, most culturally embattled writers into words he could truthfully call his own. The obvious literary touchstone was a Los Angeles novelist, John Rechy, whose 1963 stream-of-consciousness novel City of Night Jim had devoured at UCLA. But inside the verses, in their neon-blitzed images of girls hidden in Hollywood bungalows, cops in cars outside topless bars, the whole stinking city thing run on “motel, money, murder, madness,” lies the voice of another L.A. chronicler, John Fante, who indented his love of Hollywood with lines like “So fuck you, Los Angeles, fuck your palm trees, and your high-assed women, and your fancy streets. Los Angeles, give me some of you!” According to Ray, “We dug our teeth into that song. It was all about passion and hauling ass. It felt like we were on Route 101, on the road from Bakersfield to San Francisco. You can hear our enthusiasm. Welcome to Los Angeles!”
Jim spent the night of December 8, 1970, his twenty-seventh birthday, at the Village Recorders studio in West L.A., taping poetry for a solo album, accompanied by John Haeny, then chief engineer and senior staff recording engineer at Elektra’s own studio. Haeny had occasionally assisted Paul Rothchild and Bruce Botnick during Doors sessions, ensuring equipment functioned and that there were ample recording supplies. Although notoriously wary of strangers, Jim never seemed guarded around Haeny, perhaps because Haeny never seemed awed by Jim, sensing that his manipulative tactics were a type of test—that those who took the bait failed, thus inviting even more derision and taunting from Jim. Haeny, inured to rock-star trappings and the gleam of fame and fortune, simply viewed Jim as one of the many musicians he was charged with recording, and as a result Jim felt at ease around the engineer.
Jim was particularly fond of John’s Siberian husky, Nikki—the dog that is glimpsed in the promotional film for “The Unknown Soldier.” When, early in 1969, Jim asked John if he’d mind recording some of his poetry with him, they completed a session together at Elektra’s studios late on a Sunday afternoon.
Writing in 2013 on his official website, www.johnhaeny.com, John recalls, “Other than reading, Jim played a bit of piano, accompanying himself on ‘Orange County Suite’ and also giving the piano a good whack from time to time for dramatic punctuation. David Anderle, the head of Elektra West Coast A&R, and a mutual friend was present and helped with the tape logs. I’m sure David was there because it’s David’s handwriting on the tape box logs. This recording is known as the ‘Elektra Tapes’ or some call them the ‘Echo Tapes.’ Since these recordings were primarily a demo I recorded them in stereo because of the piano and also because I used a bit of live reverberation chamber on Jim’s voice to make things sound a bit more polished.”
No more was said about Jim making a poetry album, though, until almost two years later, when Jac Holzman approached Haeny to inquire if he’d be willing to go into the studio again with Jim for more recordings of his poetry. With Rothchild out of the picture and Botnick still busy constructing the new Doors album, a delighted Haeny accepted and began making arrangements, even though he did not actually sign a contract with Elektra until December 31, 1970—more than three whole weeks after the sessions—finally accepting $1,000 for his services.
Haeny had collected Jim from the Chateau Marmont hotel on the afternoon of December 8, dropping by Jim’s favorite liquor store—Monaco Liquor—to buy a bottle of Bushmills whiskey as a birthday present for him. Rothchild had once confided to Haeny that the key to accessing Jim’s loosest and most fruitful studio efforts was Irish whiskey. Writing on his website, John recalls, “It was my plan to document Jim reading his poetry on his journey from cold sober to that locked room where his drunken Irish poet lurked. Although we never discussed it, I had an overwhelming feeling that Jim knew exactly what I was up to and was happy to go along with me.”
John says that Jac Holzman had told him Jim had left the Doors and was looking to pursue new interests. “Sometime later, when I asked Jim that question directly, he simply said he had left the Doors to focus on his poetry and never elaborated further. Jim seemed exceedingly comfortable with his decision, and I never saw any reason to press him further. I figured that the time had come for him to move on, most certainly out of the public eye. Being in the public eye took a tremendous toll on Jim. That was obvious to everyone who knew him. This is one of a few things those of us who knew Jim can agree on.” Speaking now, though, Jac denies Jim ever officially left the Doors. “No, he had not left the band … but I don’t think he ever wanted to be in a band of that kind of popularity anymore, and I think he was looking at what else he could do, and to do that he had to get out of town.”
Friends dropped in and out of the Village poetry sessions, including Frank and Kathy Lisciandro, and as Jim grew more and more tight from the booze, he encouraged the onlookers to participate. Eventually Jim began slurring and staggering and, after he had fallen down twice, they called it a wrap.
Back in the so-called real world, in order to help promote both the new 13 compilation and the more sprawling live double, Absolutely Live, the reluctant band was persuaded to take on some concert dates in December. According to Vince Treanor, this was only after Jim went “begging the three guys and Bill Siddons for another chance.” He says this is one aspect of the story that never gets written about—despite outward appearances and all Jim’s utterances about wanting to move on from the Doors and become a full-time poet and moviemaker, the fact is he was desperate for another chance at the limelight. He couldn’t handle being found guilty in Miami and getting ousted from the group as a live performer at the same time. “If [Jim] wanted to be this poet, if [he] wanted to retire from the rock scene, why did [he] want another chance?” He points out that the Isle of Wight show had been Jim’s “chance to break, right there. He could have walked away and the Doors would have ended with the disaster of the Isle of Wight. But no, no! ‘Guys, I can do it. Guys, I can keep it together. Don’t worry, I’ll prove it to you!’ Oh, really …”
The dates went on sale and the band limbered up with a show, three days after Jim’s twenty-seventh birthday, at the State Fair Music Hall in Dallas, Texas. Speaking to me years later, Ray insisted this could have been the start of a reborn Doors, that they were still “relishing the hysteria. It was a controlled hysteria. Syd Barrett said that it ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun.’ That’s where we were going. Deep into the sun. Directly into that orb, that golden orb. And we will die with madness or absolute joy. One or the other. That’s the object of our performance. To play with all the passion you can possibly muster. And after you’ve opened the doors of perception you can muster a lot of passion. Because you realize that your passion is infinite. That you are infinite. That we’re all infinite. We’re in outer space. We’re on this little blue marble, it’s spinning around the sun, 365 days, to inscribe an arc around the sun, and we’re all in outer space. Holy shit! It’s terrifying! And yet we, as these innocent little things dancing on planet Earth, can make it absolutely joyous. So that’s what we would do. We would walk a tightrope, a tightrope between joy and absolute terror. And have just the most fantastic time doing it …”
By the end of that little rant I didn’t know if Ray was talking about Texas or just talking. He’d been doing it for so long it was as if he no longer knew how to stop. By all accounts the Texas show was fairly mediocre, one of their phoned-in performances, but at least Jim was moving around again. More slowly, like an old man surveying his vegetable patch, growling and snorting and yowling and playing around, almost talking to himself. But they played the set without anyone being arrested or Jim falling over or insulting anyone. They even tried out some new material on the audience: a decidedly gloomy fifteen-minute attempt at “L.A. Woman” and a more spirited go at “The Changeling,” where Jim for some reason chose to sing the song in a disturbingly ill-fitting scat. There were also stiff performances of both “The WASP (Texas Radio and the Big Beat)” and “Love Her Madly.” They even got to preview two songs that would prove pivotal on their next album, including one, “Riders on the Storm,” which both Ray and John would later tell me they thought could have been a signpost for where the Doors might have gone, musically, in the future—if they’d had a future.
It was inspired by a line from the poem “Praise for an Urn” by Hart Crane, about “delicate riders of the storm,” melded with Jim’s now almost obsessional hitchhiker imagery from his own HWY project. As Ray put it, “It gave Morrison the lyric for the last song he ever sang on planet Earth with the Doors. An insane killer, a lunatic, he’s going to do something bad. Give him a ride, why don’t you? But when the end comes you realize Jim’s singing a beautiful, romantic song: ‘Girl you gotta love your man / Take him by the hand / Make him understand …’ He was singing that for Pam.”
“Yeah, we were kind of excited by that,” John told me. “But, you know, Jim’s self-destruction caught up and … we played ‘Riders’ live, first time ever, and we thought, wow, maybe we could be this sort of cool, jazzy band.” By now, this constituted a successful show for the Doors. And at the end of it, after deductions, the band walked away $25,000 better off (a little more than $150,000 in today’s money).
Then the following night in New Orleans the whole shithouse went up in flames. The venue was inauspiciously named the Warehouse, a bare-bones, thirty-thousand-square-foot music venue on Tchoupitoulas Street in uptown New Orleans, close to the banks of the Mississippi River. The Warehouse had only opened for business as a rock venue less than a year before but was already established as the cool place for bands like the Grateful Dead to hang loose in. It seemed the perfect spot for Jim’s second comeback show with the Doors. Instead, it became their funeral pyre.
The set had begun well enough. Jim was already drunk and still out on his feet from the night before. But the band ambled through a couple songs at half-throttle without any above-average concerns. Then something happened to Jim, as he appeared to just give up the ghost. Not like at the Isle of Wight where he simply snored through the whole thing, more like a man leaving his clothes on the beach and wandering slowly into the sea. He began missing lyrics—whole lines, then verses and choruses. He had done that before but that had been drunken infelicity. This was almost … deliberate. As though it was the only way left to him to get across whatever message it was he badly needed to send. A wounded or disabled person signaling for help.
He clung to the mike, tried telling a story or two, a joke maybe, one whose punch line not even he could get to. The crowd, normally so out of control at a Doors concert, stopped what they were doing and began to low, like cows at approaching danger. Something was clearly not right; this was no longer theater, not even of the Grand Guignol variety. This was suddenly, horribly, frighteningly real.
Recalling that night in a 2010 interview with Classic Rock’s Max Bell, Ray said, “He just lost his energy completely. He was so dissipated. His voice got lower and lower and he ground to a halt. He was empty. This wasn’t like when he comes to the studio wasted and can’t deliver, but then there’s always tomorrow. … This was final.”
Panicking, the band cut the set short and launched into “Light My Fire,” their ace-in-the-hole showstopper guaranteed to make everybody, even Jim at his latest all-time low, come back to Earth, surely. But Jim just sat on the drum riser, staring into space, as though he could no longer even hear the music, let alone remember the words. Furious, John kicked him in the back and Jim slowly, unsteadily, groped his way through his stage-blindness to the mike again. He appeared to try to sing one last time but couldn’t manage it, couldn’t seem to find the way back into the song, just couldn’t … fucking … SHIT!
He picked up the mike and began ramming it into the stage, once, twice, three times, four, five … it went on and on until the band stopped playing, the crowd recoiled, and the mike stand broke right through the wooden stage floor. With the broken feet of the mike stand stuck deep into the stage, Jim snapped the shaft of the stand from its base, then hurled it like a spear right into the heart of the crowd. Pandemonium broke out as people ran to avoid the debris. Then Jim Morrison strode off into the wings for the very last time, never to be seen onstage again, with or without the Doors.
“I was standing over in the corner of stage left,” recalls Vince Treanor. “Bill Siddons was behind me. Jim had left, and John took his drumsticks and threw them on the floor. He said, ‘That’s it. Never again.’ And he walked off. Robby unplugged his guitar and uncharacteristically dropped his cord on the floor, and he unslung his guitar and just held it by the neck and walked off. He was the first one offstage. Then Ray and then John almost together.”
“Jim was just terrible,” John told me. “It was pretty tragic … I was very proud of how good we were live in the early days. We were just—phew! We could take anybody on! But I was very glad that I talked them into getting off the road, after that New Orleans show. Where it was clear we were ruining what we had created live.” In another interview with an Australian journalist, he added, “Jim was one of those kamikazes, who had creativity and self-destruction in the same package, damn it. That’s what I loved about him, [but] it was real hard with the self-destruction.”
Backstage, Vince says now, “There was a sort of a shocked silence except for John. John said, ‘Never with the asshole ever again.’ And that was it. Bill didn’t say anything. Nobody said anything. Bill then walked past me, and the mike shaft of course was somewhere. Why somebody was not killed that day I don’t know. I could not explain to you how that missile, that spear, did not get somebody. And it would have been their upper body. The way he threw it was just like a spear, just like a javelin. He just threw it right through the air and just—bing!”
The rest of the proposed dates were canceled early the following morning, including four shows at Madison Square Garden in January. Arriving back at the Doors’ office in L.A., Vince was greeted by Bob Greene. “He looked at me and said, ‘This is it, kid. That was the end.’ That was how swift that decision was made.”
On February 9, 1971, in the middle of one of the hottest periods ever recorded in California, the Doors and Botnick began mixing L.A. Woman at Poppi Studios, Motown’s West Coast outlet. The same day the San Fernando Valley experienced its fiercest earthquake in thirty years: 6.6 on the Richter scale, sixty-five people killed, more than $50 million worth of damage. Unfazed, Jim laid down a harmony vocal to “Hyacinth House” and, with the quake in mind, suggested they preface “Riders on the Storm” with a thunderstorm sound effect. He then added a final whispered overdub to the track, barely audible, yet adding a wonderful effect that is almost subliminal. It was the last thing he ever recorded.
Speaking to me in 2012, John mused on what he called “the Cult of Morrison.” He sighed. “You know, substance abuse came in pretty strong. It’s interesting, though, that somehow, even with all that, L.A. Woman, for example, and Jim clearly was an alcoholic by then, it just shined. I don’t know what … there was some pact unspoken that when we were alone together, the whole world was outside and we still created really great stuff. Not to be self-serving but, you know, I love L.A. Woman. L.A. Woman and Strange Days are it, for me.”
“You know, I never heard the album [until it was finished],” says Jac Holzman. “I was asked not to come to the sessions. I usually came to some sessions, and I would stay an hour and then I would get out. And I was concerned. Not because I didn’t think the boys could do it with Botnick. But because Rothchild had told me there weren’t any songs. That worried me. He said it was lounge music. And then when I went over to hear the album and I went into what my staff used to call the Great Listen, eyes closed, intensely, pad in my hand—on which I wrote nothing, I wrote nothing at all, I said, ‘It’s just perfect and the single is … “Love Her Madly.” ’ They all said, ‘No, the single’s “The Changeling.” ’ I said, ‘No, guys, it’s “Love Her Madly.” ’ And that went back and forth and I stayed out of it. I left it to Siddons to make it happen, and he did, and of course it was a giant hit.
“But it was the best album they made. I think it’s … the first album is one of the greatest first albums of all time. But the last album was really poignant. And ‘Riders on the Storm’ just was the perfect, I don’t know, totem for that album. It was just terrific. I was thrilled with the record. Absolutely thrilled. I told them: ‘Don’t change a thing.’ I was so relieved. I was in tears I was so relieved.”
Jac’s business acumen was as astute as ever, and “Love Her Madly” became the first Doors single to become a sizeable Top 10 hit when it was released in March, dragging L.A. Woman in its comet trail also into the Top 10. Yet all was not well. At the photo shoot for the album cover, Jim had to be propped up on a bar stool, barely able to sit up straight he was so out of it, a bottle of Bushmills at his feet. “In that photo you can see the impending demise of Jim Morrison,” Ray would later observe. “A psychic would have known that guy is on the way out. There was a great weight on him. He wasn’t the youthful poet I met on the beach at Venice.” Nevertheless the sleeve designers, Wendell Hamick and Carl Cossick, came up with an innovative idea for a rounded corner cover and a cellophane window. The band’s supposed front man may not have looked his best anymore, but the cover to L.A. Woman became the Doors’ most memorable—a dark, red wine–colored sleeve behind which a yellow inner sleeve displayed a woman crucified on an electricity pole.
Jim, now feeling like he’d been crucified on the cross for trying to break on through to whatever it really was he thought he was trying to do the day he wrote those lines, now looked to climb down, as quietly as possible. To silently escape to some other place far enough away from this—from L.A., from Miami, from himself—to be able to remember whomever the hell he thought he was supposed to be.
Pamela had left for Paris again after the Miami verdict came in, to be with Jean de Breteuil and his deliciously unstampedon heroin once again. She had returned briefly to be with Jim at Christmas, but in the wake of New Orleans Jim was in no shape to hold on to her. In February, just days after the mix of the new album had been completed, she had flown back to Paris, to the Count. To her drugs and her own form of escape to the wilderness. When Max Fink informed Jim that the next time the court met in Miami to consider his appeal, it seemed likely it would demand his passport, Jim made up his mind. He would leave for Paris too. Someone suggested he try London. But Jim wasn’t convinced. When Max explained that France had no extradition treaty with the United States, he knew what he had to do. Whatever way the cookie finally crumbled in Miami—and chances were, Jim was going to jail, the question was just for how long—they wouldn’t be able to reach him, take him back and shave his hair, grease his ass, and make him swallow his punishment whole if he was living in Paris.
The rest of the band, meanwhile, was still quietly making music, though not with Jim anymore, jamming in the basement again while Bruce Botnick kept the eight-track running upstairs. Off the back of L.A. Woman, Elektra had paid them a significant advance for another two Doors albums. The band would insist this was simply a way to keep busy while Jim took his planned “sabbatical” in Paris. But Vince Treanor points out that Jim didn’t even know they were in the studio and wonders if, after New Orleans, they began to talk to each other and feel they could do it themselves.
The last time Jac Holzman saw Jim Morrison was at an Elektra party at the Blue Boar restaurant on March 3. “He was unusually quiet. I could feel finality hanging in the air.” As the meal ended and Jac said good-bye to Jim, the two men hugged each other. “And then he turned somewhat awkwardly and walked away. I watched and wondered if I would ever see him again.” He sighs when I remind him of it. “Yeah. I didn’t think he was coming back to the band. It had nothing to do with his dying or not. I just didn’t think he’d come back to do this. But it was a poignant and somewhat disturbing moment.”
A couple weeks before Jim left for Paris, he was over at the Elektra offices, as he tended to be whenever he had nothing else to do, and Jim never seemed to have anything else going on anymore, and he bumped into Paul Rothchild. “I heard the door open and felt this large man entering,” the producer recalled in Follow the Music. “I didn’t recognize him. Then I was tapped on the shoulder, and I turned around and this large person who looked like Orson Welles’s younger son said, ‘Hi, Paul.’ I said to myself, ‘Holy fuck! This is Jim?’ ”

 20

La Mort Blanche


Jim flew TWA Ambassador Class from LAX to Paris–Le Bourget, arriving on the morning of Thursday, April 15, 1971. He had been due to fly a day earlier but had driven to LAX with the usual gaggle of hangers-on, heartbroken at having to wave good-bye to their meal ticket, and, predictably, got so drunk with them in the airport bar he missed his flight.
This time, though, Pam was actually there to meet him, and the unhappy couple checked in to a luxury suite at the George V together. Writing home sometime later, Jim described the grand old hotel as looking “like a red-plush whorehouse.” This had more to do with the fact that at around $400 a night Jim could simply not afford to stay there long. Within days Jim and Pam had moved into a $65-a-night room at L’Hotel, on the Rue des Beaux-Arts, considered cool since Mick Jagger had once stayed there. But even that was stretching the budget. With the Doors playing so few concerts since Miami—barely forty concerts in two years—and with Jim having been forced to request advances in lieu of future record royalties, he was broke. As soon as advance orders for L.A. Woman came in he’d tapped Bob Greene for more advance money to finance his Paris sojourn.
For once, Pam’s extended time away from Jim in the city of smack yielded positive results when, through a passing acquaintance with the French model and starlet Elizabeth Larivière, she was able to rent a luxury third-floor, three-bedroom apartment at 17 Rue Beautreillis, in the pretty Le Marais district. The same week Jim and Pam moved in, Newsweek ran a cover story headlined WAR AGAINST THE WHITE DEATH, an in-depth piece about the tsunami of heroin from Indochina, sparked by the Vietnam War, that was now flooding Western Europe and the United States via Paris and Marseilles. It was no coincidence that William Friedkin, about to become Hollywood’s hottest director, had just finished shooting the final Parisian scenes for his Oscar-winning smash, The French Connection, its international heroin-dealing villain, Alain Charnier, based on the real-life, Paris-based trafficker Jean Jehan, of whom US Assistant Attorney General James Drucker would say in 1973, “He wasn’t a drinker and didn’t cheat on his wife the way most of these guys do. His one big fault is that once in a while, he would import 50 to 100 kilos of pure heroin.”
It was the main reason Pam had moved to Paris almost full time. As any street-corner junkie could tell you in 1970–71, Paris was now the smack capital of the so-called civilized world. Not just any smack either, but the purest, most lethal the world outside Southeast Asia had ever seen. And nowhere more so than in the all-night clubs that Pam and the Count and their vampiric circle liked to frequent, most especially the notorious Rock and Roll Circus on the Left Bank.
Working as a bartender at the club was a twenty-one-year-old freelance war photographer, Patrick Chauvel. “The job at the Rock and Roll Circus was to pay my trips back and forth to Vietnam,” he tells me now from his apartment in Paris. “I started in ’67 with the Six-Day War. And then I went to Vietnam in ’68. In Vietnam I was eighteen. That was more or less the same age as the American soldiers, so it was OK.” He says Jim became a regular face at the Circus that summer. “He came very often. The Rock and Roll Circus was one of those clubs where all these kinds of people would come in and out.”
Visitors in the recent past had included Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, Jimi Hendrix and his entourage, and various members of Led Zeppelin. But Jim cut a somewhat more modest figure, sitting in the semidarkness, without the glitz and party atmosphere that always surrounded those other stars. The Doors had sold a lot of records in France, too, but they had never performed there, and whatever public profile Jim Morrison enjoyed was all based on the “Young Lion” look of four years before.
“I remember not recognizing him at all when someone pointed him [out] to me,” says Patrick. “Because he was, like, fat and had a big beard and didn’t at all look like the image I had in my head of him. He’d come in and sit on a couch, separate to the other clientele. He didn’t dance or make a big noise. I remember him coming in once three nights in a row. He came often and there were times when I didn’t see him, but it was a big club on two floors, full of French stars. He wasn’t the only big star in the club.”
The Rock and Roll Circus was also a hot spot for professional gangsters and big-time drug dealers, says Patrick. “A lot of drugs, yes, a very free time for sex, a lot of jealousy and tension. The nightclub scene was heavy—gangsters and very bad cops. There were a lot of fistfights inside, which wound up on the stairs and in the street. There was a gunfight outside the club. I used to carry a bayonet for protection. Crazy but necessary. There was a triangle of these places—the Circus,” which shared a large building with the Alcazar, “La Bulle, and Le Sherwood. All heavy.”
The Circus didn’t get going usually until after midnight, but Patrick recalls many occasions when Jim would show up earlier than that, chatting to the staff, as he threw back double vodkas. “I remember a few conversations, you know, at the table. He just didn’t care. One of the things I heard him say is, like, he just thought his fans were idiots. I don’t remember his exact words, but it was something like, ‘If I represent the image of my fans, or my fans represent my image, I mean, it’s horrible. They’re idiots.’ He just wanted to cut away from his fans. He did everything to get away from them. He was writing stupid poems. They were very bad. I mean the ones I read were bad. It was ridiculous.”
Patrick recalls how sometimes, as the night wore on, Jim would decide to treat the whole club to his poems, an echo of all those nights in dives like the Whisky when he would get up and tell everyone they were niggers. “Yeah. He would sometimes just stand up and just scream them through the ceiling. Everybody would shut up and listen. … It was a lot about Vietnam. He was very upset. He’d be silent, then he’d get up and say something really loud. You could see in his eyes, he had something important he wanted to say with a lot of energy, but it wouldn’t get past his mouth. It went through his eyes for a moment. That was it. He was fed up. He was not in a good place. But do you know? It was the same time there was this play called Hair. It was sort of the same area. There was [Parisian Hair star] Julien Clerc and [French rocker] Johnny Hallyday, all these people were going to the club. A lot of people were talking about Vietnam and I was coming back from Vietnam … everybody was like in a half dream, half reality.”
It was Patrick who introduced Jim to Sky Eyes. With his running fantasy about his childhood soul being invaded by the spirits of dead Indians on the highway, and his other obsession, the truly free man who walked his own road, no matter how far it removed him from the society of other men, Jim became instantly besotted with the tan-skinned army deserter. Sky Eyes, whom Patrick had first befriended in Nam, had deserted to Amsterdam, “through what they called the Jesus pipeline.” Patrick had gone to get him back, the plan being to try and find him some work in Paris. “He was this huge half-breed Apache who was in the First Cavalry, and this guy had a hard time adapting and he was always talking with Jim. Oh, a lot.”
Jim even wrote a story based on a true tale Sky Eyes had told him of his childhood, growing up the son of a Scottish engineer working for Texaco who had discovered oil in the San Carlo reservation, where he met Sky Eyes’s Apache mother. He married her, they had two kids together, then he killed himself in a car collision, drunk driving, when the children were still little. “And so the mother suddenly found herself in a white area alone with two kids, a simple Indian. So she went back to the reservation and when Sky told this story—and how he was brought up in the reservation—to Jim, I remember [Jim] tried to make up a small story about that.”
He says Jim, when drunk, also talked of plans to remake the Hair story as a real-life adventure, how he wanted to replace Sky in Vietnam, “which is exactly the story of Hair, except the guy [Claude] in Hair doesn’t do it on purpose. So at one moment, Jim said, ‘I will replace you! I’ll go and say my name is Sky Eyes …’ ” He breaks into laughter. “But he was a fat drunk guy, so …” Did Patrick think Jim was just drunk, or was he remotely serious? “Well, when he was drunk he was really serious. The fact is, Sky looked at him and said, ‘You would last about five minutes in the jungle. You don’t need the Vietcong to finish you, just the weather.’ They were laughing, but sometimes, you know, they would burst into tears. And everybody was completely stupid. I mean, it was like … there was a lot of emotion, you know, about this. And a lot of good music and girls and alcohol. So it was like a metaphor of what was happening in Vietnam. It was really strange.”
Jim’s health was poor, had been for a while. Nine months earlier doctors feared he had pneumonia—his temperature was sky-high and he had begun sweating profusely when walking just a short distance. Some of that, though, was to do with the tremendous amount of weight he had put on in a short time. Part of it was to do with his heavy drinking and smoking and drug taking. And part of it, as Patricia Kennealy put it, was because of “the pain he was having to deal with.” Now in the humid spring weather of Paris he became asthmatic. He was also victim to sudden bursts of uncontrollable hiccupping. Looking for dry heat to clear out his lungs, Jim and Pam took the train to Toulouse, 360 miles south of Paris. From there they continued after a few days on to Andorra, then Madrid, Granada, and finally Morocco, where they had both enjoyed themselves in different ways and with different traveling companions the previous summer.
By the time they returned to Paris, on May 3, Jim and Pam seemed to be more like a regular couple, enjoying showing the Super 8 home movies they had shot on their travels. Jim had even lost a little weight and shaved off his beard, and he was looking tan and reasonably healthy again. Within days, however, Pam was back seeing the Count, often for days and nights at a time, lost in her sweet junk delirium, as Jim brooded alone in the apartment. But he couldn’t stand to be alone and soon went looking for company. It was then he began to go to the Rock and Roll Circus more regularly. The club’s then manager, Sam Bernett, recalled, “Every time Morrison came in he was high, or drunk, in an abnormal state.” When things got too “abnormal” Sam would find himself in the odious position, as so many club managers before, of ordering Jim to leave. It was on one such occasion, just four days after Jim had returned from Morocco, that a young Frenchman named Gilles Yepremian first met Jim, as he was being thrown out of the club for throwing tables and chairs around.
“He was totally drunk. Nobody recognized him,” Yepremian recalled nearly forty years later. “I got a taxi and we drove down the Seine. At the lights Jim saw some policemen and he rolled down the window and shouted, ‘Fuck the pigs!’ So the driver kicked us out. I got another taxi, and Jim was so pleased he tried to tip the man hundreds of francs. He was laughing uncontrollably. I didn’t know where he lived, so I took him to the apartment of my friend Hervé Muller.”
Muller, who lived with his girlfriend, Yvonne Fuka, was gob-smacked when he opened the door to find the Doors’ singer standing there, holding on to the door frame for support. “Hervé! Meet Jim Morrison,” Gilles told him. “He’ll have to stay with you.” They led the staggering, semicomatose figure to the bedroom, where he promptly passed out on the bed. Ten hours later Jim was awake again and suddenly in fine fettle. Thanking his new-found best friends for their kindness, he treated them to a long boozy lunch at Bar Alexandre, on Avenue George V, a familiar haunt where the waiters indulged him no matter how drunk and out of order he got because of the sizeable tips he would always leave. On this occasion, Jim knocked back several large Bloody Marys as Yvonne Fuka took pictures, followed by a whole bottle of Chivas Regal. By the end of the afternoon he was back to picking arguments with other diners and becoming increasingly loud and obnoxious. As Gilles, Hervé, and Yvonne struggled to get him to leave the bar, he collapsed in a heap on a bench opposite the restaurant, shouting, “I don’t wanna go away! Where are you taking me?”
“When he was sober he just looked like an American student on holiday,” remembers Gilles. “Very quiet and shy. Once he became drunk he was a madman.” Not enough to frighten off his new friends entirely, though. Later that month Jim brought Pam with him to dinner at Hervé and Yvonne’s apartment. Invited to choose some music from their record collection, Jim plumped for Buffy Sainte-Marie, the half-Canadian, half–Cree Indian folk singer he’d first discovered on the soundtrack to Mick Jagger’s first movie, Performance. Sitting there, baked on strong hashish and the rich red Corsican wine Yvonne served them, digging Buffy and maybe beginning to remember who they thought they used to be, Jim and Pam got excited by the idea of driving down to Marseilles, the French Mediterranean coastal port where Yvonne told them you could find the best Corsican wine.
Still high on the idea, the next day they did exactly that, but this time the trip was a disaster as Jim had his passport and wallet ripped off by local street hustlers expert at relieving drunk American tourists of their valuables. Forced to wait for two days for the US embassy to forward him a new passport and for Bob Greene to wire him some more cash, they flew on to Ajaccio, on the west coast of Corsica, where Pam zoned out on some of the seaside smack she’d been able to score in Marseilles—then, like Paris, in the death-rattle throes of its biggest heroin invasion ever. The only hassle about traveling around France this way, they now realized, was that neither of them could speak French. When they returned to Paris a week later, Pam hired a pretty nineteen-year-old blonde French Canadian girl named Robin Wertle. “My job included everything from getting a cleaning lady, typing letters, calling America, buying furniture, a typewriter for Jim, and making arrangements for him to show his films,” Wertle recalled. But Jim never did get around to showing any of his films. He was too busy telling himself how much he adored his new life in Paris to look back on what was.
Hervé Muller next saw Jim on June 11, at a performance of Robert Wilson’s then-in-vogue play, Le Regard du Sourd (Deaf Man’s Glance), at Théâtre de la Musique. Alain Ronay, Jim’s old UCLA buddy, now also living in Paris, had turned up during the intermission. After the show the three men headed for a cocktail bar named Rosebud. But Jim started to get hassled by fans, an unusual occurrence in Paris. Suddenly ill at ease, he insisted they move on to La Coupole. Somewhere along the line Pam showed up, accompanied by two “weird” guys—“minets bizarre”—none of them had met before, and they found themselves being led to various smack dens favored by Pam in the Saint-Germain area of the city, before finally ending the evening in the small hours drifting incoherently from the Café de Flore, to Les Deux Magots, and eventually Brasserie Lipp, joined by a crowd of Eurotrash flotsam and jetsam and self-appointed “artistic” dopers.
Hervé Muller never saw Jim Morrison again.
In a letter home to Frank and Kathy Lisciandro, Jim idealized his and Pam’s situation in Paris, urging his friends to join them. “There’s a room for you here.” He also wrote a postcard to Max Fink. “Dear Max, it’s a beautiful spring in the ‘City of Love.’ Just got back from Spain, Morocco & Corsica—Napoleon’s birthplace. Take a vacation! The women are great & the food is gorgeous. Love, Jim x.”
At the end of May, Jim even called the Doors’ office in L.A., ostensibly to say how much he dug the finished copy of L.A. Woman they had just sent him but in reality to try and gauge the temperature of his relationship with the band, see if his absence had made their charts grow any fonder. Pulling the short straw, he got John on the phone. “He’d just got the finished album,” Densmore told Max Bell in 2010. “Jim told me what a great place Paris was, and he said he was definitely coming back to L.A. He didn’t know when. He said good things about the band. He sounded happier than when he left.” What neither John nor anyone else from the Doors’ office had felt the need yet to tell Jim was that they were already halfway through recording a new album, and lining up their next major tour, too.
“It was in that spring,” says Vince Treanor, “when Bob Greene called me in and said, ‘Say, Vince, you wanna check the equipment and dah dah dah … You’re gonna start work in …’ August, I think it was, or end of July, or early August. And we got all the equipment checked out and got everything tested and got everything together for a road trip. Then we went into rehearsal. Well, of course, that was business every day. We were over there doing the rehearsals, during which Bruce Botnick had his portable board and his recording machine and he would tape the rehearsals, and they could listen to that. … Here’s all these things going on behind Jim’s back. Bill [Siddons] of course is not going to spill the beans. He was still employed by the other guys so he couldn’t say much or he’d be looking for another job. But everybody knew that Jim was out. That was the thing. And everybody knew that [the album they were working on while Jim was in Paris] was the threat that was being carried out. ‘Jim, we will never go onstage with you again. Only in the studio.’ But they never dreamt that the consequences were going to be as they were.”
Back in Paris, in June, Jim had hooked up again with Agnès Varda and Jacques Demy. “I wasn’t like a private friend where he’d come and have dinner on his own,” Varda recalls. “It was always in company. He sat in my kitchen in what’s supposed to be his time of craziness, [but] he was OK. I didn’t bother him, and I wasn’t constantly bothered about him.”
Still trying to catch a thrill, Jim and Pam flew over to London, in June, checking in to the Hyde Park Hotel, which Jim disliked, mainly because it was another drain on his rapidly dwindling finances. London, generally, was a drag. More so when he realized Pam had only suggested the trip after she’d discovered the Count was going to be there that month. He had been given the keys to Keith Richards and Anita Pallenberg’s lavish flophouse at No. 3 Cheyne Walk, in Chelsea, while the Stones guitarist was away at Villa Nellcôte, in the south of France, working on the next Stones album, Exile on Main St. Jean de Breteuil was now using his superior-strength smack to keep three prominent ladies dangling: Pamela, John Paul Getty Jr.’s wife, Talitha, and Mick Jagger’s former girlfriend, Marianne Faithfull. In her autobiography, Faithfull describes de Breteuil as “a horrible guy, someone who had crawled out from under a stone. Somehow I ended up with him. It was all about drugs and sex.”
Also in London again was Michael McClure, who recalled getting arrested in Soho with Jim for being “drunk and disorderly.” Released after a summary fine the next day, the two amigos jumped into a London taxi and demanded to be driven to the Lake District, a northern region of England known for its natural beauty, and more than two hundred miles from London—and had the police called on them again. “I guess taking a taxi all that way isn’t done ordinarily,” said McClure.
Jim had better luck when Alain Ronay accepted his invitation to join them in London. “I moved them to the Cadogan Hotel, near Sloane Square,” Ronay, who now lives in Los Angeles, told writer Max Bell in an extraordinary piece published in Classic Rock in 2010. “It was a happy time. No paparazzi. I never saw Jim sign one autograph. We went to the theater, did all the usual things. I returned with them to Paris and moved into the apartment. Pam had her own life entirely. She wasn’t always around, but for the whole of June I lived with Morrison, practically twenty-four hours a day. I won’t deny he was a dark and complicated person, or that Pam was a basket case. But strike the fact that Jim was despondent, or drug-addicted, or terminally depressed. He was living his dream, and that had nothing to do with rock. He was delighted at the success of L.A. Woman, but his pleasure lay elsewhere.”
That was certainly the impression he liked to give his French friends. Alone back in the Le Marais apartment, though, he still fretted over what would happen in Miami. If the final appeal failed, as seemed likely, he would either have to go back and do his time in one of the country’s toughest prisons—or never go home again. Something he was now beginning to consider seriously.
Sitting alone one afternoon drinking whiskey at the Café de Flore, Jim tuned in to two young American buskers shambling their way through Crosby, Stills & Nash’s latest hit, “Marrakesh Express.” They couldn’t believe their luck when they suddenly found Jim Morrison joining them on the street, trying to sing along. Inspired as only one very drunk, unhappy man can be, Jim excitedly arranged for them to join him in a small local studio, used primarily for producing radio jingles, where they recorded a handful of woefully undercooked tunes, with one notable exception: Jim’s poem to Pam, “Orange County Suite.” When he left, the engineer at the session gave Jim the tape box, on which Jim drunkenly scribbled a band name, Jomo and the Smoothies. Jim tossed the box into a plastic carrier bag from the La Samaritaine department store, then carelessly left it at the apartment of yet another newfound best friend, Phil Dalecky, telling him he’d pick it up another day. He never did, and these days you can find the recordings on the Internet under the title The Lost Paris Tapes.
In the last week or so of June, Jim hit a new low. The Count was back in Paris—but shacked up with Marianne Faithfull—and though he was still happy to supply Pam with all the smack she wanted, she was definitely not welcome to stay with him. In a more hateful mood than usual, she now sat around the Rue Beautreillis apartment, snorting heroin and berating Jim for not getting on with more writing. He had come here to be a poet, hadn’t he? Well, where was all the great fucking poetry, man? Or was that just more bullshit? Earlier in his stay, Jim had frequented the famous writers’ bookshop-cum-salon Shakespeare and Co., near Notre Dame. Now he simply sat in bars or outside cafés, staring into a glass. One day at the end of June, escaping Pam by walking the short distance to the beautiful Place des Vosges, he slumped on a bench and wrote what would be his last poem, “The Sidewalkers Moved.” “Join us at the demonstration,” he wrote, thinking back to the Paris riots of 1968, while staring blindly into his own unimagined future.
Jim’s health had grown worse again. He was coughing up blood, feeling feverish. Pam dragged him to an American doctor, who prescribed him asthma medicines, but Jim already had his own medicines: whiskey, vodka, beer, wine. Plus coke, weed, hash, and, increasingly, now that Pam was around more, little tastes here and there of the china white the Count was selling her. Pam later told friends he did it to keep her company, “snorting lines off his credit card.” Vince Treanor can’t disguise the disgust in his voice at such stories. “That stupid bitch he was with. She was a heroin addict right from the start. It was she that introduced him to that particular recreational facility.” As Vince puts it, that’s when “things went from badder to worser, you know?”
In one of the last letters Jim would write, dated June 28, he told Bob Greene, “Paris is beautiful in the sun, an exciting town, built for human beings. Speaking to Bill [Siddons] a while back I told him of our desire to stay here indefinitely.” He waxed lyrical about the plans he and Pam now had to purchase an old property; they pictured themselves living in an old church, perhaps, he wrote. Someplace where Jim didn’t have to be a rock star anymore and really could become a poet. Getting to the point, Jim asked Greene “for a sort of financial statement in general. Also a copy of the [Doors] partnership agreement.”
Almost out of money, he urged Greene to place Themis in the care of Pam’s sister Judy and her husband. “We’d like to be completely clear of any involvement.” He also asked Bob “to organize new credit cards … we could use them made out in both our names.” And to please send him a check made out for $3,000 (about $17,500 in today’s money). “House bills are catching up,” he plaintively explained. Movingly, Jim also asked if Bob could make sure his dog, Sage, was well looked after. “Send Judy 100 bucks for the dog.” It was Jim’s good-bye letter to his old life.
On July 1, 1971, the day before Jim died, he and Pam had a very loud, very public fight in a neighborhood restaurant near their apartment, observed at close quarters by two German students who were sharing their table. Pam stormed off and Jim went for a long, despondent walk before finally settling into a chair at a table for one at the bar Le Mazet, in the Saint-Michel district, where he was spotted by an American fan—Jim, alone, surrounded by people, drinking white wine and eating a croque monsieur.
Alain Ronay, who had been staying with Jim at the apartment, had now moved out, escaping to the less melodramatic atmosphere of Agnès Varda’s house on Rue Daguerre, where she was now working with the director Bernardo Bertolucci on dialogue for his next film, to be called Last Tango in Paris. The film, starring Marlon Brando and released a year later, was about a deeply troubled American, exiled and close to death in Paris, and newly obsessed with an anonymous young Frenchwoman, played by a beautiful, red-haired young actress named Maria Schneider. When it was later suggested that the storyline was in some way inspired by Jim Morrison’s last, choking days in Paris, nobody associated with the film denied it.
On Friday, July 2, Jim spent his last morning strolling around a sunny Le Marais with Alain Ronay. Jim bought some jewelry for Pam. Despite it all, she was the only woman he really felt he didn’t have to be someone else around, someone good. Pam may have been a junkie, a sponger, a take-take-taker, but at least she knew who Jim really was. Knew he had never really been there for her and never would, yet accepted that as part of the unspoken bargain they had made somewhere back down the road, back when they both felt sure they somehow had a choice in the matter.
Jim and Alain stopped for lunch at Ma Bourgogne, the same traditional bistro that Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir had once sought refuge in. But Jim wolfed down the rich Alsace-based food too quickly, sparking another strenuous bout of hiccups. They spent the rest of the afternoon strolling around, picking up some newly mended boots for Jim at an old-fashioned cobbler’s on Place de la Bastille. These days Alain Ronay recalls a relaxed Jim, walking around, taking in the sights and smells of what was still then one of the more low-rent districts of Paris, the houses old, the shops and bistros even older. In reality, though, Jim was down, uneven, lost. They stopped off for the inevitable beers at Café du Phare, one of the Bastille’s oldest cafés, from where it was just a short walk up Rue de la Roquette to the Cimetière du Père-Lachaise, the beautiful cemetery Jim had visited recently and told Pam wistfully he would like to be buried in someday.
When Alain got up to leave for a dinner date with Varda, a clearly agitated Jim begged him to stay, to not leave him alone like this. “One more short beer! Come on! Do it for an old friend.” Alain reluctantly stayed for “one more beer.” Regarding his friend closely as they drank their final beer together, Alain recalled in Classic Rock not being able to stop staring at Jim’s face, which had suddenly appeared to grow dark, almost black in the summer glare. Noticing his look, Jim demanded, “Well? What did you see?”
What happened next has since become one of the most celebrated mysteries in rock. Pamela Courson later claimed she and Jim went out for dinner at a Chinese restaurant, then on to the cinema Action Lafayette to see an old movie Alain had recommended: Pursued, a 1947 film noir western with Freudian undertones set in New Mexico and starring a still-young Robert Mitchum and the beautiful Teresa Wright. Set at the turn of the century and told in flashback, the story centers on Mitchum’s character, whose family was wiped out when he was a boy. Jim couldn’t get into it, though; the movie was badly subtitled, and after drinking all day and night he was coming down and needed a pick-me-up, and Pam was so stoned she kept nodding out, so they left early and walked back to their apartment.
The following afternoon, however, in her official police statement to officer Jacques Manchez, as translated by Alain Ronay, Pam would claim she had been too ill to go out so Jim had dined alone at a Chinese place on Rue Saint-Antoine, and had washed the meal down with several glasses of beer. After that, she said, Jim went on to the cinema alone, returning home around 1 AM. She said Jim then built a fire, as was his habit, despite the summer heat, and started drinking whiskey. She said she recalled him sitting at his desk, trying to write in one of his spiral-bound notebooks that would later become known as the “Last French Notebook.”
She later added a further detail to this version of the story, when she told it to close friends back in L.A., which she did not make in her official police statement—that for the third day running, Jim then snorted a line of Pam’s heroin from a small mirror. According to her official version, she and Jim then kicked back to watch some of the Super 8 home movies they’d made on their travels that spring. Pam told Manchez, referring to Jim not by name or even as her lover, but simply as “my friend,” that he had “appeared healthy and seemed very happy. But I noticed there was something not quite right about him. Later we played some records that I found in the bedroom and we played music for two hours lying on the bed. I think we fell asleep about 2:30 but I can’t say when exactly. The record player turned itself off.”
Manchez asked her, “Did you have sex with the deceased?” She replied, “No, we didn’t have sex last night. About 3:30 AM, I think—there isn’t a clock in the bedroom—my friend wakes me with the noise of his breathing. He was so noisy I got the impression he must need help. I wanted to help my friend. I asked him, did he want a doctor? No. He said he was OK, and he was going to take a hot bath. He got in the bath and then he called me because he felt sick.” She added, “I took him in an orange saucepan, and my friend threw up the meal he’d eaten and I noticed some blood clots.”
She went on, as though reciting her lines. “He is sick three times. Third time it’s just blood. I tipped the pan into the basin, then I washed it. Now my friend says he feels strange. ‘But I don’t feel ill enough for you to call me a doctor. I feel better now. It’s over. Go to bed!’ he tells me. ‘I’m gonna stay in the bath, and I’ll be in with you later.’ I thought he seemed better, because he’d been sick, and his color had returned, so I went back to bed feeling reassured. I don’t know when I went back to sleep, but I woke up later and realized my friend wasn’t in bed with me. I ran to the bathroom and saw he was still in the bath with his head back as if asleep. He had blood round his nostrils. I thought he must be ill, or he’s unconscious. I tried to pull him out of the bath but it was impossible for me. At that point I called Mr. Ronay and he came with Mrs. Agnès Demy [Varda], and they called the police station for me.”
So much for Pamela Courson’s official police statement. But this is what she later told Alain Ronay. That Jim had returned that night and started listening to Doors albums, specifically Waiting for the Sun and the track “Not to Touch the Earth.” She and Jim both snorted smack, which the Count had told her was 86 percent pure—roughly four times the strength of regular street-bought heroin. She said they both began crashing out around 3 AM. The rest of the story stuck close to the “official” version she’d given the cops. She later told Ray that at one point she’d thought she heard Jim calling out to her. “Pamela—are you there?” How she’d rushed to the bathroom only to find him already dead. Then phoned Alain and Agnès in a panic. For the record, it should be stated that neither the admirable Varda nor the staunch friend Ronay have ever believed the rumors about Jim dying at the Rock and Roll Circus and have always maintained a consoling certainty in Pamela’s version of events.
All of which would form the backbone of what the rest of the world believed to be the story of Jim Morrison’s death for the next four decades. Poor old Jim, found in a bathtub by his loving spouse, dead of a heart attack, aged just twenty-seven. And not a word of it true …
Here’s what really happened.
At around 1 AM, a shit-faced Jim had slunk into the Rock and Roll Circus, slurring his hellos to the pretty blonde cloakroom girl before taking the stairs very carefully down to the basement club, where he went to the bar and ordered a bottle of vodka. “He was with some friends who I didn’t know,” the club’s manager, Sam Bernett, told Classic Rock. “He was expecting people to bring him some stuff for Pamela. He was often in there doing that, or going to little cafés and dealers in the streets in Saint-Germain. He was waiting. He drank, talked, I listened but I wasn’t always next to him. I bought him drinks. About 2 AM two guys came and then for twenty minutes he wasn’t at the bar. He disappeared.”
According to Patrick Chauvel, also there that night, Jean de Breteuil—the Count—maintained his own side room at the Circus from which he would deal heroin. “When you were going down those steep stairs from the cloakroom, into the club, there was a small room halfway down on the left filled with cushions, just cushions everywhere, and he was there. So it was like a club in the club. You would go left and voilà! And then after you would go down and listen to the music completely … on drugs, you know? He was like a guru—all the girls slept with him, once or twice. It was like sleeping with Jesus or something. You know?” he chuckles. “It didn’t count!”
The real names of the “two guys” Jim “disappeared” with that night have never been discovered. But they were rumored to be nicknamed Le Chinois (the Chinese man) and Le Petit Robert (Little Bob). Both were working that night for the Count. When Sam Bernett was alerted to the rumpus developing in the ladies’ bathroom, he banged on the door. “Anyone there?” But there was no reply. Not even the sound of someone moving around inside. Rien.
In an extraordinary interview given to Max Bell of Classic Rock magazine in 2010, Bernett recalled, “I called my security guy to smash the door open and inside was Jim. Sitting on the loo with no reaction, like he’s sleeping or knocked out, his trousers slightly down. He was sitting with his head forward and his arms down—like a dead guy, actually. I shook him. I looked at his face, still no reaction.” His skin was gray, his eyes closed, with blood foaming under his nose and around his mouth and beard. Bernett leaned forward and tried shaking him by his shoulders, shouting at him to wake up—but nothing. “I told the girl to get a doctor. I had a friend, a customer there every night—he was in the club. He came, looked at Jim, and started a little check-up.” In his 2007 memoir, The End: Jim Morrison, Bernett recalls the doctor “held Jim’s head back, raised his eyelids, opened his mouth, took his pulse, and put his ear to his chest. He looked for marks and traces on the body and the arms. A quick and professional examination. His diagnosis was just as precise: ‘This man is dead.’ Apparently the victim of cardiac arrest. The doctor was no fool and spoke about a fatal overdose.”
With onlookers now starting to gather, Sam ordered the bathroom to be cleared, began telling customers it might be best for them to leave the club early that night. Panicking, Bernett went to call the police and ambulance services. But before he could get to a phone, he was stopped in his tracks by Le Chinois and Little Bob. “He’s not dead,” Bernett recalled them telling him. “He’s just fucked up. Don’t call the police, don’t call his family. We take him home, we know where he lives.” Bernett was in a state of shock, couldn’t quite believe his ears. “I said, ‘That’s impossible! We have to call the police and the medical people.’ ‘No!’ they say. ‘Forget it. We’ll take him and we’ll use a back door.’ ”
With the Circus sharing the building with the Alcazar, a transvestite cabaret, there was a private connecting door situated at the back of the Circus cloakroom. The men decided to get Jim’s body out the back way, via the Alcazar. There then followed a macabre, Chaplinesque scene with the two drug dealers fumblingly trying to drag the dead body down the corridor. Le Chinois was a big guy, more than able to carry such dead weight. Little Bob was smaller, less able, and kept dropping his end of the body. Even when they swapped, with Le Chinois carrying the head end, Little Bob had to keep stopping for a breather.
They eventually got the body out to the street door opposite the Rue de Seine and the entrance to the Circus. “The Alcazar had closed,” says Bernett. “The cabaret was over, apart from a few people who looked to see what was happening. They took him to the apartment. I was told this. They put him in the tub and waited an hour and a half before calling the paramedic. Pamela was in the apartment, out of her mind, screaming. Completely stoned …”
According to Patrick Chauvel, who was also there that night and a witness to this grisly scene, Jean-Marie Rivière, who owned the Alcazar and was “a king of the Parisian music halls and night club scene,” now got involved. “He spoke to several guys, including me, and said, ‘We’ve got a problem here.’ They called in a doctor and asked us to stay around and, to make the [story] shorter, we had to take him out of there because if they find Jim Morrison dead in the club, that’s the end of the club. They all just wanted to keep it real quiet. It was an embarrassment, so they took him via the tunnel between the clubs, which connected the cloakrooms, and up the stairs to the backstage street door. The boss was afraid of having a doctor or a newsman say anything, so they evacuated Jim, et voilà, into the car.”
And he helped? “Yes, I helped carry him in a blanket. I can’t say one hundred percent that he was dead, but he wasn’t moving. That’s for sure. Yeah, I thought, ‘This is bizarre,’ but I’d just come back from Vietnam. I’d seen a lot of weird things. Anyhow, he was then put into the backseat of a Mercedes. I don’t know who drove the car. They took him home, is what they told me. I didn’t see the car leave, no. I helped put him in and then went back inside the Circus. They wanted everything to look as normal as possible. I remember they put him into the backseat very gently, and that’s why I thought he might still be alive. I saw that shape, that heavy shape …”
Later that night, Sam and Patrick and a few others, like Cameron Watson, an American club DJ then in Paris to escape the draft to Vietnam, had little doubt in their minds about what had happened that night. “Well, everybody knew you could get drugs in the clubs. That was not a big thing,” says Patrick. “But that week somebody brought some drugs that was pretty strong, I think. Because [Jim was] not the only guy who died in Paris in the weeks [that followed]. There was like a stronger dose, or whatever. It was pure or something, and I think, I’m not a specialist, but I think what happened is when you put the same dose but the drug is stronger, then you’ve got your problem. So I think [Jim] just overdosed not by taking more, but by taking a more pure drug than the usual way.”
The fact that he had also spent the whole day and night drinking beer, wine, whiskey, and vodka also took its toll. The connection was less well known in 1971, but a small mixture of alcohol and even the lowest-grade heroin can prove incredibly toxic, often fatal. As for what happened next, back at the apartment on Rue Beautreillis, only one man seemed to hint that he knew more than was good for him—and he killed himself, sticking a shotgun in his mouth and pulling the trigger, in front of a roomful of people at a party held—bizarrely—at the same Rue Beautreillis just a few months later.
What now seems certain is that Pam, true to form, was more concerned with saving herself than worrying about Jim when the men burst into her apartment at around 3 AM. Junkies stratify their lives clearly and without pause for doubt: first, above anything else, comes the junk. How much they have, how little, how safe it is to use, how unsafe. What the chances are, as specifically as possible, of them being busted, or even worse, left without any gear? Pam’s first thought when she saw the two breathless henchmen dragging Jim’s body in, wrapped in a blanket was, Have they come to steal my heroin? Or, worse, have they come to bust me, or rape me, then steal my heroin? Initially she gave little thought to Jim’s prone and apparently unconscious body—she had seen him carried home like that by complete strangers too many times before for that to even flicker on her radar. Screaming, she began to run around the apartment “cleaning up,” that is, hiding the detritus of another night spent chopping lines, snorting lines, spilling lines, then chopping and snorting some more. The stuff was everywhere, the nuclear fallout of the full-time, blood-oath junkie.
When the two men, in their broken English, made it clear they were friends of the Count’s, that they were here to help, she began, slowly, still woozy and still plenty wary, to calm down and force her brain into gear. When they began undressing the casually slung body on the floor, though, a new sense of foreboding overtook her.
What the fuck were they doing?
The two men carried the now-naked body over to the bath, laid it in the tub, and began to run the hot-water tap. They then dragged Pam into the adjoining room and began to tell her what to do. The hot water was to disguise the cause of death. She would wait two hours, then call the paramedics. The two men would be sitting outside in their car watching for the paramedics’ arrival. Her story was simple: she knew nothing. Jim had spent the night with her, he had taken a bath when she went to bed. When she woke up this is how she found him—and called the paras. Got it? And while she was waiting to do that, she should clean the fucking place up. The cops would not take kindly to finding all this shit all over the place …
Pamela, lost, alone, stoned immaculate, did as she was told. With the finely attuned sense of survival that only the most devout heroin addicts have access to, she instantly calculated that this was her only chance of making it out of this mess alive. Thanks a fucking bunch, Jimbo …
According to Marianne Faithfull’s 1996 memoir, Faithfull, Pamela called Jean de Breteuil, whom Marianne was in bed with, at around 6 AM. “We were staying at L’Hotel. Suddenly Jean had to leave. He slammed out the room. He didn’t come right back. He returned in the early hours very agitated. I was fucked up on Tuinals. For no reason he beat me up. I asked him, ‘Did you have a good time there?’ He replied: ‘Get packed, we’re going to Morocco.’ ”
By lunchtime they were on a plane to Marrakech, where they took refuge with the Count’s mother at another notorious international jet-set hangout, the Villa Taylor in Tangiers. Marianne had never seen the Count in such a state. Not even after the death of Janis Joplin nine months before, when de Breteuil had actually boasted about being the guy who’d sold her the fatally strong heroin that killed her. As Faithfull writes in her book, de Breteuil was “scared for his life. Jim Morrison had OD’d, and he had provided the smack. He saw himself as dealer to the stars. Now he was a small time dealer in big trouble. Jean took me to Tangier. It was a disaster. We were horribly strung out. In a panic before he left Paris he got rid of all his drugs.”
Another guest at the Villa that evening was the noted musicologist Roger Steffens, who a week later wrote an extraordinary letter home to his family, dated July 9, in which he observed, “The Countess’s son, Jean, the handsome twenty-one-year-old jet-setting playboy who inherits his late father’s title this November, arrived unexpectedly in Marrakesh last Saturday.” He went on to explain how the visibly shaken Count had arrived with a clearly distressed Marianne Faithfull. “The pair had just come from two violent days in Paris, which began with an auto crash, included an attempt by Jean’s best friend to slash his wrists, and culminated in a call from another old girlfriend of Jean’s, Pamela Courson, who was staying in Paris with her husband [sic] Jim Morrison, lead singer of the Doors. She begged Jean to rush over to her place, and when he arrived they found Morrison dead in the bathtub of an apparent overdose of drugs. All these being too much, Marianne and Jean hopped a plane for Marrakesh, and a peaceful, retreating week.”
Retreating, yes. Peaceful, no. Speaking more than forty years later, Steffens recalled how “Jean and Marianne seemed very high and spaced out as they recounted the story. They were very upset! I met Jean through his mother, the Countess de Breteuil, second wife—and first love, though a commoner—of the late Count. Jean was the apple of his mother’s eye, but in reality a profligate drug dealer who left a long trail of disasters in his wake.” Quite so. Among them, Janis Joplin, Talitha Getty (who would die, in Rome, of a heroin overdose just eleven days later), Pamela Courson (who also died of a heroin overdose, back home in L.A., less than three years later), Jim Morrison, of course. Even himself—before 1971 was over, Jean de Breteuil, too, would die in Tangier of a massive heroin overdose.
This was the end. Finis. And it was much, much worse than anyone, least of all the Doors, could ever have imagined.

 21

The Calm Calculus of Reason


Jim Morrison had barely felt the heroin slide down the back of his throat before the lies began. Barely time to feel the first heat wave of nausea and pleasure envelope his fat, sweaty body before the vultures began circling, shitting from on high.
The cleaners had just arrived at the club around eight o’clock that morning, slopping out the bathroom floors and sluicing away the blood and semen, urine and puke, on the walls, the usual morning-after-the-night-before scene for the Circus’s regular nettoyeurs. Around the same time, Pam was doing some nettoyage des toilettes of her own, calling Alain Ronay at Agnès Varda’s house. “Please call an ambulance. I think my Jim is dying,” she tells them, knowing Jim has been dead for at least three hours. “He is in the bath. He has blood around his nose. Please call for me.”
As Varda later recalled, “Pamela called my house and I answered. I called for the firemen—les pompiers. In an accident you always call them, they are the first assistance, like paramedics. I told them: ‘Go right away to this address. There is a scene there where maybe someone is out of life.’ Ronay gave the exact address. We went together, we arrived, and the fireman said, ‘It’s too late—he’s already dead.’ ” Next on the scene was Varda’s family doctor, Dr. Max Vasille, whom she had also phoned. “But it was hopeless.”
The first official on the scene was Alain Raisson. Now living in Rio de Janeiro, he recalls arriving at the apartment with his usual team of five. “We carried him onto the bed to do cardiac massage,” he says. “We tried to revive him and failed. It was a short, intense, very real and brief encounter.” The official police doctor, who arrived a few minutes later, was astonished when told he was examining the corpse of a twenty-seven-year-old. “He looks much older. I would have said a fifty-seven-year-old!” the doctor exclaimed. But the doctor was not young either, struggling against the Paris heat. Soon all of Paris’s most affluent citizens would flee the city for their summer vacations. The doctor was in no hurry to ask awkward questions. It seemed obvious what had happened, and, without any of the surviving relatives pushing for more detail, he was happy to sign away the death as being from “natural causes.” Autopsies were not as a rule performed in France unless there was a suspicion of murder. The doctor advised the death had been caused by heart failure, possibly brought about by respiratory problems. “Affaire classée.” Case closed.
By nine o’clock that Saturday the street outside Jim and Pam’s apartment was choked with police and onlookers. Yet Alain Ronay had managed to push through to take Pam to a nearby undertaker’s office and, later, to arrange to pick up an official death certificate at the town hall, which caused the commissioner of police handling the matter great consternation. Pam flushed away her entire stash before calling the paramedics, who she knew would bring with them the cops. She had been cool, done what she’d been told, or else. More mysteriously, she had also set fire to a bundle of Jim’s letters and notes, his scrawled two-line poems and small-hours elegies. When the commissioner of police arrived on the scene and saw the small fire burning in the grate, he demanded to know why she had done that. She answered, in her small, singsong, stoney-woney voice, “They mustn’t read this stuff, this stuff!”
The only note she ever admitted to keeping was the one that contained the disturbingly self-aware lines: “Last words, Last words. Out.” Followed by a space and then, “Regret for wasted nights & wasted years / I pissed it all away / American Music.” A truth teller, then, right to the end, my friend.
Now it was a slow, sunny Parisian Saturday. That night, the Rock and Roll Circus and the Alcazar opened as normal. As did La Boule, Le Sherwood, and all the other late-night hiding places for the night-bound and drug-serene. Although no one working at the Circus was allowed to breathe a word, everybody was talking about it under their breath. Earlier that day, in the dying moments at La Bulle, those still awake told of seeing Cameron Watson, who was the night-owl DJ there, being approached by two heavy-set, swarthy-looking men. Watson immediately cut the music and announced through his microphone, “Ladies and gentlemen, Jim Morrison has died tonight at the Rock and Roll Circus.” There was a moment of ill-prepared silence, then he put another record on and people again began to dance. By that night word on the street was that the Corsican Mafia had offed Morrison. A hit man had been sent up especially from Marseilles to silence the crazy American. Others told of seeing Jim beaten to death, maybe stabbed, in a street fight with the Count and his heavies. Still others said they’d heard from reliable sources that he had committed suicide. That they had seen it coming for weeks.
As the years passed, these rumors assumed even more outrageous shape. There was a huge blood-soaked knife found in the bathroom. He’d been shot twice in the head. There were strange bruises on his body. (The latter was given credence by the number of times the body was dropped during its tortured journey from the ladies’ bathroom at the Rock and Roll Circus and up the three flights of stairs to his apartment.) Today you can even buy books that claim Morrison’s death was the work of the CIA, as part of a covert campaign to reclaim youth culture, administering fatal drug overdoses first to Brian Jones, then Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and now Jim Morrison. Also on the list were John Lennon, Bob Dylan, and Mick Jagger. A decade later the same claims would be made about the tragic death from cancer of Bob Marley.
But the most sickening and absurd claim of all, and the one that has persisted the longest, was that he had not died at all, that Jim Morrison had faked his own death in order to escape the trappings of celebrity. This overlooked the fact that Jim had already forced the Doors to plan for a life without him, long before he died. That, in fact, he had already begun to live a life as far away from the famous Lizard King of L.A. as possible, so grossly overweight and heavily bearded few who passed him in the street recognized him anymore anyway. That no one cared anymore, man, what the fuck he did next.
As was French custom, his body was placed in a coffin and laid out on a long table in the bedroom. The next day was Sunday, and the day after that was a French holiday, so there was nothing else to be done anyway, they were told. Somebody from the undertaker’s would be by every few hours with large blocks of dry ice so that the decomposing body wouldn’t begin smelling too bad too quickly. Also contrary to the stories that have been passed down ever since, Pam did not spend the night alone with Jim’s body. “She stayed at my place and she went back to the apartment in the day,” according to Agnès Varda. “People were with her at all times. The secrétaire [Robin Wertle] was there. The police and the undertaker had keys to Rue Beautreillis.”
With the Count having vanished in a puff of pure Moroccan, and Jim lying dead on a bed of ice at the apartment, Pam spent the weekend relying completely on the goodwill of Varda and Ronay. There were a couple attempts to try and call home, but it was the July 4 weekend in the United States and no one was in the Doors’ office. Pam had dialed back so far from the other members of the band she didn’t even have their home numbers anymore. She determined to wait until Tuesday, when everybody would be back at work after Independence Day, and call Bill Siddons. But on Monday, July 5, Clive Selwood, who ran Elektra’s London offices, called Bill at home. “Three journalists have called me and asked if Morrison is dead,” he told him down the crackling phone line. Bill tried to shrug it off, assuring Clive the Jim-is-dead rumors did the rounds regularly in the States. Maybe they had just spread to London. But Clive was not so sure. The journalists in question had not been long-haired, pot-smoking music press bozos. These were serious reporters.
Bill spent the next six hours trying to call Pam in Paris. He finally got her on the phone at around 9 PM, French time. She blurted out the news and became hysterical. Bill promised to fly over immediately. She was to hang on, hold it together. For Jim. “I got to the apartment on Tuesday morning while all the local workers were in the cafés drinking their coffee and brandy,” he recalled in 2010. “Pam was alone. She was coherent but totally distraught. She’d hit the wall. I cooperated as best as I could. I was only twenty-one. I had no tools to deal with this. We ran around the city all day. She filed a report at the American embassy [“The Death of an American Citizen Abroad” forms] and we went to the funeral house.” Bill denies later stories that he ordered a more expensive white ash coffin for Jim to be buried in. He says he simply took Pam’s explanation for Jim’s death at face value. “All I know is Pam told me he died of a heart attack. She simply said, ‘I went to check on him, and he was no longer with us.’ ”
Speaking now from his office in Sherman Oaks, Bill recalls it as a trip into the unknown, “before telex, before fax!” Still just twenty-one years old at the time, trying to calm Pam down long enough to make arrangements for the funeral and keep his own feelings in check was an almost impossible task. “I lost someone that I just loved as a person. I mean, as much as a handful as Jim was in so many ways, he was a brilliant talent. The smartest guy I ever met, and a really good soul. He drove people crazy—intentionally. And I saw it, so it didn’t drive me crazy. So it was incredibly difficult to do. At the same time, there was no question: I was going to do … to be the support system that was needed in the moment. And I went to Paris, sat down with Pam, told her, ‘I am here on my own volition. I’m not here representing the other guys. I’m here to help you with anything you need to do. Let’s make this as painless as possible. Let’s work together in making this happen.’
“And she accepted it for what it was and … you know, we did everything together for the next three days until we flew home. I understood her values. She told me that Jim wanted to be buried in Père Lachaise and she told me the conversations of how it had happened. And I just went, ‘OK, let’s make it happen,’ and we did what we had to do.” One thing Bill was intent on doing, he explains, was avoiding the media circus that had surrounded the similarly sordid deaths of Brian, Jimi, and Janis over the past year. “Pam and I just … we talked about it and she said, ‘I don’t want it to be like Jimi and Janis.’ I said, ‘It won’t be. We are gonna bury Jim as an American poet.’ We didn’t tell the French authorities anything about [it], we didn’t say rock star singer. We said American poet. Same thing with the Père Lachaise people. Fortunately the Doors were not huge over there. And we were able to get it done before the media even found out about it.”
According to Agnès Varda, though, “When people say that Bill Siddons organized Jim’s funeral at Père Lachaise—no, he did not. I did that. I helped with all the arrangements. It wasn’t easy getting a foreigner into Père Lachaise. Anyway Jacques and I organized with Alain. There was no priest. It was all done quickly and properly. Just normal. Is it lucky to have been there? Would you love to have been there? The man was dead! I wish he were still alive. He cannot be replaced. Voilà!” While according to Alain Ronay, “I buried Morrison in Père Lachaise. It was my idea. I was the only person at the funeral parlor. I picked the site. I went alone. Agnès had nothing to do with it. Bill Siddons can’t take credit. Can he speak French? Give me a break. Enough already.” What Siddons’s arrival did do, he agrees, is take care of Pam. “She had no money and she was losing control. Agnès was good to her. Agnès drove me to the funeral. Pam wanted Jim buried in L.A. for God’s sake! What? And have bus tours stopping every two hours?”
Now Paris’s second most popular tourist site—after the Eiffel Tower—at the time of his initial interment on July 7, Jim’s grave was unmarked, and listed in the cemetery directory as Douglas James Morrison, the name Pam had given the police in order to try and disguise who he really was. A few days later a black metal plaque was placed there, with the singer’s name given this time as “Morisson [sic], James Douglas.” It was stolen two years later and replaced by another, smaller stone plaque, with the surname again spelled incorrectly. When this too was stolen, the cemetery authorities decided to mark the grave. By then the grave site was smothered in graffiti, at first in chalk, then soon with paint and spray cans, indented by morbid slogans and lines from Doors songs. In 1981 the Croatian sculptor Mladen Mikulin made a special bust, which he placed over a new gravestone to commemorate the tenth anniversary of Jim’s death; the bust was defaced mercilessly over the years, smothered in graffiti and littered with cigarette butts and empty beer cans. It was finally stolen in 1988. Mikulin made another in 1989, which was also soon stolen. And finally there was a bronze portrait of Jim, set up in 2001. But that didn’t last long either before “fans” first defaced, then stole it. In the early nineties, Jim’s now-retired father, Steve, consulted with E. Nicholas Genovese, professor of classics and humanities at San Diego State University, to produce a flat stone for the grave. It came with a beautiful bronze plaque with an inscription in Greek: KATA TON ΔAIMONA EAYTOY, meaning “according to his own daemon”—a.k.a. “guiding spirit.” Or in the simple but to-the-point words of a lifelong military man and now-heartbroken father of a son he would never quite understand yet wished, finally, to honor: “True to Himself.”
One detail nobody disagrees with is that Bill Siddons never took the opportunity to view Jim’s dead body. This would become the linchpin of all the he-faked-his-own-death guff that still bubbles around Morrison’s legacy. Says Bill with a wry chuckle, “The only thing I doubted about my decision is that I went, ‘Yeah, I guess technically I should have looked at the body.’ But I loved this man. My dad died a few years before, and when he died I walked into the funeral home and the casket was open, and I just went, ‘Argh!’ I was only fourteen or something and my mother ran to the funeral director, got him to close the casket. I never want to see somebody that I loved dead. I want to remember them as I remember them. I was there for Jim as my friend. I wasn’t there to be the Doors’ manager doing something for the Doors’ career. I was just doing what I needed to do for Jim, and I did, and I never regretted any of that.”
More aggravating, he suggests, is how “Ray took great advantage of the fact that I hadn’t insisted on seeing the body. I knew Pamela. There was never a doubt in my mind about Jim’s death. I slept in the room with his casket. I knew that there wasn’t somebody else in there. I saw the anguish in Pam. I knew she wasn’t a very talented actress. There was just absolutely no doubt. And the fact that Ray chose to exploit the myth …” He sighs heavily. “OK, it’s your myth. I disagreed with it but …”
The funeral ceremony was perfunctory, modest, weird, Bill says. “I traveled with Pamela and the secretary, Robin Wertle, to the cemetery. Ronay and Varda followed separately.” There were four unnamed pallbearers, arranged as a courtesy by the undertakers. “Everyone was distraught, but it was a nice little good-bye ceremony. Pam said some words,” reciting from one of Jim’s last poems, “The Severed Garden,” and then they left. Ready to begin the rest of their lives. Or not, as the case may be …
The same week, the newspapers reported the death of Louis Armstrong, who’d died in his sleep from a heart attack, aged sixty-nine. Publicity surrounding Jim’s death was strangely muted by comparison. Bill had issued an official press statement the day he and Pam got back. It read: “I have just returned from Paris, where I attended the funeral of Jim Morrison. Jim was buried in a simple ceremony, with only a few friends present. The initial news of his death and funeral was kept quiet because those of us who knew him intimately and loved him as a person wanted to avoid all the notoriety and circus-like atmosphere that surrounded the deaths of such other rock personalities as Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. I can say that Jim died peacefully of natural causes—he had been in Paris since March with his wife [sic], Pam. He had seen a doctor in Paris about a respiratory problem, and had complained of this problem on Saturday—the day of his death. I hope that Jim is remembered not only as a rock singer and poet, but also as a warm human being. He was the most warm, most human, most understanding person I’ve known. This wasn’t always the Jim Morrison people read about—but it was the Jim Morrison I knew, and his close friends will remember.”
Two days later, however, Britain’s then-highest-profile weekly music paper, Melody Maker, was still denying the rumors of Jim’s death. Based on a phone call a reporter from the United Press agency had made to Pam the day Bill arrived in Paris, in which she insisted that Jim was alive but staying at a special clinic outside Paris to convalesce, news of his death took much longer to sink in than it should have. Several newspapers around the world ran with the story, ignoring Bill Siddons’s statement. On July 8, the day after the funeral, the cover of a French magazine, Pop Musique, declared: “Jim Morrison n’est pas mort” (Jim Morrison is not dead).
When Patricia Kennealy got the news of Jim’s death, she immediately flew to Paris. She found the soil around the grave surrounded by shells, with a wooden plaque with Morrison’s name on top of it. She knelt there alone with her thoughts, silently vowing to Jim to remain true, no matter what.
All the time Jim had been away in Paris, she says now, “It was agony. It was absolute torture. I did not know how I was going to manage. Frankly, I didn’t think I’d ever see him again because he would die. I honestly believed that it was going to kill him. And, as we see, it did. But you hope against hope when you care about someone. When you’re in a relationship with someone. When you’re married to someone. I mean, you do what you do, you know? People have asked me, ‘He was very brutal to you from time to time.’ I say, ‘Yeah, he was. But that wasn’t him.’ Maybe that was me making excuses, but I never believed that that was him. And other people have said the same. I mean there were so many different Jim Morrisons, I think anybody that ever knew him for kind of a significant degree has their own Jim that they saw. I like to think I got the best of it, frankly, because that’s just what I have to think.”
Patricia, who changed her name legally to Kennealy-Morrison shortly after Jim Morrison’s death, remains bitter toward Pamela Courson. “I mean, both of them told me they had no sexual relationship whatsoever from about 1969 onwards … I think what it was, was that they imprinted on each other before he became famous and it was very easy and comfortable for both of them. I mean, basically they competed with one another to be more stoned and more drunk and more outrageous and more horrible to one another. It was a very, very sick relationship. He told me that himself when we first started going out. He said, basically, ‘It was a poisoned relationship, half pity and half habit.’ And I think that really kind of sums it up. He knew it. It wasn’t that he was being stupid about it. He knew exactly what was going on. But he didn’t, because of the addiction, because of the alcoholism, he didn’t have the strength to entirely get out of it. I think his best shot at that, honestly, came when he met me.”
Patricia claims she and Jim had already made plans for his return to the United States, that he was going to leave Pam and come and live with her in New York. “He had been in Paris telling his lawyer to set up some kind of alimony program for [Pam] so that when he got back he could just give her a payoff and make her go away. And that’s what he was telling me as well. So unless he was lying to Max Fink, the lawyer, and also to me, I think that that’s what would have happened. [Jim] was asking me to look for studios in New York and engineers because he wanted to record stuff solo without the Doors.”
Back in L.A., a week after Jim’s death, Bill began calling around, giving everyone the news. Asked for their memories of being told of their singer’s death, more than forty years later, all three Doors told me, as Ray put it, “On a certain level, it was not a surprise. Yes, there are some stimulations to alcohol and a freeing of inhibitions. But there’s an addictive quality to it also, and I think poor Jim fell victim to the addictive side of alcohol. That’s the great tragedy of Jim Morrison, that he did die at twenty-seven, as did Janis Joplin at twenty-seven and Jimi Hendrix at twenty-seven and Brian Jones at twenty-seven. Brilliant young people, some of them die young and it’s a great tragedy.”
Robby: “It was still a terrible shock, because we never thought that would happen, you know, really. Most of the things [Jim] did were for show, dramatic or whatever. But he obviously never killed anybody, or went that far. But, yeah, it was a surprise. I always thought he’d live to be a hundred. Be one of those drunks that drinks a bottle of whiskey every day and lives to be ninety.” He paused, sighed. Then added cheerfully, “He was lucky he didn’t meet his end sooner.”
John: “I don’t wanna blame his demise solely on fame. Certainly, there was the drink, as they say in Ireland. And then there’s genetics, growing up in a military family that moved around from base to base, so that you don’t have a lot of roots. I loved him for his words. He would just talk his words to me and I’d hear rhythms. And I was rather tortured by his self-destruction. But that was it. That was the card I was dealt, that band.” He added ruefully, “Jim knew I disapproved of his self-destruction, that’s for sure. More than anyone else in the band.”
Speaking in Follow the Music, Paul Rothchild recalled how he was sitting at home in Laurel Canyon when he heard the news. “And I had no feeling. I was numb. Then my first thought was, ‘Well, he finally made it over. I hope he’s feeling good now.’ To [Jim] the exploration of death was another and maybe the ultimate high.” “The End,” he said, was “almost a love song to death.”
In his memoir, Jac Holzman recalls how he had spent the July 4 weekend entertaining friends at his house, which he had recently moved into and named Tranquility. His partner, Ellen Sander, had recently moved out, taking their unborn baby with her. Jac was struggling with his own demons, but he tried to keep his guests entertained with funny stories about Jim Morrison. The time he’d squirted a fire extinguisher all over the studio at Sunset Sound. The time he’d pissed Ed Sullivan off mightily. The times he’d show up at Jac’s house unannounced and sit with his young son, Adam, the two of them playing happily together for hours. He told “all the stories I knew about Jim Morrison. I talked about him for hours.”
When he got to his office that Monday morning and took the call letting him know Jim had died, he says it affected him more than the death of his own father. Jac’s father had been old. Jim was young, just twenty-seven. Like Jimi and Janis. He resolved that Elektra would do better by Jim and the Doors, no quick albums or “any of that kind of sordid nonsense.” Jim Morrison was “the great seeker,” he says now. His presence in Jac’s life had changed everything, helped make him a multimillionaire, given Elektra a whole new identity, a whole different story to tell the world. Jac would never forget that.
Not one given to sentimentality, Vince Treanor says one of the big unspoken emotions among the rest of the Doors on learning of Jim’s death, however, must have been guilt. “Everybody knew that Jim was on a 10 percent grade—and he had no brakes. Everybody knew it. The problem was, everybody also knew that nobody could do anything about it. That was number one. Number two … they’re rehearsing all summer and finally [that summer] they have the in-house rehearsals, in the theater rehearsals and we were off on the road. But when the shock came [of Jim’s death] it was like ‘What? What? What?’ ” He says that when Bill called to say Jim really was dead, “Everyone went crazy. Everybody went crazy. The three boys stopped everything. It was, ‘Don’t talk to me.’ They weren’t together. They stopped rehearsals. They just came apart at the seams. They were really broke up about it.”
Pamela Des Barres simply could not get her head around the news, almost refused to believe it. “I saw [Jim] right before he went to France. He looked healthier than I’d seen him in a long, long time. He was in a convertible with a couple of friends. He saw me walking down the street, I was on a commercial audition and he just pulled up right in front of me on La Cienega and said, ‘Baby, you so sweet, and healthy.’ He said, ‘I’m going to France, and I’m going to start over. It’s good.’ He was upbeat. And I really felt so happy that he was going to do something good for himself. He was going to write his poetry, he was really into his work, and then he got there.”
She says that her first thought after hearing of his death was for Pam. Despite the crack-ups, the freak-outs, and hate trips and fighting in the street, she still believes that “he was in love with Pamela Courson, and that was it. He toyed and played with everybody because he could, because of the world we lived in, because it was there for him to fiddle with. He was curious and he wanted to tamper with everything. And he could, he was Jim fucking Morrison and he was a kid. He was a child. And of course he’s in this playground and he’s going to fuck around with it, but he was really in love with her.”
Since Jim Morrison’s death in 1971 the story of the Doors has continued, but only through wish fulfillment. A kind of phantasmagoria of Ray Manzarek’s avuncular fairy stories, given added resonance by the plethora of reissued albums, endless live compilations, box sets, limited editions, books, movies, documentaries, Internet conspiracy theories, music press whodunits, and generations of rock musicians and fans who can’t help but fall in love with the idea of Jim Morrison and the age-old fantasy he still conjures up for them. Today, despite the brilliantly researched, wonderfully evocative biographies, the Kindle-only record-straighteners, the kiss-and-tell memoirs from former lovers and friends, the online now-it-can-be-told memories of those still alive to tell the tale, at least as they lived it—despite all that, less is known about Jim Morrison and the Doors than ever before. In the acclaimed 2009 documentary When You’re Strange, the depth of what we don’t know about the Doors is revealed as staggering, unending, almost infinite. No, Jim did not die in a bathtub. But the story that he died that way is still told today just like the tale of Red Riding Hood. It doesn’t begin to uncover the truth, and it’s not meant to. Quite the reverse, in fact. No, Jim Morrison was not Christlike or given to prophetic visions. No, his poetry really wasn’t that good—yet.
But the idea of Jim Morrison—that grows more glorious, more precious, more removed from reality by the year. And who wants to spoil the kids’ fun by telling them there is no such thing as Santa Claus? Certainly not Ray Manzarek, Robby Krieger, and John Densmore. And who could blame them? After all the shit Jim put them through, practically destroying their careers when they should have been at their peaks. Something, paradoxically, he only redeemed himself for by dying so young and so “mysteriously.” His death, so young, so tragic, so apparently inexplicable, guaranteed the Doors a glorious afterlife they almost certainly would not have attained had Jim lived. They had already planned for a life without Jim, something they would ultimately not be able to do, as they would soon find out. But he would have been gone by then, staying in Paris and trying to become that poet he always talked so much about. That filmmaker he still hadn’t given up becoming. In the end, appalling though it seemed to be at the time, Jim Morrison’s death was the singer’s last great gift to the Doors. They would never work again without him. They would never need to work again without him.
Never mind the deeply troubled, immensely intelligent, utterly pretentious, irresponsibly generous, sexually gregarious, possibly repressed, possibly abused-as-a-child, irrefutably talented, brazenly forthcoming, immensely insulting, handsome-as-a-matadorin-his-prime, real-life person that was James Douglas Morrison. Never mind the books he quietly read, the sweet love he secretly made, the men he surrounded himself with who were never his equal, the cronies and the fawners, the groupies and the hangers-on, and how much he despised them for what they were but hated himself more. Never mind all that shit, man. Let’s get him onstage with the band again, man, one more fucking time. For the road! Get yourself up one morning, get yourself a beer, and let’s roll, baby, roll. Fuck, yeah! Go, Jimbo, go!
The last time Ray spoke to me, by phone from his home in Napa, some months before his death in 2013, when he surprised me by agreeing to appear on a BBC TV documentary I was helping make, by telling me I could take his words and “Do what you want, man. Be free! That’s how Jim wanted it!” he said, “You know what, I don’t think as word men we ever find that vocabulary, because music is totally ephemeral. How can words describe a musical sound? It can only be like something. You know, Robby’s guitar could scream like a banshee, but it was like a banshee. It wasn’t a banshee, it was screaming like a banshee, sliding up and down, this slithery snake of that bottleneck guitar of his. So there’s no words. … Music is totally ephemeral. It’s pure vibration, that’s all it does. It only deals with vibration, which is what made sense for it, in its placement in time, in the sixties. The sixties were a time of increased, heightened vibrations, due to psychedelic substances. And due to the fact that we were all so lucky to be there. We were the result of our parents winning the Depression and winning World War II, and we were the fruit of their Herculean effort. They sent us to school and said ‘Go and get education,’ and, I mean, we did!”
You knew what he meant even if you didn’t.
I asked him where he thought Strange Days fit into the Doors’ canon. I was writing a magazine story about the album, which I considered one of their best, alongside L.A. Woman, but Ray was so on-message all the time he barely listened to the questions, just gave you his rant, his practiced spiel, except coming from him, you knew the crazy motherfucker actually meant it, which was astounding when you thought about it after all these years.
And he said, “I never rank them. I don’t rank the albums. I don’t see them the same way that other people see them. I see this body of work—from the first song on the first album, to … all the way from ‘Break on Through’ to ‘Riders on the Storm.’ It’s our work, it’s our creation. It’s like your children. We’re like parents. We’ve created these little things and they live now without our help at all. Once we record them they become immortal and I couldn’t even possibly rank them. You know, some of the songs, in artistic terms, work better than some of the other songs. Some of them are more profound than some of the others. But even ‘Hello, I Love You’ works perfectly as a Top 40 ditty, which is why we created it. We said, ‘Let’s write a Top 40 song,’ you know? Let’s write something real light and three minutes and fun and light, something Top 40. And out of it came ‘Hello, I Love You.’ You know, so the preconceived plan was to write a Top 40 song, and it worked—boom! It was the first No. 1 song we had.”
For Ray, the music of the Doors was always the real story, the real trip. “It becomes a journey. It’s a psychic journey. You can enter into Doors-world and be taken on a long psychic journey through all manner of thought and all manner of being, and all types of consciousness.”
And if Jim hadn’t died, would it have carried on … ?
“Well, think of it this way. ‘Riders on the Storm’ is the beginning of a new Doors direction. That’s where it was going to go. Unfortunately it never got to go there. Now here’s the tragedy of the Doors. They never got to complete that journey. That narrative will always be open-ended. And it will never be completed. It would have taken, oh god, another decade to complete that journey. At least another decade. But that’s the tragedy of it. But we have what we have. We danced with Jim while he was here. We have the creations of his literary mind and we’re all better off for it.”
He was on a roll now, and it was a trip just hearing it. “And it’s open now. The mantle can be passed to the next generation, the next band that wants to come along and take over the Doors slot, it’s wide open. And I heartily encourage any band that wants to go in that direction. Please do, I’d love to hear some new Doors music. And that would encompass classical, jazz, of course a rock ’n’ roll foundation, blues, and then it’s got to have some flamenco in there too. It’s got to have a sense of Spanish. And I was planning that after Spanish we would go into adding some oriental things, some Japanese and Chinese.
“And a perfect example of that is on the album Strange Days—‘I Can’t See Your Face in Your Mind.’ It has a very oriental overtone to it. That’s one of the directions we never got to explore. I’m playing the marimba, an actual marimba, without playing the mallet backward. So it’s wood hitting against wood. And you can hear that in the background. Listen to the marimba in there, it combines both a Latin American and an oriental sound and note selections. And that’s where it would have gone.
“Plus, it would have gone, what we would have done, is gone into where John and Robby and I took it in An American Prayer”—the superb posthumous, spoken-word album the Doors released in 1978, which reactivated their career, alongside the recent use of “The End” in the brilliantly mind-altering Apocalypse Now, the movie made by another ex-UCLA visionary, Francis Ford Coppola—“in which there would have been a combination of poetry and musique concrète and sounds of the time, sounds of the street, and music and rock ’n’ roll and like that. It would have just continued to grow. It would have expanded and it would have left … perhaps it might have become too complex, but it would have left the basic power, the basic simplicity, of the Doors—Live at the Whisky a Go Go, as I like to call our first album. We would have expanded and gone further and further into performances … performance art onstage is what it would have become. And we never got to do it—shit, man! Fuck! That pisses me off …”
He paused, but only for a microsecond. Then, happy, began again. “So, you know, unfortunately we never got to grow into all the things we could have. But it was a great burst [of energy]. As Jim said, ‘That year we had a great visitation of energy.’ And that year for the Doors lasted from 1965 to the summer of 1971.”
Right on, Ray. Right on through to the other side, man. Yeah!

 Epilogue: Stoned Immaculate


After Jim Morrison’s death, the Doors tried in vain to carry on, almost as if nothing had happened. They had already recorded their first album without him while Jim was in Paris. According to Bruce Botnick, “it wasn’t to be an album. It was to work up some stuff with the hope that Jim was gonna come back, and there will be an infusion and these new ideas that the guys have been working on will meld with what Jim was doing and there would be an album. So … it became an album out of the default of Jim’s passing.”
Perhaps so, but the fact they had done so much work on a Doors album without Jim Morrison underlines just how far they were already down the road of working without their singer. Maybe they were hoping Jim would come back. But they certainly weren’t relying on it. And what were they supposed to do in the meantime? After Miami, after the Isle of Wight, after New Orleans, after everything, and now the guy’s run away to Paris and doesn’t know when he’s coming back and will probably end up going to jail if he comes back anyway?
No, fuck that. Who could blame them? What other option did they have? Hadn’t they let the whole thing drift long enough? Now it was their turn to front up and do something. As Ray said, “We were back in the studio the day after we heard he’d died.” He’d added that going back to work so quickly was a good way of dealing with the trauma of losing their friend. The fact that Other Voices, as they wincingly titled their first album without Morrison, was released just three months after his death shows just how far advanced they already were with the recording at the time of his death, and how determined they were to carry on without him, no matter what. Jim dying was the only part of the plan they hadn’t bargained for.
The result was an album that was neither fish nor fowl, characterless and plain. Produced by Bruce Botnick and recorded, again, live in the basement of the Doors’ office on mobile equipment, the album is as exciting as it sounds: the Doors without Jim Morrison. The Stones without Mick Jagger. The Velvet Underground without Lou Reed. The pen without ink. Just the three of them, Ray and Robby sharing the vocals in place of Jim. The only track that really jumps out is the lengthy, far-out jazz-rock of “Ships w/ Sails.” Built around a jam that Robby and John had worked up, with added percussive flourishes from the Afro-Cuban master percussionist Francisco Aguabella, as an instrumental it could have been something extra-cool by Santana. Unfortunately, once Ray’s overwrought vocals and half-baked lyrics have been added to the mix it becomes more like second-rate Doors.
“None of the songs on Other Voices are from Jim. That was the missing quotient,” agrees Botnick. “It was Robby trying to sing. Ray doing his thing. And all of a sudden they had to stand up and write music. But it didn’t have any of the danger or any of the theater that Jim brought to it. You’ve got to realize, musically, they were still the Doors. They just didn’t have Jim’s melodies or words to play off of. But all the arrangements, all the musicality was the three guys. So it’s not surprising that when you heard Other Voices or albums after that, that you still heard the Doors. You just didn’t hear Jim.”
In which case, wouldn’t it have been better to simply forget the whole thing? Either get a plausible replacement in to sing or simply record under another name? “Elektra could have forgiven the contract. The guys could have said, ‘You know, we can’t make any more records as the Doors, we’re sorry, Jac.’ And he would have said, ‘I understand. No problem. Keep the money.’ I’m sure that would have happened.”
Does Bruce think, in retrospect, they should have done that? He paused. “No … no, I don’t think so. I think it was … unlike other bands I’m glad they didn’t go out to find somebody else to be in Jim’s leather pants, you know?”
It must have felt very strange, though, making a Doors album without Jim.
“Totally! Totally strange. Without Jim there wasn’t really—quote, unquote—the Doors anymore. [But] I think it was important that they do those records on their own so that they could break up totally, and Ray could do his thing, and Robby could do his thing, with John, with the Butts Band, and they [could] move onward. Robby’s made six … ten albums as a solo performer. Some of it’s vanity stuff, but he’s constantly doing something. But he’s not singing, he’s only playing. He doesn’t have a singer. It’s an instrumental band. And John has done an album. Tribal Jazz was the name of his band. … If you look at other bands, did they continue after one of their main people died? For the most part, no. Look at Queen after Freddie Mercury died, they stopped.”
Except, of course, the Doors didn’t immediately stop. When Other Voices was released in October 1971, they went out on the road. And it was a disaster. With the album stalling at No. 31 in the charts and the band basing their new live set almost entirely on material from Other Voices, it was, if anything, an even sadder end to the live career of the Doors than the debacle of New Orleans. But then this was 1971 and the concept of it being better to burn out than to fade away had yet to be considered.
Vince Treanor, who did the tour with them, is still aghast at the memory. “It makes me wonder why in hell they were so damned anxious to change the music when they went on the road [with] Other Voices. Why didn’t they listen to the audience, when the kids applauded the lights off the ceiling every time they played a Doors piece and the silence was thunderous when they played this other crap.”
In fact, after the tour was over, they went straight back into the studio to have another go at making a plausible Doors album without Jim. Bruce Botnick had now bailed, though, and they were left to their own devices. The result, Full Circle, was full of good-timey get-up-and-dance guff and contrived acid-funk that made the Doors sound like what they were, adrift without a rudder, grasping at straws, up shit creek, and other clichés.
“When they came back [after Jim’s death] and they decided they wanted to record as a trio, I agreed to do that simply because I wanted to show them that it wasn’t just Jim,” says Jac Holzman now. “We made two records. The first one sold about three hundred thousand, which made its money back. The second one did less well. And then they realized that they couldn’t do it without Jim. And I wasn’t interested in anybody else taking Jim’s place.”
In fact, Holzman had tried to hook them up with an English vocalist, Howard Werth, whose London-based band, Audience, had recorded four art-rock albums for Charisma between 1969 and 1972, the later two released in the United States by Elektra. When the band broke up in 1972, Holzman suggested the three Doors look into auditioning Werth as the new singer of the Doors.
“That’s how I understand it,” says Werth now. “The Doors were looking for a new singer to replace Jim Morrison, and I met up with them in London at this lovely little summerhouse down by the river. We rehearsed a couple of days and it was working quite well. They tried a couple of other people out as well. I remember singing songs like ‘Light My Fire’ and ‘Riders on the Storm’ and some others. I wasn’t really a huge fan at that time, actually. So I wasn’t really au fait with a lot of their stuff. Then at the end they said they’d be in touch, but that was the end of it. I spoke to them at their hotel a couple of times, but then it didn’t happen because Ray Manzarek’s wife, Dorothy, was expecting their baby son, Leo. So he decided he couldn’t deal with it anymore and he went back to California.”
Werth says there didn’t seem to be much in the way of a plan beyond simply “looking for a replacement for Jim Morrison. Then if it worked they’d probably do some more recording, then organize a tour. But it just wasn’t meant to be.” Other singers under consideration in the summer of 1972 included Iggy Pop—a big Jim Morrison fan—and Joe Cocker, then widely regarded in the United States as one of the finest singers of his generation. Unfortunately, the former was about to go into the studio with David Bowie, then in full-on Ziggy Stardust mode, and the latter was still in the full throes of heroin addiction. At the same time as they were rehearsing with Howard Werth they had also set aside a few days to work with another young British talent named Kevin Coyne, whose unique blues voice and superior skills as a lyricist would have made an intriguing choice.
“They went to London,” recalls Botnick. “They gave me a call, said, ‘We want you to come over. We’re putting together a whole different thing.’ Then the day before I left I got a phone call saying, ‘Ray’s quit the band, come anyway. We’re gonna go to Jamaica, we’ll do reggae!’ which was the Butts Band.”
With Ray bailing out, Robby and John took the bull by the horns and consigned the name the Doors to history. Whatever they did next, they decided, would be new and fresh, and have nothing to do with the Doors. With Elektra having recently become part of a much larger group of companies, WEA (Warner, Elektra, Atlantic), Jac Holzman was no longer there to help guide them on a day-to-day basis, so the remaining Doors were now cast into unfamiliar territory—“out in the street,” as John told journalist John Tobler in a 1974 interview with ZigZag magazine. As they struggled to plot a course without Holzman, their captain, or Jim, their magnetic north, Ray’s return to the States abruptly closed off their creative outlet, and for gigging musicians like John and Robby downtime represented nothing less than slow, torturous death.
Rather than regroup in the United States, they resolved to dig in and make a go of it in London, and so began the survivors’ first post-Doors project. John and Robby auditioned local musicians over the course of four months, trying to play it cool so as not to intimidate the line of punters with stars in their eyes and ambitions to become the next Jim Morrison. As in their previous search with Ray, they found no one viable. It wasn’t until Davy Harper, a roadie who split time between them and Traffic, introduced them to singer Jess Roden that the flicker of hope first sparked. Roden was twenty-four, recently of critically praised but commercially unsuccessful Bronco, and a well-known face on the London recording scene who had lent his talents as singer and/ or guitarist to albums by Mott the Hoople, Sandy Denny, John Martyn, and others. Seasoned, charismatic, and gifted with a versatile range that wrapped easily around blues, rock, and soul, it was impossible to deny how effortlessly Jess gelled with the loose grooving they laid down, his harmonies dovetailing smoothly into Robby’s, his stage presence charismatic and confident. Even better, Jess was hungry. Wanted it.
The project with the ex-Doors could not have arrived at a better time, but before leaping in headfirst, Jess had a few stipulations of his own. First and foremost was the understanding among all parties that he was not interested in primping his hair, throwing on leather pants, and playing the new Lizard King. The Doors were over, as far as Jess was concerned, as he told a journalist in a 1973 interview. “I am a singer, not a showman. I’m not a sex symbol and that, I believe, is the difference [between Jim and me]. I’m here to sing, not create news stories. When I joined, Ray Manzarek had left and we just came together for an album. From the first day I met them they said they wanted to start afresh … a whole new effort.”
Even better, Jess brought his own material to the table and he introduced them to the two other musicians to round out the project—bassist Phil Chen and later keyboardist Roy Davies. The new band was complete; all that remained was to find a new name. Where John and Robby’s last project boasted a name steeped in mystic potency and literary gravitas, their new band settled on a name far closer to the way they actually felt. They decided on the schlock Butts Band, a ham-fisted attempt at irony that played them as down-and-out losers, starving for work. Such a jokey name stood in blinding contrast to Ray’s evolving fascination with mysticism and ancient pagan cults. With Ray out of the picture, however, John and Robby slipped loose of the inscrutably cryptic fetters that had constrained them for so long working with Jim and Ray.
In 1974, with the players in place, they wasted little time getting their ideas on tape, holing up in London’s Olympic Studios to cut the first half of what would become their eponymous debut, Butts Band. With Jess as the face of the new band, they built the core sound around the guitar. Robby’s leads on “I Won’t Be Alone Anymore” and the reggae-influenced “Pop-A-Top” were full of his newfound swagger, as was his work on the Jess-penned “New Ways.” Despite John’s insistence that their sound be distinct from the Doors, “Baja Bus” strongly evoked their musical past. But if any song captured the easy creative flow of the new outfit, it was the smoking live take of “Kansas City,” which perfectly showcased Robby’s extemporaneous chromatic brilliance. No one had ever talked about the guitarist of the Doors in the same way they did the guitarist of the Who or Led Zeppelin. Now Robby showed them what they’d been missing.
As the first wave of advance copies took flight to the music press, early buzz classified the sound as heavily weighted toward reggae, which was understandable, although inaccurate. Such pigeonholing stemmed squarely from Phil’s having been born and raised in Jamaica and the band’s having recorded the latter half of the album there. Moreover, Phil received an album credit for “reggae guitar.” Bob Marley had released both Catch a Fire and Natty Dread in the past year, albums that reset the dial on what a white rock audience found palatable. Eric Clapton had just enjoyed his biggest hit for years with his version of Marley’s “I Shot the Sheriff.” By 1974, reggae was the coolest music in the rock world. Even hairy rock behemoths like Led Zeppelin had dabbled with reggae (on “D’yer Mak’er,” from their 1973 album, Houses of the Holy). For the Butts Band to make it their musical calling card was about as far away from the Doors as you could get and in keeping with contemporary trends. This was not the groovy, tripped-out sixties anymore, they seemed to be saying, but the streetwise new seventies.
In June 1974, with their album on the shelves, the Butts Band began gigging around London, supporting the Kinks at the Palladium. Roden quickly established his dominance onstage, promptly disabusing anyone of the notion that he was a minor player in the legacy of the Doors. The modest US tour that followed proved equally encouraging. Their gig at Max’s Kansas City, in New York City, drew a curious gaggle of Doors fans, critics, and industry types who were equally impressed with the vibrancy of the Butts. By then the band had added Michael Berkowitz as a second drummer and showcased new material such as “Sweet Danger.” The wheels, however, were about to fall off.
While the musicians had initially committed to convening every few weeks, either in the United States or in London, the logistical briar patch of five musicians collaborating eight time zones apart eventually proved too much. Long before Skype and e-mail, such an arrangement offered awkward, costly, and impersonal solutions to the larger problem of a band needing to be in the same room to create together. John and Robby eventually dissolved the Butts Band and reformed it Stateside with Americans Michael Stull and Alex Richman, both on vocals and keyboards, along with Karl Rucker on bass.
Jess, who was already signed to Island Records, owed one more album to that label and formed the Jess Roden Band. Meanwhile, Roy opted to stay with his former band, Gonzalez, a sprawling, twenty-man collective that gigged around London in the early seventies. Phil went back to session work, although his role in the story of the Doors was not yet finished.
The new Butts Band pulled back on the jazz influence of their debut and released a 1975 follow-up called Hear and Now that saw them double down for an old-school soul record, in line with their Blue Thumb/ABC label mates the Four Tops. That record failed to engender much love in Doors fans, however, falling well short of the ambitious promise of their debut. Soon thereafter, the Butts Band quietly drew to a close. Robby and John might have achieved rock star status in the Doors, but they were studio musicians at heart; they simply wanted to play music that turned them on. Without somebody else’s creative vision, their substantial talents withered amid unoriginal songwriting and poor business decisions.
With a better name and some reliable management who got what they were all about, who knows what might have occurred? They arguably blew a golden opportunity by letting go of Bill Siddons, who recalls representing the Butts Band’s earliest incarnation, until the musicians balked at his request for the standard 15 percent commission (something he’d never enjoyed with the Doors, where as a young, inexperienced hired hand he had initially been happy to accept a salary). Looking back now, he recalls telling them, “Hey, guys, I’ve given you five years of my life. I’ve saved your ass twenty times. It’s time to pay me appropriately.” Instead, they opted for “a Hollywood manager” who they felt had a better track record, sacrificing a mentor who had proven himself a valuable ally simply to shave off a few commission points. A few years later, after the Butts Band had become just a footnote in post-Doors lore, Siddons rose to prominence shepherding the careers of Van Morrison and many others.
Meanwhile, back in Los Angeles, Ray had set to work on his own solo album, thematically inspired by his interest in Egyptology and in thrall to the King Tut exhibition that had recently taken the country by storm. The album, The Golden Scarab (A Rhythm Myth), revealed Ray’s determination to try and recapture some of Jim’s mystical lyricism, infused with his own passionate interest in sun worship and the cryptic secrets of ancient Heliopolis. John’s prediction that Ray would carry the Doors’ sound forward proved true, and in fact, Ray enlisted Doors sideman Jerry Scheff to play bass, along with guitarist Larry Carlton and virtuosic jazz drummer Tony Williams.
Although neither outfit was commercially successful, critics favored John and Robby’s post-Doors direction over Ray’s, with some accusing the keyboardist of relying on slavish, Morrisonesque vocal stylings to make a bridge back to the Doors, songs like “The Moorish Idol” and “Oh Thou Nectar Filled Form (or) A Little Fart” containing all the impish humor of early Morrison but none of the gravitas. The two projects—Ray’s solo efforts and the Butts Band—offered a preview of the musicians’ paths in the decades to come: Ray, unable to relinquish the Doors’ bequest to the ages, swathed himself in the lyrical trappings and sonic pastiche of vintage Doors, while John busied himself in low-key side projects that sounded little like his old band, although the two would soon clash in a nasty battle between their competing visions of the Doors’ legacy. Both then and now, Robby just wanted to play.
In 1978 it was announced that new Doors material would soon be released, in which a reunited Ray, Robby, and John would provide original music for a recently discovered cache of Jim’s spoken poetry. More than a crass repackaging of old material (although those days weren’t far off) or a hastily scrubbed sound-board recording from an old live show, this new album offered a scintillating promise—fresh, studio-quality recordings of legitimately new Doors music. Getting the new music out to the public, however, proved anything but simple.
Following his twenty-seventh birthday recordings with John Haeny, Jim had left his notebooks with Haeny, and sometime that month, March 1971, he asked the engineer to drop them off at the Doors’ office. He was planning on going to Paris to work on the poetry, Jim explained, so on March 12 Haeny dropped off both the notebooks and a copy of their first demos. The plan was for Haeny to meet the singer in Paris to resume work in a few months, but by then Jim was dead. Those demos, found among his belongings in Paris, eventually resurfaced as the infamous bootleg The Lost Paris Tapes.
To protect the second session from getting into the wrong hands, Haeny retrieved the tapes from the Elektra vaults and kept safe watch over them for several years, during which time Max Fink, now representing Jim’s estate, threatened to order the sheriffs to forcibly confiscate them. Haeny was unmoved. “I told Max to go ahead and try,” Haeny writes now. “If he did I would deliver a pile of ashes and he could figure out if they were the ashes of the real recordings or not. They stayed quiet after that and never challenged me again.” Years later, Oliver Stone would make the same request for his upcoming Doors film, and Haeny’s answer was still the same—no.
Robby reached out to Haeny at some point around 1976 to inquire about the tapes, and Haeny agreed to play them for the three musicians—and only those three—on condition that he be allowed to play the tapes through in their entirety, without stopping, and that if they were ever used commercially, it would only be toward the completion of the poetry album. Without any real leverage of their own, they consented. The experience blew their minds. It was the first time they’d heard new verse from their bandmate in five years. All agreed that these “lost” tapes offered an unparalleled opportunity to bring Jim’s poetry to the public in a unique and vibrant way, but before they could significantly take the idea forward, a number of sticky legal complications saw some unlikely players added to the mix.
Complicating the situation were the terms of the recently settled litigation concerning Jim’s estate, the control of which was essentially divided into two equal parts—Jim’s father, Admiral George Stephen Morrison, retained approval rights over anything autobiographical, while Pamela’s father, Columbus “Corky” Courson, retained creative control over Jim’s artistic body of work. After Jim’s death, Pam went into a tailspin, retreating into full-time heroin addiction. With Jim’s financial affairs unsettled until 1974, she was forced to scratch a living as best she could. Jerry Hopkins speculates that she turned tricks at various times to get the money together to feed her habit. Others, however, recall a lost, lonely woman who was fucked up by drugs and the memory of Jim’s death, and her passive-aggressive role in it.
Danny Fields recalls visiting Pam with friends not long after she’d returned from Paris. “We went to make a courtesy call to Pamela, who was grieving. And it was kind of spooky. But she was coherent, and she sat and we poured condolences on her. We didn’t ask her for what happened, except she sort of verified he was dead in the bathtub and the police came … OK. She had this nasty mutt. I don’t know where this dog had been the whole time that they were away or what. And this dog was … I love dogs. But this dog was being unlovable, big-time—to me. Just grabbing and growling and trying out the teeth on the leg and stuff like that. And then it jumped up on me. She [Pamela] said, ‘That’s Jim.’ I looked in the eyes of the dog and he vomited on me. Yes. And then jumped off and walked away. I swear, I mean, you couldn’t make this up. And we said, ‘Oh dear, well, yeah.’ And then [Pam] reiterated that this is how he is now. She said, ‘He’s living in that dog now.’ ”
Pam finally overdid it and was found dead on her couch on April 25, 1974. The few people who still spoke to her on any sort of regular basis say she had recently taken to saying how much she was looking forward to seeing Jim again soon. Her family tried to get her buried at Père Lachaise, next to Jim, even listing it as the place of burial on her death certificate. In fact, her cremated remains are now interred at Fairhaven Memorial Park in Santa Ana, California, in a cardboard box. The plaque reads Pamela Susan Morrison 1946–1974, though, of course, she never did marry Jim and has no legal right to the Morrison family name. When the fortune Jim had left her finally came through, it went instead to her parents, Columbus and Penny Courson, something Jim’s parents later contested, which led to additional legal battles.
In order for An American Prayer to be completed, the Doors would have to come to some form of agreement with both Corky Courson and John Haeny. Corky viewed the Doors with withering disdain, blaming Jim Morrison for his daughter’s death. The Doors for their part had little affection for Jim’s junkie girlfriend and even less for her father, the retired school principal, who now owned a percentage of everything they had recorded with Jim. Haeny, wary of the Doors from the get-go, eventually introduced Corky to his own attorney, John T. Frankenheimer, fearing that Corky would be out of his league in any dealings with Elektra or their legal team. As Haeny explained in 2013 on his website, “Individually I had always found the Doors both charming and reasonable, even warm and funny. But collectively there emerged what I called ‘The Doors Mentality.’ ” Meaning they would be tougher to deal with, more businesslike.
In addition to Haeny’s tapes, the Doors and Frank Lisciandro contributed material, including the now-famous phone call Jim placed to Michael McClure, saying that he’d just killed a guy in the desert. That call appears on “The Hitchhiker.” There were also tapes of Jim and friends drinking in a Palm Springs motel room, which yielded the tape of Jim describing his vivid childhood memory of seeing the Indians in the fatal car crash at the side of the highway. This story appears in the track “Dawn’s Highway.”
Interestingly, one of the highlights of the album, the live version of “Roadhouse Blues,” was actually a backup plan to the band’s initial decision to use a live version of “Gloria.” Corky, as a former academic, solemnly discharged his obligations as curator of Jim’s poetry, and in his view “Gloria” was both sexist and wholly inappropriate in view of his daughter’s demise. Without Corky’s approval, “Gloria” could not appear on the album. Instead, Haeny scoured the Elektra vaults and found a ferocious version of “Roadhouse Blues” that is now one of the most downloaded songs in the Doors catalog.
While Jim had envisioned his poems read against a musical backdrop, the project never progressed far enough for him to articulate what sort of music he had in mind. As he had never invited the band into the project, it was hardly a foregone conclusion that his own bandmates would provide the soundtrack, and yet the poetry needed music. It was Haeny who first proposed that the Doors provide that music, and much to his surprise they declined. He explains, “I presumed that it had been such a long time since they had played together that they were understandably apprehensive about going back into the studio again.” They eventually agreed to compose new music for Jim’s poetry, and with Frank Lisciandro brought in to assist, production resumed.
The resulting album represented a complex, balanced effort that drew heavily from Jim’s life with and without the Doors. Jim’s verse, reverently curated by Corky, received a thoughtful presentation befitting an established poet, and with so many of Jim’s confederates collaborating on the details the finished product was a much more mature, polished, groovy extension of Jim’s artistic vision than anyone could have hoped for. “I believe Jim would be pleased,” says Haeny today. “Jim would have understood our motivation and appreciated our dedication and heartfelt handling of his work.”
When it was released, Elektra arranged a massive listening party in New York City, offering thirty-five hundred lucky fans an exclusive opportunity to hear a full advance playback of the album. Tickets were awarded via a lottery that attracted sixteen thousand entries. Record company executives were licking their chops when the crowd refused to leave without at least one more listen. A few hours south, in the blue-collar city of Philadelphia, a séance was held to commune with Jim, presided over by someone claiming to be a credentialed medium. While Jim failed to materialize, participants were stunned when an irritable black cat slunk from behind a curtain and hissed at the would-be occultists before retreating back into the shadows.
Commercially, Elektra’s gambit paid off big-time—An American Prayer eventually went platinum (although not until 2001). More important, it went a long way to reactivating interest in both Morrison and the Doors, a process that had begun when Francis Ford Coppola had used “The End” over the opening shots of his classic 1979 Vietnam saga, Apocalypse Now, and culminated in the September 1981 Rolling Stone cover story, complete with the headline over an early “Young Lion” photo of Jim that read HE’S HOT, HE’S SEXY—AND HE’S DEAD!
Not all of the material from the birthday sessions was used, and Lisciandro, who declined Jim’s invitation to recite some of his poetry at that session, would later comment, “I have a hope that more of the poetry from that night’s reading will someday be released, and if it is released, I think it should be without Doors music, maybe without any music at all. Jim Morrison was one of the best poets of his time. That’s not only my opinion but it is also the judgment of teachers and poets in America who use Jim’s poetry in the classroom. I don’t know if he was a ‘visionary poet’; maybe all great poets are visionaries.”
Not all of Jim’s acquaintances appreciated his poetry, however. Judy Huddleston says, “People try to say he was a poet. A lot of poets I know look at [his poems] and are like, ‘Please! Get over it!’ Some of them are better in songs. Some of them are sophomoric, I guess you’d call them, or just embarrassing—on a real poetry level. Some of them I just go, ‘Oh dear!’ ” She laughs.
Ever the showman, Ray Manzarek announced to the media that the band had convened their own séance, that a medium had channeled the spirit of Jim and advised that upon completion of the record Jim’s soul had fulfilled its purpose and was now free to move to another plane. Back here on Planet Earth, however, the Doors’ comeback was just warming up. In 1998 No One Here Gets Out Alive was published, the first comprehensive account of Jim’s life and the history of the Doors. A collaboration between Jerry Hopkins and the former Elektra intern Danny Sugerman, No One Here Gets Out Alive offered nothing but a ripping yarn that read like one of the ancient Greek myths that had once inspired Jim. Heroic tales of excess, effusive paeans to Jim’s prodigious talent, and graphic accounts of bacchanalian revelry burst from its pages, taking the breathless reader up to Jim’s ignominious death in a French bathtub.
The problem, according to Jim’s closest friends, was that it was an overblown exaggeration that bore little resemblance to the singer, obscuring some facts while inflating others, all in the service of building the mythology of Jim. In his fascinating 2013 e-book, Behind Closed Doors, Jerry Hopkins explains how his original book—written in the wake of the success of his earlier biography of Elvis Presley, an idea Jim had given to him—became inflated by Sugerman’s own teenage fandom of Jim, but he says that without his sponsorship the book might never have been published. As John Densmore noted in his 1990 memoir, Riders on the Storm, “With Sugerman as the religious zealot and Manzarek as St. Paul the crusading has worked.”
Hopkins recalls how “in the summer of 1971, with the Elvis book on the presses, Jim, to whom the book was dedicated, died in Paris, prompting [my book editor] Jonathan Dolger to ask if I’d like to write a book about him. I said yes and, after interviewing about two hundred people in the United States and Europe—many of whom expressed surprise that I wanted to write a book about Jim Morrison—I submitted a manuscript about three inches thick. Jonathan asked me to shorten it to about an inch and a half. By the time I did that, Jonathan believed interest in Jim had waned and he rejected the manuscript. That was the first of thirty rejections before Warner Books took it, on the third submission. I might add that several I approached for interviews while researching Jim’s book said the same thing I’d been told about Elvis: ‘What do you want to write a book about him for?’ ”
The result both glorified and extended the legend of Jim Morrison—and deliberately left open the question of whether Jim had actually faked his own death. Published less than a decade after his death, for many wide-eyed young Doors fans this was a tantalizingly plausible prospect. “You know, that kid was seventeen years old when Jim died,” says Vince Treanor now. “And he’s saying, ‘I am Jim Morrison’s confidant’? Come on! You know, the relationship between a twenty-seven-year-old man and a [teenage] boy is subject to some scrutiny. Especially when Jim was on the borderline anyway. He didn’t really care what happened [anymore].
“And as far as Danny’s relationship with the group, they really didn’t want him around. He used to come over to the office and hang around. I never figured out how and why they ever fell in with Danny, except that after Bill

I have not read many books about The Doors. But have read a lot about Jim Morrison and the The Doors through the internet. The book was Ok. A few things bothered me about the writer. There are way too many assumptions and generalisations without any real in depth look on how he comes to some views/conclusions about important events and issues. The writer also has an attitude towards some people and historical events that should not be confused with a writting style.
There were times where it was clear that the writer is not objective in telling the story.

Thank you for making this book available.