Another Little Piece of My Heart (15 page)

Morrison was wearing a slept-in pullover and the requisite leather pants. He turned up the radio and fiddled with the bass control as the DJ announced one of his songs. This was the first time he’d heard himself on the air, and I wasn’t sure whether he looked happy or anxious—he pulled his lumpy hat down over his eyes. We were headed for one of his favorite spots, an ashram called the Garden of Self-Realization. Gandhi’s ashes were reputed to be there. (This was the L.A. equivalent of pieces of the true cross.) We plopped down on the lawn, beside a stucco arch with a cupola sprayed gold. I pulled out a tape recorder, but I put it down too far from him. When I played back the tape most of what I heard was the sound of Jim’s fingernails scratching nervously at the dirt. Fortunately I also took notes, and the quotes that follow come from the piece I wrote. Years later I was astonished to hear bits of that interview used as dialogue in Oliver Stone’s dubious film
The Doors
. You wouldn’t know from this movie that Morrison ever had an intelligent idea in his head.

“When you started, did you anticipate your image?” I asked him.

“Nah. It just sort of happened … unconsciously. See, it used to be I’d just stand still and sing. Now I … uh … exaggerate a little bit.”

He shot me his famous half smile. “I’m beginning to think it’s easier to scare people than to make them laugh.”

He didn’t hold much back, except the circumstances of his birth. “I don’t remember it,” he said drolly. “Maybe I was having one of my blackouts.” Like Brian Wilson he’d had a rough relationship with his father, an admiral who moved the family around—Jim still lived with friends or in motels. I learned about his fondness for alcohol (which, in those days, was not something hip people bragged about). But mostly we talked about his ambitions as an artist, how he wanted to combine the charisma of Elvis with the power of incanted poetry. “See, singing has all the things I like. It’s involved with writing and music. There’s a lot of acting. And it has this other thing—a physical element, a sense of the immediate. When I sing I create characters.”

He wasn’t exactly an intellectual, but he had a feeling for philosophical concepts in an art-school kind of way. What I remember most about him is that he radiated neediness, but that was nothing unusual in a California rocker. Far more striking was his imagination, erratic but sophisticated. I came away thinking that he was a serious artist, piecing together myths he’d gleaned from various readings. His mentor, the San Francisco beat poet Michael McClure, had taken in this SoCal stray. There’s a relationship between Morrison’s fixation on the phallus and McClure’s play
The Beard
, which got the actors arrested. (I’ve forgotten most of it, but I remember the moment when Jean Harlow describes Billy the Kid’s dick as “a piece of meat hanging from a bag of meat.”) Jim studied acting at film school and spent his down time in the Venice creative scene. Manzarek was the one who thought of setting his poems to music. His songs, his verse, his persona—all of it was a pastiche held together by his desire to create a role that could bring his warring impulses together. In our interview he was pretentious and revealing at the same time, as in this aperçu, meant to be quoted, I’m sure: “A game is a closed field, a ring of death with … uh … sex at the center. Performing is the only game I’ve got, so I guess it’s my life.”

He had read about the figure of the shaman and its function in primitive societies, and he wanted to bring that power to rock by combining visionary lyrics with a physical ritual. His aim was to unleash the subconscious. “The shaman,” he said, “was a man who would intoxicate himself. See, he was probably already an … uh … unusual individual. And he would put himself into a trance by dancing, whirling around, drinking, taking drugs—however. Then he would go on a mental travel and … uh … describe his journey to the rest of the tribe.”

Morrison was dead serious about this agenda. Say what you will about the bombastic quality of his lyrics, but they were remarkable in a hard-rock context. Not even Bob Dylan dared to write a song about incest.

Father … I want to kill you

Mother … I want to …

[Insert shrieking here.]

I’ve emphasized Morrison’s artistic ambition because that’s usually the part left out of his hagiography. But I realized, as I often did when talking with rockers known for their sizzle, that this was another borderline personality. The conflict between fame and aesthetics would be especially hard for him to deal with, because he wasn’t just known for his songs, as, say, Dylan was. Morrison was most famous for his voice and body, especially his crotch, which he unveiled during a concert in an act of drunken spite that got him arrested and made him even more notorious. I knew instantly, when I read about the incident, that it was a gesture of rage at the audience for failing to take his message about reaching into the subconscious seriously. “Break on through to the other side,” he would bellow. But he was swallowed up by the spectacle he thought he could shape. When I met him, before he lost what there was of his balance, he could still speak hopefully about his mission. As in this observation about the relationship between rock and play: “Play is not the same thing as a game. A game involves rules, but play is an open event. Actors play—also musicians. And you dig watching someone play, because that’s the way human beings are supposed to be … free.” If I had to sum up Morrison’s achievement I’d say that he combined rock with Method acting. He performed himself.

There’s a video of me interviewing him. (You can locate the clip online.) It was one of several programs on rock that I hosted for PBS, mostly on speed, since I was terrified about appearing on TV. That may be why I look so spacey, though I can’t account for the puff-sleeved flower shirt I wore. Morrison, bearded by then, looked great, and he made a very smart prediction about the future of rock. He said it would be created by just one person working a machine. This is basically what electronica is today. He was, as I’ve said, a fitful but perceptive artist. All the more reason why he freaked out before his appearance on
The Ed
Sullivan Show.
This was an obligatory ritual for famous rockers, had been ever since Elvis Presley’s performance, famously shot from the waist up. It was a tradition on that program to censor lyrics that were too sexual. Even the notorious Rolling Stones had caved, changing a key line in one of their best songs from spending the night to “spending some time together.” When it came to “Light My Fire,” the Doors were faced with a double whammy. “Girl, we couldn’t get much higher” could refer to sex, drugs, or (most likely) both.

I was present at that broadcast, standing backstage with the group. A deal had been struck—the Doors would leave the offensive line out of the song when they sang it on the air. It was a small price to pay for shamanizing the nation. But then they caught sight of the set. It was a series of doors—big ones, little ones, fancy and plain ones, but doors! This was an egregious insult for a band that had named themselves after a meditative book on psychedelics. Jim threatened not to go on. A conference followed, and a decision was made. He would sing the forbidden line—and he did, snarling, “Girl, we couldn’t get much
HIGH-ER
.” I caught the livid look on Sullivan’s face. The Doors were never invited back.

That incident raised my respect for Jim, though he’d always had my sympathy. I never saw his legendary aggression. He was gentle and vulnerable around me. But I did get to witness one of his drunken outbursts. It happened at a recording session. Morrison had envisioned an album called
The Celebration of the Lizard
, a twenty-four-minute “drama” he’d been working on. The band was in the studio. The producer, an earnest longhair named Paul Rothchild, sat at the console. Jim arrived wearing his favorite snakeskin jacket. He had brought the notebook in which he wrote his verses. That wasn’t unusual—no one knew in advance what words he would be singing. Morrison would enter a glass-enclosed booth to record the vocals while the band played behind him. This is why the Doors sound so spontaneous on their albums. They were.

I could tell from Jim’s wobbly posture, and from his girlfriend’s dire expression, that he was plastered. In fact, he guzzled from a bottle of brandy. “I’m the square of the Western hemisphere,” he boomed. “Man … whenever someone said something groovy it’d blow my mind. You like people?” he grunted at me. “I hate ’em. Screw ’em—I don’t need ’em. Oh, I need ’em … to grow potatoes.”

He was teetering and belching. “Hafta break it in,” he said, fingering his jacket, which crinkled like tinfoil. His girlfriend tried to distract him
by mentioning a Mexican wedding shirt he’d commissioned from a custom tailor. “We have to get you measured,” she said.

Jim bolted backward, his eyes large with fear. “Uh-uh. I don’t like to be measured.”

“Oh, Jim,” she muttered. “We’re not gonna measure
all
of you. Just your … shoulders.”

By that point in my career I had learned to take notes in the dark or without looking at the page, holding a pad discreetly on my knee. As Morrison ranted I scribbled it all down in an ersatz shorthand only I could read, and I wrote about that recording session, including the moment when Rothchild summoned Jim to the glass booth. The plan was to put him where he wouldn’t interfere. The other musicians were really pissed, but they had learned to work around him when he was like this. They were Apollonians to his Dionysus—so Jim had told me. He would constantly prod them to “get into the Dionysus thing,” but they would stare at him blankly and say something like, “Oh, yeah, right, Jim.” Now they hunched over their instruments, trying to ignore him as he entered the vocal booth. He fit himself with earphones and began to sing in breathy grunts. The words were too slurred to be recorded, and the musicians were trying to play over them, but his voice intruded, bigger and blacker than ever. Finally the producer turned off the sound. Jim looked like a silent-movie version of himself, a pungent but necessary prop. Suddenly he burst out of the glass chamber, sweat drunk. “If I had an ax,” he slurred, “man, I’d kill everybody … ’cept … uh … my friends.”

There he stood, a lizard-skinned titan in a helpless fit. As useless as he had probably felt when he was a child. Every attempt he’d made to escape from that sense of insignificance, of dreaded obscurity before a rejecting father, surfaced in this tantrum. His girlfriend sank back in her seat and gave herself over to a cosmic case of the blahs.

I’ve already said that Morrison reminded me of Brian Wilson, but there were other West Coast rock stars who had the same effect. The greatest of them were terribly fragile. The more emotive they were onstage, the more insecure they seemed up close. In New York we were better at hiding our vulnerability, but showing that side was easier out here, perhaps because it was part of the culture of honesty that made the local scene so ridiculous—and appealing. I certainly was surprised by the readiness with
which these rockers confided their doubts to me. There were no publicists to intervene; no time limit or subjects off-limits. They didn’t present me with a fake mystique, and I didn’t have to be shy around them. I began to feel something I’d never let myself experience as a reporter; I started to care for the people I wrote about, and I struggled to balance the need to make a story out of their lives with the desire to represent them in all their complexity. I was learning to drop the stylization that my role required, to break on through to the other side. But there were unintended consequences. As I watched these performers sink under the churning currents of fame, with no ego strength to buoy them, it heightened the sense of helplessness that would eventually overwhelm me.

Rock stars in those days were expected to be priests in a rite of fucked-upness, and it reinforced their most self-destructive impulses. Madness was its own reward, and the crazier and more volatile they got, the greater the fascination it produced. I suppose that’s always been the case in show business, the worship and devouring of vulnerable personalities; it explains the cult of Judy Garland, and of Marilyn Monroe, both of whom ended up drugged and dead. But in the counterculture, where love was the watchword, it seemed especially painful to witness this emotional cannibalism. The luckiest stars were buffered by lovers, loyal managers, or members of the band who formed a protective phalanx. But often a forced tolerance prevailed, because, after all, these freaks were bringing home the soy bacon. A vicious indifference hid under the insistence that dangerous, sometimes fatal behavior was simply “doing your thing.”

Well, I got to do my thing in California, for better and for worse. But I’m getting ahead of myself yet again. I keep wanting to jump the sequence in which these events occurred, probably because that’s the way I remember them. I know who I hung out with in L.A, but I’m not sure about the order of these encounters. Maybe it doesn’t matter; why should I presume to be a fact checker of my own mind, when the most accurate way to describe it is as a light show of pulsing shapes that suggest the image of people who exist only as images anyway, since most of them died long ago—and long before their time. My most vivid memory is the feeling that everything out here was fungible. At any moment the earth might shake and it would all be swept away. Dennis Wilson’s words still resonate within me when I think of California in 1967:
Whoa! The road is doing these weird things
.

I didn’t just bliss out in the Summer of Love. I got married. All sorts of living arrangements were possible in the sixties, from group sex to shacking up, as it was still called then. But Judith and I both wanted—and no doubt needed—something more permanent.

We’d met when I was in j-school at Columbia and she was a student at Barnard College. We bonded despite her yowling Siamese cat, but our families didn’t. If you raise an upwardly mobile child, as my folks did, your in-laws will probably be classier than you, and her parents were certainly that. Her mother was a talented painter, and her father was the rascal descendant of a British rabbinic family. Judith was raised to be an intellectual, but she had a secret passion for rock ’n’ roll. It corresponded to a hidden sense of herself as a voluptuous woman, and that zaftig hottie emerged during the five years when we were together, to my delight.