Mr Mojo Read online

  MR MOJO

  A BIOGRAPHY OF JIM MORRISON

  DYLAN JONES

  For RCB, who certainly wore leather trousers

  Contents

  Introduction

  1The Ghosts of Père-Lachaise

  2The New Californians

  3Dressing Up for Strange Days

  4Dance On Fire

  5Aping the Changeling

  6Wasting the Dawn

  7Père-Lachaise Redux

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  By the Same Author

  Index

  Introduction

  At a typical Doors concert, you had two types of crowd. You had the freaks, the heads and the hippies, the longhairs who were tuning in, turning on, and nodding their heads in collective appreciation at the psychedelic and often cacophonous din being made in front of them. They were the ones who stared at album covers to read the track listings to see who had written what.

  And then you had the teenage girls, the ‘snappers’, the ones who sat in the front rows in their high-belted miniskirts and schoolgirl bobby sox, banging their knees together as if they were fanning their insides, trying to get Jim Morrison to stare at their underwear, or – more usually – their lack of. They were the ones who stared at album covers for completely different reasons.

  If you look at film performances of the Doors in concert during their heyday, you see a sixties band in all their pomp, effortlessly working their way through their material, determinedly bringing the crowd to whatever climax they had come for. But study the performance a bit more and you see a charismatic frontman, and three musos bent over their instruments who are probably wondering how they got so lucky.

  Because the Doors was always three plus one. And the one was always Jim Morrison.

  ‘I think there’s a whole region of images and feelings inside us that rarely are given outlet in daily life. And when they do come out, they can take perverse forms. It’s the dark side. Everyone, when he sees it, recognises the same thing in himself. It’s a recognition of forces that rarely see the light of day.’

  Was Jim Morrison joking when he said this?

  Morrison was the quintessential sixties pop star – an enigmatic, egotistical playboy with a penchant for philosophical self-absorption and tight black leather trousers. A counter-cultural hero, he physically pushed himself to the limits (he was an alcoholic), exposing his ‘dark heart’ to a young audience who had only recently recovered from the onslaught of Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones.

  Jim Morrison was something else again. He was Frank Sinatra in leather trousers, an overly theatrical figurehead whose influence can be seen in the personas adopted by everyone from Iggy Pop to Robert Plant, from Patti Smith and Kurt Cobain to Michael Hutchence, Dave Gahan and Brandon Flowers, and every modern version thereof, and whose band delivered the best psychedelic pomp of its day.

  He is the narcissistic stuff of rock legend, a self-obsessed drunk whose ridiculous good looks and rich baritone contributed unduly to an archetype that would define both him and every copycat who came in his wake. Not only that, but he was walking around topless while Sting was still in school.

  He was the first rock and roll method actor, and would wrap myths around him like a long leather coat, protecting and disguising himself in the process. No literary allusion was too much, no crass putdown too high. He was playing the nascent rock star with such ferocity that it was inevitable he would stumble and fall. And he did petulance better than any entertainer since Marlon Brando.

  One of the big problems with Morrison was that he had no ability to manage his success and nor did anyone around him. These days, someone with his talent and his fondness for excessive and seemingly random behaviour would be managed and monitored and pampered and protected during every waking (and sleeping) moment; Morrison was pretty much on his own in a city that was more than happy to live up to its reputation, if not exceed it. Getting lost in LA is easy enough if you’re a cosseted twenty-first-century megastar, but imagine how easy it was for Morrison: all he had to do most days was turn up. It didn’t matter if it was turning up at a restaurant, a nightclub, a party, a hotel, an interview, hell, even a recording studio. Wherever he went he was fawned over, feted and fucked up. He was offered all the delights to be found in the most debauched city of the late twentieth century, and with his appetites, he rarely said no.

  Why would he? Who would?

  ‘Brian Jones, James Dean, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Marc Bolan, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Freddie Mercury, Kurt Cobain are our new immortals,’ said Germaine Greer. ‘Like Apollo and Dionysus they can never outgrow their dazzling boyhood.’

  Hunter S. Thompson called Morrison ‘Crazy Jim’. He had ‘eyes smarter than James Dean’s and a band that could walk with the King, or anybody else. There were some nights when the Doors were the best band in the world. Morrison understood this, and it haunted him all his life. On some nights he was noisy and lewd, and on others he just practised – but every once in a while he would get it into his head to go out and dance with the big boys, and on a night like that he was more than special.’

  Morrison used to frequently masturbate onstage, turning away from the audience, then rubbing himself before turning round again, watching the girls who couldn’t take their eyes off his engorged cock. He would slide his palm down the front of his leathers, grab his balls and start stroking himself, squeezing his cock and pulling the helmet. He had done it so often that he got hard disturbingly quickly. It was almost as though he had a permanent erection.

  A war baby, born in Melbourne, Florida on 8 December 1943, he grew up in the headstrong and affluent fifties, only to rebel against his upbringing a decade later, like so many millions of others. But Morrison was unique, a singer who created a myth around him, a ‘dark star’ whose shtick was opening up his psyche and inviting the uninitiated to come and peer inside.

  With the Doors, whom Joan Didion once called ‘the Norman Mailers of the Top 40, missionaries of apocalyptic sex’, he created some of the finest pop music of the late sixties, music which still sounds astonishing today, not least because of its lyrical content. Their first two LPs – The Doors and Strange Days – contain songs that are little more than cleverly constructed vignettes of nihilism set to jaunty tunes – yet they still resonate today. The Doors managed to marry sex appeal, musicianship, and a highly commercial exploitation of undergraduate sensibilities.

  A pseudo-intellectual in a snakeskin suit, Morrison always thought he deserved to be something other than a tawdry pop star – he courted film makers and poets, seeing himself as some kind of modern-day Renaissance man, peerless. And that was ultimately his undoing: he ended up tortured by his own image; bloated by alcohol, despising his audience, hating the tormented Adonis he’d created, the image that had made him successful.

  In reality, Morrison was more tormented than anyone knew. He went from being a star trapped inside a boy’s body to a man trapped inside his own image. And he was the first rock star to literally self-destruct. Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix both died before Morrison, but he was the only one who really needed an escape. Morrison was the first pop star to explore himself (as well as expose himself) in public, and in doing so, went just that little bit too far.

  Jim Morrison crammed an awful lot into his twenty-seven years, becoming the most adored American entertainer since Elvis. He had sex, he had drive, he had passion; he had brains, good looks, a voice, a talent for writing evocative, manipulative, nihilistic lyrics and a penchant for Dionysian imagery. He was part poet and part clown, a man who, when he revealed himself, was often to be found simply acting out his own fantasies.

  A self-proclaimed ‘erotic politician’, Morrison was as much a showman as he was a shaman, an actor who pushed his
persona as far as it would go. By the time of his ‘retirement’ in Paris, the Doors were effectively over (although the rest of the group always denied this) and – a sex symbol with a beer belly and a beard – Morrison was toying with the idea of reinventing himself as a poet. The fact that he never did – he was found dead in his bathtub in Paris in July 1971 from an apparent heroin overdose – assured him of immortality and a permanent place in rock and roll’s hall of fame. Had he lived, he might undoubtedly have undone all he had achieved during the last five years of his life; as it is, he remains, along with James Dean and Jimi Hendrix, one of youth culture’s most revered heroes, a hero dead before his time. A hero who got out just in time.

  1

  The Ghosts of Père-Lachaise

  The easiest way to get to the most famous cemetery in Paris, Père-Lachaise, is to take the Boulevard Périphérique, the continually congested motorway which circles the city. This enormous ring road separates Paris from its suburbs, cutting the capital off from the rest of France. The bane of every Parisian motorist, it nevertheless offers an alternative to the intricate web of narrow streets which weave through the centre of the city. Viewed from the Périphérique, Paris is a fortress, the constant stream of traffic an amorphous mass of frustrated drivers looking for a way in.

  It’s a typically overcast October weekend, and Paris is cold and grey. Café society has retreated indoors, the trees have all but lost their leaves and the harsh winter is only weeks away. The numbing austerity of motorway concrete leaves you with few expectations.

  You leave the Périphérique at Porte de Bagnolet, entering the 20th arrondissement, in the north-west of the city. You weave your way along Rue Belgrand, then Avenue Gambetta, and you find yourself at Père-Lachaise.

  This huge municipal necropolis was built soon after the French Revolution by Napoleon, outraged by the thousands of rotting corpses which lay stacked one on top of the other in the small cemeteries of Paris: there was no proper burial ground for the victims of the Reign of Terror. Yet it proved difficult to interest the Parisians in a cemetery which was at that time outside the city and therefore too far to walk for a traditional funeral procession.

  In the end a huge publicity campaign was launched, announcing the transfer of various celebrities’ remains from their original graves to Père-Lachaise. These included the dramatists Molière and Beaumarchais, the philosopher Abelard and his muse Héloïse, and many others. Even so, Parisians continued to snub the place.

  The situation was ultimately saved by Balzac. The popular novelist had the brilliant idea of burying his main characters in Père-Lachaise when they died, and Parisians flocked to the cemetery every Sunday to see for themselves.

  Since then it has become France’s most star-studded graveyard, a huge monument to creativity, revolution and celebrity: a celebration of both life and death. It includes the graves of Apollinaire, Sarah Bernhardt, Maria Callas, Chopin, Isadora Duncan, Max Ernst, Modigliani, Edith Piaf, Pissarro, Proust, Seurat, Simone Signoret and Oscar Wilde. There are monuments to the Communards of the revolutionary era, and to the millions who died in the Holocaust. Over a million people are buried in Père-Lachaise, and the more famous graves are found among the well-kept tombs of the beloved and the overgrown graves of the forgotten.

  Père-Lachaise is a little city, its only living residents the guards and the feral cats who stalk its rambling lanes. And like any city, it has its uptown and its downtown. Uptown are the wide, gravel avenues of marble mausoleums and ornamental family graves covered with huge bouquets of flowers; downtown are the smaller graves, an endless sea of grubby gothic sepulchres looking like row upon row of empty grey stone telephone boxes.

  Jim Morrison lives downtown. It’s not difficult to find his grave, because there are hundreds of signposts, all handwritten in chalk: ‘Jim this way’, ‘Jim 200 metres’, ‘This way for the lizard king’ – dozens of tiny arrows to help the hordes of visitors on their pilgrimage. The graffiti is overwhelming: ‘Anarchy’, ‘Jim’s not dead’, ‘The Doors are closed’, ‘Jim, I love you for ever – you will always live in my heart’, ‘From Italy for Jim Morrison for ever’, ‘Jim, love you two times’, ‘Death give us wings, but he is out of reach’, ‘Jim, if you leave me, must I come too?’ The immediate area surrounding his grave is covered with lyrics from his songs, scrawled in spidery writing or blunt block capitals.

  And though it’s easy to find, Morrison’s grave is quite difficult to see, hidden behind a cluster of narrowly spaced tombs. All that’s left is a large block of stone, covered in the inevitable Doors slogans and decorated with a couple of plastic plant pots. For years an alabaster bust graced this box, but it was stolen in May 1988 by two young bandits trying to preserve Morrison’s dignity. Disrespectful visitors had chipped away at his face, making him look like a bewigged ghost. For years there were plans to replace the bust with a more fitting tribute.

  The grave seems to smell of whisky and nicotine, and the earth surrounding the stone box is littered with bottle tops and cigarette butts.

  The tombs on either side of Morrison’s grave are constantly cleaned, and most of the graffiti is only a few weeks old. All around, his legacy lives on in badly rendered slogans: a few graves are so damaged that it’s difficult to decipher the carved inscriptions, and the trees which line Morrison’s avenue have all been carved with knives. Charles Gondouin (died 24 December 1947) must be turning in his grave, as it’s his headstone which has suffered the worst abuse. It backs on to Morrison’s grave, and has been tagged so many times it looks like the side of a New York subway train.

  Decades after his death, Morrison is still pulling in the crowds. Two local boys in leather jackets, T-shirts and blue jeans are sitting on opposite sides of the grave, passing a bottle of beer between them. They smoke cigarettes and stare at the ground. In their own way, they’re paying homage to the hedonistic ‘Lizard King’, letting him know they’re on the right course. An upturned whisky bottle has been embedded in the earth and two empty bottles of tequila and Jim Beam Kentucky bourbon have been left on the stone slab – it’s these as much as Morrison that the boys seem to be worshipping.

  Three Swedish girls wearing backpacks and walking boots stand behind the grave smoking weed as a lone Belgian flips the plastic cork from his bottle of cheap red wine. Gesturing with their hands, they pass the beer, wine and joints between the six of them. Like Morrison himself, his fans are indiscriminate drinkers. Every few minutes someone else arrives, joining the crowd around the tiny monument. They examine the graffiti, take photographs of themselves on the grave (usually wearing sunglasses), and bask in the strange air of reverence. More people arrive, another joint is passed around, and the day rolls on.

  Every twenty minutes or so the security guards pass by. They shoo people off the graves and retrieve the discarded liquor bottles and food wrappers, like any disgruntled park keeper. Occasionally the gendarmes pay a visit. They frisk undesirables, confiscate any alcohol and move people on. On the twelfth anniversary of Morrison’s death in 1983 the police had to use tear gas to break up a group of mourners. A few years ago Morrison’s grave was the focal point for Parisian juvenile delinquency, a popular place for wild parties and debauchery. People would gather here during the day and at night after the cemetery closed, to play guitars, have sex, buy drugs or just hang out. But the police stopped all that, and regularly patrol the graveyard in the hope of rounding up any suspicious characters who haven’t got the message.

  Père-Lachaise has become just another stop on the backpackers’ tour of Europe, like the Pompidou Centre, the Eiffel Tower or the Grande Arche at La Défense. There are still those who make the pilgrimage because they are Doors fanatics, or because Morrison is their idol, but usually the visitors are there out of idle curiosity. If you’re ‘doing Paris’ then you have to visit Père-Lachaise. The grave is still a shrine, but it has become a meeting place for tourists, like London’s Carnaby Street or Covent Garden.

  Twenty-year-old Jacqui is
from Sydney. She’s here because to her Jim Morrison represents the ideology and the freedom of the sixties. ‘And’, she says, ‘he was a pretty cool guy. Very sexy. I’m surprised by the grave, though – it’s very bare, very poor. I thought it would be much more elaborate. The bottles on the grave are very symbolic. I’ve just had a drink sitting on the grave – that felt very cool! I’ll definitely come again if I come back to Paris – you know, pay my respects, have another drink, and another smoke! They say he’s still alive, making music with Elvis in Africa, but I don’t know . . .’

  Lee Demelo, twenty-two, is from Ontario, touring Europe for the first time, stopping off in Paris for two weeks. ‘Basically we’ve seen all the sights and we wanted to take a day off to come here, because it’s the thing to do. It’s not what I expected, you know? You walk in here and there’s all these humungous tombstones, and you walk up to Jim Morrison’s grave and there’s nothing, really. I suppose it’s not important, right? It’s just the mental concept that this is where he’s buried, or supposed to be buried, right? All the people at the youth hostel have been here. It’s great – I’m the only person out of all my friends from Canada who’s been to Paris, and I’ll be able to go back and brag about how I went to Jim Morrison’s grave. That’s cool. We’ve taken some pictures to prove we’ve been here.

  ‘He means so much to people, you know? The Doors’ albums still sell, and they still mean a lot to people. They’re not like one of those groups that come and go . . . they’ll always be there. I’m not really a Top-40 kinda guy, and the Doors mean a lot to me.’

  Blue is an ageing French teacher who lived in Paris at the same time as Morrison. She has brought a single red rose to adorn his grave. ‘I’ve been about a dozen times since he died – whenever I’m in Paris I make a point of coming here. I come because to a certain extent he represented our generation. I was never a fan of his music but I liked his poems – and I could see he was trying to do something new with his poetry. But no one ever understood him, and he started to manipulate people when he didn’t become appreciated. I know a girl who knew him closely, and she said he was more concerned about his poetry than he was about anything else he did. When he got them published he was happier than when he got his first record release.