Tales of the Ancient Rocker -- The Doors

The Doors 'UNABLE TO CONFIRM MORRISON DEATH AND AM LEERY OF IT' Talk to the man portrayed on the book cover below -- but that would be kind of hard, wouldn't it? -- you might hear that I'm the guy who shook his hand and put him on the floor, coiled atop his black leather pants, writhing in fake pain and crying "oh man, you broke my hand." That's what you get when you drink at nine in the morning, especially in L.A., where they're nowhere near as good at it as they are in the Irish dives in Manhattan. Morrison continued to get drunk and, a while later, emerged from a back room of Sunset Sound, the recording studio where this scene occurred, and threatened to kill everyone in the room "except my friends." The victims would, I suppose, be fellow rock critic and New Yorker Richard Goldstein and me. Morrison made a song out of the drunken death threat. I made a book out of the man, the one pictured, the first of many by many writers. The Doors asked for half the $2,000 advance I got for Jim Morrison and the Doors: An Unauthorized Biography. I said that this was ridiculous -- especially since it cost me $800 just to get to L.A. and stay for a week. So I added an "un" to the intended "authorized biography." The book got me mentioned by name in his Rolling Stone obituary. The $1 cover price notwithstanding, the book now goes for $140 on the Doors collectors market. What did Ben Fong-Torres write about me in Rolling Stone? "Billy James, doing publicity, would later connect the Doors to the top pop writers back then, Richard Goldstein and Mike Jahn, especially the latter, who'd later precede Morrison as the Lizard King with his book on the Doors, chief among them." Goldstein went on to come out of the closet, write about gay issues, and become executive editor of The Village Voice. Morrison went on to die. I only found out about the Lizard King thing a year or two ago when I Googled myself and saw the Ben Fong-Torres's Rolling Stone obituary of Morrison online. I got in touch with Ben, apologized for taking more than three decades to read his piece, and asked what he had in mind by proclaiming me the original Lizard King. He said that he wrote the obit in an all-nighter in L.A. and has no idea what he had in mind. "But you're welcome to be the Lizard King if you want to," he added. As Civil War General William Sherman said, "If nominated, I will not run; if elected, I will not serve." In a 1998 interview with Rolling Stone, Ray Manzarek answered a question about what today's rockers find in the Doors' music: "They hear the jazz-rock elements in there, they hear the John Coltrane and the Miles Davis and they hear Jim's southern-gothic Carson McCullers-Tennessee Williams-Arthur Rimbaud-French symbolist poetry, and they hear the blues, and they hear the honest commitment to the music. This is why we can't let the fascists joke about the Sixties and the counter culture. Because we were honestly, deeply committed to the music, there was no cynicism. We believed. There was no irony. There's no irony in the Doors music." If you say so. If Morrison thought he was William Blake, certainly Ray Manzarek is allowed to compare himself to John Coltrane and Miles Davis. He played some of the same notes. It has recently come to my attention that I use several of the same words as James Joyce. If the Doors had no irony, as Manzarek told Rolling Stone, they also had no humility. They were, I suppose, the first gothic rock band. They were dark and ominous and sensual, sort of a white, L.A. version of Hendrix's erotic and dangerous guitar playing. Morrison was the most self-destructive person I ever met, and that includes a number of seriously balmy Broadway flameouts I knew from my novelist days and a couple of multiple-substance-abusing, wowie kinky-sex-practicing theatre types I met at Elaine's, all of whom remain alive despite many, many predictions to the contrary. Morrison also took himself more seriously than anyone I ever met. And it wasn't just me who noticed this. This past March, 2004, Will Hodgkinson wrote in Mojo of Morrison's 1967 affair with a fellow doomed artiste, Nico. She was the tall, blond German model and sort-of singer best known for fronting the Velvet Underground and turning her 18-year-old son onto heroin. "Morrison admired Nico not only for her beauty and elegant composure, but also for her ability to put away industrial quantities of beer. While the rest of the Factory crowd dismissed Morrison as a pretentious drunk, Nico called him her 'soul brother.'" The Andy Warhol Factory crowd knew just a little about pretension. (And also about weird scenes, whether or not inside gold mines. Listen to "A Walk on the Wild Side.") Generally speaking, most entertainers know that they're entertainers. Morrison should have heard the Moody Blues sing "I'm Just a Singer in a Rock and Roll Band." Consider this. My friend David Walley, the wise and astute cultural observer who wrote No Commercial Potential: The Saga of Frank Zappa, and Teenage Nervous Breakdown: Music and Politics in the Post-Elvis Age, lays the blame for Morrison's early death on L.A. "He should have moved to New York, where he would have been surrounded by other artists" who would act as a modifying force, David told me a month or two ago. Right. Living in the East Village, surrounded by thousands of poets, singers, and other artists -- not to mention eight million skeptics -- the first time he uttered "I am the lizard king" in public he would have heard something like "hey, yo! Check out this lizard king!" Morrison might have gone back to his apartment, sobered up, and rethought the entire doomed-poet thing. Which means he might still be around, still creating, honing his art, giving his fans what they deserved in return for their adulation -- a lifetime of creativity. Also, in New York Morrison would have learned to hold his liquor better. There's a great deal to be said on behalf of 4 a.m. closing times and not having to drive home. Instead, Morrison came of age in L.A., which for the most part is so artistically bereft that they lionize anyone who can put two words together. L.A. fed Morrison's tendency to inflate his own importance. Finally, he moved to Paris and fell in with Eurotrash pseudo-aristocracy, who did exactly the same thing. Shortly thereafter, he succeeded in drinking himself to a rather sordid death, laying in a bathtub covered with vomited-up pineapple chunks from sweet-and-sour Chinese takeout. I've only known one other man who actually drank himself to death. He was a writer, another warrior in the legion of the doomed whose way with words didn't save him. But Morrison could sing and write songs, and his use of words is very unique and interesting. Very unlike Dylan, Morrison used broad images. Dylan wrote of many specific details - a torrent of them, in fact: Jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule Ten words, four specific items in that one line from "Visions of Johanna." Not to touch the earth Not to see the sun Nothing left to do But run, run, run, let's run Twenty words, two very broad items - sun and earth. Morrison claimed to be a poet, and the most prominent feature of that craft is using a lot of words. He didn't, and the ones he used commonly were broad - running, jumping, touching, sun, earth. In any 20 words by Dylan you expect to find a cow bell, a pack of Luckies, a bottle of Dr. Pepper, a copy of The Communist Manifesto, a monkey, and a Volvo. He also could have tried harder to stay alive. Plenty of people out there miss him, me among them. I hated having to write his obituary, a piece of which shows how the rumors about faked death began. A cable came from the Paris bureau of The Times reading "UNABLE TO CONFIRM MORRISON DEATH AND AM LEERY OF IT." He could have tried way harder to stay alive. Apparently the subject was of minor interest to him. He had reached that point. Nothing left to do but run run run ..." Home to Tales of the Ancient Rocker Links The Doors Collector's Magazine The Doors Uncovered Go to top Home Rock in the Golden Age Rock Today Who am I? Notes Contact me