Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon

by Des Barres, Pamela

  The Lizard King crossing the imaginary line to the dark side of the moon. (HENRY DILTZ)

  The constant battle with his parents about the clothes he wore (the same dirty shirt for a week), the length of his hair, and his smart mouth began to escalate when, at sixteen, Jim discovered Friedrich Nietzsche, who confirmed Jim’s suspicions that, like the philosopher, he, too, was a free spirit and “a philosopher of the dangerous.” He began writing poetry and keeping a journal, inspired by Franz Kafka. He blew minds by asking friends to read a passage out of any one of his collection of books, then proudly telling them the title and author.

  Hoping to steer their errant son in the right direction, Steve and Clara enrolled Jim at St. Petersburg College in Florida and shipped him off to Steve’s parents’ house to live. He took psychology courses and tortured his very sober grandparents by leaving empty wine bottles in his room and blaring Elvis. After school he hung out with a guy known to be gay, who told Jim that when he cruised for guys, he always left his underwear in the drawer. “Always show your meat,” he instructed Jim, advice he would later follow.

  In 1962 Jim switched to Florida State University and moved in with five other college students but was soon asked to leave, relocating to a tiny trailer behind a girls’ boardinghouse, where he boned up on protest philosophies. He peed in the public fountain. He exposed himself to trick-or-treaters. He encouraged a few of his friends to start a riot during a campus seminar, to show that a crowd could be controlled. “We can make love to it,” he enthused. “We can make it riot!” He had no takers.

  The Morrisons had moved to California, and Jim hitchhiked across the country to tell his parents of his decision to study film at UCLA. They adamantly rebuffed his request, adding that he had better cut off his unruly hair, and he angrily went back to FSU, moving into a seedy motel. Though he continued to get top grades, amazing teachers and fellow students with his grandiose ideas, Jim was unhappy and couldn’t stay out of trouble, once getting arrested and handcuffed for “disturbing the peace, resisting arrest, and public drunkenness.”

  Against his family’s wishes, in February 1964 Jim hitched back to California and enrolled at the UCLA Theater Arts Department, where he attended classes with Francis Ford Coppola and a like-minded, well-read eccentric, Dennis Jakob. The two discussed forming a band, “The Doors—Open and Closed,” based around the statement by William Blake: “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it truly is, infinite.” Jim also spent a great deal of time with a moody, wired, arrogant freak, thirty-four-year-old Felix Venable, who inspired Jim to pursue his poetic decadence and to experiment with all sorts of mind-expanding drugs. Jim’s drinking accelerated. He teetered naked on the edges of tall buildings. He set his bed on fire, threw darts at Playboy centerfolds, filled the men’s-room walls with rancorous graffiti. The chaotic, controversial, subversive film he managed to come up with—a half-naked girl stripping on top of a television set featuring Nazi storm troopers—earned him a “complimentary D,” and Jim Morrison dropped out of film school to wander Venice Beach and smoke pot. He took fistfuls of LSD. When the array of drugs in his system failed to disqualify him for army duty, Jim convinced the army doctors he was a homosexual. Soon afterward he played harmonica on his first gig with fellow student Ray Manzarek’s band, Rick and the Ravens, and said it was the easiest money he’d ever made.

  Jim’s own mind fascinated him beyond anything else, and he began staying on the rooftop of an abandoned office building at Venice Beach, dropping acid, pondering his options, writing poetry, meditating, opening himself up to the great unknown, ready for absolutely anything. And the words started to pour out of him in a torrent. Years later he recalled this time: “It was a beautiful, hot summer and I just started hearing songs. This kind of mythic concert that I heard … with a band and singing and an audience—a large audience. Those first five or six songs I wrote, I was just taking notes at a fantastic rock concert that was going on in my head. And once I had written the songs, I had to sing them.” With a diet of drugs and very little food at his disposal, when Jim Morrison came down from the rooftop, his appearance had altered dramatically. No longer pudgy, he was lean and suntanned, his dark hair curling around his angular face, deep-set eyes hypnotically intense. Ray almost didn’t recognize him.

  One of rock and roll’s legendary cosmic moments took place that summer of ’65 when Ray Manzarek ran into Jim on the Venice Boardwalk and asked what he had been up to. “I’ve been living on some rooftop writing songs,” he said, and Ray wanted to hear Jim sing them. About the fortuitous meeting, Ray later said, “Somebody must have planned it.”

  Knocked out entirely by what he heard, Ray insisted they start a rock-and-roll band and “make a million dollars.” Jim said that was what he had in mind all along, suggested they call themselves “the Doors,” and moved into Ray’s house that afternoon, where they worked on the songs and Jim’s tentative singing for two weeks straight. Ray met drummer John Densmore at the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s Meditation Center and asked if he might be interested in playing in a new rock band. John’s first rehearsal was in Ray’s parents’ garage: “Ray said, ‘This is Jim, the singer.’ He had never sung. But they showed me some of the lyrics and I was attracted to them. Songs like ‘Moonlight Drive’ and ‘Soul Kitchen’ were real out there, yet I could see the fluidity and rhythm to them and right away thought, God, put this to rock music? Yeah! … Jim was real shy and sung facing the corner of the garage, but he was different and great looking. He didn’t know anything about chords or any of that, but he was a genius for melody—he heard them in his head … .”

  Along with Ray’s brother on guitar, the burgeoning group recorded a demo and, surprisingly, were signed right away by Columbia’s Billy James, then left to sit and wait. While they waited, Robby Krieger replaced Ray’s brother on guitar, and the music really started to happen. They were serious, rehearsing five days a week, but when the Doors auditioned for a few local clubs, they were turned down because they had no bass player. Believing their sound was exciting and different, the Doors refused to compromise.

  Jim wrote to his father to tell him of the exciting new developments in his life, but the elder Morrison wrote back to Jim, objecting angrily, stating that what Jim was doing was “a crock.” Jim never wrote to his father again.

  Still hell-bent, getting arrested, tearing up friends’ apartments, breaking girls’ hearts, getting high as a helium balloon, Jim somehow managed to make the all-important rehearsals. Just as they were about to relent and get a bass player, the Doors were offered a running gig at London Fog, a tiny dump on the Sunset Strip. At first Jim was shy, singing with his back to the small audience, but still managed to attract a slim, freckle-faced redhead, nineteen-year-old Pamela Courson, who quickly became his beloved counterpart. Although he would certainly veer off wildly in other directions—including my own—in his heart Jim Morrison was very much a one-woman man. Seemingly reserved and acquiescent, Pam could not only match wits with Jim but give as good (or as bad) as she got. She was the only one who would dare tell Jim that he needed to see a psychiatrist (he went twice) or that he’d been wearing his leather pants so long that he smelled. She nagged him about his excessive drinking. When he fucked around, she fucked around. Jim could be brutal, sometimes tying her up, insisting on anal sex. When he stayed away for days at a time, she wrote “Faggot” on his favorite vest and cut his clothes into tiny pieces. Although she called herself “Jim’s creation,” Pam was hot-tempered, demanding, and fearless, and somehow managed to hang on to her wild-child man for the rest of his life.

  Realizing he had too much musical competition, Jim developed his stage show so that it became increasingly fraught with danger—he would take acid, pop amyl nitrate before going onstage, collapse in a heap, start fistfights. After four months the Doors were shown the London Fog door—just in time to get hired at the Whiskey-a-Go-Go, the showplace for rock’s biggest acts, where Jim’s antics started causi
ng quite a buzz. People (like myself) turned up just to hear Jim alter lyrics to songs like Them’s “Gloria”: “She come on my bed, she come in my mouth, little girl suck my …” It was almost too much.

  Dropped by Columbia, the Doors were free to seek another record deal, and word was out that the singer was a true madman. Encouraged by Arthur Lee of Love, Jac Holzman checked out the Doors and offered them a deal at his small label, Elektra. This was incredible news for the Doors, but already the band members were plagued by the consistently destructive behavior of their singer. One night when Jim didn’t show up for a Whiskey gig, John and Ray found him at the eight-dollar motel he was so fond of, flying on twenty doses of acid. “He really wanted to get out of himself,” marveled John, “totally go to the ends, as far as you can go, every time. Find out!” The Doors had been fired and rehired at the Whiskey over and over again, but this would be their final Whiskey gig. During “The End” Jim shouted to the expectant revelers that he wanted to fuck his mother.

  Recording on the Doors album began in September 1966, produced by Paul Rothchild on a four-track recorder at Sunset Sound Studios, and totally capturing the sensual feel of a live Doors show. According to Rothchild, Jim had no fear about revealing himself. “He was exposing his soul and that was bravery in the extreme in those days when everybody was posturing.” The first time the Doors attempted “The End,” Jim was high on booze and acid, repeating the words “Fuck the mother, kill the father” until they became a twisted mantra and the session was over. But the following day Rothchild described as “the most awe-inspiring thing I’d ever witnessed in a studio … one of the most important moments in recorded rock and roll.” They got it on the second take, and Ray described the experience as Jim taking everyone on a “shamanistic voyage.” Jim later said that “The End” was about three things: “sex, death, and travel … liberation from the cycle of birth-orgasm-death .” When the music was over, everybody went home, but Jim came back alone and destroyed the studio, pulling a fire extinguisher from the wall and spraying chemical foam all over the control board. Ray said there had been too much heat and that Jim was just “calming the whole thing down.” The bill was sent to Elektra.

  After a controversial stint at New York’s Ondine Club, Jim moved in with Pam Courson in Laurel Canyon at 1812 Rothdell Trail, a little green wooden house above the Country Canyon Store—right next door to a friend of mine!

  This little story illustrates how wide open Jim Morrison was to whatever came his way, and what Pam had to deal with on a daily basis. I didn’t know my friend lived next door to the Doors’ lead singer, and one afternoon when I was alone in the house, inhaling some of that strange PCP liquid, I heard some very familiar music. Aaaahhhh. I had heard the songs often enough to know that somebody must have had a prerelease copy of the Doors album, and they were playing it very loud. I went out into the blasting sunlight and down a hundred rock stairs until I was surrounded by that glorious music, which was pouring out of the house next door! I could see the naked back of a guy digging around in his fridge, humming along with “The End.” He grabbed a beer and when he turned around and started to knock it back, I let out a minor shriek. Lord have mercy on my teenage soul, it was Jim Morrison himself, with those black leather pants unzipped to the danger zone. Armed with fictitious chemical confidence, I proceeded through the green door and went into a perfect backbend (purple velvet dress over my head) in the middle of the tatty Persian rug. Despite my whacked-out condition, I soon realized I wasn’t alone with the Lizard King. I opened my eyes and stared into the face of a very pissed-off redhead. Jim was backed into a corner, curled up, hissing “Get it on!” Then the redhead very unpolitely asked me to leave. So unneighborly! As I careened back up the stairs, I was too high to have been embarrassed, even though I should have been.

  A few minutes later I heard a racket downstairs and then Jim was tapping at the door. He wanted to know what I was on, and could he have some? I assumed the sparkling liquid was on the planet for my pleasure. Much later I found out it was used to knock out gorillas, elephants, and whales. I still mourn the brain cells that bit the dust in those days. But that sunny California afternoon I gave Jim Morrison the quart jar, and soon we were rolling around on the floor like old friends. The following night, as I left for a Doors show at the Hullabaloo Club, I had to step over a whole bunch of shattered Doors demos that Pam had hurled at Jim when he attempted to come back home. I waited for Jim at the backstage door, and he took me by the hand to the hallowed backstage area. I offered him a spot of Trimar and we poked around and found a ladder leading to a small musty stage area. Jim laid out my muskrat jacket like it was a set of silk sheets. Up, up, and away. We landed in horny nirvana, throbbing and pulsating, making out like maniacs, until we heard the first few chords of “Light My Fire” from somewhere over the rainbow. His gorgeous face loomed before me, and I could see him trying to figure out where he was, what he was doing, and what he was supposed to be doing. Then realization hit and he was down the ladder and gone. I lay there, looking at the glowing spot where his face had been, trying to gather up my limbs and make them function. Then I followed him. Very dumb move. I walked right onstage with the Doors and stood there gaping like a goon. Jim was already squirming at the microphone, and a large roadie came to lead me gallantly from the stage. I guess I should have been embarrassed one more time, but I wasn’t.

  When the gig was over, Jim climbed behind the wheel of my 1962 Olds and we cruised the hot Hollywood night. After some date-nut bread and O.J. at the now-defunct Tiny Naylor’s, Jim headed for the hills, grabbed the jar of Trimar, and hurled it into some overgrown ivy. “That stuff could hurt our heads,” he drawled. “Now we won’t be tempted.” Had it been anyone other than Jim Morrison, I might have been seriously pissed off, but I took it like a big girl. He actually gave me a small lecture on the evils of drugs, and told me that his disorderly stage persona was just an elaborate act to go along with his music. I felt like a privileged insider, but I didn’t believe it for a minute. I had my head on his shoulder and he was calling me “darling.” It was a sweet summer dream come true. Predawn I dropped him off at the cheesy Sunset motel where he stayed when Pam threw him out. He told me to come and see him the next day, but when I flounced in with high hopes, I found that he had already checked out. He was back on Rothdell Trail. I listened to Jim and never, ever took another whiff of Trimar. Too bad he didn’t follow his own astute advice on the evils of drugs.

  That long-ago night Jim also told me that he really considered himself to be “a poet.” So did Pam, and it became one of the consistent battles in their relationship. She wanted him to leave the rowdy rock life and spend his time writing poetry.

  The Doors’ press kit contained some Jim gems. He was awesomely quotable:

  We are from the West. The sunset. The night. The sea. This is the end. The world we would suggest would be of a new, wild West. A sensuous and evil world. Strange and haunting, the path of the sun … . I like ideas about the breaking away or overthrowing of the established order—I am interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos, especially activity that seems to have no meaning.

  He also insisted that his parents were dead.

  “Break on Through,” the first single, didn’t even crack the Top 100, but the Doors were rampaging across America, grabbing devotees, and by the summer of 1967, “Light My Fire” was climbing to the top spot, followed by the album, which hit number one and stayed on the charts for two years.

  While the Beatles and Stones led the Summer of Love kids on a merry chase, the Doors represented the shady side of rock and roll. Jim Morrison was a bona fide damp dream, the unruly Pied Piper who led us willingly into chaos. He slept anywhere, fell down in the Sunset Strip gutters and was carried away by strangers. He drove cars into trees and left them behind. He was the real thing. Said John Densmore, “Morrison was devastating in those days. He wore his leather pants twenty-four hours a day and looked like some kind of swamp lizard out on the
border.”

  The second album, Strange Days, which included the astute “People Are Strange,” was recorded in three months and the Doors went back on the road. According to Crawdaddy magazine, “The Doors, in person, have become the best the West has to offer … the best performers in the country, and if the albums are poetry as well as music, then the stage show is most of all drama, brilliant theater in any sense of the word.” And though they were starting to make a fortune, it didn’t seem to matter to Jim, who never carried any cash. True to his credo, Jim continued to overthrow the established order. At a drunken show in Long Island, Jim tried to remove all of his clothes. Right after a gig at Yale University, Jim climbed to the bell tower, stripped naked, and swung out on the bell-tower shutter, hundreds of feet above the scattering crowd. He was promptly arrested.

  Jim’s mother, Clara, refused to stay “dead,” finally reaching her missing son through Elektra, inviting him home for Thanksgiving, adding that he had better cut his hair. After the conversation Jim told one of his roadies not to accept her calls. Backstage at a Doors show in Washington, D.C., she was unable to see her son. During “The End” that night, Jim stared at Clara at the side of the stage. “Mother? I want to … FUCK YOU!” Jim never saw or spoke to his mother again.

  In August 1966 the Doors played the Cheetah Club in L.A. I was front and center, swooning when Jim seemed to topple into the audience. It wouldn’t be the last time he took that precarious dive. We started to expect his sweaty madness in our upraised arms.

  In September the Doors performed on Ed Sullivan’s very important TV show, making rock history when they were told to excise the word “higher” from “Light My Fire.” The promise was made, but Jim didn’t keep it. They never played “The Ed Sullivan Show” again, and Jim didn’t care.