Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon

by Des Barres, Pamela

  Validated by Time, Newsweek, and Vogue, who called him “shaken-loose and mind shaking … as if Edgar Allan Poe had blown back as a hippie … .” Jim kept taking chances onstage. “Sometimes I just stop the song and let out a long silence,” Jim said, “let out all the latent hostilities and uneasiness and tensions before we get everyone together.” The music stopped for minutes at a time, the audience stopped breathing. “I like to see how long they can stand it, and just when they’re about to crack, I let ’em go,” In a highly quoted interview, Jim told Time magazine that the Doors were “erotic politicians” who were looking for “an electric wedding,” adding that he was more interested in “the dark side of the moon.”

  Jim’s close friend and photographer, Paul Ferrara, told me that Jim was well aware of the pandemonium his icon status created. “One time we were watching The Misfits, and he said, ‘The thing about Marilyn Monroe is that she lets it all hang out. She’s everything to all people.’ Jim had the same vulnerability that Marilyn had. The fact that he brought it up makes me think that he was totally aware of the ‘thing’ he was experiencing.”

  The day after Jim’s twenty-fourth birthday, December 9, 1967, he crossed the imaginary line to the dark side of the moon. Backstage at a gig in New Haven, Connecticut, he was making out with a young girl in a shower stall when a cop stormed in, insisting that no one was allowed backstage. When Jim grabbed his crotch and told the cop to “eat it,” his face was sprayed with Mace. The cop realized he had made a big mistake and, along with the Doors’ manager, Bill Siddons, bathed Jim’s face with water, but Jim wasn’t amused. He was mad at the pigs. During the instrumental break in “Back Door Man,” Jim put on a thick Southern accent and insulted the entire New Haven police force. After the tirade, he shouted, “The whole fucking world hates me!” and a police lieutenant climbed up onstage to tell Jim he was under arrest. “Okay, pig,” he taunted, “come on, say your thing, man!” Then there was chaos. Jim was dragged offstage and down a flight of stairs, beaten, and kicked before being thrown into a cop car and taken to the station house—arrested for “indecent and immoral exhibition.” Not to mention “breach of the peace and resisting arrest.” The charges were eventually dropped. A couple of months later a very loaded Jim was in trouble again after being whacked over the head by an incensed guard at an X-rated Las Vegas movie theater. The police arrived and Jim called them “redneck stupid bastards” and “chickenshit pigs.” He was arrested for “public drunkenness” and taken to jail. It was becoming a very common occurrence.

  Paul Ferrara told me a tale that describes Jim’s everyday behavior pretty well. “There were three of us in Jim’s Ford Shelby. We turned onto Sunset Boulevard after a night of partying. Jim floored it in front of the Whiskey and ran through about four red lights—foot on the floor, about one hundred miles an hour, cars zooming across in front of us! All I remember saying was, ‘I want the fuck out of this car!!’ It freaked me out! I felt he was playing Russian roulette with all of our lives—the same as pulling a trigger on a gun you’re not sure about. I was angry, but not as angry as when he killed himself. He was trying all the time. It was like he was saying, ‘I can walk across the tightrope and you can’t.’” When I asked Paul if he thought Jim lived in the moment, he said, “It was a very pagan moment. He was just in a different consciousness—he had switched over, broke on through.”

  Jim Morrison’s mug shot in New Haven, Connecticut, after his arrest for “indecent and immoral exhibition.” What else was new? (POLICE SHOT)

  During the recording of the third album, John Densmore quit the Doors because Jim was so drunk he was unable to sing, lying on the floor in his own urine. It didn’t last twenty-four hours. The Doors hired the first of Jim’s “caretakers,” people who followed him around attempting to keep him out of trouble. Needless to say, it didn’t work. The rest of the Doors had to tiptoe around their leader’s increasingly erratic lunacy. Almost every song on Waiting for the Sun took twenty takes. Jim tried to recite a rambling poem, “The Celebration of the Lizard King,” but was too wasted. “I am the lizard king!” he shrieked. “I can do anything!” His drinking pissed everybody off, so he drank more. He arrived at the studio with a motley assortment of scary hangers-on. He was late. He was very late. Sometimes he didn’t show up at all.

  Up until now, Jim had enjoyed the heady power he had created, but was getting edgy about the pressures of fame. He was the antithesis of his glamorous image and preferred the bleak anonymity of a cheap motel. He didn’t own anything (like a home), didn’t want to own anything, and constantly gave away any belongings he happened to accumulate. When he did buy clothes, he would leave his old ones behind as if he were shedding a skin. He carried one credit card and a torn-up driver’s license. Bored with the skintight Adonis image, he trimmed his long ringlets, gained weight, became bloated and pale. He felt that due to his fame, people had stopped being honest with him, and he was alone. In June of 1968 he actually tried to quit the band, saying, “It’s not what I want to do,” but was convinced to stay. The Doors caused riots out on the road. Jim crawled around on the floor, curled himself into a fetal position, and howled. Critics called him “mesmerizing,” “spell-binding,” “demonic.” There was a disastrous meeting with Janis Joplin at a pool party, and Jim was so brutally obnoxious, she wound up clobbering him over the head with her bottle of Southern Comfort. Paul Ferrara was there. “Janis and Jim were sitting on the couch, waiting their turns at pool, and they started arguing really loud, beating on each other, so we separated them. Then they were both gone and we heard a honking out in the driveway. We all ran out and Janis was beating Jim with a bottle in the front seat of the car.” Jim was disappointed when she didn’t want to see him again.

  A good friend of mine was there the night Jim crawled across the floor at New York’s Scene Club to the stage where Jimi Hendrix was playing. He wrapped himself around the guitarist and shouted, “I want to suck your cock!,” actually attempting to remove Jimi’s velvet trousers. “I was the guy who broke the thing up,” Paul Ferrara told me. “Poor Hendrix was trying to do his set, and his fans started beating Jim up. He was flailing and I gave him this massive bear hug, took him in my arms, and dragged him away.”

  “Hello, I Love You” was the Doors’ first smash in Europe, and the tour went well until they reached Amsterdam and Jim took every drug that was handed to him by enthusiastic fans. He gyrated wildly onstage for a minute or two, then collapsed into a heap and was taken to the hospital.

  Waiting for the Sun went gold the day it came out, and it looked as if the Doors were about to become “acceptable,” which irked and confused Jim. When critics barked that the Doors were going “commercial,” Jim needed to prove that he was more than a rock-and-roll commodity while he headlined the Forum. Assisted by his booze buddy, poet Michael McClure, Jim met with a literary agent, hoping to get his poetry published. The agent was very encouraging, which gave Jim the impetus to eventually publish it himself. Meanwhile the Doors worked on their documentary, and by the end of October Jim was devoting all of his time to editing Feast of Friends.

  Todd Schifman was Jim’s booking agent and ally. “We had a line of communication that was pretty unique. I got to know his character pretty well. Because I wore a suit and tie, I think he was kind of surprised by my liberal ideas.” When I asked Todd about Jim’s relationship with Pam, he said he thought it was “abusive and unhealthy,” adding, “He was the sadist and she was the masochist … . Here’s an area where I hesitate … In private, at parties, I certainly got the impression that [Jim and another male celebrity] were involved in a full-blown relationship. I’ve been at social gatherings where they were a couple. Jim was not the dominant one.” I told Todd that perhaps bisexuality was just one more way for Jim to push the limits. “I think Jim was gay,” he said categorically. What about Pamela and Patricia? I asked. “That doesn’t mean he wasn’t gay. Those were not successful storybook relationships. And Pam always seemed like a little boy to me. I
know for a fact that Jim was into being gay.”

  Jim’s constant drinking was messing with his performances, the once-spontaneous collapses and falls becoming rote and predictable. Sometimes he could barely stand up, hanging on to the microphone, finally finishing the show from the floor. After a riot in Phoenix, the Gazette reported: “Blame it on the Doors, possibly the most controversial group in the world. Lead singer Jim Morrison appeared in shabby clothes and behaved belligerently. The crowd ate up Morrison’s antics, which included hurling objects … cussing and making rude gestures.” When Jim realized his words and music were taking second place to his terrifying persona, he tried to rein it in during a pivotal show at the Hollwood Bowl. He just sang his ass off. But the audience had expected a Doors freak show. There was no encore that night, and Jim bitterly accepted his fate. At a concert with the Who in Queens, New York, Jim went ballistic and was downright disgusting, chanting on about “a Mexican whore sucking my prick.” When he grabbed his dick and let out a scream of obscenities to a girl down front, her boyfriend responded by going for Jim with a chair and all hell broke loose. By the time it was over, all the Doors’ equipment was destroyed and twenty people were hospitalized. But Queens was just the foreplay for Miami.

  While Jim struggled with his massive success, Pam dug it. Jim bought her a new XKE and spent $250,000 so she could run her own trendy boutique on Sunset Boulevard. She started taking cocaine and dabbling with heroin, which pissed Jim off. They had severe arguments but were too caught up in each other’s drama to make a move. Jim continued his downward drinking spiral. At a show at Madison Square Garden, Jim pointed to one side of the hall and said, “You are life,” then to the other side, “You are death,” then announced, “I straddle the fence—and my balls hurt.”

  Along with friend Paul Ferrara, in February 1969 Jim attended several performances of the highly avant-garde Living Theatre, which really stirred him up. The performers interacted with the audience, agitating, confronting, and frightening them, finally ending the play by stripping down to loincloths and forming a pyramid that spelled out “ANARCHISM.” Jim was inspired and planned to add these confrontational tactics to his very next show—in Miami. “I think he was liberating himself, just the way he saw the Living Theatre do. We were totally blown away by the freedom,” Paul Ferrara told me. “He was about experimenting to the max. He was looking to open all the different doors. Scientific expedition—‘I’ll take six of these and see where I get.’ And he had this humongous secret life. I knew him as a devil and an angel at the same time. He couldn’t separate them. He was the most generous person I knew, but sometimes he did the angel thing, sometimes the devil thing.”

  Jim on the floor—a typical place to find him. (MICHAEL MONTFORT/MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/ VENICE, CALIF.)

  Somebody should have seen it coming. The capacity crowd was overcharged by the time the Lizard King finally made it to the stage with a mad gleam in his eye and so far gone that he probably couldn’t see. The Doors played some music, but their singer couldn’t hear it. “I’m not talking about a revolution!” he howled. “I’m talking about havin’ a goooooood time! Hey, listen! I’m lonely, I need some love, you all. Come on, I need some good times. I need some love-ah love-ah. Ain’t anybody gonna love my ass?” While the Doors gamely played behind him, Jim waited for a response to his plea. “Nobody gonna come up here and love me, huh? All right for you, baby, that’s too bad. I’ll get somebody else!” After a few words of “Five to One,” Jim began his confrontation. “You’re all a bunch of fucking idiots! Lettin’ people tell you what you’re gonna do! Lettin’ people push you around! … Maybe you love gettin’ your face stuck in the shit … . You’re all a bunch of fuckin’ slaves!” He hoarsely tried to sing, then shouted, “THERE ARE NO RULES!” He put down the state of Florida, and when a freak from L.A. handed Jim a lamb, he said, “I’d fuck her, you know, but she’s too young.” A few words of “Touch Me,” then the tirade continued. “Hey, wait a minute! Wait a minute! You blew it, you blew it! I’m not gonna take this shit! I’m coming out! I’m coming out!! FUCK YOU!” He grabbed a cop’s hat and sailed it into the audience, championing the Living Theatre. “I wanna get on the trip, I wanna change the world!” Over and over he repeated, “I wanna see some action out there!” Then “Let’s see a little skin. Let’s get naked! Grab your fuckin’ friend and love him! I’m talkin’ about some love! Love love love love love love love.” People started taking off their clothes, and then it happened: “Do you want to see my cock? You didn’t come here only for music, did you? You came for something else, didn’t you? WHAT IS IT? You want to see my cock, don’t you? That’s what you came for, isn’t it?! YEAAAAHHHH!” He then ripped off his shirt and started fiddling with his belt buckle. Nobody knew it, but Jim was wearing boxer shorts, planning to pull a “Living Theatre,” but when he started unbuckling his pants, a roadie came to the rescue and tried to stop it.

  Nobody seems to know what happened next. “See it? Did you see it?” Jim asked the flabbergasted audience. “There are no rules, there are no limits!” he insisted. “C’mon, this is your show, anything you want, let’s do it!” and fans started to swarm the stage. He prowled through the frenzied crowd, pretending to masturbate; he got on his knees in front of Robby and, when he was knocked offstage, led a whip dance through the concert hall while several fights broke out. The Doors played a seething version of “Light My Fire” until the electricity had to be turned off. “Uh-oh,” Jim later said to manager Bill Siddons, “I think I might have exposed myself out there.”

  Jim and the Doors missed the heated response to the show, flying out the next day to the Caribbean, where Jim had a perfectly miserable time on his little holiday (without Pam—they were in another battle). When asked about the concert, Jim admitted he had been too drunk to remember what happened. Meanwhile warrants for Jim’s arrest were being drawn up in Miami. One felony—lewd and lascivious behavior (stating that Jim did “lewdly and lasciviously expose his penis and shake it … simulate acts of masturbation upon himself and oral copulation on another)—and three misdemeanors—“indecent exposure, open profanity, and drunkenness.” Headlines across America shouted GROSSED OUT BY THE DOORS and GET RICH QUICK—BE OBSCENE, proclaiming Jim “King of Orgasmic Rock.” The Doors were banned in concert halls all over the country, gigs were canceled, and they were dropped from radio playlists. Jim’s life had changed irrevocably, and he dragged the rest of the Doors along with him. Everything seemed to hinge on the trial. The band was never the same again.

  Jim turned himself in to the FBI on April 3, 1969, then buried what remained of his sex symbol status by growing a full beard, rarely bathing, wearing the same clothes endlessly. He began recording his poetry, worked on his own movie, HWY, about an aimless young hitchhiker, and waited for the trial. He and Pam moved to Beachwood Canyon. Life wasn’t much fun. Pam’s heroin use had escalated and she was trying to hide it. And Jim was drinking so much, he rarely satisfied her. “Some sex symbol,” she scrawled on the mirror in lipstick. “Can’t even get it up!” In a telling interview with Jerry Hopkins, Jim said that getting drunk was “a choice … . I guess it’s the difference between suicide and slow capitulation.”

  The fourth album, The Soft Parade, took eight difficult months to record, and by the time it was completed in June, the Doors were starting to get a few bookings despite the “Miami incident.” Jim grumbled about the five-thousand-dollar bond that had to be posted for every show, calling it a “fuck clause,” but the shows were well received and without incident.

  On July 3, 1969, Brian Jones was found dead in his swimming pool and Jim wrote a touching poem for him, “Ode to L.A. While Thinking of Brian Jones—Deceased.” Strangely, two years later to the day, Jim himself would be found dead in water.

  In November Jim returned to Miami and entered a not-guilty plea. Bail was set for five thousand dollars, with the trial scheduled to begin the following April. And he was about to get in trouble again. After a rowdy plane r
ide to a Rolling Stones show in Phoenix, a very inebriated Jim and his friend Tom Baker were arrested upon landing, charged with “drunk and disorderly conduct” and “interfering with the flight of an aircraft,” a very serious offense. Both of them had a heated argument with the captain, and Tom, in particular, had made suggestive remarks to the flight attendant and grabbed at her thigh. He and Jim were held in the Phoenix jail for eighteen hours. Back in L.A., Jim had a car accident that destroyed five trees on La Cienega Boulevard, where he left the car behind, claiming it had been stolen. At a party for his twenty-sixth birthday, a half-comatose Jim whipped out his member and proceeded to pee on an expensive rug. Guests caught it in goblets so the rug wouldn’t be destroyed. A day later he told Bill Siddons that he thought he was having a nervous breakdown.

  One night around this time, I was at my den of iniquity away from home, the Whiskey. I must have been pretty hard up because the 1910 Fruitgum Company were playing, but I was determined to rock out. I was sitting with Miss Lucy from my group, the GTOs, when Jim Morrison slid into our booth and hollered, “Get it on! Suck my mama!” Jim definitely had a thing about his mom, no doubt about it. Anyway, we were nice to him (I still harbored a secret adoration), but he was in one of those infamous moods again, and very drunk, too. He reached across the table, yelled, “Get it on!,” grabbed Lucy’s beer, and hurled it into her face. She got pretty upset and told him it wasn’t very nice. He said, “I know,” with a sad, sorrowful voice, as if he couldn’t help it. Right before he crawled across the dirty Whiskey floor to climb onstage with the startled Fruitgum Company, he slapped me real hard across the face for no reason. It was as if he was trying real hard to feel something. With my cheek throbbing and mascara running down my face, I watched him grab the microphone away from the singer, moan, and shove it right down his pants. The owner of the Whiskey finally had to turn off the lights and sound to get Jim out of the way. The lights are turned out, I couldn’t help thinking, so I guess the music’s over.