27: Jim Morrison (2 page)

In Clearwater, Florida, Jim Morrison went to live temporarily with his paternal grandparents while he attended St Petersburg College. In 1962 he transferred to Florida State University in Tallahassee. It was while in college in Florida that he somewhat belatedly discovered the vocal appeal of Elvis Presley, now in his post-army period; for listening to ‘Return to Sender' at full volume, he was expelled from a student lodging. (The other influence on his own rich vocals to which Jim Morrison would always admit was Frank Sinatra.) In Clearwater he also met Mary Frances Werbelow, whom he would see every weekend, hitchhiking the 280 miles from Tallahassee. While at FSU he made the decision to study film at the University of California in Los Angeles, and began taking courses that would set him up for this. So, at the very beginning of 1964, he hitchhiked 2,500 miles from Florida to California and enrolled in UCLA's theater arts department.
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Fortunately, when Jim Morrison was a young boy his father had set up a tuition fund for his eldest son, to which he had access and with which he paid for his course; fortunately, for taking this course was in direct defiance of his father's wishes. As a consequence, his father broke all contact with him.

While at FSU in Tallahassee, Jim Morrison had been arrested at the age of nineteen for being drunk and disorderly, resisting arrest and larceny. He had stolen an umbrella from a police car on the way to a football game, and received a fifty-dollar fine. It was the first indication that drink might cause Jim Morrison difficulties in life. Yet why was he so drawn to drink and, later, drugs? By the need for self-obliteration? From what was he trying to escape? Partially, one senses, Jim Morrison simply liked getting out of it: it was more fun than reality – and there is a great tradition of musicians filling the dead time spent on the road with alcohol. Yet with Jim Morrison it certainly ran deeper than that. Indubitably hedonistic, Jim Morrison's relationship with drugs and alcohol unquestionably brought about his end, directly and indirectly. It lay at the heart of his aberrant behaviour and self-created disasters.

In time, Ray Manzarek, with whom he had founded The Doors, came to see the singer as schizophrenic: there was the very nice, sensitive and creative Jim Morrison; then there was ‘Jimbo', a drunken, self-indulgent hedonist, surrounded by idiotic, sycophantic lackeys. As his fondness for psychedelic drugs gave way to alcohol after the release of
Strange Days
, Jim Morrison began to justify his drinking: ‘I'm not a musician, I'm a poet. And I'm Irish. The drug of Irish poetry is alcohol.'
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By far the most extreme example of Jim Morrison's dysfunctional behaviour was the notorious incident at a Miami show, on 1 March 1969, when he allegedly exposed himself on stage – although no one at the show, audience or band members, ever saw his penis. He may have taken it out, but (if he did) it was kept hidden behind his wafting shirt tails. All the same, it seemed no coincidence that his most extreme transgression should have occurred in his home state, where he had first lived with the parents whose behaviour appeared to haunt him.

For although ostensibly self-possessed to the point of arrogance, inside Jim Morrison was deeply vulnerable. And as is often the case, the roots of this insecurity lay within his childhood.

Prior to his Miami obscenity trial, Jim Morrison told his attorney Max Fink that he had exposed himself because ‘I thought it was a good way to pay homage to my parents.' He also told Fink that as a child he frequently wet his bed, and that when he told his mother about this, she would send him back to sleep on the soaking bed linen. He was often reduced to sleeping on the floor.
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Even more seriously, Jim Morrison also told Fink that as a young child he had been molested by a male close to the family. Moreover, when he had attempted to inform his mother of this, she had refused to believe her son, telling him he was a liar. The trauma of recounting this to Fink reduced the 26-year-old singer to tears.
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The bedwetting followed a deeply disturbing incident, one widely believed to have had a profoundly formative influence on the young ‘Jimmy' Morrison. When he was four years old, while driving early one day in New Mexico with his parents and grandparents, they came upon what clearly had been a recent, extremely serious motor accident: a car had ploughed head-on into a truck packed full of Native Americans. There were dead bodies strewn across the road, while those seriously injured moaned and screamed. Inevitably, the gory vision before him fascinated the young boy, as well as burning deeply into his psyche an image that resided there permanently. This was the source of the ‘scattered on dawn's highway bleeding' line in ‘Dawn's Highway' on the posthumous
An American Prayer
, released in 1978, seven years after Morrison had passed away. And the dead Indians mentioned in ‘Peace Frog' on
Morrison Hotel
is a direct reference to this traumatic sight. When Oliver Stone came to direct
The Doors
, the biopic released in 1990, Ray Manzarek told him how Morrison would emit a screech and Manzarek would think, ‘This is not the soul of a white man, there's an Indian in there.'

Taking into account the regular diet of LSD and marijuana that he began in 1964, the year he commenced film studies at UCLA, it is perhaps unsurprising that Jim Morrison continued and expanded his interest in the shamanism of Indians from the American south-west. With a friend at the university, Felix Venable, a 35-year-old Berkeley graduate and a connoisseur of the Beat lifestyle, Jim ingested LSD, then still legal. Travelling out to the Joshua Tree area by Palm Springs, they would trip, endeavouring to communicate with shamanic Indian spirits.
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On one such occasion, Jim revealed to Venable his belief that the spirit of one of the dead Indians he had observed at the car wreck had entered his own soul. Venable subsequently connected Jim Morrison with a UCLA anthropology student who had undertaken research in Mexico with a Yaqui shaman. ‘Jimmy knew someone in the department,' wrote Stephen Davis, ‘and apparently made contact with Carlos Castaneda, whose dissertation would become the 1968 best-seller and counterculture bible
The Teachings of Don Juan: a Yaqui Way of Knowledge
. Poet Michael Ford was also at UCLA at the time and believes Morrison did meet with Castaneda. But no details of the meeting survive.'

Whatever transpired, as the finely pitched vocalist with The Doors, Jim Morrison took on that shamanistic role of an animal deity, in his case that of The Lizard King. He expressed this on their third album,
Waiting for the Sun
, in the song ‘Not to Touch the Earth': ‘I am the Lizard King / I can do anything.' The lizard's ability to shed its skin may have had some connection to the leather trousers he would constantly wear. Jim Morrison had also discovered he had an anagrammatic alter ego, Mr Mojo Risin', which he employed in his song
LA Woman
. It was a name that above all else suggested the male libido and the virility of the penis. According to author James Riordan,
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Doors producer Paul Rothchild recalled that in the recording studio it was not unknown for an invariably drunk Jim Morrison to be found ‘involuntarily talking in tongues'. ‘The shaman,' said Morrison, ‘was a man who would intoxicate himself. He was probably already an unusual individual. And he would put himself into a trance by dancing, whirling around, drinking, taking drugs – whatever. Then he would go on a mental travel and describe his journey to the rest of the tribe.'
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Jim Morrison began his studies in Los Angeles in February 1964, the month after the Beatles had so tumultuously arrived in the United States. But it was also six weeks after the death in the city of one of his inspirations, Aldous Huxley, the British author of the dystopian
Brave New World
. Huxley had died on the same day that President John F. Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, Texas. Relocating in 1948 to the then lotus land of southern California, Huxley had become a pioneering participant in consciousness-expanding experiments involving the ingestion of mescaline, peyote, and, later, LSD. In 1954 he had published an account of such experiments in his book
The Doors of Perception
.

Part of Jimmy Morrison's reason for beginning studies at UCLA in the then brand new discipline of film studies was to avoid compulsory service in the US military. The month that he commenced his UCLA studies, Jimmy had been obliged to visit his father in San Diego, where the USS
Bonhomme Richard
was docked. Although clad in appropriately preppy clothing, his hair neatly trimmed, he was immediately ordered by his father to attend the ship's barber for a further haircut.

At UCLA Jim Morrison began his course in film production. ‘More than anything else,' wrote James Riordan, ‘Morrison was interested in reaching the masses and film was the best medium he had found for it up to this time.'
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His reading expanded: as well as Nietzsche, he now loved the writing of Blake, Rimbaud, Kafka, Artaud and Baudelaire.
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The Greek historian Plutarch became a favourite, notably his writings on Alexander the Great. (Oliver Stone, who later made a film about the great Greek leader, was similarly entranced.) He also immersed himself in studying Greek tragedy, and the manner in which its effects were achieved. Soon Jim Morrison would take on the appearance of a Greek god, one that combined oddly with his gaucho look of black leather trousers and white lace shirts. For now, however, he was pudgily overweight and not immediately impressive to look at. Wanting to move with the cool set, a sign of his ambition, he hung out with older students, especially the circle of Felix Venable, with whom he began to drink excessively and ingest LSD. Another student to whom his peers looked up was Ray Manzarek, like Venable older than many of the other students on the film course. Manzarek had already completed his economics degree at DePaul University in Chicago, where he had been born and grown up, the son of Polish parents who had themselves recently moved to the Los Angeles area, to the suburb of Manhattan Beach. Initially he had signed up at UCLA for a law degree, but quickly switched courses. Manzarek was distinctly unimpressed with Morrison's friendship with Venable, considering him ‘a plain, evil mind-fuck'. As a consequence of this friendship, Manzarek noted, Jim Morrison was ‘starting to act a little weird. It's like those black demons were always there just waiting … and this guy happened to come along and swing the gate open, and they all came bowling out.'
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On their course was an impressive cast list of instructors: among the teachers was Jean Renoir, director of the classic
La Regle du Jeu
. He was succeeded by Josef von Sternberg. And Jim Morrison certainly was a serious student of what at the time he clearly intended to be his future craft, travelling in late 1964 the 400 miles to Berkeley, outside San Francisco, to a rare screening of Jean Genet's thirty-minute film
Un Chant d'Amour
, a paean to gay love in prison. Ray Manzarek was also there. Although Manzarek and his girlfriend Dorothy were spending a few days in San Francisco, Morrison had travelled all the way simply for that short film. ‘Together, as if we were fated,' wrote Manzarek. ‘In the same place, at the same time, for the same art. It was simply meant to be.'
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And it was not only esoteric foreign art films that bonded the pair: both Manzarek and Morrison were huge fans of the 1961 western
One-Eyed Jacks
, directed by Marlon Brando, rating it far higher than John Ford's revered
The Searchers
. ‘We were all Dadaists in a way,' considered Manzarek. ‘All a little mad, a little over the top, and all in love with life … Jim was a poet. I was the jazzer-musician-blues guy.'
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Ray Manzarek noted that Jim Morrison lived in a nice apartment on Goshen Avenue, near the Veterans Hospital complex on Wilshire and San Vicente. ‘Obviously his mother and father had a couple of bucks,' thought Manzarek.
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His book shelves bulged with the tomes of the era: French existentialists such as Sartre, Camus and Genet, as well as cultural reading list American standards like Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner and the more recent Norman Mailer. Jim Morrison was also partial to the Beat poets, and the highly stylized work of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, the French modernist novelist, whose
Journey to the End of the Night
was a clear influence on The Doors' ‘End of the Night'. At his apartment, he and Manzarek would talk and drink beer and smoke pot. Jim was an excellent joint-roller, ‘little works of art', according to Manzarek.
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Jim's girlfriend from Clearwater, Florida, Mary Werbelow – who was stunningly beautiful, according to Manzarek – had followed him out to LA looking to fulfill her ambition to become a dancer. To Jim's surprise, she had moved into her own place. Enrolling as a student at Los Angeles City College, she took a job as a go-go dancer, becoming ‘Gazzari's Go-Go Girl of 1965' at the club of the same name on the Sunset Strip – The Doors would play there the next year. Mary thought this was the start of her career, unaware that it was the highest point she would reach, and that Jim Morrison was tiring of her; their relationship ended when she came to see him and found him with another girl.

Meanwhile, Ray Manzarek, an experienced, classically trained pianist who was also into the blues and modern jazz, had started to play keyboards in a surf band, Rick and the Ravens, who had a regular spot in a Santa Monica bar. Manzarek performed under the stage-name of ‘Screamin' Ray Daniels, the bearded blues-shouter', and his five dollars a show earnings contributed to his tuition fees. One night, for no particular reason, he announced that audience member Jim Morrison, ‘a poet from UCLA film school', would come up onstage and perform ‘Louie Louie', a song that Morrison would facetiously and drunkenly call out for. ‘He was good. And he loved it. He bopped around and sang himself hoarse … That was the first time Jim Morrison ever sang onstage.'
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