Mr Mojo Read online

  ‘It’s a pity he became so manipulative, because I really think he had something, but he turned into quite a monster, I think. A shame.’

  By now there are twenty people mingling around the grave, swapping stories, drinks and telephone numbers. There’s Adam from Iowa, Jim and Sheila from Birmingham, England, Bruce and Mikey from San Francisco, and a gaggle of college students from Los Angeles. Three middle-aged Parisian women sit on a nearby grave, sharing a bottle of cheap cognac and talking about nothing in particular. No one there knew Morrison, but this is the place to be. Two boys and a girl sit opposite, collectively rolling a joint. They finish a packet of Camel filters before smoking it. Natalie, Fred and Oliver all live nearby, and come to the cemetery every day. They always meet at Morrison’s grave, because, they say, ‘We like his history, he was a rebel.’ They’re thinking of not coming any more, because the place is always swamped by tourists. ‘And the police come every five minutes,’ says Natalie, ‘it’s getting to be a drag. I’m not sure if it’s cool to hang out here anymore.’

  A frail-looking couple dressed entirely in black amble up to the throng. The boy holds a bunch of flowers. They stare for a minute and then start to walk away. ‘The flowers are for Oscar Wilde,’ says Jeremy, a nineteen-year-old from Manhattan. The girl, also from New York, is called Kris. ‘Jim Morrison gets all the attention,’ she says, ‘so we thought we’d visit Wilde. Anyway, it looks like we’re gatecrashing a party here.’

  Photographers and backpackers come and go, cautiously approaching the grave in case they’re intruding; some scan the cemetery guide, perhaps wondering why Morrison’s name is misspelt Morisson; the security guards drive past again and the day draws to a close. It seems like Morrison’s grave is the longest running open-air nightclub in Europe.

  As the wind gets up, Blue slowly turns to say goodbye. ‘I don’t think I’ll be coming again,’ she says. ‘This place is like a garbage tip now.’

  There are as many rumours about Jim Morrison’s death as there are about his life. Not only are the circumstances in which he died incredibly suspect, but so are the many things which are supposed to have befallen him since. You can take your pick: he is still alive; his body was stolen by friends soon after his death and shipped back to California; he was cremated and his ashes eventually smoked by Morrison’s Parisian heroin dealer; his ashes were scattered over the Seine. One journalist was even told by a guard at Père-Lachaise that Morrison’s family came and collected the body at the beginning of the eighties. Graffiti near the grave states, ‘We came to see you, Jim, even though we know you’re not there’ – but this is wishful thinking. By keeping their options open Morrison obsessives can perpetuate the myth, which becomes dramatically less mysterious if you believe he is buried at Père-Lachaise. But there seems little doubt that he is.

  Monsieur Forestier, the custodian of the cemetery, was shocked when asked whether Morrison was buried there. ‘Of course he’s there, he’s always been there. Only the bust has been removed.’ He even refutes the story about the family retrieving the body: ‘Even they can’t take away the body, they’re officially not allowed to. You can’t just pick up bodies and move them somewhere else. He’s here.’

  Should we believe this? Certainly the custodians of Père-Lachaise didn’t have the same qualms when they moved Molière, Beaumarchais and Abelard to attract attention to their cemetery; and bodies are moved from cemeteries all the time (often to make way for real estate). It’s also possible that Admiral Steve Morrison’s contacts allowed him to secretly move his son’s body back to the USA.

  But if Morrison’s body isn’t there, why do they claim it is? One of the most densely populated cemeteries in the world, Père-Lachaise is not starved of tourists, and the graves of Oscar Wilde and Edith Piaf alone would keep it full of visitors. It’s not as if the authorities need Jim Morrison. The surrounding graves have to be regularly cleaned, and the guards could find better things to do with their time than patrol Morrison’s tomb on the lookout for deviants. Monsieur Forestier simply doesn’t need the trouble, so why should he lie?

  Two hours later the grave is littered with flowers: small bunches of tulips and individually packed red roses. Pinet Fleurs, the florist next door to the entrance to the cemetery in Boulevard de Ménilmontant, say they sell flowers to Morrison-mourners every day of the year.

  As you leave the cemetery the graffiti continues: ‘The Doors are for ever, not some fast trend’, ‘I ask this of you, Jim, is this the end?’, ‘Fuck it all’, ‘Jim, dead but not gone’, ‘Some oysters for you, Jim’, ‘Jim, we party for you for ever’, ‘Jim, Becky from Crystal Lake, Illinois, Loves You’. There is graffiti from all over the world – cryptic little messages in Italian, French, German, Spanish, personal pleas from Australia, America, Canada and Britain. The final message, scrawled on a plastic rubbish bin opposite the Métro, is written in thick black felt-tip: ‘Jim stinks’, it says.

  2

  The New Californians

  Today in Los Angeles, the sixties are still very much alive and kicking – if you know where to look, that is. Laurel Canyon is often written about as the place that gave the world Crosby, Stills & Nash, the place that inspired Joni Mitchell’s ‘Ladies of the Canyon’, Danny Sugerman’s Wonderland Avenue. It is a neighbourhood of benign bad behaviour and clandestine misdemeanours. Everyone from Clara Bow and Christina Applegate to Frank Zappa and Marilyn Manson has lived there, and it retains a genuine local feel – almost impossible in LA. This being Los Angeles, the area has also had its fair share of dark moments, not least the Wonderland murders, which happened in 1981, when four people were bludgeoned to death with striated steel pipes in a drug-related plot that involved the porn star John Holmes.

  Despite being the subject of standard-issue gentrification, the Canyon has kept the funky, rainbow-coloured charm of the Love Generation, something that is most apparent when visiting the Canyon Country Store, still the neighbourhood’s social hub. Wedged along the twisting Laurel Canyon Boulevard in the Santa Monica Mountains between West Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley, this is the place mentioned in Jim Morrison’s ‘Love Street’ (‘I see you live on Love Street, There’s this store where the creatures meet’). In fact the song was completely based around the store; Morrison would spend days hanging out there, loafing around outside, sitting on an orange crate, staring at girls and drinking from a bottle of Scotch. For years the graffiti MR MOJO RISIN’ graced the front of the store. The wooden-floored grocery shop/café is still the place to go for canyon dwellers with the munchies, or for those in the industry who aren’t working, and who need somewhere in the morning to stop for an espresso having spent all night partying in the Valley. Here they’ll find Dandy Don’s ice cream, Dave’s Kombucha (fermented tea), bespoke sandwiches, hearts of palm salads, and the almost-but-not-quite-legendary decaf almond-milk latte. Run out of Californian chardonnay, Heinz baked beans, Daddy’s Sauce or patchouli incense? Look no further.

  The Country Store is also the site of the annual Photo Day each October, where the residents of the Canyon all come together to have a group picture taken. The tradition dates back to the late eighties, a celebration of the sort of community spirit you don’t find anywhere else in LA.

  Over the hill, the temporal nature of Hollywood is at its most obvious. Here, in the village of bougainvillea and watery melodies, time stands still. And if you want to wear your bellbottoms and feathers, don’t think twice, it’s all right. This is where so many people ended up when they moved to LA in the mid-sixties. Sure, there were many more who ended up living in squalor in East Hollywood, and even more whose living arrangements involved the wrong end of Sunset Boulevard (where the house numbers are broken into fractions), but the canyons between LA and the Ventura are where so many wanderers made their home. New wanderers!

  That was the thing about the sixties: everybody was new. No one had been around for a while – no one had been loitering around for five, ten years – no one had been hovering on the edge of the scene, desperate for a flash of fairy dust, as there hadn’t actually been a scene. There had been such a flight to California, such a migration, that the state was suddenly full of young people searching for a future. These were not Okies seeking jobs, land or dignity; these were teenagers looking for reinvention. If the dust bowl farmers brought country music to California, the teenage prodigies who descended on San Francisco and Los Angeles helped build a bucolic haven that soon became the centre of the counter-cultural universe. If London had invented the modern ‘scene’ at the start of the sixties, the second half of the decade belonged to California.

  Everyone here was here for the first time. Here, having escaped the dull ceiling of a sky that stretched all the way from Chicago to New York, the newly arrived smartly dressed denizens of Haight-Ashbury and Laurel Canyon were all afflicted with blind optimism. Now that they were all in California, what was the worst that could happen? And here, as if in the middle of some bizarre Darwinian experiment, this loose amalgamation of outsiders – hellions, even – gradually became less and less like the people they’d left behind, and more and more like . . . well, Californians . . . New Californians!

  Like E. B. White’s new New Yorkers, these recently arrived Los Angelenos were seeking sanctuary or fulfilment or some greater or lesser grail. White said that no one should come to New York to live unless they are willing to be lucky; luck was even more important in LA. Whether they wore tie-dye T-shirts or satin suits festooned with flowers, California’s beautiful people were as one – eager participants in bespoke bacchanalia. Like a line from the Leiber and Stoller song ‘Fools Fall in Love’, they built their castle on wishes with only rainbows for beams.

  During the spring of 1965, people all over America began migrating to Los Angeles, eager to bathe in the soporific glow of the lifestyle revolution and bask in the emerging bohemian culture. The city quickly acquired its own band of freaks, dressed in jerkins, knee-breeches, knitted shawls, Indian beads, old lace dresses and flowered shirts. Musicians, artists, actors, film makers, sculptors, designers, bikers, hedonists, hippies: the synthesis of the West Coast social revolution.

  But unlike San Francisco, where altruism was the order of the day, Los Angeles produced a kind of venal synaesthesia, a sensory overload. As Lawrence Dietz described the scene, writing in Cheetah magazine: ‘You go out to Los Angeles from the East, and of course you have heard all of these funny stories about the funny natives, and all of the funny things they’re into, and it takes some time for you to realise that everyone out there is playing this whole new game. Everyone is searching for what you might call self-realisation of one sort or another. In LA everyone is into himself, in one way or another.’

  Some were there by accident, others by design, but all by default. The whole of LA was in a frenzy; a frenzy compounded by heat, fame, drugs and life on the beach. LSD was becoming the sacrament of the city, and it was said that being in LA was like being high all the time. One of the new wave of beatniks who flocked to Los Angeles was a twenty-one-year-old college student called Jim Morrison. He arrived in the spring of 1964 fresh from Florida State University, keen to embroil himself in modern America’s fairy-tale city of light. He journeyed to California – against his parents’ wishes – to reinvent himself. He wasn’t looking to drop out – he would have gone to San Francisco for that. The budding boho was looking to drop in, to be accepted by the new bohemians. Soon he would begin to feed off the city, letting it wrap itself around him, letting its warm neon flow through his veins. But for the time being he threw himself into his work, casting himself as a student of film. Jim Morrison’s own movie was unfolding.

  According to legend, the Jim Morrison movie really began in 1947, when he was four years old. While driving through the New Mexico desert, the Morrison family came across a horrendous road accident, an event which would cause severe repercussions in Jim’s life, and one to which he would constantly refer in his poems. Morrison was convinced that at the age of four the soul of a dead Pueblo Indian entered his body, altering the course of his life: a more than suitable beginning for a movie.

  ‘The first time I discovered death,’ said Morrison, ‘me and my mother and father, and my grandmother and grandfather, were driving through the desert at dawn. A truckload of Indians had either hit another car or something – there were Indians scattered all over the highway, bleeding to death. So we pulled the car up . . . I don’t remember if I’d ever been to a movie, and suddenly, there were all these redskins, and they’re lying all over the road, bleeding to death. I was just a kid, so I had to stay in the car while my father and grandfather went back to check it out . . . I didn’t see nothing – all I saw was funny red paint and people lying around, but I knew something was happening, because I could dig the vibrations of the people around me, ’cause they’re my parents and all, and all of a sudden I realised that they didn’t know what was happening any more than I did. That was the first time I tasted fear . . . and I do think, at that moment, the soul or the ghosts of those dead Indians, maybe one or two of ’em, were just running around, freaking out, and just landed in my soul, and I was like a sponge, ready to just sit there and absorb it . . . It’s not a ghost story, it’s something that really means something to me.’

  Jim Morrison was the son of a high-ranking naval officer, born into a family with a long history of career militarists. James Douglas was Steve and Clara Morrison’s first child, a bright, healthy baby with fat cheeks and cold, sparkling eyes. Soon after Jim was born, Steve Morrison was posted to the Pacific, where he stayed for three years, entrenched in a war of attrition with the Japanese. His father away at war, the boy spent the first three years of his life with his mother at his paternal grandparents’ house, in Clearwater, on the Gulf coast of Florida. When he eventually returned from the war, in the humid summer of 1946, Steve Morrison’s family began a gypsy-like existence, first moving to Washington DC for six months, and then to Albuquerque, New Mexico, for a year. During the next fifteen years, Morrison senior was sent all over America, and was often away from home on manoeuvres, leaving the boy to be brought up by Clara. If little Jim needed a father figure, he certainly didn’t get one.

  The family kept on moving: early in 1948, Steve Morrison took his family to Los Altos in northern California, where they were stationed for nearly four years. Then it was back to Washington DC for a year (while Steve was stationed in Korea), then Claremont, California, for another two. Along the way little Jim acquired a sister, Ann, and a brother, Andrew. And still they kept on moving: when Morrison senior returned from Korea, they went back to Albuquerque for two years before moving on to San Francisco. In December 1958, they returned to Washington, where they stayed for three years, and where Jim attended George Washington High School.

  Although his family were conventional, middle-class Republicans, with solid, traditional, patriarchal values, little Jim’s stability was constantly threatened by this continual uprooting. Life in the services offered welcome financial security in the fifties, but it hardly fostered emotional stability. Morrison was always rootless, and soon developed a shield and a way of responding to people with whom he knew his relationship would be brief. Without a peer group to call his own, he remodelled himself wherever he went – a chameleon with a satchel.

  Morrison grew up quickly. In adolescence he discovered a gregarious side to his nature, and developed an extreme way of dealing with the world. He wanted to be liked, and the easiest way was to show off by acting the fool or performing outrageous stunts. Morrison was already behaving in a resolutely odd manner, and each new set of classmates quickly learned to avoid the nascent rebel. He was also discovering a Machiavellian streak in himself, finding it easy to manipulate his school friends, and a sick sense of humour was beginning to manifest itself. Morrison could be deliberately mysterious, and was already acquiring an armoury of masks.

  It was at George Washington High that the softly spoken and articulate sophomore began writing poetry. He discovered he was adept with words, and started to keep a diary and write short stories. He immersed himself in his books. He had a formidable capacity for learning, and devoured William Blake, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Colin Wilson, Aldous Huxley, Sartre and Rimbaud, while at the same time developing a taste for beer. He was soon fascinated by the romantic notion of poetry, as Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman point out in their biography, No One Here Gets Out Alive. ‘To be a poet entailed more than writing poems. It demanded a commitment to live, and die, with great style and even greater sadness; to wake each morning with the fever raging and know it would never be extinguished except by death, yet to be convinced that this suffering carried a unique reward.’

  This was something to which Morrison could aspire. The tortured artist? Sure, he could do that, no problem. But although he was alarmingly intelligent and a gifted, if lazy, student, Morrison was completely indifferent to any possibilities of a long-term career. Being remarkably bright, the Navy brat didn’t have to study much to achieve high marks and consistently got good grades, even though he spent most of his time reading poetry, writing his diary or getting drunk. His parents, sensing his apathy, enrolled him in St Petersburg Junior College in Florida, informing him that he had to live with his grandparents in Clearwater. Morrison reluctantly co-operated, and in September 1961, while the rest of the family travelled to San Diego, he moved to the Sunshine State. After an unremarkable year he transferred to Florida State University in Tallahassee, before dropping out and forcing his parents to allow him to switch to UCLA to study film in early 1964.