The Doors (24 page)

Morrison refused to change “higher” in “Light My Fire” for
The Ed Sullivan Show,
but in “The End” for the recording studio he substituted a strangled “Arrragghhh” for the “Fuck you”—or “Fuck you all night long”—he used on stage.

Or for that matter the Doors themselves—when in 2003 Ray Manzarek and Robby Krieger reformed the band under its own name with Ian Ast-bury of the Cult hanging on to the microphone stand, 1960s video footage and a pyschedelic light show projected behind them, and Ty Dennis, late of the terrible L.A. new wave band the Motels, substituting for John Densmore, who refused to take part.

The Miller Beer version omitted the line “There's a man with a gun over there, telling you you've got to beware,” bumping the chorus forward to cover the gap.

Unless, as Eve Babitz, much closer to Jim Morrison than most who would claim to be, put it at the time Stone's movie was released, “Oliver Stone was so uncool he voluntarily went to Vietnam instead of prowling around the Sunset Strip with the rest of his generation. Oliver Stone was such a nerd he became a soldier, a Real Man. He didn't understand that in the'60s real men were not soldiers. A real man was Mick Jagger in
Performance
, in bed with two women, wearing eye makeup and kimonos.” In
The Doors
, Stone played Morrison's UCLA film professor, tough but fair.

“Hybrid of an Elvis movie and a World War II underground resistance film,” in the words of one movie guide, but mainly the 1984 follow-up to the huge Abrahams-Zucker-Zucker comedy
Airplane!

“One of the minor problems we had back in those days,” the disc jockey Larry Miller says, speaking of his time at KMPX in San Francisco, where, originally holding down the midnight-to-6-a.m. shift on an otherwise all foreign-language station, he invented FM rock 'n' roll radio, “was that certain long songs turned into ‘phone monsters.' Like ‘Inagaddadavida.' Listeners to rock music were blown away by hearing anything more than three minutes long. There were good phone monsters, like the Stones' ‘Goin' Home,' or Quicksilver's ‘The Fool.' But after the umpteenth demand for ‘When the Music's Over' and ‘The End,' I decided one night I'd play them both—simultaneously.

“They are not just in different keys—they are in keys that clash badly. The result was like Charles Ives on acid.

“The demands for both songs diminished somewhat after that.” (E-mail to GM, June 27, 2011).

In November 1955 Bo Diddley was booked, and told by Sullivan to sing Tennessee Ernie Ford's “Sixteen Tons,” then the biggest song in the country. He did “Bo Diddley” instead and never appeared on the show again.

“One night at TT&G studios in Hollywood, where we were recording at $100 an hour, Paul Rothchild took us by the hands and dragged us from the control room into the studio for one of his little talks. He said that we needed a hit soon and that ‘Hello, I Love You,' with a tight arrangement, could fit the bill,” John Densmore wrote twenty-two years later. “It turned into an unusual song with tons of distortion on the guitar via the latest electronic toy, the fuzz box. Robby had also suggested a catchy way of turning the beat around à la Cream's ‘Sunshine of Your Love.' Though I liked the lyrics very much, the new arrangement seemed contrived. When it climbed to number one, I was baffled.” A song about a real situation that has some tiny drama in it—someone going up to someone else on the street and shamelessly saying what he feels—is made into something stupid, obnoxious, a rock star preening, by a jerky arrangement that leaves everyone sounding phony.

Berman, whose face appears on the cover of the Beatles'
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
, was a zoot-suit jazzbo from the forties; rock 'n' roll favorites (as included on a mix-tape compiled by his son, Tosh Berman, in 2007) included the Kinks' “Who'll Be the Next in Line,” the Beatles' “And I Love Her,” the Righteous Brothers' “You've Lost that Lovin' Feeling,” the Rolling Stones' fabulous “Tell Me,” Ike and Tina Turner's “River Deep, Mountain High,” Love's “Little Red Book,” Roxy Music's “The Bogus Man” (“I cannot count the times I have seen my father lying on the floor in our living room with Koch headphones on listening to this track,” Tosh Berman wrote in his notes to the set), Syd Barrett's “Baby Lemonade,” and the New York Dolls' “Trash.”

“Apple iPhone Discovers Hot New Act: The Doors,”
deadtreemedia.com
posted on April 19, 2011.

On December 9, 2010, on the initiative of outgoing Governor Charlie Crist, the Florida Clemency Board granted Morrison a pardon for the convictions resulting from his 1970 trial for indecent exposure, public obscenity, and inciting to riot. On December 22, John Densmore, Robby Krieger, and Ray Manzarek issued this statement:

“In 1969 the Doors played an infamous concert in Miami, Florida. Accounts vary as to what actually happened on stage that night.

“Whatever took place that night ended with The Doors sharing beers and laughter in the dressing room with the Miami police, who acted as security at the venue that evening. No arrests were made. The next day we flew off to Jamaica for a few days' vacation before our planned 20-city tour of America.

“That tour never materialized. Four days later, warrants were issued in Miami for the arrest of Morrison on trumped-up charges of indecency, public obscenity, and general rock-and-roll revelry. Every city the Doors were booked into canceled their engagement.

“A circus of fire-and-brimstone ‘decency' rallies, grand jury investigations and apocalyptic editorials followed—not to mention allegations ranging from the unsubstantiated (he exposed himself) to the fantastic (the Doors were ‘inciting a riot' but also ‘hypnotizing' the crowd).

“In August, Jim Morrison went on trial in Miami. He was acquitted on all but two misdemeanor charges and sentenced to six months' hard labor in Raiford Penitentiary. He was appealing this conviction when he died in Paris on July 3, 1971. Four decades after the fact, with Jim an icon for multiple generations—and those who railed against him now a laughingstock—Florida has seen fit to issue a pardon.

“We don't feel Jim needs to be pardoned for anything.

“His performance in Miami that night was certainly provocative, and entirely in the insurrectionary spirit of The Doors' music and message. The charges against him were largely an opportunity for grandstanding by ambitious politicians—not to mention an affront to free speech and a massive waste of time and taxpayer dollars . . . If the State of Florida and the City of Miami want to make amends for the travesty of Jim Morrison's arrest and prosecution forty years after the fact, an apology would be more appropriate—and expunging the whole sorry matter from the record. And how about a promise to stop letting culture-war hysteria trump our First Amendment rights? Freedom of Speech must be held sacred, especially in these reactionary times.”