Realizing he had too much musical competition, Jim developed his stage show so that it became increasingly fraught with danger—he would take acid, pop amyl nitrate before going onstage, collapse in a heap, start fistfights. After four months the Doors were shown the London Fog door—just in time to get hired at the Whiskey-a-Go-Go, the showplace for rock’s biggest acts, where Jim’s antics started causing quite a buzz. People (like myself) turned up just to hear Jim alter lyrics to songs like Them’s “Gloria”: “She come on my bed, she come in my mouth, little girl suck my …” It was almost too much.
Dropped by Columbia, the Doors were free to seek another record deal, and word was out that the singer was a true madman. Encouraged by Arthur Lee of Love, Jac Holzman checked out the Doors and offered them a deal at his small label, Elektra. This was incredible news for the Doors, but already the band members were plagued by the consistently destructive behavior of their singer. One night when Jim didn’t show up for a Whiskey gig, John and Ray found him at the eight-dollar motel he was so fond of, flying on twenty doses of acid. “He really wanted to get out of himself,” marveled John, “totally go to the ends, as far as you can go, every time. Find out!” The Doors had been fired and rehired at the Whiskey over and over again, but this would be their final Whiskey gig. During “The End” Jim shouted to the expectant revelers that he wanted to fuck his mother.
Recording on the Doors album began in September 1966, produced by Paul Rothchild on a four-track recorder at Sunset Sound Studios, and totally capturing the sensual feel of a live Doors show. According to Rothchild, Jim had no fear about revealing himself. “He was exposing his soul and that was bravery in the extreme in those days when everybody was posturing.” The first time the Doors attempted “The End,” Jim was high on booze and acid, repeating the words “Fuck the mother, kill the father” until they became a twisted mantra and the session was over. But the following day Rothchild described as “the most awe-inspiring thing I’d ever witnessed in a studio … one of the most important moments in recorded rock and roll.” They got it on the second take, and Ray described the experience as Jim taking everyone on a “shamanistic voyage.” Jim later said that “The End” was about three things: “sex, death, and travel … liberation from the cycle of birth-orgasm-death .” When the music was over, everybody went home, but Jim came back alone and destroyed the studio, pulling a fire extinguisher from the wall and spraying chemical foam all over the control board. Ray said there had been too much heat and that Jim was just “calming the whole thing down.” The bill was sent to Elektra.
After a controversial stint at New York’s Ondine Club, Jim moved in with Pam Courson in Laurel Canyon at 1812 Rothdell Trail, a little green wooden house above the Country Canyon Store—right next door to a friend of mine!
This little story illustrates how wide open Jim Morrison was to whatever came his way, and what Pam had to deal with on a daily basis. I didn’t know my friend lived next door to the Doors’ lead singer, and one afternoon when I was alone in the house, inhaling some of that strange PCP liquid, I heard some very familiar music. Aaaahhhh. I had heard the songs often enough to know that somebody must have had a prerelease copy of the Doors album, and they were playing it very loud. I went out into the blasting sunlight and down a hundred rock stairs until I was surrounded by that glorious music, which was pouring out of the house next door! I could see the naked back of
a guy digging around in his fridge, humming along with “The End.” He grabbed a beer and when he turned around and started to knock it back, I let out a minor shriek. Lord have mercy on my teenage soul, it was Jim Morrison himself, with those black leather pants unzipped to the danger zone. Armed with fictitious chemical confidence, I proceeded through the green door and went into a perfect backbend (purple velvet dress over my head) in the middle of the tatty Persian rug. Despite my whacked-out condition, I soon realized I wasn’t alone with the Lizard King. I opened my eyes and stared into the face of a very pissed-off redhead. Jim was backed into a corner, curled up, hissing “Get it on!” Then the redhead very unpolitely asked me to leave. So unneighborly! As I careened back up the stairs, I was too high to have been embarrassed, even though I should have been.
A few minutes later I heard a racket downstairs and then Jim was tapping at the door. He wanted to know what I was on, and could he have some? I assumed the sparkling liquid was on the planet for my pleasure. Much later I found out it was used to knock out gorillas, elephants, and whales. I still mourn the brain cells that bit the dust in those days. But that sunny California afternoon I gave Jim Morrison the quart jar, and soon we were rolling around on the floor like old friends. The following night, as I left for a Doors show at the Hullabaloo Club, I had to step over a whole bunch of shattered Doors demos that Pam had hurled at Jim when he attempted to come back home. I waited for Jim at the backstage door, and he took me by the hand to the hallowed backstage area. I offered him a spot of Trimar and we poked around and found a ladder leading to a small musty stage area. Jim laid out my muskrat jacket like it was a set of silk sheets. Up, up, and away. We landed in horny nirvana, throbbing and pulsating, making out like maniacs, until we heard the first few chords of “Light My Fire” from somewhere over the rainbow. His gorgeous face loomed before me, and I could see him trying to figure out where he was, what he was doing, and what he was supposed to be doing. Then realization hit and he was down the ladder and gone. I lay there, looking at the glowing spot where his face had been, trying to gather up my limbs and make them function. Then I followed him. Very dumb move. I walked right onstage with the Doors and stood there gaping like a goon. Jim was already squirming at the microphone, and a large roadie came to lead me gallantly from the stage. I guess I should have been embarrassed one more time, but I wasn’t.
When the gig was over, Jim climbed behind the wheel of my 1962 Olds and we cruised the hot Hollywood night. After some date-nut bread and O.J. at the now-defunct Tiny Naylor’s, Jim headed for the hills, grabbed the jar of Trimar, and hurled it into some overgrown ivy. “That stuff could hurt our heads,” he drawled. “Now we won’t be tempted.” Had it been anyone other than Jim Morrison, I might have been seriously pissed off, but I took it like a
big girl. He actually gave me a small lecture on the evils of drugs, and told me that his disorderly stage persona was just an elaborate act to go along with his music. I felt like a privileged insider, but I didn’t believe it for a minute. I had my head on his shoulder and he was calling me “darling.” It was a sweet summer dream come true. Predawn I dropped him off at the cheesy Sunset motel where he stayed when Pam threw him out. He told me to come and see him the next day, but when I flounced in with high hopes, I found that he had already checked out. He was back on Rothdell Trail. I listened to Jim and never, ever took another whiff of Trimar. Too bad he didn’t follow his own astute advice on the evils of drugs.
That long-ago night Jim also told me that he really considered himself to be “a poet.” So did Pam, and it became one of the consistent battles in their relationship. She wanted him to leave the rowdy rock life and spend his time writing poetry.
The Doors’ press kit contained some Jim gems. He was awesomely quotable:
We are from the West. The sunset. The night. The sea. This is the end. The world we would suggest would be of a new, wild West. A sensuous and evil world. Strange and haunting, the path of the sun … . I like ideas about the breaking away or overthrowing of the established order—I am interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos, especially activity that seems to have no meaning.
He also insisted that his parents were dead.
“Break on Through,” the first single, didn’t even crack the Top 100, but the Doors were rampaging across America, grabbing devotees, and by the summer of 1967, “Light My Fire” was climbing to the top spot, followed by the album, which hit number one and stayed on the charts for two years.
While the Beatles and Stones led the Summer of Love kids on a merry chase, the Doors represented the shady side of rock and roll. Jim Morrison was a bona fide damp dream, the unruly Pied Piper who led us willingly into chaos. He slept anywhere, fell down in the Sunset Strip gutters and was carried away by strangers. He drove cars into trees and left them behind. He was the real thing. Said John Densmore, “Morrison was devastating in those days. He wore his leather pants twenty-four hours a day and looked like some kind of swamp lizard out on the border.”
The second album,
Strange Days,
which included the astute “People Are Strange,” was recorded in three months and the Doors went back on the road. According to
Crawdaddy
magazine, “The Doors, in person, have become the best the West has to offer … the best performers in the country, and if the albums are poetry as well as music, then the stage show is most of all drama, brilliant theater in any sense of the word.” And though they were starting to
make a fortune, it didn’t seem to matter to Jim, who never carried any cash. True to his credo, Jim continued to overthrow the established order. At a drunken show in Long Island, Jim tried to remove all of his clothes. Right after a gig at Yale University, Jim climbed to the bell tower, stripped naked, and swung out on the bell-tower shutter, hundreds of feet above the scattering crowd. He was promptly arrested.
Jim’s mother, Clara, refused to stay “dead,” finally reaching her missing son through Elektra, inviting him home for Thanksgiving, adding that he had better cut his hair. After the conversation Jim told one of his roadies not to accept her calls. Backstage at a Doors show in Washington, D.C., she was unable to see her son. During “The End” that night, Jim stared at Clara at the side of the stage. “Mother? I want to … FUCK YOU!” Jim never saw or spoke to his mother again.
In August 1966 the Doors played the Cheetah Club in L.A. I was front and center, swooning when Jim seemed to topple into the audience. It wouldn’t be the last time he took that precarious dive. We started to expect his sweaty madness in our upraised arms.
In September the Doors performed on Ed Sullivan’s very important TV show, making rock history when they were told to excise the word “higher” from “Light My Fire.” The promise was made, but Jim didn’t keep it. They never played “The Ed Sullivan Show” again, and Jim didn’t care.
Validated by
Time, Newsweek,
and
Vogue,
who called him “shaken-loose and mind shaking … as if Edgar Allan Poe had blown back as a hippie … .” Jim kept taking chances onstage. “Sometimes I just stop the song and let out a long silence,” Jim said, “let out all the latent hostilities and uneasiness and tensions before we get everyone together.” The music stopped for minutes at a time, the audience stopped breathing. “I like to see how long they can stand it, and just when they’re about to crack, I let ’em go,” In a highly quoted interview, Jim told
Time
magazine that the Doors were “erotic politicians” who were looking for “an electric wedding,” adding that he was more interested in “the dark side of the moon.”
Jim’s close friend and photographer, Paul Ferrara, told me that Jim was well aware of the pandemonium his icon status created. “One time we were watching
The Misfits,
and he said, ‘The thing about Marilyn Monroe is that she lets it all hang out. She’s everything to all people.’ Jim had the same vulnerability that Marilyn had. The fact that he brought it up makes me think that he was totally aware of the ‘thing’ he was experiencing.”
The day after Jim’s twenty-fourth birthday, December 9, 1967, he crossed the imaginary line to the dark side of the moon. Backstage at a gig in New Haven, Connecticut, he was making out with a young girl in a shower stall when a cop stormed in, insisting that no one was allowed backstage. When Jim grabbed his crotch and told the cop to “eat it,” his face was sprayed with Mace. The cop realized he had made a big mistake and, along with the Doors’
manager, Bill Siddons, bathed Jim’s face with water, but Jim wasn’t amused. He was mad at the pigs. During the instrumental break in “Back Door Man,” Jim put on a thick Southern accent and insulted the entire New Haven police force. After the tirade, he shouted, “The whole fucking world hates me!” and a police lieutenant climbed up onstage to tell Jim he was under arrest. “Okay, pig,” he taunted, “come on, say your thing, man!” Then there was chaos. Jim was dragged offstage and down a flight of stairs, beaten, and kicked before being thrown into a cop car and taken to the station house—arrested for “indecent and immoral exhibition.” Not to mention “breach of the peace and resisting arrest.” The charges were eventually dropped. A couple of months later a very loaded Jim was in trouble again after being whacked over the head by an incensed guard at an X-rated Las Vegas movie theater. The police arrived and Jim called them “redneck stupid bastards” and “chickenshit pigs.” He was arrested for “public drunkenness” and taken to jail. It was becoming a very common occurrence.
Paul Ferrara told me a tale that describes Jim’s everyday behavior pretty well. “There were three of us in Jim’s Ford Shelby. We turned onto Sunset Boulevard after a night of partying. Jim floored it in front of the Whiskey and ran through about four red lights—foot on the floor, about one hundred miles an hour, cars zooming across in front of us! All I remember saying was, ‘I want the fuck out of this car!!’ It freaked me out! I felt he was playing Russian roulette with all of our lives—the same as pulling a trigger on a gun you’re not sure about. I was angry, but not as angry as when he killed himself. He was trying all the time. It was like he was saying, ‘I can walk across the tightrope and you can’t.’” When I asked Paul if he thought Jim lived in the moment, he said, “It was a very pagan moment. He was just in a different consciousness—he had switched over, broke on through.”