Mr Mojo (10 page)

A staggering amount of hype preceded the tour, particularly concerning the group's four proposed concerts at the Roundhouse in North London, during September. Granada TV were planning a TV special called
The Doors Are Open
, and John Peel, fast becoming the country's foremost alternative DJ, was plugging the band and their gigs on his radio show. ‘I remember various people slagging them off before they'd even arrived, so I started repeating “Stand clear of the Doors, it can be dangerous to obstruct the Doors,” just like they say on the tube trains.'

By this time the British underground saw the Doors as the new Rolling Stones. People thought the concerts would be transcendental, like the records. Needless to say, they failed to live up to such high expectations.

The afternoon before the first concert Morrison was typically quiet backstage. He was on strange turf, so the screens had come up.

This was Morrison the Singular Man, a publicly private man. He was all charm and deference, handshakes and kisses, seemingly happy to mingle with the Roundhouse gofers and groupies. Jeff Dexter, the DJ at the Roundhouse concerts, remembered it well: ‘Backstage he got a lot of attention, and he seemed to play along with everyone. But you could tell he wasn't like that. It just looked like an act to me.'

Then, come showtime, fired up by booze (he had foregone the soundcheck in favour of a lone drinking session), knowing that the television crew were filming the event, Morrison slipped into his lizard suit and began his evening ritual, the evocation of the spirits of the American West. He moved like a cripple, swigging on a bottle of Jack Daniel's like a gunfighter, draping himself over the microphone while staring wide-eyed at the stage. His drunk, jerky movements made him look silly, but Morrison was oblivious to it all. The boozy slut in leather pants was in full flight, and if the audience didn't like his act, then to hell with them.

The first concert produced a very hip crowd, the self-appointed gurus of the underground bumping up against a motley collection of trendy students and a battalion of young girls. They blew bubbles and waved their hands in the air; they swapped drugs and admired each other's garb. Chris Rowley, then a stalwart of the underground press, remembered ‘there was a lot of leather'.

Jeff Dexter was one of the many dissatisfied punters: ‘The Jefferson Airplane played long improvised jams, whereas the Doors stuck to the songs as you heard them on the records, with a few instrumental breaks and a little orchestrated poetry thrown in. This led people to think they were pedestrian. I thought they were just like a pop band, really.'

This was much more of a pop show than a subcultural tour de force, and the Roundhouse crowd saw the Doors for what they were: pure theatre.

Journalist Neil Spencer was in the audience that night. ‘I remember being very disappointed that he couldn't dance, and he kept falling about all over the place. At other times the show was so choreographed it didn't look real . . . it looked completely theatrical. The band were very professional, and some of the songs produced a genuinely psychotic atmosphere, but it was really a big anticlimax, and we realised that our perception of them was all wrong.'

The British underground continually aped bohemian America, and its non-recognition of reality made the British hippie movement seem even more esoteric than it already was. The Doors, unwittingly, had put a temporary halt to this American imperialism. When, during ‘The End', Morrison repeated the line ‘Father, I want to kill you', one indignant member of the audience shouted ‘Bloody carnivore!'

In the dressing room after the show, Morrison was in a sullen mood, brushing off compliments, and pouring yet more booze down his throat. This caused some consternation among the hippy cognoscenti who had made it backstage. In those days alcohol had redneck connotations, and it didn't matter if you were the lead singer with the hippest band in America, drinking was still uncool. Morrison was oblivious,
sodden, sinking more and more into his shell. This was his third persona of the day, and as luck would have it the easiest to adopt.

The hip might not have been entirely convinced by the Doors' European debut, but the hype surrounding their visit worked wonders, with ‘Hello I Love You' becoming their most successful British hit (it reached number 15) and
Waiting for the Sun
eventually reaching number 16. The TV documentary
The Doors Are Open
received a positive critical response, and, despite coming across rather badly in a rambling, monotone interview, Morrison liked the film too, his only criticism being that it was rather obvious: ‘The thing is, the guys that made the film had a thesis of what it was going to be before we came over. We were going to be the political rock group, and it also gave them the chance to whip out some of their anti-American sentiments, which they thought we were going to portray, and so they had their whole film before we came over.'

For Morrison, the rest of the European tour was a blur, a litany of alcohol and drug abuse, the singer spending most of his free time either drunk, or asleep, sometimes in a hotel bedroom, but other times sprawled out on the pavement. Give or take the odd debacle, the group's performances were usually up to scratch, though they were already performing on autopilot. Manzarek, Krieger and Densmore were
merely going through the motions, while Morrison often had trouble remembering what those motions were. In the interviews he gave during this period, you can hear the timidity in his voice, as if he didn't really care whether or not he made himself understood.

Jefferson Airplane's lead singer Grace Slick remembers Morrison vividly. She said he reminded her of ‘a rabid Johnny Depp, perfectly formed and possessed by abstraction'. She also remembers what she describes as his ‘colourful non sequiturs', but which in print simply looks like Morrison's attempts to make himself appear more interesting.

‘“Jim,” I'd say, “did you see that broken chair by the speaker system?”

‘With a pleasant smile and pupils dilated to the very edges of the iris, he'd respond with something like, “Lady in smoke shop, nobody for broken, chair broken, chair broken.”'

Even though he was fond of talking gibberish, Slick seduced him on the tour. ‘He was a well-built boy, his cock was slightly larger than average, and he was young enough to maintain the engorged silent connection right through the residue of chemicals that can threaten erection.'

Slick described their time in Holland: ‘Both bands were walking down this street in Amsterdam, one of the main streets . . . and the kids would offer us drugs.
We'd say, “Thanks very much,” [and] put it in [our] pockets . . . but you wouldn't take everything you would be given otherwise you'd be dead.

‘Jim, on the other hand, took everything that was given to him, on the spot.'

The European tour also introduced both groups to ‘poppers' (amyl nitrate), and Morrison was such a fan of the drug that he used to come running on to the stage like a pinwheel. One night, when Jefferson Airplane were performing, he invaded the stage and started dancing along to one of their songs, blitzed out of his mind. He then collapsed, and was rushed to hospital in a portable oxygen tent. Later that night the Doors played as a three-piece, Ray Manzarek filling in for Morrison on vocals. It was not one of their most successful performances.

5

Aping the Changeling

By the end of 1968 the Doors were the most popular group in America, as well as the most controversial. Because they were so popular, their exploits were blown out of all proportion. Larger than life, and twice as ugly, the Doors represented the mood of the nation, the Zeitgeist incarnate. Morrison himself was still considered to be the sexiest man in rock and roll, in spite of the fact that he spent most of his time stupefied by alcohol and benzedrine, and in spite of being labeled the ‘Mickey Mouse de Sade' by many of those who worked for him.

Danny Fields regularly felt the brunt of Morrison's sadistic personality: ‘He really was a terror – he was the epitome of the old-fashioned concept of a brat, a big, brilliant, sexy brat. They don't make them like that any more, people who have that way of reacting to the
world. These days pop stars are different when you try and talk to them about the realities of the business, or about what's required of them as a human being; they stop being bad boys. Morrison, he was an original. Of course it was all contrived – the macho pose thing – but he lived it, and underneath he didn't give a damn. Didn't give a damn about money, property, obsessions . . . he was one of the few people from that period who was genuinely anti-bourgeois. I suppose the hedonism got in the way.'

‘His life, such as it was, was an open book,' said Steve Harris. ‘This was the first time a pop performer had been so explicit in public, and he left nothing to the imagination. He lived his image to the hilt.'

The new tour got under way in November, the biggest the Doors had yet undertaken, and their fans reacted with an unexpected fervour. The group caused pandemonium almost everywhere they played, and there were riots in Phoenix, Cleveland, St Louis and Chicago. They had become satanic beat messiahs, a carnival freak-show, and the crowds came baying for blood, expecting some kind of unholy resurrection. Seeing the Doors was now a real experience, what with the unruly crowds, the band's increasingly sinister sound, and the performance of Morrison himself crawling around the stage dishevelled and drunk, sneering, swearing and hurling abuse at the audience. Unbeknown to the rest of the band, Morrison
was deliberately courting violence at these concerts, manipulating the crowds into a frenzy.

‘I was less theatrical, less artificial when I first began performing,' said Morrison of his stagecraft. ‘But now the audiences are much larger and the rooms we play much bigger, it's necessary to project more – to exaggerate – almost to the point of grotesqueness.'

A big influence on Morrison at this point was a drama group called the Living Theatre – disciples of one of Morrison's heroes, the radical French dramatic theorist Antonin Artaud. Morrison had been infatuated with the group's activities for years, but now that the Doors' stage shows were becoming predictable and perfunctory, he began trying to incorporate the Living Theatre's ideas of confrontation and shock into his own performances.

If there is one event which led to Morrison's ultimate demise, it was the performance at the University of Southern California on 28 February 1969 by the Living Theatre. Here, Morrison saw the group enact their pièce de résistance,
Paradise Now
, an exercise in crowd manipulation. Including the repetition of several key phrases meant to drive the audience into a frenzy,
Paradise Now
was a guerrilla theatre performance, an aggressive spectacle, a serious art statement about censorship and freedom of speech. At the climax of the show the performers stripped off their clothes to the legal limit, though the police moved in and stopped
the display before any of them got very far. Morrison was transfixed.

The next day the Doors were due to play Miami, their first ever concert in Florida. After a fight with Pamela which delayed him in LA, Morrison followed the rest of the band east, missing his connecting flights and drinking heavily. He arrived so late in Miami that the band went onstage an hour late. The rest of the band were already furious because the promoter had crammed far too many people into the auditorium, making the atmosphere hot and uncomfortable. The crowd themselves were hot and hungry: they were crushed together like animals, the band were late and the stories of earlier riots were passing around the auditorium like wildfire. Everyone felt the same: tonight was going to be special, tonight was going to be
real
.

Manzarek, Krieger and Densmore eventually crept onstage and began playing, hoping Morrison would join them. Eventually he did, but it was plain to all three of them that he was far drunker than he usually was when he fell onstage. The trip from Los Angeles had obviously taken its toll, as he could hardly stand up. The band ploughed through the material, making it more than obvious when they expected Morrison to come in with a vocal, but the singer was more interested in swearing at the audience, and muttering obscenities to himself. He'd start joining in with
the band, then stop after a verse and a half to berate the audience some more. Here was the vulgar poet in all his drunk and disorderly glory, wrapping himself around the mike stand, belching, grabbing his crotch, gobbling the microphone like it was a rapidly melting ice cream.

‘Anybody here from Tallahassee?' he enquired. After an affirmative response he hit back with, ‘Well, I lived there once. I lived there until I got smart and went to California.'

From there it was downhill all the way: ‘You're all a bunch of fucking idiots, how much longer are you going to let them push you around? You love it, you're all a bunch of slaves, what are you going to do about it? I'm not talking about getting out on the streets, I'm talking about having some fun, I'm talking about dancing, I'm talking about love your neighbour, till it hurts, I'm talking about grab your friend, I'm talking about love, love, love, love. Hey! Listen, I'm lonely, I need some love, y'all. Ain't nobody gonna love my ass? Come on, I need you. There's so many of you out there, ain't nobody gonna love me? Sweetheart, come on. Hey! How about fifty or sixty of you people come up here and love my ass? Come on!'

And with that, Morrison began taking off his clothes, throwing his shirt over his shoulder and unbuttoning his trousers. The drunken gibberish over with, he wanted to show the crowd what he was really made of.
The Living Theatre's Situationist striptease was being acted out by a paralytic pop star in front of thousands of screaming fans in a concert hall in Miami. Morrison imagined himself under the Klieg lights now, giving the finger to the world.