22391_ch00.i-iii.qxd 4/21/04 8:52 AM Page i Jim Morrison life, Death, legend 22391_ch00.i-iii.qxd 4/21/04 8:52 AM Page ii ALSO BY STEPHEN DAVIS Hammer of the Gods Walk This Way Reggae Bloodlines Reggae International Bob Marley Say Kids! What Time Is It? Moonwalk Fleetwood This Wheel’s on Fire Jajouka Rolling Stone Old Gods Almost Dead 22391_ch00.i-iii.qxd 4/21/04 8:52 AM Page iii Jim Morrison life, Death, legend STEPHEN DAVIS GOTHAM BOOKS Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2 Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand Published by Gotham Books, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. First electronic edition, April 2006 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Copyright © 2004 by Stephen Davis All rights reserved Gotham Books and the skyscraper logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Davis, Stephen, 1947– Jim Morrison : life, death, legend / by Stephen Davis. p. cm. MSR ISBN 0 7865 6325 7 AEB ISBN 0 7865 6326 5 Set in Cremona Regular with Trajan and Abbess Designed by Sabrina Bowers Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability. www.us.penguingroup.com 22391_ch00.iv-xiv.qxd 4/21/04 8:53 AM Page v For JIM MORRISON 1943–1971 KATA TON ∆AIMONA EAYTOY Ex-fan des sixties Ou sont tes années folles? Que sont devenues toutes tes idoles? —Jane Birkin 22391_ch00.iv-xiv.qxd 4/21/04 8:53 AM Page vii CONTENTS Introduction ix BOOK one. jimmy chapter one. The Lizard King’s School Days 3 chapter two. Cancel My Subscription 29 chapter three. Learn to Forget 57 BOOK two. jim morrison chapter four. Back Door Man 99 chapter five. The Warlock of Rock 157 chapter six. Sunken Continents 221 BOOK three. JAMES DOUGLAS MORRISON chapter seven. Lord of Misrule 305 chapter eight. THE Soul of a Clown 357 chapter nine. Last Tango in Paris 403 Epilogue. the Cool Remnant of a Dream 461 Author’s notes 475 selected sources 479 vii 22391_ch00.iv-xiv.qxd 4/21/04 8:53 AM Page ix INTRODUCTION H e’s been dead for decades, but he’s still causing trouble. Jim Morrison was a mesmeric figure in the American sixties, a rebel poet and godhead in snakeskin and leather. He lived fast, died young, and left a less-than-exquisite corpse in Paris while hiding out from the law. In his prime the writers and critics went nuts trying to do his weird mojo some measure of justice. (One called him “an angel in grace and a dog in heat.”) Jim was the greatest American rock star of his era, and one of its most publicized celebrities, but—more than three decades later—his life and works have yet to yield all their secrets and enigmas. Jim Morrison tried to set the night on fire. As lead singer of the Doors, he was an acid evangelist on a suicide mission to deprogram his generation from what he saw as a prisonlike conformity to social and sex- ual norms. He was a seer, an adept, a bard, a drunk, a bisexual omnivore. Jim styled his band “erotic politicians,” and relentlessly urged his huge audience—at the height of the dangerous sixties—to break on through the doors of perception, to free themselves from robotic familial condi- tioning, to seek a higher, more aware consciousness. Doors concerts— throbbing with war-dance rhythms and superheated intimacy—were as close to the experience of shamanic ritual as the rock audience ever got. The Doors captured the unrest and the menace that hung in the air of the late sixties like tear gas, and they did it with hypnotic cool. ix 22391_ch00.iv-xiv.qxd 4/21/04 8:53 AM Page x Between 1965 and 1971 Jim Morrison wrote a hundred songs, recorded seven platinum albums, wrote and published four editions of poems, made three films, recorded his poetry, wrote screenplays, and filled dozens of notebooks with verse and notations. He played more than two hundred concerts with the Doors. He established himself as a sex icon and the major American rock star of the sixties. He violated all of puritan America’s sexual taboos and—in a frenetic burst of political energy—even threatened the vindictive Nixon administration with his blatant invitations to protest and revolt. Jim Morrison, as it turns out, was much more important than anyone realized at the time. Critically dismissed as a has-been Bozo/Dionysius before his death, Morrison’s poetic visions have stayed on the radio for more than thirty years, and on into the new century. They have become the classic texts of classic rock, reaching out to generations beyond the one that first understood the deepest meanings, the organic unity, and the transcendent qualities of his greatest work. Jim Morrison was the last incarnation of that quintessential late- romantic figure, the demonically aroused poet shaking with rage at his world and his contemporaries; a prophet with terrible eyes and rigid fea- tures, clad in black leather. He was arguably the major poet to emerge from the turmoil of the legendary American sixties. Decades later, Jim Morrison has materialized as the true avatar of his age. His words are burned into the brains of three American generations—the emergency telegram of “Break On Through,” the visionary cadences of “L.A. Woman,” and the mysterious whispered verses of “Riders on the Storm.” His voice echoes on classic-rock stations from coast to coast. His image haunts dorm walls everywhere, emblazoned: JIM MORRISON / AMERICAN POET / 1943–1971. The Doors’ album sales, as of this writing, are over fifty million units, and climbing. Today, more than thirty years after Jim Morrison died, important new revelations are emerging concerning his tumultuous life, his tragic death, and his enduring legend. And the questions about him still linger. Who was he really? Why did he destroy himself? Why was he failed by everyone who knew him? * * * INTRODUCTION x 22391_ch00.iv-xiv.qxd 4/21/04 8:53 AM Page xi I t wasn’t all great,being a rock god in the sixties. The tours were primitive and disorganized. The groupies were pretty, but they gave you herpes and the clap. The drugs and alcohol turned you into an im- becile. Your old lady slept around while you were on tour. The critics hated you when you got huge, and suddenly the press that had built you up into a deity began to tear you down. The Doors at their best were about as good as rock music ever got. At their worst, they were one of the most pretentious bands on the planet. But no one had a clearer grasp of the complexities and ironies of the age than Jim Morrison. Living the times as he did, in full senses-deregulated consciousness, Jim understood the American sixties for what they were: an era of new religious visions, spiritual crisis, political unrest, race riots, assassina- tions—as well as a rare opportunity for change and reform. The decade’s promises were never fulfilled, but some of its goals—such as integration, civil rights, the “global village,” and the bringing of East and West into closer harmony—are clearly still in process. Jim Morrison hitchhiked along this psychic landscape like a killer on the road, and the Doors’ mu- sic still has the uncanny power to poison every new class of ninth graders with its dark messages and raw power. What thirteen-year-old today can play “People Are Strange” and not hear it as a postcard of comfort from beyond the grave? How many dead rock stars have an an- nual riot at their tomb? I n one of his unpublished spiral notebooks,sometime in 1968, Jim penned his credo in blue ink: “I contend an abiding sense of irony over all I do.” Jim Morrison’s famous “Lizard King” persona was a joke, but it was a serious joke, a cosmic put-on. Jim’s serial evocation of the American desert and its reptilian underworld was part of his existential drive to in- clude in the experience of life the omnipresence of impending death. In another notebook entry he wrote: “Thinking of death as the climactic point of one’s life.” John Densmore, the Doors’ drummer, who was often frightened and bewildered by Jim Morrison’s behavior, later observed that all the other California bands of the sixties preached the raising of consciousness to- INTRODUCTION xi