The Rolling Stone interviews

by edited by Jann S. Wenner

  We used to play, for example, “Heat Wave,” a very long version of “Smokestack Lightning,” and that song we sang tonight, “Young Man Blues,” fairly inconsequential kind of music which they could identify with and perhaps something where you banged your feet on the third beat or clapped your hands on the fifth beat, something so that you get the thing to go by. I mean, they used to like all kinds of things. They were mods and we’re mods and we dig them. We used to make sure that if there was a riot, a mod-rocker riot, we would be playing in the area. That was a place called Brighton.

  By the sea?

  Yes. That’s where they used to assemble. We’d always be playing there. And we got associated with the whole thing, and we got into the spirit of the whole thing. And, of course, rock & roll, the words wouldn’t even be mentioned; the fact that music would have any part of the movement was terrible. The music would come from the actual drive of the youth combination itself.

  You see, as individuals these people were nothing. They were the lowest, they were England’s lowest common denominators. Not only were they young, they were also lower-class young. They had to submit to the middle-class way of dressing and way of speaking and way of acting in order to get the very jobs which kept them alive. They had to do everything in terms of what existed already around them. That made their way of getting something across that much more latently effective, the fact that they were hip and yet still, as far as Granddad was concerned, exactly the same. It made the whole gesture so much more vital. It was incredible. As a force, they were unbelievable. That was the Bulge, that was England’s Bulge; all the war babies, all the old soldiers coming back from war and screwing until they were blue in the face—this was the result. Thousands and thousands of kids, too many kids, not enough teachers, not enough parents, not enough pills to go around. Everybody just grooving on being a mod.

  I forget if I read this or whether it is something [producer and engineer] Glyn Johns told me. You and the group came out of this rough, tough area, were very restless and had this thing: You were going to show everybody; you were a kid with a big nose, and you were going to make all these people love it, love your big nose.

  That was probably a mixture of what Glyn told you and an article I wrote. In fact, Glyn was exactly the kind of person I wanted to show. Glyn used to be one of the people who, right when I walked in, he’d be on the stage singing. I’d walk in because I dug his group. I’d often go to see him, and he would announce through the microphone, “Look at that bloke in the audience with that huge nose,” and of course the whole audience would turn around and look at me, and that would be acknowledgment from Glyn.

  When I was in school the geezers that were snappy dressers and got chicks like years before I ever even thought they existed would always like to talk about my nose. This seemed to be the biggest thing in my life: my fucking nose, man. Whenever my dad got drunk, he’d come up to me and say, “Look, son, you know, looks aren’t everything,” and shit like this. He’s getting drunk, and he’s ashamed of me because I’ve got a huge nose, and he’s trying to make me feel good. I know it’s huge, and of course it became incredible, and I became an enemy of society. I had to get over this thing. I’ve done it, and I never believe it to this day, but I do not think about my nose anymore. And if I had said this when I was a kid, if I ever said to myself, “One of these days you’ll go through a whole day without once thinking that your nose is the biggest in the world, man”—you know, I’d have laughed.

  It was huge. At that time, it was the reason I did everything. It’s the reason I played the guitar—because of my nose. The reason I wrote songs was because of my nose, everything, so much. I eventually admitted something in an article where I summed it up far more logically in terms of what I do today. I said that what I wanted to do was distract attention from my nose to my body and make people look at my body, instead of at my face—turn my body into a machine. But by the time I was into visual things like that, anyway, I’d forgotten all about my nose and a big ego trip, and I thought, well, if I’ve got a big nose, it’s a groove and it’s the greatest thing that can happen because, I don’t know, it’s like a lighthouse or something. The whole trip had changed by then, anyway.

  JIM MORRISON

  by Jerry Hopkins

  July 26, 1969

  How did you start this . . . decide you were going to be a performer?

  I think I had a suppressed desire to do something like this ever since I heard . . . y’see, the birth of rock & roll coincided with my adolescence, my coming into awareness. It was a real turn-on, although at the time I could never allow myself to rationally fantasize about ever doing it myself. I guess all that time I was unconsciously accumulating inclination and listening. So when it finally happened, my subconscious had prepared the whole thing.

  I didn’t think about it. It was just there. I never did any singing. I never even conceived it. I thought I was going to be a writer or a sociologist, maybe write plays. I never went to concerts—one or two at most. I saw a few things on TV, but I’d never been a part of it all. But I heard in my head a whole concert situation, 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 inside my head. And once I had written the songs, I had to sing them.

  When was this?

  About three years ago. I wasn’t in a group or anything. I just got out of college and I went down to the beach. I wasn’t doing much of anything. I was free for the first time. I had been going to school, constantly, for fifteen years. It was a beautiful hot summer and I just started hearing songs. I think I still have the notebook with those songs written in it. This kind of mythic concert that I heard . . . I’d like to try and reproduce it sometime, either in actuality or on record. I’d like to reproduce what I heard on the beach that day.

  Had you ever played any musical instrument?

  When I was a kid I tried piano for a while, but I didn’t have the discipline to keep up with it.

  How long did you take piano?

  Only a few months. I think I got to about the third-grade book.

  Any desire now to play an instrument?

  Not really. I play maracas. I can play a few songs on the piano. Just my own inventions, so it’s not really music; it’s noise. I can play one song. But it’s got only two changes in it. Two chords, so it’s pretty basic stuff. I would like to be able to play guitar, but I don’t have any feeling for it.

  When did you start writing poetry?

  Oh, I think around the fifth or sixth grade I wrote a poem called “The Pony Express.” That was the first I can remember. It was one of those ballad-type poems. I never could get it together, though. I always wanted to write, but I always figured it’d be no good unless somehow the hand just took the pen and started moving without me really having anything to do with it. Like, automatic writing. But it just never happened. I wrote a few poems, of course.

  Like, “Horse Latitudes,” I wrote when I was in high school. I kept a lot of notebooks through high school and college and then when I left school for some dumb reason—maybe it was wise—I threw them all away. There’s nothing I can think of I’d rather have in my possession right now than those two or three lost notebooks. I was thinking of being hypnotized or taking sodium Pentothal to try to remember, because I wrote in those books night after night. But maybe if I’d never thrown them away, I’d never have written anything original—because they were mainly accumulations of things that I’d read or heard, like quotes from books. I think if I’d never gotten rid of them I’d never been free.

  A question you’ve been asked before countless times: do you see yourself in a political role? I’m throwing a quote of yours back at you, in which you described the Doors as “erotic politicians.”

  It was just that I’ve been aware of the national media while growing up. They were always around the house and so I started reading them. And so I became aware gradually, just by
osmosis, of their style, their approach to reality. When I got into the music field, I was interested in securing kind of a place in that world, and so I was turning keys and I just knew instinctively how to do it. They look for catchy phrases and quotes they can use for captions, something to base an article on to give it an immediate response. It’s the kind of term that does mean something, but it’s impossible to explain. If I tried to explain what it means to me, it would lose all its force as a catchword.

  Deliberate media manipulation, right? Two questions come to me. Why did you pick that phrase over others? And do you think it’s pretty easy to manipulate the media?

  I don’t know if it’s easy, because it can turn on you. But, well, that was just one reporter, y’see. I was just answering his question. Since then a lot of people have picked up on it—that phrase—and have made it pretty heavy, but actually I was just . . . I knew the guy would use it and I knew what the picture painted would be. I knew that a few key phrases is all anyone ever retains from an article. So I wanted a phrase that would stick in the mind.

  I do think it’s more difficult to manipulate TV and film than it is the press. The press has been easy for me in a way, because I am biased toward writing and I understand writing and the mind of writers; we are dealing with the same medium, the printed word. So that’s been fairly easy. But television and films are much more difficult and I’m still learning. Each time I go on TV I get a little more relaxed and a little more able to communicate openly, and control it. It’s an interesting process.

  Does this explain your fascination with film?

  I’m interested in film because to me it’s the closest approximation in art that we have to the actual flow of consciousness, in both dream life and in the everyday perception of the world.

  You’re getting more involved in film all the time . . .

  Yeah, but there’s only one we’ve completed—Feast of Friends, which was made at the end of a spiritual, cultural renaissance that’s just about over now.

  How much in ‘Feast of Friends’ is you? Aside from what we see. The technical aspects . . . putting the film together . . . how much of that did you do?

  In conception, it was a very small crew following us around for three or four months in a lot of concerts, culminating in the Hollywood Bowl [summer 1968]. Then the group went to Europe on a short tour and while we were there, Frank Lisciandro and Paul Ferrara, the editor and photographer, started hacking it together. We returned, we looked at the rough cut and showed it to people. No one liked it very much and a lot of people were ready to abandon the project. I was almost of that opinion, too. But Frank and Paul wanted a chance so we let them. I worked with them in the refining of the editing and I made some good suggestions on the form it should take and after a few more . . . after paring down the material, I think we got an interesting film out of it.

  I think it’s a timeless film. I’m glad it exists. I want to look at it through the years from time to time and look back on what we were doing. Y’know, it’s interesting . . . the first time I saw the film I was rather taken aback, because being onstage and one of the central figures in the film, I only saw it from my point of view. Then, to see a series of events that I thought I had some control over . . . to see it as it actually was . . . I suddenly realized in a way I was just a puppet of a lot of forces I only vaguely understood. It was kind of shocking.

  I think of one part of the film, a performance sequence, in which you’re flat on your back, still singing . . . which represents how theatrical you’ve gotten in your performance. How did that theatricality develop? Was it a conscious thing?

  I think in a club, histrionics would be a little out of place, because the room is too small and it would be a little grotesque. In a large concert situation, I think it’s just . . . necessary, because it gets to be more than just a musical event. It turns into a little bit of a spectacle. And it’s different every time. I don’t think any one performance is like any other. I can’t answer that very well. I’m not too conscious of what’s happening. I don’t like to be too objective about it. I like to let each thing happen—direct it a little consciously, maybe, but just kind of follow the vibrations I get in each particular circumstance. We don’t plan theatrics. We hardly ever know which set we’ll play.

  I’m hesitant to bring it up, because so bloody much has been made of it, and I guess I want your reaction to that as well as the truth of the matter . . . the Oedipus section of “The End.” Just what does this song mean to you?

  Let’s see . . . Oedipus is a Greek myth. Sophocles wrote about it. I don’t know who before that. It’s about a man who inadvertently killed his father and married his mother. Yeah, I’d say there was a similarity, definitely. But to tell you the truth, every time I hear that song, it means something else to me. I really don’t know what I was trying to say. It just started out as a simple goodbye song.

  Goodbye to whom, or to what?

  Probably just to a girl, but I could see how it could be goodbye to a kind of childhood. I really don’t know. I think it’s sufficiently complex and universal in its imagery that it could be almost anything you want it to be.

  I don’t care what critics write about it, or anything like that, but one thing that disturbed me . . . I went to a movie one night in Westwood and I was in a bookstore or some shop where they sell pottery and calendars and gadgets, y’know . . . and a very attractive, intelligent—intelligent in the sense of aware and open—girl thought she recognized me and she came to say hello. And she was asking about that particular song. She was just out for a little stroll with a nurse. She was on leave just, just for an hour or so, from the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute. She lived there and was just out for a walk. Apparently she had been a student at UCLA and freaked on heavy drugs or something and either committed herself or someone picked up on her and put her there. Anyway, she said that song was really a favorite of a lot of kids in her ward. At first I thought: Oh, man . . . and this was after I talked with her for a while, saying it could mean a lot of things, kind of a maze or a puzzle to think about, everybody should relate it to their own situation. I didn’t realize people took songs so seriously and it made me wonder whether I ought to consider the consequences. That’s kind of ridiculous, because I do it myself; you don’t think of the consequences and you can’t.

  Getting back to your film, then, there’s some of the most incredible footage I’ve ever seen of an audience rushing a performer. What do you think in a situation like that?

  It’s just a lot of fun [laughs]. It actually looks a lot more exciting than it really is. Film compresses everything. It packs a lot of energy into a small . . . anytime you put a form on reality, it’s going to look more intense. Truthfully, a lot of times it was very exciting, a lot of fun. I enjoy it or I wouldn’t do it.

  You said the other day that you like to get people up out of their seats, but not intentionally create a chaos situation . . .

  It’s never gotten out of control, actually. It’s pretty playful, really. We have fun, the kids have fun, the cops have fun. It’s kind of a weird triangle. We just think about going out to play good music. Sometimes I’ll extend myself and work people up a little bit, but usually we’re out there trying to make good music and that’s it. Each time it’s different. There are varying degrees of fever in an auditorium waiting for you. So you go out onstage and you’re met with this rush of energy potential. You never know what it’s going to be.

  What do you mean you’ll sometimes extend yourself . . . work the people up a bit?

  Let’s just say I was testing the bounds of reality. I was curious to see what would happen. That’s all it was: just curiosity.

  There is a quote attributed to you. It appears in print a lot. It goes: “I’m interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos . . .”

  “. . . especially activity that appears to have no meaning.”

  Right. That one. Is this another example of media manipulation? Did you make that one up for a n
ewspaper guy?

  Yes, definitely. But it’s true, too. Who isn’t fascinated with chaos? More than that, though, I am interested in activity that has no meaning, and all I mean by that is free activity. Play. Activity that has nothing in it except just what it is. No repercussions. No motivation. Free . . . activity. I think there should be a national carnival much the same as Mardi Gras in Rio. There should be a week of national hilarity . . . a cessation of all work, all business, all discrimination, all authority. A week of total freedom. That’d be a start. Of course, the power structure wouldn’t really alter. But someone off the streets—I don’t know how they’d pick him, at random perhaps—would become president. Someone else would become vice president. Others would become senators, congressmen, on the Supreme Court, policemen. It would just last for a week and then go back to the way it was. I think we need it. Yeah. Something like that.