Mr Mojo by Dylan Jones

the stage. His drunk, jerky movements made him look silly, but Morrison was oblivious to it all. The boozy slut in leather pants was in full flight, and if the audience didn’t like his act, then to hell with them.
    The first concert produced a very hip crowd, the self-appointed gurus of the underground bumping up against a motley collection of trendy students and a battalion of young girls. They blew bubbles and waved their hands in the air; they swapped drugs and admired each other’s garb. Chris Rowley, then a stalwart of the underground press, remembered ‘there was a lot of leather’.
    Jeff Dexter was one of the many dissatisfied punters: ‘The Jefferson Airplane played long improvised jams, whereas the Doors stuck to the songs as you heard them on the records, with a few instrumental breaks and a little orchestrated poetry thrown in. This led people to think they were pedestrian. I thought they were just like a pop band, really.’
    This was much more of a pop show than a subcultural tour de force, and the Roundhouse crowd saw the Doors for what they were: pure theatre.
    Journalist Neil Spencer was in the audience that night. ‘I remember being very disappointed that he couldn’t dance, and he kept falling about all over the place. At other times the show was so choreographed it didn’t look real . . . it looked completely theatrical. The band were very professional, and some of the songs produced a genuinely psychotic atmosphere, but it was really a big anticlimax, and we realised that our perception of them was all wrong.’
    The British underground continually aped bohemian America, and its non-recognition of reality made the British hippie movement seem even more esoteric than it already was. The Doors, unwittingly, had put a temporary halt to this American imperialism. When, during ‘The End’, Morrison repeated the line ‘Father, I want to kill you’, one indignant member of the audience shouted ‘Bloody carnivore!’
    In the dressing room after the show, Morrison was in a sullen mood, brushing off compliments, and pouring yet more booze down his throat. This caused some consternation among the hippy cognoscenti who had made it backstage. In those days alcohol had redneck connotations, and it didn’t matter if you were the lead singer with the hippest band in America, drinking was still uncool. Morrison was oblivious,sodden, sinking more and more into his shell. This was his third persona of the day, and as luck would have it the easiest to adopt.
    The hip might not have been entirely convinced by the Doors’ European debut, but the hype surrounding their visit worked wonders, with ‘Hello I Love You’ becoming their most successful British hit (it reached number 15) and
Waiting for the Sun
eventually reaching number 16. The TV documentary
The Doors Are Open
received a positive critical response, and, despite coming across rather badly in a rambling, monotone interview, Morrison liked the film too, his only criticism being that it was rather obvious: ‘The thing is, the guys that made the film had a thesis of what it was going to be before we came over. We were going to be the political rock group, and it also gave them the chance to whip out some of their anti-American sentiments, which they thought we were going to portray, and so they had their whole film before we came over.’
    For Morrison, the rest of the European tour was a blur, a litany of alcohol and drug abuse, the singer spending most of his free time either drunk, or asleep, sometimes in a hotel bedroom, but other times sprawled out on the pavement. Give or take the odd debacle, the group’s performances were usually up to scratch, though they were already performing on autopilot. Manzarek, Krieger and Densmore weremerely going through the motions, while Morrison often had trouble remembering what those motions were. In the interviews he gave during this period,