Another Little Piece of My Heart

by Richard Goldstein

  He had read about the figure of the shaman and its function in primitive societies, and he wanted to bring that power to rock by combining visionary lyrics with a physical ritual. His aim was to unleash the subconscious. “The shaman,” he said, “was a man who would intoxicate himself. See, he was probably already an … uh … unusual individual. And he would put himself into a trance by dancing, whirling around, drinking, taking drugs—however. Then he would go on a mental travel and … uh … describe his journey to the rest of the tribe.”

  Morrison was dead serious about this agenda. Say what you will about the bombastic quality of his lyrics, but they were remarkable in a hard-rock context. Not even Bob Dylan dared to write a song about incest.

  Father … I want to kill you

  Mother … I want to …

  [Insert shrieking here.]

  I’ve emphasized Morrison’s artistic ambition because that’s usually the part left out of his hagiography. But I realized, as I often did when talking with rockers known for their sizzle, that this was another borderline personality. The conflict between fame and aesthetics would be especially hard for him to deal with, because he wasn’t just known for his songs, as, say, Dylan was. Morrison was most famous for his voice and body, especially his crotch, which he unveiled during a concert in an act of drunken spite that got him arrested and made him even more notorious. I knew instantly, when I read about the incident, that it was a gesture of rage at the audience for failing to take his message about reaching into the subconscious seriously. “Break on through to the other side,” he would bellow. But he was swallowed up by the spectacle he thought he could shape. When I met him, before he lost what there was of his balance, he could still speak hopefully about his mission. As in this observation about the relationship between rock and play: “Play is not the same thing as a game. A game involves rules, but play is an open event. Actors play—also musicians. And you dig watching someone play, because that’s the way human beings are supposed to be … free.” If I had to sum up Morrison’s achievement I’d say that he combined rock with Method acting. He performed himself.

  There’s a video of me interviewing him. (You can locate the clip online.) It was one of several programs on rock that I hosted for PBS, mostly on speed, since I was terrified about appearing on TV. That may be why I look so spacey, though I can’t account for the puff-sleeved flower shirt I wore. Morrison, bearded by then, looked great, and he made a very smart prediction about the future of rock. He said it would be created by just one person working a machine. This is basically what electronica is today. He was, as I’ve said, a fitful but perceptive artist. All the more reason why he freaked out before his appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. This was an obligatory ritual for famous rockers, had been ever since Elvis Presley’s performance, famously shot from the waist up. It was a tradition on that program to censor lyrics that were too sexual. Even the notorious Rolling Stones had caved, changing a key line in one of their best songs from spending the night to “spending some time together.” When it came to “Light My Fire,” the Doors were faced with a double whammy. “Girl, we couldn’t get much higher” could refer to sex, drugs, or (most likely) both.

  I was present at that broadcast, standing backstage with the group. A deal had been struck—the Doors would leave the offensive line out of the song when they sang it on the air. It was a small price to pay for shamanizing the nation. But then they caught sight of the set. It was a series of doors—big ones, little ones, fancy and plain ones, but doors! This was an egregious insult for a band that had named themselves after a meditative book on psychedelics. Jim threatened not to go on. A conference followed, and a decision was made. He would sing the forbidden line—and he did, snarling, “Girl, we couldn’t get much HIGH-ER.” I caught the livid look on Sullivan’s face. The Doors were never invited back.

  That incident raised my respect for Jim, though he’d always had my sympathy. I never saw his legendary aggression. He was gentle and vulnerable around me. But I did get to witness one of his drunken outbursts. It happened at a recording session. Morrison had envisioned an album called The Celebration of the Lizard, a twenty-four-minute “drama” he’d been working on. The band was in the studio. The producer, an earnest longhair named Paul Rothchild, sat at the console. Jim arrived wearing his favorite snakeskin jacket. He had brought the notebook in which he wrote his verses. That wasn’t unusual—no one knew in advance what words he would be singing. Morrison would enter a glass-enclosed booth to record the vocals while the band played behind him. This is why the Doors sound so spontaneous on their albums. They were.

  I could tell from Jim’s wobbly posture, and from his girlfriend’s dire expression, that he was plastered. In fact, he guzzled from a bottle of brandy. “I’m the square of the Western hemisphere,” he boomed. “Man … whenever someone said something groovy it’d blow my mind. You like people?” he grunted at me. “I hate ’em. Screw ’em—I don’t need ’em. Oh, I need ’em … to grow potatoes.”

  He was teetering and belching. “Hafta break it in,” he said, fingering his jacket, which crinkled like tinfoil. His girlfriend tried to distract him by mentioning a Mexican wedding shirt he’d commissioned from a custom tailor. “We have to get you measured,” she said.

  Jim bolted backward, his eyes large with fear. “Uh-uh. I don’t like to be measured.”

  “Oh, Jim,” she muttered. “We’re not gonna measure all of you. Just your … shoulders.”

  By that point in my career I had learned to take notes in the dark or without looking at the page, holding a pad discreetly on my knee. As Morrison ranted I scribbled it all down in an ersatz shorthand only I could read, and I wrote about that recording session, including the moment when Rothchild summoned Jim to the glass booth. The plan was to put him where he wouldn’t interfere. The other musicians were really pissed, but they had learned to work around him when he was like this. They were Apollonians to his Dionysus—so Jim had told me. He would constantly prod them to “get into the Dionysus thing,” but they would stare at him blankly and say something like, “Oh, yeah, right, Jim.” Now they hunched over their instruments, trying to ignore him as he entered the vocal booth. He fit himself with earphones and began to sing in breathy grunts. The words were too slurred to be recorded, and the musicians were trying to play over them, but his voice intruded, bigger and blacker than ever. Finally the producer turned off the sound. Jim looked like a silent-movie version of himself, a pungent but necessary prop. Suddenly he burst out of the glass chamber, sweat drunk. “If I had an ax,” he slurred, “man, I’d kill everybody … ’cept … uh … my friends.”

  There he stood, a lizard-skinned titan in a helpless fit. As useless as he had probably felt when he was a child. Every attempt he’d made to escape from that sense of insignificance, of dreaded obscurity before a rejecting father, surfaced in this tantrum. His girlfriend sank back in her seat and gave herself over to a cosmic case of the blahs.

  I’ve already said that Morrison reminded me of Brian Wilson, but there were other West Coast rock stars who had the same effect. The greatest of them were terribly fragile. The more emotive they were onstage, the more insecure they seemed up close. In New York we were better at hiding our vulnerability, but showing that side was easier out here, perhaps because it was part of the culture of honesty that made the local scene so ridiculous—and appealing. I certainly was surprised by the readiness with which these rockers confided their doubts to me. There were no publicists to intervene; no time limit or subjects off-limits. They didn’t present me with a fake mystique, and I didn’t have to be shy around them. I began to feel something I’d never let myself experience as a reporter; I started to care for the people I wrote about, and I struggled to balance the need to make a story out of their lives with the desire to represent them in all their complexity. I was learning to drop the stylization that my role required, to break on through to the other side. But there were unintended consequences. As I watched these performers sink
under the churning currents of fame, with no ego strength to buoy them, it heightened the sense of helplessness that would eventually overwhelm me.

  Rock stars in those days were expected to be priests in a rite of fucked-upness, and it reinforced their most self-destructive impulses. Madness was its own reward, and the crazier and more volatile they got, the greater the fascination it produced. I suppose that’s always been the case in show business, the worship and devouring of vulnerable personalities; it explains the cult of Judy Garland, and of Marilyn Monroe, both of whom ended up drugged and dead. But in the counterculture, where love was the watchword, it seemed especially painful to witness this emotional cannibalism. The luckiest stars were buffered by lovers, loyal managers, or members of the band who formed a protective phalanx. But often a forced tolerance prevailed, because, after all, these freaks were bringing home the soy bacon. A vicious indifference hid under the insistence that dangerous, sometimes fatal behavior was simply “doing your thing.”

  Well, I got to do my thing in California, for better and for worse. But I’m getting ahead of myself yet again. I keep wanting to jump the sequence in which these events occurred, probably because that’s the way I remember them. I know who I hung out with in L.A, but I’m not sure about the order of these encounters. Maybe it doesn’t matter; why should I presume to be a fact checker of my own mind, when the most accurate way to describe it is as a light show of pulsing shapes that suggest the image of people who exist only as images anyway, since most of them died long ago—and long before their time. My most vivid memory is the feeling that everything out here was fungible. At any moment the earth might shake and it would all be swept away. Dennis Wilson’s words still resonate within me when I think of California in 1967: Whoa! The road is doing these weird things.

  The Summer of My Discontent

  I didn’t just bliss out in the Summer of Love. I got married. All sorts of living arrangements were possible in the sixties, from group sex to shacking up, as it was still called then. But Judith and I both wanted—and no doubt needed—something more permanent.

  We’d met when I was in j-school at Columbia and she was a student at Barnard College. We bonded despite her yowling Siamese cat, but our families didn’t. If you raise an upwardly mobile child, as my folks did, your in-laws will probably be classier than you, and her parents were certainly that. Her mother was a talented painter, and her father was the rascal descendant of a British rabbinic family. Judith was raised to be an intellectual, but she had a secret passion for rock ’n’ roll. It corresponded to a hidden sense of herself as a voluptuous woman, and that zaftig hottie emerged during the five years when we were together, to my delight.

  Our wedding celebration was held at the Cheetah, a large midtown discotheque with thousands of flickering lightbulbs. Murray the K hosted, the Velvet Underground played, and the bride wore a nightgown. (I was hoping she would wear her paper sari to go with my silver boots.) A few weeks later, we had a proper Jewish ceremony for the parents—this time Judith wore a minidress. When the rabbi was late, she stormed out of the bride’s room, shouting, “When the fuck is this going to happen?” I stomped on the glass that the groom is supposed to break, out of anxiety that I wouldn’t succeed. Our honeymoon was a trip to the event that inaugurated the tradition of rock festivals, Monterey Pop.

  First marriages are often auditions, especially when they happen at a young age. My best understanding is that Judith and I grew each other up. Thanks to my career, we had remarkable adventures together. She was the best editor I ever had, and she managed to drag me out of despair about writing more than once by insisting that blocks were creative opportunities, urges toward change. She was right about many things except my ability to stay committed. My love for her felt real, and the sex was so good that it allowed me to quell the drawn-and-quartered feeling of my conflicting drives. The problem was my inability to let her—or anyone—all the way in. I saw myself as a fragile balloon, pendulous with liquid, that would burst if penetrated, splattering its murky water on the freshly waxed floor. It took many years and a long struggle, with some false starts and painful turns, to break through this terror of intimacy, but at the age of twenty-three it was buried so deeply that I wasn’t even aware of it. I was a jumble of desires and equally urgent fears. Still, there were times when everything seemed like it was right where it should be. I remember the morning we spent in Monterey before the opening concert. Monarch butterflies filled the air, and Judith was radiant with self-possession, her insecurities banished in the California dreaming.

  When we got to the festival I realized right away that this was no love-in for nomads like the kids I’d met in Golden Gate Park. Though the tickets were cheap—a mere $3.50 for an evening show, as I recall—the crowd was anything but common. These were members of a new aristocracy, courtly and enlightened, wearing costumes of fine fabric in shimmering hues. Watching them promenade through the craft market, a woodsy version of the pushcarts I’d grown up with, I felt a bit like Otis Redding must have when he performed at Monterey. (He was the major representative of soul music; Motown was nowhere on the lineup.) Glimpsing the audience, Otis allowed himself a gently cynical quip: “This is the love crowd, right?” No R&B singer could achieve the perfect lack of edge, the casual insularity, that these people displayed. I was witnessing the birth of a new class pretending to be classless, and it was imperial at the core. The descendants of this bangled illuminati now dine on free-range meat and artisanal cheese. They colonize neighborhoods, driving out the poor and turning slums into Potemkin villages of art. You know these hipsters by the tilt of their fedoras, but their ancestors flashed peace signs.

  Somewhere in the crowd I caught a glimpse of Brian Jones in a fur-trimmed-robe sort of thing. I introduced myself, sure that he would remember our encounter on that yacht during the Rolling Stones’ first American tour—after all, I’d been part of the rescue party that saved him from a pack of wild fans. But he looked past me and ambled away. We’d met as journalist and subject, which meant we were strangers. I should have known that, but I always felt hurt when it became apparent. I licked my wounds and proceeded to the press gate, where I identified myself. The credentialer was skeptical. “You’re the third Richard Goldstein we’ve had today,” she groaned.

  I was flattered, but I needed access, so I yanked out my press card to prove who I was. As a journalist I could enter the restricted area behind the stage, and I joined the scrum of performers and their roadies hanging out there. I’d arrived in the aftermath of an argument between Jimi Hendrix and Pete Townshend of the Who over which of their bands would go on first. This was an important issue, since both were hard-rock acts. According to Townshend, they solved the problem with a coin toss, but the buzz backstage was that Hendrix lost the dispute because he was less famous. (That would change after his performance at Monterey.) I caught a glimpse of Hendrix huddling with his sidemen, thin British gents who could have played footmen to a libertine lord in a costume drama. It looked like they had a plan. I had a feeling that it had something to do with smashing guitars.

  That was the Who’s signature shtick. Townshend would throw his ax into the amps during the climax of their most belligerent song, “My Generation” (“Things they do look awful c-c-cold/I hope I die before I get old”). Then Keith Moon would knock over his drum kit as smoke enveloped the band. Busting up equipment seemed risky to me, but it epitomized the Who’s crypto-punk image, though it also obscured their musical gifts. I think of them as the fathers of anthemic rock and, in a broad sense, all the genres that emanate from metal. As for Hendrix, he redrew the borders of pop by melting blue notes and reshaping them into elastic sonic sculptures. His revision of “The Star Spangled Banner,” complete with bombing sounds and snippets of “Taps,” is the most astonishing statement in sixties music about the violent and ecstatic dream life of America. Hendrix was the John Coltrane of the wah-wah pedal, but it took me some time to grasp that. At first his playing seemed too disconnected fr
om melody, too chaotic. As I’ve already confessed, I came to rock as an English major.

  I understood why Hendrix was focused on the Who. He had a history of topping his betters. As a rookie rocker he’d outflashed Little Richard in that singer’s own band. (He got fired for that.) Now he decided to outdestructo the Who. Hendrix would smash his guitar and then ignite it, tossing the flaming thing into the audience. The moment has been captured in countless video clips, but I saw it happen. I was sitting just below the stage, and I ducked the incoming. Robert Christgau, who was sitting near me, made a World Series catch, grabbing the remains of the charred instrument. He kept it in his East Village apartment until a subtenant lost it.

  I “interviewed” Hendrix not long before he died in 1970. The occasion, I recall, had something to do with the opening of his recording studio in Greenwich Village, but it may have happened earlier than that. What sticks in my memory is the way he looked. Hendrix was stupefied, his shirt stained with what looked like caked puke. I listened to him mumbling for several minutes before leaving as graciously as I could. There was no publicist to make excuses or even wipe him up. I was tempted to put that meeting into print, but by then I had lost my distance from the musicians I wrote about. I’d learned to honor the feeling of empathy that they often aroused in me. There were two kinds of rock stars, it seemed: the survivors, such as Dylan and Jagger, who hid behind their personas, and those whose precarious egos marked them for ritual self-destruction. No way would I perform the journalistic equivalent of that nasty spectacle by blowing Jimi’s cover. I was horrified but not surprised when he choked to death on his vomit.