Mr Mojo (8 page)

Fields' ruse worked, and not only did Morrison and Stavers become lovers, but he became a visible inhabitant of
16
, extending his career substantially. Predictably, though, Morrison treated her badly. Once he had a date with her in New York: after arriving at the Chelsea Hotel from LA, he called her up and invited her over. They hadn't seen each other for a while, and Gloria was tremendously excited, so she rushed down to the hotel. Though she was tough and terse in business, she could be like a little girl when she was in love.

When she got to his room, the door was open so she went in. She looked for him, called out his name, but he was nowhere to be seen. She called his name for over fifteen minutes and then left. When she got back to her apartment the phone was ringing. It was Morrison. ‘Where are you?' she asked.

‘In my room,' he said.

‘I was just there,' Gloria explained, ‘and I looked everywhere for you . . .'

‘Not under the bed,' he said.

Morrison was full of silly little tricks. Rothchild and Fields took him to dinner once in LA, and he didn't say a word all night, pointing at things he wanted on the menu. Even when they insulted him, he just stared at his food, gulping down huge quantities of wine and belching when appropriate. For America's biggest pop star, being difficult was the easiest thing in the world.

By the time of their second LP,
Strange Days
, released in November 1967, the Doors were as big as the Beatles and, in the eyes of the press, twice as subversive. Treated with reverence by their fans and with muted respect by the establishment, the band were beyond criticism, and all they had to do was consolidate that position.

Strange Days
certainly didn't rock the boat, being a virtual photocopy of their debut, a madcap medley of discontent, with plenty of gothic orchestration. But if their first record had been an invitation to glimpse the dark side of life,
Strange Days
was a guided tour. The sex and death motifs were still in abundance, as were the quirky little love songs and the apocalyptic overtures. The record may have been portentous and melodramatic, but it had great tunes. ‘People Are Strange' is perhaps the finest piece of post-acid paranoia ever recorded. With this track the Doors captured that sense of what happened
after
drugs: when acid really hit Los Angeles, the Doors' music was the most appropriate soundtrack, as it spoke to those people who were
really
changing their lives with drugs. Their music
captured too the sleaze and furtiveness of the times. The Beach Boys and the Doors spoke for two different sides of Los Angeles, and in 1967 it was the Doors who were talking the loudest. This was the end of an endless summer. Morrison always felt there was something deeply disturbing and bogus about the so-called Summer of Love (to his credit, Jefferson Airplane's Paul Kantner said that the Summer of Love should have simply been called the golden age of fucking), and he used this theme like a mantra in his songs. On
Strange Days
, with its eerie underwater organ sound, backward tapes and lethargic tone, he sounds like a drugged beast stalking through paradise.

‘I offer images,' Morrison said at the time. ‘I conjure memories of freedom that can still be reached – like the Doors, right? But we can only open the doors – we can't drag people through. I can't free them unless they want to be free . . . A person has to be willing to give up everything, not just wealth. All the bullshit he's been taught, all society's brainwashing. You have to let go of all that to get to the other side. Most people aren't willing to do that.'

The only tell-tale sign of things to come was the opus that ended side two: ‘When the Music's Over'. A distillation of everything on their first LP – the magical significance of rock music, alienation, nihilism, doomed romance – it seemed somewhat forced in its evocation of Armageddon (in one apocalyptic
outburst he asks for his subscription to the resurrection to be cancelled). As in a lot of his songs, here Morrison was orchestrating his own funeral. Detached, mysterious and allusive, Morrison's obsessive and allegorical lyrics (mostly concerning his unrelenting death wish) were as haunting as they had been on the first album.

The Doors
was recorded on 4-track, but after its release the Sunset Sound Studio was converted to 8-track. That was when, according to Manzarek, ‘We began to experiment with the studio itself, as an instrument to be played. Those eight tracks to us were really liberating. So at that point we began to play . . . it became five people: keyboards, drums, guitar, vocalist and studio.' There was another addition to the line-up, as Pamela Courson became a frequent visitor to the studio. Her only contribution, though, occurred during the recording of ‘You're Lost, Little Girl' when Paul Rothchild tried to incorporate her into the song by asking her to perform oral sex on Morrison while he recorded the vocal. Not surprisingly, this didn't work, and the song had to be recorded again.

And though Morrison was already going through the motions, he still believed his music could radically help change people's lives, and still talked opportunistically of his shamanistic qualities: ‘I think people resist freedom because they're afraid of the unknown. But it's ironic. That unknown was once very well known. It's where our souls belong. The only solution
is to confront yourself with the greatest fear imaginable. After that, fear has no power, and fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes.'

The American public lapped this up and
Strange Days
reached number three in the charts.

Their first album featured their portraits on the cover but the band resolutely refused to have another picture of themselves on this one. So Elektra came up with the idea of photographing some carnival freaks instead.

Morrison was amused, thinking it looked like a still from a Fellini movie: ‘I hated the cover of our first album, so for
Strange Days
I said, “I don't want to be on this cover. Put a chick on it or something. Let's have a dandelion, or a design,” and because of the title, everyone agreed, 'cause that's where we were at, what was happening. It was right. Originally, I wanted us in a room surrounded by about thirty dogs. Everyone was saying, “What are the dogs for?” And I said that it was symbolic that it spelled God backwards. Finally we ended up leaving it to the art director and the photographer. He came up with some freaks, a typical sideshow thing. It looked European.'

Worried that the band's fans might not immediately identify this new product, Elektra placed full-page ads in the rock press, stating: ‘Their second super-album, STRANGE DAYS, is now available. Look for it carefully – because THE DOORS are not exactly on the cover. But they sure as hell are inside.'

4

Dance On Fire

The stage is empty, and bathed in darkness. Below, ten thousand avid Doors fans are screaming their pained, ear-piercing screams. A light hovers, and then John Densmore, Robby Krieger and Ray Manzarek quietly walk onto the stage. They calmly engage their instruments and break into song, the aggressive strains of ‘Break On Through' filling the auditorium. Manzarek crouches over his piano, intently pursuing the rhythm, as Densmore pounds his drum kit and Krieger walks around like a sentry, looking, as ever, like someone walking onstage to look for his dog.

The intro seems to last for ever, but then the crowd roars with appreciation as something moves offstage. It's a man: about five feet eleven inches tall, 160 pounds (the booze has taken effect), with long, curly brown hair. He wears leather trousers, a flouncy
white cotton shirt, black boots and a large American-Indian belt.

Wearing his familiar studied frown, Jim Morrison glides across the stage towards the microphone. ‘Hi,' he says, in his best Brando growl. He looks out at the sea of fans, then down to the stage, then quickly behind to his three comrades, and then he cocks his head, shakes his hair, closes his eyes and opens his mouth – the defiant melodramatic gasps of ‘Break On Through' at last filling the night air.

He stares off into the darkness, as a crowd of squirming, sweaty girls peer back from the stalls. He gropes himself and screams, internalising for all to see. He grabs the microphone with one hand, wraps one thin leather leg around the skinny steel stand, and places the other on its base, while rubbing his crotch with his spare hand. He rocks back and forward, gently swaying . . . and the girls groan with delight. He stalks the stage, singing, little muscles popping in his throat. He jerks, twists, hopping from one foot to the other, jumping like a frog; but he is stilted, unable to express himself fully with his body, finding it difficult to dance. His psychosexual energy manifests itself all the same, his partially erect penis clearly visible through his trousers. The band create their familiar wall of sound as Morrison rolls out his catchphrases: ‘Cancel my subscription to the resurrection.' ‘We want the world and we want it now.' ‘I am the Lizard King, I can do anything . . .'

During ‘The Unknown Soldier' Morrison enacts the obligatory shooting scene while Krieger holds his guitar like a machine gun, suffering from splenetic fits and dropping to the stage, his suggestive body movements and incendiary lyrics provoking a typically enthusiastic response. But this time he grabs a cigarette from the audience before acting out his death – the little leap and the dramatic, dead-bird fall. He slumps to the floor and folds over like a wind-blown leaf. Then he jumps up again, startled, embarrassed by his own phoney seizure.

When he was onstage Morrison underwent a transformation, bringing the cartoon Lizard King to life. Up in front of his public, his usually composed face managed to express the most emotions, ‘a thousand masks of tensions'. Onstage, he tried to act out his life.

His dancing was always ungainly, and he hopped about as though he was summoning the gods, in a rain dance of less than epic proportions. His head bent forward, he would jig around the stage, never actually dancing, always aloof, never becoming part of the music. He set himself up as a healer. All hail Morrison! He is here to cure our ills, to feed our poor and fill our souls. All hail the King! Oh lordy, the drunk King!

And then he'd belch and scour the front row for bottles of wine, possibly bumming a cigarette as well. Morrison pretended to be possessed, acting out images from his lyrics, working the crowd into a frenzy before
doing something calculatedly silly and deflating the whole situation. For his fans he embodied physical magnetism and spiritual restlessness, and he never failed to exploit this.

Sometimes he genuinely seemed to enjoy it: he told
Newsweek
's John Riley in 1967, ‘The only time I really open up is onstage. I feel spiritual up there.'

When he believed in himself he saw these shows as a celebration of existence, of pure unbridled joy: an expression of potency. Mick Farren, in
The Hunting of the Lizard King
(an article in the
NME
in 1975), said what Morrison did ‘was present a rhetoric and mime that exactly typified the thoughtless, emotive confusion of the sixties youth revolt. Unlike Dylan, he didn't question. He saw no other point of view than that of the Lizard King's narrow perspective. Onstage, for the few moments Morrison had total control, objectivity was suspended. His histrionics, the prowling, the long insolent stares, the lunges at the mike, and the spasmodic twitching leaps, ceased to be absurd.'

Yet these epiphanies were rare, and mostly the performances were only conceits orchestrated to inflame the audience. Morrison was acting, inflicting his persona on the crowd, enacting his primitive ritual. And acting like a bit of a dick. He was never the real Jim Morrison onstage, but then he was no longer the real Jim Morrison offstage, either.

Ray Manzarek, always Morrison's most fervent defender, remained convinced of the singer's integrity: ‘Jim's contribution to music was that he was real onstage. He was not a performer, he was not an entertainer, he was not a showman . . . He was possessed by a vision, by a madness, by a rage to live, by an all-consuming fire to . . . make art.'

Perhaps Paul Rothchild was nearer the truth when he said, ‘The Doors always tried to be unique, to be different . . . avant-garde. There was a conscious attempt to be new.'

‘The Jim Morrison thing started out as an act, but so many people believed it, that he became that,' said Danny Fields. ‘They returned to him what they saw, and he started acting out their fantasy. After all, what does it take? What is a shaman? There were no mystical rays coming from heaven, he wasn't surrounded by an aura – it was just a psychological relationship between him and his admirers. It was all a pose, and he became his own invention. He knew he had a special quality – a kind of dangerous, threatening, menacing sexuality that women went berserk over – and he used that to cover up.'

In the band's early days, Morrison had two set pieces which he would incorporate into their live shows: the first was the Oedipal section of ‘The End', the second a dive into the audience. He would just let go and dive into the crowd like it was a pool of
water, and the audience would catch him and carry him back to the stage. Though the audience quickly began to expect it, and it is now common, back then no rock performer had ever done such a thing. The jump has since been copied by, among others, Iggy Pop, Peter Gabriel and (unsuccessfully) David Bowie.

‘The first time I ever saw him do the dive was in Bido Lido's in May 1967,' said Pamela Des Barres, ‘a little ditty place which only held about two hundred people. I was sitting way up in a booth and saw it all. Jim was so dynamic, so brave. He was saying “Fuck it” – he pushed it as far as anyone could. He wanted an adverse reaction, he wanted people to be involved with the show, he wanted them to respond. He would just let go and career into the audience, who would eventually put him back onstage. No one had ever seen anything like it, and Jim didn't even consider the consequences. But it was like he turned it on – he put everything he had into performance.