Oliver Stone: Chasing the Light, Making The Doors

A new intimate memoir by the controversial and outspoken, Oscar-winning director and screenwriter about his complicated New York childhood, volunteering for combat, and his struggles and triumphs making such films as Platoon, Midnight Express, and Scarface. Before the international success of Platoon in 1986, Oliver Stone had been wounded as an infantryman in Vietnam, and spent years writing unproduced scripts while driving taxis in New York, finally venturing westward to Los Angeles and a new life. Stone, now 73, recounts those formative years with in-the-moment details of the high and low moments: We see meetings with Al Pacino over Stone’s scripts for Scarface; his risky on-the-ground research of Miami drug cartels for Scarface. Chasing the Light is a true insider’s look at Hollywood’s years of upheaval in the 1970s and ’80s. It will be released by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (July 21, 2020)

“Everyone got the demon in here,” Mickey says in Natural Born Killers. “It feeds on your hate. Cuts, kills, rapes. It uses your weakness, your fears. We all know we’re no good pieces of shit from the time we could breathe. After a while, you become bad. You know the only thing that kills the demon, Wayne? Love. That’s why I know that Mallory’s my salvation. She was teaching me how to love.” Stone's work and his critiques of the way white men have gone about making this country constantly summon James Baldwin, who wrote, “People pay for what they do, and, still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply: by the lives they lead.” We see this most glaringly in Stone’s white heroic depictions, like the hero of Platoon, realizing that he has to pick a side and kill the representative of “the machine.” We see this in the hero of Wall Street selling good fathers, including his blood father, to get in good with Michael Douglas. We see it in the hero in Born on the Fourth of July, buckling under a superior officer’s pressure to lie about battlefield atrocities, then rising up years later to oppose the entire war effort. 

Stone's greatness is his audacity, which lies partially in his talent as a skilled storyteller, but mostly in his ability to explore and exploit his moral mediocrity while standing utterly unafraid of looking at how bad, bad, bad our nation has made you, him, and me. Although he is in many ways very far left by Hollywood standards, he is also not the most enlightened person when it comes to feminism, race relations, homophobia, and the like. He struggles with terminology, and like most straight men of his generation, he tends to go into a rhetorical defensive crouch when interrogated about his language and beliefs. Here and there you’ll see lines that are redacted instead of deleted. No one will ever know who requested the redactions—a lawyer working for Abrams Books; my editor or a copy editor; Oliver; me—or what, exactly, is hidden under the redaction lines, but I wanted them to have a presence on the page, even if you couldn’t actually read them. You should think of these blackened lines as spirits cut down during the battle to get this book published. In 1969 Stone wrote his first (still unproduced) feature-length script, Break, an expressionistic piece that turned the war into a psychedelic interior journey, equally influenced by European art cinema, and the rock and roll that made life bearable for soldiers in the bush. Stone sent a copy of the screenplay to Jim Morrison, who was eking out his final days in Paris; his favorite sergeant in Platoon Elias, is a Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol infantryman, whom Stone described as having a Morrison-like face and a dreamy, mystic quality. 

After NYU, Stone obsessed over the war while he wrote spec scripts, worked odd jobs in the East Coast film scene, and drove a cab at night. In 1976, Stone wrote the first draft of a screenplay titled The Platoon—a more straightforward account of his experiences than “Break,” filled with journalistic details and savage violence, and anchored to a blank-slate hero not unlike Crane’s Henry Fleming. In 1986, Stone finally got to direct Platoon which is set in the sixties, and its story of a young US Army infantryman (Charlie Sheen) morally torn between a stoner Jim Morrison/Jesus figure (Willem Dafoe) and a ruthless leather-faced, alcoholic redneck (Tom Berenger). Chris is noble, naive, doomed: an innocent abroad, coming of age in hell. 

Stone, who sent his first feature-length script “Break” to Morrison right before the singer’s death and modeled Platoon’s Elias on him, has said that The Doors is his fantasy of the rock star as an embodiment of Dionysian fearlessness—a dream figure who carried the emotional arc of the sixties counterculture within him, moving from utopian rebellion and feral boldness to booze-soaked depression, withdrawal, and oblivion. As a film stylist, Stone shares Morrison's interest in breaking away from convention, and at times he frees his movie The Doors from the usual Hollywood formulas, gliding through time and space with exhilarating, psychedelic ease. Stone is less inventive at scene-by-scene storytelling, though. Pamela Courson is depicted as saying hostile things to Patricia Kennealy, when by all reports their interactions were polite. What Stone found particularly compelling about Morrison emerges through such a motif as he studies his hero as doomed not just by internal failings, but also by the specific flaws of his society. Just as much as Nixon represented to Stone both the beauty of America in his capacity to rise from straitened youth to national captaincy—and its dark flipside in his resentment and paranoia—Morrison likewise represents a spiritual America doomed to be tortured by a materialistic age where hedonism is offered as substitute for liberty.  

Deleted Scenes on The Doors DVD — These extended scenes are introduced by Oliver Stone who regrets removing some of them from the final cut: Pamela and Jim are on a plane to New York talking about how they would like to die. Another scene showing Ray and Dorothy Manzarek's wedding, followed by Pamela and Jim shopping for their dinner. Also, Morrison in a motel room crying in company of a groupie. What ruined Jim Morrison? The film, at times, dares to make the outrageous suggestion that he died for his audience's sins. One of Mr. Stone's most effective tricks is to fade out the sound entirely at one crucial moment, as Morrison becomes fatally out of touch with his audience. Perhaps Morrison is symbolic of the death of the artist in a society bent on war and destruction. 

—Steve Wheeler: What are your thoughts about the Stone movie? 

—Frank Lisciandro: "I found it to be intolerable. Oliver Stone did not want to know who Jim Morrison was and he did not come close to capturing the essence of Jim. The film never presented the quiet, sensitive, extremely intelligent human being that Jim was. He wasn’t frantic and manic as he is portrayed in this movie. Jim had a sensational sense of humor and that is what is entirely lacking in the Stone film. The guy was hilariously funny and he would make himself the butt of jokes. I never saw Jim lock someone in a closet and set the room on the fire. I couldn’t even imagine him doing anything remotely like that; this was absolutely not in his nature or personality. He was not a violent person. If Jim needed to get back at you, he would do it with words, and he could be devastating that way. Jim loved to laugh and he was not shy about laughing at himself either. He had such humility that he would do that. Yes, he did some crazy things on occasion, but he was also a warm and sensitive person a vast majority of the time. There’s a balance that you don’t find in the movie and that imbalance totally eliminates the real Jim Morrison from the screen.”

—Steve Wheeler: We did interviews with Morrison's closest friends, bandmates, managers, and others over the years. People thanked us very much for searching and exposing the truth, and not the usual unrealistic, ignorant, garbage gossip people are presented 99% of time. I do find it sad that Stone refused to show any of Morrison's good sides. Even Danny Sugerman, not one to shy away from spewing myths and salacious rumors about Morrison, admitted: “It’s Oliver Stone’s version of Jim. There is some truth within it, but it’s not the truth, and it contains numerous fictionalized accounts and considerable exaggeration.” Robby Krieger: “Oliver was only interested in the self-destructive, brooding personality so he was focusing on that aspect of Jim. We were always complaining that the script was too dark, and that’s why Ray bailed on the movie. Oliver did make Jim into a caricature. I mean Jim could be a little freaky from time to time, but not all the time like the movie would have you believe.”

Jim Morrison: “The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you'll always be seeking. I've never seen anybody really find the answer. They think they have, so they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer."

"Yeah, I missed out on the sixties," Stone admits. "I'm not angry about it, but I am saddened that I missed it—especially the healthy male/female relationships. I never had a coeducational existence. The sixties had this enormous sense of sexual liberation. Women started to come out of the closet and fucking was 'in'. It was stylish, fashionable. I missed all that, and the honest, open man/woman communication that came with it." Stone saw Jim and Pam's relationship as a great love story: "She may be basically a figure of innocence, but I see the movie character of Pam as a monster, too. She's very much a sixties child, not too thoughtful, not too intelligent. She decides to ride the snake with Jim, she can hold on and stay with him all the way out—till the point where she's willing to die with him. What I like in their story is that Jim had this loyalty, too. He stuck with her to the end. That's at the center of the movie. He really loved her. Morrison was even darker than we showed in a lot of ways—what struck me was his sadness and depression. I couldn't find the exact Jim. He's an enigma. Nobody could play Jim Morrison but Jim Morrison." —"Oliver Stone: The Controversies, Excesses, and Exploits of a Radical Filmmaker" (1995) by James Riordan

“Part of what made it easy to play Jim was that he was a brilliant actor. He acted a lot. He didn’t want people to know him and he presented something which prevented you from getting close.” -Val Kilmer

We're reaching for death on the end of a candle. We're trying for something that's already found us. Everything human is leaving her face. Soon she will disappear into the calm vegetable morass. Stay! My Wild Love! Earth Air Fire Water. Mother Father Sons & Daughters. Airplane in the starry night. First fright. Forest follow free. I love thee. Watch how I love thee. Shake dreams from your hair. My pretty child, my sweet one. Choose the day and choose the sign of your day. A vast radiant beach in a cool jeweled moon. And we laugh like soft, mad children. The time has come again. Choose now, they croon. Beneath the moon. Enter again the sweet forest. Enter the hot dream. Everything is broken up and dances. Your milk is my wine. My silk is your shine. —Wilderness (1971) by Jim Morrison

Ray Manzarek: A lot of people didn’t care for Jim’s shades back in the day. My wife complimented him on them and he seemed stunned. He told her “Pam thinks they look too far out there.”

Alan R. Graham (ex-husband of Jim Morrison's sister Anne): Pamela Courson was so very close to Jim Morrison from the beginning because of her love for his poetry. She told him he was a real poet before anyone else did. In return for her love and nurture, Morrison let her deep inside of his heart. He needed this kind of love badly.

-Matt Zoller Seitz: Do you see a connection between The Doors and Natural Born Killers?

-Oliver Stone: Yeah, I think of it as a line. Filming Natural Born Killers was like being free again. I think The Doors is like Natural Born Killers. It’s in that line of film where with imagery we freed ourselves and allowed free associations. I rewrote Randall Jahnson's script. My concept was to set the story to the songs. The song would set the scene, like we did later in Natural Born Killers. There’d be a song that’d be the mood, and it was written. I'd sent Morrison a script of Break, which was my first script which I wrote when I came back, about Vietnam. It was very psychedelic. I thought Jim could play the soldier. He could play the character of me. It was quite a wild script. I didn’t hear back, of course. I’m used to that, I’ve been rejected before. 

-Matt Zoller Seitz: So he never contacted you?

-Oliver Stone: No. He died in ’71, so that would’ve been probably two years after I wrote the script. I thought Jim was serious, almost suicidal, all out for nothing. I think you see it in the movie, he takes no prisoners. ‘Do you love me?’ ‘Would you die for me?’ It’s crazy stuff. When he left LA for Paris, he was finished with the band. I do think Paris was the beginning of a new stage but it got derailed. I think part of that, this is my opinion only, I can’t prove it, but I do feel that Pamela Courson had a drug problem. My feeling is that he was trying to help her, and kept up with her, and I think he overdid it. We weren’t allowed to depict her addiction, because her parents didn’t want to have any of that, but you can see in the film that she’s high. I actually had access to 120 transcripts through the kindness of Jerry Hopkins, who had collected them. But Manzarek, who I don’t believe ever saw Hopkins’ transcripts, was outrageous in what he said, and totally mean-minded. But the thing that really bothers me is that Manzarek, if you really go over Hopkins’s transcripts, doesn’t figure prominently, except as a musical coworker. He’s Jim’s colleague and all that, he's very important at the beginning, but after the first album you sense Manzarek was a complete opposite to Jim. Everything with Jim was freedom; Manzarek is control. Manzarek is the authority figure. Jim never really had a social life with Ray anyway. Manzarek was like an Iago figure to me. I probably made Morrison more dangerous than he wanted him to be, but I read those transcripts: what was going on sexually, his impotence, all kinds of issues. 

-Oliver Stone: He was an alcoholic with a capital A and he wasn’t that sex-driven as much as he was this idea of sex, and you know, Pamela’s a pretty straight woman, kind of boring in a way, [Redacted] But in other words, I don’t see Pamela as some exotic hippie chick. So Meg Ryan was not bad in the part, although she’s strange somehow. Pam Courson was a strange lady, but I find her to be kind of bland, and I think Jim liked that quiet quality of her. I think he was so outrageous that he wanted the opposite. In the film it wasn’t the way Pam really was, but she would probably be happy with Meg. I think we got away with Meg Ryan. Val Kilmer told me—he broke my heart—at the end of the shoot, he said, "You don’t know how to direct" at the last wrap party.  —The Oliver Stone Experience (2017) by Matt Zoller Seitz

Watergate's Exposed Secret Agenda, Oliver Stone's Controversies, Jim Morrison's American Prayer

Who in 1972 when Watergate broke could have foreseen that the scandal eventually would lead back to President Trump’s uncle John G.Trump, an eminent scientist at MIT in the 1940’s who was delegated by the government among other classified tasks with reading Tesla’s secret files after his death and investigating the UFO phenomenon and then into the next century to Donald Trump inside the White House in a titanic struggle for global control? Only one person foresaw this: President Richard Nixon who 48 years ago predicted that year 2020 would be cataclysmic not only for America but for the whole planet and who 33 years ago predicted that Donald Trump one day would be president. Robert Merritt was employed by the police and the FBI in spying on the New Left, a task that ultimately led to his infiltration of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a bete noire of America’s right wing. That said, Secret Agenda since its publication has been eclipsed by startling revelations that undercut much of its account of Watergate. For example, scholar Jim D'Eugenio recently wrote in the Education Forum, “I mean has everyone read what Angelo Lane said? He was the chief investigating officer for the FBI. He even goes as far to say either Hunt or McCord tipped off the police. I should add, today Jim Hougan (author of Secret Agenda) agrees with that. He feels he was too mild on Carl Shoffler in his book.”  

The work that Merritt did for the FBI dovetails with the numerous revelations of FBI illegal acts described in David Wise’s authoritative The American Police State published in 1976.  On June 8, 1972, the FBI terminated its CI contract with Merritt. He was still, however, employed by the MPD as a CI with Shoffler supervising him. What happened next is history as commonly accepted. Shoffler was parked in a police vehicle one block from the Watergate when Frank Wills telephoned the MPD about 1 a.m. on Saturday, June 17, of a possible burglary underway within the Watergate building. The MPD dispatcher alerted Shoffler to Wills’ call and he accompanied by two fellow officers who also had been in the police vehicle entered the building and arrested the burglars. Shoffler knew in advance that a crime was to take place. He had an obligation to report it to his superiors in the Washington Metropolitan Police Department. Merritt had attempted to alert Sgt. Gildon in the Intelligence Division but he cursorily brushed him off. Shoffler then forbade him to have any further contact with Gildon on the matter. Shoffler, the consummate narcissist, dreamed of becoming a famous detective even if it meant creating a constitutional crisis that would lead to the destruction of the Nixon presidency and the defeat of America’s armed forces at war in Vietnam. 

Enemies of Nixon were aware of a plan to break into the Democratic National Committee on June 18 and that the break-in would result in the downfall of Nixon from the presidency. Nixon responded that he was aware of a general plan to break into the DNC that had been authorized by the government agencies involved in the Huston Plan. He said he did not know any of the details as to who exactly would carry out the break-in. He said the purpose of the break-in was to gather evidence of a prostitution ring being operated out of the DNC that would be used in his reelection campaign. There was some further discussion about the planned break-in that was wrapped up when the President became quiet and thoughtful and then mused aloud, “I wish I could get a handle on this.”   

Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA, was published to acclaim in 1984, I lost no time in buying a copy. I had been the original attorney for the Watergate seven burglars: Howard Hunt, Gordon Liddy, James McCord, Bernard Barker, Frank Sturgis, Eugenio Martinez and Virgilio Gonzalez, having been retained as defense counsel by Hunt and Liddy who had escaped after the five other burglars had been arrested inside the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in the Watergate complex on June 17, 1972. When I checked the index I saw that my name appeared in the appendix.  “Among those who are skeptical of the Ervin committee’s investigation of the Watergate affair, there is a school of thought that holds that some Washington police knew in advance that the June 16-17 [1972] break-in was about to occur. Skeptics as politically disparate as H.R. Haldeman and Carl Oglesby point the finger of suspicion at arresting office, Carl Shoffler. Secret Agenda since its publication has been eclipsed by startling revelations that undercut much of its account of Watergate. For example, scholar Jim D'Eugenio recently wrote, “Has everyone read what Angelo Lane said? He was the chief investigating officer for the FBI. He even goes as far to say either Hunt or McCord tipped off the police. I should add, today Hougan agrees with that. He feels he was too mild on Carl Shoffler in his book.”

Why does Hougan feel differently about Shoffler today? One factor may be that Robert Merritt wrote a book that was published in 2010 titled Watergate Exposed: How the President of the United States and the Watergate Burglars Were Set Up as told to me as the original attorney for the Watergate seven. Our book, which contains a number of documents from the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, proves that it was Robert Merritt who tipped Shoffler off on June 2 of the plan to burglarize the Democratic National Committee on June 17, not Hunt, McCord or Baldwin. Nixon in the wake of the breaking of the Watergate scandal concluded correctly that there was no longer anyone inside the White House whom he could trust. Alghough he was a college dropout, Merritt had an I.Q. of 138. After six months the CIA told Merritt his services were no longer needed and they parted on good terms. But the whole venture had hooked Merritt on the idea of clandestine work for the government. In October 1971, Merrritt worked with the MPD Intelligence Division for about a year, and was transferred to the Washington, D.C. Field Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI assignment primarily dealt with targeting the Institute for Policy Studies and the Weather Underground, two organizations deemed radical and dangerous under the government’s COINTELPRO program. 

Merritt decided to bring to Nixon’s attention of the telephone conversation that he overheard while operating the switchboard at the Columbia Plaza Apartments. The conversation revealed that enemies of Nixon were aware of a plan to break into the Democratic National Committee on June 18 and that the break-in would result in the downfall of Nixon from the presidency. The meeting ended with the President telling Merritt that he would be summoned again to meet with him on an unknown date. Merritt’s final meeting with Nixon took place in the second week of July 1972, three weeks after Watergate broke. Merritt found President Nixon distraught with some tears rolling down his checks. Merritt asked Nixon why he was crying. Nixon pointed to an article about the Watergate case in the early edition of the Washington Post lying on top of his desk. He said he was being destroyed, and his presidency was over. He said that he had been betrayed by many in the White House who were motivated by power and money. He could trust no one. He said John Dean was a traitor and Dean had visited Nixon’s enemies on Capitol Hill before and during Watergate. Nixon also singled out by name General Alexander Haig, Carl Shoffler, T.D. (Shoffler’s police buddy) and Captain Edmund Chung as traitors. The President again acknowledged that he knew of the general idea of a break-in at the Democratic National Committee being planned under the Huston Plan but had  known nothing of its details. He expressed remorse for not taking more seriously the information that Merritt had provided him at their prior meeting. 

Nixon blamed the NSA, FBI, CIA and Military Intelligence for wanting him destroyed. The President spoke about the goals of his presidency that were now in jeopardy. He said it might be years before the historians would realize what he had hoped to accomplish, which was to assure the security and well being of Americans alive and those of future generations. He told Merritt that he was going to give him the letter to deliver to Kissinger. He told Merritt to remain quiet and not say a word as he read the letter out loud. Nixon said, “I took my order from above and have followed it to the T.” Merritt was taken aback by the remark and asked Nixon what he meant. Nixon did not reply directly but instead declared that “the year 2020 would be cataclysmic not only for America but for the world.” Merritt asked Nixon how he knew this would happen. Nixon replied, “Think of me a prophet.”  Merritt never saw the President again. He remembers the occasion as one in which the president was distraught throughout.

As recounted in that posting President Nixon told Robert Merritt at their third and final meeting in mid-July 1972: “It was then at Nixon made a cryptic remark, apparently to emphasize the importance of the assignment that he had given Merritt. Nixon said, “I took my order from above.” Merritt was taken aback by the remark and asked Nixon what he meant. Nixon did not reply directly but instead declared that “the year 2020 would be cataclysmic not only for America but for the world.” Merritt asked Nixon how he knew this would happen. Nixon replied, “Think of me a prophet.” The coronavirus entered America’s consciousness in January 2020. Its impact has been horrific and the worst of it lies in the coming months. Nevertheless it does not fit the definition of being a cataclysmic event, which is one of violent change or upheaval, because soon a vaccine will be developed to deal with it. The real cataclysmic event will take place later this year. Actually it will be two events, the first immediately triggering the second. Source: www.amazon.com

Between the late 1950s and the early 1960s Jim Morrison preferred to skip school and visit beatnik hangouts in San Francisco. Two significant events had shaken America. First the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first satellite to orbit the earth. This sensational event provoked spasms of American self-doubt about being beaten into space by the Russians. It began the so-called missile gap debate that later helped put John Kennedy in the White House. In the summer of 1960, something in Jim Morrison changed. Classmates remembered he seemed to undergo a change of personality. He appeared depressed and angry, and neglected his studies. Apparently he took no interest in the November presidential election—hotly debated in his politically conservative school—in which John Kennedy beat Richard Nixon. But Kennedy’s death occupied a dark corner of the Morrison psyche, making frequent appearances in notebooks and later lyrics. “Dead president’s corpse in the driver’s car” is one of the keystone images from both 'Celebration of the Lizard' and the song “Not to Touch the Earth.” On the same notebook page on which Morrison recorded the Kennedy assassination, he wrote the name of Aldous Huxley. Huxley had died at his home in Los Angeles on the same day Jack Kennedy was murdered. Oliver Stone's "JFK" reprised the circumstances and complexities behind that historic and fateful day: that precise instant when an entire civilization was forever changed. 

Kennedy's death established a milestone that American society had reached unknowingly. It became more significant the further away in time we got historically from that event. The assassination was a huge tragedy that created an inability for the nation to find firm footing after it had been knocked off balance. Leonard Pitts, Jr., a columnist for “The Miami Herald,” wrote: "Whatever you think of the 60's one thing is undeniable: They tore us apart, ripped American society to pieces and threw those pieces in the air so they rained down like confetti, falling into new configurations, nothing where it used to be. It was an angry time—we are still sifting through confetti pieces, trying to find a way.” The events of the 1960's set up the impulse toward “psychic disintegration” we are now encountering in recent times.

Morrison saw what was happening to our souls as a society and reported as a witness to "the vultures descending on the scene for curious America aplomb," a nation possessed and frozen in time. JFK and Jim Morrison seemingly had in common health ailments and a sex addiction, but whereas the President had multiple liaisons with Hollywood stars (Gene Tierney, Marilyn Monroe, June Allyson, Arlene Dahl), Morrison juggled female journalists and groupies. Although often exhibiting a lusty attitude, Morrison was usually both mild-mannered and passionately inclinated with women. He liked to cite John Stuart Mill's quote: "Women are a subject of which most men know absolutely nothing." Inspired by the 60s tumultuous days, Morrison wrote “Peace Frog,” with innovative guitars by Robby Krieger. For Morrison it was a song not only of isolation but a complete rejection of what America had become that suggested an inevitable and violent end. He unconsciously intimated that mayhem in America would become epidemic. In the song’s opening line there is a chorus chanted in counterpoint. “She came” is the chorus that follows Morrison's opening warning, “There's blood in the streets, it's up to my ankles.” “She came,” has a dual meaning. It is an easy reference to sexual climax. But the phrase also refers to a line in the first break, “Just about the break of day, she came, and then she drove away, sunlight in her hair.” The sunshine in her hair is a brilliant image that might be just Pamela Courson. She is a fleeting, unreachable image when she leaves the city, and she remains beyond us, unobtainable, the queen of the highway, beckoning to us on the edge of town. 

Dennis Jacob: Pamela said something I will never forget: “I feel sorry for Mary.” I knew it meant she was not threatened by the emergence of Mary Werbelow in Jim's life. That something had long been settled between Pam and Jim. A relationship deeper than either one of them had ever had before. I’d begun to suspect that something had been settled between the two of them – unbreakable except by death itself. Nietzsche once said: 'In the end what a woman wants is a warrior'. Perhaps the women who gravitated toward Jim Morrison were attracted to this quality. Morrison felt that women had a greater future perhaps than most men would have because most men were concerned with the accumulation of empty numbers. Morrison was the contemplative type, hardly the freak that popular consumption would have us believe. He was Apollonian in his life, and Dionysian on stage. He aimed at the heart of American Democracy. He believed in it. —"Summer with Morrison: The Early Life and Times of James Douglas Morrison, A Memoir" (2011) by Dennis C. Jakob and "Some Are Born to Endless Night: Jim Morrison" (2011) by Gerry Kirstein

Jim Morrison: "Most men chase power and control, but they miss the meaning of life. Women have a comic approach to life. They are noble creatures who carry on your name with dignity after you die."

"When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness.” -Marcus Aurelius

Oliver Stone's JFK (1991) is the way most Americans learn about one of the most traumatic events in their recent history. According to Robert Brent Toplin, JFK has probably “had a greater impact on public opinion than any other work of art in American history.” Indeed, the movie remains a great source of pride for Stone, if not his masterpiece. Hollywood had been chasing the Jim Morrison story over the years. The Doors story had been pursued by eight directors: Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese, William Friedkin, Walter Hill, Paul Schrader, Ron Howard, Barry Levinson, and Francis Ford Coppola. "I read hundreds of transcripts from people who had known Jim," Stone said. However, Jerry Hopkins contradicts Stone saying there were roughly "less than 100 transcripts, and most were mine". Stone expounds: "It was like Citizen Kane in a way, because every one of these people had a different point of view. Still, the Doors script was always problematic. I wrote it quickly that summer 1989 in Santa Barbara. The script was written more as a tonal poem. The concept was that the movie was all in Jim's lyrics. I picked the songs I wanted and wrote each piece of the movie as a mood to fit that song. The motivations of the characters were murky to some, clearer to others. I trusted to his lyrics to tell his tale. I tried not to put my rationalizations about his motivations. Jim looked at everything as an artistic creation. It's almost like he constructed his life in the same way as he would labor over a piece of poetry or a song. I think Morrison looked at his life as an epic poem, as if it were a long suicide note. He had sexual problems, he was an alcoholic in the severe sense in that he had a cut-off point, so he couldn't really enjoy drinking; for him it was an all-or-nothing affair. He couldn't even enjoy most drugs any more, he had to go beyond, into heroin. Everything got jaded." As 1989 drew to a close, Stone's second draft was completed and circulated among the concerned parties. Immediately, there were problems. When Morrison died, he left everything to Pamela Courson, including the rights to his poetry and his share of the rights to the music of The Doors. When Pamela died in 1974, all this went to her parents; after a series of lawsuits, it was now controlled jointly by Morrison's parents and the Coursons. The Coursons weren't at all pleased with Stone's script and tried to slow the production down.

The producers had already agreed not to portray Pamela Courson as having anything to do with Morrison's death (some believe Morrison accidentally snorted Pamela's heroin stash). Manzarek was equally unenamored of Stone. "Oliver Stone was over there in Vietnam and the hippies were back here smoking dope and practicing free love, and he was jealous. Oliver Stone is using the Doors to get revenge." Kathleen Quinlan seemed to enjoy playing the free-spirited Patricia Kennealy. The Kennealy character is a composite of different women who were part of Morrison's life and was originally named Annie O'Riordan, but later changed to Kennealy. "Meg was much more about control than Kathleen," Stone said. "Quinlan in dealing with the sixties seemed to understand it immediately and was able to work easily in that framework. I combined several women from Jim's life and by rights I should have used an alias for the name Kennealy because it's somewhat misleading." —"Stone: The Controversies, Excesses, And Exploits of a Radical Filmmaker" (1995) by James Riordan

John Haeny: "I would never say that I was especially close to Jim.  I actually rather doubt that anyone (besides Pam) was truly close to Jim. When I saw Jim with others he always seemed to be somewhat preoccupied and distant, caught up in his own thoughts, always wary of others. Jim was always warm and polite around me. From time to time we would sit on the desks at the back office at Elektra and have social chats. Over a very long career I have never been intimidated by any ‘star’. I always accepted them as normal people, respecting them as artists but never allowing them anymore than that. I think Jim sensed that in me. I did notice that in really intense situations when Jim and I were in the same studio control room we would exchange brief glances and quiet smiles. Although Morrison was essentially a lonely and tortured rebel, he was likable and engaging in all kinds of conversation.  Jim and I had about a half dozen meetings at my house in Coldwater Canyon to discuss and plan the project "American Prayer". Jim was always clear minded, softly spoken and exceedingly polite. Jim also left me his entire collection of notebooks so I could become more familiar with his work at a formative level. The time came when I heard through the grapevine that Jim had left The Doors.

I had always known that Jim considered himself firstly a filmmaker and a poet. His Rock and Roll life was an unexpected development that was thrust upon him. Now he felt tired of that role. After Jim’s death his notebooks were scattered to the four winds. I think there are still some missing, some sitting in private collections, other lost forever. I resisted every legal, civil and social pressure to give up those initial recordings, especially during the lawsuits regarding the estate of Jim. The Doors then attorney, Max Fink, threatened to send up the Sheriff to pick up the tapes. I told Max to go ahead and try. If he did I would deliver a pile of ashes and he could figure out if they were the ashes of the real recordings or not.  It was somewhat similar during the making of Oliver Stone’s film “The Doors” although with a bit less threat on display. When Oliver’s people contacted me to ask for access to the poetry tapes I simply said “no”. I felt Stone's portrayal of Jim was embarrasing, by the way. The estate of James Douglas Morrison was shared between Jim’s parents and the parents of Pam Courson, Jim’s wife. Individually I always found The Doors reasonable, even warm and funny. But collectively there emerged what I called “The Doors Mentality”. They would become aggressive, greedy, extremely distrustful and could easily become litigious. There were also a big stack of tapes known as “The Endless Night Tapes” recorded during an all night session at a motel room in Palm Springs. But, we had a problem.  Jim’s voice was buried in the roar of a cheap air conditioner in that Palm Springs motel room. We had to reclaim Jim’s story from those tapes. This was going to ultimately involve a trip to Salt Lake City, Utah. The brilliant and highly advanced work of Dr. Thomas Stockham of Soundstream helped us salvage that recording. Dr. Stockham had also created a highly complex digital restoration process called ‘Blind De-Convolution’. Eventually we had all our materials sorted.  Jim only occasionally titled his poetry and never dated them, creating a huge dilemma for us.  We had to discover a way to make order out of seemingly chaos. This was the single biggest challenge we faced during the making of the album. Source: johnhaeny.com

Pamela Des Barres, Musical Heroes, Dion, Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, Lou Reed

After decades of loving Dion Di Mucci, I was invited by his manager to see him reunite with the Belmonts at Radio City Music Hall in ‘87. As a card-carrying member of Dion’s fan club, back in 1961, I’d hustle home from Northridge Jr. High to catch his suave glory on American Bandstand.  I gave him a copy of my first book, and he was as kind and charming as humanly possible. I got to hang out with him for awhile, and I still never miss Dion play. I went all the way to New Jersey last fall, and wept through my favorite song, Love Came to Me just like it was 1961 all over again. I’ve also made the Dion pilgrimage, walking the hallowed streets of the Bronx. It took 40 years, but I did finally meet Paul McCartney. After I handed him my first book, he raised those oh so famous eyebrows and asked nervously, “We haven’t met before, have we?” I'd met John Lennon, Keith Moon introduced us, in the middle of his Lost Weekend, and it turned into “Pamela John, John Pamela,” staring at me like he was not very interested. I met the flirtatious Mr. George Harrison three times, but as much as I enjoyed his seductive attention, I’ve always left married men alone.

I attended a bash to celebrate Dylan’s 50th year on the planet, along with a few of his friends, including all of the Traveling Wilburys. That glorious Malibu afternoon turned out to be right up there as one of the best days in my life. At one point, Patti d'Arbanville and I were sitting under an umbrella with Bob and George Harrison when the quiet Beatle asked Dylan if he‘d read my book I’m With the Band, adding, “I’m not in it – unfortunately…” In that British accent! If that wasn’t enough, George introduced me the mechanic fellow he’d brought along to the party, “He works with engines the way you and I work with words.” you and I?! Great God Almighty! Call me an old flowerchild, but I believe we are all someone’s hero at one time or another – even if it’s just for one day.  We recognize ourselves in our heroes, and by adoring our them, we’re adoring ourselves.

A little later, Bob Dylan motioned me over to him, took a little piece of paper from his wallet and asked for my phone number, “Maybe we could write together on something. A screenplay maybe.” How does one respond to such an unexpected offer?  “Sure, that would be swell.” A few weeks later, I was invited backstage after Dylan’s gig, a rare occurrence indeed. He opened his arms wide as I walked in, exclaiming “I read your book cover-to-cover, and you’re a good writer!” I’ve said many times that I could have died happily at that moment. It’s a cliché but I swear to Buddha, all the clocks in the world stopped ticking. Dylan is my favorite musical hero.

The Earl Carroll Theater in 1967 across from the Hollywood Palladium was where I climbed a rickety ladder to a dark and dusty loft above the Doors stage where I made out wildly with Jim Morrison. And it involved a dangerous short-lived drug called Trimar. When Jim Morrison suggested the Trimar stuff might “hurt our heads,” I paid attention and that’s probably why my gray matter still functions. I thought he was the most beautiful man I had ever seen. One of God's greatest gifts to rock and roll was that guy's face. He was so gorgeous, everything about him was just perfect. The 60s was a very special time. All of a sudden women could express themselves sexually, freely. Much more than now. I had never kissed anyone while high before and it was a revelation, it felt like we melted into each other! Later we drove all around Hollywood and on our way to Tiny Naylor's on La Brea, Jim Morrison grabbed my bottle of Trimar, and threw it out the window into a yard full of overgrown ivy. 'Now we won't be tempted,' he said. We had nut bread and fresh orange juice while the sun came up. He told me the persona he put forward onstage was an elaborate act, and he really wanted to be noticed as a poet. After some heavy necking, he climbed from behind the wheel and said, 'I really want to see you again, darling, come here and see me or call anytime.' 

That was the only time I had my hands on Jim Morrison. I never went all the way with him, although I know we would have if Pamela wouldn't have interrupted us. He turned out to be very much a one-woman man. As far as I know, he spent the rest of his life with Pamela Courson, and their relationship was of the stormy nature, but I guess he loved her madly. I didn't dare return to his house on Laurel Canyon after Pamela ordered me out. The last time I saw him was right before he left for Paris. I was walking down La Cienega. Jim was on the other side of the street, driving a convertible, and he turned left into the Benihana parking lot, stopping me dead in my tracks. He told me how nice it was to see me again and how pretty I looked. He took my hand and kissed it; then he backed into the honking traffic and careened down the street." —"I'm with the Band: Confessions of a Groupie" (2005) by Pamela Des Barres

-Frank Lisciandro: Is it true you were hired to keep Jim out of trouble and from drinking too much?

-Tony Funches (Jim Morrison’s bodyguard): Keep him out of trouble? Yes. Drinking too much? Generally no. He wasn’t so constantly wasted that he couldn’t stick up for himself. There were times I observed some hoity-toity schmuck (male or female) observe, “Oh! Jim Morrison! Do something weird, Jim” as in “thrill me you fool!” He would then ‘read’ them and regurgitate back to them that which they uniquely feared the most about themselves. He was truly a magnificent guy, really. They took him for a lightweight because of the image, press coverage and such. They should have looked closer and witnessed the genius. I did and I’m no Rhodes Scholar. I never saw the guy start any trouble with anybody. But in terms of everyday activities, he was extremely polite to everyone, soft spoken, shy, and incredibly generous. The man tipped service extravagantly, even very rude service. I witnessed this numerous times, especially on a road trip from LA to San Francisco. We encountered a rude, bitter old waitress who didn’t approve of hippies or blacks. When Jim left a $50 tip, she came running out of the restaurant, demanding to know why. Jim replied, “For such great service.” You should see that woman's face expression, it was priceless.

-Tony Funches: The power brokers and radio jocks set him off with their bullshit, but he was the nicest guy on the planet with the faceless crowd. It would really take a book to tell that part. Has he been portrayed accurately by the media? Fuck, no! That Lizard King bullshit was dreamed up by some marketing idiot. Jim never really subscribed to it but did allow others to see it that way if they wished. Again, much of that sex-god image was contrived by others and Jim went along because they babbled that it was good for the band and record sales, etc. He couldn’t have given a shit about all that crap.

-Frank Lisciandro: What about his relationship with Pamela?

-Tony Funches: Jim didn’t really feel close to any other living human being, maybe with the exception of Pamela. She passed for whatever closeness his kind of loner could connect with. He knew she really cared for the real person. As much as his intellect could fathom that recognition, he loved her. The rest of the band usually had their wives along on the tours, but we all dreaded Pamela attempting to show up. Like fingernails on the blackboard. She drove Jim up the wall and consequently the rest of us as well. She was definitely high maintenance and could be very critical of Jim as performer. Jim wasn’t a clotheshorse, and I’m pretty sure Pam bought whatever clothes he carted around with him. 

-Frank Lisciandro: Did he ever discuss how he felt about being famous? Was he comfortable with having a rock star image or is it true he was more interested in pursuing poetry/film?

-Tony Funches: The latter is true. He could not stand the media circus and phony assholes populating that hemisphere of indulgence.

-Frank Lisciandro: Do you think his problem with alcoholism escalated because he had a hard time dealing with his success?

-Tony Funches: Yes. Again, I repeat many of the assholes that crawled out from under the slime would cause extreme reactions from anyone! That Jim’s genius allowed him to tolerate them is testament to how irritating they were in the first place. —"Jim Morrison: Friends Gathered Together" (2014) by Frank Lisciandro

-Steve Katz: When I first met Lou Reed, he was doing epic amounts of speed. His drug of choice was methamphetamine hydrochloride, the brand name Desoxyn. He was losing weight and his shaking hands got worse, he shook like a leaf. I was curious as to what Desoxyn felt like. One day, I asked Lou to leave me a pill before he left. Taking a break from my daily weed regimen, I swallowed half of it. I couldn’t get to sleep nor could I properly form a chord on my guitar or press the play button on my tape deck. My wife had to change the channels on the TV. I was a zombie. My first thought was, “How does he do this shit?” Lou was probably too intelligent for his own good, but he could be one of the funniest people I had ever known, a refreshing change from the studio guys in boring old Blood, Sweat & Tears. Lou respected that I was a musician and that we had a shared history in the New York underground, even if the Blues Project had been abjectly terrified of the Velvet Underground. During the summer of 1973, Lou and I started spending more time together. Most of the time, I was able to see beyond the arrogance and the drugs and I learned that much of what Lou did was an act. His questionable bisexuality during this period also lent him a mystique that he himself helped foster, but I knew that when you took that much speed, you probably couldn’t even get an erection. In a perverse way, it probably caused his relationships to be less threatening, but the illusion certainly fed his fans and critics alike. —Blood, Sweat, and My Rock 'n' Roll Years (2015) by Steve Katz

Strange Days with The Doors, JFK lyrics

“Not To Touch the Earth” (1968): House upon the hill/Moon is lying still/Shadows of the trees/Witnessing the wild breeze/Come on baby run with me/The mansion is warm, at the top of the hill/Rich are the rooms and the comforts there/Red are the arms of luxuriant chairs/And you won't know a thing till you get inside/Dead president's corpse in the driver's car/The engine runs on glue and tar/Come on along, not going very far/Wake up, girl, we're almost home/We should see the gates by morning/We should be inside the evening/ Burn... 

“Small minds cannot grasp great ideas; to their narrow comprehension, their purblind vision, nothing seems really great and important but themselves.” ―James George Frazer, The Golden Bough (1890). The Doors song “Not To Touch the Earth” (whose opening lines are inspired by “The Golden Bough”) deals with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy (“dead President’s corpse in the driver’s car,” as Kennedy was killed while in a motorcade). Similarly, there are no stones unturned in Dylan's narrative of "Murder Most Foul" (2020). Dylan puts us again in that limousine, before the shots fired, during the assassination, and on that six-mile trip to Parkland Hospital, to when Vice President Lyndon Johnson is sworn in as President at 2:38 pm that afternoon. It's especially chilling and emotionally soaring, when he notes in the next verse, "I said the soul of a nation been torn away / And it's beginning to go into slow decay / And that it's 36 hours past Judgement Day." Similarly, Jim Morrison wrote (in one of his Hidden poems, 1969): "I have a vision of America. Seen from the air 28,000 ft. & going fast. A one-armed man in a Texas parking labyrinth. A burnt tree like a giant primeval bird in an empty lot in Fresno." Source: www.popmatters.com

John Humphrey Noyes (1811-1886) was an American preacher, radical philosopher, and utopian socialist. He founded the Putney, Oneida and Wallingford Communities, and is credited with coining the term "complex marriage". He left Andover for Yale University and started an uproar when he began preaching Perfectionism, the heretical notion that a religious life must be free of sin. Argumentative and charismatic, Noyes became a local celebrity and attracted small crowds of supporters, opponents and gawkers. It was around this time that Noyes met Abigail Merwin. He was 22; she was 30. It’s hard to find details about Merwin, other than that she was smart, beautiful and had dark-grey eyes. Many of Noyes’s descriptions of her are saturated with ecstatic religious imagery. During a period when he stopped eating and sleeping and instead wandered manic through the streets of lower Manhattan, he envisioned her ‘standing, as it were, on the pinnacle of the universe, in the glory of an angel’ (although, in his mania, he wondered whether she was actually the devil incarnate). Merwin was Noyes’s first follower, and he loved her. In his Confessions of Religious Experience (1849), he admitted that ‘she was undoubtedly the person to whom I was attached more than any other person on earth’.

Noyes’s instability eventually scared off Merwin. After his manic spell in New York, she deserted him and Perfectionism. Her father later told Noyes to keep away. Yet when Merwin announced her engagement to a man named Merit Platt, Noyes sent her a letter. ‘I loved you as I never loved another,’ he declared, confessing that ‘the thought of marriage was unavoidable’. She had left him but Noyes was convinced that they were joined in divine matrimony: ‘God shall make you know that he has joined us in an immortal marriage, and that what God hath joined together man can not put asunder.’ Merwin and her new husband moved to Ithaca. Noyes followed them, but Merwin refused to acknowledge him. It was then that Noyes began to develop his doctrine of free love, which, conveniently enough, would justify his having a relationship with Merwin. Today, Noyes is best known for founding the Oneida Community, a religious utopia that, among other ambitions, eradicated traditional marriage. Any man could ask any woman to have sex; each woman could in turn reject any man. The nuclear family disappeared. The Oneida experiment is one in a long line of anti-marriage crusades stretching from 2nd-century North Africa to 20th-century Israel. And like all of them, it failed. After 30 years of enforcement, 30 years of criticism and religious indoctrination, the impulse for special relationships was too strong to control. Younger members revolted. Some developed relationships in secret; others quit the community and married outside. Noyes’s failure to destroy marriage demonstrates just how resilient the institution is. It suggests there’s something deeply human that inspires us to create and participate in marriage. Despite modern trends, most people cohabiting want to get formally married eventually. According to a recent survey (February 2020) from the Pew Research Center, around 70 per cent of respondents in the US said that marriage is either essential or important to living a fulfilling life. Source: aeon.co

"Inside The Fire - My Strange Days With The Doors" (2009) by B. Douglas Cameron—As an 17 year old from the mid-west he bought a ticket for a Doors show in Chicago, November 3 1968 that forever changed his life. In 1969 Douglas Cameron became a roadie for the band who worked very hard lugging 240 pound amps for gigs in the mid-west and down to Mexico City for $60 per week. Cameron knew personally Morrison, his girlfriend Pam Courson, and even paid a visit to the Courson family. Some extracts: “Morrison generally was fair. If he went on the attack against somebody they usually deserved it. Morrison hated feeling he was being used. He rarely used people, that was not his style. Despite the legend, I only saw him around groupies a few times. He treated girls fine, groupies, girlfriends, whatever they were. Pam was in another category, practically she was his wife. They loved each other, but there was this weird competition they had, like a test to see who was the stronger, who loved the other one the most. There was a lot of mind fucking going on. She had been there from the start, from when Jim had nothing at Venice, until that final, fatal night. His final words were ‘Pam, are you still there?’ She was lovely and very funny, but most of The Doors' entourage hated her. I would lie if I said she was all sweetness and rainbows. She could be very difficult to deal with a times and knew how to press Jim's buttons. When she called him Jimmy it reminded him of when he was a kid. I think that’s what his grandma called him as a kid. When Pam was really pissed she called him James Douglas Morrison, you know, like a mother would. Pam kinda went into helpless girlish mode and then he melted to her. She didn’t do baby speak or play the fool, but she could give off this vulnerable vibe. Jim told me he loved her and they shared a common destiny. I thought that destiny thing was a crock, just more of weird luck, but there was no way he was going to believe me. Anyways, he said they were meant to be together.”

Jim was the ultimate existentialist. It wasn't that he didn't want to talk about the band so much as he didn't want to talk about anything that was a burden. The image of the dead albatross hanging around his neck was a metaphor for Jim's freedom. He wasn't free because he had an albatross called the Doors hanging around his neck. Pam's dependency on heroin complicated the things between them even more. I witnessed first hand a couple of their foul arguments, where she would threaten to leave him for the count, a French dealer. We all thought Jim was going to break it up with her but she actually had given him an ultimatum, it was her or The Doors. Diane Gardiner admitted so much ('Pam was fed up after Miami's catastrophe. She said Jean de Bretueil wanted her as his girlfriend and she had outgrown Jim'). It may sound ludicrous, but what if she was not bluffing this time and was leaving Jim for good? Could you imagine what was going through Jim's mind? Even his own sister Anne said that everyone in the family thought Jim would end up as a ‘bum’. The same insecurities, the same desperate attempts that he exhibited in Miami after fighting with Pam at the L.A. airport, resurfaced. Nearly all the lyrics of his songs ‘We could be so good together’; ‘Hyacinth House’; ‘Cars Hiss by my Window are about Pam. What if Morrison was actually shy? Maybe Pam was, in his mind, his only real friend or soulmate. I think she made him feel like a man because she looked vulnerable and romantic. He got drunk so he could talk to the press and perform for the fans. The idea of death obsessed him. I remember him saying once: “Well sometimes people die by accident, sometimes by design and sometimes they just die and there isn’t a reason.” He was being crucified by his own mind. 

On 1st March 1969 Jim missed his direct flight from Los Angeles to Miami, where The Doors were booked to play at the Dinner Key Auditorium, an old stuffy hall near the harbour, constructed of corrugated iron. He sat down in a bar at the airport and drank a lot, ruminating on the ultimatum Pam had given him. As there were no more direct flights, he had to change planes in New Orleans around noon, and had to wait several hours for the connecting flight. Eventually he arrived at the Dinner Key Auditorium just minutes before the beginning of the concert. He was totally drunk. The atmosphere backstage was already at its lowest point. Against an arrangement that had been made, several thousand extra spectators had been squeezed into the venue. And when Bill Siddons, the manager of The Doors, voiced a desire to cancel the concert, he discovered that the lorry that had picked up the band's equipment from the airport had suddenly and mysteriously disappeared. Amidst the concert, Jim takes the microphone and rambles. "Wake up! You can't remember where had this dream stopped? The snake was pale gold, glazed and shrunken. We were afraid to touch it. The sheets were hot, dead prisons. Run to the mirror in the bathroom, look, she's coming in here... I can't live through each slow century of her moving..." At this point someone throws a bag of red paint at him. Jim's pants got covered with paint. One of the security guards has had enough, and amongst all the howling from the fans, he shoves Jim off the stage. One of the promoters pushes through to the microphone and shouts: "Hold it, someone's gonna get hurt! Stop it." Not until an hour later is the hall empty. In L.A. the heat was already on. The first comments about the cancelled concerts arrived, and the press began publishing exaggerated and fabricated reports about the Miami concert. Every article picked up on the contents of the warrant, and to most of them Jim Morrison was guilty right from the beginning. It was found particularly distasteful that he had performed his 'exhibitionist show'. Jim Morrison was now a fugitive from the law, and with an international warrant out for his arrest, was wanted by the FBI. This warrant eventually arrived at the Doors Office, and Jim gave himself up to the FBI in L.A. in the presence of his lawyer, Max Fink, on 3rd April 1969. A degrading court case followed, which would stretch out until pronoucement of judgement on 30th October 1970. Despite the recording of the concert, as well as 150 photographs that did not show one shred of evidence of Morrison's apparent exhibitionist behaviour in public, he was found guilty on these charges. On top of this, he was harassed by that witch from New York, who is a professional liar. Morrison hated her presence. He was given 28 months of probationary time. Due to Jim's subsequent death, however, there would never be another meeting in court. It was obvious that Judge Murray Goodman, with a lot of pressure from outside, wanted to make an example of this case. 

My feelings after watching the Miami debacle. Disappointment, despair, frustration and I also knew that the future for me and everyone in and around the Doors was very much uncertain. In New Orleans, on the way to the stage prior to the show Jim gobbled hashish laced with opium which contributed to his 'lethargic performance.' Jim was burned out from performing by the end of 1969. Going way back to Amsterman in 1968, Jim already was signalling an end to his desire to perform live on stage. I was sorry to witness such a collapse of a human being who really was at his core, a decent fellow, with a penchant for becoming a "wordsmith". Jim pleaded his case to the band about the stress of the upcoming trial, fights with Pam and other excuses for his lethargic and unprofessional behavior. But the guys decided that they had enough and they planned, in secret, to form a new band, Other Voices, and continue their careers as a new group. This was planned only after New Orleans. The planning went on through the recording of LA Woman. When Jim left for Paris I was asked to set up a stage while they organized new performances. Bruce Botnick also rehearsed the set-up and recording of the stage performance and got his equipment ready for the road. It was disappointing to me because it lacked the content and mystique of the original Doors sound and music. This was also reflected in the audience reactions. The Tour in 1972 was finally cancelled owing to lack of ticket sales. The Doors had, indeed, closed. Jim went to Paris to lick his wounds, knowing full well that, as a stage performer, he was finished with The Doors. If Pam was in Paris it was because Jim paid for it with cold cash. She had no income due to the financial failure of her boutique Themis. He told me both were going to detox and he was going to propose her marriage in Paris.

In New Orleans, Densmore said Jim caught the mike tripod and began smashing it on stage, again and again, until wooden boards fly into pieces while the spectators of the first rows watched horrified. That's not the total truth. They all remember Jim bashing the stage with the mike stand and Jim's "crappy" performance. That's about it for their "truth." But they have no recollection any longer of what happened throughout the duration of the show. As wasted as Jim was, he was able to last for just about the entire set. He probably sounds like crap and his voice is certainly no better than it was at Dallas, but they embellished the story to make Jim sound the big bad wolf again. Jim just shattered some layers of plywood and made a hole. On that last stroke, the base of the mike went through the hole and snapped off the shaft. Jim was a little surprised, I think. John then approached him and shook Jim while verbally reprimanding him. Jim then walked off stage, on the sudience left side, and disappeared through the door. John threw down his stick, commented that he would "never play with that asshole again" and walked off. Ray and Robby were sort of in shock. One after the other they followed John off stage and up the stairs. As a group, they did not do nothing constructive about it. It was this shaman crap promotion that allowed Ray to justify not taking any step to stop Jim. To tell you the truth I think they cannot remember because they do not want to. It was a painful experience to remember they didn't help him. They were definitely angry with Jim and his drunken antics. One thing certain, this affirmed their resolve to get rid of Jim. From that ill fated day in New Orleans, the path led straight to "Other Voices" just 10 months later. Only for Jim all of it seemed a joke. There was only one problem, however, no one was laughing.

Notes on a Screen (Jim Morrison's prose poem, 1969): "It's a matter of demolishing experience, just a question of gathering up all fragments into one zone of awareness, then pulverizing them to expel from the system through its tiny doors, leaving behind the mind stripped bare, devastated and stark as ground zero. You got to have the guts to lace your own network with it. Let the risk illuminate your own dreams. Lit up like emerald peacock feathers! You gotta hook your brain fibre on the spike of a distant star and let it stretch you at the receding speed of the primal explosion. All the way, brothers and sisters, to the breaking point, and pray for a glimpse before the tissue tears. The extension of the human mind, the structure of technology, on the area of collective consciousness. Get out from under the antientropic plumbing; become not just the source of energy but the receiving substance as well. Rediscover your self-programming! For now, take it as a delight to be nothing more than a stab, a fragment with the total mathematical content of a pleasure quotient. Use your brain as an instrument for appreciating sensual input with its developed intricacies only as method of acquiring more pleasure. Kill the image!" 

I think Jim Morrison was light years ahead of their bandmates. They didn't understand his goals. Danny Sugerman lied about Morrison a lot. I mean if Danny was close to Jim, how come we don't ever see him in the footages we've got recorded? How come he is never in photos with Jim or even near Ray, Robby, John? I know his only work was to answer fan mail at The Doors Office if that's what he did and didn't go on tour with the band. He just made up stories to make a profit. No one can say what was in Jim's mind at any time on any subject. It is nothing more than presumption to do so. Not only Sugerman lied about Jim, also Max Fink, his lawyer. I didn't expected that Max Fink would have said anything good about Pam since he was well known to hate her. The letters Jim wrote in Paris and the fact he ordered Bob Green that a credit card should be put under Pam's name shows that they had reconciled and were still in love with each other. It doesn't really matter what Max Fink thought. He was from a different generation and probably judged everything that way. He was Fink by name and Fink by nature, as they say. A contemptible person. What books on Jim would I recommend? I wouldn't know because in my opinion most of them are seriously flawed by willful errors, sloppy scholarship, macho pseudo-identification, jealousy, ignorance, deliberate lies, and hostility. I think The Jim Morrison Scrapbook by Jim Henke is supposed to be pretty good. He interviewed Pam's parents and other people who tell some reliable stories. Source: www.thedoorscollection.com

Patricia Kennealy-Morrison in a letter to Rainer Moddemann for The Doors Quarterly Magazine. "Jim was terribly scared, and he wasn't embarrassed about showing it to me. While we were talking about a possible abortion, he cried. We reached the opinion that the timing wasn't good, and he said that we could have a child together later at another time. I would have had the child for only one reason, that it was Jim's child - and I think it was terribly egotistic of me to want a child just because it was with a certain person, and not because I wished to have a child. It was the most difficult decision in my life."

-Frank Lisciandro: Did you have a feeling that there was a strong relationship going on between Jim and Patricia Kennealy? I mean, were they lovey-dovey?

-Leon Barnard: Oh, no, when I got where she lived, a very casual apartment in the Greenwich Village area, it wasn’t at all like that. I didn’t feel that there was any special connection between them.

-Frank Lisciandro: She did an interview with Jim for Jazz & Pop magazine. What was that interview like?

-Leon Barnard: Well, it was more of just a conversation. It wasn’t a formally structured interview. It wasn’t a question/answer thing at all. That’s when we went out to dinner and it was more of an informal conversation. I think his main interest was getting a review of his poetry books—The Lords and The New Creatures—talking about his poetry in a casual sense.

-Frank Lisciandro: Did you have the impression that Jim thought of himself as a poet first before he thought of himself as a rock & roller?

-Leon Barnard: Yeah, I would say definitely, I would say more as a writer across the board, where maybe there’s a possibility of screenplays too. So I don’t think it was specifically poetry though.

-Do you think Pamela Courson was an influence in Jim’s life in terms of his artistic life?

-Leon Barnard: Yes, I think she was. I mean she must have had something. She may have been one of those people that could read his poems and make comments about them. She didn't talk of Jim's poetry with us. She was just a secretive person. I think Pam managed Jim on several levels and sometimes she sought to control him. And I think that to some degree he enjoyed that. But if I were going to look at the psychology of it, I think he also enjoyed breaking the rules so he could get punished for it, and then forgiven by Pam to keep it interesting.

-Frank Lisciandro: Do you think Jim and Pam had any violence in their relationship?

-Kathy Lisciandro: I remember him saying once or twice, “my little woman,” in a very sarcastic way. But I would never believe that he was actually violent with Pam, because I don’t think he had that in him. He was not a violent person so I don’t think he would have been violent with Pam of all people. They yelled at each other from time to time.

Murder Most Foul, new epic song by Bob Dyaln

Along with a new single released on 27th March, Murder Most Foul, Dylan released the following message: “Greetings to my fans and followers with gratitude for all your support and loyalty across the years. This is an unreleased song we recorded a while back that you might find interesting. Stay safe, stay observant and may God be with you.” Bob Dylan is no stranger to longer epics. Time Out of Mind had a track “Highlands” that lasted over 16 minutes. And his album Tempest had the title track that clocked in at almost fourteen minutes. Murder Most Foul is mesmerizing. The music is hushed. It’s a piano being quietly played over very muted percussion. Doug Herron’s violin plays along as a beautiful accent. There’s no jam or big guitar solo that tears up 10 minutes like CCR playing “Heard It Through the Grapevine.” The focus is all on Dylan’s voice – which sounds much less gravelly here than he’s sounded on his latter day albums. He’s singing in a less fierce, more melancholy way so maybe that’s why it isn’t so scratchy. He’s not whispering but it’s like a secret being murmured. The music is almost ethereal. There’s an almost spiritual or holy vibe. The focus on Dylan’s vocals are key because the lyrics of this song are mind blowing. The theme, on the surface at least, is the assassination of JFK in November of ’63. Leave it to Bob Dylan to write a song about one of the darkest chapters of America’s history during the current dark period of America’s history. It's poetry set to music. It feels like ‘The Iliad’, being the title “Murder Most Foul” probably from Shakespeare. One thread is a surreal, fever-dream imagining of JFK’s thoughts/conversation after he’s shot. But the lyrics seem to point to a bigger story than just JFK’s assassination. When he sings “The day they killed him someone said to me, “The Age of the Antichrist has just only begun,” we get the feeling there’s more to this song. It plays more like a travelogue through the last fifty years of culture. It’s more a commentary of how things were never quite right in America after JFK was killed. “For the last fifty years they’ve been searchin’ for that, Freedom, oh freedom, freedom over me, I hate to tell you, mister, but only dead men are free.” You could almost suggest that Dylan is painting a picture here that JFK wasn’t the only one who died on that grim November day in Dallas. As Dylan sings, in what seems to be a stream-of-consciousness way, he makes so many cultural references. This one is a stone-cold classic. It’s wonderful when rock and roll transcends the format and becomes art. Dylan’s music has always had the power to move us. This song is no exception. The song closes by inscribing itself into the corpus of American song through which American history is both forged and preserved: Play “Love Me or Leave Me,” by the great Bud Powell, play “The Blood-Stained Banner,” play “Murder Most Foul.” Source: bourbonandvinyl.net