Mr Mojo by Dylan Jones Page B

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, Morrisonwas deliberately courting violence at these concerts, manipulating the crowds into a frenzy.
    â€˜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 were becoming predictable and perfunctory, he began trying to incorporate the Living Theatre’s ideas of confrontation and shock into his own performances.
    If there is one event which led to Morrison’s ultimate demise, it was the performance at the University of Southern California on 28 February 1969 by the Living Theatre. Here, Morrison saw the group enact their pièce de résistance,
Paradise Now
, an exercise in crowd manipulation. Including the repetition of several key phrases meant to drive the audience into a frenzy,
Paradise Now
was a guerrilla theatre performance, an aggressive spectacle, a serious art statement about censorship and freedom of speech. At the climax of the show the performers stripped off their clothes to the legal limit, though the police moved in and stoppedthe display before any of them got very far. Morrison was transfixed.
    The next day the Doors were due to play Miami, their first ever concert in Florida. After a fight with Pamela which delayed him in LA, Morrison followed the rest of the band east, missing his connecting flights and drinking heavily. He arrived so late in Miami that the band went onstage an hour late. The rest of the band were already furious because the promoter had crammed far too many people into the auditorium, making the atmosphere hot and uncomfortable. The crowd themselves were hot and hungry: they were crushed together like animals, the band were late and the stories of earlier riots were passing around the auditorium like wildfire. Everyone felt the same: tonight was going to be special, tonight was going to be
real
.
    Manzarek, Krieger and Densmore eventually crept onstage and began playing, hoping Morrison would join them. Eventually he did, but it was plain to all three of them that he was far drunker than he usually was when he fell onstage. The trip from Los Angeles had obviously taken its toll, as he could hardly stand up. The band ploughed through the material, making it more than obvious when they expected Morrison to come in with a vocal, but the singer was more interested in swearing at the audience, and muttering obscenities to himself. He’d start joining in withthe band, then stop after a verse and a half to berate the audience some more. Here was the vulgar poet in all his drunk and disorderly glory, wrapping himself around the mike stand, belching, grabbing his crotch, gobbling the microphone like it was a rapidly melting ice cream.
    â€˜Anybody here from Tallahassee?’ he enquired. After an affirmative response he hit back with, ‘Well, I lived there once. I lived there until I got smart and went to California.’
    From there it was downhill all the way: ‘You’re all a bunch of fucking idiots, how much longer are you going to let them push you around? You love it, you’re all a bunch of slaves, what