Chapter 19
The evil triangle ... The Plaster Casters, ahead of their time ... Southern overexposure ... Black leather pants and the great white shaft ... The beard of the poet
JAC: Delaney & Bonnie at Elektra were a one-act melodrama that ended badly. The Doors were a full-on rock-and-roll serial, and right on our doorstep.
JOHN VAN HAMMERSVELD: One thing that really flashes on me is how exposed Jim was. This exhibitionist kind of thing—the leather pants, the white shirt, the mane of hair. Being posed at the Players restaurant on La Cienega, down from Elektra Records, eating breakfast. A little vignette. You're driving by, and Jim Morrison is sitting alone in the sunlight, glistening, in this posture. And here he is a principal star in the media. No bodyguards, nothing, just totally exposed. It was like two dreams combined. He had his dream which he took down to the street, and ate, and my side of the dream is I'm walking by—and Morrison's a soundtrack, you know, 'Light My Fire,' or 'The End'—and why is he sitting in that ordinary space in the middle of that ordinary thing?
BILL SIDDONS: For the Doors office, I took a building on Santa Monica Boulevard, facing north, literally fifty yards from Elektra. It was a ramshackle, rundown duplex. The upstairs we made into the offices, and the downstairs was outfitted as a rehearsal room, ultimately as a recording studio, albeit a primitive one.
Freaks would show up. There was Cigar Pain, who wanted to be Jim Morrison, so he stuck burning cigars down his throat to make his voice real hoarse. He came in and sang demos for me. Crazy Nancy, one of those people who was crazy about Jim she came by at all hours of the day and night to try and meet Jim—and hang out with him. She might have been an acid casualty, but I'm not sure that it was even drug-induced. She was just someone who in most cases would be institutionalized because she was pretty dysfunctional. Harmless, though, and a very nice girl, so we were real kind to her and tried to give her a break. But she broke in a couple of times and slept there, and I think she stole a couple of guitars once because she was broke. So I put up iron gates, that stuff. We had a lot of crazies, a few that I just had to call the police and get rid of. But most of the time people came by who were completely giant Jim fans. He spoke to them in ways that nobody else did. He spoke to most people that way; they just took it more seriously than others. Sometimes Jim's girlfriends, one-night stands, would come by. It was an interesting time.
JAC: It was also the Warholian fifteen minutes of fame for the Plaster Casters, two teenage girls with a singular performance art specialty. They hung around rock stars, gave them head, then immortalized the erection on the spot by casting it with dental plaster.
Ellen Sander, one of the notable early rock journalists, wrote a wonderful article about them. Ellen normally published in the Saturday Review or the New York Times, but plaster casting was counter-culture news that did not qualify as fit for the Good Grey Lady's Arts & Leisure section, so Ellen's story appeared instead in Paul Krassner's sharp, funny and highly scabrous little alternative periodical, the Realist.
Jimi Hendrix dwarfs the rock competition
The Plaster Casters, in grand Hollywood style, acquired a manager, none other than Herbie Cohen, and a mentor in Frank Zappa, who was editing a collection of Groupie Papers. Zappa planned to have the exhibits bronzed and made into a permanent collection. Frank also came up with a mother of invention idea, making ice cream molds and marketing a line of flavors with the slogan, "Suck Your Favorite Rock Star."
Cynthia Plaster Caster and her industrious companion, Diane, amassed a unique collection of artifacts, spearheaded, so to speak, by Jimi Hendrix. I have been told that Fritz Richmond of our LA studio was also in that hallowed company. And of course the Plaster Casters wanted the Doors. Morrison was the most prestigious and eligible—or at least in his tight leather pants he was the most obvious. In or out of his pants he was generally available for all kinds of performance art, like prancing naked with Nico on the battlements of the venerable Hotel Chateau Marmont. But the Plaster Casters never did get Jim, or any of the other Doors.
SUZANNE HELMS: Jim hung around the Elektra office quite a bit. He would come in and sit on the bench. For hours he would sit there and write lyrics and bits of poetry on his yellow pad. And Jackson Browne would get a ride from Laurel Canyon into town, and sit in my office the whole afternoon. I typed both their lyrics endlessly, because I was teaching myself to type.
PAT FARALLA: Jim kept kind of slouching in in jeans, T-shirt, the leather jacket, rumpled, tousled boots, pretty much the same look night and day. He'd stroll through, usually around three or four in the afternoon, rather placid-looking, just shufflin' through, always serene, but with edgy waters inside. He'd be looking for somebody to talk to, or listen to, a warm body. He wanted to connect on some level. He'd say, "You want to go have a drink?" So we'd go down the street to this little French café and sit in the bar, and Jim would say a lot of nothing, to which I would say a lot of nothing, or he'd have something on his mind and just start to talk, free form, stream of consciousness. Who knew how much he'd had to smoke or drink or ingest before we got there?
BILL SIDDONS: Across Santa Monica from the Doors office was the Phone Booth, a topless bar. On the southwest corner, facing north, was the Extension, owned by the same people. The Alta Cienega Motel was around the corner, north on La Cienega, simple, clean, very small. The southeast corner was this decrepit run-down used furniture place run by an old couple who had stopped cleaning up twenty years before. The place was phenomenal in its trashiness, piles of stuff everywhere. I bought a file cabinet there that still has all my Doors memorabilia in it.
Across the fence from my back yard was an office building on La Cienega, facing east, in which David Geffen and Elliott Roberts had their office. And Pamela rented out the front for a boutique that she called Themis. She created a space that was full of snakeskin hides and feathers and the things you remember from those days, the Indian and Afghani garments, a lot of pretty far-out stuff.
Then a little bit east on Santa Monica was the whole subculture of Barney's Beanery, which was kind of a biker-beat-intellectuals crowd. And right across from Barney's was Rudy Gernreich, who designed the topless swimsuit.
So it was still primarily a busy business neighborhood, with four lanes of traffic, but with a bit of an artistic community. And a lot of freaks.
SHERRI KANDELL: Everyone was on drugs and I was kind of the hippie transport. I was driving my VW bus with the back seat taken out, huge Indian madras pillows and the roof draped in an Indian bedspread, and crystals hanging, and incense. I was working for the Moveable Feast, near the Troubadour, a company that made sandwiches and sent girls with baskets to office buildings at lunchtime. Avocado on whole wheat—that kind of health food consciousness was coming in. My Moveable Feast route in the VW bus was the anti-corporate hip route. Dick Clark's offices were on the Strip, way more corporate, very business. But Elektra was a freak show, which was why I loved going there.
EVE BABITZ: That Elektra-Barney's-Alta Cienega triangle—
BILL SIDDONS:—And of course there was the Tropicana, the flop house of the music business, the new rock generation and the hippies.
SUZANNE HELMS: Real seedy, seedy motel. They never repaired things or painted, there were fingerprint smudges on the walls. But they had a lot of things going on there.
BILL SIDDONS: Every rock star that came to LA for the first time had to stay there.
SUZANNE HELMS: A lot of famous people. It was a place of choice. Someone should write a book on the Tropicana. There was a wonderful old man running it that I used to lunch with about once a month. It was very important that I kept that relationship going, because we had a lot of people who really destroyed stuff.
MIRANDI BABITZ: Musicians, and people sliding down the bottom end of the scale. I think in those days it was really the core of the rock and roll scene and the drug scene.
BILL SIDDONS: Probably a dozen people had drug overdoses in the Tropicana.
DIANE GARDINER: Jim would take a room there when things were perhaps too intense at home with Pamela, when he needed to get away. That would be the office for all his bizarre stuff to come out.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: Morrison was two people. When Jim was sober, you couldn't want a better friend, you wouldn't want a dearer heart. A sensitive, aware, wonderful human being. Take him anywhere, take him home for dinner with Mom, take him to Ahmet Ertegun's party for senators and princes. Just don't give him a drink. If you give him a drink you end up with a taunting kid, looking to find your darkest weaknesses at all times.
Jim was a guy who tested the edges endlessly. And when he was drunk, tested them cruelly. With everybody. There were no exceptions. None. There were a few hardy ones who could stand up under that and come right back at him. Myself as one. Bob Neuwirth. No one in the band. Lord knows they tried. Ray tried the hardest; he was the one who worked hardest at being the diplomat. But there were guys in Jim's drinking cadre—
EVE BABITZ: Jim would get himself into a sort of Hell's Angels group of companions. I mean, you can wallow on Santa Monica Boulevard if you're looking to.
VINCE TREANOR: On a Friday or Saturday night, when the Doors had finished rehearsing, or Jim had finished business, or he had come to get his weekly stipend, he was very close by the Phone Booth for a brief pause for refreshment. And he and his entourage, his followers who were followers as long as Jim was buying, would trek over there. Now, of course, if Jim had been drinking and wasn't feeling quite up to crossing the wide span of Santa Monica Boulevard, if he was a little unsteady or a little unsure how to get to the Phone Booth, he could always make it to the Extension, right next door to the office. But the Phone Booth was the resort of choice.
FRANK LISCIANDRO: I'd walk to the corner, and there would be Jim walking out of the Doors office, and the others might have been pulling up in an old car, and we would saunter across the street, and Tom Baker would already be in the Phone Booth, and we would order a round of drinks, and the next thing you knew we were moving on to another club.
You get a bunch of people like this together and there's going to be a lot of alcohol going down. You get feisty, you start challenging each other in boyish pranks, like—walk that ledge, or I can jump in front of the next truck that comes along, or jump on the freight, or bash that, jump on that typewriter with my boots on.
DIANE GARDINER: There was a side of rock and roll that Jim understood thoroughly—that people were utterly willing to make fools of themselves in the name of being close to a rock star, and he would do it, and he was a genius at it.
FRANK LISCIANDRO: I never really saw Jim necessarily initiate this kind of stuff, but when Tom or Babe Hill or I happened to mention, "Let's do this," I mean, Jim was volunteering.
VINCE TREANOR: There was another bar further west. The famous billiard table overturning incident occurred in that one. Jim and Babe and Paul Ferrara, you never knew how many, got down there and some controversy arose and the upshot was that this billiard table got upset and so did the owner.
FRANK LISCIANDRO: I never saw Jim hit anybody, I never saw him get into a fist fight, although Babe and I did save him several times from fist fights, in bars and around pool tables and things like that, mostly by ducking and dragging him out, or Babe wedging himself into a doorway and holding off all comers while I put him in the car and we made a quick getaway. Because Jim, if he got a little out of hand—I mean, he was not averse to insulting everyone in the bar. Could be bad, could be very bad.
DIANE GARDINER: I think he was fond of using that power, and at the same time, let's face it, it's pretty repulsive.
SHERRI KANDELL: I thought he was a dark character. I saw the depth, but it came across in a downer way—the charisma was anti-charisma. Sometimes late at night, after Gazzari's or the Whisky, I would be allowed to sit in a booth near Jim when he would be holding court at Ben Frank's. Unkempt, and his pants—god, can you see his short hairs? I was a high school girl, a virgin, and I was always worried and hopeful that I would.
MICHELLE PHILLIPS: Outside the Whisky one night, Morrison was tugging on Janis Joplin's braids. Actually it was kind of playful at first, but she didn't take very kindly to it, and she took the bottle of Southern Comfort that she had in her hand and whacked him upside the cheek with it, and then when he tried to apologize she whacked him over the other cheek.
DIANE GARDINER: He would just let it go and let it go until it got awful, dangerous, nauseating, horrendous.
ERIC BURDON: One night I was at the Whisky, and I had a very nice inoffensive girlfriend who was a dancer across the road at the Body Shop, and I ran and got her after the show and brought her to the Whisky, and we were sitting having a drink and Jim slid in alongside of us in the booth. And I guess, in a way, to him, to impress the girl, he poured beer over her head. That really impressed her. You see, he orchestrated people, he wanted an immediate scene. And she was pissed off, but she maintained her cool, just, like, "Oh, no, what's with this guy?" And instead of getting crazed at him, I took him aside and I said, "Now listen, that's not on, Jim. You're moving among human beings here. This is not stage acting." And he was really upset at what he had done. It was like he came out of a trance and suddenly realized what he had done and he was very apologetic.
And then he clicked into madness again, because the next thing I knew, he climbed up on the stage with the band, a visiting band, young kids from the Midwest. When they saw it was Jim Morrison, they stood back in awe—"Wow, Jim Morrison's on stage with us!" But they were playing rock and roll, and he was grabbing the microphone and reciting poetry. So after a while the band ground to a halt and left the stage, it was just the bass player left, and it turned very sour. Jim started to rap about provocation and about revolution. "You've all had your revolution, and it's all over. And there'll never be another revolution, 'cause you're all niggers." If this act had been presented on the marquee outside as The Future Poets Starring Jim Morrison, Provocative Theater, there would have been applause. But it wasn't, it was out of time, he was out of time. He was trying to get in step with his own desire to create mayhem. He went on and on and on about, "You're niggers," and nahnahnah, and silence fell over the club. And then you could almost hear the hammer on this pistol from upstairs creak back. The old policemen, the private dick of the house, an old black guy, he put his head out and he drew a bead on Jim, and he said, "I'll give you niggers, you son of a bitch. Get off the fucking stage." And by that time somebody called the police and they were there in seconds. They were always patrolling that section. He was bundled out the door, his shirt ripped off. And I think he actually broke loose from the cops on the street and slipped past them and took off bounding over the roofs of cars into the night.
ROBBY KRIEGER: Jim ran into cops many times. He had a knack for antagonizing cops wherever he went. I'm amazed he never got shot by a cop, because he used to taunt them so.
MIRANDI BABITZ: He got so many drunk driving tickets they took his license away.
VINCE TREANOR: He piled up his Cobra, destroyed the damn thing. Bill Siddons got the tow truck to go get it before the police picked it up. I saw a picture of that car. Nobody could have survived it, and yet he walked away, stone drunk on his ass.
FRITZ RICHMOND: He'd get out in the middle of La Cienega with a bottle in one hand and the other hand waving in the air to keep his balance, stopping traffic and yelling at people, "You're all a bunch of niggers!" Can you imagine? Well, it's a cruel drug, that alcohol.
JANICE KENNER: He'd be staying out in the street, in his leather clothes, which he hadn't changed in probably a year, completely shitfaced drunk, trying to get girls.
ELLEN VOGT: Being around Jim scared me. You never knew his mood, you never knew what to expect. You'd be prepared for anything in the office when he walked in. A couple of times he'd get into it in the hallway with one of the Doors, there'd be a little pushing and shoving. Some mornings there would be a real mess. One morning I came in and my desk had been trashed and my typewriter had a malt poured down through it. You just picked up and went on with your day and you didn't really think about it. When we'd see him the next time, it was never mentioned.
SUZANNE HELMS: He got terribly drunk one night and destroyed my typewriter.
JAC: He grabbed the emergency fire ax from outside the studio door and took it to that innocent machine.
SUZANNE HELMS: I came in in the morning and the keys were all sticking up every which way, like one of those self-destructing sculptures by Jean Tinguely.
JAC: Suzanne Helms in high dudgeon is a fearsome sight. She was fond of that typewriter. In full sail, she thrust her arm out. "Look what HE did. " I agreed that this was indeed terrible. I told her to order a new typewriter and we'd charge it to his royalties.
MARTY RICHMOND: She calls IBM and sits there with her arms folded, refusing to work, until they deliver it.
ELLEN VOGT: One morning Michael James Jackson came in really excited and said to Suzanne, "There's a body laying in the bushes out front!"
MICHAEL JAMES JACKSON: Sprawled in a bizarre position, covered in leaves and mud.
ELLEN VOGT: Michael said, "He could be dead! Call the police!"
MICHAEL JAMES JACKSON: Suzanne said, "Put the phone down."
ELLEN VOGT: Michael was really upset. "Suzanne, he's not moving at all! He's just laying there, face down in the bushes!"
MICHAEL JAMES JACKSON: Suzanne said, "That's just Jim. He's just passed out. Don't touch him, don't talk to him."
ELLEN VOGT: She said, "Michael, just relax, go to work, everything will be fine." And a couple of hours later, Jim got up and dusted himself off—
MICHAEL JAMES JACKSON:—And strolled off to Duke's for breakfast.
JAC: The General Motors TV commercial may have been the flashpoint for some of the antics. General Motors asked to use 'Light My Fire' as the theme for a new model car. They were offering good money: $80,000 in 1969 dollars, which would be split, Doors $60,000, Elektra $20,000. During the negotiations, Jim was off and nowhere to be found, but the remaining Doors OK'd it and so did Max Fink, Jim's lawyer. Personally, I didn't care one way or the other.
When Jim rematerialized he freaked. He was sure we had all taken advantage of his absence. The other Doors supposedly laid it on my doorstep. Jim phoned me in New York. I set out the sequence of events in typical Jaconian detail and he seemed mollified, or at least no longer blaming me. I said, "Jim, as far as Elektra is concerned it's not a matter of money. Elektra will contribute its full share to a film scholarship fund at UCLA"—an interest of his and Ray's—"if the Doors will match it. That will still leave $40,000, $10,000 each for the Doors." I was urging him to take the money and then turn around and do some real good with it. Jim thought it was a notion to consider, but after that conversation the subject never again came up.
A commercial was shot and aired, but very sparsely. Jim may have hoped to create such a furor that General Motors would be reluctant to use the tune. He once threatened to take his quarter share, buy a bunch of Buicks and smash them on Santa Monica Boulevard.
MICHAEL FORD: When Jim got out into public life and realized his imagination was being tapped into for a lot of the wrong reasons, a disenchantment became very marked in him. That disenchantment led to more eccentric ingestion of chemicals. His need seemed to me to be a quest, searching for a divine molecule that would give him what Ray, I think, once called The Ultimate Vision, a vision of himself exactly as he belonged in this dichotomous plane on which he found himself—the dichotomy of him being a visionary and a threat to cultural equilibrium, and a guy who jangled the cash register and got all the greedheads their fat wallets. Adulation and the money jones and the worship was a perversion of that vision, and then he realized that he had perverted everything that he in the beginning trusted about himself. What happens to an artist when suddenly he can't trust himself any more? "Wait a minute, I know I wasn't wrong, but this feels wrong. Buy me a drink, gimme a toke, gimme a shot, shoot me full of something."
JAC: Jim's reliability was a constant concern. Would he show up for a concert? What might he do on stage? 'The End' would bring out the fringe who would go crazy whenever there was a full moon, or who acted as if there was a full moon year-round. The off-the-wall types—the Andy Warhols and to the left of Andy Warhol—would cart him off. He would vanish for days.
ERIC BURDON: I had to run him out of my house once. For years I was into guns, a gun fanatic. I owned a .44 magnum which was given to me on tour as a gift so therefore I couldn't get rid of it—that's my excuse to keep it. There was a party at my house one night, and a crew of people didn't leave. It was Jim and his groupies. They decided to camp out in the entranceway to this villa that we had in Bel Air. Really an awful place, real Beverly Hills cream pie. Some woman had built this very feminine mansion, and the entranceway was a grandiose hall, with a massive chandelier, which I hated. I hated the place, but I was sharing it with a bunch of guys, and it was a good place to office out of. So I'd leave in the morning, and step by Jim's thin, half-naked body, black leather pants and this thin naked body and this group of girls. I'd step over them on the way out, I'd come home in the evening and they'd still be there. And this went on for days. On several occasions I said, "Just leave," and they didn't. So I went up and got the gun. I put one round in the chamber and came downstairs and I took the gunman's stance, legs apart, double hold, pulled back the hammer. Their ears perked up, they stood up. And it went click! Jim looked at these girls and went, "See, he's only joking." I spun the cylinder and went squeeze, click! and Jim said, "I told you, no problem," and they started sliding down the wall. I spun it again, squeeze, click! nothing. By this time their asses were on the floor. I went squeeze, click! again, and—POWWWW! I mean, like, the noise was horrendous. And a bullet went winging through the air, through the chandelier, didn't bring it down, but it chipped a few parts and spread glass all over the floor. And the bullet ricocheted around the room upstairs about five times and then disappeared through the roof. And they took off like a squadron of terrified bats! Desert bats in the night!
DAVID ANDERLE: One night Jim called me up and said, "I want to do a blues record." That's all he kept talking about. So I got hold of John Haeny, and without Jac and Rothchild and the other Doors knowing, we went in a couple of nights after hours and did this tape. Just Jim, playing piano, on which he was very bad, sketching some things. The sessions were fun and great, and the hanging out was great. Some of the most fun times I've had in the studio. When we finished, which was not real late, we went back to his house, and he walked in and said to Pam, "Hi, honey," and gave her a big hug and a kiss. He went upstairs and Pam said, "I just wish it could always be like this. He's doing what he wants to do musically, and he's with people who aren't putting pressure on him."
Then another day he came around the office, sort of the end of the day, and we got into a particularly good conversation about German theater, Brecht and Weill, which he knew all about. It was getting to be evening, and he said, "Let's go get something to eat," so we went to Casa Cugat. We had dinner, and he started drinking, beer and a little tequila, and he started changing a little bit. Then he said, "Let's go to the Whisky."
Elmer Valentine always had this special booth for Jim when he came in. If there were people sitting in the booth, he'd have them move. It was in the farthest corner, with no one at your back, and it's also where everyone had to pass by. So Jim and I were in that booth, and now we're starting to drink, and I'm into the show—it was a black act, Sam and Dave or someone—I'm into the audience, people are coming up, the girls are all over Jim.
And all of a sudden he is, like, gone. He is standing on the table and yelling, "Niggers! Fucking niggers can't sing! I can sing the blues better than you!" Thank God the music is loud. I grab him by the pants to try to get him seated, and I look up, and he's looking down at me, and it's the first time I ever encountered a schizophrenic, where a person's face actually physically transformed. Jim as a guy was so calm and soft-speaking, very gentle deep voice, beautiful eyes, very sweet face. But this was the Devil. Chiseled face, maddened eyes. Just hate coming out of that face, hatred. He resembled physically no one that I knew. I had no idea who that person was, and he had no idea who I was. In the truest sense, this was not just a guy who's blind drunk, but a person who actually went through a physical metamorphosis and became someone else.
I'd never been so scared. I just got up from the booth and split. I wasn't going to get killed for some guy I didn't know, this devil, this demon.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: Jim conjured—for his mad orgies with his cronies down in Mexico, or with a single individual, a girl who's been totally scarred by fire, head to foot, and he finds a day of great fascination with her. He does that also with the blues, where he looks into blues literature and tries to conjure up the darkness and the passion.
When exploring the underworld, sometimes you succeed in conjuring up the devil. And once you do, it's very hard to control the madness that such a conjure brings. Jim did that many times. He would conjure the dark forces and get swallowed by them.
But then again, that's what he wanted. He found that interesting. It's what he sought, really.
JAC: In March of 1969, Jim conjured the ultimate Morrison out-of-control experience. The word came that he had exposed himself in full view of a concert audience in Miami.
RAY MANZAREK: It was the first time we ever played in the South.
BILL SIDDONS: Our basic policy was not to work more than three days in a row, because by the third day Jim was pretty out of control. Miami was the first date.
JAC: If someone wanted to construct a bad scene, you could use this occasion as the template. I wasn't there, but I heard about it in infinite and intimate detail from people who were. The concert was in the Dinner Key Auditorium, a converted Pan Am hangar—
VINCE TREANOR:—An abandoned building. Dry-rotted, grayed-out, rickety, a concrete floor, and a wretched smell, the most godawful stench. It had been used by derelicts in every possible way for quite some time. A cesspool. They literally had to hose it out.
JAC: Bill Siddons said it was supposed to hold about eight thousand, and that was the agreed-upon limit negotiated with the promoter, but there were close to double that number. And no seats. It was hot, stinking, overcrowded, packed to the rafters and beyond. The promoter was ripping off the band and the audience. Bill had to get into it with him about the gate, the ticketing, the percentages—
BILL SIDDONS:—A promoter who was insane himself, and his karate brother who was threatening everybody with karate moves. I had my own security force, a number of black gentlemen out of Philadelphia, a former detective and all the people he used to arrest, and he is offering me that if I want anything done to the promoter he's got some friends, and he gives me an Italian name that I won't mention.
Jim Morrison
JAC: And all this is before the concert even started. Morrison turned up very late and very drunk, and then didn't want to sing. I heard the tape, and it is Jim rapping and ranting about revolution, about needing love, someone to love his ass, alternately with the crowd being slaves, fucking idiots. He wants action. He says there are no laws. He taunts people to join him on stage.
VINCE TREANOR: There was a guy holding a lamb who jumped up on stage. Somebody else jumped up and poured champagne on Jim. Jim took his shirt off because he was soaking wet. He shouts, "Let's see a little skin! Let's get naked!" And clothes started to come off, shirts over the head and bras being thrown up.
JAC: On the tape Jim is taunting and provoking, shouting, crescendo. Now he says the crowd hasn't come for music, they want something more—they want to see his cock. The crowd goes wild.
RAY MANZAREK: It was like a beast—Wheeeuuuggghhh! Growwwlll! Some girls were screaming, "No! No!" Other girls were screaming, "Yes! Yes!"
JAC: Where had this come from? And why this night?
RAY MANZAREK: The week before, in LA, Jim had seen the Living Theater, Julian Beck and Judith Malina's group, every performance. They stripped right down, they were doing all kinds of stuff: "I'm not allowed to walk naked if I want to, I'm not allowed to travel without a passport." That sort of thing, and they did it brilliantly—
BILL SIDDONS:—Running through the audience, yelling things into your face. "I am not allowed to smoke marijuana!" They'd say that twenty or thirty times, and then they'd go, "I'm not allowed to expose my breasts!" and women would start taking their tops off in the audience. Jim was profoundly affected by how into the moment this brought people. It probably best reflected what Jim was really all about. From the time I knew him, he did things to provoke people, because he felt that's when they were most real.
RAY MANZAREK: Jim was doing his own mini-version of the Living Theater in the Dinner Key Auditorium. But he hadn't told the Doors. We had no idea what he was going to do. All we knew was that he was late to the gig, and we're in Miami, and he starts taking his clothes off.
JAC: But did he or didn't he expose himself? If it had happened it would have been a sight to remember.
BRUCE BOTNICK: The Great White Shaft.
RAY MANZAREK: The sheer heft! An avenger! A terrible object! The destroyer!
JAC: But no one with the best viewing angle actually saw the weapon being brandished. No one backstage. And no one on stage—not Ray, not Robby, not John.
VINCE TREANOR: Ray said, "Vince, Vince, don't let him take his pants down!" I came up behind Jim and put my fingers into his belt loops and tweaked, making his pants tight, so he couldn't unbuckle them or unsnap them if he was going to. I put my elbows on my hips and lifted his pants up. I think I lifted his pants hard enough so that he was choking on his whatzit down there. If he ever reached down there and pulled the thing out, that's a pretty long haul to pull it up over his pants when they're tucked up under your chin. I had him. I was literally curling him by his pants. Whether he opened his belt or not, whether he opened his fly or not, doesn't make any difference.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: With all those instamatic cameras, there's not one photograph.
VINCE TREANOR: Absolutely no pictures of any whimwham being seen.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: I think he created a mass hallucination. I'm sure he was making lewd moves. That was Jim. I think people chose to believe they saw what they didn't see.
JAC: With cops by the dozen all around, the show is not stopped, it lurches on. Jim continues to shout to the crowd to come up on stage. It turns into a mob scene.
VINCE TREANOR: The stage starts to collapse, the whole right rear quarter of it starts to come down, amplifiers are falling backwards, and we're talking about nearly a ton of amplifiers on each side of the stage. Plus one quarter of John's drum platform is on the collapsing side of the stage. The police start screaming to clear the hall.
JAC: The promoter's karate brother throws Jim off the stage—
VINCE TREANOR:—Stiff-armed him right off the platform.
JAC: Jim lands OK—that amazing physical control in the midst of chaos—and he snake-dances out, the crowd now transformed into Eve's serpent, following after him.
VINCE TREANOR: When the place is empty, people move in to start cleaning up. When they finished picking up the clothes there was a pile, my guess, twelve to sixteen feet in diameter and nearly six feet high with no wearers. Panties, bras, jockstraps, swimming suits, boys' underwear of every size, color and description, pants, dresses, shirts, jackets, shoes, socks, stockings, garters.
What did those kids wear home? How do you explain to Mom when you walk in without any pants or a dress?
JAC: Later, Jim said two things that were classic Morrison. First, he said he didn't remember even being in Miami. Second, when Pam asked him whether or not he did it, he leaned over and whispered, "You really want to know?" Pam nodded yes. Jim replied, wearing his sheepish, little boy look, "I did it." Why? "I wanted to see how it looked in the spotlight."
BILL SIDDONS: They issued an arrest warrant, a fugitive warrant for Jim.
JAC: Lewd and lascivious behavior, a felony. And five misdemeanors—one count of public drunkenness, two of public profanity, and two for indecent exposure, which always confused me since I thought he had only one set of genitals.
JACLYN EASTON: When Jim came to the house, I refused to come out of my room. My mother didn't know why I wouldn't come out and say hello, and I couldn't tell her why. I was afraid that Jim was going to pull his pants down.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: There were several ages of Jim, from the time I met him. And each one of them seems like a creation, a character that Jim seemed to actively create and manipulate in his exploration of the human soul—his experiments into the lowest common denominator, the wild edge of life. He was a driven person. He created these personae to explore places where you and I wouldn't go.
I think Miami freed him in a way: "I give my notice that this is not my medium and I'm bailing out." It took him a year and a half, two years to pull free, but in the old theatrical sense that moment was the denouement for Jim as a rock star. He broke the mold he himself had cast. He killed his James Dean.
JAC: A black cloud descended over the Doors. I felt badly for the boys, Bill Siddons, the many who adored Jim and for the people at Elektra who had worked so hard. The Doors were smart enough to know that most artists have a success cycle which is time-limited. You do as well as you can for as long as you can. An artist can influence his own cycle for good or bad. Jim had made this wrenching, violent move for reasons I'm not sure even he himself knew, although I thought that down deep it all made some kind of sense to him. Jim was now in another world. He had separated from the rest of us because he had to. We would survive, and I was certain that Miami wouldn't stop the group from recording, but the future certainly looked dark. Melancholy was the mood of the day.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: Promoters all over the country were canceling their shows as fast as the Doors could answer the telephone.
ROBBY KRIEGER: All the hall managers were alerted to us nasty boys.
VINCE TREANOR: We were the polluted, we were the untouchables, contagious.
JAC: And in the middle of all the confusion, the Doors were scheduled to go into the studio for their next album.
BRUCE BOTNICK: As Elektra started to grow, and there was not now just ten, twenty people, it was getting up into the hundred-plus, Jac couldn't spend the time with the artists that he used to, the real creative time. And Paul would get into a very protective mode with the Doors, because as Morrison got more out of control, Paul became the Doors in some respect. You have to understand, we made six Doors albums in a two-and-a-half-year period. Very, very prodigious. And during the whole time with the Doors, Paul was the ringmaster of the circus, because we had every band known in the Sixties coming to the sessions, and everybody was getting high, everybody was juiced, it was a circus all the time. When I look back on it, it's amazing we made any records at all, and the only thing I can say about it is that I wasn't wrecked and Paul wasn't wrecked. Paul always had a very good viewpoint, he could stand aside from it, but he knew that without him there would be no records.
"Soft Parade" was a very, very tough album. We were going through hell. Jim was all over the place, and until that court thing in Miami was settled there was a real pall, a real lack of focus.
Paul was doing his best to keep the whole thing from drowning. We didn't have all the material that we wanted, and Paul, trying to make a better album, decided it was time to add horns and strings. I disagreed with the tack he was taking. I didn't feel it was true to the Doors. I had pretty heavy arguments with him. And I remember on one of Jac's visits to LA, he and Paul got into a huge battle about concept.
JAC: I wanted to stick with the clean Doors sound as much as possible.
BRUCE BOTNCK: Paul's position was, "This is all I have, and so I have do something to make these songs work, and this is what I'm going do. You don't like it? That's tough. You want a record? You've got to let me finish it my way. If not, no record." I'd never seen Jac lose his cool before, but they got into a screaming argument. Nobody won.
JAC: "Soft Parade" is released in July 1969, goes gold, and the single, 'Touch Me,' with its horns blaring, shoots to the top of the charts.
