27

by Howard Sounes

  Monika Dannemann gave numerous interviews about Jimi after his death, portraying herself as the woman he would have married had he lived, and turning her East Sussex cottage into a shrine to the star. When challenged about her reminiscences she went to law to defend her reputation, which proved to be a fatal mistake. In 1990 she unsuccessfully sued the publishers of Noel Redding’s autobiography, in which he claimed that she had hesitated before calling an ambulance when Jimi died. Around the same time another of Jimi’s former girlfriends, Kathy Etchingham, began to investigate what had happened at the Samarkand Hotel, speaking to the ambulance men and the police who had attended the scene. They told her Jimi was dead when they arrived. Kathy and Monika were now at loggerheads over the circumstances of Jimi’s demise. When Monika described Kathy Etchingham as an inveterate liar, Etchingham sued for libel. The case was settled in her favour, with Dannemann promising not to repeat her allegations. When she did so in a 1995 book, Etchingham sued for contempt of court. Monika Dannemann was found guilty on 3 April 1996. Two days later she gassed herself to death in her car.

  Jimi’s financial and musical legacy is equally unedifying. When he died his estate was valued at £208,000 ($330,700), most of which was swallowed by debt. Because he died intestate, that is without a will, his estate passed to his father, to whom he had not been particularly close. After Jimi’s manager, Michael Jeffrey, died in 1973, Al Hendrix entrusted the management of Jimi’s music to a lawyer named Leo Branton in return for $50,000 (£31,446) a year, plus bonuses, which must have seemed like a lot to the aged gardener. To exploit Jimi’s catalogue Branton went into business in 1975 with Jimi’s producer friend Alan Douglas, who says that the estate had gone to seed by this time. Half of Jimi’s publishing had been sold and the half the estate retained was only generating $400,000 a year (£251,572). Douglas bought back Jimi’s publishing. ‘And then I started to make records, and do merchandising, and do what one does with the music of Jimi Hendrix. Everything started to happen, and [by 1985] we were doing $15 million [(£9.4 million) a year].’ Douglas achieved this turnaround partly by releasing new albums created from recordings Jimi had left behind, some overdubbed with session musicians. Many fans and critics considered this a misuse of Jimi’s music.

  Al Hendrix came to regret his deal with Leo Branton and sued for what he had signed away, ‘not really understanding he was signing it away,’ says Janie Hendrix, one of the daughters of Al’s second wife. Al won the case and established a family company to handle Jimi’s music, Experience Hendrix, managed by Janie. When Al died in 2002 the Hendrix estate was valued at $80 million (£50 million). Al left everything to Janie and other family members, but cut the children from his first marriage to Lucille, Jimi’s mother, out of the will. For years he had denied paternity of most of these children, though it is likely that they were his. There was little doubt that Leon Hendrix was Jimi’s blood brother. Jimi and Leon had also grown up together. If anybody should have benefited from the estate, it was Leon. But Leon had fallen out with his father and got nothing. He contested the will, but lost. Many of Jimi’s friends were dismayed at this outcome, while also being surprised that Janie Hendrix, who was not a blood relative, had wound up running things.

  As with the Branton-Douglas regime, under Janie Hendrix’s leadership songs Jimi had not seen fit to release in life are being released posthumously. Janie takes the view that Jimi worked tirelessly in the studio to lay down a musical legacy, which she is sharing with the world, estimating his catalogue at 110 songs – twice as many as were released in his lifetime – ‘and not just one version, but several versions’. This makes for a seemingly endless series of ‘new’ Hendrix releases. Meanwhile, legal wrangles over the estate continue, with Alan Douglas, now in his eighties, still embroiled in disputes with Experience Hendrix. He cannot disguise his dislike of Janie Hendrix. ‘She’s nasty … but she’s smart.’ And he does not think highly of Experience Hendrix, though his own custodianship of Jimi’s music was criticised. The posthumous history of Jimi’s affairs is frankly unpleasant. Naturally, it’s all about money. ‘It’s always about money,’ says Douglas. ‘He still makes money now – today. People are fighting about it.’

  As for Jimi’s last resting place, it was originally a modest grave in Greenwood Memorial Park, south of Seattle. After Al died the family had Jimi’s remains moved to a more prominent location in the park, and commissioned a massive new granite memorial, decorated with images of the musician and quotations from his lyrics. It is an ugly but robust edifice built to withstand the attentions of the 120,000 people who come to pay their respects each year. For when all is said and done Jimi Hendrix was one of the most original and exciting musicians of the rock era.

  2

  Janis Joplin was cremated and her ashes scattered in the Pacific Ocean off Marin County where she lived latterly. Janis owned her home and had money in the bank when she died in 1970, but she did not die rich. After the funeral, Laura Joplin asked Janis’s attorney Bob Gordon how much the estate was worth. ‘I said, “Well, I think it’ll be at least fifty thousand dollars.” But that was before Pearl came out.’ Pearl was, of course, the album Janis had been recording with the Full Tilt Boogie Band when she died. When the record became a posthumous hit the money gushed like oil. ‘The Pearl album has sold ten million copies – it’s a lot – and there have been innumerable repackagings of her recordings and a lot of use of her songs for licensing for one purpose or another, so I think the family have done quite well,’ says Gordon. ‘As I understand it, the mother and father [willed] their portion to the children, so that the monies are now divided between Laura and Michael.’

  A greatest-hits compilation released in 1973 built upon the success of Pearl, selling seven million copies in the United States. If Janis had not been rich in life the Joplin family were rich now. This was a remarkable result for Laura Joplin in particular, considering that she had been excluded from Janis’s will until the last days of her sister’s life. ‘I think it’s very funny that her sister has become extremely wealthy because of Janis,’ says the singer’s former housemate, Lyndall Erb. ‘She really didn’t get along with her family at all.’

  Some of the musicians who worked with Janis, especially those on Pearl, are unhappy about the way they have been treated by the estate. ‘My particular band has not had a happy relationship with her record company or her estate. It’s very tiresome. Greed seems to have motivated both of them. It hasn’t changed our feelings for Janis. The odd thing is that the way they’ve behaved is the absolute antithesis of how Janis felt about her last band,’ says organist Ken Pearson. The band was paid union scale for recording Pearl, but not rewarded further. There is no contractual reason why the musicians should get any more money, but that doesn’t stop them feeling hard done by. Pearson says that they only hear from the record company when new editions of Pearl are released and they are asked to do interviews to promote the CD. ‘The history of pop music is littered with this sort of thing. Janis, she was fair and loved us, and we loved her, and it was an equal thing. The memory is fine. It’s just how business gets done after that … I guess the ten million records at ten dollars a record – which would be a hundred million (£62 million) – just wasn’t enough. Do you know what I mean? It’s obscene.’

  Sam Andrew, who played with Janis in Big Brother, then the Kozmic Blues Band, and was a close friend, has a more personal regret. Having survived the 1960s and 1970s, which he terms ‘a poisonous period’, he finds himself enjoying a drug-free old age and wishes that Janis had lived to enjoy the same. ‘Now is the best time of my life. I’d hate to have missed this. I’m sorry Janis did, truly sorry. She would have really enjoyed this.’ Sam can imagine Janis Joplin at seventy. ‘I know she wouldn’t look very good. I don’t … But, you know, it’s a happy time, mainly because there aren’t so many drugs. So it’s rational and logical, and you have a partner who you stay with. I’ve been married to my wife for a long time. It’s a rich relationship. [Janis] probably wou
ld have found that.’

  With no grave to visit, Janis’s admirers gravitate to the Landmark Hotel in Hollywood (now named the Highland Gardens Hotel) where Room 105 is booked in advance on her birthday and the anniversary of her death. The suite is much as it was when Janis died there and her fans have taken to writing their names in the closets where she hung her clothes. Some visitors and hotel staff swear that Janis’s ghost inhabits the hotel, knocking pictures off the walls, making telephones jangle when no one is calling, and opening doors. ‘And occasionally the john flushes, which is funny,’ says Don Hoyt, who often checks into 105 in memory of Janis, whom he says he knew. ‘I say, “Janis has been drinking Southern Comfort and has to pee.”’

  3

  Jim Morrison willed his estate to Pamela Courson. After her death in 1974 her parents, Penny and Columbus Courson, inherited Jim’s portion of the Doors’ royalties. Jim’s mother and father went to law for a share of the money, with the result that the Coursons and Morrisons split Jim’s quarter-interest in the Doors. Considering the froideur that existed between Jim and his parents, this is a surprising outcome, though the history of the 27 Club demonstrates that money trumps family feeling, and the people who benefit financially from the deaths often seem the least deserving.

  The Doors attempted to continue without Jim, releasing two more albums, but they could not sustain a career as a trio and split in 1973. The rest of their lives would be lived in the shadow of their charismatic singer. ‘It was over, and we would all be something slightly less. We would always have a part of us missing. For the rest of our lives,’ Ray Manzarek has written.* But it wasn’t the end of the Doors as a commercial enterprise.

  When Francis Ford Coppola used ‘The End’ in Apocalypse Now in 1979 he started a revival of interest in the Doors that hasn’t abated. There was an immediate, dramatic rise in sales of the band’s back catalogue. A new greatest-hits compilation, in 1980, went platinum. That year also saw the publication of No One Gets Out of Here Alive, a bestselling biography of Jim that built up the legend of a Dionysian rock star. Former Elektra Records executive Steve Harris told the authors about Jim suggesting he stage a ‘death hoax’ for publicity, and they cited the story at the end of the book to tease readers with the notion that Jim might have faked his death in Paris. A surprisingly large number of people were persuaded by this improbable idea, with sightings of Jim reported across the world over the next few years. Steve Harris doesn’t buy it for a moment. ‘I think he’s completely dead. No doubt about it.’

  Another popular theory is that Jim overdosed in the toilets at the Rock ’n’ Roll Circus in Paris hours before his ‘official’ death in the apartment where he and Pamela were staying. A former manager of the Rock ’n’ Roll Circus, Sam Bernett, claims to have found Jim’s body in the club toilets. ‘[As] I am the one who found Jim dead I know what I’m talking about.’ Bernett’s story is compromised by the fact that he kept quiet for 36 years, making his claim in a 2007 newspaper article and book. Meanwhile, others tell a slightly different version of the tale, saying Jim was found unconscious at the club, rather than dead. Either way the story of what happened next is essentially the same.

  Unnamed men – drug-dealers in Bernett’s account – apparently smuggled Jim’s inert body out of the Rock ’n’ Roll Circus and through the back of the club, via an adjacent building, into a parallel street. They loaded it into a vehicle and drove it to rue Beautreillis where they carried it upstairs to Apartment 4 and dumped it in the bath. All this was supposedly done to avoid trouble with the police.

  It is hard to believe that anybody would have gone to such lengths to cover up an accidental death. The idea that such an operation may have been conducted without anybody noticing is far-fetched. When one imagines smuggling a dead weight across the centre of Paris, in and out of vehicles and buildings, without being seen, as large and heavy as Jim’s corpse would have been, incredulity sets in. Like all such theories, this one would rely upon many people, including Pamela Courson, agreeing to a conspiracy of silence, which is not feasible. Yet all this and more has appeared in print. ‘Jim, I think, would love all these fantasies,’ says Alain Ronay, who was with Jim the day before he died. He believes that if Jim were alive today he wouldn’t sue for defamation. He would laugh.

  It was Ronay who chose Jim’s grave at Père Lachaise, believing he had found a plot that fans would not easily locate. When he returned to the cemetery a year later the grave had already become a popular tourist attraction. ‘What I saw, which was really distressing, was the signs on the graves, saying, “Jim, this way,” and so on, which I thought was terrible, that they had no respect whatsoever for the fact that it’s a cemetery.’ The surviving Doors were likewise shocked by the graffiti when they visited Père Lachaise in 1975, and surprised that nobody had erected a monument to Jim. Pamela had been given the money to do so, but hadn’t got around to it. Jim’s parents were also slow to give their son a headstone, though they did so eventually. Neither did they hurry to France to pay their respects. ‘I guess my parents finally went one time, but it wasn’t like they ran over [there] the first year – there was no purpose,’ says Andy Morrison, noting that the admiral and his wife were not ‘real religious’, and the family didn’t consider the circumstances of Jim’s death particularly important. ‘We didn’t care whether it was drugs, or alcohol, or what [killed Jim]. He died in the bath tub, and he’s dead. So what difference does it make – all the exact little details? The thing is he partied too hard and he’s gone.’

  Andy says his parents started to receive substantial income from Jim’s estate – regular six-figure cheques – ten years after his death when the Doors revival got under way. The money has kept coming ever since. ‘I guess it’s never going to stop.’

  The cult of Jim was fuelled by Oliver Stone’s 1991 feature film The Doors. By this time merchandising as well as CD sales had become a significant source of income for the estate. People who were not born in 1971 took to wearing Jim Morrison T-shirts, wanting to associate themselves with a handsome and transgressive rock star. The image printed on the T-shirts is usually the iconic Joel Brodsky photograph of Jim in his beefcake prime. ‘They think that’s how he looked when he died. You know, live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse,’ observes Jim’s friend Dickie Davis. ‘I don’t believe Jim had a good-looking corpse.’

  Jim’s grave is now listed in all the guide books to Paris, drawing millions of visitors to Père Lachaise, many of whom ignore the graves of Chopin, Piaf, Wilde and other luminaries, making straight for the Lizard King. Some say he is no longer in the grave, the family having repatriated his remains, but this is denied by the cemetery and the estate.

  Although most visitors to Père Lachaise behave responsibly, a proportion of those who traipse up the cobbled lanes each year damage Jim’s grave and those of his neighbours. Parts of Jim’s memorial have been stolen. The very earth has been scooped up and taken away. At night fans climb over the walls to have sex on the grave or shoot up. One fan overdosed and died. More commonly, they scribble messages on Jim’s grave, also marking the adjacent stones and the nearest tree, such inanities as ‘Thank You, Jim’, ‘Light My Fire’ and ‘This isn’t the End’. The unfortunate tree is also smothered in gobs of chewing gum inscribed with hearts. When the custodians of Père Lachaise complained to the Morrison family, Jim’s parents paid for a steam-cleaning machine and a robust new memorial, but this has not solved the problem. There are currently crowd barriers around Jim’s grave, uniquely in the cemetery, and a security guard stands on duty during opening hours.

  Visitors to Jim Morrison’s grave are a mixed bunch, of all ages from all over the world, not necessarily fans of the Doors. Rather, the grave has become one of the sights to see in Paris. ‘It’s an iconic life – live hard, die young,’ observes Kyle Fisher, a middle-aged man from Ohio, visiting with his daughter in 2012. ‘I think he was in the 27 Club.’ Peter Niedner from Germany believes that the number 27 is important. ‘The
two and the seven is a nine, and nine is a special number,’ he says enigmatically, at the graveside. ‘What I think is amazing is that he is more than forty years dead and you can come whenever you want and you see fresh flowers.’

  ‘Plastic.’

  ‘Yeah, but someone put them there.’

  Andy Morrison, who has visited Père Lachaise several times, has found it a mixed blessing being Jim’s brother. People always want to talk to him about Jim, though some refuse to believe he is related. Once a sailor challenged him in a bar: ‘If you’re really Jim’s brother, what was his nickname?’

  ‘He didn’t have a nickname.’

  The sailor looked at his friends as if he had found Andy out. ‘He doesn’t know Jim’s nickname was the Lizard King!’

  ‘Excuse me. That’s right,’ replied Andy sarcastically. ‘I remember my mother yelling up the stairs, “Come on down, Lizard King! Your eggs are getting cold.”’

  After his parents died Andy and his sister inherited the family share in the Doors, enough money for Andy to quit his job in construction and buy a 154-acre property in California. He enjoys his good fortune, but he believes that his brother is misunderstood and misrepresented, especially as portrayed by the actor Val Kilmer in Oliver Stone’s film. ‘He was a lot more human and down-to-earth [than people think]. Very friendly. Would get along with anybody … he could be a very personable person [and] he had a wonderful sense of humour … Val Kilmer, he never smiled.’

  Andy is not keen on Jim’s former band mates, especially keyboard player Ray Manzarek, whom he considers ‘a stuck-up stupid asshole’. There is also a rift within the band, with John Densmore vetoing deals to use Doors music in advertising, and going to law to stop Ray Manzarek and Robby Krieger touring under the Doors name. As a result Manzarek and Krieger are obliged to tour under their own names if they want to perform Doors material, which makes the difference between playing clubs and giving concerts in arenas. In his memoir Manzarek describes Densmore as ‘a pissant’.