Janis would of been 74 today.
Jim Morrison was another rough character who came into her life in 1967. From the beginning their bands had been linked in people's minds. The Doors were known around San Francisco as "Hollywood's
version of Big Brother," and in LA, Janis was referred to as "the female Jim Morrison."
"The Doors came north and we went south," Sam (Andrew) says. Big Brother started gigging at LA's Whisky-A-Go-Go and the Golden Bear Club
in Huntington Beach, and the Doors came up the coast regularly to play the Matrix and Winterland. Says Sam, "They were a slithery crew even
then. We were playing the Matrix one weekend when we heard about the Doors coming to town. This was when we first met all of them. They were in an incubation period just as we were, still sweet and
innocent."
James Gurley, recalling the night he and Janis first saw the Doors, takes a more acerbic view. "Janis and Morrison were two big egos clashing in the night," he says. "They never got along from the first
time we saw the Doors at the Matrix. She didn't like Jim Morrison and he didn't like her. They were too much alike – two monstrous egos."
In January 1967, the Doors were playing Winterland, and Paul Kantner of the Jefferson Airplane told them they should catch Janis' act at the Avalon between their sets. The Doors complained that the Avalon
was two miles across town, but John Densmore would never forget the trip. Said John, "The female lead singer was so good, we were told it
would be worth the hassle of getting back for our last set. I remember thinking that a girl who called herself `Big Brother' must be kind of butch."
Robby Krieger and Densmore arrived, "in the middle of a torching rendition of `Down On Me'" and later went backstage to tell Janis how sensational she was. Said Densmore, "She thanked me kindly and
offered me a slug of her gallon of rotgut wine. Seeing Janis Joplin up close wasn't as appealing as from a distance, but she was warm and friendly, and that deep, husky voice kept reminding me how powerful
she could belt the blues."
In June 1967, Jim Morrison was in New York, complaining bitterly that he had not been invited to participate at Monterey Pop. The weekend
of the festival was practically a national holiday in the rock world, and the Scene, the hip club in Manhattan where the Doors would usually played, closed so that everyone could go to California. The Doors were reduced to playing dumpy little clubs in Philadelphia and
Long Island, and Morrison began to nurse a grudge against the San Francisco bands. "My flower-child half strongly wanted to be tripping and dancing at the Festival," said the Door's Densmore, "but I was in
the demon Doors."
"Morrison took it personally," according to his biographers, feeling he was being discriminated against because of his identity as an LA rocker. By the time Janis and Morrison got together after Monterey,
she'd returned to Haight-Ashbury a star. Rolling Stone, which started publishing in 1967, called her "the major female voice of her generation," and Ralph Gleason said she was "easily the most exciting singer of her race to appear in a decade or more." Alternately happy
and puzzled by the big splash she'd made, she said she was enjoying fame but was acutely mindful that "before this, nobody ever care whether I lived." A social outcast since puberty, she was bewildered by the world's sudden adulation and frankly didn't know what
to do with it. But there was one aspect of fame that she embraced instantly and wholeheartedly" It was an aphrodisiac. Some of the most attractive men of her time were now available to her.
Jim Morrison was in her apartment one night with a group that included Dave Richards, Sam Andrew, Morrison's girl, Pamela Courson, and his tailor. "When I got there, Morrison was already there
with some hippie guy who was his clothing designer and traveled all around with him, making Morrison's leather pants," says Dave Richards. "Morrison was very drunk. We all were. Sam was, I was, Janis was. Only Morrison's girlfriend wasn't drunk. She was a
little uptight, actually. She didn't want to be there. Both Sam and I had designs on her. They only other woman there was Janis and we both knew that Janis had designs on Jim Morrison."
At Janis's apartment that night in San Francisco, Janis went over to Dave Richards after a while and whispered, "I'm going to go in there in my bedroom. Why don't you tell Jim to come in there? I want
to talk to him for a minute."
"Oh," Dave said, "Okay." Then he went over to
Morrison and said, "Hey, Jim." Morrison glanced up and said, "Yeah?"
"Janis wants to talk to you for a minute."
Morrison got up and walked into the bedroom, Says Dave, "The door closed and I heard lock – clank! And that was that. The girlfriend sat there and sat there. Hours passed."
Janis's boudoir was a soft and seductive seraglio, with velvet, satin, lace and silk everywhere. Bob Seidemann's nude poster of her adorned one wall, and there were incense, lubricating lotions, booze,
dope, water pipes and needles.
Morrison may well have struck her as the ultimate catch. Writers of the sixties out did themselves attempting to capture his sensuality.
Biographers noted that in black leather he "looked like a naked body dipped in India ink." Journalists referred to him as a "surf-born Dionysus" and a "hippie Adonis." Rock critic Lillian Roxon wrote adulatingly, "The Doors are unendurable pleasure prolonged." Richard
Goldstein lionized him as a "sexual shaman" and a "street punk gone to heaven and reincarnated as a choir boy."
If Morrison got as far as Janis's life story that night in her bedroom, he learned that they had much in common. Jim wanted to be a writer, and Janis, too, intended to write a book, according to Sam. They were both avid readers and both and been to Venice, California, beatniks because of On The Road. Both read Nietzsche, Ferlinggetti, McClure, and Corso, and if Janis wasn't the expert on Plutarch, Baudelaire, and Norman O. Brown that Jim was, she could readily discuss Gurdjieff, Wilfred Owen and F. Scott Fitzgerald, not to
mention The Sensuous Woman.
Jim and Janis remained cloistered in her room for hours, while Sam, Dave Richards, and Pam waited just outside the door. Says Dave, "Finally I said to Pam, `You know, if you're waiting for him to come out of there, he's probably not going to be out of there
until tomorrow. He's not coming out."
"Oh, yes he will!" she said.
"She was pretty young, `No,' I said. "He's not
coming out." Sam and I had ulterior motives, anyway. Finally, she got really mad and she said, "Call a cab." I called her a cab and later, as I was walking
her down to the street, I opened the door of the cab for her and she got in and Sam went in right past me, pulled the door shut, and the cab went off with both of them in it. I told Sam later, "You son of a bitch!" He said, "You got to be quick." Sam slithered
right in there.
Sam had this myth in his mind about the equipment men: "Goddamn, you guys get all the women because you always get to town first." Since he was a star and making more money then us, he'd invested the oppressed workers with great sexual prowess. That's what was in his head."
Sam confirms Dave's account, saying, "Yes, it's true. The
equipment men arrive first at a gig and get all the girls. At last, with Pam, I could challenge the typical proletarian myth about the potency of the working class."
Sometime after Janis's night with Morrison, she told her friend Henry Carr, "I don't like Jim Morrison. He was okay in bed, but when we got up the next morning, he asked for a shot of sloe gin." By Janis's standards, sloe gin was a sissy drink.
Pamela Courson, though hurt when Jim slept around, went along with the Lizard King's peccadillos. Given her choice, Pam would have preferred a "more traditional" relationship. She was living with Jim at this time at 1812 Rothdell Trail in LA's Laurel Canyon and they were already playing the dangerous games that would eventually kill them both, drugging, scaring each other with spiders and black magic, getting high on acid, and driving down Mulholand with their eyes closed.
Around the time that Jim was sleeping with Janis, Pamela got even by making it with handsome actors such as John Phillip Law and Tom Baker. Later Tom Baker fell in with Andy Warhol's crowd in New York
and starred in I, A Man, one of Warhol's pornographic epics. Ironically, when Pam broke off with Baker and went back to Morrison, the two men became close friends and drinking buddies, and Baker became one of Janis' lovers. He lived at the Casa Real near the
Chateau Marmont with two other young men, and the three of them became known as "the boys who fuck famous women."
Baker, who'd appeared nude in the Warhol film, told Morrison he was nothing but a "prick tease" and challenged him to "let it all hang out" at a rock concert. Eventually, Morrison did exactly that, in Miami, and the resultant legal complications drove him to a nervous
breakdown. Baker perhaps also goaded Janis to some of the extremes, including exposure, that came to typify her later concerts. (pages 133-137)
1970 – Jim Morrison and Janis got together at his request shortly before he left for Paris. Calling her his old drinking buddy, he said he wanted to make amends, and they had a warm visit. Morrison was
trying to control his alcoholism, drinking only white wine, but the damage had already been done. He had a deathly pallor, his coordination was shot, and he was carrying forty pounds of bloat. Janis, too, was under the illusion that switching from hard liquor to some other drink – in her case, a mixture of alcohol and milk
– would help, but for booze hounds like Janis and Jim, any kind of hooch, from Kahula to cough syrup, is a killer. When they said good-bye that day, Jim told her that rock `n' roll was now a part of his past.
(page 293)
|
Threaded
Previous
Index
Next
Edit 
Reply 
CLEAN AND EASY STB TEK
HOW I GROW MY SHROOMS
