Behind Closed Doors Page 5

  What happened at Sundance surprised everyone connected to the documentary. At the end of the screening, Johnny Depp came out of the audience and volunteered his services to rerecord the narration. “We always knew the director’s narration would be replaced,” Bruce Botnick said. “And Johnny was a Morrison fan. I mean, he was really into it. I wanted more poetry in the film and Johnny read tons of it, getting stuck on a line and saying, ‘Oh, I wish he was here to help me understand.’ And then he’d read the line and he nailed it. Unfortunately, most of the poems were not used.”

  Although the initial response from foreign distributors was encouraging, criticism following Sundance and several other festivals was largely negative. Reviews following release to a limited number of theaters also were mixed. Rolling Stone called it “hypnotic,” the Washington Post said it was “an absorbing visual voyage” and in the Atlantic it was “utterly enthralling,” but the New York Times described it as “muddled, pretentious….a shallow hodgepodge.” Depp’s narration was called “solemn” and “worshipful,” but his public emergence as a Doors fan did the band no harm, while giving the film added marketing power. The music from When You’re Strange was released as a CD and the documentary was awarded a Grammy for “Best Long Form Music Video” despite the fact it was not a video. Nonetheless, those connected to the film, including The Doors, said they were content.

  Over the years, the literary, scholarly, cinematic, and theatrical tributes rolled in. In France, there were enough books to call Jim Morrison a publishing genre, including a comic book recounting the story of his imagined friendship with the man he said died in his club’s toilet. Years past, the singer’s sister, Anne Morrison Graham, produced a rock opera (starring the young Dave Brock, who went on to form his tribute band Wild Child and then joined Manzarek and Krieger on the road), while her former husband Allan maintained a tenuous webpage connection, along with who knows how many other sites set up by onetime associates and fans.

  Ray Manzarek published a novel called Poet in Exile about a rock star who faked his death and was found years later living on an island in the Indian Ocean with a wife and two kids. There were books by more women who insisted they were Morrison’s true loves and one by Mark Opsasnick called The Lizard King Was Here: The Life and Times of Jim Morrison in Alexandria, Va., where Jim had spent just two years of his high school life. In Moscow a theatrical production called Light My Fire both spoofed and lionized Morrison, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix together. In Los Angeles in the run-up to the fortieth anniversary of the singer’s death, fifty-seven-year-old Cyndi Lauper was cast as the love interest in a film about a rock star who went to Paris to write poetry. An animated comic book/novel had a tentative go-ahead from the Doors. John Densmore was writing a book about the trial. Robby Krieger was reported close to finally finishing his memoir. And a writer no one had ever heard of, Ron Clooney, published Mr. Mojo Risin’ (Ain’t Dead), another fantasy.

  The weird scenes from the goldmine continued as well, as a two-bedroom, seventy square meter apartment in West Hollywood, Jim’s and Pamela’s last residence before going to Paris, was decorated with Doors posters and offered for rent at $3,000 a month (no charge for visits to the “meditation garden” in the back where Jim allegedly wrote poetry) and in Clearwater, Florida, when the house he lived in with his grandparents for a year while attending St. Petersburg Junior College was razed to make way for a condominium and retail development, bits and pieces of it were sold on eBay.

  As all this was going on, Krieger offered a limited edition replica of his Gibson 1967 SG Standard Gibson guitar, with reproduced dings, scratches and belt rash, priced at $3,500. And with the Morrison family’s help, the Rock and Roll Museum & Hall of Fame in Cleveland mounted an exhibit of childhood memorabilia that included Jim’s Cub Scout uniform and a baby album in which his mom described the shape of his head at birth as looking like an “Idaho potato.”

  Of all the posthumous Morrison stories to delight the press, none got as much attention as when in November 2010 it was learned that Governor Charlie Crist of Florida might pardon Jim Morrison forty years after being convicted of exposing himself on stage in Miami.

  The campaign to get the pardon began in 1996 when Jerry Prochnicky, an avid Doors fan and one of Morrison’s several biographers, suggested the idea to Kerry Humpherys, who was then phasing out the printed version of his Doors Collectors Magazine and moving it onto the Net. Eventually he collected thirty thousand signatures on a petition, but when Danny Sugerman talked about that effort to another Doors fan, Dave Diamond, Diamond told Danny “a petition is something you circulate when you want a stop sign put up in your neighborhood.”

  For the next ten years, starting in 2000, Diamond badgered Florida politicians and bureaucrats and got nowhere—you can imagine what Governor Jeb Bush had to say—until finally he was told “anyone could apply for a pardon on behalf of a deceased person, assuming Constitutional flaws could be proven and that there were sufficient legal precedents. In 2003, the governor of New York had pardoned Lenny Bruce and three years later, when Ken Lay died after his Enron trial, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals abated the conviction. That’s when we went to Crist.”

  The governor in turn asked his staff to collect information and that effort plus a reconstruction of the Miami concert written by Rainer Moddemann led him to believe “an injustice was being done.” In December 2010, just weeks before his term ended, he convened the Parole Board and said, “Because he [Morrison] is unable to state his case for clemency before this board today, I offer to do so for him.”

  After pointing to the court’s failure to allow the singer to present “evidence of community standards of other rock performances of the era [which] would have offered cultural context for the allegations against him” and the judge refused to permit him to face all of his accusers, his constitutional rights were denied, after which his death “prevented him from exercising his right to a direct appeal, a right given to every American by the United States Constitution.

  “In addition, at the time of Morrison’s death, a convicted defendant who died before his appeal was heard was entitled to have the conviction dismissed so that he was again presumed innocent. This doctrine, known as ‘abatement ab initio,’ wiped the slate clean—as though the conviction had never taken place. In this case, guilt or innocence is in God’s hands, not ours,” Crist said. “That is why I ask my colleagues today to pardon Jim Morrison.”

  The vote was unanimous and the Florida native’s slate was wiped clean. In a rare expression of unity, the three surviving Doors and the Morrisons jointly released a statement saying the charges against the singer were “largely an opportunity for grandstanding by ambitious politicians.” They said an apology would be more appropriate, followed by “expunging the whole sorry matter from the record.” Patricia Kennealy-Morrison, still wearing widow’s rags, said much the same thing on CNN.

  The good news, at least for Manzarek and Krieger, was that in 2011, four decades after their original singer died, they were still on the road, as Ray Manzarek and Robby Krieger of the Doors (just as Densmore wished)—appearing first with vocalist Brett Scallions (from a band called Fuel) and Miljenko Matijevic (from Steelheart) and then Dave Brock, who continued to front the Los Angeles-based Doors tribute band Wild Child between tours.

  Also in 2011, Dennis Jakob, a film school friend on whose rooftop Morrison lived following graduation from UCLA, published a book called Summer With Morrison and a man who said he was the band’s first roadie turned his adventures humping amps into a book as well.

  The bad news was that however successful Elektra continued to be with its endless repackaging—re-mastering and releasing in 2006 a twelve-disc box set in “Surroundsound” (and featuring session outtakes and other “extras”)—in 2011 Bruce Botnick said there was nothing remaining in The Doors barrel to scrape. All known unreleased material had now been packaged and released. />
  “There’s nothing left,” he said. “What’s that mean? It’s the end of a cycle. We have nowhere to go from here.”

  About the same time, the Doors had a lawyer send a letter to the Lezard King, a bar in Paris not far from where Morrison once lived, telling the owner to change the name of the establishment, destroy all the decorations and replace the names of the cocktails named for Doors songs. Predictably, this generated another wave of worldwide publicity, with most media chuckling at the irony seen in the estate’s going after a bar named for a man who spent so much of his life in them.

  In a long statement posted on numerous websites, Jeff Jampol explained that his office authorized hundreds of such “cease and desist” letters every month, all aimed at protecting intellectual property rights held by the Doors and the Morrison estate. He also pointed out that the owner of the bar admitted that he didn’t request permission to use the names and likenesses because he figured the answer would be no. So, Jampol said, why all the headlines, what’s the big deal?

  Did this generate any sympathy for the Doors? Not any more than likely was inspired by John Densmore’s 2011 announcement on his website that he could no longer reply to requests for his autograph as it was getting in the way of his living a normal life.

  When I asked the Doors’ manager, Jeff Jampol, what he was planning for the anniversary, he said that unlike Elvis, for whom a ten-day program of events is scheduled routinely on the anniversary of his death, pulling tens of thousands of fans to Memphis, the Doors were not taking note, officially.

  “We do not celebrate his death,” Jampol said, “—we celebrate his life. It’s the same for all my clients.”

  This didn’t stop what now was called the “Manzarek/Krieger Band with Dave Brock on vocals.” Following some scattered Spring concerts in Mexico, South America and the United States, the band opened a month-long European tour in Paris on July 2nd, the eve of the fortieth anniversary of Morrison’s death. Competing with Manzarek and Krieger, from Scotland came a group called Doors Alive and at the Lezard King Bar, another from Germany, Stone Immaculate.

  Thousands of fans gathered peacefully at the gravesite, wearing tee shirts emblazoned with Jim’s picture, dancing, singing Doors songs and before the day was out, the films were on YouTube for all to see. Ray and Robby paid their respects as well and two days later they were playing “Light My Fire” in Tel Aviv and after that they flew to Moscow to begin their three-week, eight-country tour of the continent.

  —Jerry Hopkins, Bangkok, July 2011

  Postscript…

  Bruce Botnick’s gloomy forecast proved premature, largely thanks to some lucky breaks—the discovery of unreleased tapes. The first of these were included in a two-disc, fortieth anniversary edition of The Doors’ final studio album, L.A. Woman. To commemorate this manufactured event, the original recording was re-mastered, but of more interest to fans was what was found on the second disc. Included with alternate takes of “L.A. Woman,” “Love Her Madly” and “Riders on the Storm”—along with live chatter that included Jim suggesting the thunderstorm sound effect that opened the latter—was a song that was completely forgotten, “She Smells So Nice,” remarkable for its title if nothing else. The Doors also released a DVD/Blu-ray to commemorate the anniversary, Mr. Mojo Risin’: The Story of L.A. Woman. This included interviews with Ray, John and Robby, Jac Holsman, Bill Siddons, and Bruce Botnick, among others.

  More surprising was what came next: another lost tape. It was only a month after Ray and Robby had put in an appearance at Jim’s graveside that, while appearing with their hybrid band in San Francisco, they let it leak that someone had come forward with a reel-to-reel tape made by one of Ray’s UCLA friends when the fledgling band performed in 1966 at the London Fog. And not only was the tape said to be of excellent quality, there were photographs as well.

  Again, it was product of primary interest to hardcore fans. For them, surprises on the track list included a cover of Wilson Pickett’s “Don’t Fight It,” covers of Little Richard’s “Lucille” and Big Joe Williams “Baby Please Don’t Go” (a recent release by Van Morrison and Them), and the only known live recording of “Strange Days.” A second, longer reel was said to exist, but apparently was lost.

  Lightning struck a third time with the release of a double live album compiled and re-sequenced from recordings made in 1967 at The Matrix in San Francisco by club co-owner Peter Abram. As was usual for the band in the early days, they paid allegiance to their rock roots, performing songs written by Slim Harpo, Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters, and Bo Diddley but also performed a rendition of George Gershwin’s “Summertime.”

  Another surprise was the discovery of a motorcycle once owned by Jim for sale on Craigslist by a dealer of vintage vehicles who didn’t know what he had until after he’d purchased it. Checking the ownership history of the 1968 Honda 305 Scrambler, he found two of the singer’s early addresses as well as paperwork from the management company that handled the singer’s property following his death.

  Most remarkable of all was what was termed “The Original Jim Morrison Conception Home,” a home offered for sale in Pensacola, Florida. More than a hundred years old, this modest, two-story house was described as being in the Morrison family since 1932 and the temporary home for Jim’s parents when the future admiral was attending flight school in 1943. There was no way to know if this was where conception actually occurred, of course, but surely the possibility enough.

  Bonus Story

  Rejected by 30 Publishers, Blamed for Creating the Myth

  — The Book’s Success, Coupled with that of Its Subject

  Jim Morrison was more than an acquaintance and less than a friend. Ours was a relationship that developed when we found ourselves drinking in the same crummy Los Angeles bars back in the 1960s and I interviewed him several times for Rolling Stone when I was its LA correspondent. I went to Mexico for a week with The Doors. He invited me to film screenings and poetry readings and took me to my first topless bar.

  We also discovered that we had the same literary agent, Sylva Romano, when I drove Jim to her office to sign a contract for what became his first book of poetry, for Simon & Schuster. His editor was named Jonathan Dolger. That same day, Jim said he had read a small rock music history that I’d written and asked if I was working on another book. I said I was looking for a subject for a biography. Maybe Frank Zappa, I said, as I’d known him for many years and thought him smart and articulate. Jim said, simply, “I’d like to read a book about Elvis.”

  That planted the seed and a few months later Sylva got me a contract to write what became the first Elvis biography, selling the idea to Jonathan. At the time, Elvis was still making all those awful movies in Hollywood, hadn’t even returned to performance in Las Vegas, and many of the people I approached for interviews asked, “Why do you want to do a book about him?”

  Then, in the summer of 1971, with the Elvis book on the presses, Jim (to whom the book was dedicated) died in Paris, prompting Jonathan to ask if I’d like to write a book about him. I said yes and, after interviewing about two hundred people in the US and Europe—many of whom expressed surprise that I wanted to write a book about Jim Morrison—I submitted a manuscript about three inches thick. Jonathan asked me to shorten it to about an inch and a half. By the time I did that, Jonathan believed interest in Jim had waned and he rejected the manuscript.

  For the next six years, the manuscript was submitted to some thirty publishers in the US and UK. Sometimes an agent represented the book. Other times, the manuscript went in cold to an anonymous “reader” whose job it was to sort the wheat from the chaff. Even Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone tried to find a taker.

  Among the companies that turned the book away was Warner Books, part of a growing media conglomerate that included three record companies, Warner, Atlantic, and Elektra (WEA), Elektra being The Doors’ old label. I asked Jac Holzma
n, who had been the founder/president of Elektra and now was on the WEA board, if he would do me a favor and resubmit the manuscript to Warner Books, but this time to the guy at the top.

  He did and the president of Warner, Max Kaminsky, sent me a letter that said, “We still don’t want it.” Wow, I thought, those guys have got memories! Time passed and, after the number of publishers who said no reached thirty, I decided to hang it up, figuring I’d given enough time and energy to Mr. Mojo Risin’.

  One of the people I’d interviewed while researching the book was Danny Sugerman. Danny was working for Ray Manzarek at the time. When I told Danny I was giving up on the biography, he asked if he could try to find a publisher. I said, “Sure, and if you find one, you get ten per cent, agent’s commission.”

  Not knowing the history, he sent it to Warner Books, the last place I would’ve suggested. But it landed on the desk of a young editor named Marcy Rudo and that made all the difference. When Marcy took it to the editorial committee, she was told, “We’ve rejected this turkey two times already and we don’t want it.” As I was told the story later, Marcy was only a few years out of university but she had a good track record at Warner; every book she brought in either broke even or made money. So I guess she argued persuasively and they finally told her okay, but don’t give Hopkins and Sugerman any money. We accepted a pitiful $1,500 advance.

  Although it was the longer manuscript that was accepted, rather than the truncated version Jonathan Dolger had requested, Danny asked if he could shuffle the two together. He also volunteered to write an introduction, ask Michael McClure to write an afterword, compile the discography, get permission to use the lyrics and photographs, and add a few anecdotes of his own. I said, go for it—now you’re the co-author and in for thirty per cent of the royalties and fifty per cent of the movie rights, which at that time we thought were worthless. The $1,500 went to a typist to put the final manuscript together.