Mr Mojo by Dylan Jones

you’d want to know. He’d hang out with people for a while, but he had no real friends.’
    In the Elektra press release which accompanied the release of the album, Morrison set out his own personal manifesto, the first of many. ‘You could say it’s an accident that I was ideally suited for the work I am doing. It’s the feeling of a bowstring being pulled back for twenty-two years and suddenly being let go. I’ve always been attracted to ideas that were about revolt against authority. I like ideas about the breaking away or overthrowing of established order. I am interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos – especiallyactivity that seems to have no meaning. It seems to me to be the road toward freedom – external revolt is a way to bring about internal freedom. Rather than starting inside, I start outside – reach the mental through the physical.’
    He also stated that his parents, his whole family, were dead. As far as Morrison was concerned, it was true. In his head he was now the Lizard King, and Lizard Kings weren’t meant to have parents.
    It wasn’t just Morrison, though, who resorted to subterfuge. Soon after the album’s release, Steve Harris hired a small group of girls – ‘girls who would get their arms cut off on the subway for Jim Morrison’ – to follow the band around and create as much hysteria as they could while they were on tour. Through an intricate network of contacts, these girls made sure there were gangs of other girls parked outside the band’s dressing rooms and hotel rooms, that there was screaming at the concerts, and that flowers and underwear got thrown onstage. Similar schemes had been devised for Elvis, Frank Sinatra and the Beatles, and while it was a failsafe trick to guarantee press attention, the acts in any case quickly found a huge audience of genuine fans. The Doors were also the first rock group to use a billboard to promote their product – above a clothes shop called Pandora’s Box on Sunset Boulevard. ‘The Doors break on through with an electrifying new album,’ it screamed.
    As the album continued to sell in vast quantities (
The Doors
would stay in the charts for two years) and as the group performed in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York, Morrison’s public image was confirmed. Intense and assured, he was a new rock hero with hooded Garbo eyes and a sexy Southern drawl. But in private he was already beginning to disintegrate. He had finally moved in to Pamela Courson’s apartment in Laurel Canyon, but continued his philandering; and his drinking was starting to become such a problem that the group began hiring ‘babysitters’ to look after him. The Doors were getting more famous, playing bigger theatres to bigger audiences, and their entourage grew to include an array of managers, lawyers and publicists. Their records were selling all over the world, and their pictures were in all the right magazines. Yet at its very core their world was already falling apart.

3
    Dressing Up for Strange Days
    Looking the way he did, being born that way, was not entirely terrible
    Grace Slick, Jefferson Airplane
    Morrison was born lucky. If adolescence had briefly tarnished his image with a layer of puppy fat, by the time he wanted to become a rock star his looks were second to none. He had height, a good physique, and the right profile. If you look at the first publicity pictures of the Doors, Morrison looks ungainly and unremarkable in his Haight-Ashbury rags and Carnaby Street chic; but undress him with your eyes and you see a surf-born Adonis. He had the raw material – all he had to do was create a uniform that matched the group’s dark urban soundtrack. He had created his own psychic cocktail, his own mythology (a mish-mash of Nietzsche, French theatre, Greek symbolism, contemporary psychology and silly hippie rhetoric). Now his outward appearance needed the