This was only one example of Jim’s misbehaviour at Steve Paul’s Scene. Musician Harvey Brooks, who played bass with the Doors in the studio and on stage, recalls Jim grovelling at his feet one night when he was jamming at the club. ‘At one point he licked my toes. Don’t ask me why.’
The most famous incident at Steve Paul’s Scene involved Jim in a drunken encounter with Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, presenting the fascinating image of three principal 27s together during a night out. Hendrix was in New York working on his third and final studio album, Electric Ladyland. Despite his intensive schedule, he would drop into clubs like the Scene late at night to jam for pleasure. One night in the spring of 1968 a drunken Jim Morrison got on stage with Hendrix. Steve Harris of Elektra Records says Morrison grabbed Hendrix’s hat before repeating his trick of taking the microphone and swinging it around his head. ‘The audience had to duck.’ Another witness, Doors publicist Danny Fields, says Morrison made a drunken pass at Hendrix. ‘Morrison crawled on his stomach to the microphone, got onstage … put his arms around Jimi’s hips and said, “I want to suck your cock.” And Jimi was, like, so shy, he was, like, embarrassed, but a professional, and he tried to keep playing.’ Morrison then tumbled into the table where Janis Joplin was sitting, knocking her drink over. Some say Joplin was so incensed that she broke a bottle over Morrison’s head.
The story has become confused in the telling, and may well have been exaggerated, but evidently something happened between Morrison, Hendrix and Joplin at the Scene, and it certainly wasn’t the only time Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin had an altercation. Janis told her publicist that she hit Jim with a bottle one time after he’d yanked her hair, while Big Brother guitarist Sam Andrew remembers two such incidents: ‘Jim Morrison was a brat. He was really ill-behaved … You know, at a party he came over to Janis and pulled her hair down to the floor. I don’t know what he was thinking. That’s just like really boorish behaviour. I think he was trying to shock people … But he was going too far. His father was an admiral, so he knew what correct behaviour was.’
At the time Janis was working on the Cheap Thrills album for CBS, Big Brother having signed to the label after Monterey. They had also signed with the premier manager of the day, Albert Grossman, whose clients included Bob Dylan. Grossman warned the members of Big Brother at the outset of their relationship that he wouldn’t tolerate his clients using heroin. They nodded agreement. ‘When he said that to us, you know, we all said yes, but at least three of us out of the five in that room were already doing it,’ says Sam Andrew, who was one of those using heroin, as was Janis.
Despite several overdoses Sam Andrew was fortunate to live to old age. Heroin killed Janis and many of their friends in their prime. One wonders why so many musicians abused heroin, knowing how dangerous it was. ‘It’s an opiate and Janis was really fast, in all of her reflexes, and thinking and everything. So to a person like that who is fast and kind of anxious and quick, any kind of opiate is gonna be very attractive, because it gives them a chance to relax,’ explains Sam, who offers an image of how good heroin made them feel: ‘It’s like a really warm summer day and everything is beautiful and kind of warm and dreamy.’
Fans of Big Brother empathised with the band’s dreamy, druggy music. Others saw Big Brother as amateurs, complaining that they played out of time when they were stoned. This became an issue for Janis as her popularity and ambitions outgrew the band in the build-up to the release of Cheap Thrills, her first significant recording.* The original idea had been to make a live recording of Janis and Big Brother, but the band was so loose in concert that most of the album had to be recorded in the studio with the audience sound overdubbed. Producer John Simon lamented Big Brother’s lack of musicianship. ‘I always thought they were a great performance band, but I didn’t think they made it as a recording band.’
Janis initially wanted the album titled Sex, Dope and Cheap Thrills, playing up to her libertine image. This was abbreviated to Cheap Thrills, the cover illustrated by her friend the artist Robert Crumb who was saddened by Janis’s subsequent decline. ‘She was a tough, hard-drinking girl, but soft inside. She liked getting fucked up too much, obviously. She ended up surrounded by blood-sucking sycophants and scary parasite types, both male and female. Poor thing, she didn’t stand a chance.’ The musicianship on Cheap Thrills may have been crude, but the album succeeded in capturing the energy of Janis’s performances, her impassioned vocals sounding especially impressive on ‘Summertime’, ‘Piece of My Heart’ and ‘Ball and Chain’. And the album was a commercial success, number one in the US charts for eight weeks in the summer of 1968.
The Doors’ third album, Waiting for the Sun, and Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland were released within a couple of months of Cheap Thrills. All three made number one in America, uniting Joplin, Hendrix and Morrison at the apex of their careers, at roughly the same age. They were all between 24 and 25. In many ways it was downhill from now on.
That autumn Jim Morrison confessed to Ray Manzarek that he wanted to leave the Doors, as Manzarek recounts in his autobiography, Light My Fire. Manzarek couldn’t understand why Jim wanted to quit when they had an album and a single at number one.
‘I just can’t take it anymore,’ said Jim.
Manzarek reminded his friend that they had it good. They didn’t tour much. And recording wasn’t that onerous. When Manzarek pressed for an explanation, Jim made a significant admission.
‘I think I’m having a nervous breakdown,’ he said.
Manzarek refused to believe it. ‘Oh, man. No, you’re not. You’re just drinking too much. It’s starting to get to you.’
‘No, Ray. I’m telling you … I’m having a nervous breakdown. I want to quit.’
Manzarek persuaded Jim not to do anything hasty. The conversation ended with him agreeing to stay with the Doors for six months. As it turned out, he stayed longer. But the die was cast. Jim wanted out.
The Doors flew to Europe in September 1968 to play some gigs with the Jefferson Airplane. The bands gave two shows at the Roundhouse in London, a former train shed on Chalk Farm Road in Camden that would feature in the lives of three 27s. Brian Jones was one of those who came backstage to meet Jim Morrison, along with his French girlfriend Zouzou, who recalls Jim looking fit and handsome. ‘He was so sexy on stage.’ Later she would encounter a different Jim in Paris. By comparison Brian looked awful. He was baggy-eyed, nervous and paranoid, having recently been busted for cannabis for a second time. (‘Why do you have to pick on me?’ he whined to the police officers who raided his home. The result was another conviction and fine.)
After their London shows, the Doors and the Airplane travelled to continental Europe. They played Frankfurt, then Amsterdam on 15 September 1968. Before the Amsterdam gig, Jim swallowed a block of hashish, possibly given to him by a member of Canned Heat, who had been on the bill in Germany the previous night. (The members of Canned Heat were notorious for their drug use, save Al Wilson, ironically, who would die of an overdose.) The hash reacted with the booze Jim had been drinking sending him high as a kite. He appeared on stage unexpectedly during the Jefferson Airplane’s set, performed what Ray Manzarek describes as a ‘whirling dervish dance’, then collapsed.
As an ambulance transported Jim to hospital, the remaining Doors were obliged to take the stage without him. Manzarek and Krieger sang Jim’s parts as well as playing their instruments. After they’d got over the shock of working without him, they enjoyed the experience. For the first time Densmore, Krieger and Manzarek basked in the attention and applause usually focused on Jim, and they received good reviews.
The fact that the Doors had done well without Jim seemed to depress the singer when he came round the next day. He was also coping with a monumental hangover. ‘When I walked in he had his head on a piano, and he was plunking one key [repeatedly] and he was in bad shape, really bad. I think had they not got him to the hospital he might have gone that night,’ says Vince Treanor. He further believes t
hat the fact the Doors proved they could perform without Jim fundamentally undermined his confidence. Indeed, a feeling began to grow that the group might have a future without him.
4
At this point in the history of popular music, virtually all the big rock bands were intact, including the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. There was a prevailing belief that, despite personality clashes, the major bands would continue together for the common good. This fantasy would be broken by the Stones, who had all but given up on Brian Jones by the end of 1968 when they released Beggars Banquet.
‘Brian wasn’t really involved on Beggars Banquet, apart from some slide [guitar] on “No Expectations”; that was the only thing he played on the whole record,’ says Mick Jagger. ‘He wasn’t turning up to the sessions and he wasn’t very well. In fact we didn’t want him to turn up, I don’t think.’ Beggars Banquet was the group’s strongest album yet, with Mick and Keith showing a significant musical and lyrical development on songs such as ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ and ‘Street Fighting Man’. This was the beginning of the band’s glory days, when they became a swaggering creative unit with a unique sound. Brian, who was not part of this development, was merely called upon for promotional duties, including attending the launch party for the album in December 1968, which culminated in a food fight for the press photographers. Symbolically, Mick Jagger plunged the first cream pie into Brian’s face.
Two weeks before Christmas the Stones recorded a concert film in a London TV studio dressed to resemble a circus tent. The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus brought together artists including Eric Clapton, John Lennon and the Who in a circus-themed show before a live audience that culminated in a set by the Rolling Stones. The night before the recording, Brian telephoned the director Michael Lindsay-Hogg in tears, complaining that the Stones were being horrid to him and saying he didn’t want to appear in the film. Lindsay-Hogg, who had known the band since they first appeared on Ready Steady Go!, a TV show he had directed, talked Brian round, but the guitarist was in a sorry state during filming – a weary, depressed little man, chubby now, with a drawn face.
‘He changed,’ says Lindsay-Hogg. ‘I met him first on Ready Steady Go! in April ’65 when he was still himself. But he had become a very, very different person in only three years. His looks were shot. His connection to other people was shot. And he just seemed to be fading as a person, unlike Mick and Keith, who were coming into their own at that time. They’d all become famous [at the same time], and they still were very young, but they had had life experiences at that point which often people in their fifties and sixties had never had. Mick and Keith were talented and tough, with great will power, and Brian had none of those things to the degree the other two had.’
The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus would be Brian’s last public appearance with the band.
5
Although she had thrown her son out of the family home when he was an obstreperous teenager, Wendy O’Connor, in common with other 27 parents, revelled in Kurt Cobain’s success. ‘I just received a phone call from my son, Kurt Cobain, who sings and plays guitar with the band Nirvana. They are presently touring Europe. Their first album with Geffen Record Co. just went “Platinum” (over 1 million sales),’ Wendy O’Connor wrote to her local newspaper, the Daily World, in November 1991. ‘Kurt, if you happen to read this, we are so proud of you and you are truly one of the nicest sons a mother could have. Please don’t forget to eat your vegetables or brush your teeth and now you can have your maid make your bed.’
At the time, Kurt was in Europe with Nirvana, and he and Courtney were using heroin. Kurt said they’d started using together in Amsterdam around Thanksgiving 1991. ‘It was my idea,’ he told his biographer Michael Azerrad, always keen to shield Courtney from blame, though he said she scored. ‘I didn’t really know how to get it, so Courtney was the one who would be able to somehow get it.’ Here, then, was a love affair steeped in drug abuse from the outset. Back in the USA in December, Kurt overdosed, as he would time and again during the remaining two and a half years of his life, as Janis Joplin had before him. In both cases doctors warned the artists that one day they might never wake up. Still, they carried on taking heroin.
The seriousness of Kurt’s problem became apparent to his close associates when his management, record-company executives and family gathered in New York in January 1992 for Nirvana’s appearance on Saturday Night Live. ‘The first time I knew he was doing hard drugs was around the first time the band did Saturday Night Live,’ says Nirvana’s manager Danny Goldberg. ‘It was clear to me he was stoned.’ Drummer David Grohl says he hadn’t realised how bad things had become until he visited Kurt and Courtney in their hotel room prior to the recording and found them ‘nodding out in bed, just wasted’. Others realised what was going on when Kurt reached the NBC studio. He was throwing up, and spending an inordinate amount of time in the toilet. ‘Frankly, he looked strung out. He looked unhappy,’ says Geffen executive Michael Maska.
Kurt, who had dyed his hair red for the TV show, didn’t appear entirely present as he performed ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ for the cameras. For their second number Nirvana played ‘Territorial Pissings’, at the end of which they went through the motions of breaking their equipment. That night Kurt overdosed again.
Kurt and Courtney moved to Los Angeles where they detoxed after Saturday Night Live. In Courtney’s case there was a special reason to get clean. She was pregnant. There wasn’t time to address Kurt’s problems properly, however, without putting Nirvana on hiatus. The band was about to tour Australia and Japan. Courtney joined Kurt on tour, travelling with him to Hawaii where the band also had concerts. On 24 February 1992, Kurt and Courtney married on Waikiki Beach. Kurt took heroin before the ceremony, literally and symbolically making heroin part of their union.
Noticeably absent from the Hawaii beach wedding was Kurt’s band mate and, for several years, his best friend, Krist Novoselic. Krist and his wife Shelli had fallen out with Kurt and Courtney after Shelli had criticised the couple’s drug use. She was particularly concerned because Courtney was pregnant, though whether she used heroin when she knew she was pregnant would become a contentious issue. Kurt and Krist were further estranged by an argument over money. As the main songwriter in Nirvana, Kurt now asked for a larger percentage of publishing income than his band mates received. The argument almost broke the group. Kurt’s drug problem compounded these issues and made for an increasingly difficult relationship between the musicians.
It was at this stage that Kurt’s managers staged their first intervention to try to get him off drugs. In what was then a fashionable method of dealing with drug-users, Kurt was confronted with his problem, and warned of the consequences if he did not stop. He was persuaded to check into Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles for methadone treatment, but he rejected the Twelve Steps programme, by which alcoholics and other addicts admit that they have a problem they can’t control and give themselves up to a higher power/ God. The quasi-religious aspect of the programme is a barrier to many addicts, as is the group therapy. Kurt was uncomfortable with the programme. He quit treatment early and returned to his heroin habit, which became more ferocious than ever.
On tour in Europe that summer Kurt collapsed and had to be hospitalised again. A number of shows were cancelled. Returning to Los Angeles, he went into a suicidal depression, bought himself a gun and contemplated blowing his brains out. He was obsessed with this dramatic and violent form of suicide, which is more common in the United States than in most countries due to the availability of guns. If one is serious about suicide, a bullet in the head is also a highly effective method – not a suicidal gesture, like slitting your wrists or swallowing a random number of pills, which may well fail – though not necessarily fool-proof. (Approximately three-quarters of suicide attempts with firearms prove fatal. A significant minority survive, often with severe injuries.) Two of Kurt’s uncles successfully shot themselves dead and Kurt had recently been obs
essively watching a video of a gunshot suicide, no doubt ideating his own exit. But he didn’t pull the trigger. Not yet. He went back to Cedars-Sinai to detox. Almost simultaneously Courtney checked into the maternity ward of the hospital to have their baby. She ordered Kurt to attend the birth, which took place in chaotic circumstances on 18 August 1992. Drug sick, Kurt passed out during the delivery.
The fact that the child, Frances Bean Cobain, was born healthy was a relief to everybody, but there was an immediate related drama. While pregnant Courtney had given an interview to Vanity Fair in which she seemingly admitted to using heroin during her pregnancy. Reading an advance copy of the feature, she was dismayed to see herself characterised as an avaricious and boastful ‘train-wreck personality’. The article reported that many people considered her ‘a charismatic opportunist’, who had pursued Kurt, and possibly introduced him to heroin (which he denied). The real bombshell came in Courtney’s account of using heroin with Kurt. She was quoted as saying that they were using in New York in January when Kurt had recorded Saturday Night Live, as Kurt corroborated. ‘After that, I did heroin for a couple of months.’ If true, this meant that Courtney was still using heroin when she was pregnant, which exposed their baby to health risks.
Kurt and Courtney were furious and scared: furious at Vanity Fair journalist Lynn Hirschberg for having the temerity to take a critical look at Courtney, who had expected the magazine to publish a puff piece about her, and scared that the authorities would see them as unfit parents. They had discussed what they would do if their baby was taken away, deciding upon a catastrophic response.
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