Dylan Jones - Mr. Mojo: A Biography of Jim Morrison

MR MOJO

A B IOGRAPHY OF J IM M ORRISON

D YLAN J ONES

For RCB, who certainly wore leather trousers

Contents

At a typical Doors concert, you had two types of crowd. You had the freaks, the heads and the hippies, the longhairs who were tuning in, turning on, and nodding their heads in collective appreciation at the psychedelic and often cacophonous din being made in front of them. They were the ones who stared at album covers to read the track listings to see who had written what.

And then you had the teenage girls, the snappers, the ones who sat in the front rows in their high-belted miniskirts and schoolgirl bobby sox, banging their knees together as if they were fanning their insides, trying to get Jim Morrison to stare at their underwear, or more usually their lack of. They were the ones who stared at album covers for completely different reasons.

If you look at film performances of the Doors in concert during their heyday, you see a sixties band in all their pomp, effortlessly working their way through their material, determinedly bringing the crowd to whatever climax they had come for. But study the performance a bit more and you see a charismatic frontman, and three musos bent over their instruments who are probably wondering how they got so lucky.

Because the Doors was always three plus one. And the one was always Jim Morrison.

I think theres a whole region of images and feelings inside us that rarely are given outlet in daily life. And when they do come out, they can take perverse forms. Its the dark side. Everyone, when he sees it, recognises the same thing in himself. Its a recognition of forces that rarely see the light of day.

Was Jim Morrison joking when he said this?

Morrison was the quintessential sixties pop star an enigmatic, egotistical playboy with a penchant for philosophical self-absorption and tight black leather trousers. A counter-cultural hero, he physically pushed himself to the limits (he was an alcoholic), exposing his dark heart to a young audience who had only recently recovered from the onslaught of Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones.

Jim Morrison was something else again. He was Frank Sinatra in leather trousers, an overly theatrical figurehead whose influence can be seen in the personas adopted by everyone from Iggy Pop to Robert Plant, from Patti Smith and Kurt Cobain to Michael Hutchence, Dave Gahan and Brandon Flowers, and every modern version thereof, and whose band delivered the best psychedelic pomp of its day.

He is the narcissistic stuff of rock legend, a self-obsessed drunk whose ridiculous good looks and rich baritone contributed unduly to an archetype that would define both him and every copycat who came in his wake. Not only that, but he was walking around topless while Sting was still in school.

He was the first rock and roll method actor, and would wrap myths around him like a long leather coat, protecting and disguising himself in the process. No literary allusion was too much, no crass putdown too high. He was playing the nascent rock star with such ferocity that it was inevitable he would stumble and fall. And he did petulance better than any entertainer since Marlon Brando.

One of the big problems with Morrison was that he had no ability to manage his success and nor did anyone around him. These days, someone with his talent and his fondness for excessive and seemingly random behaviour would be managed and monitored and pampered and protected during every waking (and sleeping) moment; Morrison was pretty much on his own in a city that was more than happy to live up to its reputation, if not exceed it. Getting lost in LA is easy enough if youre a cosseted twenty-first-century megastar, but imagine how easy it was for Morrison: all he had to do most days was turn up. It didnt matter if it was turning up at a restaurant, a nightclub, a party, a hotel, an interview, hell, even a recording studio. Wherever he went he was fawned over, feted and fucked up. He was offered all the delights to be found in the most debauched city of the late twentieth century, and with his appetites, he rarely said no.

Why would he? Who would?

Brian Jones, James Dean, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Marc Bolan, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Freddie Mercury, Kurt Cobain are our new immortals, said Germaine Greer. Like Apollo and Dionysus they can never outgrow their dazzling boyhood.

Hunter S. Thompson called Morrison Crazy Jim. He had eyes smarter than James Deans and a band that could walk with the King, or anybody else. There were some nights when the Doors were the best band in the world. Morrison understood this, and it haunted him all his life. On some nights he was noisy and lewd, and on others he just practised but every once in a while he would get it into his head to go out and dance with the big boys, and on a night like that he was more than special.

Morrison used to frequently masturbate onstage, turning away from the audience, then rubbing himself before turning round again, watching the girls who couldnt take their eyes off his engorged cock. He would slide his palm down the front of his leathers, grab his balls and start stroking himself, squeezing his cock and pulling the helmet. He had done it so often that he got hard disturbingly quickly. It was almost as though he had a permanent erection.

A war baby, born in Melbourne, Florida on 8 December 1943, he grew up in the headstrong and affluent fifties, only to rebel against his upbringing a decade later, like so many millions of others. But Morrison was unique, a singer who created a myth around him, a dark star whose shtick was opening up his psyche and inviting the uninitiated to come and peer inside.

With the Doors, whom Joan Didion once called the Norman Mailers of the Top 40, missionaries of apocalyptic sex, he created some of the finest pop music of the late sixties, music which still sounds astonishing today, not least because of its lyrical content. Their first two LPs The Doors and Strange Days contain songs that are little more than cleverly constructed vignettes of nihilism set to jaunty tunes yet they still resonate today. The Doors managed to marry sex appeal, musicianship, and a highly commercial exploitation of undergraduate sensibilities.

A pseudo-intellectual in a snakeskin suit, Morrison always thought he deserved to be something other than a tawdry pop star he courted film makers and poets, seeing himself as some kind of modern-day Renaissance man, peerless. And that was ultimately his undoing: he ended up tortured by his own image; bloated by alcohol, despising his audience, hating the tormented Adonis hed created, the image that had made him successful.

In reality, Morrison was more tormented than anyone knew. He went from being a star trapped inside a boys body to a man trapped inside his own image. And he was the first rock star to literally self-destruct. Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix both died before Morrison, but he was the only one who really needed an escape. Morrison was the first pop star to explore himself (as well as expose himself) in public, and in doing so, went just that little bit too far.

Jim Morrison crammed an awful lot into his twenty-seven years, becoming the most adored American entertainer since Elvis. He had sex, he had drive, he had passion; he had brains, good looks, a voice, a talent for writing evocative, manipulative, nihilistic lyrics and a penchant for Dionysian imagery. He was part poet and part clown, a man who, when he revealed himself, was often to be found simply acting out his own fantasies.

A self-proclaimed erotic politician, Morrison was as much a showman as he was a shaman, an actor who pushed his persona as far as it would go. By the time of his retirement in Paris, the Doors were effectively over (although the rest of the group always denied this) and a sex symbol with a beer belly and a beard Morrison was toying with the idea of reinventing himself as a poet. The fact that he never did he was found dead in his bathtub in Paris in July 1971 from an apparent heroin overdose assured him of immortality and a permanent place in rock and rolls hall of fame. Had he lived, he might undoubtedly have undone all he had achieved during the last five years of his life; as it is, he remains, along with James Dean and Jimi Hendrix, one of youth cultures most revered heroes, a hero dead before his time. A hero who got out just in time.