Mr Mojo (6 page)

In July 1967 a much-abridged version of ‘Light My Fire' was released as a single. It quickly climbed the American charts, staying at number one for three weeks and selling over a million copies, becoming the biggest selling single of the year in the process.
(The first single from the LP, ‘Break On Through', had previously sunk without trace.) Written by Robby Krieger, it would become their best-selling single, and it remains their best-known song. ‘In order to compete with Jim's songs, I knew I'd have to be pretty good,' said Krieger in 1988. ‘I figured I'd keep it on a universal scale and write about earth, air, fire or water. I picked fire, mainly because I always liked that song by the Stones, “Play With Fire”.'

In his best Elvis Presley voice, Morrison poured heart and soul into the song, sending out an invitation to all the young girls in the world. ‘Jim had this idea of the band being like a shooting star, going up real fast and being a huge success,' said Krieger. ‘For him, it was too slow in happening, even when “Light My Fire” hit. But without it, we probably would never have stayed together.'

But they did, basking in the attention the song's success brought them. Overnight, like all good pop sensations, the Doors became a little larger than life itself.

The Doors
was greeted with open arms by the world's rock press, given rave reviews by all the critics who counted. There were those who didn't understand what the band were doing, but they only helped to fan the flames surrounding their success. To the press, who quickly realised that the Doors revolved around the lead singer, Morrison was a godsend – a handsome,
articulate, intelligent rock singer increasingly capable of giving good copy. Morrison was never lost for words, and always provided journalists with sufficient quotes. He knew which journalists worked for which papers, and he tailored his interviews accordingly, always coming up with the goods.

‘He proved quite early on that he was his own master manipulator,' said Danny Fields. ‘I don't think there was anything, any magazine, he didn't get [coverage in]. He never asked, where is this coming from, how am I getting this, I want more. He gave the journalists what they wanted, and he got what he wanted in return. He did seem in many ways that he was a thousand years old, in his cunning, and his ways to control people . . . even though he acted like an adolescent. But because he was so calculating, and manipulative, he wasn't the kind of guy you'd want to know. He'd hang out with people for a while, but he had no real friends.'

In the Elektra press release which accompanied the release of the album, Morrison set out his own personal manifesto, the first of many. ‘You could say it's an accident that I was ideally suited for the work I am doing. It's the feeling of a bowstring being pulled back for twenty-two years and suddenly being let go. I've always been attracted to ideas that were about revolt against authority. I like ideas about the breaking away or overthrowing of established order. I am interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos – especially
activity that seems to have no meaning. It seems to me to be the road toward freedom – external revolt is a way to bring about internal freedom. Rather than starting inside, I start outside – reach the mental through the physical.'

He also stated that his parents, his whole family, were dead. As far as Morrison was concerned, it was true. In his head he was now the Lizard King, and Lizard Kings weren't meant to have parents.

It wasn't just Morrison, though, who resorted to subterfuge. Soon after the album's release, Steve Harris hired a small group of girls – ‘girls who would get their arms cut off on the subway for Jim Morrison' – to follow the band around and create as much hysteria as they could while they were on tour. Through an intricate network of contacts, these girls made sure there were gangs of other girls parked outside the band's dressing rooms and hotel rooms, that there was screaming at the concerts, and that flowers and underwear got thrown onstage. Similar schemes had been devised for Elvis, Frank Sinatra and the Beatles, and while it was a failsafe trick to guarantee press attention, the acts in any case quickly found a huge audience of genuine fans. The Doors were also the first rock group to use a billboard to promote their product – above a clothes shop called Pandora's Box on Sunset Boulevard. ‘The Doors break on through with an electrifying new album,' it screamed.

As the album continued to sell in vast quantities (
The Doors
would stay in the charts for two years) and as the group performed in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York, Morrison's public image was confirmed. Intense and assured, he was a new rock hero with hooded Garbo eyes and a sexy Southern drawl. But in private he was already beginning to disintegrate. He had finally moved in to Pamela Courson's apartment in Laurel Canyon, but continued his philandering; and his drinking was starting to become such a problem that the group began hiring ‘babysitters' to look after him. The Doors were getting more famous, playing bigger theatres to bigger audiences, and their entourage grew to include an array of managers, lawyers and publicists. Their records were selling all over the world, and their pictures were in all the right magazines. Yet at its very core their world was already falling apart.

3

Dressing Up for Strange Days

Looking the way he did, being born that way, was not entirely terrible

Grace Slick, Jefferson Airplane

Morrison was born lucky. If adolescence had briefly tarnished his image with a layer of puppy fat, by the time he wanted to become a rock star his looks were second to none. He had height, a good physique, and the right profile. If you look at the first publicity pictures of the Doors, Morrison looks ungainly and unremarkable in his Haight-Ashbury rags and Carnaby Street chic; but undress him with your eyes and you see a surf-born Adonis. He had the raw material – all he had to do was create a uniform that matched the group's dark urban soundtrack. He had created his own psychic cocktail, his own mythology (a mish-mash of Nietzsche, French theatre, Greek symbolism, contemporary psychology and silly hippie rhetoric). Now his outward appearance needed the same juxtaposition of forces. Like Elvis, he created his look from a variety of sources,
clothes which were fundamental to the creation of the Lizard King's image.

To celebrate ‘Light My Fire' reaching number one in the charts, Morrison went out and bought his most iconic piece of clothing, a custom-made black leather suit. But the image wasn't all his. In May 1966, Morrison had seen the Velvet Underground perform at the Trip on Sunset Strip; in the audience was Gerard Malanga, a Factory stalwart (and later the Velvets' biographer), dressed from head to toe in tight, black leather. Malanga's outfit that night had a huge effect on Morrison, who quickly realised that to make any kind of lasting impression on the West Coast crowd he'd have to adapt the East Coast chic of the bohemian New Yorkers.

Morrison's leather trousers were not only tailor-made – they were made out of kid-glove leather, which is thinner, finer and far more delicate. At first the tailor thought Morrison had made a mistake and so refused to make them, but he quickly realised that the singer didn't want them any other way. He also asked for them to be cut in the same style as his Levi's, which were narrower than most leather trousers.

‘They were super; they just fit,' said Ray Manzarek, who was with Morrison when he went to pick them up. ‘They were like snakeskin. He looked like a snake, man. He looked like a black mamba. He put on those leather pants and from the waist down he had turned
into a black mamba. That was the beginning of the reign of Jim Morrison the sex symbol, Jim Morrison the sex idol onstage, when he became the black mamba. That was it, man, it was all over. All the women who saw him just absolutely fell in love.'

His cheeks were already gaunt, his torso was lean, and he had those cheekbones, pectorals and wraparound sunglasses – but it took a top Hollywood hair stylist to give him the Alexander the Great haircut he craved. Now the Young Lion added an American-Indian concha belt, cowboy boots and a black gangster hat (complete with a metal skull-and-crossbones motif), all of which he wore with a complete lack of irony. He also bought a solid-gold microphone which he liked to carry from gig to gig. His clothes, like his lyrics, were full of allusion and metaphor – chic, uncompromising and sexy.

Today it is commonplace for pop stars to use their music as a vehicle for indulging their ego. The last five decades have seen pop music become an open prison for the maladjusted, a home for so many appalling egos, all signed up by record companies in the hope that some of their warped genius will transmute into dollars. But Morrison was one of the first to seriously abuse the medium.

Apart from Dionysus, another obsession of Morrison's was, to quote Mick Farren, who wrote about him in
The Black Leather Jacket
, ‘the kind of
ancient fertility religions that ensured their followers' survival and prosperity by choosing a monarch (usually young, cute, male and virile), who would be sacrificed (usually by young, cute, nubile females) after seven years or some other suitable mystic period. Morrison's writing makes it clear that this was the role he wanted, if not for his total being, then certainly for his stage persona.'

In his eyes he was a victim, dressed in black leather. He proposed himself explicitly as his generation's sacrificial lamb: ‘We are obsessed with heroes who live for us and whom we punish.' As Farren pointed out, this wasn't merely a bleak observation: it was Morrison's job description and career goal. Dressed in his martyr's garb, he was ready to be lauded, victimised, reviled and immortalised. He would grow to hate this self-conscious beefcake image – it was only studied perversity, after all – but it was all his own creation. By covering himself with this reptile skin, Morrison gave himself a mask, but he knew if he ever took it off, he would be in deep trouble.

‘He was the Lizard King and he could do anything,' said Farren. ‘That theoretically included the ability to shed his skin at the crucial moment and slip away before they could stretch him out on the altar and reach for the knife. (It's quite possible that the guilt for this cosmic deceit would have been enough on its own to force him to drink himself to death.)'

The sartorial symbolism of the leather worked on many different levels: ‘Morrison had clearly given a good deal of thought to the psycho/sex/freako trappings which go with a leather suit,' said Farren. ‘Without doubt, he had evolved the kind of long, complex, floating theory that's the delight of the continuously loaded. Anyone who goes around calling himself the Lizard King is virtually compelled to take what might be called the reptile route. The reptile route is a loose cocktail of Jungian phallic symbolism and dinosaur fear – all that Carl Sagan stuff about how we all have this generic memory from the time when dinosaurs not only ruled the earth but all liked to snack on our ancestors, the first cuddly little mammals. This comes out of the cerebral blender as the explanation that, when you dress up in black leather, you've given yourself the approximation of a shiny reptile skin. When you confront other humans, they're filled with an echo of the fear felt by an early cuddly mammal faced with a hungry and carnivorous dinosaur. It's tortuous even for a pervert.'

Morrison's image was so iconic it was even copied by Presley himself. For the King's 1968 comeback TV special, costume designer Bill Belew fashioned a black leather costume for Elvis, almost entirely based on Morrison's. It not only resurrected Presley's career, but also re-established him as a sex symbol.

Because he carried his life around in a plastic bag (sleeping in a different hotel every night, often keeping
his clothes in the trunk of his car), Morrison had permanent body odour.

Danny Fields remembered that, ‘He never changed his clothes. Once he had a brand new snakeskin suit, and he walked into the Elektra reception and everyone was amazed to see him in something different. Someone asked him where the snake was, and Jim said “Inside”. He loved that lizard metaphor. He owned nothing, that was part of his make-up. He could always escape, change hotels or leave town, switch girls.'

He was purposeful about his anonymity, never wanting to be tied down to anyone or anything; feeling that his life was becoming trapped inside a badly scripted movie, the tormented hedonist found it easy to wander from scene to scene with scant regard for reality.

His perpetual drunkenness also made it easier for him to sleep his way around Hollywood. There are hundreds of Jim Morrison sex stories: tales of impotence, violence, remarkable prowess and appalling degradation. There are also other less sensational stories.

Pamela Des Barres, the once-notorious rock groupie with whom Morrison had a less-than-torrid affair during 1967, spoke of a quiet man, with an occasional temper. She enjoyed being with the singer, going to parties, walking along the shore, taking drugs (an early
form of liquid ‘angel dust' was an occasional favourite), but mostly just necking.

‘In those days you could tell someone you didn't want to get fucked and they'd respect it. Jim did. We went to third base, but he understood that I didn't want to go any further. When I first met him he was a sweety – very quiet and very shy offstage. He was very caring. He never talked about his work with the Doors, just about his poetry. He used to carry it around with him all the time. He was so sweet . . . he was like a poet. But a year later I met him in the Whisky and he slapped my face and threw a bottle of beer at a friend of mine. He'd lost it, it was too bad, but he lost it completely. The thing was, at that time no one really knew how far you could push things – everyone was taking the most incredible amount of drugs – and no one really knew when to stop. But Jim got an addiction, and that was that . . .'

‘He wasn't as promiscuous as people say he was,' said Danny Fields, ‘and tended to hang on to one woman at a time. He let himself be attacked by girls, he was sort of passively promiscuous. If some piece of trash came up and sat on his cock, he wouldn't pick her up and throw her off. But he didn't go out with the specific intention of picking girls up – and he certainly didn't order people to get him girls. If they came and conquered him, that was fine. His life was a series of rather long relationships, and he always had a woman
somewhere. He didn't have a girl every night, but he didn't push them away, either. I don't think he loved to fuck.'