Night Beat (16 page)

Well, as you say, in America we had the Vietnam War to oppose.

You had the war. But there were other things to revolt against, weren’t there? When you actually look back on it, it’s very hard to pin down what these causes were. Now maybe you’ll get a lot of letters saying, “Mick Jagger doesn’t remember. We were fighting for a lot of things—for the rights of minorities, to end poverty, and so on.” And that’s all certainly worth fighting for. But it’s got to be said: There were a lot of people who wanted violence for its own sake. And in every crowd, these people tended to be the most loud-mouthed. You have to remember violence is the most exciting thing that ever happened to some people.

But this whole issue of violence seems indivisible from the Rolling Stones’ image. In fact, to some people, it was synonymous with the band. You said it yourself, that violence is exciting for some people. Was it ever troubling to you that this was the image that many people had of the Stones? Or did it help energize your performances?

It’s a . . . it’s a
very
difficult question. I mean, I don’t know what to say. [
Pauses
.] The best rock & roll music encapsulates a certain high energy—an angriness—whether on record or onstage. That is, rock & roll is only rock & roll if it’s not safe. You know, one of the things I hate is what rock & roll has become in a lot of people’s hands: a safe, viable vehicle for pop. Oh, it’s inevitable, I suppose, but I don’t like that sort of music. It’s like, rock & roll—the best kind, that is, the real thing—is always brash. That’s the reason for punk. I mean, what was punk about? Violence and energy—and
that’s
really what rock & roll’s all about.

And so it’s inevitable that the audience is stirred by the anger they feel. That’s probably one of the ideas. Now, if that anger spills out into the street, that’s not funny for people. But if it’s contained within a theater and a few chairs get broken, my opinion at the time—and my opinion now—is, well, so what?

But the truth is, I don’t like to see people getting hurt. At early concerts we did, the police used to . . . I remember vividly the first time we played Memphis. Little girls would be standing up taking pictures, and the police would come down front and
bang—
these girls would get hit over the head with a billy club. And the same happened in Europe, in Germany and Holland—this gratuitous violence from the police or the bouncers or whoever they were, the people there with the muscle. And the audiences were often provoked by that
more—
that the authorities were creating these confrontations. Because otherwise, nothing much really happens at rock shows. I mean, you get a few kids onstage. But when they start to put huge flanks of police or private security in there, with the sole idea of showing how butch they are—the classic case being Altamont—then there’s trouble.

Anyway, it’s never been my intention to encourage people to get hurt. In fact, we used to always stop in the middle of a number if we saw someone getting hurt. I remember doing that many times. And yes, sometimes it got out of hand.

Well, it doesn’t really happen anymore.

Perhaps the most famous instance of it getting out of hand, as you mentioned, was at Altamont. Over the years many people have asserted that the violence that occurred on that day was somehow a consequence of the dark imagery the band had been flirting with all along. Looking back, does that seem like a fair accusation?

It’s not fair. It’s ridiculous. I mean, to me that is the most
ridiculous
journalistic contrivance I ever heard. I disagreed with Jann Wenner at the time. I
still
disagree with him. I
don’t
think he was at the concert. I don’t think any of the writers who wrote about it so fully were ever there. Everyone who lived in San Francisco—including a lot of those people who wrote about Altamont—knew that a lot of concerts had gone on with all these same organizers, with the Hell’s Angels. It had simply happened a lot in San Francisco. And it may sound like an excuse, but we believed—however naively—that this show could be organized by those San Francisco people who’d had experience with this sort of thing. It was just an established ritual, this concert-giving thing in the Bay Area. And just because it got out of hand, we got the blame. Well, I think that was passing the buck, because those writers who were there
knew
we didn’t organize the concert. I mean,
we did not organize it.
Perhaps we should have—that’s another question. In fact, that was one of the lessons well learned.

But at the time, I naively thought that these people in San Francisco were the most organized people, because at that time they had a lot going for them, a lot of respect. And I went along with it. If I’d known it was going to be what it was, obviously I wouldn’t have done it. It was foolish of me to be so naive, but we were still living at the end of the “everyone’s together and lovable” era, and San Francisco was supposed to be the center of it all. That’s one of the reasons we did the concert there.

So I don’t buy all that other bullshit. I mean, that’s an excuse made by the people in San Francisco. And I don’t like when they completely put the blame on us.
Some
of it, yeah. But not all of it.

In their recent books about the Rolling Stones, Philip Norman and Stanley Booth—

God bless them both.

Both authors have claimed that after Altamont, the Rolling Stones were never quite the same—that the group was never quite as willing to invoke violence in its music, or even face tough issues, except in largely superficial ways.

I don’t know. I mean, it sounds really good in a book, you know, to have, like, this great claim: “And that was the end of the era.” It’s all so wonderfully convenient.

But, you know, it
did
teach me a lesson. The lesson is that you can’t do a large show without, um, control.

But as to violence and so on . . . well, we did a song on the last album that’s quite violent [“One Hit to the Body”], and I don’t think . . . well,
maybe.
I mean, you can postulate all you want about what happened on that day. I don’t know. I felt very upset. And I was very sad about the violence, the guy that died and the Hell’s Angels behaving the way they did. It was
awful.
It was a horrible thing to go through. I hated it. And the audience had a hard time. It was a lesson that we all learned. It was a horrible experience—not so much for me as for the people that suffered.
I
had a pretty easy ride, you know—I was lucky. There’s no doubt that it did leave . . . a regret. And it left things at a very low ebb at the end of what was otherwise a very successful tour—in fact, the first major arena tour.

So, I don’t know—I’m not the one to make the judgment, except to say I think it’s a bit convenient when you’re writing a book. I mean, this notion of “the end of the sixties”—it’s just too good to be true. I mean, things aren’t quite as simple as that. But it was . . . it was . . . an
experience.

Let’s move ahead a couple of years, to the time that you recorded
Exile on Main Street
—an album that many critics now regard as the Rolling Stones’ finest work.

I don’t.

You don’t?

No. It’s a wonderful record, but I wouldn’t consider it the finest of the Rolling Stones’ work. I think that
Beggars Banquet
and
Let It Bleed
were better records. They’re more compressed. You know, when you put a double album out, there’s always going to be something that could have been left off and would have made it maybe better.

But, you know,
Exile . . .
its reputation just seems bigger now than it was back then. I remember it didn’t really sell well at the time, and there was only one single off it. And we were still in this phase where we weren’t really commercially minded; we weren’t trying to exploit or wring dry the record like one would do now, with a lot of singles. I mean, we weren’t really looking at the financial and commercial aspects of it.

But the truth is, it wasn’t a huge success at the time. It wasn’t even critically well received. I think if you go back and look at the reviews, you’ll see I’m right. It mostly got very indifferent reviews. And I love it now when all these critics say it was the most wonderful thing, because it’s a lot of those same guys who, at the time, said it was crap! Anyway, I think
Exile
lacked a bit of definition. I’m being supercritical, I know, but the record lacks a little focus.

But that’s part of what seems to lend the record its force. It seems like a work of world-weariness—the work that results from a time of disillusion. In that sense, it also seems a bit of a definitive seventies work.

Is it? I don’t know what the seventies is really all about. Spandex trousers, isn’t it? And, you know, funny clothes? I think
Exile
was a hangover from the end of the sixties.

Were the seventies a harder time to be inspired?

Well, judging from the records, perhaps they were. I mean, at the time I felt I was just carrying on, but . . . well, it’s a long way from
Exile
to “Angie.” I don’t think that one would’ve gone on
Exile.
The Rolling Stones is just a straight-ahead rock & roll band.

Do you consider that a limitation?

Yes, it is limiting, but I
like
the limitation of that. That’s fine.

For years, though, the Rolling Stones seemed to define what rock & roll could be at its best. You know, “The World’s Greatest Rock & Roll Band” and all that.

I
never trumpeted us as such . . . though I did put up with it, I suppose.

I mean, people have this obsession: They want you to be like you were in 1969. They want you to, because otherwise, their youth goes with you, you know? It’s very selfish, but it’s understandable.

the legacy of jim morrison and the doors

N
early twenty-five years ago, in the middle of a season in which rock & roll was seeking to define itself as the binding force of a new youth community, the Doors became the houseband for an American apocalypse that wasn’t even yet upon us. Indeed, the Los Angeles-based quartet’s stunning and rousing debut LP,
The Doors,
flew in the face of rock’s new emerging positivist ethos, and in effect helped form the basis for an argument that persists until the present day in popular music. Whereas groups like the Beatles or the many bands emerging from the Bay Area scene were earnestly touting a fusion of music, drugs, and idealism that they hoped would reform—and redeem—a troubled age, the Doors had fashioned an album that looked at prospects of hedonism and violence, of revolt and chaos, and embraced those prospects unflinchingly. Clearly, the Doors—in particular the group’s thin, darkly handsome lead singer, Jim Morrison—understood a truth about their age that many other pop artists did not understand: that these were dangerous times—and dangerous not only because youth culture was under fire for breaking away from established conventions and aspirations. On some level, Morrison realized that the danger was also internal, that the “love generation” was hardly without its own dark impulses. In fact, Morrison seemed to understand that any generation so bound on giving itself permission to go as far as it could was also giving itself a permission for destruction, and he seemed to gain both delight and license from that understanding.

Consequently, in those moments toward the end of the Doors’ experimental Oedipal mini-opera, “The End,” when Morrison sang about wanting to kill his father and fuck his mother, he managed to take a somewhat silly notion of outrage and make it sound convincing, even somehow
just.
More than the songs of Bob Dylan or the Rolling Stones, Morrison’s lyrics were a recognition that an older generation had betrayed its children, and that this betrayal called for a bitter payback. Little wonder, then, that the Doors’ music (in particular, “The End”) became such a meaningful favorite among the American youth fighting in Vietnam, in a war where children had been sent to kill or die for an older generation’s frightened ideals. Other groups were trying to prepare their audience for a world of hope and peace; the Doors, meanwhile, were making music for a ravenous and murderous time, and at the group’s best, the effect was thoroughly scary, and thoroughly exhilarating.

Now, a generation later—in a time when, at home, anti-drug and anti-obscenity sentiments have reached a fever pitch, and when, abroad, the Doors’ music is once again among the favored choices of young Americans fighting in the Gulf War—Jim Morrison seems more heroic to many pop fans than ever before. Indeed, a film like Oliver Stone’s
The Doors—
which is the most ambitious, epic-minded movie yet produced about rock culture and its discontents—can even make it seem that the band, in a dark way, has won its argument with cultural history. But back in the midst of the late 1960s, it seemed rather different. To many observers, it appeared that the group had pretty much shot its vision on its first album. By the time of the Doors’ second LP,
Strange Days
(October 1967), the music had lost much of its edginess—the sense of rapacity, of persistent momentum, that had made the previous album seem so undeniable—and in contrast to the atmosphere of aggression or dread that Morrison’s earlier lyrics had made palpable, the new songs tended too often to the merely melodramatic (“Strange Days”), or to flat-out pretension (“Horse Latitudes”). It was as if a musical vision that, only a few months earlier, had seemed shockingly original and urgent had turned flatly morbid, even parodic.

In addition, Morrison himself was already deeply caught up in the patterns of drug and alcohol abuse and public misbehavior that would eventually prove so ruinous to him, his band, his friends, and his family. Some of this behavior, of course, was simply expected of the new breed of rock hero: In the context of the late 1960s and its generational schisms, youth stars often made a point of flaunting their drug use, or of flouting mainstream or authoritarian morality. Sometimes, this impudence was merely showy or naive, though on certain other occasions—such as the December 1967 incident in which Morrison was arrested after publicly castigating police officers for their backstage brutality at a New Haven concert—these gestures of defiance helped embolden the rock audience’s emerging political sensibility. More often than not, though, Morrison’s unruliness wasn’t so much a gesture of countercultural bravado as it was simply a sign of the singer’s own raging hubris and out-of-control dissipation.

In other words, something far darker than artistic or political ambition fueled Jim Morrison’s appetite for disruption, and in March 1969, at an infamous concert in Miami, this sad truth came across with disastrous results. In the current film version of this incident, Oliver Stone portrays the concert as part pageant and part travesty, and while it was perhaps a bit of both, most firsthand accounts have described the show as simply a pathetic, confusing mess. The Doors had been scheduled to perform at 10 P.M., but had been delayed nearly an hour due to a dispute with the show’s promoters. By the time the group arrived onstage, Morrison was already inebriated, and continued to hold up the performance while he solicited the audience for something more to drink. A quarter-hour later, after the music started, Morrison would halt songs in mid-performance and wander about the stage, berating the audience to commit revolution and to love him. At one point during the evening, he pulled on the front of his weatherworn leather jeans and threatened to produce his penis for the crowd’s perusal. (Oddly enough, though more than twenty years have passed, and more than ten thousand people witnessed Morrison’s performance—including band members and police officers onstage—it has never been clearly determined whether Morrison actually succeeded in exposing himself that night.) Finally, toward the end of the show, Morrison hounded audience members into swarming onstage with him, and the concert ended in an easy version of the chaos to which the singer had long professed to aspire.

At the time, the event seemed more embarrassing than outrageous, but within days, the
Miami Herald
and some political-minded city and legal officials had inflated the pitiable debacle into a serious affront on Miami and the nation’s moral welfare; in addition, Morrison himself was sized up as a foul embodiment of youth’s supreme indecency. The Doors’ nationwide schedule ground to an immediate halt, and in effect, the band’s touring days were finished. Amid all the hoopla that would follow—the public debate, Miami’s shameful trial for obscenity—almost nobody saw Morrison’s gesture that evening for what it truly was: the act of a man who had lost faith in his art, himself, and his relation to the world around him. On that fateful evening in Miami, Jim Morrison no longer knew what his audience wanted from him, or what he wanted from himself for that matter, and so he offered up his most obvious totem of love and pride, as if it were the true source of his worth. The Doors’ lead singer—who only two years before had been one of rock’s smartest, scariest, and sexiest heroes—was now a heartrending alcoholic and clownish jerk. He needed help; he did not merit cheap veneration, and he certainly did not deserve the horrid, moralistic-minded brand of jailhouse punishment that the State of Florida hoped to impose on him.

Of course, Morrison never received—or at least never accepted—the help that might have saved him. By 1970, the Doors were a show-business enterprise with contracts and debts, and these obligations had been severely deepened by Morrison’s Miami antics. To meet its obligations, the band would produce five albums over the next two years, including two of the group’s most satisfying studio efforts,
Morrison Hotel
and
L.A. Woman:
surprisingly authoritative, blues-steeped works that showed Morrison settling into a new, lusty, dark-humored vocal and lyrical sensibility. But if Morrison had finally grown comfortable with the idea of rock & roll-for-its-own-sake, he also realized that he no longer had much of consequence he wanted to say in that medium—or at least nothing he cared to say in the context of the Doors.

In March 1971, Morrison took a leave of absence from the Doors, and along with his common-law wife, Pamela Courson, moved to Paris, ostensibly to distance himself from the physical and spiritual rigors of rock & roll, and to regenerate his vocation as a modern poet. Perhaps in time he might have come to a compassionate wisdom about what he and his generation had experienced in the last few years, as the idealism of the 1960s had finally given way to a deflating sense of fear and futility. (Certainly there were glimmers in Morrison’s last few interviews that he had begun to acquire some valuable insight about the reasons and sources for his—and his culture’s—bouts of excess.) As it turned out, Morrison simply continued to drink in a desolating way, and according to some witnesses, he sometimes lapsed into depression over his inability to reinvoke his poetic muse, taking instead to writing suicide notes.

Finally, at five in the morning on July 4, 1971, Pamela Courson found Morrison slumped in the bathtub of their Paris flat, a sweet, still grin on his face. At first, Courson thought he was playing a death-game with her. On this dark morning, though, Morrison was playing no game. His skin was cold to his wife’s touch. Jim Morrison had died of heart failure, at age twenty-seven, smiling into the face of a slow-coming abyss that, long before, he had decided was the most beautiful and comforting certainty of his life.

INITIALLY, Morrison’s death seemed to be the end for the Doors. In fact, the rock community accepted the news of his passing with a sad sense of logic. The year before, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin had died as well, also of causes brought on by the use of alcohol or drugs. Now, Morrison’s death—which had been more clearly foreseeable—made plain that young fatalities were likely to be one of the more frequent costs of rock heroism, that today’s brightest prodigy might simply be tomorrow’s next likely flameout. Though the surviving Doors—keyboardist Ray Manzarek, drummer John Densmore, and guitarist Robby Krieger—went on to make two trio albums under the band’s name, they could never really rebound from Morrison’s death. If, in some ways, Morrison had turned out to be the band’s most troubling and limiting factor, he had also been the group’s central claim to an identity or purpose, and without him, the Doors weren’t even a notable name.

Today, though, over twenty years after Morrison’s death, the Doors enjoy a renewed popularity that shows no signs of abating—a popularity that, in fact, might have proved far more elusive had Morrison survived and returned to the group. The roots for this renewal trace back to the mid- and late 1970s, and to the issues surrounding the advent of the punk movement. By 1976, many younger rock & roll fans and musicians began to feel that the pop world had lost touch with its sense of daring, that much of the music of the 1970s, and the work of the surviving mainstays of the 1960s, had grown too timid in content, and too obsessed with privilege and distance. As punk rose, it brought with it a reevaluation of rock history, and as a result, some of the tougher-minded bands of the late 1960s—such as the Doors, Velvet Underground, MC5, and the Stooges, all of whom had explored some decidedly difficult and often unpopular themes during their short-lived careers—enjoyed a new currency that transformed them into some of American rock’s more enduring and pervasive influences.

The Doors’ revival was also helped along by Francis Coppola’s use of the band’s music in his film,
Apocalypse Now.
Watching Coppola’s repellently beautiful immolation of the Vietnamese jungles by napalm, accompanied onscreen by Jim Morrison intoning “The End,” made vividly plain that the best of the Doors’ music had, all along, been a brilliant and irrefutable soundtrack to one of the more notorious examples of modern-day hell. And finally, the Doors’ comeback owes a great debt to
No One Here Gets Out Alive,
Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugarman’s highly sensationalistic (and probably frighteningly accurate) account of Morrison’s life and death. The book’s excitable chief theme (a theme that has been appropriated and advanced by Oliver Stone in his film) is that “Jim Morrison was a god,” a dark-tempered, visionary poet who was also a heroic example of the wisdom that can be found by living a life of relentless excesses.

In other words, Jim Morrison has gradually been rehabilitated into one of the more indelible, widely revered heroes of the 1960s, or of rock & roll history at large for that matter. In part, this has happened because several of the people involved in this curious reclamation have a stake in redeeming Morrison’s legacy, and because they have found that there is still a considerable career to be made in perpetuating his and the Doors’ history. But what is perhaps more interesting is to ask why Morrison’s revival has played so well and so consistently with the modern rock audience of the last decade or so. In other words, what does a contemporary rock audience find in Morrison, or need from him, that cannot be found in the musicians of its own generation? After all, we are told repeatedly that this is a more conservative era, and that in particular, today’s youth is far more conservative than the youth of the 1960s. If that’s the case, why does such a large young audience continue to revere an artist that appeared to be so radically hedonistic (even nihilistic) in his outlook?