ARTISTS/WRITERS: MORRISON

(from November 2024…)

Those people out there,” Morrison said, gesturing beyond the walls at the street below, “don’t know they’re going to die.”

We were sitting in The Doors’ office at the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and LaCienega. Morrison had a Nagra tape recorder in his lap that he was itching to use. The band had finished what would stand as their penultimate album together, Morrison Hotel, at the Elektra Records studios across the street. During a recent Florida concert, Jim had allegedly exposed himself to the audience and in the wake of his desperate theatrics, concert promoters had blacklisted the band. Grounded while awaiting his court trial in Miami, he had time on his hands. He suggested we alleviate the desultory afternoon by taking the Nagra out on the street and querying passersby as to their awareness of their own mortality.

A few doors down La Cienega, in a two-story stucco edifice called the Clear Thoughts Building, Morrison was overseeing the cutting of Feast of Friends, a film he was making with Frank Lisciandro, a fellow UCLA film school grad and the mutual friend who had introduced us. The Kem moviola spooled interminable takes of Jim in leather pants walking down a deserted highway outside of Palm Springs in wavery heat: The Lizard King in situ.

Morrison and I had become casual friends that year. Our educations and experiences were not dissimilar, and we shared certain literary and cultural interests - Blake and Rimbaud, European art films, jazz and essential blues. I found him good company when sober, more interesting artistically and intellectually than his detractors claimed - he read continually and deeply - if less than his rock adulators imagined. I’d try to catch up to him during the days, when things were calmer, saner, before afternoons inevitably slid into blowsy, incoherent nights at a bar a half a block away called The RainCheck, Morrison’s de facto clubhouse and watering hole. There the conversions grew fatuous, the circle of acolytes around the leatherette booths wider and drearier, and eventually I’d become bored and slip away. Still, I was in Jim’s debt that summer for he’d done me a true favor.

Desperate for money, I shamelessly (see Writing sex) began hiring myself out to pursue writing or music in any form. Coincident with this flurry of enterprise, a demo tape of songs I’d written had found its way to Morrison through our friend Frank, and Jim had arranged a songwriting grant for me through a foundation his manager had endowed.  I drove to his lawyer’s office in Beverly Hills and was handed a check for three thousand dollars, a lifesaving amount at the time.

It was on one of those smoggy summer afternoons that I ended up at The Doors’ office with Morrison. After we’d exhausted the idea of asking a few pedestrians on Santa Monica Boulevard if they knew they were going to die, we adjourned to the RainCheck, where before long we were joined by some of the regulars.

In retrospect, that afternoon takes on the aspect of a wake. Tom Baker, a handsome actor who’d achieved marginal notice in Andy Warhol’s film I, a Man, playing an inarticulate sex object - on the basis of which he’d come to Hollywood hoping for a career  in film - was there that night. He was soon to die of a heroin overdose. Also there that night was Tim McIntyre, a vastly talented actor who had fallen so deeply under Jim’s sway and example that, after Morrison’s death, he set out to imitate his idol and succeeded - dying of cocaine and alcohol excess. Journalist Jerry Hopkins would make better coin of his experience with Morrison, co-writing a bestselling book about The Doors, No One Here Gets Out Alive, before opting for the sensual life in Bangkok. Nico, the blonde German Warhol beauty and occasional singer, sat with us that night, silent and adoring, tangled in a futile obsession with Morrison that surely trailed her to her death in a motorcycle accident on Ibiza. 

After a while I left Jim and the crew. It was the last time I’d see Morrison. In November of that year he’d be convicted in Florida of “vulgar and indecent exposure.” There’d be a last Doors album, a brief Paris interlude, death in a bathtub, and poète-maudit immortality.

Of course I’ve wondered what Jim might have made of the years that followed had he not destroyed himself at 27. But this remains among other mysteries that have trailed me across my life.