Mr Mojo by Dylan Jones Page A

you can hear the timidity in his voice, as if he didn’t really care whether or not he made himself understood.
    Jefferson Airplane’s lead singer Grace Slick remembers Morrison vividly. She said he reminded her of ‘a rabid Johnny Depp, perfectly formed and possessed by abstraction’. She also remembers what she describes as his ‘colourful non sequiturs’, but which in print simply looks like Morrison’s attempts to make himself appear more interesting.
    â€˜â€œJim,” I’d say, “did you see that broken chair by the speaker system?”
    â€˜With a pleasant smile and pupils dilated to the very edges of the iris, he’d respond with something like, “Lady in smoke shop, nobody for broken, chair broken, chair broken.”’
    Even though he was fond of talking gibberish, Slick seduced him on the tour. ‘He was a well-built boy, his cock was slightly larger than average, and he was young enough to maintain the engorged silent connection right through the residue of chemicals that can threaten erection.’
    Slick described their time in Holland: ‘Both bands were walking down this street in Amsterdam, one of the main streets . . . and the kids would offer us drugs.We’d say, “Thanks very much,” [and] put it in [our] pockets . . . but you wouldn’t take everything you would be given otherwise you’d be dead.
    â€˜Jim, on the other hand, took everything that was given to him, on the spot.’
    The European tour also introduced both groups to ‘poppers’ (amyl nitrate), and Morrison was such a fan of the drug that he used to come running on to the stage like a pinwheel. One night, when Jefferson Airplane were performing, he invaded the stage and started dancing along to one of their songs, blitzed out of his mind. He then collapsed, and was rushed to hospital in a portable oxygen tent. Later that night the Doors played as a three-piece, Ray Manzarek filling in for Morrison on vocals. It was not one of their most successful performances.

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 theworld. 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.’
    â€˜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