Mr Mojo (4 page)

Manzarek's band were billed to support Sonny and Cher at a graduation hop, and Manzarek asked Morrison to step in and replace their guitarist, so that they could make up the six musicians required in the contract. Unable to play an instrument, Jim made his debut performance standing at the back of the stage with his back to the audience, an unplugged guitar over his shoulder. Looking as mean and moody as he could, Morrison was Stuart Sutcliffe incarnate. He had at last found an actor to play the lead role in his movie.

While Morrison loved rock and roll – ‘It opened up a whole new world that I wasn't aware of – a free, exciting, strange, tense landscape' – and was particularly interested in the blues, he had never entertained the idea of becoming a singer. It took the hot summer of 1965 and a lot of acid to convince him that music could become a vehicle for his poetry. Morrison was also becoming more aware of himself physically, realising he was turning into a seriously attractive twenty-one-year-old. He'd initially been hurt by the film school's rejection, but as his self-confidence grew, the idea of becoming a rock singer became increasingly plausible. He could be a film maker some other time.

Then came another fateful meeting with Ray Manzarek. ‘[It was] a beautiful California summer day,
the middle of August, and who should come walking down the beach but Jim Morrison. I said, “Hey man, I thought you were going to New York,” and he said, “Well, I was, but I decided to stay here. I've been at a friend's house, up on his rooftop, writing songs.” '

Morrison then started singing ‘Moonlight Drive', and Manzarek was hooked. ‘When I heard those first four lines, I said, “Wow, that's it – those are the best lyrics I've ever heard for a rock'n'roll song!” As he was singing, I could hear the chord changes and the beat: my fingers immediately started moving.'

Manzarek asked if he had any others, and Morrison sung a few more. Manzarek seized the opportunity, and told Morrison they should form a group.

When they met that day, Manzarek said Morrison looked like Michelangelo's David, having lost his puppy fat and found his cheekbones. As he'd been living off little but acid for the past few months, he was incredibly gaunt, his weight having dropped from 160 pounds to under 135. The transformation was nearly complete.

The pair then recruited a drummer called John Densmore whom Manzarek had met in his meditation class. At first the sober and untroubled Californian had reservations about the partnership: ‘Their songs were really far out to me . . . I didn't understand very much; but then I figured, I'm the drummer, not the lyricist.' Nevertheless, he joined.

Morrison set about turning the group into a vehicle for his ideas. In the spirit of the times, he became obsessed with subversion: ‘America was conceived in violence. Americans are attracted to violence, out of cans. They're TV-hypnotised – TV is the invisible protective shield against bare reality. Twentieth-century culture's disease is the inability to feel any reality. People cluster to TV, soap operas, movies, theater, pop idols, and they have wild emotion over symbols. But in the reality of their own lives, they're emotionally dead.'

Morrison was also obsessed with what he called the ‘Apollonian–Dionysian split'. The idea came from Nietzsche, who devoted much time to analysing the phenomenon in Greek culture. The German philosopher's book
The Birth of Tragedy
, written in 1872, was once cited by Morrison as the volume to read if you wanted to understand his thoughts. It is, to quote Morrison biographer Mike Jahn, ‘a philosophical road map to the Doors'. The terms are derived from the names of the Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus. As well as being the messenger of the gods, Apollo was the presiding deity of music, medicine, light and youth, and was identified with the sun. The handsome, youthful, long-haired Dionysus was the god of wine and permissiveness, universally adored by women. It's no wonder Morrison chose to identify with him.

Nietzsche used these terms to make a distinction between reason and instinct, between order and
chaos. Apollonian culture produced order and control, whereas Dionysian culture encouraged emotional abandon. ‘Under the charm of the Dionysian,' wrote Nietzsche, ‘not only is the union between man and man reaffirmed, but nature which has become alienated, hostile or subjugated, celebrates once more her reconciliation with her lost son, man.' When he pointed out that music and theatre were the natural expressions of the Dionysian, Morrison took the bait, hook, line and sinker.

Morrison often referred to the Doors as a theatre of myths, always stressing the Greek connection. ‘Sometimes I like to look at the history of rock and roll like the origin of Greek drama,' he once said, ‘which started out of a threshing floor at the crucial seasons and was originally a band of worshippers, dancing and singing. Then, one day, a possessed person jumped out of the crowd and started imitating a god.'

In September 1965 Morrison met an eighteen-year-old redhead called Pamela Courson, a typically pretty California girl, whose father was also an officer in the Naval Reserve. Just before meeting Morrison she had dropped out of her art classes at Los Angeles City College, and was ‘looking for something meaningful to do'. In Jim Morrison she found it. The couple fell in love, soon becoming inseparable. Jim would often refer to Pamela as his ‘cosmic mate', and their relationship continued right up until his death. For Morrison
it was a perversely normal relationship – he read her his poems and lectured her on what books to read, while she taught him how to dress. And together they plunged into Mondo Hollywood.

By the end of 1965, Los Angeles was awash with freaks. Every proto-hipster came equipped with his own emotional baggage and newly adopted convictions. Every new arrival had an angle; Morrison's was poetry. Pamela Zarubica (aka Suzy Creamcheese), the infamous Frank Zappa acolyte, remembers Morrison's arrival, courting the famous and the influential, the notorious and the hip, desperate to be liked: ‘That Jim Morrison sure was a drag, always play-acting and making everybody listen to his poems.' Captain Beefheart (Don van Vliet), a genuine Californian bohemian, was amused by Morrison's lust for approval. He remembers him turning up in LA, looking like a weekend hippie, with his very own ‘bongo speech', gauche and eager to make friends, trying to penetrate the underbelly of hip LA.

By fleeing to LA, Morrison left behind his white-bread upbringing. Dismissive of the cradle-to-grave security of his father's world, he revamped himself for public consumption. To quote journalist Mick Farren, LA ‘provided him with a backdrop to act out his fantasies'. The Los Angeles that Morrison found was a movie set full of failed actors, freaks, beatniks, weirdos and drug fiends. If San Francisco had the ultimate
utopian Zeitgeist, Los Angeles was a more hungry city, a town where fame and fortune were still desirable, tangible things. LA was the ultimate synthetic city, an unholy sprawling town with no real sense of community. In LA, people didn't understand good or evil – only success or failure. Many had come looking for fame and fortune, though few had been chosen. The unlucky ones were destined to prowl the bars along Sunset Strip, dreaming of what might have been.

Morrison the actor was at home in LA. In San Francisco his dreams would have appeared callous and shallow, but in a city full of aspiring luminaries his ambitions weren't noticed. He had found his city. LA was the twentieth-century manifestation of the Apollonian–Dionysian split, where reality and unreality went side by side, bumper to bumper: the rich and the poor, the famous and the invisible.

Morrison naturally gravitated towards the hipper, seamier side of the city, hanging out with winos and hookers, as well as with the young hippies who littered the beaches and the bars. He could remake himself here, he thought, and no one would notice, because no one particularly cared; in LA, everyone looked out for himself.

Before Manzarek was lucky enough to hook up with Morrison, Rick and the Ravens had signed a contract with Aura Records. Their first single died, so rather than release another potential disaster, Aura
offered them free studio time. The Ravens, who were practically now the Doors, gratefully accepted. One September evening in 1965 the group spent three hours in World Pacific Studios on 3rd Street recording six prototype Doors songs: ‘Hello I Love You', ‘Moonlight Drive', ‘My Eyes Have Seen You', ‘End of the Night', ‘Summer's Almost Gone' and ‘Go Insane' (which was later incorporated into ‘The Celebration of the Lizard'). They hawked the demos around to various record companies, until Columbia eventually offered them a small deal.

Morrison called the band the Doors in homage to William Blake and Aldous Huxley; Blake had written, ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it truly is, infinite,' which inspired the title of Huxley's book about his mystical experiences with mescaline,
The Doors of Perception
(1954). For a cocky college kid who wanted to be a rock star, the name had all the right cultural connotations.

Morrison then set about moulding his band into the kind of vehicle he felt comfortable with. The cover versions slowly began to disappear, and all of a sudden the band stopped smiling onstage. This was an important turning point: how could you peddle esoteric, philosophical rock if you looked happy about it?

Columbia had taken the bait, but Ray's brothers decided to leave, unsure about the group's new direction. Short of a guitarist, they recruited the mild-mannered
Robby Krieger, a friend of John Densmore (they had played together in a band called the Psychedelic Rangers) and a member of John and Ray's meditation class. A native of Los Angeles, Krieger was studying psychology at UCLA. He was only nineteen, the youngest in the group. Krieger's was a highly original guitar sound, an idiosyncratic, folk-based noise, and he often used a bottleneck (preserved for posterity on ‘Moonlight Drive', the first song all four Doors played together).

The band honed their sound during their many gigs in the LA area, though at this time Manzarek did most of the singing, Morrison standing with his back to the audience, too shy to perform to anyone other than his friends. They played bar mitzvahs, birthdays, weddings – any gig they could get. They really wanted a residency at a club, but were turned down by all of them because they didn't have a bass player. Just as they were about to recruit one, Manzarek stumbled upon a Fender Rhodes piano bass being played by the house band in one of the many clubs they auditioned for.

The piano bass sounded like a bass guitar but played like a keyboard, and as Manzarek had been trained in the boogie-woogie, stride-piano technique (in which the hands work almost independently of each other), he decided to use it in the band. And so the Doors' sound was born: Morrison's throaty baritone vocals; Krieger's intricate, clean guitar; Densmore's sharp,
unobtrusive drums; and Manzarek's oceanic keyboards. They were now playing crisp, jazzy, white-boy blues – sensual, cinematic vignettes dramatised by Morrison's primordial lyrics.

The more concerts the Doors played, the more confident Morrison became onstage. And as he started being pursued by the gangs of girls who were now appearing in the audience, so he grew into his image. Morrison soon discovered he could be sexy as well as brainy.

After rehearsing for three months, in January 1966 the Doors finally got their residency, and were lucky enough to become the house band at the London Fog, a small, sleazy club near the Whisky a Go Go on Sunset Strip. The Fog was usually frequented by drunks, hookers, sailors and the occasional hipster – the kind of habitual fly-by-nights who weren't interested in the textural subtleties of a band like the Doors. As far as they were concerned, the four long-haired college students up on the stage were a bar band, good and simple. But the Doors thrived. Just like the Beatles in Hamburg, they would play four or five sets a night, starting at nine and continuing until two or three in the morning with fifteen-minute breaks in between.

It was in this atmosphere that the band developed their sound, perfecting new material like ‘Light My Fire', ‘Hello I Love You', ‘Break On Through' and ‘Waiting for the Sun', songs which would serve them
well on their first three albums. They knew these songs so well that when they came to record them they did it almost live. And because they played so often they were able to experiment continually, allowing themselves the luxury of long instrumental breaks. They played the London Fog for four months, making $5 each per night and $10 at weekends.

The Doors' relationship with Columbia was brief, and they were soon dropped. They were also dropped by the Fog, though they were signed up almost immediately by the prestigious Whisky a Go Go, becoming the house band and opening for Buffalo Springfield, Captain Beefheart, Them, Love, the Turtles and the Byrds. The band played there for three months, earning $125 each a week. They soon gained a reputation for playing too loud and attempting to blow the headlining act offstage. They also started to attract a small crowd who would turn up night after night to see them. Morrison was now the star attraction, having learned to love the spotlight. He would often turn up drunk, stoned or both, though unsurprisingly this only endeared him to the band's growing audience.

It was at the Whisky that they were first seen by Jac Holzman, the founder and president of Elektra Records, an independent New York company mostly known for its folk-rock catalogue. Elektra had recently signed Arthur Lee's psychedelic quintet Love, and was looking to sign up other rock acts. After a few return
visits, Holzman offered to sign the Doors. Although desperate for a deal, the band nevertheless played it cool. But secretly they were more than pleased with the proposition – Elektra had the integrity that a lot of the major labels lacked, and the deal gave them almost complete control over their output. They soon signed. The timing was right, as they had recently been fired from the Whisky, too. One night Morrison, blitzed on LSD, decided to improvise during one of their longer songs, ‘The End'. Digging through his library books, he came up with a trite spoken passage steeped in Freudian theory: ‘Father,' Morrison shouted from the stage. ‘Yes son . . . I want to kill you . . . Mother . . . I want to . . . FUCK YOU!' He had been orchestrating silences, screams and manic outbursts during most of the band's recent performances, but this was a primal scream to end them all. The audience were shocked; the management, appalled, fired the band.