27

by Howard Sounes

  Janis’s increasingly rebellious lifestyle led to run-ins with the police, which is typical of the 27s. The first incident came when she was on a double date with some boys who threw fire crackers from their car. Not long after this, she went on a joy ride to New Orleans with older boys and was stopped by police. Because of Janis’s age, the young men she was with were technically in breach of the Mann Act, which prohibits taking underage girls across state lines. Janis was sent home in disgrace. But she had caught the travel bug. A dissipated trip to Houston followed. ‘[I] took a lot of pills, drank huge quantities of wine and flipped out,’ she wrote of the adventure, adding that she was sent home and ‘put in the hospital’. Janis’s anxious parents also sent her to a counsellor, one of several mental-health experts Janis would consult over the next few years.

  After graduating from high school, Janis enrolled at college in Beaumont, Texas, dropping out after one semester to take a clerical job. When she tired of it, she went to work in Los Angeles where she fell in with some ‘big-league junkies’. By 1962 she was back in Texas, at the University of Texas at Austin, majoring in art. Janis sang with a student folk group, the Waller Creek Boys. She dated a member of the band, and fell pregnant, but lost the child. Her sex life had become promiscuous and varied, with lesbian as well as male lovers, and she was experimenting with drugs as well as drink in the beatnik spirit of wanting to imbibe experience. Janis became one of the biggest personalities on campus, a larger-than-life character who revelled in attention. Yet, paradoxically, she was easily hurt. Some friends say Janis laughed when her fellow students nominated her for the annual Ugly Man competition. Others say she cried.

  Janis decided she’d had enough of Austin, and Texas. She wanted to explore America. ‘I figured it out,’ she said. ‘Got to get outa Texas … Soon as I get outa Texas everything’s gonna be OK.’ In January 1962 she dropped out of university and hitch-hiked to San Francisco, the destination of Kerouac’s characters in On the Road as they race across the continent in search of kicks, and themselves.

  4

  Uniquely among the 27s, words were more important than music to Jim Morrison. The intellectual of the Big Six, Jim was a voracious reader who aspired to be a poet before he became the front man of the Doors. He was trying to return to the life of a writer when he died.

  James Douglas Morrison was born in Melbourne, Florida, on 8 December 1943, making him slightly younger than Jones, Hendrix and Joplin, though their careers overlapped. His parents were Steve and Clara Morrison, and he had two younger siblings, Anne and Andy. Steve Morrison was a naval pilot who rose through the ranks to become the captain of an aircraft carrier when Jim was in college, ultimately achieving the exalted rank of rear admiral. When Jim was young, though, his father was, of course, more junior, and the family lived relatively modestly, moving frequently as Dad was posted to various bases. ‘We didn’t have any set home,’ says Andy Morrison, who quashes speculation that this itinerant life made Jim wayward. On the contrary, he says the Morrison kids enjoyed travelling. ‘It never bothered us. It teaches you to be outgoing.’

  With the words of Wordsworth and Larkin in mind, Jim’s relationship with his parents is particularly interesting. Jim wrote and sang about wanting to kill his father and have sex with his mother in the Oedipal section of ‘The End’. Even if this was purely a work of the imagination, the biographical background is striking. Jim severed contact with his family when he was on the brink of fame, telling his publicist that his parents were dead. When it emerged that both parents were alive, and they wanted to see their son, Jim snubbed them. In a 1969 interview, he explained that he originally told people his parents were dead ‘as some kind of joke’, but he confirmed that he had no contact with them. His younger brother – whom he still saw – suggests that Jim may have been embarrassed, as a rock star at the time of the Vietnam War, to have a father of high rank in the military. Even so, it is remarkable that Jim declined to receive his mother when she came backstage at a Doors show, and refused to take her calls. Jim’s former manager, Asher Dann, believes Jim hated his parents. Evidently something had gone wrong in his childhood.

  The Morrison children were brought up to be as tough and self-sufficient as their parents. Andy Morrison describes their navy mom as a no-nonsense woman with ‘a hard streak’. If one of the children was in a bad mood and sulked, the whole family would turn on them, ‘like a pack of dogs’, teasing them mercilessly. ‘It helped you for life in the future, anyway, it toughed you up.’ Andy recalls Dad as ‘real easy-going’, so long as the children abided by his rules, but concedes that Admiral Morrison may have been stricter with his first-born – and, indeed, Jim later complained about the discipline. At the same time he was the apple of his father’s eye, according to his brother, who notes that after Jim died Steve Morrison would make the touching subconscious error of addressing him as ‘Jim’.

  Along with the fact that Jim was raised in an atmosphere of military discipline and high expectations, it is surely significant that his father was away at sea for up to nine months of the year. This meant that Jim became ‘the little man around the house’, as Andy Morrison observes. ‘So he and my mother – I’m not getting into the song “The End” or anything. There was nothing sexual, as far as I know – but they had a different kind of relationship.’ Jim and his mother had the domestic arguments of a couple. ‘I didn’t know you wrestled with your mother,’ observes Andy, of one fight he witnessed.

  Although the Morrisons moved frequently, they lived within a community of naval families, Steve and Clara socialising with fellow officers and their wives. At boozy weekend house parties, Steve Morrison restricted himself to two gins and tonic. But Clara drank to excess. ‘She drank too much when he was at sea,’ says Andy, emphasising that this became most noticeable after his father had made admiral. ‘She’d have the captain’s wife and the commander’s wife [over to the house]. All the girls in the unit were like a bunch of hens, and they’d get together at night. I’d come home at one in the morning and they’re still sitting around in the living room drinking. When Dad got home, he put a stop to that.’ Like their mother, Jim and Andy were heavy drinkers in adult life.

  The family considered Jim a borderline genius. He read widely, interested in history, philosophy, literary fiction and poetry, including the work of Baudelaire, Rimbaud and the beat writers. Like Janis Joplin, Jim saw his yearning for experience expressed in On the Road, and affected a beatnik look and habits as a teenager, wearing shabby clothes and acquiring bongo drums, which he played in his basement den. He also took piano lessons briefly, but never learned to play an instrument with proficiency. Words were what excited Jim, writing rather than singing them. ‘I never did any singing,’ he told Rolling Stone, looking back on his youth. ‘I never even conceived it. I thought I was going to be a writer or a sociologist, maybe write plays.’ Anne expected her brother to become a poet ‘and be poor all his life’. As an example of his intellectual interests, she notes that when he graduated from high school in 1961 he asked his parents for the complete works of Friedrich Nietzsche as a reward, which says something about the sort of boy he was and offers a key to understanding the performer he became.

  As a young man, Jim was enthused by The Birth of Tragedy, published when Nietzsche was 27, an exploration of Greek tragedy via the idea that there were two primal forces in Greek art: the Apollonians, who, like the god Apollo, were orderly and rational; and the Dionysians, who, like Dionysus (also known as Bacchus), were transgressive. Nietzsche suggested that great art was created in the conflict between those forces, which are archetypes. In mythology, Dionysus is the son of Zeus, the product of a liaison with a mortal. Zeus’s jealous wife persecuted Dionysus, causing him to wander the world accompanied by frenzied worshipping women known as Maenads. Dionysus is the god of wine. He is sometimes depicted as a handsome young man, but also as an older bearded man with a drink, and is associated with both drunkenness and licentiousness. The relevance to the rock star Jim
Morrison is striking. The Doors’ female fans were modern Maenads.

  Jim became fascinated with the Dionysian archetype, as described by Nietzsche, who wrote that Dionysian excess was a path to wisdom. Intoxicated with the idea, Jim became a Dionysian rock star: wild, drunken, sexually free and transgressive. He often referred to Dionysus in conversation, and is described in Dionysian terms by his band mates. In fact, all six principal 27s could be said to have lived Dionysian lives. But Jim Morrison was the only one who intellectualised his debauchery.

  After leaving school Jim enrolled at St Petersburg Junior College in Florida, transferring to Florida State University where he studied philosophy and theatre history and acted in student productions. He was arrested for the first time in 1963, for being drunk and disorderly, a tentative start to the Dionysian life. That year Steve Morrison became captain of the USS Bon Homme Richard. Jim spoke of the shock of seeing his father in command of that mighty vessel. ‘That was another pivotal point in his life when Jim went out on [the] aircraft carrier and realised his father could launch these planes, some of which were carrying really nasty weapons,’ says Vince Treanor, the Doors’ road manager. ‘Jim said he couldn’t conceive that one man could have that much power, and life and death decision over hundreds, if not thousands of people, and I think it was one of the things that put Jim into rebellion against the establishment.’

  Still, Jim’s parents tried to accommodate their precocious son. They supported his decision to leave Florida State and enrol in film school at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Steve Morrison reasoned that if Jim was serious about getting into the movie industry, as he said, this was the place to go.

  Jim came into his own at UCLA. ‘When he got to LA, all of sudden he was out in the open, he was free,’ says Vince Treanor. ‘That was when he began to realise there was an open horizon out there.’ Jim made significant new friends at UCLA, including two film students of French background, Alain Ronay and Agnès Varda, both of whom would play a part in the drama of his death in Paris. Most importantly, he met Ray Manzarek. A tall, bespectacled film student of Polish immigrant stock, Manzarek was four years older than Jim, and had already served a year and a half in the US Army. Like Jim, Ray was an intellectual. He was also an accomplished keyboard player, a blues aficionado who played in a surf band, Rick and the Ravens. The students would go to clubs to see the Ravens perform. One night Jim got up with them and sang ‘Louie, Louie’.

  Also hanging around campus was the poet Michael C. Ford, who recalls sitting with Jim in film classes given by Josef von Sternberg at the end of his illustrious career. While von Sternberg held forth on directing The Blue Angel, Jim composed poetry. Ford was impressed by what he wrote. ‘I would read things that to me were astonishing … I thought it had a brilliance about it.’ Jim had been a drinker since high school, but it was at UCLA that he started using marijuana and LSD to ‘super-charge his lyric writing,’ says Ford. ‘I think he was hooked on the whole idea of trying everything, [even] become addicted to it. That’s romantic, too.’ In this frame of mind, and under the influence, Jim became an increasingly wild Dionysian character. He also changed in appearance, losing his youthful pudginess, allowing his hair to grow long and curly, taking on the idealised appearance of a Greek god.

  Upon leaving UCLA in the spring of 1965, aged 21, Jim seemed unsure of what he wanted to do with his life, other than that he didn’t want to be drafted for the Vietnam War. He was registered for the draft, classified 1-A (qualified for service) in January 1962, then granted student deferment until the summer of 1965. Selective Services were about to contact him again, with every chance that Jim would be packed off to war. Meanwhile, he talked about going to New York to pursue his film career, but he ended up doing very little. He hung around Venice Beach, sleeping at a friend’s house, sunbathing and getting high.

  One day Ray Manzarek bumped into Jim on the beach and asked what he had been doing since college. ‘I’ve been writing some songs,’ Jim replied, according to Ray’s memory of the pivotal conversation of their lives. That Jim spoke of song lyrics, rather than poems, may have been due to Bob Dylan’s recent success in marrying poetry to popular song.

  ‘You know what, sing me a song,’ Ray urged. ‘Let me hear what you’ve been writing.’

  Jim recited ‘Moonlight Drive’, which begins:

  Let’s swim to the moon

  Let’s climb through the tide

  Ray imagined music behind the sinuous, poetic words, the best lyrics he’d ever heard. ‘Man, we got to get a band together,’ he said. ‘We’re gonna make a million dollars!’

  5

  The fifth principal character in the story of the 27 Club was born on 20 February 1967, a month before the Doors released their début album, making Jim Morrison famous. The Rolling Stones were established. The Jimi Hendrix Experience had been launched successfully in Britain, and were about to break in America, as was Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company. We shall catch up with all these stories in due course.

  While the sixties started to swing, Kurt Cobain was born and raised in Aberdeen, Washington, a logging town a hundred miles south-west of Seattle, a journey that takes the traveller through a wet, green landscape mostly given over to forest, the gaps between the trees accommodating farms, hamlets, factories, trailer parks and cheap motels. Finally the road enters the port of Aberdeen, on the eastern shore of Grays Harbor, on the Pacific Ocean. Aberdeen is an unpretentious working-class place, rough around the edges, especially since the logging industry went into decline. In Kurt’s youth Aberdeen was busier, well supplied with bars and whorehouses for the entertainment of the men who worked on the docks and in the saw mills. Such is the perversity of life that a sensitive, artistic boy was born into a place he decried as a ‘redneck logger town’.

  Kurt was the eldest child of Don and Wendy Cobain (née Fradenburg), teenage sweethearts from Aberdeen High. Wendy fell pregnant shortly after she graduated, giving birth to Kurt when she was nineteen. A second child, Kimberley, followed when Kurt was three. There was a history of odd behaviour and violent death in the extended family. On his mother’s side, Kurt’s great-grandfather died in a mental hospital of a self-inflicted stab wound. His daughter, Kurt’s Grandma Fradenburg, subsequently became a recluse. On his father’s side, Kurt’s great-grandfather, Art Cobain, a county sheriff, died in bizarre circumstances. Reaching for a cigarette he dislodged his pistol, which fell to the ground, went off and shot him dead. Two of Sheriff Cobain’s sons, Burle and Kenny, chose suicide by gunshot. Kurt decided there were ‘suicide genes’ in the family.

  Kurt’s father worked as a mechanic, later in a saw mill. When Kurt was two the family moved to a small wood-frame house on East 1st Street in a part of Aberdeen known as Felony Flats, overlooked by the more prosperous citizens on Think of Me Hill (named after a sign for a brand of cigars). Largely because of Kurt’s comments in interviews, Aberdeen has acquired a bad reputation. It was certainly provincial, conservative and stratified when he grew up there, but everybody knew each other; there were plentiful jobs when Kurt was a boy; and it was a safe place for children, with space to play, trees to climb and rivers to explore. Sitting on the bank of the Wishkah river under the Young Street Bridge, at the end of his road, Kurt might have imagined himself in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. It was an ideal place to make a camp. Later, when Kurt found that he wasn’t welcome at home, he camped for real under the bridge, inspiring the song ‘Something in the Way’.

  Kurt was a hyperactive child, treated with Ritalin when he was seven. Later he developed mood swings. He decided he was manic-depressive (bipolar). He was also an artistic rather than a sporty boy, which seems to have been a disappointment to his father, with whom he had a poor relationship. ‘Don was kind of mean to him. [He] would go by and flip his [finger] on his head. I said, “What did you do that for?”’ recalls Kurt’s uncle, Chuck Fradenburg. Don said he wanted to discipline Kurt. ‘Poor little guy, he [didn’t] know what
’s going on. He was probably five or six years old at the time. And I saw [Don] do other kind of verbal abuse to him – tell him he’s dumb, he’s stupid.’

  The major trauma of Kurt’s young life came shortly after his ninth birthday, in 1976, when Wendy Cobain announced that she wanted a divorce. Don tried to persuade his wife that they should stay together, but Wendy was determined. ‘There was a lot of arguing, that’s what Kurt didn’t like. He didn’t understand,’ says Uncle Chuck. Don moved out of the family home, though he continued to have hope for the marriage. ‘Donny, for a long time there, he thought he was going to get her back,’ says his father, Leland Cobain. But it wasn’t to be. The Cobains divorced, with Wendy retaining custody of the children. Kurt scrawled on his bedroom wall: ‘I hate Mom, I hate Dad. Dad hates Mom, Mom hates Dad.’ In later life he harked back to the divorce as the point at which his life had gone wrong; he blamed not only his parents, but a generation of adults who pursued personal happiness over the welfare of their children – at a time when the divorce rate rose dramatically in the United States. ‘Every parent made the same mistake … my story is exactly the same as ninety per cent of everyone my age,’ Kurt said. ‘All these kids my age found themselves asking the same question at the same time – why the fuck are my parents getting divorced?’*

  Divorce had a calamitous effect on Kurt, as it did on other members of the 27 Club. ‘It just destroyed his life. He changed completely. I think he was ashamed. And he became very inward,’ his mother has said. Marriage break-ups are one of the primary causes of psychiatric disorders in children, and Kurt started to show signs of being disturbed. He began to complain of stomach pain, which unhappy children often do to win sympathy and time off school (truancy and absenteeism are common in disturbed children). Kurt continued to complain of stomach pain into adulthood, ultimately using it as an excuse to use heroin.