Mr Mojo (5 page)

Ray Manzarek described how the song developed. ‘ “The End” was originally a very short piece, but because of all the time we had to fill onstage, we started extending songs, taking them into areas that we didn't know they would go into . . . and playing stoned every night. It was the great summer of acid, and we really got into a lot of improvisation, and I think the fact that no one was at the club really helped us to develop what the Doors became.'

A year before, the band had sounded like any other beat combo, but now, with Morrison writing nearly all of their songs, the Doors were firmly entrenched in the emerging drug culture. Morrison's songs were often incongruous and demanding, but they were written like advertising copy: concise and compact.

Encouraged by the group's success, he began incorporating more and more philosophical and mythological references into the songs, drawing on his considerable literary knowledge. Those days in the library hadn't been wasted, as he now used his wide reading to build himself a career, page by page.

Morrison's creativity was helped by his staggering drug intake: his experiments with LSD, peyote, grass and alcohol. He still had nowhere to live, preferring to wander the streets of West Los Angeles, looking for kicks and sleeping rough. By comparison the rest of the group were clean-living, and their drug-taking never seemed to interfere with their day job. But drugs now fuelled Morrison's work, and he began more and more to rely on them to keep himself sane. Success was only just around the corner, and he had to be prepared.

Morrison saw himself as a Dionysian, and may well have believed himself to be testing the reality of Rimbaud's assertion that a poet becomes a visionary through ‘a long, boundless and systematic disordering of the senses' – a creed, to quote writer Mick Brown,
‘which has percolated into rock and roll as the mythology of romantic self-destruction'.

His ‘Big Thing', to which he constantly referred in both song and interview, was the confrontation of reality. A typical explanation would go something like this: ‘People are afraid of themselves – of their own reality – their feelings most of all. People talk about how great love is, but that's bullshit. Love hurts. Feelings are disturbing. People are taught that pain is evil and dangerous. How can they deal with love if they're afraid to feel? Pain is meant to wake us up. People try to hide their pain. But they're wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain. It's all in how you carry it. That's what matters. Pain is a feeling – your feelings are a part of you. Your own reality. If you feel ashamed of them, and hide them, you're letting society destroy your reality. You should stand up for your right to feel your pain.'

‘Sometimes the pain is too much to examine, or even tolerate,' he said, explaining the meaning of the line, ‘My only friend, the End'. ‘That doesn't make it evil, though – or necessarily dangerous. But people fear death even more than pain. It's strange that they fear death. Life hurts a lot more than death. At the point of death, the pain is over. Yeah – I guess it is a friend . . .'

When he began to be probed by journalists, Morrison found he had an answer for everything: ‘If you reject
your body, it becomes your prison cell. It's a paradox – to transcend the limitations of the body, you have to immerse yourself in it – you have to be totally open to your senses . . . It isn't easy to accept your body – we're taught that the body is something to control, dominate – natural processes like pissing and shitting are considered dirty . . . Puritanical attitudes die slowly. How can sex be a liberation if you don't really want to touch your body – if you're trying to escape from it?'

Sex and death motifs, enigmatic words about the dark side of life, about the possibilities of life: Morrison's songs spoke volumes about his fears and obsessions. Unlike the trippy West Coast rock scene evolving around them, the Doors were always literate – though at their worst they sound verbose and repetitious. It's easy to call Morrison pretentious, but his pretensions were always based on knowledge: he'd done his homework.

His songs also captured a certain side of  Los Angeles: the dark, nihilistic side. If his arcane and portentous lyrics were essentially a celebration of his own existence, he also had the ability to focus on the restless nature of West Coast youth. He may have been professionally expedient but he also happened to be in the right place at the right time.

By the autumn of 1966, although he still occasionally looked awkward in performance, Morrison had developed such a strong stage persona that it began to
envelop his whole personality. Now, he wasn't just arrogant, enigmatic and resolutely sexual onstage – he was like it offstage, too. Fuelled by huge quantities of acid and beer, he evolved into a sullen erotic showman – the hedonistic poet. Like his hero, Elvis, he had charisma and star quality, things most people couldn't learn. Only Morrison used this raw quality to create his personality.

Having established themselves on the West Coast, in November the Doors flew to New York for their first out-of-town concerts. Since it had opened at the beginning of 1965, Ondine's had been one of the chic-est clubs in Manhattan, and its East 59th Street location was now a Mecca for young, glamorous New Yorkers. It was the very apex of hipness, and it was no surprise that the group decided to make their East Coast debut there. Fortified by their new-found fame, they turned in dynamic performances and took the city by storm. They were a pop-cultural whirlwind.

While in New York Morrison was a frequent visitor to the club, even when the band weren't performing, quickly embroiling himself in the scene. The Doors played at Ondine's again the following spring, the singer treating the club as a second home. His behaviour was becoming predictable: he would drink himself into unconsciousness, often having to be carried home.

Andy Warhol, in
POPism
, remembers it well: ‘Jim would stand at the bar drinking screwdrivers all night
long, taking down[er]s with them, and he'd get really far gone – he'd be totally oblivious – and the girls would go over and jerk him off while he was standing there.' Warhol also pinpointed part of Morrison's appeal: ‘It was obvious just from watching these kids operate that there were new sex-manoeuver codes. The girls were only interested in the guys that didn't go after them. I saw a lot of girls pass on Warren Beatty, who was so good looking, just because they knew he wanted to fuck them, and they'd go looking for somebody who looked like he didn't want to, who had “problems”.'

Morrison had agreed to be the star of Warhol's first blue movie, but when the time came he didn't show up. The following summer he was also meant to appear in another Warhol movie,
I, a Man
, with Nico, but again the proposed collaboration came to nothing.

It was in New York that Morrison first met Danny Fields, the Elektra press agent who would work with the band for most of their career. ‘When I first met him,' said Fields, ‘I thought he was intriguing, but sullen. At the time I pretty much thought he was another singer – a bit shifty, a little difficult, a little stubborn, but another singer. But after spending time with him I knew he was different, I knew he'd be trouble. Very quickly his character began to take shape. I realised he wasn't very nice – he wasn't very warm, he wasn't very giving, and he began adopting the persona he invented
for the stage – you know, dark, brooding, mysterious. That's when he became an asshole.'

At one of the soundchecks at Ondine's, Steve Harris, the Vice President of Elektra, also had his first glimpse of the star: ‘He sauntered over to me from the bar – where else – and I thought to myself, if this guy can recite the phone book, he's going to sell a million records. He had a way of moving, a way of looking at you, and a way of projecting himself; he was gorgeous, magnetic. He knew he had the goods, and he knew how to use them. He was very clever, and though he was often a slob, whenever he was introduced to a journalist or a record-company person at a party or whatever, and they had their wife with them, he would always try and conquer the wife first. And he usually did. I know he grew to hate the sex-symbol thing, but at the beginning he was always after the adoration. And he unified that image onstage, and off.'

It was during their first stint at Ondine's that Morrison's mother tried to contact him. After getting through to Steve Harris, and finding out where he was staying, she called Morrison direct, at the Henry Hudson Hotel on West 57th Street. Morrison talked briefly with her on the phone, and then went off in a tantrum. In the years to come members of his family, usually his mother or brother, would try to get in touch with him, more often than not to little or no avail, Morrison refusing to speak to them and then going
off in a rage, often to get blind drunk. The old life was behind him now, and he didn't want his family interfering with his new personality. He had reinvented himself, and there was no going back.

This new image enveloped Morrison completely. Immediately after a particularly successful concert at the Fillmore West early in 1967, the singer took Steve Harris aside and asked him if he thought it would be a good publicity stunt if Morrison disappeared, and Elektra started a death hoax. ‘It's a good idea,' said Harris, ‘but there's just one problem. No one knows who you are yet.'

The Doors
remains one of the most extraordinary debut albums in rock history, as influential now as it was when it was released. This was no confused rock and roll arrangement – it was a statement of intent. Released in January 1967, the group's first LP established a powerful and theatrical rock-blues style, and was a blueprint for their whole career.

The album was produced, as were all subsequent records apart from
LA Woman
, by Paul Rothchild, a thirty-year-old fan of the band who had just finished an eight-month jail sentence for smuggling marijuana. Assigned to the group by Elektra – Jac Holzman had the producer flown in from New York – Rothchild immediately clicked with them, becoming almost a fifth member. He understood what they were trying to do, and had a sympathetic ear. He got them to record
in Sunset Sound, a studio renowned for its ‘live' feel, something which made the band sound all the more assertive. Most of the LP was recorded quickly as the band had played the songs so many times, and rehearsals weren't necessary. Recorded live, nearly everything was cut in a couple of takes. A bass player was drafted in to beef up Manzarek's tinny Fender keyboard bass on a few songs, but the resulting record was practically an exact copy of the Doors' stage sound.

The sound of this first Doors record was remarkable for a variety of reasons: not only for the great tunes or for the sophistication of the lyrics, but for the crystal-clear definition – it sounded
clean
. Because this was his first time in a proper recording studio, Morrison was mostly well behaved, and his enthusiasm for the project manifested itself in his extraordinary performances. He knew this was his chance of immortality; he was, to quote one journalist, ‘conscious of the Kleig lights monitoring his every move'. Recording was occasionally postponed when he came in too drunk to sing (or when he didn't turn up at all), but mostly it went according to plan.

And what a plan it was. A blueprint for a dark new tomorrow,
The Doors
was full of haunting little trailers of the future, compelling tales of transcendence, sexuality, death and, in Morrison's own words, ‘celebrations of existence'. These topics were hardly standard pop fare, and in a world dominated by the Monkees, the
Box Tops and the Turtles, the Doors stuck out like a sore thumb, all swollen and bleeding. These sensuous, acid-induced songs were quite unlike anything that had been heard before – modern life as synthesised by an egotistical ‘shaman' in leather trousers. Morrison's songs were clipped little poems which he turned into rock and roll vignettes – urgent, obsessive songs of freedom and spiritual death – what he called ‘a journey into truth'.

Most of Morrison's early songs share a similar refrain: forget your past and create your future: ‘break on through', ‘learn to forget', travel to the ‘end of the night'.

But if Morrison's lyrics were full of rich imagery and cryptic trivia, the songs themselves were carefully constructed pop packages. Manzarek, Krieger and Densmore created a whirlwind of a backdrop, a gorgeous, malevolent swirl of sounds which evoked the dread side of flower power: sly, hypnotic blues – electric white man's blues. ‘Break On Through', ‘The Crystal Ship', ‘End of the Night' and the rest are figments of Morrison's imagination, sung in his rugged, flat baritone, and bathed in Manzarek's surreal, phantom fairground organ, that distinctive Baroque hurdy-gurdy sound which characterised all their best records. Among Morrison's life-or-death snapshots were a couple of dazzling cover versions: Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's ‘Alabama Song (Whisky Bar)'
and Willie Dixon's ‘Back Door Man' – avant-garde pomp and deep, dark blues. The Monkees they most certainly weren't.

‘The End', an eleven-and-a-half-minute epic in which Morrison spelt out his existential theories, closed side two – a sprawling, bombastic poem, it became the band's anthem. If ‘Light My Fire' identified them as a
Billboard
pop band, ‘The End' cast them as art terrorists. It bordered on the pretentious – Morrison taking his ‘ring out the old, ring in the new' theme to extremes – yet somehow the band got away with it. When they recorded it, they had only performed that version (complete with the Oedipal section, where Morrison expresses his desire to fuck his mother and kill his father) once before. As Paul Rothchild said, ‘ “The End” was an always-changing piece. Jim tended to use it as a kind of open, almost blank canvas for his poetic bits and pieces, images and fragments, couplets and the little things he just wanted to say, and it changed all the time . . . After it was down on record, they could listen to it and tended to perform it that way, but Jim still used to leave something out, put something else in, transpose verses.'