Mr Mojo (9 page)

‘It was very black, the way he moved. No one, not even Mick Jagger, had been as overtly sexual as Jim was onstage. It was very James Brown – ripping off his clothes an' all. It was filthy.'

In 1971, when asked by Dan Knapp of the
Los Angeles Times
about the sexual overtones of his performance, Morrison said, ‘Sometimes they just happen, and sometimes it's just part of the act.'

By this time he had stopped jumping. He was now so famous he was scared what the crowd might do.

A hypnotic figure dressed in black – Gene Vincent with a college degree – he controls the audience from the safety of the stage. The girls are screaming louder now, as he squirms and vamps in his impossibly tight leather trousers, the human phallus about to reach his climax. The group crashes into ‘Light My Fire' and the crowd goes berserk. The king of acid-rock hops in front of Manzarek's piano, pumping the air with his fists, his eyes closed, sweat pouring down his shirt. He wanders over to John Densmore and tries to interfere with his kit. Densmore ignores him and looks to Krieger for guidance. Morrison then kneels before Krieger's guitar and simulates fellatio, something that was again copied by David Bowie during his Ziggy Stardust period, when he pretended to give head to his guitarist, Mick Ronson.

‘Light My Fire' is cold-blooded and immaculate, Morrison's ad libs and seemingly impromptu scissor kicks only distracting from the gorgeous wall of noise. He makes constant interruptions: during a lull in ‘Gloria', he shouts, ‘Little girl, how old are you? Little girl, what school do you go to? Little girl, suck my cock?'

During ‘The End', his hands covering his face, he laughs to himself behind the microphone, not wanting the crowd to see how silly he thinks it all is. In one
of the quieter sections of ‘When the Music's Over' – the audience rapt with attention – he belches into the mike, and laughs. What a gas, he thinks to himself. Are the audience really taking this shit seriously?

A lot of Morrison's songs were of course written from a distance, with a deep sense of irony, but this passed a lot of people by. While journalists like Lester Bangs recognised that Morrison occasionally ‘realised the implicit absurdity of the rock and roll bête-noire badass pose and parodied, deglamorised it', others took it at face value. In 1970 Morrison told the
Los Angeles Free Press
: ‘That piece “Celebration of the Lizard” was kind of an invitation to the dark forces. It's all done tongue in cheek. I don't think people realise that. It's not to be taken seriously. It's like, if you play the villain in a Western, it doesn't mean that that's you. I really don't take that seriously. That's supposed to be
ironic
.'

‘Occasionally,' said Mick Farren, ‘he would even hold up the [Morrison] image and demonstrate just how hollow it was. This was more often in front of an audience than the press. At a 1969 Madison Square Garden concert he pointed dramatically to one half of the audience.

‘“You are life!” He pointed to the other half. “You are death! I straddle the fence – AND MY BALLS HURT.”'

At the concert in New Haven, Connecticut, on 9 December 1967, the day after Morrison's twenty-fourth
birthday, the Doors witnessed the first major upset of their career. Before the band's performance, Morrison met a girl backstage, and took her into one of the shower rooms. A police officer, clearing the area, caught the couple necking and asked them to break up and move on. When Morrison protested, the cop brought out an aerosol canister of tear gas from behind his back and sprayed them both in the face, as nonchalantly as if he was throwing a bucket of water over a pair of fighting cats. Later that night, as the band were ploughing their way through ‘Back Door Man', Morrison told the crowd his version of the story, repeatedly shouting the word ‘pig' and talking in a dumb Southern accent, to antagonise the police. But as Morrison told his tale, the house lights went up and the police invaded the stage, arresting the singer for breach of the peace, later adding the charges of indecent and immoral exhibition and resisting arrest. It was ironic that 1967 should finish this way for the band, as the preceding twelve months had been a succession of triumphs. But now they had been conveniently fingered by the establishment.

Morrison was still seeing Pamela Courson, while continuing to sleep around. He'd graze the bars along Sunset Strip, staying most nights at the Cienega Motel in West Hollywood. Rarely sober, he usually had his first beer of the day with breakfast in one of the many restaurants along La Cienega Boulevard. He continued to get into fights, to abuse the rich and the
famous at the various celebrity parties which he was invited to, and constantly tried to gatecrash performances by other rock groups, often crawling onto the stage and trying to join in. (Rock biographer Albert Goldman once interpreted Morrison's brush with Jimi Hendrix, at the Scene in New York – the singer rushed onstage and clutched Hendrix's legs – as an attempted blowjob.)

Consciousness became bearable to Morrison only if he was drunk, and he recruited a small posse of fellow drinkers to accompany him on his binges, including the actor Tom Baker and the then-unknown Alice Cooper. Morrison was always a chameleon, and his most popular guise was that of the boozer. Hidden away, behind the blinds of his motel window, he could be tender and reflective; sitting in a bar at three in the afternoon he could be funny and full of camaraderie; he was generous to the extent of squandering his money, and was always willing to help out a friend. But offstage the Lizard King was a man without conscience, a drunk without a will.

The Doors began recording their third album early in 1968, but the recording sessions were constantly disrupted by the gang of groupies and liggers with which Morrison had surrounded himself. He began inviting them along to the studio at all times of the day, much to the annoyance of the rest of the group. His drinking was also increasing, so much so that
the band hired Bob Dylan's ex-minder to look after Morrison, ostensibly to direct a documentary about the Doors, but really to make sure Morrison turned up for recording alone. And though the band still tolerated his drunken displays and non-appearances, John Densmore threatened to quit. So did Morrison, though nobody believed him.

The recording took far longer than before, firstly because a lot of the songs were new, and secondly because Morrison found it difficult to perfect his vocals in anything less than ten takes. ‘When he was drunk,' said Paul Rothchild, ‘it was odds-on you wouldn't get a vocal.'

In April 1968 ‘The Unknown Soldier', the first single from the new album, reached number 39 in the American charts. The band made their own ‘rock theatre' promo film for the song, in which Morrison was ‘shot' on the cross, in a bizarre and gauche crucifixion scene which publicly presented him rather pathetically as the Saviour for the ‘love generation'.

Morrison had written the song the last time he was in New York. Steve Harris remembered ‘being out with Jim and Paul Rothchild one night, and Jim got so drunk we had to take him home. We found a cab and took him back to his hotel on the West Side, took off all his clothes and put him to bed with a waste-paper basket next to the bed because he was retching. I turned to Paul and said, “Look at this,
this is the biggest star in America, just look at him.” Just before we left Jim asked us to bring him his leather trousers, which we did. He then took a small piece of paper out of the pocket, on which were written the lyrics to “The Unknown Soldier”. He'd written them that night and then gone out and got completely, outrageously drunk. It must have taken a lot out of him.'

In August ‘Hello I Love You', a relatively jaunty pop song, became the band's second US number one (for two weeks) and their second million-seller. Short, taut, and unashamedly commercial, it was a dead ringer for the Ray Davies song ‘All Day and All of the Night' recorded by the Kinks in 1964. Still, it contained some of Morrison's best lines, where he mixed Billboard logic with brazen irony, and more than a hint of sex. Never again would he be able to fuse light and dark in such a seamless fashion. This was Morrison making timeless, sexy pop, full of wit, pathos and an inimitable sense of urgency.

It was this kind of Doors record – snappy, Spartan – which appealed so much to American Top 40 radio, whose DJs could hear rampant commerciality among the clever-dick arrangements, monotone vocals and lyrics about dead horses, drugs and sleeping with your mother. Other songs on the new LP were similarly arranged, and both ‘Love Street' and ‘Summer's Almost Gone' displayed that cunning pop sense.

Elsewhere, things were getting sloppy. By the time Morrison, Manzarek, Krieger and Densmore recorded
Waiting for the Sun
, there was no longer the urgent passion in their work. Released in September of 1968, the third album showed the world that the Doors were fallible, just another rock band. And while the collection was shrink-wrapped by Paul Rothchild's by now distinctive production, many of the songs themselves flagged, being either leftovers from Morrison's Venice days, or hastily written studio compositions.

‘Not to Touch the Earth' is an excerpt from an abortive recording of one of Morrison's theatrical extravaganzas, ‘Celebration of the Lizard', a would-be tour de force in the style of ‘The End'. It was originally meant to occupy a whole side of the record, and it's not surprising that Manzarek made sure it wasn't included, for when it eventually surfaced on
Absolutely Live
in 1970, it was mostly unlistenable, a long, rambling stream of consciousness – Morrison's visions of Nietzschean self-glorification clouded by unwieldy lyrics, drink and his perverse ego.

Tongue firmly in cheek, Morrison explained his preoccupation with the scaly reptile: ‘The lizard and the snake are equated with the subconscious forces of evil. Even if you've never seen one, a snake seems to embody everything that we fear. It [‘Celebration of the Lizard'] is a kind of invitation to dark, evil forces.'

There were amateur dramatics elsewhere on the record – ‘Five to One', one of the album's most enigmatic songs, was pure rhetorical agitprop, a political sham best remembered for its opening chorus, containing one of his most enduring catchphrases, ‘no one here gets out alive'; though listeners were spared the snippets of poetry he wanted to include between the songs. (‘Five to One' was the approximate ratio of whites to blacks in the US, as well as non-pot smokers to pot smokers. It was also a reference to the number of US citizens under twenty-five, while many think it's just a song about masturbation: five fingers and one cock.)

‘We Could Be So Good Together', however, was another classic example of the pop music the Doors made so well, harking back to the formulaic structure of the songs on the first two LPs. Surprisingly, it was their only album to go to the top of the American charts, spending four weeks at number one.

Morrison was bored by recording – it had lost its immediacy for him – so he embroiled himself in his other interests: poetry and film.

He decided to make a documentary about the band (eventually called
Feast of Friends
), asking some friends to direct and produce it. He also began making moves to have his poetry published: a motley collection of half-formed ideas, notes and lyrics he hadn't been able to incorporate into his songs. He saw his future
as a poet, blind to the fact that his words lost their importance without the music. On paper they were preposterous and bombastic schoolboy scribblings. Much of Morrison's poetry evoked pain, death, alienation and sex, and drew on Freudian symbolism – all the elements that made the group's songs so powerful. With the Doors he managed to evoke strange and forceful images; with his poetry he provoked embarrassment. On paper his nightmares didn't look real. Nevertheless, there were enough sycophants willing to massage Morrison's ego, and he was encouraged to publish his work. Simon and Schuster would later publish the two collections,
The Lords
and
The New Creatures
, though for now he was content to publish them himself. If the Doors were less of an ensemble and more of a straightforward rock group than Morrison desired, then he would have to explore those other areas alone. The group were more popular than ever, and continued to tour. On 10 May 1968, Morrison incited his first riot, at a Doors performance in Chicago. His contempt for the audience had grown so much that he openly provoked them, causing them to run amok.

Following the release of
Waiting for the Sun
, the Singer Bowl concert in New York also proved difficult. Danny Fields said, ‘This was when he started to self-destruct. And he did it in public, turning the audience against him. The Who opened for the Doors
that night – there was a nasty crowd, bad security, a disaster waiting to happen. I told him before he went on, “Be careful, Jim, I've a feeling something's going to happen.” And he turned to me and said, “How would
you
know?” So he went out there and abused the crowd. That night there was riot number two.'

The Doors were rapidly becoming a freak show. According to Ray Manzarek, ‘After the New Haven bust, the vice squad would come. People would come to see this sex god, and to see what he was up to. Then people came to see him expose himself. Then, he freaked out, and they came to see him freak out, even though his freaking out was not really a normal part of the act. They had a love/hate thing for him. They were jealous of him.'

In Britain, by the summer of 1968, the group had become a creature of fiction. They were so different from anything else coming out of America at that time that an aura had built up around them. Their records were difficult to buy and hardly ever played on the radio, and, with the British pop press being somewhat old-fashioned, news of the band's activities seldom crossed the Atlantic. However, one item did manage to find its way into the papers, predictably causing havoc among the Doors' British fans: news of the band's first European tour. They were to co-headline with Jefferson Airplane, in
London, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Stockholm and Frankfurt.