Mr Mojo (11 page)

There are wildly conflicting reports about the subsequent exposure, and there have never been any photographs which show Morrison with his penis out. Yet he is supposed to have opened his leather trousers, displayed his partially erect penis and feigned masturbation. If true, it was hardly out of character.

Underwear and empty bottles were thrown at him during the striptease, but the debacle was cut short by a security guard who eventually pushed Morrison offstage. The concert had lasted just forty-five minutes.

Though this was the most explosive concert the band had so far performed, the press took a while to respond. But within a few days it was evident that Morrison had not got away with it. When the news of Morrison's exposure was substantiated, the police department and the state attorney's office came down heavily on the band, and Morrison was charged with everything from lewd and lascivious behaviour to indecent exposure, drunkenness and profanity. This sent terror through the Doors camp: if found guilty he could be sent down for seven years, effectively ending their career.

The press went crazy: exaggerated reports of the concert appeared all over the country, and the Doors became the
bête noire
of American rock and roll. The
Miami Herald
wrote: ‘Included in the audience were hundreds of unescorted junior and senior high girls . . . It was not meant to be pretty. Morrison appeared to masturbate in full view of his audience, screamed obscenities, and exposed himself. He also got violent, shrugged off several officials and threw one of them off the stage before he himself was hurled into the crowd.'

In Florida a decency rally was organised, and across the nation all manner of public servants came out of the woodwork, denouncing Morrison as the devil himself. In a fit of moral panic, even the FBI got in on the act, issuing a warrant for Morrison's arrest and charging him with ‘unlawful flight', even though he had left Miami three days before the warrants were issued. Before the concert Morrison had worried that the band were becoming public property; now they were public enemies – and he was Public Enemy Number One.

In Miami Morrison purposely tried to start a riot, but only succeeded in drawing attention to himself. Like many performers, he was unable to harness his own stardom, and because of this, began lampooning himself. Morrison couldn't cope with being a star because he didn't believe in what his fans believed
in: himself. So he took it out on the rest of the group, then the audience, and then himself. He was dismissive of his audience because he held them in contempt. They treated him like a god, yet he knew he was only a puppet of the crowd; they weren't interested in his literary allegories, they wanted him to make a spectacle of himself. Morrison had now failed on two counts. First, he had been unsuccessful in killing off his creation. Secondly, the whole affair was an embarrassment: he was being persecuted for
perhaps
exposing himself. In Britain a few years previously, P. J. Proby's career had been cut short by a succession of trouser-splitting performances, but in America Morrison's performance in Miami was the first time since Elvis that indecent exposure by a pop star had caused so much controversy. It would become commonplace, with many rock stars exposing their private parts for public consumption, but in 1969 it was heresy.

As a sign of defeat, after Miami Morrison put away the leather trousers, swapping them for black jeans and baggy cotton pants. Because of his stomach, his shirts changed too, and he took to wearing white muslin Mexican shirts which he let hang down outside his belt. He also let his beard grow, and his hair began to turn grey.

The band needed to tour, but found this almost impossible – they immediately lost thirty concerts because of Miami. At the few concerts they managed
to organise they had to put up a $5,000 bond – a ‘fuck clause', as they called it – in case Morrison disgraced himself. And the audiences came expecting the very same, and were disappointed when he let them down. His trousers safely zipped up, Morrison roamed the stage, hamming it up, contemptuously singing ‘Light My Fire' while sneering at the audience. But if he appeared angry, inside he was sad. Interviewed for
Rolling Stone
by Jerry Hopkins soon after Miami, Morrison showed a new maturity and even voiced a few regrets. He was tired and frustrated, wounded and scared. Was a new Jim Morrison emerging? More contemplative, and extremely paranoid, the new Jim Morrison suddenly looked like the unhappiest rock star in the world.

In one of his last interviews, with Bob Chorush of the
Los Angeles Free Press
in 1971, Morrison said, ‘The Doors never really had any riots. I did try and create something a few times just because I'd always heard about riots at concerts, and I thought we ought to have [one]. So I tried to stimulate a few little riots, and after a few times I realised it's such a joke. It doesn't lead anywhere. You know what, soon it got to the point where people didn't think it was a successful concert unless everybody jumped up and ran around a bit.'

While in London Morrison had met the poet Michael McClure, who was extremely excited by the singer's poetry, and urged him to get it published. Back
in Los Angeles, with time on his hands, Morrison set to work, determined to make his poetry public. But McClure was one of the few who had faith in Morrison's poems: ‘I was always disappointed that the poetry didn't measure up to the songs,' said Patricia Kennealy, the girl Morrison would soon marry. ‘They weren't much. I think he would have possibly gotten better at it as he went along, but I found the ones he did write very self-indulgent and self-referential. But he was young.' While the Doors were on hold, Morrison threw himself into his poetry, eventually persuading Simon and Schuster to publish two volumes.

During February 1969 a new Doors single ‘Touch Me' climbed to number three in the American charts, becoming a million seller. The band must have thought themselves lucky, as the song was not only their weakest single so far, but it also featured plenty of brass as well as a string ensemble. Fans were shocked, though not quite enough to ignore the record. But the worst was yet to come. If
Waiting for the Sun
had been a disappointment, then
The Soft Parade
, the Doors' fourth album, was little short of a tragedy. Originally planned as the band's
Sgt. Pepper
, it turned out to be the worst record they ever made, taking over a year to record and costing nearly $100,000. For the first time the songs bore individual writing credits, with Robby Krieger responsible for over half the album and most of the lacklustre compositions.

Because Morrison had not written many songs – he was concentrating on his poetry – he wanted to distance himself from those of Krieger, and insisted on the individual credits.

Everything on
The Soft Parade
was well below par: ‘Wishful Sinful', another single from the LP, only reached number 44, while ‘Tell All the People' and its follow-up, ‘Runnin' Blue', did even worse. All were written by Krieger.

Morrison washed his hands of the affair, and as he didn't really care about the music any more it was no surprise when the group started to deteriorate. Morrison was experiencing his own decline and fall and, suffering the onslaught of the press, retreated into himself.

The Soft Parade
is still viewed as the Doors' nadir: ‘Tell All the People' is a ridiculous Pied Piper overture, the kind of paint-by-number ditty that could have been produced by any number of bands. ‘Touch Me' is an unsuccessful rerun of ‘Light My Fire' (throughout their career the group would continue to rework the ‘Light My Fire' formula, with songs like ‘Touch Me', ‘Hello I Love You' and ‘Love Me Two Times'); while ‘Runnin' Blue' is simply bizarre. This song, a tribute to the recently deceased Otis Redding, features completely inappropriate bluegrass fiddles and mandolins.

Interviews from the time, in which he would ramble more than usual, reflected Morrison's general
malaise: ‘It used to seem possible to generate a movement – people rising up and joining together in a mass protest – refusing to be represented any longer – like, they'd all put their strength together to break what Blake calls “the mind-forged manacles” . . . The Love Street times are dead. Sure, it's possible for there to be a transcendence – but not on a mass level, not a universal rebellion. Now it has to take place on an individual level – every man for himself, as they say. Save yourself. Violence isn't always evil. What's evil is the infatuation with violence.'

Except for a few rare occasions, Morrison didn't come across well in interviews. While he was certainly outgoing, and talked a lot about his work, in print he always seemed to be reciting lines. He gave good copy, but never appeared to give much of himself, even when explaining some deep and obviously personal philosophical point. He would talk for hours about shamanism, or his role as an idol, and then deflate it with a sarcastic and often self-deprecating remark. When journalists saw that he could turn his soul-searching monologues on and off like a light switch, it made them wary. Even the writers who went on bar crawls with him, who spent days in his company, never felt much warmth. They couldn't crack the code.

Morrison fell back on abstractions: ‘I'm not sure it's salvation that people are after, or want me to lead them to. The shaman is a healer like the witch-doctor. I don't
see people turning to me for that. I don't see myself as a savior. The shaman is similar to the scapegoat. I see the role of the artist as shaman and scapegoat. People project their fantasies onto him and their fantasies come alive. People can destroy their fantasies by destroying him. I obey the impulses everyone has, but won't admit to. By attacking me, punishing me, they can feel relieved of those impulses.'

Self-aggrandising, self-absorbed, self-obsessed? Completely.

The drink, the drugs and the endless supply of women were the consolation prize for knowing he could never really win. Being a star meant he had several career options open to him: he could burn out, throw away his credibility and let his fans crucify him, or he could die. Either way, Morrison knew it couldn't last. So while the Doors released mediocre records, Morrison continued his extracurricular activities, organising the publication of
The Lords
and
The New Creatures
, and starting work on a new movie. After forming his own production company, Morrison hired a few friends and asked them to interpret an amorphous idea he had for a film.
Hwy
, as it was eventually called, was almost a sequel to the first film he'd made back in college. It included the usual Morrison symbolism: hitchhikers in the desert, peyote and coyotes, and death on the road. Early footage also featured the daredevil rock star walking along an eighteen-inch-wide ledge on top of a
seventeen-storey building on Sunset Boulevard. When the crew expressed alarm at this proposal, Morrison – typically drunk, typically stubborn – danced along the ledge without his safety rope, urinating as he went.

The band suffered a terrible backlash from the press. On the one hand they were savaged by the music critics for making such a misguided record; on the other they were hounded by the national press for their contribution to the decline of American moral values.

But though the critics were merciless, some understood why Morrison was going off the rails. Liza Williams, writing in the
Los Angeles Free Press
in early 1969, was more than aware that Morrison had become public property: ‘He is the ultimate Barbie doll, and Barbie speaks when we pull her string, that's what she's supposed to do, and she only says what we want her to say because you see on the other end of the string is a piece of tape, that's why she is our Barbie doll and that's why he is our Jim Morrison and that's why we want him to sing ‘Light My Fire' and stop Stop STOP all these other strange sentences that the doll didn't say when we bought her, these new words on the tape, she has no right to new words, just do her thing.'

This was no consolation for Morrison, who had never wanted his teenybopper audience, always striving for ‘adult' acclaim. ‘The band were always popular with the little girls and with the older, more serious
rock fans,' said Danny Fields. ‘But when he lost his original, extremely hip, older college audience, it was the little girls who kept him in the charts. It was the little girls who made “Touch Me” a smash, the little girls who put
The Soft Parade
into the charts, the little girls who made him rich.'

Even before the disaster in Miami, things were looking decidedly grim for the Doors. At the 18,000-seater Forum in Los Angeles in January 1969, the strain was beginning to show. The audience were not so enthusiastic about the new material from
The Soft Parade
, and kept asking for songs from the first album. The band members were also spending less and less time together. Manzarek, Krieger and Densmore were very protective about their image and the myth surrounding the group, but Morrison was finding it increasingly difficult to communicate with them, and after a while began to think of the Doors simply as his backing band. After Miami, Morrison had purposely taken stock of himself; he had become quieter and more reflective, preferring his own company.

But while he internalised his emotions, his body went to seed: the small paunch was soon not so small and his beard hung down over his chest. He was noticeably shaken and there were worrying signs of wear and tear.

Danny Fields recalled that ‘his looks had gone by this point. When his cheeks puffed up from the alcohol
his eyes disappeared and he got this sort of pig face. His beauty was gone. He knew his days as an idol were over. Jim Morrison was like Dorian Gray in reverse – he was visibly deteriorating in front of his public. But they always expected him to be as beautiful as he used to be. Nevertheless, he seemed to have acquired some wisdom, balance, a sense of humour . . . a sort of warmth. He had a sense of self-understanding, and a humility that I had thought he was incapable of. It took losing that fiery look for him to become a human being.'