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Authors: Pamela Des Barres

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BOOK: Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon
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In 1978 Keith returned to London with Annette, taking up residence in Harry Nilsson’s flat in Mayfair (strangely, Cass Elliot of the Mamas and the Papas died there in 1974). In between recording sessions, Keith actually went to a health farm and seemed temporarily together, but his lifeblood drumming just wasn’t the same and it knocked him off the wagon (drum stool) forever. Keith couldn’t keep time and couldn’t follow arrangements. Once again the band talked of replacing him, but Pete couldn’t bring himself to do it.
On a holiday with Annette, Keith tired of the long plane trip and, losing all control, dashed into the cockpit and drummed on the flight engineer’s table, then attacked a stewardess and some crew members. He was thrown off the plane, taken to a local hospital, and pronounced “unfit to travel.” These continuing incidents dashed hopes that Keith might get better. Despite Pete’s loyalty, the band was ready to relieve Keith of his drummerly duties—but he did it for them.
Keith, the night of his death. “It was like a sacrifice,” said Roger Daltrey. (MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/VENICE, CALIF.)
On September 6, 1978, Keith and Annette attended Paul McCartney’s midnight screening of
The Buddy Holly Story.
Paul owned Buddy Holly’s catalog and celebrated Buddy’s birthday every year with a spectacular bash. Keith was in his element that night, sitting at the head of the star table with Paul and his wife Linda, gregarious, charming, and flamboyant as ever. The couple got home at four-thirty, whereupon Keith took a handful of sleeping tablets and a sedative called Heminevrin (a relaxant that curbs alcoholism and mania—he definitely suffered from both!) and fell asleep to
The Abominable Dr. Phibes,
a Vincent Price horror film. His eyes flew open at seven-thirty and, after unsuccessfully trying to get Annette to cook for him, he went to the kitchen, made himself a steak, drank some champagne, swallowed a few more Heminevrin pills, and died before he got old.
Keith’s ashes were interred at Golder’s Green crematorium during a small funeral ceremony for the band, his family, and a few friends. Roger Daltrey’s floral tribute was a TV set with a champagne bottle smashed through the screen.
“In a way it was like a sacrifice,” Roger said. “We can do anything we want to now. I have very odd feelings. I feel incredibly strong and at the same time incredibly fragile.”
“Keith has always appeared so close to blowing himself up in the past that we’ve become used to living with the feeling,” Pete Townshend said at the funeral. “But this time Keith hasn’t survived, he hasn’t come round, he hasn’t thrown himself off the balcony and landed in one piece. Everybody laughed at Keith and his antics, but they never saw the other shoulder was wet with tears.”
JIM MORRISON
I
was one of the few hundred people who watched the rise and demise of the Lizard King. In the early, early days, right in front of my greedy eyes, he would slink around the Sunset Strip, black leather unzipped, devilish grin, cocky and unremorseful. “Aaaahh,” we all whispered. “What goes on behind that flawless face? Where does he go when the lights go all the way down?” Tousled, tormented, and highly in demand, he led the parade with dangerous indifference. Even the naked facts do nothing to alter those early images: dark, messy ringlets, love beads, angry, penetrating scowl. Come hither, but be careful.
The first time I witnessed Jim Morrison slither onto a stage, I was bombed out of my mind on a very early version of PCP called Trimar. My friend Jerry Penrod, the bass player for Iron Butterfly, smuggled it out of the hospital where he worked during the day. He got it in quart jars and handed them right to me. Wasn’t I just the lucky one? An itsy-bitsy vial sold for ten dollars on the street, so I was very popular that balmy night in Hollywood. The underground
cavern club Bido Lido’s was packed. I held on to sopping lace hankies full of this incredibly dangerous drug—inhaling, giggling, waiting.
The news was out all over town that this new band, the Doors, had a gorgeous, hot singer who actually
sucked
the microphone, and all of us wild, loony girls couldn’t wait to get a load of him. The anticipation was high and so were we. The band played pretty cool, with lots of moody organ, and then Jim Morrison was onstage. Somehow he just
appeared,
holding the microphone like it was trying to get away, clutching it hard like it might just be alive, moaning, eyes closed, feeling enough pent-up pain for everyone in the room. And
God,
what did he look like? I had to get a closer eyeful. I struggled and squeezed my way down front and gazed up at a future rock legend in delirious wonder. HE’S HOT, HE’S SEXY, HE’S DEAD. Remember that
Rolling Stone
cover? I had never seen such blatant sexuality onstage. He writhed in horny anguish, demanding that everybody in the stormy, sweltering room light his fire. “We want the world, and we want it
now.”
He hooked us all together. We wanted the entire fucking world, and we wanted it right this
minute
! I had seen the Stones a couple of times and Mick Jagger inspired some steam dreams, but he had his frenzy under control. Jim Morrison was so out of control that it scared people. It scared me close to imaginary death and I loved it. While Mick suggested that danger lurked in his trousers, Jim grabbed hold of it and shook it in our faces. He defied the system with his dick, like a rock-and-roll Lenny Bruce. While the flower dolls urged us to live in peace, Jim bellowed about insanity, incest, and murder. His defiance was catching and we all wanted a piece of it. When he took a dive into the audience without premeditation, we all held him up, snatching some of his scary stuff oh-so-briefly
Instead of telling journalists that his father had been a captain in the navy and he had been a navy brat, traveling around the country, changing schools on a regular basis, Jim Morrison told the press that his parents were dead. It was easier. Although witty and charming, Steve Morrison had been a strict disciplinarian who barked orders at his sons and daughter, demanding that Jim follow rules that he seemed determined to break. Mother Clara upheld her husband’s position, and there was a constant battle to tame Jim’s innate rebellious nature.
When Jim was barely five, the Morrisons were taking another trip across the country when they were waylaid by a deadly accident involving a family of Indians. “Jimmy was very much affected,” Grandmother Caroline said. “He wanted to do something.” The highway police and an ambulance were called, but Jim was so upset that his father said to him it hadn’t really happened, that he had just been having a bad dream. It was a dream that never died, and Jim would later claim that the souls of the dying Indians jumped into his head that afternoon.
While his siblings were content to walk the line, Jim was constantly prodding
the facade of fifties morality. With an IQ of 149, he mercilessly tore into his teachers, demanding answers they were unable to give, and, in fact, he would always have a smoldering disdain for authority figures. To pass the time he read
Mad
magazine and drew stacks of twisted, sexually explicit drawings.
Jim’s George Washington High School experience in Alexandria, Virginia, was just something to get through. He didn’t participate in any school activities, but because good grades came so easily to him, he was bored and always looking for a way to shake things up and get noticed. When he was late for school, he claimed to have been kidnapped by gypsies. Once he left class early, saying he was having brain surgery that very afternoon. He called to friends in the hallway—“Hey, motherfucker!”—many, many years before it was even slightly acceptable. He painted copies of de Kooning nudes, and he was wild for words, foraging through poetry books, glomming on to Blake, Rimbaud, Balzac, Camus, and Beat writers Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Jack Kerouac, who gave Jim permission to “ … burn, burn burn like fabulous Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars … .”
His high-school girlfriend, Tandy Martin, while captivated by Jim’s sensitivity (one of Jim’s poems for her stated, “But one / The most beautiful of all / Dances in a ring of fire / And throws off the challenge with a shrug”), still had to put up with his wicked sense of humor, which often brought her to tears. She was devastated when Jim was asked to join the all-important AVO fraternity and he had no interest whatsoever. When the couple broke up, Jim threatened to cut her face up so nobody would look at her but him, but Tandy never believed he would do it. Jim seemed to have quite a few friends but somehow remained a loner, spending more and more time at a club on Route 1, listening to the blues. He graduated in June 1961 but, much to the dismay of his folks, didn’t attend the graduation ceremony. Jim Morrison’s diploma was sent to him in the mail.
 
The Lizard King crossing the imaginary line to the dark side of the moon. (HENRY DILTZ)
The constant battle with his parents about the clothes he wore (the same dirty shirt for a week), the length of his hair, and his smart mouth began to escalate when, at sixteen, Jim discovered Friedrich Nietzsche, who confirmed Jim’s suspicions that, like the philosopher, he, too, was a free spirit and “a philosopher of the dangerous.” He began writing poetry and keeping a journal, inspired by Franz Kafka. He blew minds by asking friends to read a passage out of any one of his collection of books, then proudly telling them the title and author.
Hoping to steer their errant son in the right direction, Steve and Clara enrolled Jim at St. Petersburg College in Florida and shipped him off to Steve’s parents’ house to live. He took psychology courses and tortured his very sober grandparents by leaving empty wine bottles in his room and blaring Elvis. After school he hung out with a guy known to be gay, who told Jim that when he cruised for guys, he always left his underwear in the drawer. “Always show your meat,” he instructed Jim, advice he would later follow.
In 1962 Jim switched to Florida State University and moved in with five other college students but was soon asked to leave, relocating to a tiny trailer behind a girls’ boardinghouse, where he boned up on protest philosophies. He peed in the public fountain. He exposed himself to trick-or-treaters. He encouraged a few of his friends to start a riot during a campus seminar, to show that a crowd could be controlled. “We can make love to it,” he enthused. “We can make it riot!” He had no takers.
The Morrisons had moved to California, and Jim hitchhiked across the country to tell his parents of his decision to study film at UCLA. They adamantly rebuffed his request, adding that he had better cut off his unruly hair, and he angrily went back to FSU, moving into a seedy motel. Though he continued to get top grades, amazing teachers and fellow students with his grandiose ideas, Jim was unhappy and couldn’t stay out of trouble, once getting arrested and handcuffed for “disturbing the peace, resisting arrest, and public drunkenness.”
Against his family’s wishes, in February 1964 Jim hitched back to California and enrolled at the UCLA Theater Arts Department, where he attended classes with Francis Ford Coppola and a like-minded, well-read eccentric, Dennis Jakob. The two discussed forming a band, “The Doors—Open and
Closed,” based around the statement by William Blake: “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it truly is, infinite.” Jim also spent a great deal of time with a moody, wired, arrogant freak, thirty-four-year-old Felix Venable, who inspired Jim to pursue his poetic decadence and to experiment with all sorts of mind-expanding drugs. Jim’s drinking accelerated. He teetered naked on the edges of tall buildings. He set his bed on fire, threw darts at
Playboy
centerfolds, filled the men’s-room walls with rancorous graffiti. The chaotic, controversial, subversive film he managed to come up with—a half-naked girl stripping on top of a television set featuring Nazi storm troopers—earned him a “complimentary D,” and Jim Morrison dropped out of film school to wander Venice Beach and smoke pot. He took fistfuls of LSD. When the array of drugs in his system failed to disqualify him for army duty, Jim convinced the army doctors he was a homosexual. Soon afterward he played harmonica on his first gig with fellow student Ray Manzarek’s band, Rick and the Ravens, and said it was the easiest money he’d ever made.
Jim’s own mind fascinated him beyond anything else, and he began staying on the rooftop of an abandoned office building at Venice Beach, dropping acid, pondering his options, writing poetry, meditating, opening himself up to the great unknown, ready for absolutely anything. And the words started to pour out of him in a torrent. Years later he recalled this time: “It was a beautiful, hot summer and I just started hearing songs. This kind of mythic concert that I heard … with a band and singing and an audience—a large audience. Those first five or six songs I wrote, I was just taking notes at a fantastic rock concert that was going on in my head. And once I had written the songs, I had to sing them.” With a diet of drugs and very little food at his disposal, when Jim Morrison came down from the rooftop, his appearance had altered dramatically. No longer pudgy, he was lean and suntanned, his dark hair curling around his angular face, deep-set eyes hypnotically intense. Ray almost didn’t recognize him.
One of rock and roll’s legendary cosmic moments took place that summer of ’65 when Ray Manzarek ran into Jim on the Venice Boardwalk and asked what he had been up to. “I’ve been living on some rooftop writing songs,” he said, and Ray wanted to hear Jim sing them. About the fortuitous meeting, Ray later said, “Somebody must have planned it.”
Knocked out entirely by what he heard, Ray insisted they start a rock-and-roll band and “make a million dollars.” Jim said that was what he had in mind all along, suggested they call themselves “the Doors,” and moved into Ray’s house that afternoon, where they worked on the songs and Jim’s tentative singing for two weeks straight. Ray met drummer John Densmore at the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s Meditation Center and asked if he might be interested in playing in a new rock band. John’s first rehearsal was in Ray’s parents’ garage: “Ray said, ‘This is Jim, the singer.’ He had never sung. But they
showed me some of the lyrics and I was attracted to them. Songs like ‘Moonlight Drive’ and ‘Soul Kitchen’ were real out there, yet I could see the fluidity and rhythm to them and right away thought, God, put this to rock music? Yeah! … Jim was real shy and sung facing the corner of the garage, but he was different and great looking. He didn’t know anything about chords or any of that, but he was a genius for melody—he heard them in his head … .”
Along with Ray’s brother on guitar, the burgeoning group recorded a demo and, surprisingly, were signed right away by Columbia’s Billy James, then left to sit and wait. While they waited, Robby Krieger replaced Ray’s brother on guitar, and the music really started to happen. They were serious, rehearsing five days a week, but when the Doors auditioned for a few local clubs, they were turned down because they had no bass player. Believing their sound was exciting and different, the Doors refused to compromise.
Jim wrote to his father to tell him of the exciting new developments in his life, but the elder Morrison wrote back to Jim, objecting angrily, stating that what Jim was doing was “a crock.” Jim never wrote to his father again.
Still hell-bent, getting arrested, tearing up friends’ apartments, breaking girls’ hearts, getting high as a helium balloon, Jim somehow managed to make the all-important rehearsals. Just as they were about to relent and get a bass player, the Doors were offered a running gig at London Fog, a tiny dump on the Sunset Strip. At first Jim was shy, singing with his back to the small audience, but still managed to attract a slim, freckle-faced redhead, nineteen-year-old Pamela Courson, who quickly became his beloved counterpart. Although he would certainly veer off wildly in other directions—including my own—in his heart Jim Morrison was very much a one-woman man. Seemingly reserved and acquiescent, Pam could not only match wits with Jim but give as good (or as bad) as she got. She was the only one who would dare tell Jim that he needed to see a psychiatrist (he went twice) or that he’d been wearing his leather pants so long that he smelled. She nagged him about his excessive drinking. When he fucked around, she fucked around. Jim could be brutal, sometimes tying her up, insisting on anal sex. When he stayed away for days at a time, she wrote “Faggot” on his favorite vest and cut his clothes into tiny pieces. Although she called herself “Jim’s creation,” Pam was hot-tempered, demanding, and fearless, and somehow managed to hang on to her wild-child man for the rest of his life.
BOOK: Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon
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