Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry by Gareth Murphy

Author:Gareth Murphy [Murphy, Gareth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466841741
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2014-06-17T04:00:00+00:00

18. TAURUS

On every horizon, it was a familiar pattern. In 1968, Elektra boss Jac Holzman, wrestling with the record man’s equivalent of a midlife crisis, took time out on the Hawaiian island of Maui. Alone on a double bed watching the fan revolve hypnotically, he savored the balmy stillness and, for the first time as an adult, contemplated a life beyond the music business.

Years of workaholism had taken their toll. He’d been feeling his age lately—a corporate president commanding operations deep inside the hippie revolution. His marriage was doomed; drug casualties mounted in the artist roster. Barefoot on the beach, looking out across the glassy azure sea, he promised himself, “In five years, somehow, I’ll be through with this. I’ll move here to Maui and start over.”

Despite all the commercial success, Elektra had seen its fair share of collateral damage over the previous year. The fiery genius of Arthur Lee had consumed Love. The angelic Tim Buckley was drifting down a path of self-indulgence and introversion that eventually led him to heroin. Elektra’s dark star, Jim Morrison, mainly as a result of alcohol abuse, now needed full-time care. “The Morrison storm warnings grew in volume and frequency, including Jim passing out on the studio floor, peeing in his pants,” Holzman remembered. On Paul Rothchild’s recommendation, he hired a suitable babysitter—Bob Neuwirth, Bob Dylan’s former sidekick.

“It became a matter of trying to keep him interested in making a record,” recalled Neuwirth, who found that if he drank at Morrison’s pace, he was able to gain the singer’s trust. “It was a lot of cajoling. I represented the record company. Jim knew that I was there to try to bounce ideas around him, and he didn’t want to be tricked into anything.” Engaged in a dangerous game of self-destructive exhibitionism, “he knew what he was doing,” Neuwirth believed. “He had a method behind all of it, he had great sense of his own image, and played it.”

Beefing up, with bloated jowls, Morrison was losing interest in his own sex appeal, but experience had earned him a subtle command of the fame game. The further he took his daredevil antics, the larger the legend grew. At a concert in New Haven in December 1967, he sassed back to a policeman and was maced. Exercizing his First Amendment rights through the sound system, he was arrested onstage. It was “a defining moment in pop culture,” Holzman believed, and it led to a multipage report in Life magazine. “Advance orders for their next album, Waiting for the Sun, shot up to three-quarters of a million units.”

Morrison kept up the same routine until, inevitably, he went too far. Performing to 13,000 on a hot March night in 1969, he taunted his Miami audience to strip off their bras and underwear, then allegedly pulled out his cock. He was arrested onstage for indecent exposure and incitement to riot. This time, however, promoters across America canceled dates, airplay dipped, and even the music press turned on him.

In the

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