Mr Mojo (13 page)

The bubble burst when Kennealy saw how he could behave in front of other people. ‘He gave people what perhaps he seemed to think they expected of him. He was rather obliging in respect of his drinking. I don't think the person I met was an act, I thought the Jim Morrison I knew was the real person. I might have been naive as hell, but I thought that this was what he was really like, and the other stuff – the drinking and the drugs – was extraneous. I thought he was a genuinely shy person, and the other stuff was a mask, a convenient persona for people to relate to. It was self-defence. But this side of his character manifested
itself in a totally outrageous and malevolent way, and it became larger than he was. His success magnified his human weaknesses.'

Kennealy tried to pull Morrison back to earth, but as soon as she'd persuaded him to stop drinking, split from the band and concentrate on living his life, he'd recoil and turn back into the Pigman from LA.

‘At the time I thought, if this is as good as it can get, then this is what I'll have to settle for. I would rather have had what I had, than not have had anything. He would always say that it was over between him and Pamela, that the relationship was half pity, but he never would have left her.'

At this stage, Kennealy was one of the few people trying to get Morrison to slow down. To others he was simply a wild rock and roller. ‘In those days,' said Steve Harris, ‘people didn't think in terms of cleaning up their acts – record companies didn't ask bands to lay off the booze for a while because an important gig was coming up. There was none of that, basically because there wasn't the knowledge that there is now. That was the first period when people went for it in a serious way. Now, years later, those people are either dead, they've cleaned up, or they're vegetables. The records were still selling, so why should we have tried to stop him? We thought: so, he drinks, everybody drinks, right? Rehabilitation would never have worked because he just didn't want it.'

‘I tried to stop him, but by then he was too far gone,' said Kennealy. ‘It had got so out of hand I don't think he could have gone off and been the semi-private person he would have liked to have been. He was beginning to fall apart, on all levels, just sliding downhill. I felt useless; I would have sold my soul to stop it. It was just so inevitable; it was like a Greek tragedy after a while. It just got worse, and worse and worse. No one could do a damn thing about it. We'd talk, argue, scream, and nothing would change. It didn't seem to be anything he could do anything about.

‘He was too entrenched in all the bullshit. I would tell him he was surrounded by assholes, and he would laugh and say, yes, he knew. What can you do? You can't kidnap someone and deprogram them. Maybe you can, but it wasn't something that would have occurred to me at the time. People can't be saved unless they want to be saved, and Jim didn't. I think he had this idea that once he was saved he wouldn't be an artist any more. It was this whole romantic Hemingway thing.

‘He thought he could become a serious artist by being a rock singer, but just found the whole thing relentlessly trivialised by his fans. It depressed him when he realised that people only saw him as a rock star, and that he probably didn't control his own life or destiny any more. It was really sad – he should have cut out a hell of a lot sooner.'

By the end of 1969 Jim Morrison was a sex symbol with a paunch and a beard. He was fat, drunk and unhappy. Strapped to a rollercoaster which showed no signs of slowing down, he was rushing through life with no sense of purpose, all his sensibilities blurred by drink. As all around him the pressure and tension built up, he became a frenzied zombie, a walking corpse, a man who only wanted escape.

This was hardly surprising, as Morrison's life had recently become a litany of disasters: during November he had entered a ‘not guilty' plea to charges as a result of the incident in Miami, and had been released on $5,000 bail.

Two days later he was arrested after flying to Phoenix with Tom Baker and a few drinking buddies, ostensibly to see the Rolling Stones; he was charged with being drunk and disorderly and interfering with the flight of an aircraft, after being rowdy and apparently molesting an air stewardess. The charges were eventually dropped.

The documentary film
Feast of Friends
was finally released, and was described by
Variety
as a failure, ‘made either from the out-takes of some larger project or an unsold try at daytime-TV slotted to meet the kids home from school'.
Rolling Stone
, meanwhile, simply called it pretentious, although the film won an award at the Atlanta Film Festival. And
Hwy
, another film close to his heart, was screened to a resolutely
unenthusiastic reception. He was courted to appear in several movies – including one marshalled by Steve McQueen – but nothing came of them.

To console himself, Morrison continued on his drinking binges, but increasingly he was unaccompanied. (Tom Baker, perhaps his closest drinking buddy, had fallen out with Morrison after the Phoenix trip.) His twenty-sixth birthday was celebrated at Bill Siddons' house in Manhattan Beach, where Morrison repaid his hospitality by falling asleep on the couch, his penis poking out of his trousers and soaking the carpet with piss. Because he was turning into such a behemoth, and because the paranoia surrounding the band's performances had led to the cancellation of so many concerts, the rest of the band kept asking him to get his act together, to shave and shed a few pounds for their forthcoming dates in LA; but Morrison just ignored them. Miami had really taken its toll, and constant paternity suits only made him more insecure. Morrison began to look vulnerable. It was now that he first began mentioning a move to Paris as a possible means of escape. Elektra tried to combat the steadily increasing flow of bad publicity by relaunching Morrison as a Renaissance man, and various press releases outlining Morrison's genius were drawn up for his approval. Predictably, the singer wanted nothing to do with it: he didn't want the people told that he was a superman; he wanted them to discover it for
themselves. One thing that did please Morrison was the publication of
The Lords
and
The New Creatures
in one volume by Simon and Schuster, even though it was credited to Jim Morrison, and not James Douglas Morrison, as he'd requested.

In February 1970 the group released their fifth LP,
Morrison Hotel
(named after a real $2 skid-row hotel in downtown LA). After the disappointment of
The Soft Parade
, this was almost a return to form, though by no means a complete success. The record contained some strong, evocative songs. ‘Peace Frog' made reference to the horrific car accident Morrison had witnessed as a child, where he claimed the souls of various American Indians entered his ‘fragile eggshell mind'. ‘Queen of the Highway' was inspired by Courson. ‘Roadhouse Blues', with its flagrantly ironic blues lyric – Morrison guzzling beer as soon as he wakes up – was the story of Morrison's life. But somehow everyone expected more. It was as if the Doors had lost their social context.

Rock critic Robert Christgau's reaction to the album was typical: ‘As he [Morrison] discovers his real affection for rock and roll music . . . he uncovers his inability to relate wholeheartedly to it. Suddenly, Morrison's timbre loses much of its former mystery, his phrasing lacks wit, and the music, while competent enough, excites only those over on the persona he once managed to project with such ferocious intensity – those entranced by an afterimage, so to speak.

‘For although Morrison once made music that was good as music, music was never his specialty, and consequently it was never the strength of the group he defined. The Doors were film students, remember, and their deepest passion was communication, which Morrison called “politics”. Only Robby Krieger was a musician by commitment, and, given a few bad breaks, the group might very well have disbanded as quickly as it succeeded. When their success became perfunctory, so did their music.'

Ever counter-intuitive, Hunter S. Thompson loved it: ‘Crank it all the way up on one of those huge obsolete wire-burning MacIntosh amps and eighty custom-built speakers. Then stand back somewhere on the main beams of a big log house and feel the music come up through your femurs . . . and after that you can always say, for sure, that you once knew what it was like to hear men play rock and roll music.'

But if the music had become more pragmatic, a note of bitterness had crept into Morrison's interviews. He told
Creem
magazine at the time, ‘The music has gotten progressively better, tighter, more professional, more interesting, but I think that people resent the fact that three years ago there was a great renaissance of spirit and emotion and revolutionary sentiment, and when things didn't change overnight I think people resented the fact that we were just still around doing good music.'

Two months after its release,
Morrison Hotel
was awarded a gold disc, making the Doors the first American rock group to achieve five gold albums in a row.

During the spring Morrison renewed his acquaintance with Patricia Kennealy. They had not had much contact since their first meetings eighteen months earlier, only exchanging the occasional letter, phone call or gift, but it was Kennealy whom Jim called when he doubted himself and needed to be told he was a god or a schmuck; and Kennealy who would tell him in no uncertain terms. His relationship with Courson might have been more habitual, but it was Kennealy who offered the intellectual firepower, who challenged him. When Jim showed Courson the lyrics to a new song, she'd tell him how marvellous he was; when he showed Kennealy, she'd point out its pretentious literary references. He was as abusive to her as he was to Courson, but Kennealy saw sides of him that no one else did. ‘I saw him be a terrible pig,' she said. ‘He was a pig to me and he was a pig to Pam, but I have the other stuff to balance against that. I was honest with him. Apart from me I don't think anyone was honest with him at that point. And because he couldn't trust anyone, he covered up. He had this really vulnerable psyche, this inner self that he genuinely wanted to protect, the way we all do. He threw up screens to protect himself, and sometimes he was successful, sometimes not.'

On Midsummer's Night 1970, at 10.30 p.m., after spending the day together, Morrison and Kennealy were married in her Gothic East Village apartment in New York. But this was no ordinary service; it was a Wicca wedding, a ceremony based on ‘white' witchcraft. At this period in her life Kennealy was a practising member of a New York coven, and the ceremony was conducted by its founders, a high priest and priestess.

‘What I practise is witchcraft, for want of a better word,' she said. ‘It's esoteric Christianity. I've fallen out of the habit of covens and all that kind of stuff, but I would characterise myself more as a Pagan than a Christian. When I pray, it's not always to Jesus. I told Jim the first time I met him that I was involved in witchcraft – I was either so anaesthetised by drink or so incredibly comfortable that it just came out. He was surprised, sort of how you might be surprised if your cat suddenly started talking: you might be a bit intimidated, but on the whole, you'd rather like it.

‘I suppose he felt a need for some kind of avowal of his feelings, a formalised connection, however unorthodox it might have been. The drama of the ceremony certainly appealed to him. It was an extraordinary experience, it was magical.'

Morrison and Kennealy took part in the ritual handfasting, and drew each other's blood, as part of the Celtic tradition. They mixed a few drops of their blood with consecrated wine, which they then drank,
and then signed the official documents, one written in English, the other in runes. They then signed their names in blood, after which Morrison fainted.

‘He fainted because he came into the presence of the Goddess, one of the ancient forces of nature, and one of the people to whom we pray,' Kennealy said. ‘Being in a magical circle takes an awful lot out of you – it's very intense. It's an actual physical thing, and if you're not prepared for it – which Jim obviously wasn't – it's very powerful. Magic is a very real thing . . . it's a draining of energy.'

Life sped on. There was no time to think, only drink . . . obliteration was the key. Soon after his bizarre marriage to Kennealy, Morrison visited Paris, scouring the city for apartments as well as visiting the bars. A week later he was back in LA, where he continued his excessive behaviour, one week being arrested for public drunkenness, the next catching pneumonia.

At a time when live performances by the group were sporadic, in July Elektra decided to release the Doors' first live album, a two-record package called
Absolutely Live
, which had been recorded in New York during January. It contained some good performances, but was only noteworthy for the inclusion of a full-blown version of ‘Celebration of the Lizard'. The cover was a dead giveaway, featuring a photograph of Morrison which was at least eighteen months old; there was little
point using a recent picture of the singer: he was too wan and fat.

The Miami trial began in August and was a farce from the outset. The prosecution paraded a seemingly endless procession of witnesses claiming to have seen Morrison expose himself, even though 150 photographs taken at the concert contradicted this. Miami versus Morrison was a sham – maybe because the odds were stacked against him from the start. His attorneys tried to sidestep the issue by comparing his stagecraft with other forms of contemporary ‘art': things like the novel
Portnoy's Complaint
, the stage show
Hair!
and the film
Woodstock
, which included nudity, swearing and purposeful exhibitionism. It was a cunning ploy, but the judge nevertheless threw the idea out of court, declaring that examples of ‘community standards' would not be admitted for evidence.