Mr Mojo (3 page)

The Country Store is also the site of the annual Photo Day each October, where the residents of the
Canyon all come together to have a group picture taken. The tradition dates back to the late eighties, a celebration of the sort of community spirit you don't find anywhere else in LA.

Over the hill, the temporal nature of Hollywood is at its most obvious. Here, in the village of bougainvillea and watery melodies, time stands still. And if you want to wear your bellbottoms and feathers, don't think twice, it's all right. This is where so many people ended up when they moved to LA in the mid-sixties. Sure, there were many more who ended up living in squalor in East Hollywood, and even more whose living arrangements involved the wrong end of Sunset Boulevard (where the house numbers are broken into fractions), but the canyons between LA and the Ventura are where so many wanderers made their home. New wanderers!

That was the thing about the sixties: everybody was new. No one had been around for a while – no one had been loitering around for five, ten years – no one had been hovering on the edge of the scene, desperate for a flash of fairy dust, as there hadn't actually
been
a scene. There had been such a flight to California, such a migration, that the state was suddenly full of young people searching for a future. These were not Okies seeking jobs, land or dignity; these were teenagers looking for reinvention. If the dust bowl farmers brought country music to California, the teenage prodigies who
descended on San Francisco and Los Angeles helped build a bucolic haven that soon became the centre of the counter-cultural universe. If London had invented the modern ‘scene' at the start of the sixties, the second half of the decade belonged to California.

Everyone here was here for the first time. Here, having escaped the dull ceiling of a sky that stretched all the way from Chicago to New York, the newly arrived smartly dressed denizens of Haight-Ashbury and Laurel Canyon were all afflicted with blind optimism. Now that they were all in California, what was the worst that could happen? And here, as if in the middle of some bizarre Darwinian experiment, this loose amalgamation of outsiders – hellions, even – gradually became less and less like the people they'd left behind, and more and more like . . . well, Californians . . . New Californians!

Like E. B. White's new New Yorkers, these recently arrived Los Angelenos were seeking sanctuary or fulfilment or some greater or lesser grail. White said that no one should come to New York to live unless they are willing to be lucky; luck was even more important in LA. Whether they wore tie-dye T-shirts or satin suits festooned with flowers, California's beautiful people were as one – eager participants in bespoke bacchanalia. Like a line from the Leiber and Stoller song ‘Fools Fall in Love', they built their castle on wishes with only rainbows for beams.

During the spring of 1965, people all over America began migrating to Los Angeles, eager to bathe in the soporific glow of the lifestyle revolution and bask in the emerging bohemian culture. The city quickly acquired its own band of freaks, dressed in jerkins, knee-breeches, knitted shawls, Indian beads, old lace dresses and flowered shirts. Musicians, artists, actors, film makers, sculptors, designers, bikers, hedonists, hippies: the synthesis of the West Coast social revolution.

But unlike San Francisco, where altruism was the order of the day, Los Angeles produced a kind of venal synaesthesia, a sensory overload. As Lawrence Dietz described the scene, writing in
Cheetah
magazine: ‘You go out to Los Angeles from the East, and of course you have heard all of these funny stories about the funny natives, and all of the funny things they're into, and it takes some time for you to realise that everyone out there is playing this whole new game. Everyone is searching for what you might call self-realisation of one sort or another. In LA everyone is into himself, in one way or another.'

Some were there by accident, others by design, but all by default. The whole of LA was in a frenzy; a frenzy compounded by heat, fame, drugs and life on the beach. LSD was becoming the sacrament of the city, and it was said that being in LA was like being high all the time. One of the new wave of beatniks who flocked to Los Angeles was a twenty-one-year-old college
student called Jim Morrison. He arrived in the spring of 1964 fresh from Florida State University, keen to embroil himself in modern America's fairy-tale city of light. He journeyed to California – against his parents' wishes – to reinvent himself. He wasn't looking to drop out – he would have gone to San Francisco for that. The budding boho was looking to drop in, to be accepted by the new bohemians. Soon he would begin to feed off the city, letting it wrap itself around him, letting its warm neon flow through his veins. But for the time being he threw himself into his work, casting himself as a student of film. Jim Morrison's own movie was unfolding.

According to legend, the Jim Morrison movie really began in 1947, when he was four years old. While driving through the New Mexico desert, the Morrison family came across a horrendous road accident, an event which would cause severe repercussions in Jim's life, and one to which he would constantly refer in his poems. Morrison was convinced that at the age of four the soul of a dead Pueblo Indian entered his body, altering the course of his life: a more than suitable beginning for a movie.

‘The first time I discovered death,' said Morrison, ‘me and my mother and father, and my grandmother and grandfather, were driving through the desert at dawn. A truckload of Indians had either hit another car or something – there were Indians scattered all
over the highway, bleeding to death. So we pulled the car up . . . I don't remember if I'd ever been to a movie, and suddenly, there were all these redskins, and they're lying all over the road, bleeding to death. I was just a kid, so I had to stay in the car while my father and grandfather went back to check it out . . . I didn't see nothing – all I saw was funny red paint and people lying around, but I knew something was happening, because I could dig the vibrations of the people around me, 'cause they're my parents and all, and all of a sudden I realised that they didn't know what was happening any more than I did. That was the first time I tasted fear . . . and I do think, at that moment, the soul or the ghosts of those dead Indians, maybe one or two of 'em, were just running around, freaking out, and just landed in my soul, and I was like a sponge, ready to just sit there and absorb it . . . It's not a ghost story, it's something that really means something to me.'

Jim Morrison was the son of a high-ranking naval officer, born into a family with a long history of career militarists. James Douglas was Steve and Clara Morrison's first child, a bright, healthy baby with fat cheeks and cold, sparkling eyes. Soon after Jim was born, Steve Morrison was posted to the Pacific, where he stayed for three years, entrenched in a war of attrition with the Japanese. His father away at war, the boy spent the first three years of his life with his mother at his paternal grandparents' house, in Clearwater, on the
Gulf coast of Florida. When he eventually returned from the war, in the humid summer of 1946, Steve Morrison's family began a gypsy-like existence, first moving to Washington DC for six months, and then to Albuquerque, New Mexico, for a year. During the next fifteen years, Morrison senior was sent all over America, and was often away from home on manoeuvres, leaving the boy to be brought up by Clara. If little Jim needed a father figure, he certainly didn't get one.

The family kept on moving: early in 1948, Steve Morrison took his family to Los Altos in northern California, where they were stationed for nearly four years. Then it was back to Washington DC for a year (while Steve was stationed in Korea), then Claremont, California, for another two. Along the way little Jim acquired a sister, Ann, and a brother, Andrew. And still they kept on moving: when Morrison senior returned from Korea, they went back to Albuquerque for two years before moving on to San Francisco. In December 1958, they returned to Washington, where they stayed for three years, and where Jim attended George Washington High School.

Although his family were conventional, middle-class Republicans, with solid, traditional, patriarchal values, little Jim's stability was constantly threatened by this continual uprooting. Life in the services offered welcome financial security in the fifties, but it hardly fostered emotional stability. Morrison was always
rootless, and soon developed a shield and a way of responding to people with whom he knew his relationship would be brief. Without a peer group to call his own, he remodelled himself wherever he went – a chameleon with a satchel.

Morrison grew up quickly. In adolescence he discovered a gregarious side to his nature, and developed an extreme way of dealing with the world. He wanted to be liked, and the easiest way was to show off by acting the fool or performing outrageous stunts. Morrison was already behaving in a resolutely odd manner, and each new set of classmates quickly learned to avoid the nascent rebel. He was also discovering a Machiavellian streak in himself, finding it easy to manipulate his school friends, and a sick sense of humour was beginning to manifest itself. Morrison could be deliberately mysterious, and was already acquiring an armoury of masks.

It was at George Washington High that the softly spoken and articulate sophomore began writing poetry. He discovered he was adept with words, and started to keep a diary and write short stories. He immersed himself in his books. He had a formidable capacity for learning, and devoured William Blake, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Colin Wilson, Aldous Huxley, Sartre and Rimbaud, while at the same time developing a taste for beer. He was soon fascinated by the romantic notion of poetry, as Jerry Hopkins and
Danny Sugerman point out in their biography,
No One Here Gets Out Alive
. ‘To be a poet entailed more than writing poems. It demanded a commitment to live, and die, with great style and even greater sadness; to wake each morning with the fever raging and know it would never be extinguished except by death, yet to be convinced that this suffering carried a unique reward.'

This was something to which Morrison could aspire. The tortured artist? Sure, he could do that, no problem. But although he was alarmingly intelligent and a gifted, if lazy, student, Morrison was completely indifferent to any possibilities of a long-term career. Being remarkably bright, the Navy brat didn't have to study much to achieve high marks and consistently got good grades, even though he spent most of his time reading poetry, writing his diary or getting drunk. His parents, sensing his apathy, enrolled him in St Petersburg Junior College in Florida, informing him that he had to live with his grandparents in Clearwater. Morrison reluctantly co-operated, and in September 1961, while the rest of the family travelled to San Diego, he moved to the Sunshine State. After an unremarkable year he transferred to Florida State University in Tallahassee, before dropping out and forcing his parents to allow him to switch to UCLA to study film in early 1964.

Morrison had been fascinated by cinema since his early teens, though the transfer to UCLA was as much about moving to Los Angeles as it was about
studying film. And although he hurled himself into the course, it was his first experiments with drugs that really fuelled Morrison's thoughts. Twelve frustrating and uneventful months later he was gone. After receiving negative grades for his end-of-term film, he quit college and disappeared to the beach. His project, a free-form short with no discernible script, was, to quote Morrison, ‘a film questioning the film process itself . . . a film about film'. In reality it was a series of abstract and surreal images stuck together like a proto-pop video. Nazi soldiers were juxtaposed with the title sequence from the TV show
The Outer Limits
, as the cameraman's girlfriend jumped about in bra, panties and high heels. This medley of meaningless images failed to impress Morrison's tutors, who gave him a ‘complimentary D'. Throughout his short career, his lyrics and poems would allude to the cinema, and when he finally got around to making films himself, they were heavily self-referential.

Having lost his student deferment, Morrison was now a prime candidate for military service, so to escape the draft he moved to Venice, an early cradle of hippiedom on the ocean-front south of Santa Monica. From June 1964 to August 1965 he shared an apartment with another student from his film course, all the time increasing his use of alcohol and drugs. LSD was still legal at the time, and Morrison made the most of it, by his own admission swallowing acid ‘like candy'.
Having already stretched his mind through books, he now wanted to expand it even further, by pummelling it with drugs. It was during this period that he wrote most of the songs which would appear on the first two Doors LPs, songs inspired by Huxley, Blake, Céline and the other writers he had studied in school.

‘I was hearing in my head a whole concert situation, with a band and an audience. Those first five or six songs I wrote, I was just really taking notes at this fantastic rock concert that was going on inside my head . . . and once I'd written these songs, I just had to sing them. The music came first, and then I'd make up some words to hang on the melody, and because that was the only way I could remember it, and most of the time I'd end up with just the words and forget the tune. I'd been going to school or college constantly for fifteen years, it was a beautiful, hot summer and I just started hearing songs.'

Morrison had recently met Chicago-born Ray Manzarek, a fellow film student and prodigious classical pianist who played in a blues band called Rick and the Ravens with his brothers in a bar in Santa Monica at weekends. Like many Americans of his age, ever since he'd witnessed the British invasion, Manzarek had wanted to be a rock star: ‘We saw the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and thought – wait a minute, these guys are art students like us. Are you kiddin'? These people are front page news! People are going crazy
over them! Girls are throwing themselves at them. They're making records; they're making money. We want this too!'