Glimpses Read online

  I felt like I was watching from a long way away. She hasn’t lost her desire, obviously. She’s just lost her desire for me. I remembered the way she sounded on the phone when I was in L.A., that love and loneliness in her voice. Where did it go now that I’m here?

  I went to the kitchen for some Jack Daniel’s and a couple of beers to help it go down. By the time I’d finished she’d rolled over with her back to the TV, fast asleep.

  On Monday I heard a voice inside say, “Let’s go.” Graham had set me up with an L.A. book dealer named Mike Autrey, who’d diligently shipped me everything he could find on the Doors and L.A. in the sixties. I’d spent a week reading and studying and it had started to come together.

  The first thing I did was a work tape, with the first two albums as models and a list of the songs we thought were available. Side one opens with “Waiting for the Sun,” which didn’t get released until Morrison Hotel in February of 1970. Then “The Unknown Soldier,” the first single. Followed by “Hello, I Love You,” the second single, and “Summer’s Almost Gone.” Graham and I both liked putting “My Wild Love” into the “Horse Latitudes” slot, next to last on the side. The song was an afterthought, recorded hastily after they decided to scrap “Celebration,” but it fit perfectly. Then the usual long song to close the side, “Five To One.” Graham thought side two might have opened with a blues, like the first album’s “Back Door Man,” if there was room. I used “Roadhouse Blues” from Morrison Hotel. The rest of the side was the only available version of “Celebration of the Lizard,” from Absolutely Live. I could hear the edits that Rothchild had to make, even in midsong, to get something salvageable.

  It wasn’t all I heard. I heard why Graham had wanted me to make my own tape, not just dub a copy of the one he had at home. Something in the experience of putting the songs together got inside me. It’s the feeling of setting right a twenty-year-old injustice. A feeling I’d made an album that was not just better, it was more correct, closer to some kind of absolute truth.

  I canceled my ad in the Chronicle so I’d have fewer stereos to fix and more time for the Doors. I gradually got into a routine: a few hours’ work in the morning while I listen to the tape or else to the first two Doors albums, both of which I have on CD. When Elizabeth gets home it’s my cue for the first beer of the day, which I take from the little half-sized refrigerator under the workbench. She kisses me on the cheek and goes back downstairs. I hate the empty gesture of that kiss. If she doesn’t want to kiss my mouth then she should just leave me the hell alone.

  Afternoons and nights I study. I have Morrison radio interviews, a British concert video called The Doors Are Open, and the documentary Morrison was involved in, Feast of Friends. He’s taking shape in my mind: the sleepy, silken voice that could suddenly crack or turn vicious; the hooded eyes, the hands folded over the mike stand, the slumped shoulders, seeming drunk or narcoleptic; the sudden madman who would explode a moment later and race around the stage, windmilling his arms, screaming, sometimes throwing himself headlong into the floor or the audience.

  Elizabeth is asleep by the time I get to bed. Some nights I lie awake and think about leaving her. I don’t have the words to ask her to go, so it would have to be me. I would lose the house, the shop, every material thing I care about. Some nights it seems possible. Other nights I just feel trapped.

  I switched to Coors, Morrison’s favorite brand, despite the watery taste and the brewery’s politics. It’s all part of the Morrison experience. Ride the snake. Late Friday night, with ten of them under my belt, I went upstairs to give it a shot.

  The idea was that I would put together a tape here at home, then go to L.A. and redo it in digital. The hardest part was getting to the album. I can’t explain it better than that. It’s like the new archeology, that my father always talked about, how you’re supposed to decide what you’re going to find before you start digging. You make your model and then you dig for it.

  To make my model I had to find a way that the album could have been made. To get the album I needed the title song. The rest would follow.

  The song starts with hissing maracas and tambourine and a few muttered lines of poetry. Then Morrison screams “Wake up!” The band comes in, Manzarek mashing a handful of random keys, Krieger lifting one corner of his amp and dropping it on the stage with the reverb full on, a noise like a building collapsing. More recitation against a background of noise. We’re well into the song before Morrison actually starts singing and the band starts to play something with a melody. From there things build nicely, through the “Not to Touch the Earth” section and a big climax, then back to the tambourine and a few last lines of poetry.

  The first decision I made was that it had to happen live in the studio, the way they’d recorded “The End.” If I had to, I would settle for a couple of different versions that could be spliced together. But that give and take between Morrison and the band was essential. Which meant I needed Morrison in the kind of condition where he could perform a twenty-minute song.

  February of 1968. A long, long time ago. If Morrison is out of control, so is the world. We’re in the middle of the Tet offensive in Vietnam, a month-long all-out Communist assault that leaves hundreds of Americans killed or wounded, and at least five thousand Vietcong dead. At the end of March President Johnson will throw in the towel and refuse to run for a second term, shattered by the rising death toll of the war and the rising tide of protest at home. In May, French students will paint “Never Work” on the walls of the city and riot in the streets. Martin Luther King will be murdered in April, Bobby Kennedy in June.

  February of 1968. In Dallas it’s cold and windy and I’ve just been to see Jimi Hendrix at the State Fair Music Hall. Kevin, the lead player of my band, is up front with his steady girlfriend, driving her home. I’m in the back seat of Kevin’s station wagon with Alex. I’ve kissed her before, at parties, but this is our first real date, this is serious, and when I kiss her she kisses back. My nose is full of her perfume and I can taste the heat of her breath. We’re all four seniors in high school and for the moment everything seems full of enormous possibility. I haven’t seen the things that Morrison has seen, and I can’t predict the future that’s almost upon us: the riots in Chicago, the election of Nixon and Agnew, the deaths of Brian Jones and Joplin and Hendrix and Morrison. Feuding with my father that will end in a couple of abortive attempts to run away from home, anguished breakups and reunions with Alex, my dropping out of college and losing the band, the growing realization of how limited the possibilities were for any of us.

  February of 1968. We were helpless, but none of us knew it yet. Except for Jim Morrison.

  Mike Autrey had somehow found me photos of the Celebration sessions. The walls are cheap wooden panels, the kind with the precut vertical grooves. Ray Manzarek sits behind his Vox Continental organ with its red and black body and its white and black keys reversed. His glasses and sunglasses and a light-gray patch cord sit on top of it. He hunches completely over the keys when he plays, a big sweep of dark blond hair falling across his eyes. From the side all you can see is the hair and the big muttonchop sideburns. He’s wearing a striped shirt and jeans and a wide leather belt. It’s early evening, dark and cool outside, timeless and air-conditioned in here.

  Robbie Krieger, always a little spaced and awkward-looking, is wearing striped seersucker shorts and a denim jacket and sandals. He’s wearing tinted glasses and his hair is a haphazard frizz. His red Gibson SG is on his lap, and he’s finger-picking flamenco style.

  Behind a wall of gobos, chest-high padded partitions, are Douglas Lubahn and John Densmore. Lubahn played bass for Clear Light, an underrated band that never got past their first album. He’s strictly a session man for the Doors since Manzarek does the bass parts with his left hand in the stage shows. He’s got receding black hair and a black fringe beard. He’s left-handed and plays a regular Fender bass upside down. He’s on a stool in the corner, looking like he really doesn’t know what th
e hell is going on.

  Densmore is in black, hung with pounds of beads and chains. He’s got a helmet of black hair and long, sculptured sideburns. He’s got some stuff taped to the head of his snare drum to kill the overtones. I used to use a wad of newspaper, held down with duct tape, the drummer’s friend. I know from experience that Densmore spends most of his time sitting on his drummer’s throne, his back stiff and uncomfortable, waiting, because that’s what drummers do most of in the studio. At one point during these sessions he will throw his sticks across the room and yell that he’s had it, he’s quitting. He’s sick of Morrison’s drunkenness, of the hangers-on, of the lack of communication, the endless retakes—one hundred and thirty on “The Unknown Soldier” alone—robbing the songs of any vitality they ever had.

  Morrison is wandering around the studio, trying to get in the mood to shut himself in the vocal booth and actually record something. Let’s say for argument that he is not yet terribly drunk. Let’s say this so we can take a shot at “Celebration of the Lizard.” He’s in his standard black leather pants, today with a brown cashmere sweater over them. He’s still fairly lean and his dark hair curls past his shoulders, loose and sexy. He’s shaved clean to show off his sensuous mouth, the heavy lower lip, the upper lip curled to reveal a hint of teeth. When he walks, even on a wide level surface like the floor of the studio, there’s a sense that he’s balanced precariously, like he’s on a wall around the roof of a building, a dozen stories above Sunset Boulevard.

  What the pictures don’t show are the three girls passing a joint on the leather couch in the corner behind Manzarek. Morrison keeps coming back to pet one of them, a pretty strawberry blonde in brown hip-huggers and a white tank top. She might be all of sixteen. Let’s say that just tonight Morrison’s drinking buddies, Tom Baker and Bobby Neuwirth, are somewhere else.

  Rothchild and his engineer, Bruce Botnick, are in the booth and they are tired of waiting too. Rothchild is in his early thirties, high forehead, kinky blond hair slowly getting long again after a pot bust two years before. Botnick is darker, with a broad face and five-o’clock shadow.

  Manzarek walks over to Densmore and Lubahn, and Krieger listens in. Manzarek talks them through the arrangement and the others all nod. Morrison takes a tambourine and maracas into the vocal booth. “Wake up!” he screams into the microphone.

  Rothchild gets on the intercom and says, “Don’t overblow, Jim, you’ve got a long way to go.”

  Morrison says, “Why not?” and he sounds plaintive, like a spoiled child.

  Rothchild says, “Okay, Jim, let’s try it.”

  I had the remote for my cassette player in my hand. I let off the PAUSE and lay down on the couch in darkness.

  “Jim, come on, let’s go.” The voice was coming through the speakers now, the ones in the studio and mine as well.

  “Yeah, yeah, all right.” There’s a pause, then Morrison says, “Hey Paul? Paul, man, there’s some chick passed out in here.” He giggles. “She ain’t got no clothes on, man.” Rothchild comes out to investigate. Morrison’s words are still coming out over the speakers in the studio. “She’s ugly, too.”

  The three other girls help their friend out of the vocal booth, drape some clothes on her, and take her away. Densmore says, very quietly, “Good. Now maybe we can get some work done.” Krieger, who has been playing some meandering Far Eastern line on the guitar, stops to tune up. Everything is ready again.

  “Rolling,” Botnick says.

  Rothchild says, “‘Celebration of the Lizard,’ take—what is this?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “Take eighteen.”

  Silence. It goes on long enough that Densmore and Krieger look at each other. Densmore shrugs. Finally there is a rattle of tambourine and maraca. Densmore touches his cymbals gently with the points of his sticks. “Lions in the street,” Morrison says, and we’re off. He gets through the opening recitation. The words are a little slurred, but it’s dramatic nonetheless, that same walking-the-edge-of-the-abyss drama that’s in everything he does. Another long pause, then he screams, “Wake up!” The band crashes and growls, but Morrison is laughing. “Wake up the fat chick!” he says, and the music lurches into silence. “Get the bitch back in here! I’m so horny I could fuck a snake!” That gets him laughing even harder. “I am the Lizard King!” he shouts. “I can fuck anything.”

  I sat up on the couch. It was not happening. I could see the studio, smell it, sweat and dope and cigarettes and perfume, the camphor smell of the drums, the burning rosin smell of hot electronics. I could hear the music, hear Krieger’s fingers slide on the strings, the squeak of Densmore’s bass drum pedal. But I couldn’t get inside. Morrison is too strong. He won’t let me in.

  I didn’t get up until after noon Saturday. Elizabeth reminded me that we had a Christmas party that night at Sondra and Gary’s, then she went shopping. I shuffled around the house in jeans and socks and a sweater, watching the rain through the sliding glass doors at the back of the house.

  It’s a contest of wills with Morrison. He wants to drink; I want him to make the album. To get what I want I have to be stronger than him.

  Or I have to break him.

  He’s not easy to push around. His father is career Navy, the kind of guy people just naturally called “the Commander.” Jim grew up resenting uniforms and authority of any kind. He was compulsively belligerent to cops, even when a little diplomacy could have kept him out of trouble. His friends talked about how his eyes would go out of focus and some kind of demon would take over. Nobody ever saw him hurt anyone else, but he would bring violence down on himself like it was some kind of retribution. The more the cops beat him the more he taunted and cursed them until finally someone else had to break it up. They said he didn’t know when to back off.

  I sat on the couch, my heart pounding. I remembered the times I had taunted my father in the same way, daring him, needling him. Knowing he was mad, watching it build up, being scared and still I couldn’t back down, because I was so little and he was so powerful and made me feel so helpless. Until he finally broke down and hit me, his big open hand across my face. Remembering how it felt, shame at having fucked up, at being a bad kid, and at the same time pride that I could push him so far. The pain didn’t matter as long as I could be the one in charge and him out of control.

  Was it that way for Morrison? Did he have to keep pushing because the only alternative was to give in to the fear, to let it overwhelm and destroy you?

  I went into the kitchen and opened a Coors. “Roadhouse Blues” played in my head: “Well I woke up this morning and I got myself a beer.” It tasted terrible. I drank it down and looked at my reflection in the rain-smeared window. Yes, I thought. This is how it is.

  Morrison’s father was gone for months at a time, either at sea or on some top-secret project. I don’t know how it was with the Morrison family, but I know how it was with mine. My father was in the National Park Service, where he did ruin stabilization, rebuilding national monuments. He helped restore Jamestown, and Fort Frederica on the Georgia coast, and the Anasazi ruins in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. We moved all over the country, just like the Morrisons did. If we were in one place for more than a year my parents would lose their lease or for some other reason have to move to the other side of town, which put me in a different school and took me away from whatever friends I’d managed to make. From early spring to late fall, eight or nine months a year, my father would be in the field. When he was home, or when school was out and we went to live in the trailer with him where he was stationed, he had to make up for lost time, prove all over again that he was the boss. My mother used to keep me hanging for weeks, saying, “Wait till I tell your father.” Jim Morrison’s mother did the same thing.

  Supposedly all that moving around as a kid leads to three things: alcoholism, resentment of authority, and broken marriages. So far I’m two for three, and the marriage does not look good.

  We left for the party a little before nine. I
was at the apex of a nice high, due to careful application of beer all afternoon. I was loose and very tuned in to the inanimate world. The reflected lights in the rain-slick streets, “Riders On The Storm” inevitably, unavoidably on the car radio, my hair down and still damp from the shower, the comforting textures of an old flannel shirt and my leather jacket. Elizabeth’s silence fit me the same way, snug and familiar.

  At Sondra’s house Elizabeth headed for the kitchen, where most of the women had already settled. The men were mostly in the computer room with the kids and Gary’s flight simulator program. The stereo in the front room was on, just below the threshold of attention. I went through the tapes and put on Morrison Hotel, easing the volume up just enough that nobody would notice.

  I threaded my way into the kitchen through the women’s conversations: kids, politics, TV. When we first started coming to parties with this crowd, I swear the women and men talked to each other, or at least played games together. We’re all college educated, liberal people, but now when we hit some critical mass we split into two cultures, just like our parents did.

  I stood in the cool air of the refrigerator for a minute, liking the way it felt. I still had the leather jacket on, though it was warm enough inside to do without. I took two beers and headed back into the living room, suddenly conscious of the way I moved, feeling the beer and yet feeling very graceful, very animal, at the same time. Maybe it was my imagination, but I was sure Sondra was watching me. We’d flirted now and then, and I wasn’t the worst-looking guy at the party. A bit thick around the waist, maybe, but plenty of hair, an okay smile, and something extra tonight. Confidence, or maybe recklessness.

  Morrison was singing “You Make Me Real” as Larry and Diane Olsen arrived with their two kids in tow. Diane looked like she’d had electroshock. Gary helped her out of her coat and Larry said, “Sorry we’re late. We’ve just had a bad day.” Larry is tall and blond and finishes his sentences with an involuntary chuckle, even when he isn’t remotely amused. “Diane hit a kid on her way home from work.”