Published: September 13th, 1969 - Toronto Star
Copyright © Jack Batten
*Note: All efforts have been made to reproduce the above article as it was originally published.
Jim Morrison: The rock singer who carries demons inside him
By Jack Batten
SPECIAL TO THE STARHOLLYWOOD
"Yeah, it's been a creative summer for me." Jim Morrison, the vocalist and song-writer of the Doors, was saying softly and thoughtfully "In September, really just this month everything's coming together."
Morrison - the headliner at the rock revival festival today in Toronto's Varsity stadium-was sitting in the Doors' office, a skinny, cluttered two-story building at 8512 Santa Monica Boulevard, next door to a topless-bottomless club where Morrison sometimes does his drinking.
It was morning, and he had on an old pair of black-and-white striped workman's pants and a rumpled shirt. He'd cut off his beard, the thick, black whiskers that had made him resemble an unlikely cross between Che Guevera and a Talmudic scholar, and he'd cropped his hair shorter than he'd ever worn it since he had begun his career as a big-time singer and sex symbol three years ago. His skin was pale, and his eyes, when the sunlight caught them through the window, were bright and dangerous. He talked slowly, and his conversation was edited with pauses and sighs and the silences of reflection. He seemed wasted.
Maybe his low-key mood saved something to the accumulated belief that the police department of the United States have visited on him. More likely, it grew out of his long summer of accomplishments - concerts presented, film scripts written, other films shot and edited, books of poetry prepared for publication, recording dates rehearsed. More likely still, he was simply zapped from his work of the night before. 14 hours, from 2pm to 4am, mixing the music soundtrack for a 35mm color short he'd made called Hiway.
"It's a lyrical piece." Morrison was saying. "It lasts half an hour. No plot line. Essentially just a silent movie. It follows a hitchhiker from out of the mountains until he comes down into the city and it ends there. It has a non-rock music track. A friend of mine, a classical composer named Fred Myrow, plays keyboard music on the track, and then we mixed in tapes and records and random stuff off the radio into a collage that gives you a kind of portrait of Los Angeles. And yeah, yeah, I play the hitchhiker."
Then he explained how Hiway was the third movie he'd worked on, how he'd been into film long before his participation in American rock 'n' roll, studying filmmaking at UCLA, and about how he had taken part in the hard, grinding technical details of his films. He wasn't merely a performer but a technician as well.
And he wrote, too. He had recently finished a feature-length screen play, working with a poet and novelist named Michael McClure on an adaptation of The Adept, McClure's novel.
Now they were looking for financing, for a producer who'd give them half a million dollars and the freedom to make the movie the way they've written it.
"And Simon and Schuster are going to bring out a collection of my poetry next spring." Morrison went on, sitting on a sofa in the office, a coffee mug in his hand, one foot curled under his thigh. "All these things, all these fields go together for the film and the poetry and music. My poetry is based on imagery rather than language and so's film, I guess. And music.. uh music connects a lot of things."
Yeah, right, you thought sitting there, nodding at the things Jim Morrison had to say nodding, agreeing, liking it all. Great. And you hardly bothered to pay any attention to that other question hanging around at the back of your mind - this quiet, sensible, intelligent, very nice guy, this is infamous Jim Morrison, the Jim Morrison who's at the centre of all the lip-smacking stories you'd read in the rock 'n' roll press?
The stories all present him acting out a role best described in Mike Jahn's recent book about the Doors, a role as "the Sex-Death, Acid-Evangelist of Rock, a sort of Hell's Angel of the groin."
They inevitably dwell on his conviction last year for giving an indecent performance in New Haven, Connecticut, and go on to wonder exactly what did happen anyway on stage at the Dinner Key Auditorium in Miami last March 2 that led the police of Dade County to issue six arrest warrants against Morrison, including one for a felony charging "lew and lascivious behavior in public."
It's those charges, as all the stories make clear, that got the Doors banned from performing in at least half a dozen American cities, and, what's far worse, that could lock Jim Morrison away in an evil southern prison for a couple of years, depending on the result of his hearing later in the autumn.
But, you thought, pondering the image of that Morrison, ever since you'd arrived in Los Angeles, Jim Morrison's friends and co-workers had been assuring you that, listen man, Jim doesn't exactly live in a cage. I mean, man, he's not some kind of wild nut or anything.
"Jim used to have a lot of little demons inside him." Bill Siddons, the Doors young, bright, cool manager, had said, "but I don't think he has so many any more."
And Leon Barnard, an assistant manager in charge of a lot of Doors things, had tried to enunciate even more specifically the special enigma of Morrison's public troubles. The Doors and their people have gathered themselves into a tight, cozy group - "like a family" Barnard put it - and part of the group's function, perhaps instinctive, is to gently enclose Morrison inside the unit, warding away from him the dumbness of the outside world.
"Jim is together 99 per cent of the time," Barnard had explained carefully. "but when he flips, as we all do, he really goes strong, I mean, if you or I did anything out of the ordinary, nobody would pay any attention. But if Jim does the slightest thing, the whole world's watching him.
But the vibes are all good with Jim these days." Barnard had said. "It's a good time to see him. He's very eager and he if likes you he'll talk, if he doesn't he won't say much. It's very natural, given everything that's happened to him."
Then Barnard, who had a neat red beard and whose vocation is easily painting and drawing, had gone on to describe a little of Morrison's tranquil life. Jim had a place by the beach, he said, out in Pacific Palisades. He had a girl and a dog. And he attracted a lot of creative kids like the boy, around 21, who'd hitchhiked all the way down from Seattle to show Morrison a large pictured he'd painted.
Well, all right, you thought, still sitting there in the Doors' office, asking Morrison questions and listening to the slowly unfolding answers, all right, he's a complex guy. But, as he talked, it became clear that he didn't mind giving away pieces of himself. He was, he casually revealed, interested in intimacy and in exploring all kinds of unknown psychic territory and in testing a few barriers, just out of curiosity, and he was interested in threatrical effects in the theatre of rock and of word and of action.
He wasn't hiding anything. You suspected he rarely did.
And starting at a simple level in the range of opinions he laid down that morning, he said he was mildly uneasy about the circumstances of the Toronto Rock Revival Festival, where the Doors are performing today.
"We're at our best in intimate theatres, in old places." he said. "Things get dissipated in a lot of open space. They're lost before they reach the audience. But then it may be our fault, not the arena's or the stadium's. Maybe we just haven't found the right spirit for big places."
Still, in his own mind, he couldn't help comparing the prospects for Toronto with the triumphant concert a few weeks earlier at the Aquarius Theater in Los Angeles. The concert, two long sets, was recorded for inclusion on the Doors next album, and it was the group's first appearance in their home town for a year.
"There were 1,500 people filling the theatre." Morrison recalled, "and the excitement that they generated communicated to us. I believe we played very well, very strongly. It felt that way."
And during the second set Morrison had offered one of his great spontaneous gestures. He had disappeared from the stage and reappeared suddenly on a scaffol over the heads of the rest of the band. He was bathere in a blue light and he sang a few choruses of Celebration of the Lizard. Then he grabbed a rope that hung from the ceiling, pushed off into space, swooped over the stage, lifted his boots just in time to avoid smashing into a giant amplifier and landed gracefully on the platform.
Errol Flynn of the pyschedelic age! A magnificent moment, a touch of theatre, a move to galvanize the audience, a change, a thrill. And it worked, the impact on the crowd in the auditorium was stunning.
"I don't think we'll take too many tracks from the recording at Aquarius for the album." Morrison allowed. "The concert was fine, but what makes a great evening of theatre doesn't necessarily make great music. A lot of it is physical and you can't get that feeling on tape. It isn't the kind of thing you'd want to listen to over and over on a record."
Ah, yes, yes, you thought, always the theatre, and its true that these days Morrison is involving himself more and more in film. The phone calls that came into the office for him that morning dealt rarely with the rock 'n' roll business, but frequently with the film business.
The prospects of making his and McClure's feature-length movie are almost consuming Morrison. Besides co-writing it, preparing a score and ushering it through production, Morrison plans to play the lead role.
"The character, Nicholas, is a young man who is on a spiritual search but doesn't know." Morrison explained. "He has long hair. He rides a chopper to which he's very attached. He carries a trunk around with him that contains some strange things-a Scottish cape, a knife in a scabbard, an Indian print of a lion god extracting a head from a sacrificial victim. And... well. I can't talk too much about him or I don't like to. I want to keep the character loose. I have to play him when the time comes."
And at that point, Morrison decided that enough time for talking had gone by, that he should head over to the Elektra studios across La Cienega where the Doors were working on more tracks for the new album. He stood up and, you thought, he looked slightly heavier than he does in his photographs and movies and on television, not as purely sexy, more serious, more like a man who makes his moves deliberately and with purpose.
"I'll have to go alone," Morrison said. "It's the first day in the studio and if the others knew there was a journalist around, they might be uptight. They'd have to watch things they said."
But Morrison pressed a couple of books on his elegantly bound private editions of his poems and of his relfections on film as an art form. He shook hands and walked to the door and looked friendly in a shy way.
And I went next door and ordered a beer in the empty topless-bottomless club, opened up the book of poems, The New Creatures, and began on the first page to look for Jim Morrison:
Snake-skin jacket
Indian eyes
Brilliant hair
He moves in disturbed
Nile insect
Air
* Jack Batten writes on pop music and jazz for The Star
Copyright © Jack Batten