Behind Closed Doors
Page 1
Jerry Hopkins
Behind
Closed
Doors
The No One Here Gets Out Alive Update
The Doors Don’t Want You to Read
Published by Hopkins Publishing, Lacey, Washington, USA
Cover Photo © Baron Wolman. Website address: www.baronwolman.com
Copyright © 2013 Hopkins Publishing
Foreword: “On Mr. Mojo Risin’ Again”
Copyright 2011 Jackson Baker.
Cover design by Nicholas Hopkins, Dream River Design
www.dreamriverdesign.com
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Application in process
ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number)
To be assigned
Table of Content
Introduction
Doors Just Say No!
— How the Doors Stopped an E-book edition of No One Here Gets Out Alive
Foreword
On Mr. Mojo Risin’ Again
— Why Jim Morrison is Still Relevant in the Twenty-first Century, analysis by Jackson Baker
Behind Closed Doors
What Happened When the Singer Died
— The Update Material That Was Intended for the e-book Edition but Was Halted By the Surviving Doors and My Co-Author’s Widow
Bonus Story
Rejected by 30 Publishers, Blamed for Creating the Myth
— The Book’s Success, Coupled with that of Its Subject
Selected Doors Websites
Key personality sites
Key music sites
Doors photographers
Memorabilia, fan and tribute sites
Fan art:
City tour guides
Introduction
Doors Just Say No!
— How the Doors Stopped an E-book edition of No One Here Gets Out Alive
I had planned to include what follows in the new electronic edition of No One Here Gets Out Alive, but the three surviving Doors and Danny Sugerman’s widow, Fawn Hall Sugerman, first delayed and then halted electronic publication of the entire book. Here’s how that happened.
A year ahead of the fortieth anniversary of Jim Morrison’s death (July 3, 2011), I suggested to the book’s original publisher that I update the epilog. So much of a dramatic nature had happened since it was last updated, in 1995, I thought the rest of the story should be told, not merely because it revealed much about The Doors individually and as a band but also much about pop icons and how their followings behave.
Early in 2011, the original publisher, Warner Books, now called Grand Central Publishing, commissioned the update and I set to work, listening to a lot of music I had missed over the years, reviewing the voluminous material on the Internet, conducting interviews on Skype, and calling on the network of loyal fans. In this fashion I assembled the bits and pieces, the insults and the lawsuits—along with all the good things that happened—more or less chronologically.
I also wrote a “bonus” chapter that told how No One Here Gets Out Alive was rejected by thirty publishers and went to No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list, and then was “blamed” for creating the Jim Morrison cult and the myth that he was (maybe) still alive. I also tried to summarize why I (and some others) thought Jim’s icon status had lasted so long, something no one would have predicted during his lifetime or in the first decade following his demise, when The Doors nearly vanished from memory.
I additionally had a friend, Jackson Baker, a former professor at Memphis State University, write a foreword, while Ida Miller, The Doors fans’ loving den mother, provided many of the websites I tacked on as an appendix. All of this was sent to New York in July 2011, immediately after the fortieth anniversary of Jim’s death, for anticipated publication by the end of the year. Soon thereafter, the poop hit the rotary blades.
When Beth deGuzman, vice president of Grand Central’s paperback division, acting as my editor, approached The Doors through their manager Jeff Jampol to negotiate a royalty rate for the e-book use of the lyrics and photographs that previously had appeared in print editions, Ray Manzarek, Robby Krieger and John Densmore, via Jampol, made a reading of my update material a condition in their possible agreement. I consented to let them see the text. Soon afterwards, New York was told there would be no changes allowed. None. Hopkins’s new text was unacceptable. It was the existing print edition or nothing.
What made this censorship especially hurtful for me was that The Doors were supported in the decision by Danny’s widow. This surprised me because as heir to Danny’s thirty percent interest in the book’s earnings I thought it would have been clearly in her interest to have an e-book commercially available.
I contemplated removing the pictures and lyrics, but felt that would substantially weaken the book and be unfair to new readers and those who wanted it in the new format in its original form. So I conceded without a fight. I told Beth to tell The Doors it was okay with me to go with the old (1995) epilog and forget about the new one.
Months passed and there was no further word. Beth said no one was responding to follow-up email messages or repeated phone calls. She also said that even without the lyrics and photographs—if I had chosen to remove them—Fawn’s continued refusal to sign off on her share of ownership killed the deal. Leaving me without even the original text available as an e-book. I felt The Doors, and Fawn, were being unreasonable.
More time passed and in February, 2013, I wrote Beth again, proposing we make one more run at Jeff Jampol and his clients. I said I would even be willing to cut the lyrics and photographs and rewrite necessary paragraphs. I didn’t want to do that, but if it got the book online, I considered it an acceptable sacrifice.
Her response continued in the negative. “We do not need approval from anyone to create an electronic version of the current edition of the book,” she wrote. “But we do need to establish a royalty rate with you and Fawn, and Fawn has not responded to the proposed royalty rate. Further, our permission agreement with the Doors to reprint all the lyrics in the book does not provide a royalty rate for use in the electronic version, so we have to establish one. But Jeff Jampol has stopped communicating with us. I am not favorably inclined toward a new edition without lyrics/photos, and in any case, Fawn needs to agree to this edition of the book…”
It sounded to me like, well, a door slamming.
As I write this, it is more than eighteen months since I first submitted the update material to my publisher (and shortly after that to The Doors) and because it does not appear that there is any way over the legal hurdles The Doors and Fawn have put in the e-book’s path, I have decided to publish the epilog material myself.
And that is why there is no e-book edition of No One Here Gets Out Alive and none is being planned. That is also why you are reading this new end-piece separately.
Foreword
On Mr. Mojo Risin’ Again
— Why Jim Morrison is Still Relevant in the Twenty-first Century, analysis by Jackson Baker
[Note: When the following was written, it was anticipated that the full text of No One Here Gets Out Alive would be published electronically and that this would appear at the start of the e-book edition and as a supplement to Danny’s foreword.]
As Jerry Hopkins’ No One Here Gets Ou
t Alive, freshly updated, goes into a new printing, some thirty-odd years after it first appeared, it behooves us to consider why this chronicle of the life and times of Jim Morrison not only became a phenomenal bestseller but continues to be consulted as a sort of guide to that transformational ‘60s-‘70s time which swept over us and whose eddy has still not entirely passed.
Copies of No One Here Gets Out Alive, often seriously dog-eared, have been on the shelves of serious rock adepts ever since its publication— almost as evidence of a rite of passage. Clearly, the book is part of a continuum, and Hopkins, who was the first noteworthy biographer of rock’s undisputed avatar, Elvis Presley, is well placed to adjudge the life and times of Jim Morrison, in many ways a successor.
Though similar in the way they impacted an audience, Presley and Morrison were wholly different kinds of personalities. Unlike the humble boy from Tupelo, Mississippi, born to a sharecropper family, dutiful and doting toward his forebears , Morrison was the son of a ranking admiral in Lyndon Johnson’s developing war in Indochina, so thoroughly estranged from his parents that he disowned them, famously willing an Oedipal revenge in his most famous (or notorious) set-piece, “The End.”
Morrison and his cohorts in the group that would come to be world-famous as The Doors — keyboard maestro Ray Manzarek, drummer John Densmore, and guitarist/lyricist Robby Krieger — developed their act not in some hard-scrabble but cocky place like Memphis but under the Aquarius-tinged western sun of southern California, hard by the languid canals of Venice Beach. They were university-bred, and, after their fashion, worldly-wise.
The Doors were not the Beatles, a study in four-part harmony, nor were they the Stones, a cohesive outlaw band with an established front man. They were a metaphor of sorts for some rogue impulse — unruly, experimental, demagogic, and intentionally apocalyptic. — that exactly corresponded to Jim Morrison’s own demons. “Erotic politicians,” Morrison’s public description of the group early on, was conscious self-parody, but there was a hint of truth to it.
Purely as biography, the story Jerry Hopkins tells is intriguing. How astounding it is that a film student, would-be poet, and book-learnt Nietzschean, with little or no preparation in actual music or drama, could morph almost overnight into the nearest thing to a Dionysian figure the American entertainment stage would see in the latter twentieth century.
If Elvis lit the match, Morrison bore that Olympic fire forth with an arsonist’s glee. A shamanistic shouter, yes (though a paradoxically shy one). But also — ex nihilo, it would seem — a capable crooner and bluesman and songwriter, both craftsman and archetype, as essential to the development of the rock style as to the theory and practice of Götterdämmerung.
Here’s the anomaly: For all the dominance commanded by his persona, Morrison appeared, most of the time, to see himself as merely the member of a band, less a leader than primus inter après. Hopkins tells about the time that a master of ceremonies at one of the Doors’ arena stops introduced the group as “Jim Morrison and the Doors.” Morrison made him do it over. ”We’re the Doors!” he insisted — an appellation he’d created by himself, though the concept owed something both to Blake and Aldous Huxley.
“Break on through to the other side” wasn’t just a lyric to Jim Morrison (the anagrammatic “Mr. Mojo Risin’”), it was a commandment. And he saw himself and his mates, quite literally, as the way through. The doors.
The Lizard King, a companion volume published by the author some years after NOHGOA, collects several interviews done with Morrison (not the least of which is Hopkins’ own, for Rolling Stone) during the not quite half a decade of Morrison’s worldly prominence. It is striking how unpretentious and analytical Morrison is in these dialogues — a world away from the fire and brimstone of the concert stage and the mad vandalism of Morrison’s private life.
As Hopkins makes uncomfortably clear, Jim Morrison was never a candidate for America’s Sweetheart. At various points in NOHGOA , Morrison comes off as the Original Bad Seed, as some kind of close kin to Damien in The Omen — risking the lives of his siblings in a mad toboggan ride, mocking a palsy victim, trashing an airplane in flight, assaulting a promoter, bamboozling Ed Sullivan, fomenting riots , and, most notoriously, when his spurned mother dared show up for a concert, hurling the brutal climactic lines of “The End” at her as his farewell.
Nope. Not Miss Congeniality. Nor was meant to be.
But there was something bizarrely Horatio Alger-like about his story. What seems unique about Morrison, and one of the things that distinguishes him from so many of his musical precursors is that he seems less a force of nature and more of a self-willed creation — an auto-didact, even, an intellectual intrigued by, say, Artaud’s theory of a Theatre of Cruelty and determined to materialize it in his own being.
It is this quality which explains the pivotal moment in Morrison’s career — the alleged self-exposure in Miami in 1969 which resulted in trial and ultimate conviction and which stigmatized the Doors with concert promoters at the very height of their commercial fortunes. Oddly enough, while Hopkins’ two volumes on Morrison document the Miami circumstance as well as anyone has, or perhaps as well as anyone can, it remains uncertain as to just how much Johnson, if any, Morrison actually showed, or how flagrantly, or for how long.
What does seem clear from Jerry Hopkins’s impressive research is that Morrison, who normally went au naturel under his skin-tight leathers, was wearing cotton bloomers on the night in question, apparently determined to re-enact the letter and spirit of Living Theater performances he had just witnessed, occasions when the performers had, literally, stripped to their skivvies to illustrate the last-ditch intractability of repression.
Hopkins, who had the opportunity both to talk shop and go drinking with Morrison, indeed doing both at once, confesses, somewhat reluctantly, that the more he found out about Morrison the less he liked him. And yet his respect for the artist seems to have grown.
We readers go through the same changes as did the author, feeling the magnetism of the man even through the discomfort of being in his presence. It is a measure of Hopkins’ success in channeling Morrison that the creepier aspects of the artist’s personality, and there were many, become so many tragic flaws, more to lament rather than to be repelled by. The Lizard King had many skins to shed. Along with everything else, he was the poor man’s Kundalini.
Morrison may finally have wanted nothing more than to come back through the doors he’d opened, to return to normality from the other side, to become again the mere aesthete that he’d started out to be. Hence the late attempts at filmmaking, and the fact that, toward the end, he began to think of himself as one James Douglas Morrison, poet. That was at best a comfortable delusion. Though some of his lyrics, both in songs and written as poems per se, possess real merit and are publish-worthy in isolation, none of them are exactly world class. Integrated into the Doors’ stage theatrics , though, they become another matter: One thinks of Wagner and the concept of “music drama” — especially with drawn-out spellbinders like “The End” or “When the Music’s Over,” in which the words create an incantatory spell, both driven by and driving the music, toward an end that was not so much catharsis as willful confrontation of the Abyss.
The saga of Morrison and the Doors wasn’t all Sturm und Drang, of course. NOHGOA reminds us, too, of those Top 40 singles — “Hello, I Love You,” “Love Her Madly,” Touch Me,” “Light My Fire” (both long and short versions) — that must have aroused the envy of many a purely pop artist and were just plain fun, as catchy as they were succinct. It’s that Morrison we miss, too.
My own pick for the Doors album that has it all is Morrison Hotel, the 1970 release that — on Side One, especially — combined joyous honky-tonk (“Roadhouse Blues,” with Morrison doing some mean skat), synthesizer rock (“Waiting for the Sun”), topicality (“Peace Frog”), soulful balladeering (“Blue Sunday”) and an
old-fashioned AM romper (“You Make Me Real”). We learn from NOHGOA that everybody — the Doors, the Elektra label, critics at large — regarded Morrison Hotel as a renewal. A restatement, rather.
It is painful to realize that in little more than a year, it would be all over.
Jerry Hopkins does not romanticize the denouement. Jim Morrison ended as an overweight domesticated male, a burn-out case. As atypical as was his de facto marriage to longtime companion Pamela Courson, part-Lilith, part-Daisy, (at a time when Morrison, something of an obligatory philanderer, had actually gone through a wedding ceremony, Wiccan-style, with Patricia Keneally), it was still a form of monogamy. And, as exotic as Paris still is in all our imaginations, as important as it was as a geographical and artistic source-book for Morrison, the City of Light seemed to have functioned for Jim and Pamela as an opportunity for rest and rehab, less a place of discovery than a retreat, a temporary retirement home, even. Jim’s apparent heroin overdose there was an anomaly; a paunchy alcoholic by this time, he was on course, somewhere down the line, for a middle-aged coronary.
Part of the reason for this book’s durability is that Jerry Hopkins has a bona fide tragedy on his hands and knows it, though his account of the rise and fall and complicated life of Jim Morison is not so much Greek or Shakespearean as it is in the Arthur Miller mode. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Between those moments of the mundane, though, was a glorious flame, unusually bright, unusually instructive, forever poignant.
—Jackson Baker
• Jackson Baker is a journalist and sometime university professor who has written and lectured extensively on the music of his native Memphis and, in particular, on the life and meaning of Elvis Presley, whose next-door neighbor he was during a crucial phase of the King’s Sun years.
Behind Closed Doors