Mr Mojo (14 page)

‘It was a complete sham,' recalled Patricia Kennealy, who was at the trial. ‘He was a scapegoat, taking the heat for a lot of other people.'

Morrison's problems were compounded when, on 14 August, Kennealy called him from New York to tell him she was pregnant with his child. After inviting her down to Miami, he systematically avoided her and refused to have anything to do with the impending birth. After a while he relented and talked it through, though they couldn't agree to keep the child. In the
end he offered to pay for an abortion, and promised to be with her when it happened.

‘We talked about having the baby for quite a while,' said Kennealy, ‘which is why it went as long as it did [twenty weeks]. I had to face up to the fact that he probably wouldn't be around much, and really neither of us wanted the child anyway. It was terrible timing all round. I only really wanted the child because it was Jim's, and as he wasn't crazy about it, well . . .'

In the middle of the trial the band flew to England to appear at the Isle of Wight festival, which – despite strong competition – turned out to be one of their most chaotic performances. Morrison had been up for thirty-six hours when he went onstage, and his drinking had affected him so much he could hardly stand. The band hated the experience, hated playing outdoors in front of thousands of people they couldn't see or hear, and Morrison hated it so much he claimed he would never appear onstage again. By now, the whole band were sick of performing. As Robby Krieger said, ‘At that time we didn't think we'd ever go out on the road again. We were contented to stay in LA and cut records. We'd had it with the police, hall managers, narcs and the vice squad. They were always there – with tapes, cameras, microphones. They were ready for anything.'

In September, after more than a month, the trial was finally over, Morrison having been found guilty of indecent exposure and profanity, though he was
acquitted on the charge of ‘lewd and lascivious behaviour'. He was released on $50,000 bail. He said to reporters after leaving the courtroom: ‘This trial and its outcome won't change my style, because I maintain that I did not do anything wrong.'

Things went from bad to worse: Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin had just died, and Morrison would sit in the bars along Sunset Strip saying, ‘You're drinking with number three.' What if he
was
next? He'd sit alone by the jukebox and ponder the question. Paranoia was getting the better of him: ask him at the wrong end of the day and he'd say his life was no longer worth living because it had become a living nightmare. He'd alienated most of his friends, the arguments with Courson and Kennealy were getting more intense, and he could no longer talk to Manzarek, Krieger or Densmore.

In Miami in October he was officially sentenced to eight months' hard labour and a $500 fine. He appealed. In November Kennealy had the abortion in New York. Morrison was not present; there were no flowers; he didn't even call.

‘Looking back I'm astonished at what I let myself be put through,' said Kennealy. ‘But I'm older now. He was only about the third boyfriend I'd had in my whole life, and I didn't have a whole lot of experience. Obviously he made me happy or else I wouldn't have put up with it for as long as I did.'

6

Wasting the Dawn

It's late 1970, and the recording of
LA Woman
, the Doors' sixth studio album, is going badly. Morrison, as drunk as ever, is even more unreliable than usual, and the frustration of the rest of the band is reaching new heights. Paul Rothchild has already walked out, claiming to be bored by their new songs, not wanting to hang around and produce ‘cocktail music'. Bruce Botnick, their regular engineer, has replaced him, recording the band live in their rehearsal studios on Santa Monica Boulevard, right across the street from Elektra Records. To the band the songs sound good, though it's difficult getting Morrison into the studio to record them. Recording starts around one o'clock on most afternoons, with the singer turning up around five or six, completely drunk, having dragged himself from the Tropicana, the Chateau Marmont,
the Alta Cienega or some other misery motel. When Morrison does eventually turn up, Botnick tries to record his vocals in one take, just in case he disappears again.

But Morrison's final offering wasn't as bad as Paul Rothchild originally thought. In fact,
LA Woman
is one of the most memorable Doors records, containing real red-letter music. The urgency has gone, and at times the record sounds contemplative and weary, but overall the feeling is one of menace and unease. On
LA Woman
Morrison managed to transform himself into an old blues singer, and for him, these dark, brooding songs seemed a dignified departure from the adolescent pop of their previous records. In his own mind, Morrison had something of a death wish now, and in hindsight, the record seems like a melancholy farewell. His voice, ravaged by drink and three packets of cigarettes a day, rode roughshod over the chromatic soundtrack, a brooding, menacing voice that even to the most casual listener sounded resigned, desperate, tired. He was a man exposed, a man saying goodbye in the only way he knew.

In many ways
LA Woman
exists on a bass line, a fat, linear throb: the title track is a road song, but as Los Angeles is only really a collection of roads, this makes perfect sense. Here Morrison depicts the anonymous, depraved urban jungle – not, as in ‘People Are Strange', with wide-eyed wonder, but with regret. Morrison is
bruised, and he wants to let us know. LA was a town of temptation for Morrison, but when he sings ‘LA Woman', cataloguing the city's various highs and lows, it's easy to assume he's leaving town for good.

By contrast, ‘The WASP (Texas Radio and the Big Beat)' is a paean to rock and roll, a studied yet uplifting exultation. Written in 1968 (like ‘The Changeling'), this pop voyage of discovery was often incorporated as a route into the group's concerts. According to Krieger, ‘It was about the new music Jim heard when his family moved round the South West. He'd got this vision of a huge radio tower spewing out noise . . . this was when XERB was broadcasting and Wolfman Jack was on the air. You could hear him from Tijuana and Tallahassee up to Chicago, where Ray lived. That started rock and roll for our generation.'

Of the other songs on the album, ‘Crawling King Snake' is a version of the John Lee Hooker classic, while ‘Cars Hiss by my Window' is another punch-drunk evocation of Los Angeles. The LP's centrepiece is ‘Riders on the Storm', Morrison's epic swansong. Almost twee in its orchestration, ‘Riders on the Storm' is quite sinister, and Morrison's grotesque vocals are deceptively sombre, almost suicidal. Like contemporary records by the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, the Doors' new music was a sad synthesis of exhaustion and regret. This was to be Morrison's last will and testament, truly the end of the road.

‘With
LA Woman
he didn't have any more to give,' said Steve Harris, ‘he was just wrapping things up. He was completely out of control at this point. We'd go into restaurants and he'd order three meals because he wasn't sure what he wanted. He'd have this big pile of food sitting in front of him and he'd just pick his way through it. Three months before he went to Paris he started to look really rough, rougher than anyone had ever seen him before. He was practically dead at this point. He'd aged ten years, his hair, which was matted and greasy, was starting to recede, and he'd gotten really fat.'

‘But although he hated losing his looks,' said Danny Fields, ‘in a way he revelled in it, because he was free from the shackles of his own imagined beauty. Towards the end he was far happier with himself, more satisfied with what he had become, and the way he looked. He'd got tired of people expecting to be blown away by this Adonis.'

One song on the album, ‘The Changeling', was Morrison's final declaration of independence: here was the fancy-pants chameleon shedding yet another unwanted skin, putting his rock-god days behind him. And this desperation showed like fresh warm sweat on a tight white shirt. This time he was adamant: he was a poet, goddamn it, and people had better believe it. But if, by growing his beard and getting fat, he was moving away from his image as the sexy shaman, the image
he was cultivating was not really an image at all. The new Jim Morrison was defined by all the things he no longer wanted to be: he knew what he wasn't, but he wasn't really sure who he
was
.

This confusion led to Morrison's flight to Paris. There he could concentrate on his poetry, hang loose, escape the rush and the push of Los Angeles, and avoid the thousands of temptations awaiting him there. As well as outgrowing the frenetic world of rock and roll, he had finally outgrown his beloved America, no longer looking on the nation as a ‘warm neon breast'. He had no reason to stay: he didn't owe Elektra any more product.
Hwy
lacked a distributor, and the continued street hassle of LA was getting to him. In Paris he could be a boulevardier; he could wander the streets, notebook in hand, pop into any of the many cafés and bars and drink himself senseless. And no one would notice.

Now was the time, thought Morrison, to end the Doors once and for all. In an interview with the
Los Angeles Free Press
in November 1970, he told Bob Chorush: ‘I think the Doors were very timely. They seem naive now, but a couple of years ago people were into some very weird things. There was a high energy level and we could say things like we did and almost half-ass believe them. We may have been one of the first groups to come along who were openly self-conscious of being performers, and it was reflected in our career as it was happening.'

Steve Harris said, ‘It was assumed Jim would go his own way. The band left him alone because they knew he was their meal ticket. He wrote 80 per cent of the material, he was the lead singer, the focal point. It was always Jim. But the others didn't have much of an ego problem, they were too shrewd to want power.'

One of the many things that precipitated the split was Ray Manzarek's obsession with taking the Doors to play in Japan. Manzarek had strong Eastern ties (his wife Dorothy was Japanese) and he wanted the band to immerse itself in its culture. Manzarek told Morrison about the proposed tour, about how it had all been arranged, how it would be great for their creativity and so on. And Morrison, in his deadpan, emotionless way, told Manzarek that not only did he not want anything to do with the proposed Japanese tour, but he also wanted nothing more to do with the group.

Morrison might have had enough of the Doors, but
LA Woman
was greeted with rave reviews by the press, and proved to be their most acclaimed album since
Strange Days
.
Creem
magazine pointed out that ‘no other rock group went so dramatically from a position of admiration to sheer hatred in so short a space of time . . . something about them must have rubbed people up the wrong way . . . but
LA Woman
has a more subtle effect, more calm, more resigned . . . than its predecessors.'

During its recording Morrison kept to his usual routine of excessive drinking followed by indiscriminate sex. With Courson away on a tour of Europe, he cruised the bars of downtown LA, getting thrown out of most of them for reciting his poetry, starting fights or molesting girls. He was taking a lot of cocaine, and developed a taste for Scotch. He was still working on a screenplay, but when the words didn't come he consoled himself with booze. He was trying to organise an album through Elektra, and also talked of various movie projects he'd been offered. He'd do anything, he said, to take him away from the Doors.

On 8 December he recorded the poetry which would eventually surface on the posthumous album
An American Prayer
. On 11 and 12 December the Doors played their final concerts, in Dallas and New Orleans. Dallas was quite a success, but his last performance in New Orleans was a shambles, with an almost unrecognisable Morrison stumbling about the stage, mumbling incoherently. He had lost patience with himself and with his audience. According to Manzarek, ‘Anyone who was there that night saw it. Jim just . . . lost all his energy halfway into the set. You could almost see it leave him; he hung on to the mike stand and his spirit just slipped away. He was finally drained.'

Alone in LA, Morrison was a danger to himself – he needed Courson or Kennealy to round off the edges. But what he didn't need was both of them together.
This inevitably happened when they both turned up in the city at once, Courson returning from France and Patricia (whom he hadn't seen since before the abortion) flying in from New York. Kennealy, wanting to keep an eye on her man, lodged with Morrison's former publicist Diane Gardiner, who lived directly below Courson's flat in Norton Avenue. Not surprisingly, the two adversaries soon met, and having tried to sort out their differences, ended up talking, drinking and smoking grass together for over three hours.

‘I thought Pamela was very sweet,' said Kennealy, ‘very pretty, but very young. She had a lot of problems, too. As far as I can tell she never had a proper job in her life . . . I don't know about having an idea in her head. I was disappointed when I met her, I thought perhaps he could have done a bit better. There was this incredible dichotomy – he needed someone like her who he could feel protective towards, but he also had this need to be challenged, and that's what I think he wanted from me. He needed Pamela because she was so vulnerable. It wasn't a relationship of the mind from what I can tell. He needed both of us.'

Morrison came to Courson's apartment that night, only to discover his two regular girlfriends deep in conversation. After all three of them had spent a far-from-uncomplicated evening together, he ended up sleeping with Kennealy, having refused to stay with Courson. For Kennealy this was only a fleeting success,
as Morrison spent most of January and February living with Courson.