Behind Closed Doors

by Jerry Hopkins

  The three surviving Doors continued to pursue their own careers. After the Krieger-Densmore Butts Band broke up (without any great success, although they were just ahead of the Jamaican reggae wave), Densmore toured the United States for two years with a dance company; studied acting and appeared the La Mama Theatre in New York in a one-act play he had written, Skins; won an L.A. Weekly award for music with a play directed by Tim Robbins; and through the 1980s and early 1990s continued to act in theater and television, as himself in the series Square Pegs and in a role with Malcolm McDowell in Get Crazy. Later, he formed a band called Tribaljazz, combining his longstanding love of jazz with African percussion, recording an album in 2006.

  After leaving the Butts Band, Krieger also returned to his jazz roots and recorded a handful of albums as Robby Krieger & Friends, the Robby Krieger Organization, and the Robby Krieger Band (the latter featuring his guitarist son Waylon). In 2000, he recorded an instrumental fusion CD with guest performances by Billy Cobham and Edgar Winter.

  It was Manzarek who still commanded the most attention as he collaborated in concert and on recordings with the composer Philip Glass and a number of poets including Jim’s old friend Michael McClure, Michael C. Ford, and UK musician Darryl Read, punk icon Iggy Pop, the British band Echo and the Bunnymen, and in a Doors parody, “Weird” Al Jankovich.

  As the individual Doors got on with their lives, their recording past—the six studio albums and one live LP produced when Morrison was alive—was being chopped up, juggled, shuffled and repackaged over and over again by Elektra Records. The first was called The Best of the Doors, released in 1973, and others were titled The Doors Greatest Hits, The Doors Classics, The Complete Studio Recordings, and The Very Best of the Doors. Most were also re-mastered and reissued as technology advanced.

  Bruce Botnick said he and the individual Doors squirmed with discomfort about the lack of imagination displayed by Elektra, but their pleas to stop went unheard after The Best of the Doors, containing nineteen previously released songs on two discs, including both “The End” and “When the Music’s Over,” sold more than eight million copies.

  Fans did what fans do: they mourned and they formed clubs and started magazines and once the Internet arrived, created blogs and websites, developing into a semblance of community. There were tribute bands. Artists created original Morrison images on line. A sculptor sneaked into Pere Lachaise and bolted a lifelike bust to the gravesite. (Later it was stolen.) Doors Collectors Magazine started running a page of Morrison and Doors tattoos and Rainer Moddemann in Germany, editor of The Doors Quarterly Magazine, produced fan guidebooks for Paris, New York, and Los Angeles. One fan wrote me to say she had been “channeling” Jim for four months; did I want to know what he’d told her? Another in Portland, Oregon, claimed to be Jim Morrison, still another somewhere else the singer’s son.

  Some fans wanted a piece of Jim, literally, and as happened to his high school role model, Elvis Presley, anything Jim was said to have owned suddenly had value it didn’t have in life. In 1998, Sotheby’s auctioned for $6,900 a handwritten speech on masturbation that Jim composed in high school and Christie’s sold a copy of Jim’s Alameda, California, high school yearbook bearing his signature for $5,175 and the “handwritten and typescript working lyrics for “The Celebration of the Lizard” for $40,250.*

  * It should be noted that in the early 1990s I sold my copies of The Lords and The New Creatures—the original, private printings, a gift to me upon publication from Jim—for $5,000 and two watercolors from Jim’s theater design class at Florida State University for $10,000. When I checked with a friend at one of the big auction houses, saying I wanted to double the price for the watercolors, he said, “Take it. I can’t get five for a John Lennon.” I also sold all my photographs, of The Doors in Mexico and recording their last album, to Danny Sugerman for $3,000.

  Kerry Humpherys, a Doors fan in Utah who runs the Doors Collectors Magazine on-line to market memorabilia told me, “Jim Morrison’s handwritten will was the coolest thing I ever found. I sold it for $12,000, which was a good price for it then…now if I had a chance to buy it back for $12,000, I would and ask ten times that amount and get it.”

  Some of the strangest things sold over the years were the rebellious and explicit drawings Jim made while in high school in Alameda, California. His best friend from that period, Fud Ford, kept the drawings and in 1994, after making and selling a limited printing of lithographs, auctioned the originals at Christie’s in New York. Twenty-six pencil drawings and five comic strip panels in which real comic characters were cut out and pasted onto paper and given sexually explicit captions varied in price and a full set sold for $18,995. When Ford died, the remaining lithographs were purchased by Humpherys to be resold on his website, $289 for the set.

  Kerry also sold posters and original copies of magazines with articles about the band, Doors guitar picks and skateboard decks, “Jim Morrison beads” (strung to match the color pattern in the “young lion” photos), tee-shirts, miniature models of the cars he drove, a “Jim Morrison greatest hits candle,” a “Light My Fire oil lamp,” and real postage stamps depicting the singer from Germany, Congo, Eritrea, St. Vincent, Touva, and Abkhazia. (A common practice for many poor nations to draw revenue from fans and philatelists.)

  Humphreys does not sell anything that can be purchased from The Doors’ website and admits that in an effort to please them he has taken stories off his site that offended. He explains he has the www.doors.com address because he got there first and while he paid nothing for it, Danny Sugerman had to pay $12,000 to a website “squatter” who had already registered www.thedoors.com.

  There was more. “Weird scenes inside the gold mine” may have been an isolated line in “The End,” but it was also the perfect description of the strangeness that dogged Jim and his band after his death, most of it attributable to their following.

  The fans were most visible in Paris, where Jim’s grave was now established as a pilgrimage site and they came in sufficient number that Pere Lachaise was sometimes identified as the city’s third most popular visitor attraction, behind the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre. In fact, the Notre Dame Cathedral was and is the unchallenged leader and because there is no entrance fee, it escapes traditional tourism lists. Still, France tops the list for countries visited worldwide, attracting more than seventy million a year, half of them spending time in the capital, and while the number of Morrison fans surely is relatively small, tourism and city officials agree that the number of visitors who visit Jim’s grave puts the cemetery in the city’s Tourism Top 10.

  Certainly no one at the cemetery had seen anything like it, as jaded as they might have become by the presence of some two hundred celebrity tombs. From the early 1990s, guards were assigned to the Morrison gravesite periodically (and always on the singer’s December 8 birthday and July 3, anniversary of his death); eventually surveillance cameras were installed in an effort to curtail the graffiti and inhibit the partying and a sturdy stainless steel fence was erected around the grave’s perimeter. Admiral and Mrs. Morrison paid for the maintenance and cleanup of the grave and surrounding tombs for some time. They also marked the site with a flat stone bearing the Greek inscription usually interpreted to mean “true to his own spirit.”

  On July 3, 1991, the twentieth anniversary of his death, when Patricia Butler, author of dual bio of Jim and Pamela, Angels Dance and Angels Die (1998), visited the cemetery, she said she “waded into a sea of perhaps five thousand people who, it seemed had converged on the cemetery from all corners of the world. In the hours that followed, I witnessed mayhem on a scale I’d never imagined. I saw a peaceful crowd turn into an ugly mob when denied access to the cemetery by police who felt—and were—ridiculously outnumbered. A full-blown riot ensued, with cars overturned, people beaten bloody, the riot squad called in, tear gas thrown, and, ultimately, the massive wooden doors of the cemetery set alight.�
�� This was not the last time unruly fans provided a marked contrast to those who lighted candles and talked in hushed tones at Elvis’s Memphis grave each year. It happened again in 2001.

  Violence was not the only extreme behavior. When the movie An American Werewolf in Paris was released in 1997, it showed a young couple making love on Jim’s grave, an act that started a rash of that.

  Graceland and Pere Lachaise had something besides crowds in common: the persistent rumor that the grave’s occupant wasn’t there, but still alive. During the lead-up to Oliver Stone’s movie release and in the months that followed, new information was made public. First, the official documents from the Paris police were revealed. These did nothing but add detail to the official story that Jim had died of a heart attack in a bathtub. But then, after twenty years of silence, Alain Ronay and Agnes Varda, two of the five present at the funeral, gave an interview to Paris-Match, saying Pamela called them after discovering Jim dead in the tub. They rushed to the Morrison flat, where they found firemen and police already on the scene.

  They were told that Jim’s body had been moved to the bed and cardiopulmonary resuscitation efforts had failed. A physician arrived. Pamela told police on the scene and later in her deposition that Jim never used drugs and had a breathing problem complicated by a chronic cough. She said he had a history of asthma and was a heavy smoker. The doctor examined the body, found no evidence of foul play—such as puncture marks as might be caused by intravenous drug use—and said the death was due to natural causes, a “myocardial infarction,” or heart attack. No autopsy was required under the circumstances and Pamela was allowed to proceed with her funeral plans for a man she identified at the US Embassy and on the death certificate as “James Douglas Morrison, Poet.”

  Now, twenty years later, Ronay and Varda told Paris-Match that Jim and Pamela shared some heroin after a night of drinking in bars. Jim put a tape of the first Doors album on the sound system and they nodded out. Pamela said she was awakened by Jim’s coughing. Jim said he wanted to take a bath. Pam went back to sleep, woke later and went to the bathroom, where she found Jim in the tub, complaining that he was going to be sick. Three times, Pamela brought a kitchen cooking pot to him, cleaning it in a nearby sink each time he vomited. Pamela reportedly told Varda and Ronay that Jim seemed to recover, telling her to return to bed. He said he’d join her in a minute. The next time Pamela woke up, she found him lifeless and called the police.

  Ronay then changed his story and wrote a detailed account of Jim’s final day that was published in the Italian language magazine King. In it, Ronay said that when he arrived at the flat, Pamela told him, “The other night we came home right after the movie. When we arrived, we immediately began to sniff heroin and Jim began to play his songs. He played all of them, one after another, even ‘The End.’ Then we went to bed. Jim asked me to give him some more stuff, that’s how it happened that he took much more than me, especially since he’d taken some on his own during the day. We also did a little on the night before.” In still other versions, Ronay himself spent part of the day or night drinking with Jim.

  However Ronay told it, it was presumed that Jim died of an inadvertent overdose, that the alcohol consumed with Ronay and/or Pamela and the heroin with Pamela acted synergistically, both individual central nervous system depressants increasing the other’s effectiveness.

  In any case, the phrase “died in mysterious circumstances” always—always—appeared in any Doors or Morrison related stories and in 2007 the mystery was marched out once again. This was when Sam Bernett published a book in France saying Jim died of a heroin overdose in the toilet of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Circus, a nightclub he managed in Paris. According to Bernett, Jim was carried out of the club by two “known dealers,” taken to his flat and dumped into a bathtub in a failed attempt to revive him.

  It was a story I had been told in 1972 while researching No One Here Gets Out Alive, not by Bernett (whom I never met), but by Jim’s Paris friends, and the story is told briefly as one of several possible scenarios in the final chapter of No One Here Gets Out Alive. When Bernett, claiming falsely to be the singer’s good friend, published his book, Paris insiders scoffed, said the man was a liar. The cause of death may have been true, and even likely was, but Bernett had fabricated his version of it, aggrandizing his role in it.

  International media ran with the story, nonetheless, just as they had when Agnes Varda and Alain Ronay told Paris-Match that yes, it was an overdose, although in their version it happened at home. Meanwhile, Patricia Butler made a good case for death by asthma attack in her book and while it was true that Jim had a history of asthma and respiratory problems associated with his heavy cigarette smoking, there was only indicative evidence that this had anything to do with his death. There were others who insisted it was murder, part of a right-wing conspiracy that also killed Hendrix, Joplin, Martin Luther King and the Kennedys.

  It didn’t matter. Regardless of what explanation was floated, the truth only receded further into mystery, expanding the Morrison myth.

  Amid all this nonsense and squabbling over how and if, the fans made the surviving Doors multi-millionaires, far wealthier than they ever had been when Jim was alive. Predictably, it came from the music that was being repackaged over and over and over again. Bruce Botnick said the multiplicity of the “Best of…” anthologies churned out by Elektra Records became so repetitious he feared the fans would complain or, worse, go away. So when the opportunity arose, he was happy to turn to something more creative.

  The first of the special projects was The Doors: Box Set, a four-CD collection released in 1997 that offered a grab-bag: fifteen “Band Favorites” (the same old hits that were included, Botnick said, only because Elektra insisted, with Manzarek, Krieger and Densmore each selecting five); four demos dating back to 1965—nearly two years before the release of their first single—and two live performances that featured Albert King. One disc was entirely live, most of the material coming from the 1970 shows at the Felt Forum in New York. In all, there were more than four hours of music, but as pointed out by critics and collectors, only six of the forty-seven songs were new and unknown to fans. The sixty-page book of notes that came as part of the package, largely written by Danny Sugerman, was widely praised.

  The live performances were a preview of coming attractions. One of the things The Doors did, perhaps more than any other band of the period, was document themselves. Not only did film school buddy Paul Ferrara haul a thirty-five mm camera around and keep it running—creating the material that became Feast of Friends and Hwy—the band also leased a recording truck and took it on the road with them.

  “Every concert was recorded on the ‘Absolutely Live’ Tour in 1969,” Botnick said. “We went out with a console and eight-track recording equipment, which was state-of-the-art for the time. So we had lots of material and the quality was good.”

  By now, Elektra was becoming a label known for its rap artists and its archival Doors material started appearing on Rhino Records, a label built on re-issues. Botnick said it was Danny Sugerman’s idea to form a new record company, Bright Midnight, which was owned by the surviving Doors and the Morrison estate, with distribution and marketing aimed mainly at fans and through the Internet. The release of a sampler in 2000 with thirteen previously unreleased live tracks was followed in the same year by Live in Detroit and the next year by Live in America (which included fourteen songs from eight venues, one of only three known live recordings of “The End” among them), and three CDs derived from performances at Hollywood’s Aquarius Theatre, one for each of two concerts and a third disc compiling “highlights” from both shows. Later, concerts from Vancouver, New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, Los Angeles, Boston, Pittsburgh and, finally, Live at the Matrix, and shows recorded in the San Francisco club in 1967 also were released.

  The marketing of so much live material was not done frivolously or for profit alone. Of
course the same hits kept reappearing, but the band’s repertoire was widely varied on the “Absolutely Live” tour and it’s fair to say that different concerts had different personalities. In Boston, Morrison was drunk and it was the band that kept him going, while in Detroit the mood was what Botnick called “dark,” with the Black Panthers in militant attendance. It was also in Detroit where the band played its longest set, playing for two hours rather than the usual one. It also featured more blues material than the band generally played, a reflection of the group’s recent release of Morrison Hotel.

  Botnick favors the two-disc set from Madison Square Garden’s Felt Forum, a venue that seated 4,000. “They didn’t want to play the big room and did four shows in the smaller one. New York always loved the Doors and there was a lot of audience interaction. David Peel was there and he had a shouting conversation with Jim. Jim was in a good mood. When someone passed up a joint, he said, ‘That’s New York for you, the joints are so small you can pick your teeth with them’.”

  There were some relative oddities in the Bright Midnight catalog, too, one of the most interesting called Boot Yer Butt: The Doors Bootlegs, released in 2003. This was Robby Krieger’s idea and, according to Botnick, he worked from home, calling on the fan network for assistance, soliciting copies of their bootlegged cassette tapes. The two-disc, twenty-six-track result, covering shows from 1967 to the band’s final concert in Dallas in 1970, included a tasty variety of performances and will be remembered with a smile for its long whiney opening harangue from the concert promoter, who called everyone “man” a dozen times and said he would not permit the show to start until the aisles were cleared and everyone returned to their seats, an announcement that brought back the feel of the 1960s almost as vividly as the music did.