Further evidence of the dire state of Brian’s mental health came at the full appeal hearing later in the year. This time his barrister spoke of the strain fame had put on Brian’s ‘already fragile mental make-up’. Dr Flood said he had found Brian ‘anxious, considerably depressed and potentially suicidal’ when he had first treated him. He added revealingly: ‘He was easily depressed and easily thwarted. What to him seemed overwhelming problems made him anxious and depressed. He was not able to sort his problems out satisfactorily because he became anxious and depressed. He has a history of depressive mental illness.’ The appeal was successful. Brian was released with a fine on the condition that he continued to receive psychiatric treatment.
Even allowing for the fact that Brian’s barrister was calling witnesses to keep him out of jail, the evidence of the psychiatrists at the appeal hearing is striking. Here was one of the leading pop stars of the 1960s, one of the core group of musicians who went on to die at 27, described at the age of 25 as a man with ‘a history of depressive mental illness’ who was ‘potentially suicidal’. The words are worth bearing in mind as we follow Brian’s life to its conclusion.
2
All performers face the challenge of getting psyched up for a show, then having to come down from that high before repeating their performance the next night, or as required. It is an emotionally exhausting regime. There are healthy ways of managing the up-and-down cycle, involving diet and exercise, and less healthy ways, using drink and drugs. Amy Winehouse tried both methods. Ultimately, like other 27s, she fell back on substance abuse with fatal consequences.
In many ways the stars of the 1960s had a harder time because, as touched upon, they worked harder. Amy released only two albums and gave precious few concerts. One of her former managers has remarked ruefully that ‘you were lucky if Amy did thirty days a year’. By comparison the Rolling Stones gave hundreds of shows in the sixties and still found time to record nine studio albums while Brian Jones was in the band, though he contributed less and less. The Doors didn’t tour intensively by the standards of the day, but they cut six studio albums in four years. Janis Joplin released three albums. So did Jimi Hendrix, plus the live Band of Gypsys (sic) album. In brief gaps in a virtually continuous concert schedule, the Jimi Hendrix Experience found the time to record a second sensational album in 1967, Axis: Bold as Love, released in Britain only seven months after their début LP. By comparison there were three years between Amy Winehouse’s two albums. Hendrix also toured more than any other 27. From October 1966 until February 1969 he was onstage almost every night, sometimes playing a matinée as well. Only in the last months of his life did he get significant time off the road, and he spent most of it in the studio.
Inevitably, Jimi’s workload affected his behaviour. He cracked up after a show in Gothenburg, Sweden, in January 1968, according to Noel Redding, who wrote in his memoirs that Jimi got stinking drunk and suggested that Redding and Mitch Mitchell join him and a Swedish journalist in an orgy. Redding says that when he and Mitchell turned him down the guitarist went berserk and smashed up his hotel room. ‘You could hear the noise all over the hotel,’ Redding wrote, adding that the police were called when his band mates failed to calm Jimi down. Mitchell doesn’t mention the orgy suggestion in his book, but he agreed that Jimi wrecked his room.
Redding also gives an alarming account of the substances the trio consumed on the road. ‘Just how do you get down after the show so you can sleep?’ Redding writes in his book. ‘[A] few stiff drinks and a sleeper sped you on your way. But plane time would come long before the sleeper wore off, hence the leapers. But the flights are terribly boring when you’re up, so a creeper rounds off the edges and a lot of drink takes a bit of the cotton wool out of your mouth. But booze (well over a bottle of vodka a day now) makes life a bit grim, so “just a bit” of acid makes you feel all tingly and good. But it’s hard to concentrate on acid, so a quick sniff of coke (just becoming trendy …) brings the brain briefly to attention while you smoke some grass or hash to take the nerviness out of the coke. Then, as you’re beginning to feel a bit tacky by the time the flight’s over, the hotel is found, and it’s gig time: a bath, a snort of Methedrine and a big tobacco joint puts you onstage. Repeat as necessary.’ Redding may have been exaggerating for effect. But if half of what he wrote was true it would help to explain why all three members of the Experience died before their time. Redding developed cirrhosis of the liver and died at 57; Mitchell died on the road at 61 after years of heavy drinking; while Hendrix, of course, bowed out at 27.
The most gruelling Experience tour – ‘the one that did us in,’ wrote Redding – began in January 1968. This was a two-month trek across the United States during which the band played virtually every night. In mid-February the tour brought Jimi home to Seattle and a reunion with his father, whom he hadn’t seen since he’d joined the army. Al Hendrix had remarried. His new wife was Japanese, Ayako ‘June’ Jinka, who had five children of her own: Willie, Marsha, Linda, Donna and Janie. The whole family turned out to greet Jimi and his band as they arrived at Sea-Tac airport.
As we have seen, several of the 27s had strained relationships with their parents. In the normal course of events they may have had little or nothing to do with their families in adult life, as indeed Jim Morrison didn’t. But success introduced a new dynamic. Jim Morrison’s face on an album cover was enough to make Admiral Morrison telephone his son to try to patch up their relationship. Mitch Winehouse became ever present in Amy’s life when her recording career began. And there was a marked change in Al Hendrix’s relationship with Jimi now that he was a star. ‘Mr Hendrix finally accepted him, but he accepted him only after he had made it,’ says Anthony Atherton. ‘That wasn’t a good basis for a good relationship. I don’t think that [Jimi] really held that against his father, but I think they could have been closer.’
The first Al knew of Jimi’s new life was when Jimi telephoned from Britain in 1966. Al didn’t welcome the call, according to Jimi’s girlfriend Kathy Etchingham, who says he admonished Jimi for calling collect, suggested that he write instead and hung up. One of his stepsisters, though, gained a different impression. ‘I was in the living room when Jimi called,’ says Janie Hendrix, crossly. ‘I heard the conversation and I got to talk to Jimi, and he was so excited, and there was no wet cloth thrown on his exuberant news of he’s made it.’ Her memory of events may not be perfect as she was only five or six at the time. ‘My dad was very, very supportive [of Jimi].’ Janie is defensive of the memory of Al Hendrix, whom she refers to as ‘Dad’ although there was no blood relationship between her and Al, any more than there was between her and Jimi, whom she refers to as her brother. Nevertheless, she would inherit and control Jimi’s musical legacy, making her a significant figure in his story.
By the time Jimi returned to Seattle, the extent of his success was clear to everybody, Al included, yet the family were taken aback by his prosperity. The guitarist arrived home wearing a vintage military jacket and an elaborate silver and turquoise belt. Janie Hendrix recalls Jimi showing off his belt to the family, saying that it had cost several hundred dollars, to their amazement, and telling his father, ‘When I’m not here, it’s yours.’ Janie interpreted this to mean that Jimi knew he wouldn’t live long. ‘It always seemed as though Jimi just felt like he wasn’t going to be here, and perhaps there was a time limit, and it seemed like he knew what that was.’
Mitch Mitchell recalls Jimi’s surprise upon meeting the new family members, but gained the impression that Al was ‘genuinely pleased to see his son had made good’. The kids had drawn a ‘Welcome Home’ banner on butcher’s paper, which Jimi displayed onstage that night when he played Seattle’s Center Arena. The family sat in the front row. Afterwards there was a party at Jimi’s hotel, and the next day he was guest of honour at his old high school, before leaving town to continue the tour. Jimi would return to Seattle three more times. He was generous with his family, giving Al money to buy a truck and a c
ar. But the visits were not entirely happy. Jimi was concerned to see his younger brother Leon in trouble with the police, and there was friction between father and son, while friends couldn’t help but notice how differently Al Hendrix behaved towards Jimi now. ‘When he came back everybody was in awe of him, you know, that’s just human nature,’ says Jimi’s friend Sammy Drain. But Al’s reaction was pronounced. Sammy imitates the old man: ‘My boy! My boy! … That’s my boy!’
3
Like some other members of the 27 Club Jim Morrison seemed obsessed with his mortality, though it wasn’t always clear whether he was truly morbid or if he was talking about death to make an impression.
After a Doors show at the Fillmore West in 1967, just before the band hit the big-time, Jim took Elektra Records executive Steve Harris aside and said, ‘Let’s pull a death hoax,’ meaning they should tell the press he’d died, then announce that he was alive, after all, for publicity.
‘It’s a great idea, Jim. What a wonderful idea. Except for one thing.’
‘What?’
‘Nobody really knows who you are yet.’
Though this was a jokey exchange, Jim’s obsession with death and indeed suicide rivalled that of Kurt Cobain. Jim’s band mate Robby Krieger recalls a night in Los Angeles with Morrison and the Doors drummer John Densmore when Jim ‘was very depressed and he was talking about killing himself, which wasn’t that unusual, but we believed him. He just didn’t think it was worth it anymore, and life was horrible … And so we spent all night talking him out of killing himself …’ In the morning the musicians went outside to watch the sun rise, at which point Jim cheered up considerably. Indeed, he was inspired to write a song, ‘People are Strange’, which the Doors recorded the following day.
There is no doubt that Jim Morrison enjoyed playing mind games with his band mates, especially Krieger and Densmore. But there is evidence that he did suffer with depression, exacerbated by his drinking and use of drugs, which increased after he became famous. ‘He became downright crazy. He got way too drunk,’ says Dickie Davis, who knew Jim before he was a star, and shudders at the memory of how his friend abused drink and drugs during the years of his celebrity. Jim had always been a hedonist, but he was much worse now. ‘It was a tragedy. Tragedy is so romantic when people write about it, but it is horrible to see. There’s nothing pretty about a person destroying themselves. And it gets romanticised. Everybody thinks, Oh, it must have been wonderful to know [Jim]. It was, up until it became a tragedy, and then it was impossible to know him.’
One symptom of dissolution was getting into trouble with the police. All the principal 27s had brushes with the law, mostly when under the influence, and Jim was no exception, though his first arrest as a star was not his fault. He was making out drunkenly with a girl backstage before a show in New Haven, Connecticut, in December 1967, when a police officer ordered them to leave the area, not realising who Jim was. Jim’s mistake was to tell the cop to ‘eat it’. The cop sprayed him with Mace.
When he came onstage Jim told the audience what had just happened, incorporating the story into a performance of ‘Back Door Man’, effectively taunting the police and turning the crowd against the officers at the venue. Fearing a riot, the police turned on the house lights and arrested Jim, on charges that were later dropped. They punished him in a more direct way backstage. ‘I saw them pounding Jim. There was this guy holding him, and one pounding his back and another punching his face,’ says Vince Treanor, later the band’s road manager. Luckily Jim was so drunk he hardly felt it.
Jim wore leather onstage in New Haven. It had become his look, complementing his image as the Lizard King. The moniker derives from his poem ‘The Celebration of the Lizard’, also sung in concert, in which Jim proclaimed: ‘I am the Lizard King/ I can do anything’. Jim bought his leathers off the peg initially, but as the Doors became more successful he had his outfits tailor-made, with bespoke features such as stash pockets for his dope. Many of these outfits were made by Mirandi Babitz, a friend of Jim’s girlfriend Pamela Courson, who ran a boutique in LA. Mirandi came to know Jim well, getting a unique insight into the domestic life of the Lizard King when she and her musician husband, Clem Floyd, stayed briefly with Jim and Pamela.
Jim and Pamela were renting a funky little wooden house in a side-street in Laurel Canyon, above Hollywood, an address Jim sang about in ‘Love Street’, though the actual address was Rothdell Trail. Considering Jim’s wild-man image, his home was surprisingly neat and tidy, a pretty little ‘hippie castle’, says Mirandi, with pine furniture draped in gingham and Madras-cotton throws. Pamela had made a cosy nest for herself and the man she wanted to marry. Marriage wasn’t considered particularly cool for people in and around the music business at the time. Mirandi had married her British husband for visa reasons, but she says Pamela very much wanted to marry Jim, and she was frustrated that he wouldn’t make her his wife. It was one of the causes of tension in a tempestuous relationship.
Drink and drugs were problems too. Jim was a drunk with a fondness for marijuana and LSD while Pamela used heroin. Drinking and drug abuse made the relationship explosive. When they were high Jim and Pamela were prone to extravagant arguments that saw them tear their house apart. ‘The drug use was, like, so heavy, and the drinking was so heavy, and the wild running off into the night, fighting with each other, throwing things around … It was really tempestuous, just dramatic,’ says Mirandi. Sexual jealousy was also an issue. ‘[Pamela] would do things like cut up his clothes. He was unfaithful, and so was she, but they were both supposed to be faithful … He also had his back-door man thing going on,’ she adds, referring to Jim’s apparent predilection for anal sex, which Pamela didn’t think cool. ‘[So] she wrote “fag” across his clothes and cut them up.’
Mirandi, too, was a drug-user. Later she cleaned up and became a therapist, counselling addicts. Looking back, she believes that Jim had a range of problems, including ‘bipolar disorder, depression [and] total addiction’. His conversation was also morbid, as was true of Pamela. ‘Him and Pamela, the two of them together were just always talking about death, [and] they talked about dying together.’ The couple acted out suicide fantasies on the twisting roads of Laurel Canyon. ‘They did things like take the cars up on Mulholland Drive and play chicken, you know, We’ll drive towards the cliff, and we’re totally stoned on acid, and we’ll see if we can stop in time, and maybe we’ll die together.’
These stories add to the picture of Jim Morrison as a man bent on self-destruction, his death at 27 the inevitable result of reckless living. Clem Floyd agrees with his ex-wife that Jim was a depressive and reckless, but he is not convinced about Jim’s obsession with death. ‘He wasn’t really obsessed with death – until he got killed,’ he quips. ‘Now he’s obsessed.’ Rather, Floyd saw a young artist who hadn’t learned to leave his act on stage. ‘Morrison was kind of depressed under the weight of his stage image. He was trying to carry that personality around with him. You can’t do that. You have to drop it when you get off stage,’ says Floyd, who didn’t warm to Jim personally during the time he and Mirandi stayed with the rock star. ‘I didn’t like being around him, because you never knew what goddamn stupid thing he was going to do next.’
While the Doors were now very successful, there was a growing sense that Jim was already tiring of his role as the band’s front man, and finding it difficult to come up with new songs. He had used his best ideas on the first two albums. Now he felt he was on a treadmill to churn out product. As he complained to an interviewer in 1969, ‘there’s not the time to let things happen as they should.’ The Doors were contracted to deliver several more albums to Elektra on a tight schedule. Recording sessions became long and difficult.
The third Doors album, Waiting for the Sun, was a particular struggle. Jim got into the habit of bringing friends into the studio to relieve the boredom and tension, turning recording sessions into parties. One of the people he invited over was the young millionaire and friend to t
he stars Deering Howe, who spent a wild night in LA with Jim after they had left the studio. ‘The last thing I remember that night is waking up about four in the morning in somebody’s house underneath the table, and sitting at the table above me was Jim Morrison, and some guy I had never met, and they were playing Russian roulette with a loaded fucking gun. OK, time for me to leave …’ In an attempt to get Jim to finish Waiting for the Sun, the Doors engaged the musician Bob Neuwirth to keep an eye on him. But Neuwirth was almost as dissolute as Jim. ‘Bobby Neuwirth needed a keeper himself,’ says Deering Howe. ‘This was like the blind leading the blind. My God!’
John Densmore became so frustrated that he quit the Doors briefly during the making of Waiting for the Sun. When the album was finally finished it was weaker than Strange Days, which in turn had not been as impressive as the Doors’ début LP, showing a band in artistic decline, though not yet in commercial trouble. The album and its single, ‘Hello, I Love You’, both went to the top of the charts.
When the Doors went to New York to promote their records, Jim visited Steve Paul’s Scene, on West 46th Street, where he drank to excess and acted the fool in the company of fellow stars. One night he got onstage with Tiny Tim, grabbed the microphone and swung it around his head like a lasso, a dangerous trick he often performed when drunk, occasionally hitting people. He accidentally hit the promoter Bill Graham at a show in San Francisco. After interrupting Tiny Tim’s set, Jim got into a fight with his manager, Sal Bonafede. The men starting brawling, ‘like an old Western thing,’ says Bonafede’s partner Asher Dann, who separated them and escorted Jim back to the Warwick Hotel where Jim punched him. ‘All of a sudden he spins me around and throws a punch at me. I go – boom – down he goes … He was a handful.’
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