The White Album

by Joan Didion

  3

  It was six, seven o’clock of an early spring evening in 1968 and I was sitting on the cold vinyl floor of a sound studio on Sunset Boulevard, watching a band called The Doors record a rhythm track. On the whole my attention was only minimally engaged by the preoccupations of rock-and-roll bands (I had already heard about acid as a transitional stage and also about the Maharishi and even about Universal Love, and after a while it all sounded like marmalade skies to me), but The Doors were different, The Doors interested me. The Doors seemed unconvinced that love was brotherhood and the Kama Sutra. The Doors’ music insisted that love was sex and sex was death and therein lay salvation. The Doors were the Norman Mailers of the Top Forty, missionaries of apocalyptic sex. Break on through, their lyrics urged, and Light my fire, and:

  Come on baby, gonna take a little ride

  Goin} down by the ocean side

  Gonna get real close

  Get real tight

  Baby gonna drown tonight—

  Goin’ down, down, down.

  On this evening in 1968 they were gathered together in uneasy symbiosis to make their third album, and the studio was too cold and the lights were too bright and there were masses of wires and banks of the ominous blinking electronic circuitry with which musicians live so easily. There were three of the four Doors. There was a bass player borrowed from a band called Clear Light. There were the producer and the engineer and the road manager and a couple of girls and a Siberian husky named Nikki with one gray eye and one gold. There were paper bags half filled with hard-boiled eggs and chicken livers and cheeseburgers and empty bottles of apple juice and California rose. There was everything and everybody The Doors needed to cut the rest of this third album except one thing, the fourth Door, the lead singer, Jim Morrison, a 24-year-old graduate of U. C. L. A. who wore black vinyl pants and no underwear and tended to suggest some range of the possible just beyond a suicide pact. It was Morrison who had described The Doors as “erotic politicians.” It was Morrison who had defined the group’s interests as “anything about revolt, disorder, chaos, about activity that appears to have no meaning.” It was Morrison who got arrested in Miami in December of 1967 for giving an “indecent” performance. It was Morrison who wrote most of The Doors’ lyrics, the peculiar character of which was to reflect either an ambiguous paranoia or a quite unambiguous insistence upon the love-death as the ultimate high. And it was Morrison who was missing. It was Ray Manzarek and Robby Krieger and John Densmore who made The Doors sound the way they sounded, and maybe it was Manzarek and Krieger and Densmore who made seventeen out of twenty interviewees on American Bandstand prefer The Doors over all other bands, but it was Morrison who got up there in his black vinyl pants with no underwear and projected the idea, and it was Morrison they were waiting for now.

  “Hey listen,” the engineer said. “I was listening to an FM station on the way over here, they played three Doors songs, first they played ‘Back Door Man’ and then ‘Love Me Two Times’ and ‘Light My Fire. ’”

  “I heard it,”Densmore muttered. “I heard it.”

  “So what’s wrong with somebody playing three of your songs?”

  “This cat dedicates it to his family”

  “Yeah? To his family?”

  “To his family. Really crass.”

  Ray Manzarek was hunched over a Gibson keyboard. “You think Morrison’s going to come back?” he asked to no one in particular.

  No one answered.

  “So we can do some vocals’?” Manzarek said.

  The producer was working with the tape of the rhythm track they had just recorded. “I hope so,” he said without looking up.

  “Yeah,” Manzarek said. “So do I.”

  My leg had gone to sleep, but I did not stand up; unspecific tensions seemed to be rendering everyone in the room catatonic. The producer played back the rhythm track. The engineer said that he wanted to do his deep-breathing exercises. Manzarek ate a hard-boiled egg. “Tennyson made a mantra out of his own name,” he said to the engineer. “I don’t know if he said ‘Tennyson Tennyson Tennyson’ or ‘Alfred Alfred Alfred’ or ‘Alfred Lord Tennyson,’ but anyway, he did it. Maybe he just said ‘Lord Lord Lord. ’”

  “Groovy,” the Clear Light bass player said. He was an amiable enthusiast, not at all a Door in spirit.

  “I wonder what Blake said,” Manzarek mused. “Too bad Morrison’s not here. Morrison would know.”

  It was a long while later. Morrison arrived. He had on his black vinyl pants and he sat down on a leather couch in front of the four big blank speakers and he closed his eyes. The curious aspect of Morrison’s arrival was this: no one acknowledged it. Robby Krieger continued working out a guitar passage. John Densmore tuned his drums. Manzarek sat at the control console and twirled a corkscrew and let a girl rub his shoulders. The girl did not look at Morrison, although he was in her direct line of sight. An hour or so passed, and still no one had spoken to Morrison. Then Morrison spoke to Manzarek. He spoke almost in a whisper, as if he were wresting the words from behind some disabling aphasia.

  “It’s an hour to West Covina,” he said. “I was thinking maybe we should spend the night out there after we play.”

  Manzarek put down the corkscrew. “Why?” he said.

  “Instead of coming back.”

  Manzarek shrugged. “We were planning to come back.”

  “Well, I was thinking, we could rehearse out there.”

  Manzarek said nothing.

  “We could get in a rehearsal, there’s a Holiday Inn next door.”

  “We could do that,” Manzarek said. “Or we could rehearse Sunday, in town.”

  “I guess so.” Morrison paused. “Will the place be ready to rehearse Sunday?”

  Manzarek looked at him for a while. “No,” he said then.

  I counted the control knobs on the electronic console. There were seventy-six. I was unsure in whose favor the dialogue had been resolved, or if it had been resolved at all. Robby Krieger picked at his guitar, and said that he needed a fuzz box. The producer suggested that he borrow one from the Buffalo Springfield, who were recording in the next studio. Krieger shrugged. Morrison sat down again on the leather couch and leaned back. He lit a match. He studied the flame awhile and then very slowly, very deliberately, lowered it to the fly of his black vinyl pants. Manzarek watched him. The girl who was rubbing Manzarek’s shoulders did not look at anyone. There was a sense that no one was going to leave the room, ever. It would be some weeks before The Doors finished recording this album. I did not see it through.

  4

  Someone once brought Janis Joplin to a party at the house on Franklin Avenue: she had just done a concert and she wanted brandy-and-Benedictine in a water tumbler. Music people never wanted ordinary drinks. They wanted sake, or champagne cocktails, or tequila neat. Spending time with music people was confusing, and required a more fluid and ultimately a more passive approach than I ever acquired. In the first place time was never of the essence: we would have dinner at nine unless we had it at eleven-thirty, or we could order in later. We would go down to U. S. C. to see the Living Theater if the limo came at the very moment when no one had just made a drink or a cigarette or an arrangement to meet Ultra Violet at the Montecito. In any case David Hockney was coming by. In any case Ultra Violet was not at the Montecito. In any case we would go down to U. S. C. and see the Living Theater tonight or we would see the Living Theater another night, in New York, or Prague. First we wanted sushi for twenty, steamed clams, vegetable vindaloo and many rum drinks with gardenias for our hair. First we wanted a table for twelve, fourteen at the most, although there might be six more, or eight more, or eleven more: there would never be one or two more, because music people did not travel in groups of “one” or “two.” John and Michelle Phillips, on their way to the hospital for the birth of their daughter Chynna, had the limo detour into Hollywood in order to pick up a friend, Anne Marshall. This incident, which I often embroider in my mind to include a
n imaginary second detour, to the Luau for gardenias, exactly describes the music business to me.

  5

  Around five o’clock on the morning of October 28, 1967, in the desolate district between San Francisco Bay and the Oakland estuary that the Oakland police call Beat 101 A, a 25-year-old black militant named Huey P. Newton was stopped and questioned by a white police officer named John Frey, Jr. An hour later Huey Newton was under arrest at Kaiser Hospital in Oakland, where he had gone for emergency treatment of a gunshot wound in his stomach, and a few weeks later he was indicted by the Alameda County Grand Jury on charges of murdering John Frey, wounding another officer, and kidnapping a bystander.

  In the spring of 1968, when Huey Newton was awaiting trial, I went to see him in the Alameda County Jail. I suppose I went because I was interested in the alchemy of issues, for an issue is what Huey Newton had by then become. To understand how that had happened you must first consider Huey Newton, who he was. He came from an Oakland family, and for a while he went to Merritt College. In October of 1966 he and a friend named Bobby Seale organized what they called the Black Panther Party. They borrowed the name from the emblem used by the Freedom Party in Lowndes County, Alabama, and, from the beginning, they defined themselves as a revolutionary political group. The Oakland police knew the Panthers, and had a list of the twenty or so Panther cars. I am telling you neither that Huey Newton killed John Frey nor that Huey Newton did not kill John Frey, for in the context of revolutionary politics Huey Newton’s guilt or innocence was irrelevant. I am telling you only how Huey Newton happened to be in the Alameda County Jail, and why rallies were held in his name, demonstrations organized whenever he appeared in court, LET’S SPRING HUEY, the buttons read (fifty cents each), and here and there on the courthouse steps, among the Panthers with their berets and sunglasses, the chants would go up:

  Get your M-31

  ‘Cause baby we gonna

  Have some fun.

  BOOM BOOM. BOOM BOOM.

  “Fight on, brother,” a woman would add in the spirit of a good-natured amen. “Bang-bang.”

  Bullshit bullshit

  Can’t stand the game

  White man’s playing.

  One way out, one way out.

  BOOM BOOM. BOOM BOOM.

  In the corridor downstairs in the Alameda County Courthouse there was a crush of lawyers and CBC correspondents and cameramen and people who wanted to “visit Huey.”

  “Eldridge doesn’t mind if I go up,” one of the latter said to one of the lawyers.

  “If Eldridge doesn’t mind, it’s all right with me,” the lawyer said. “If you’ve got press credentials.”

  “I’ve got kind of dubious credentials.”

  “I can’t take you up then. Eldridge has got dubious credentials. One’s bad enough. I’ve got a good working relationship up there, I don’t want to blow it.” The lawyer turned to a cameraman. “You guys rolling yet?”

  On that particular day I was allowed to go up, and a Los Angeles Times man, and a radio newscaster. We all signed the police register and sat around a scarred pine table and waited for Huey Newton. “The only thing that’s going to free Huey Newton,” Rap Brown had said recently at a Panther rally in Oakland Auditorium, “is gunpowder.” “Huey Newton laid down his life for us,” Stokely Carmichael had said the same night. But of course Huey Newton had not yet laid down his life at all, was just here in the Alameda County Jail waiting to be tried, and I wondered if the direction these rallies were taking ever made him uneasy, ever made him suspect that in many ways he was more useful to the revolution behind bars than on the street. He seemed, when he finally came in, an extremely likable young man, engaging, direct, and I did not get the sense that he had intended to become a political martyr. He smiled at us all and waited for his lawyer, Charles Garry, to set up a tape recorder, and he chatted softly with Eldridge Cleaver, who was then the Black Panthers’ Minister of Information. (Huey Newton was still the Minister of Defense. ) Eldridge Cleaver wore a black sweater and one gold earring and spoke in an almost inaudible drawl and was allowed to see Huey Newton because he had those “dubious credentials,” a press card from Ramparts. Actually his interest was in getting “statements” from Huey Newton, “messages” to take outside; in receiving a kind of prophecy to be interpreted as needed.

  “We need a statement, Huey, about the ten-point program,” Eldridge Cleaver said, “so I’ll ask you a question, see, and you answer it...”

  “How’s Bobby,” Huey Newton asked.

  “He’s got a hearing on his misdemeanors, see...”

  “I thought he had a felony.”

  “Well, that’s another thing, the felony, he’s also got a couple of misdemeanors...”

  Once Charles Garry had set up the tape recorder Huey Newton stopped chatting and started lecturing, almost without pause. He talked, running the words together because he had said them so many times before, about “the American capitalistic-materialistic system” and “so-called free enterprise” and “the fight for the liberation of black people throughout the world.” Every now and then Eldridge Cleaver would signal Huey Newton and say something like, “There are a lot of people interested in the Executive Mandate Number Three you’ve issued to the Black Panther Party, Huey. Care to comment?”

  And Huey Newton would comment. “Yes. Mandate Number Three is this demand from the Black Panther Party speaking for the black community. Within the Mandate we admonish the racist police force...” I kept wishing that he would talk about himself, hoping to break through the wall of rhetoric, but he seemed to be one of those autodidacts for whom all things specific and personal present themselves as mine fields to be avoided even at the cost of coherence, for whom safety lies in generalization. The newspaperman, the radio man, they tried:

  Q. Tell us something about yourself Huey, I mean your life before the Panthers.

  A. Before the Black Panther Party my life was very similar to that of most black people in this country.

  Q. Well, your family some incidents you remember, the influences that shaped you—

  A. Living in America shaped me.

  Q. Well, yes, but more specifically—

  A. It reminds me of a quote from James Baldwin: “To be black and conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage.”

  “To be black and conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage,” Eldridge Cleaver wrote in large letters on a pad of paper, and then he added: “Huey P Newton quoting James Baldwin.” I could see it emblazoned above the speakers’ platform at a rally, imprinted on the letterhead of an ad hoc committee still unborn. As a matter of fact almost everything Huey Newton said had the ring of being a “quotation,” a “pronouncement” to be employed when the need arose. I had heard Huey P. Newton On Racism (“The Black Panther Party is against racism”), Huey P. Newton On Cultural Nationalism (“The Black Panther Party believes that the only culture worth holding on to is revolutionary culture”), Huey P. Newton On White Radicalism, On Police Occupation of the Ghetto, On the European Versus the African. “The European started to be sick when he denied his sexual nature,” Huey Newton said, and Charles Garry interrupted then, bringing it back to first principles. “Isn’t it true, though, Huey,” he said, “that racism got its start for economic reasons?”

  This weird interlocution seemed to take on a life of its own. The small room was hot and the fluorescent light hurt my eyes and I still did not know to what extent Huey Newton understood the nature of the role in which he was cast. As it happened I had always appreciated the logic of the Panther position, based as it was on the proposition that political power began at the end of the barrel of a gun (exactly what gun had even been specified, in an early memorandum from Huey P. Newton: “Army . 45; carbine; 12-gauge Magnum shotgun with 18” barrel, preferably the brand of High Standard; M-16; . 357 Magnum pistols; P-38”), and I could appreciate as well the particular beauty in Huey Newton as “issue.” In the politics of revolution everyone was expendable, b
ut I doubted that Huey Newton’s political sophistication extended to seeing himself that way: the value of a Scottsboro case is easier to see if you are not yourself the Scottsboro boy. “Is there anything else you want to ask Huey?” Charles Garry asked. There did not seem to be. The lawyer adjusted his tape recorder. “I’ve had a request, Huey,” he said, “from a high-school student, a reporter on his school paper, and he wanted a statement from you, and he’s going to call me tonight. Care to give me a message for him?”

  Huey Newton regarded the microphone. There was a moment in which he seemed not to remember the name of the play, and then he brightened. “I would like to point out,” he said, his voice gaining volume as the memory disks clicked, high school, student, youth, message to youth, “that America is becoming a very young nation...”

  I heard a moaning and a groaning, and I went over and it was— this Negro fellow was there. He had been shot in the stomach and at the time he didn’t appear in any acute distress and so I said I’d see, and I asked him if he was a Kaiser, if he belonged to Kaiser, and he said, “Yes, yes. Get a doctor. Can’t you see I’m bleeding? I’ve been shot. Now get someone out here.” And I asked him if he had his Kaiser card and he got upset at this and he said, “Come on, get a doctor out here, I’ve been shot.” I said, “I see this, but you’re not in any acute distress.”...So I told him we’d have to check to make sure he was a member....And this kind of upset him more and he called me a few nasty names and said, “Now get a doctor out here right now, I’ve been shot and I’m bleeding.” And he took his coat off and his shirt and he threw it on the desk there and he said, “Can’t you see all this blood?” And I said, “I see it.” And it wasn’t that much, and so I said, “Well, you’ll have to sign our admission sheet before you can be seen by a doctor.” And he said, “I’m not signing anything.” And I said, “You cannot be seen by a doctor unless you sign the admission sheet,” and he said, “I don’t have to sign anything” and a few more choice words...