Life on Planet Rock

by Lonn Friend

  What’s transpiring at the opening date of the Harley-Davidson Open Road Tour on the dusty floor of the California Speedway forty miles east of Los Angeles is utterly hypnotic. The Hog tribe is here, connected by a love for the road and rock ‘n’ roll.

  If one was flying on earthen chemicals in some hallucinogenic Castaneda dream state and happened into this odd, amazing two-wheel tribal assembly by accident, the sight of the Cult’s Ian Astbury wailing Jim Morrison would at least inspire a serious double-take. But on this warm Indian summer evening, it is he who sells sanctuary to those long awaiting the return of the Lizard King.

  When the surviving members of the Doors reunited to perform at a biker festival in September 2002, no one was sure if it was the beginning of a new era for the seminal L.A. band or just some mad experiment. That day in Ontario, California, I watched an old friend realize a long-held dream while getting my first glimpse of a subculture that is absolutely devoted to the spirit of freedom.

  I had last physically encountered the artist Astbury in December 2001. The Cult was opening for Aerosmith in Miami. Ian and his alter-ego sidekick, guitarist Billy Duffy, had buried a very rusty hatchet and started to make music again. They’d signed a fat new deal with Lava/Atlantic Records, reunited with Bob Rock, whose production guidance had taken them to multiplatinum a decade before with the LP Sonic Temple.

  But as had often occurred in an industry of no guarantees, the new record failed to find its audience, and the Cult’s revivification was put on permanent hold. Ian blamed the label, the industry, the earth, the moon, and the Milky Way. His vitriol was inconsistent with the enlightened traveler that a year previously had marched with the Tibetan Sherpas to base camp, where a near-death experience worked its cosmic magic to reveal the soul beneath the star.

  My weekly Internet radio show on KNAC.com, Breath of Fire, debuted on the summer solstice 2000. From 8 to 10 P.M., PST, every Wednesday night, I went out live on the Web across the globe, playing and saying whatever I wanted to. I was given complete freedom to spin eclectic and rap uncensored.

  As in the Pirate Radio days, I had guests in studio every week. Ian stopped by our Santa Monica studio one evening, and I devoted the entire two hours to him. We discussed the days of Guns N’ Roses and the long rift between Axl and Slash. “You should mediate their reunion, Lonn,” he said. “No, I’m serious. You’re the perfect guy to do it. And if [Cult guitarist] Billy Duffy and I can get along again, anyone can. It’s really all about ego.” We went on to discuss his spiritual journey, more specifically the trip to the Himalayas, where he was stricken with severe frostbite and almost died. I identified with the changes he was going through.

  I said good-bye to my listeners on June 21, 2001, and Breath of Fire morphed from sound to word, continuing as a semiregu-lar missive that I’d distribute to my considerable e-mail list. Years before blogs, this was my online journal where I’d rant on the state of music, mankind, and anything else that happened to be passing through my fingers. Essays on everything from my blind goldfish to the Zen brilliance of L.A. Laker basketball coach Phil Jackson found their way into the virtual mailboxes of hundreds of friends and acquaintances from disparate parts of the globe. I’d receive responses ranging from complete adulation to “It might be time to seek professional help, Lonn.”

  Six weeks after September 11, I took a walk to Ground Zero with a group of dear New Yorkers. I reported the experience to my audience. On October 19, 2001, the subject of my mass mailing read “Something Wicked/Something Wonderful.”

  I am there, in the throes of catastrophe. I see the panic in the streets, the plumes of raging fire; chaos, destruction, hysteria. Hell in its first domestic manifestation; a three-dimensional Robert Williams painting of incomparable and disturbing detail. My mind’s eye spies on the offices evaporated in a nuclear instant. How many saints were lost? How many scumbags? It doesn’t matter now. The souls have all left the building.

  Where we stand, here in this once bustling garden of commerce, creativity, greed, and goodness, swollen with grand New York gestalt, there is damage, sadness, and great loss. This site is now sacred land. Forever it will possess Holocaust importance, an eternal reminder to generations of Homo sapiens who venture forth from this spot, that it was here, on that day, that everything changed. Our descent and destruction, or ascent and salvation, depend on where we go from here.

  Ian Astbury became one of Breath of Fire’s most loyal readers, as did unlikely rockers like Def Leppard’s Joe Elliott, WA.S.P.’s Blackie Lawless, and Mötley Crüe’s Tommy Lee. They wrote back to me, often reflecting the same quandary with civilization as I. Most of my audience didn’t respond, but I had a sense they were out there, listening and digesting. The twenty-four months between March 2000 and April 2002, when I sporadically composed and delivered Breath of Fire, represented a period of unprecedented truthful communication for me. Perhaps someday, I’ll gather those essays into a book, a time capsule of a writer and a world at the brink.

  But when I met up with the Cult singer after the Aerosmith gig in Miami, I found a different Ian Astbury. “This isn’t you, man,” I said. “The Cult comeback wasn’t meant to be. Let it go. The record business is a falling kingdom. This is just a door closing. Another one will open.” Ian was bottoming out on that fateful winter’s night. So was I, for that matter. I hadn’t worked in four months, and I had no clue where my next dime was coming from. The following morning, George Harrison died.

  Then an e-mail arrived in August 2002 from a friend pointing me to a news item on the Web dropping hints that the Doors were preparing to tour again, but with a new vocalist. I saw Ian’s name in the item and it took about ten seconds to process what I’d just read. Fucking genius! I said to myself. I sent Ian a note, asking for confirmation of the rumor, and he responded with humble brevity. “It’s true, mate,” he said. “I’m terrified.”

  When I found out that the big event was taking place at the speedway outside Fontana (birthplace of Sammy Hagar and occasional hang for skinheads and neo-Nazis—no correlation, of course), my first inclination was to complain about the venue and skip the gig. I was forty-six years old and my lower back wasn’t what it used to be. And what did I know about the society of two-wheeled, motorized wanderlust? My only bike experience was the Schwinn ten-speed I owned as a teenager. I don’t wear leather or eat much red meat. Come to think of it, in junior high, I had the classic Fonda/Hopper Hog poster from Easy Rider on my bedroom wall (until my mother ripped it down).

  I got to the concert site three hours before the first act of the day, local Latino legends Los Lobos, hit the stage. I took a seat on the grass near the entrance and watched the parade of fans. As they would all day, Morrison’s lyrics floated about my brain. The people looked strange but I was the stranger. “We’re all born to be wild for at least a few days,” read a poster promoting the three-day event that would also see Billy Idol, Stone Temple Pilots, George Clinton, Journey, Nickelback, and Kid Rock perform.

  They marched by me, two by two, mostly couples, men and women, many in their forties and fifties, hand in hand, having just parked their motorcycles in the special Hog lot, located closest to the front gate. The choppers were of all makes, models, colors, designs, and years, lined up domino-style across the asphalt.

  Typically, these strident individuals are pigeonholed as hard, tough, and unwaveringly patriotic. But that’s incomplete. I strolled the grounds all day, talked to these fascinating folks, and found they were freedom lovers, wanderers, thrill seekers, rolling across America on a red-white-and-blue carpet of confidence and conviction. Beneath their rugged carriages lay human engines that purred soft, smooth, and strong.

  One woman with ass-length silver hair and a pair of painted arms that would have given Tommy Lee a run for his ink told me that she and her “old man” had come all the way from Austin. “I’m fifty-two years old and we stopped to make love every five hundred miles!” she said.

  “What are you talking about, girl?” in
terrupted her rugged but less-illustrated partner. “I nailed you twice between Phoenix and Palm Springs! Ha-ha!”

  A T-shirt stand was doing brisk business to my direct right. A classic Harley dude was massaging his cell phone, his long, silver hair pulled back into a ponytail, held taut by a red bandana. His faded Levi’s toted a healthy chain of keys that jangled whenever his heavily tattooed arms rose in gesticulation. “I met this gal in San Diego yesterday,” he blurted into the tiny receiver, his four-inch bearded chin supporting a wide, wicked smile. “She gave me her number. We’re gonna hook up. Yeah. The San Diego Street Scene said that Steve Stills and Slash are playing …”

  This man seemed to have no cares, no anxieties. I was in awe of how comfortable he was simply being himself. He didn’t need to shape-shift to fit the moment or situation. He required no one’s approval, and no matter how burned out he appeared, one thing was obvious: my man was getting his carnal chrome polished with great regularity. That theme would recur over and over again throughout the day. These folks enjoyed life. I envied their seemingly boundless liberation.

  The distance from the box office to the exhibit area and main stage was at least that of five football fields. Laminated lads and lasses buzzed about in motorized golf carts while I hoofed it.

  Two hours before the Doors’ scheduled start time, I managed to get backstage, where I was greeted straightaway by Danny Sugerman, band manager and coauthor (with Jerry Hopkins) of the first rock ‘n’ roll book I ever read, No One Here Gets Out Alive, the original, quintessential biography of the Doors. I’d encountered Danny several times over the course of my twenty-year career.

  In the mid ‘90s, during my Arista Records stint, Danny and Doors drummer John Densmore brought a singer-songwriter named John Coinman to my office for a meeting. Coinman was a very special, soft-spoken music man from Tucson, Arizona, whose songs harkened back to Tim Buckley and early Jackson Browne. But he was in his late forties; it didn’t matter whether he had a “Doctor My Eyes” in his musical bag of tricks or not, Clive Davis would not have been interested. We were looking for hot, new talent, fresh, young meat to tenderize for mass consumption. John was like a fine wine, aged, full-bodied, poetic. His product was too hard to sell. This was but one of the umpteen reasons I loathed the modern record business.

  “Hi, Danny,” I said, offering my hand in reconnection. He appeared immediately fragile to me. We dispensed with superfluous pleasantries as he commenced to chronicle the last six years of his life—a period that included both addiction and cancer. Danny’s story read like a prurient bestseller with two silver linings. First, his solid marriage to Iran-Contra poster boy Oliver North’s former secretary, Fawn Hall, and second, the reason we were all gathered tonight, out here, at a bikerfest in the Inland Empire: the resurrection of the Doors.

  “I’ve been working on this for ten years,” he confessed to me. “For the first time, the presentation feels right. Ian is perfect. No one really knew what would happen until everyone got in a room and started playing. And they’ve only rehearsed seven times. But something’s going on here.”

  I was out of the loop until I learned a few minutes later that John Densmore was missing the party due to a serious case of tinnitus, the maddening earringing affliction that’s haunted rock legends from Pete Townshend to Jeff Beck. But as the saying goes, “Out of adversity comes opportunity.” Enter Police percussion patriarch Stewart Copeland to fill the seat in the back.

  Danny is a year older than I am. We both grew up in Los Angeles. While I was typing my biology notes after a brain-freeze day at Grant High School—often to the vinyl vibrations of The Soft Parade, Strange Days, and Morrison Hotel—Danny was hanging out on Sunset Boulevard or in the canals of Venice with his mentor Morrison. He was there, in the company of the Lizard, as rock’s Rimbaud slinked about the City of Angels in search of the devil.

  Danny was the original, unwitting, rock-’n’-roll fly on the wall. He had the all-access pass to the five-year Season in Hell tour that ended abruptly on July 3, 1971, in Paris, France, when the incandescent star Jim Morrison suddenly burned out at age twenty-seven. French poet Arthur Rimbaud, the alienated genius with whom Morrison deeply identified, languished until he was thirty-six, though he’d written the bulk of his verses before his eighteenth birthday. Jim wanted to die in Paris, or so it’s been said. Even Danny wasn’t hangin’ with him that dark day in the City of Lights. No one was.

  My heart sank in Danny’s presence. He was wearing the mask of suffering, something I recognized well after the past several maddening midlife spins of the globe. “Fawn and I want to have a baby,” he confessed. His voice trailed off before constructing the next sentence. “We’ll see what happens with the cancer.” That was the last time I saw Danny Sugerman. He succumbed to the Big C on January 5, 2005, joining his shaman, hero, and friend on the other side of eternity.

  “Hey, man, glad you could make it,” uttered Ian, his short dark curly hair hanging down his brow, not unlike the way Jim used to wear it in the early days, before the bloat, the beard, and the bon voyage. The sexy Jim, you remember him? The Morrison that the young Eddie Vedder emulated with true emotional angst.

  “I like the cut,” I said. “The resemblance is a bit, uh, scary.”

  A reserved smile crept to the surface. “This is how my hair naturally looks,” he replied, shyly. That day back in 1990 when Ian came to my house on my thirty-fourth birthday with Axl and Sebastian, his hair was jet black and practically scraped the floor. His girlfriend at the time told me that before gigs, she would iron it in the dressing room.

  “I think this is amazing, Ian,” I said. “I can hear you sing the songs in my head.”

  He pulled me close. “Lonn, I’m fucking scared shitless,” he whispered. And for good reason. He’d idolized Morrison since he was toddler with a turntable back in Merseyside, England. What was transpiring on this mystical eve was no accident.

  “Remember talking in Miami?” I said. “Talk about another door opening! ‘God leads you to it; God leads you through it.’ ”

  He smiled, twitched, and replied, “I think I’ll just sing my ass off.”

  Ian Astbury was not always this self-effacing, gentle, respectful of a rock star. He and Billy Duffy locked horns over egotistical minutiae that would make even a five-star asshole retch with disgust. But he went through it; his career ebbed, flowed, and ebbed again. When he hit bottom in December of 2001, he was being tested. Like Job, he suffered. Like Job, he was about to rise again to heights unimagined. Like Job, he had been waiting for the sun, and it was about to shine in the desert darkness of California’s smoggy Inland Empire.

  “Lord, have mercy!” cried the evening’s master of ceremonies, veteran L.A. disc jockey Jim Ladd. He approached the mike at the center of the stage with the same stoned-out swagger that had made him the grand high-exalted ruler of the airwaves for three decades. The crowd knew him and signaled their love with a resounding “Yeah!” I knew him because, like the Doors and Los Angeles, he was a part of where I came from. And it was Jim Ladd’s smoky, soothing voice that came to me in my room that ebony night December 8, 1980—Morrison’s birthday—and informed me of the news. The news that Lennon was dead and the music was over.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, from Los Angeles, California, the Doors!”

  It’d been almost thirty years to the day since that introduction landed on the ears of a concert audience. The Hollywood Bowl, an hour and ten down the road, September 10, 1972. Keyboardist Ray Manzarek and guitarist Robby Krieger, the instrumental alchemists who transmuted Morrison’s poetry into song, stroked their familiar weapons of melody as Ian stood stoic and prepared to channel the most notorious and revered ghost in rock history. The instant the first line to “Roadhouse Blues” left his tongue, the fear was gone, the crowd was engaged, the clouds parted, and the ceremony had begun.

  Well, I woke up this morning, and I got myself a beer!

  I watched him carefully during the first song. He was gor
geous, powerful, sensitive, and clever, driven from note one by that inexplicable something that only an artist flying on the wings of expression can understand.

  “Break on Through”—the metaphysical ballad that birthed a man, a band, a vibe, a cult, a city a movement, and a myth—followed. The thematic foundation of the Doors’ artistic mission was cemented in the embryonic grooves of the band’s 1967 self-titled debut. At the height of Beatlemania, this was something entirely new. Ray Manzarek’s keyboard, Robby Krieger’s guitar, and John Densmore’s drums, sans bass for the most part, this curious concoction bred aural textures that morphed from stripped-down bluesy garage to psychedelic symphony.

  “When the Music’s Over” floated by next. Almost every Doors LP with the exception of Morrison Hotel finished with an apocalyptic multilayered anthem. This was the ethereal masterpiece that closed out Strange Days, the Doors’ second LP, released a scant ten months after their debut.

  “Love Me Two Times” and “Alabama Song” were mischievous numbers that served as foreplay for the big bang. “I’m a backdoor man!” roared Ian, his vocal confidence now ascending exponentially. This was Morrison’s homage to the “other guy,” the sleazy fella from the across the tracks who knew the right moves and juicy words not just to find the little girl’s emerald city, but how to get there through the dirty back road.

  During “5 to 1,” from 1968’s Waiting for the Sun, Ian began to levitate. I mouthed the lyrics and glanced over at Danny, standing off to the left. I could see that he was pleased. How could he not be? What was taking place ten feet away from us was miraculous. At age sixty-three, the virtuoso Manzarek tweaked his ivory palette with youthful precision and grace. He addressed the crowd with a nod, a wink, a fist, and a flowing Hammond B3 knuckle-thumping noodle designed to humble the cocky kiddies who think their shit is lavender. Read ‘em and weep. Jim and Ian were not the only ones reborn that night.