1632862441 (N) by Dylan Jones

Author:Dylan Jones
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781408860571
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-05-29T21:00:00+00:00

5

Aping the Changeling

By the end of 1968 the Doors were the most popular group in America, as well as the most controversial. Because they were so popular, their exploits were blown out of all proportion. Larger than life, and twice as ugly, the Doors represented the mood of the nation, the Zeitgeist incarnate. Morrison himself was still considered to be the sexiest man in rock and roll, in spite of the fact that he spent most of his time stupefied by alcohol and benzedrine, and in spite of being labeled the ‘Mickey Mouse de Sade’ by many of those who worked for him.

Danny Fields regularly felt the brunt of Morrison’s sadistic personality: ‘He really was a terror – he was the epitome of the old-fashioned concept of a brat, a big, brilliant, sexy brat. They don’t make them like that any more, people who have that way of reacting to the world. These days pop stars are different when you try and talk to them about the realities of the business, or about what’s required of them as a human being; they stop being bad boys. Morrison, he was an original. Of course it was all contrived – the macho pose thing – but he lived it, and underneath he didn’t give a damn. Didn’t give a damn about money, property, obsessions . . . he was one of the few people from that period who was genuinely anti-bourgeois. I suppose the hedonism got in the way.’

‘His life, such as it was, was an open book,’ said Steve Harris. ‘This was the first time a pop performer had been so explicit in public, and he left nothing to the imagination. He lived his image to the hilt.’

The new tour got under way in November, the biggest the Doors had yet undertaken, and their fans reacted with an unexpected fervour. The group caused pandemonium almost everywhere they played, and there were riots in Phoenix, Cleveland, St Louis and Chicago. They had become satanic beat messiahs, a carnival freak-show, and the crowds came baying for blood, expecting some kind of unholy resurrection. Seeing the Doors was now a real experience, what with the unruly crowds, the band’s increasingly sinister sound, and the performance of Morrison himself crawling around the stage dishevelled and drunk, sneering, swearing and hurling abuse at the audience. Unbeknown to the rest of the band, Morrison was deliberately courting violence at these concerts, manipulating the crowds into a frenzy.

‘I was less theatrical, less artificial when I first began performing,’ said Morrison of his stagecraft. ‘But now the audiences are much larger and the rooms we play much bigger, it’s necessary to project more – to exaggerate – almost to the point of grotesqueness.’

A big influence on Morrison at this point was a drama group called the Living Theatre – disciples of one of Morrison’s heroes, the radical French dramatic theorist Antonin Artaud. Morrison had been infatuated with the group’s activities for years, but now that the Doors’ stage shows

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