Jimi relocated to New York in 1964, performing under the stage name Maurice James. That spring he toured with the Isley Brothers, later with Curtis Knight and the Squires. Foolishly, he signed a three-year recording contract with Knight’s manager, Ed Chalpin, for a nominal advance of a dollar, a deal that caused problems in the future while doing little to help him in the short term. Indeed, by 1965 he was virtually down-and-out.
‘When we met him he was very poor. He had a guitar with no [strap], no amplifier,’ says David Brigati, a member of Joey Dee & the Starliters, with whom Jimi toured after the Squires, opening each night with their number one hit, ‘Peppermint Twist’. Brigati recalls that Jimi travelled light, with a single overnight bag in which he had a change of clothes and a set of hair curlers. ‘He was very shy and quiet … kind of soft-spoken.’ When he did speak, Hendrix had a habit of putting a hand to his face and talking between his fingers. His shyness didn’t impede his sex life. Brigati gives examples of Jimi’s prowess with women, including the night he met three Indian ladies in an elevator in Buffalo. ‘The next day he reported that he slept with all three.’ Another night Jimi took part in a threesome with a girl and another man in Brigati’s room, while Brigati ate dinner downstairs. ‘Afterwards she said it was the best night of her life.’ Although Jimi’s drug problems are usually thought to have started later, Brigati claims to have received a call one morning from one of Jimi’s girlfriends saying he’d overdosed on heroin in her room. ‘I said, “Do you love him?” She said, “Yes.” I said, “Then call the fucking police.” Those were my words. And she did, and he was [revived].’
Jimi Hendrix left the Starliters in 1965, for more money with King Kurtis, but he was weary of this journeyman life. He was in New York when he met the English model Linda Keith, then Keith Richards’s girlfriend. The Stones were big now, and Linda had come to New York ahead of the band’s summer tour of the United States. She befriended Jimi, introducing him to LSD, which would influence his work significantly, and encouraged him to strike out on his own, assuring him that he could be a star.
He began performing in the clubs of Greenwich Village with two sidemen as Jimmy James and the Blue Flames. Bob Dylan had got his break in the Village, and Jimi was a Dylan fan. The fact that Dylan had become a star with such a quirky voice encouraged Jimi to sing for the first time. Like Dylan, he had a distinctive way of phrasing, part-speaking lyrics, often with a chuckling laugh. Jimi included Dylan’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ in his set along with ‘Wild Thing’. He began to wear increasingly colourful outfits, letting his hair grow long and performing his stage tricks, including playing his guitar with his teeth, and behind his back. A buzz developed around this extraordinary guitarist.
When the Stones arrived in New York, members of the band came to the Village to see Jimi play. Linda Keith gave him one of Keith Richards’s guitars and asked Andrew Loog Oldham if he would manage him. Loog Oldham passed: it wasn’t his type of music. Linda Keith continued to sing Jimi’s praises to others, including Chas Chandler, bass player with the Animals, who wanted to get into management. Chandler asked Jimi if he would come to England. Jimi wasn’t sure. For the time being he continued to scratch a living in New York. The blues musician John Hammond Jr recalls Jimi as being semi-destitute, playing with borrowed equipment and desperate for money. ‘He said, “Could you get me a gig?”’ So Hammond arranged for Jimi to back him at the Cafe au Go Go on Bleecker Street where he had a residency, showcasing Jimi as part of his set. ‘It just turned out that everybody, a who’s who in New York at that time, came to the show. It was packed out every night … Anybody who heard this guy knew he was phenomenal and he was going to go places.’
At the end of the summer, Chas Chandler asked Jimi again to come to England, where he and his partner, Michael Jeffrey, would manage him. Jimi was dubious. He had never been outside North America. But having spent four years working his way up from nothing to penniless obscurity in his homeland, he had little to lose by going abroad. Two months before his 24th birthday he flew to London where his life was transformed.
3
Janis Joplin hitchhiked to San Francisco in January 1963 in search of the adventures Jack Kerouac’s characters found in the Bay Area. She arrived at a time when the subculture was in transition. The heyday of the beats was over, but hippie culture had not yet flowered. In-between was the tail end of the folk revival. Janis slipped into this milieu, singing country blues in coffee houses, relying on the hospitality of friends and lovers of both sexes. This was, as she later wrote, ‘my gay period’, though she had lesbian partners throughout her life. It was also a drug period. ‘Janis called herself a candle burning at both ends,’ says her flatmate Linda Gottfried.
Janis became a ‘meth freak’ in San Francisco, injecting Methedrine to get high. In common with many meth users she believed that speed energy helped creativity, allowing her to work all night on song lyrics and drawings. In the light of day, the quality of the work was often poor, and the user was left with jangled nerves. Many turned to heroin to come down, which may have been Janis’s introduction to the drug that killed her. Drugs in general came to dominate her life. ‘I wanted to smoke dope, take dope, lick dope, suck dope, fuck dope, anything I could lay my hands on I wanted to do it, man,’ she later admitted, with characteristic candour.
Janis dated a fellow user, Peter de Blanc, who took so much speed he was admitted to an asylum. Janis wanted to marry de Blanc, but she felt that she needed to get clean first, so she returned to Port Arthur in the summer of 1965 to recuperate. She came home in a shockingly wretched state: her body was emaciated, her clothes were dishevelled and her arms were punctured with needle marks. She spent the next few months in Texas trying to live a healthier, more conventional life, enrolling in college, even taking up country-club golf, as she planned for marriage to Peter de Blanc. The romantic fantasy dissolved when she realised her intended was seeing other women in San Francisco. Janis went into a depression and consulted a psychiatrist, telling him that she ‘wanted to be like normal people’. The psychiatrist advised her to accept herself as she was, while a doctor prescribed Librium, the same drug Amy Winehouse would take to smooth out her anxieties. Both women were a mass of neuroses. In a letter to Peter de Blanc, Janis wrote: ‘I want to be happy so fucking bad.’ One can imagine Amy saying the same.
In time Janis forgot de Blanc and started singing again. In March 1966 she accepted an invitation from a friend named Chet Helms to return to the Bay Area where the hippie renaissance was in full swing, the use of LSD having a dramatic effect on fashion, music and design in the city. Helms, who knew Janis as a singer, and was an important figure in the Bay Area music scene, wanted to put her together with Big Brother and the Holding Company, one of a number of happening rock ’n’ roll bands he was working with in and around San Francisco. Like the Grateful Dead, Big Brother was a family band whose members lived and worked in a communal house in an atmosphere that was intellectual and drug-oriented. Janis entered this stimulating world with a sense of excitement and foreboding.
Big Brother had two guitarists, Sam Andrew and James Gurley. Janis had a fling with both men, but she developed a particularly close and lasting friendship with Sam, who recalls her mixed feelings about returning to San Francisco after her earlier bad experience: ‘She’d failed in San Francisco and she’d gone home, tried to live a normal person’s life [and] tried to do everything her mother wanted her to do … She was probably frightened by her early San Francisco experiences. And then Chet wanted her to come back out to San Francisco a second time. She had a lot of trepidation about that … She was afraid that if she came back to the West Coast she would fall back into her same ways and die, and in essence that’s exactly what happened.’
Sam describes Janis as ‘very quick, really quick in her bodily movements, and in her thoughts and in her reactions to everything. She was very fast. She was highly intelligent and very focused on her career, more so than we were. We were kind of just a hipp
ie band, and we were kind of stumbling, bumbling around trying to find our way, and she kind of had her eye on the long trajectory, ironically enough. [And she was] a very funny person.’ Although Janis’s image is of a melancholic, Sam corrects this, saying that everything about Janis was magnified, the highs as well as the lows. In fact she displayed classic bipolar disorder. ‘She had more fun than anyone – that I know for sure. She really had a great time. And then she probably had a really miserable time, more miserable than anyone also.’
Big Brother had a small but loyal following in San Francisco, and some of their fans doubted that Janis was good enough to sing with the boys. There was perhaps some sexism. ‘I thought she was a rag … a cheap piece of shit clothing hung on a twig in a middle of a stiff breeze,’ says photographer Bob Seidemann, a close friend of the band, who later took an iconic nude photograph of Janis. He remembers that Janis dressed for the stage initially as if she was still at college, not yet wearing the satins, boas and extravagant hats she became known for. ‘She looked ratty. Her hair was unkempt. She was wearing a really crummy piece of clothing … She was a mess. She wasn’t good-looking, [and] I didn’t think her singing was all that good. In fact, the first time I heard her singing with the band I called the drummer over to say, “Get rid of the chick.”’
Janis was so nervous that she almost ran home to Texas. She didn’t have the experience to sing before large crowds at venues like the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco. She hardly had any songs prepared. Yet she grew in confidence onstage. ‘The music was boom, boom, boom! And the people were all dancing, and the lights [were going] and I was standing up there singing into this microphone and getting it on. And, whew, I dug it.’ Janis decided to stay in San Francisco, and Bob Seidemann was one of many who completely changed their mind about her. ‘I was lucky enough to be able to ask forgiveness of her, for my original opinion, because I went from a low regard to a high regard.’
4
While Janis Joplin was getting together with Big Brother in San Francisco, the Doors began their career in Los Angeles. There would be rivalry between the Doors and the Bay Area bands in the years ahead – as there always has been between the two great cities of California. The use of LSD, though, was common to all and a vital ingredient in the music being made.
Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek were both into LSD when they decided to form a band, using the drug to achieve ‘nirvana’, a word popular with the hippies as it caught the attention of Kurt Cobain decades later. Manzarek believes that he was ‘reborn’ during his first major trip: ‘I was a new Ray Manzarek.’ The drug had an equally profound effect on Jim, whom Manzarek invited home to stay with him and his girlfriend as they started to make music together, rehearsing initially with Ray’s brother’s band. They then recruited drummer John Densmore, whom Manzarek had met at a Transcendental Meditation meeting. Densmore had also dropped acid. Musically, his taste was jazz, which helped form the band’s unusual sound. Although not yet complete, Manzarek and Morrison had a name for the group. Manzarek recalls that Jim coined it that first day on the beach: the Doors.
‘You mean, like the Doors in your mind … Like Aldous Huxley?’ asked Manzarek, referring to Huxley’s book about drug experiments, The Doors of Perception, itself a quote from William Blake.
‘Exactly.’
The naming of the Doors has become a foundation stone of its legend, the literary associations lending gravitas to a band that took itself very seriously. There may have been a more prosaic inspiration. ‘I remember their mentioning, “What shall we call the band?”’ says actor Britt Leach, who lodged at Manzarek’s apartment at the same time as Jim Morrison. ‘And we were in a nest of doors [at the apartment]. We were standing in a door. The front door was right there. [Ray] said, “the Doors!” And then, of course, later it became the Doors of Perception … I swear to God that’s bullshit.’
The boys needed to cut a demo. Jim approached a friend of his father’s for money to make the recording. Admiral Morrison, then stationed in London, had not seen his elder son since his senior year at UCLA and was not pleased to hear about his new career. He wrote Jim a stinking letter, ‘severely criticising his behaviour and strongly advising him to give up any idea of singing or any connection with a musical group,’ as he later said, ‘because of what I considered to be a complete lack of talent in this direction’. It was an unduly harsh response, an indication perhaps of what Jim had had to put up with from his father, and it had a dramatic result: Jim cut all contact with his parents.
Morrison, Manzarek and Densmore somehow found the money to make their demo, which they took around the record companies. The only interest came from Columbia, which signed the Doors to a six-month development deal, during which time the company did nothing to promote them. Meanwhile, the band finalised its line-up, recruiting guitarist Robby Krieger, another acid head who describes taking psychedelics as one of the defining events of his life. Krieger’s musical interests were jazz and blues, which complemented Manzarek’s and Densmore’s. For want of a bass guitarist, Manzarek played the bass parts on his keyboard, which was another important element in the Doors sounding different from other rock bands.
The threat of being drafted still hung over Jim, as it did over thousands of young Americans at the height of the Vietnam War. In May 1966 Jim appeared before the draft board again. Although he had originally been passed fit to serve in the military, government records show that this time he was classified 4-F, meaning he was disqualified.* Like many young men Jim must have pulled a trick to get out of service, possibly pretending to be homosexual, as John Densmore and many others did.
With the fear of being sent to war lifted, the Doors began gigging on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, where further evidence as to the origins of the band’s name may lie: the group was billed at the London Fog as the Swinging Doors. ‘I don’t know if it was them or the club, but the sign advertised them as the Swinging Doors,’ recalls Dickie Davis, who came to see the band with a view to managing them. ‘It was clearly art rock. It was jazz, a very loose jazz format with Jim holding himself up with the microphone stand, reading poetry into the microphone … Jim closed his eyes, just went inward. He hung on that microphone stand. It was a strong erotic image. He really sold it.’ Davis told the band he didn’t think he was the right person to manage them, but he became friends with Jim.
A former actress named Ronnie Haran was sufficiently impressed to hire the Doors as the house band at the Whisky a Go Go, further along Sunset Strip. She also invited Jim to stay with her at her bungalow on Westbourne Drive, thereby coming to see herself as one of the ‘little girls in their Hollywood bungalows’ Jim sings about in ‘LA Woman’. Jim was heavily into drugs by this time. ‘He was a doper,’ says Haran. ‘If we were walking down the street and somebody came up and said, “Hey, Jim! Hey, man, take this,” he’d take it [even though] he didn’t know what it was. [He was] totally reckless.’ The couple took acid together and Jim smoked marijuana constantly, littering the bungalow with roaches.
Ronnie Haran says her relationship with Jim was not sexual, surprisingly, possibly because Jim was ‘too stoned’. She also suggests that his interest may have lain elsewhere. ‘I know he was testing the limits of bisexuality. He used to talk to me about wanting to have an affair with a guy to see what it was like.’ Be that as it may, and there is a hint of bisexuality with many of the main 27s, he had numerous girlfriends, often unknown to one another. Around the time Ronnie knew Jim he was also dating a model named Billie Winters, who lived at the Tropicana Motel in Hollywood. When he and Billie parted, Jim took up with her roommate, a model named Enid Graddis, who doesn’t recall a problem with impotence: ‘I was one of the many girls who thought Jim was the most amazing guy. He was so charismatic … [We] had an amazing relationship.’ Then there was Pamela Courson, a delicate hippie chick from Weed in northern California, who wafted into Jim’s life around this time and stayed with him until he died. Like Brian Jones, Jim was a man who got on bet
ter with women than men.
As the Doors continued to play the Whisky, creating long hypnotic jams for the patrons to dance and trip to, they worked out the definitive versions of many of their most famous songs including ‘Break on Through’, with its bossa nova beat, and ‘Light My Fire’, largely written by Robby Krieger. The band reached back to the 1920s to cover ‘Alabama Song’, by Brecht and Weill, revealing their sophistication. Then there were Jim’s original song stories, laced with poetry and philosophy. High on acid, he howled stream-of-consciousness poetry into the microphone at the Whisky until he blurted out the Oedipal section of ‘The End’, screaming that he wanted to kill his father and fuck his mother. The outraged club owners fired the Doors on the spot.
Fortunately Ronnie Haran had interested a record company in the band. She says that Jac Holzman didn’t like the Doors when he first saw them at the Whisky, but he signed them to Elektra Records and teamed them up with producer Paul Rothchild, who did so much to make the Doors a success. Meanwhile, the boys signed a management deal with Asher Dann and Sal Bonafede. Dann was a charming former B-movie actor, once billed as ‘Hollywood’s handsomest man’. With his acting career behind him, he switched to management and clicked with Jim immediately. ‘He was a lot younger than me, but I used to love to go out and I used to love to party, and he saw that in me.’
Jim was essentially a loner. He got along with Asher Dann and Ray Manzarek, whom he had known since college, but he was distant from the other two band members. John Densmore was particularly wary of Jim, whom he considered borderline crazy, and there was evidence to corroborate this view. Whether one believes that Jim set out to live the Dionysian life as a way of making art, or whether he was a pretentious drunken boor, the result was the same. Jim was one of what Kerouac called ‘the mad ones’. Many of the 27s were.
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