by Ray Manzarek
She has robes and she has monkeys,
Lazy diamond-studded flunkies
To support these “artistic” endeavors, Jim was drawing against future royalties. He was in debt to his own band. Ultimately, the Doors paid for everything. He had zip in the bank. Money was spilling from between his fingers like the sand that he had held clenched in his fists when he first sang “Moonlight Drive” to me on the beach of Venice, back a long time ago.
It was not working out the way I planned it. He had not turned the corner as we thought he would—as he said he would—at our “confrontation.” It was, as John said, not a phase. Jimbo was still present. The madness was still present. And it was slowly taking over.
I was aching inside.
I wanted to say to Jim, “Forget about all this cash-guzzling nonsense. Come home. Just come home to the rehearsal room. We’ll take care of you. All you have to do is write your poetry. Robby, John, and I will take care of you. We’ll never fail you. We’ll never make bad art with you. We won’t allow you to fail. Just come home. You’ve wandered enough. You need to rest now.” But I never could. When I’d look in his eyes, I would see both of them. Jim and Jimbo. And I was afraid. I had never dealt with anything like this before. I didn’t even know what it was. I was lost…but we carried on. Knowing the music, the joy in the music, would transcend all of this.
We finally got a gig. PBS television. An hour-long show called Critique. A show of performance and interview with the artist, and a panel discussion of the artist’s worth by New York journalists. We played “Tell All the People,” “Back Door Man,” “Wishful Sinful,” “Build Me a Woman,” and a powerful version of “The Soft Parade.” A song of the anguish of Jim’s internal life. His turmoil. His need to rest. His need for succor.
Can you give me sanctuary?
I must find a place to hide,
A place for me to hide.
Can you give me soft asylum?
I can’t take it anymore.
The man is at the door.
We played the hell out of the song. We were all on top of it, rocking with a controlled fury. It was good to play in a public setting again. Good to be the Doors again. And this was a very prestigious PBS show. It usually featured classical and jazz musicians. We were only the second rock group to be asked to appear on Critique. The other was the New York Rock and Roll Ensemble, obviously an artsy group, with a name like that. So we played with our best fury and precision. Jim was extremely focused. Really on his game. As you know, Jimbo didn’t come to New York. Outclassed, you see. In New York, Jimbo would stay hidden. He was waiting for other places. Other times. He was waiting for Paris.
You can see our performance and interview on the Universal home video, The Soft Parade. We didn’t include the panel discussion. Frankly, it was pedestrian: Richard Goldstein of the Village Voice was the moderator. “Rosco,” the D.J. from WNEW, was insightful. Al Aronowitz, another writer, hated the Doors. He said our music was inconsequential, wouldn’t last. He was from the Freudian, Bob Dylan-is-the-best, New York folk-rock school of critics. They simply couldn’t allow themselves an immersion in the Jungian waters of the unconscious. They couldn’t “drown tonight.” They refused to “swim to the moon.” Too liquid, too opalescent…too feminine. They were still beholden to the patriarchal religion. As was Freud, vis-à-vis Jung. Aronowitz had a long way to go. Patricia Kennealy was the last panelist. She was also a well-known writer. She simply fell in love with Jim. Madly.
Another gig came in. Mexico City. A bull ring, fifty thousand people. We were going to play for something like fifty cents per person. For the students. For the people. We all went down.
Went down south and crossed
the border.
Left the chaos and disorder back there,
over his shoulder.
Everybody took their girls and wives. Lynn and Robby were soon to be married—and they still are. John brought Julia Brose, a hip, blond clubette who would soon become his wife. We were all happy for John. Julia was cool and made a great wife and hostess; we even used to hang out at their house. “Let’s go up to John and Julia’s and shoot some pool.” Julia would always have drinks and food and pot for the gang. It was fun. I’d never seen John happier. Of course, it didn’t last. He’s onto wife number three now. I brought Dorothy. Jimbo had taken a backseat for a while, so Jim was in good form. He brought Jerry Hopkins, a writer for Rolling Stone who was doing a post-Miami profile.
We had a great Doors’ family time in Mexico. Bill and Vince were there, too. Had to be. No performance without Vince, and Bill collected the pesos. We went to the pyramids of Teotihuacan and the magnificent Anthropological Museum that had been opened especially for us. A private tour. Arranged by the son of the president. A small group of fifteen or so young people walking amid the art and statuary of an ancient civilization. The great stone sun calendar of the Aztecs. The jaguar god. The snake god. All sitting in pools of light. Bathed in luminescence. We walked in dark shadows, an eerie and unfamiliar darkness, surrounded by the gods of a lost people glowing with light. It was overwhelming. Quetzalcoatl was with us. Cuculcan. And a great stone coiled serpent. The ancient snake. Jim was home. These people had touched the same interior images that he had. Universal. Reptilian. Jungian.
Ride the snake, to the lake,
The ancient lake.
The snake is long, seven miles.
He’s old,
And his skin is cold…
Being with those stone effigies, those great stone deities, was one of the most memorable experiences of my life. Like Egypt. Ancient and lost civilizations that are the foundation of what we are. Who we are. And perhaps offer clues as to even why we are.
The bull ring concert never happened. The government pulled the plug. It would have been on the anniversary of the student riots of the year before. No way were the jefes going to allow fifty thousand young people to gather for gringo rock on that day of rebellion. It could happen again. So we wound up playing a sit-down supper club for the “Mustang” set. Rich kids. They liked the Ford Mustang. It was their symbol of swinging. Mod London and the Mustang…and the Oedipal Doors. “Father, I want to kill you. Mother, I want to fuck you.” They loved it. They shouted it out in unison from their tables. From behind their fancy place settings. Their nappery. At the top of their lungs. Speaking in English. With Jim. “I want to keeel you!” Machismo, eh? Muy macho! What a trip.
More gigs finally started to come in. We didn’t know how many, or how long it would last, so we decided to record what we could for a live album. We wanted to get the Doors experience on tape. Live. One time. For the ages. We wanted to capture the distillate in the alembic. We wanted the shamanic, trance-inducing seance to exist on tape as a record of the healing. The palliation of the assembly.
I love the friends I have gathered together on this thin raft,
We have constructed pyramids in honor of our escaping.
We would record the construction of the pyramid. And in doing so, perhaps we could capture the moment of escape. Live.
Eventually we recorded performances at the Aquarius Theater in Los Angeles, the Felt Forum in Madison Square Garden, the Spectrum in Philadelphia, the Pittsburgh Civic Arena, and Cobo Hall in Detroit. We called the album Absolutely Live.
These gigs, and all the rest, came with a new contractual proviso. We called it “the fuck clause.” It was an obscenity clause that prevented Jim, or any other Door, from using profane language on the stage. If an obscenity were to be uttered, the entire concert would be halted and the Doors would forfeit all the proceeds. It was insane. And it lasted, sporadically, for the rest of our too-brief career.
We would take the stage in the less enlightened towns—meaning every city other than New York, San Francisco, and L.A.—and two representatives of the local vice squad would be waiting in the wings with warrants. Our names were on the warrants, the offense wasn’t. They were waiting for the commission, for the utterance, for the display of pub
lic drunkenness, open profanity, indecent exposure, lewd and lascivious behavior…what have you. Any violation would do. And it was off to the slammer.
Sometimes the narcs were there, too. LSD was now illegal, and since the Doors were the “Kings of Acid Rock,” let’s see if we can bust ’em, went the thinking. And you could see them in the wings, too. They were dressed like plain, unmarked Plymouths. They’d be on the opposite side from the vice men. “Narcs to the left of us, vice to the right. Into the valley of death rode the four!” It was absurd. It was more Kafka. It was the dark, paranoid madness that had descended on our great country of the free and the brave. We had become afraid of each other. Americans, afraid of other Americans. It was not a good time. And it still isn’t. Hallucinogens are still criminal. The “food of the gods” is illegal. The keys to the doors of perception are against the law. Their ingestion is an illegal act. The mere growing of a peyote plant is illegal. Using LSD therapy with convicts, drug addicts, and alcoholics is illegal. The great therapeutic tool of LSD that was proven so effective in case after case of psychological maladjustment has been taken away from the doctors of the mind by the fundamentalist, conservative guardians of our public morality. And that’s the way it is to this very day. No medical research. And certainly no looking behind the veil. No breaking on through to the other side. Just booze and cigarettes and guns. Yahoo! Yee haw! The American way.
Events started speeding up now. In a crazy out-of-control vortex that was sucking us all toward the final curtain. But in our youthful hubris, our boyish naïveté, we thought we were immortal. Nothing could happen to the Doors. We could steamroll all the problems. Jim would grab hold of himself. He would conquer his drinking. He would be back to that young prince who lived with Dorothy and me in our little one-bedroom apartment on Fraser overlooking the “roofs and the palm trees of Venice.” He would be back.
First, however, he turned himself in at the Dade County Public Sheriff’s Department. He was officially arrested at 9:50 A.M. and made bail of fifty thousand dollars at 10:10. A formal not-guilty plea was entered by his attorney. Five days earlier, ironically, the Living Theatre had played in Coconut Grove without incident, without arrest. Miami! Shit.
A few days later, Jim was arrested at the airport in Phoenix, Arizona, on charges of “drunk and disorderly conduct” and “interference with a flight crew.” It seems that Jim and Tom, A Baker, had had too many little bottles of Wild Turkey and Jack and Courvoisier on a flight to Phoenix to see the Stones concert and had taken to pinching the ass of a quite cute stewardess in the first-class section. The captain had to come back and tell the louts to cool it. They didn’t. He called ahead for the police. They were busted. Bail was $5,000. The Doors paid for that, too.
Between Miami and Phoenix, Jim was facing a maximum of over thirteen years in prison. Three and a half in Raiford Penitentiary in the County of the Dead, and ten in a federal hoosegow because “interference with a flight crew” was an offense against the new skyjacking law. Even if it was only pinching the ass of a cute stewardess.
Cancel my subscription
to the resurrection.
Send my credentials
to the house of detention.
I got some friends inside.
He would probably get off. It was all minor shit. A good lawyer, with money, could get him off. But it weighed on Jim’s psyche. His soul was heavy. It had lost the exquisite lightness it wore in the early years. It was as if fame had become a yoke placed upon the shoulders of Jim Morrison’s spirit. Weighing him down. Making him do crazy things to shed the burden. Or forget the burden. But at the time I couldn’t believe that Jim wanted to abandon his responsibilities. After all, what were they? To create? To write songs and make music with the Doors? That’s too hard? For me, that was the real fun. Creating something out of nothing. Thinking up something and then bringing it to fruition. Manifesting a thought in reality. Conceiving a reality, a plan, a work of art in your mind…and then actually making it happen. It was incredible. We were actually doing it. Manifesting the dreams we had back in Venice. We were right up there with the Beatles and the Stones. I was loving it! And this was too hard for Jim? He wanted to get away from it all? I didn’t believe it. Would you?
It was that rotter, Jimbo. The doppelganger.
the end times
We went into the studio to begin the recording of Morrison Hotel. The enforced layoff caused by Miami resulted in a burst of creativity by Jim and Robby. We were loaded with hot new songs. The rehearsals were very productive. We were having fun again. Jimbo was nowhere to be seen. Jim was relaxed and as happy as a man facing possibly thirteen years in the slammer could be. He simply put it out of his mind, as we all did—we never spoke of it. Instead, he threw himself into creativity. And the songs were hot!
“Roadhouse Blues,” “You Make Me Real,” “Waiting for the Sun,” “Peace Frog,” “Blue Sunday,” “Ship of Fools,” “Land Ho!,” “The Spy in the House of Love,” “Queen of the Highway,” “Indian Summer,” and “Maggie M’Gill.” All good stuff. And all to be played within our basic Doors format. No horns. No strings. Just Doors. Pure Doors. Pure rock and blues and jazz and soul and love. Pure love. We were going to lay it down. Hard and fat. John Sebastian sat in on harp on “Roadhouse Blues,” as did Lonnie Mack on bass. Ray Neapolitan played bass on all the other cuts.
It was a great album to record. The sessions were super. Mucho good times in the recording studio. Many friends and guests dropping in for moral and vibrational support. Hell, even Babe, Frank, and Paul Ferrara came by and were cool. Don’t get me wrong, they were all good people but they, too, had been seduced by Jimbo. They would have followed him off a cliff. Like lemmings. They worshiped him. They were his puppy dogs. I’m sure they always said, “Yes, Jim.” But they didn’t know—hell, no one knew—they were saying yes to Jimbo. But Jimbo never made an appearance at the recording sessions. Everyone was cool. No mind games. Pure fun. Hence, the recording and creativity were at Nietzsche’s “noon time.” We were Übermenschen. At the upper extremity. We were on the etheric plane. And, man, it was fine.
We did a great improvisation, a jam called “Rock Is Dead.” It came out toward the tail end of the sessions. It was Jim at his prescient best. Predicting the death of “rock and roll.” The usurpation of rock by the corporate mind. The co-opting of the revolution by the power of the dollar. The loss of freedom to “the bottom line.”
We could change it, you know. We could maneuver the world in whichever direction we wanted. We could shift the world. All we have to do is “do it!” It takes only an act of courage. An act of will. And we could create a new bottom line. The bottom line of the common good. “How does what I’m doing affect the planet…and my fellow man on this planet?” That’s the question to ask. That’s the new bottom line! We could take it to that place we tried to hit in those Morrison Hotel recording sessions. We did it then. We could all do it again. And that should be our goal for the twenty-first century. Enlightenment…and the planting of a new Garden of Eden. We can do it.
And we did our own crazy variation of it that long-ago night at Elektra’s 10 percent–discount recording studio, across from the Doors’ workshop on La Cienega Boulevard, after a dinner of riotous drinking, eating, and toasting at the Blue Boar Restaurant. A baronial setting. A manly-hunting-lodge Hollywood-theme restaurant. Just down the street on “Restaurant Row.” We were all there. The Doors, Botnick and Rothchild, Vince Treanor and Bill Siddons, Danny Sugerman and Leon Barnard, and the faux Doors.
We were ushered into one of the private, long-table rooms, complete with fireplace and banners of Germanic heraldry. We took our seats as beer and wine, mead and ale were brought to the table amid boisterous laughing and manly shouting. Great platters of beef and chops and sides of steaming vegetables and bowls of roasted, mashed, and baked potatoes were ordered for the table. More rounds of drinks came. And Ferrara, emboldened by the wine and the camaraderie, rose to his feet, toasted the Doors—“Here
’s to the Doors and their damn fine music!”—drained his wineglass, and hurled it into the fireplace. It shattered in the flames. An explosion! A moment of shock…and then we all roared our approval. “Hear, hear! Yes, Paul!”
“More wine,” Jim cried out. “More wine for my men!” And more wine was brought by the serving girls in décolleté costume. And Babe rose for a toast. “Here’s to the Doors…and my salary!” We drained our glasses. Ferrara hurled another glass into the flames. We roared again. Paul was in some Errol Flynn swashbuckler that was unreeling behind his eyes. He was zonked. And then Morrison toasted. “Here’s to rock and roll!” And then we all toasted in our turn. Laughing and joking and shouting and reveling in the camaraderie of each other’s company. Eating and drinking with boisterous abandon. With youthful joy and exuberance. It was friends, and life, and good to be alive.
But it was the last supper. It was the last time we would all eat together this way. Soon Jim would be leaving for Paris.
We went back to the studio, staggering and shouting along La Cienega Boulevard. And we captured “Rock Is Dead” out of the ether. We just snatched it out of the limbo state it was dwelling in and made it ours. We put it on tape. Jammed it into existence. And had one hell of a good time creating it.
On another night in the studio Jim brought along a pair of new acquaintances. He had just met them at dinner in a restaurant down the street and invited them to the session. They were the actor Laurence Harvey and, dig this, the chief of police of the city of Los Angeles, Tom Reddin. They walked in just as Rothchild was rolling a joint from a small pile of freshly sifted marijuana resting seductively on the recording console. I don’t think Jim knew who Tom Reddin was. But Rothchild did. He took one look, his eyes bugged out, and recognition hit! And fear! He quickly put his attache case on his lap, opened it, and, hands trembling, began furiously scraping the stash, seeds and all, into the hiding place. Rolling papers and the half-rolled joint also were thrown in, and the case was quickly closed and even more quickly locked. Only then did Paul turn, sweat beading on his forehead, and introduce himself to the famous actor and the chief of police.