27: Jim Morrison (4 page)

The exposure earned by The Doors at the hip Whisky A Go Go quickly brought them to the attention of its equally hip patrons. Arthur Lee, for example, the leader of the already revered Love, had immediately understood what The Doors were about. Love had signed to Elektra, an effort by the folk label to expand its roster into the blossoming new rock market. Now Elektra was searching for further top-quality rock acts – Buffalo Springfield had been a target, but the label lost out to Atlantic. So when Jac Holzman, Elektra's founder, came to the Whisky to watch a Love show, Lee insisted he remain and check out The Doors' next set. Exhausted after a flight from New York City, Holzman did not at first get them. Arthur Lee was so persuasive that Holzman returned to watch their next four shows, finally understanding and falling utterly for The Doors, and offering to sign them. ‘Love had gotten my foot in the rock door, and now I needed a second group to give Elektra more of that kind of credibility, but The Doors weren't showing it to me,' wrote Holzman in his autobiography
Follow the Music
. ‘Jim was lovely to look at, but there was no command. Perhaps I was thinking too conventionally, but their music had none of the rococo ornamentation with which a lot of rock and roll was being embellished – remember, this was still the era of the Beatles and
Revolver
, circa 1966. Yet, some inner voice whispered that there was more to them than I was seeing or hearing, so I kept returning to the club.

‘Finally, the fourth evening, I heard them. Jim generated an enormous tension with his performance, like a black hole, sucking the energy of the room into himself. The bass line was Ray Manzarek playing a second keyboard, piano bass, an unusual sound, very cadenced and clean. On top of Ray, Robby Krieger laid shimmering guitar. And John Densmore was the best drummer imaginable for Jim – whatever Morrison did Densmore could follow … this was no ordinary rock and roll band.'
³²

Holzman was impressed by not only The Doors' inclusion in their set of Kurt Weill's ‘Alabama Song', with its elements of foxtrot and blues, but also by their arrangement of it. ‘And when I heard, really heard, Manzarek's baroque organ line under ‘Light My Fire', I was ready to sign them.'

Holzman offered them a one-year, one-album contract with two one-year options, with a reported initial advance of $5,000. The official signing took place in New York. Elektra flew the four musicians there, and set up The Doors' first club gigs in the city, at Ondine's, a hip venue. As though to emphasize their sophisticated roots, John Densmore and Ray Manzarek went to see Dizzy Gillespie play at the Metropole club.
³³

The group had dinner at the New Jersey home of Paul Rothchild, whom Holzman had earmarked to produce their first LP. Just out of jail on a pot charge, Rothchild was being given a break by Holzman. That evening Jim, drunk, came on very openly to Rothchild's wife, a cause of concern for the other group members – they felt Jim was like a child seeing how far he could push it with the parent figure of Paul Rothchild.
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On the drive back to their fleabag hotel in Manhattan, Jim started to pull Rothchild's hair as he was driving. But then he transferred his attentions to Ray, doing the same thing to him.
³⁵
Back in his hotel room Jim stripped naked and, drunkenly, stood out on the window ledge. Then he pissed on his hotel room's floor rug.
³⁶
Shouldn't such puerile behaviour have been interpreted as a worrying sign?

At Ondine's, however, The Doors triumphed, and became the talk of the town: Andy Warhol appeared with his entourage, a sign of a certain form of success, as did the actor Warren Beatty.

*

Back in Los Angeles, The Doors now had a reputation as the hottest new local group. Jim Morrison was being spoken of as a sex symbol: he took advantage of as many of the opportunities this presented to him as he possibly could. ‘The word was out on the street that everyone had to see this lead singer because there had never been anything like him, with the unnatural grace of someone out of control, wrote Pamela Des Barres, former rock and roll groupie, in her book
I'm With the Band
. ‘He looked like a Greek god gone wrong, with masses of dark brown curls and a face that sweaty dreams are made of … It was really mind-boggling. There was no modern sexy American icon at that time and he instantly became that for me and all the girls I knew and we never missed them. I saw The Doors play a hundred times.'

All the same, Pamela Courson reigned supreme as the queen of Jim's harem. ‘Pamela had reddish golden hair, porcelain skin, and lavender eyes. Their sex life was weird. Pam could take his tying her up and beating her, but what she really minded was Jim's penchant for anal intercourse,' revealed Ellis Amburn in
Pearl
, his biography of Janis Joplin.
³⁷
Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman, Morrison's first biographers, described an archetypal Morrison sexual encounter with a girl he had just met in West Hollywood's Alta Cienega Motel, of all the sleazy lodging houses used by Morrison, the one he most favoured: ‘he got her whole life story, then he butt-fucked her.'
³⁸

Despite the evident success of their musical project, Jim Morrison all of a sudden committed what could in retrospect be seen as an act of self-sabotage – of a kind that, as time progressed, would become increasingly common. To Ray Manzarek he declared that he had a problem with the line-up: he didn't like drummer John Densmore. Despite their clearly defined sound, Jim Morrison wanted him fired. What sparked this? Was it the jealous memory that The Doors' drummer had been the first to attempt to hit on his girlfriend? He seemed to harbour deeply rooted subconscious resentment towards John Densmore. Later, Jim came round to John and his girlfriend's apartment as he tripped on acid, virtually destroying the place and pissing in their bed.
³⁹
Did the drummer's calm outlook on life, partially influenced by his Transcendental Meditation practice, unhinge Jim Morrison, who must have known in the core of his being that much of his own behaviour was downright dysfunctional?

Soon this whim of sacking John Densmore passed over. In August 1966, they recorded their first album in a four-track studio in six days, the songs well set into their playing psyches. This would be their biggest ever seller.

In the album's initial publicity blurbs, Jim talked about being attracted to chaos, revolt, disorder. ‘I thought they'd never play our records with comments like that!' remembers John Densmore.
⁴⁰
New York critic Richard Goldstein had perceptively labelled Jim's lyrics as ‘Joycean Rock'. But The Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia understood the dark side of the group. ‘Everybody says the Dead are so dark,' he mused. ‘Well, what about The Doors? They were the dark band of the sixties.'

By the end of the first week of September 1966, the group's debut album had been recorded. The Doors were anxious for the eponymously titled long player to be in the stores. Yet Jac Holzman advised them that, to avoid the record becoming lost in the Christmas release rush, he did not intend to put out
The Doors
until January. To mollify the anxious musicians, he assured them no other Elektra album would be released that month, thereby guaranteeing for a brief time the ceaseless attention of the record company's publicity, promotions and marketing department.

The last track on
The Doors
was the 11-minute epic ‘The End', a remarkable work by any standards. Had there ever been a song of such ambition in the rock 'n' roll genre? Initially the song was about the break-up Jim Morrison had had at UCLA with Mary Werbelow, the girl who had followed him out to Los Angeles from Florida. ‘Every time I hear that song,' Jim Morrison told
Rolling Stone
writer Jerry Hopkins in 1969, ‘it means something else to me. It started out as a simple good-bye song … Probably just to a girl, but I see how it could be a goodbye to a kind of childhood. I really don't know. I think it's sufficiently complex and universal in its imagery that it could be almost anything you want it to be.'
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In fact, ‘The End''s Oedipal lyrics could have come straight from an extreme psychoanalytic session. Self-consciously histrionic, ‘The End' evoked Greek theatre. It's impossible, really, to see the song as anything other than an exorcizing of Jim Morrison's clearly complex feelings about his parents. On first hearing, ‘The End' was startling.

Inevitably, Jim Morrison had dropped acid before the recording session. But at first the song wouldn't click for the singer. Paul Rothchild and Morrison sat and talked it through all evening. The next morning the first take nailed the number. Paul Rothchild felt the recording equipment almost worked itself, in harmony with this great, extremely ambitious work. Yet it clearly had a psychological effect on the singer. That night he returned to the studio, alone, in a drink- or drug-induced frame of mind, and – after removing his boots and shirt – sprayed it with the foamy contents of a fire extinguisher.

As though signifying the breadth and depth of The Doors' music, ‘The End' sat perfectly comfortably alongside blatantly commercial songs like ‘Light My Fire'. (‘The End' would gain legendary status when featured in Francis Ford Coppola's
Apocalypse Now
, which further embedded The Doors in popular culture.)

The Doors
was released on 4 January 1967, right as that year of change kicked in. The Elektra label already had an aura of cool about it, and the centrepiece of their marketing could only confirm that: the billboards of Sunset Boulevard had long sold junk products, but now the Strip, the apogee of the band's scene, was graced with the presence of their album cover. The first time this had ever been done for a musical act, the billboard was a statement of Elektra's faith in their new signing, Holzman averred. The same day that the album came out, Elektra also released the group's first single, ‘Break on Through', with its bossa nova beat, coupled with ‘End of the Night' on the flip.

‘Break on Through' was a failure as a single, reaching only 126 in the US national chart – although it was number eleven on the LA chart. But the next 45 fared far better. Released in April as a single, ‘Light My Fire', largely written by Robby Krieger but credited to the whole group, was number one nationally for three weeks – although it took time, three months, for the single to peak, on 25 July. (In celebration, Jim Morrison bought a black leather suit to wear on stage.) Similarly, the album had steadily risen up the US album charts, until it hit the number two spot in September 1967, behind only the mighty Beatles'
Sgt Pepper
.

In January 1967, The Doors played six nights at the Fillmore in San Francisco, important shows in the self-styled alternative culture capital of California. First they supported The Young Rascals and Sopwith Camel, for three nights. Then they opened for The Grateful Dead and Junior Wells and his All-Stars. On that occasion, however, there were signs of impending problems: for the second of those concerts, Jim Morrison was a no-show, sitting in a Sacramento cinema through three screenings of the classic film
Casablanca
and never turning up at the venue.

In March they played San Francisco's Avalon, this time topping the bill.
The Doors
was heading up the album charts and the evening was ‘one stoned gig', as John Densmore described it.
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They were supported by Country Joe and the Fish and Sparrow. This was the first time they had noticed serious audience appreciation for ‘The End', as thought ‘they were meeting us halfway,' Densmore wrote.

Soon they also topped the bill at San Francisco's Winterland. ‘When The Doors came on to do their thing,' read a review in the
New York Times
(a sign of their growing popularity), ‘there was sudden silence and the crowd sat as if it were about to hear a chamber music concert.'

In Janis Joplin's apartment in San Francisco one night, Ellis Amburn wrote, Pamela Courson was present and sat and watched as Janis requested Jim's presence in her bedroom. After waiting several hours, she eventually
took a cab to her hotel with Big Brother and the Holding Company guitarist Sam Andrew. Later, after that night with Jim Morrison, Janis gave the thumbs-down to the experience. ‘I don't like Jim Morrison. He was okay in bed, but when he got up the next morning, he asked for a shot of sloe grin.'
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It was the inappropriate choice of liquor that occasioned Janis's doubts about The Doors' singer.

Clearly Pamela Courson felt obliged to accept her consort's egregious rock-star behaviour. But she would get even, taking up with Tom Baker, a friend of Jim's, an actor considered a ‘hunk' by girls, who would soon star in
I, a Man
, a Warhol sub-porn movie. With a pair of cohorts, he was known as one of ‘the boys who fuck famous women.'
⁴⁴
(After he had appeared nude in the Warhol film, Baker challenged Jim Morrison to let it all hang out at a Doors show – which eventually Jim Morrison almost did, causing himself immense problems.)

There were further examples of bad rock-star behaviour. Sitting one night that summer in a booth in New York's Max's Kansas City, Jim Morrison was too drunk to get up and urinate in the men's room. Instead, he pissed several times into an empty wine bottle. At the end of the evening, he gifted it to the waitress, telling her he hadn't time to finish the apparently half-full bottle.

On Saturday 29 April, The Doors and The Grateful Dead jointly topped the bill at a show at the Earl Warren Showgrounds in Santa Barbara, California – a pair of the leading proponents of underground rock, both with their hot debut albums recently released. The Dead's acid guru Owsley Stanley gifted Jim Morrison his specialty: purple barrel LSD.

Two weeks later, The Doors again were topping the bill at San Francisco's Avalon Ballroom. Future Doors road manager Bill Siddons saw the show: ‘We ended up sitting in the audience at this show at the Avalon Ballroom, watching this maniac. What I remember is Jim on stage. I wasn't affected one way or the other by meeting him, but when I saw him on stage I was more emotionally gripped and moved and disturbed than I had ever been at any similar type of thing.