Mr Mojo by Dylan Jones

pounds (the booze has taken effect), with long, curly brown hair. He wears leather trousers, a flouncywhite cotton shirt, black boots and a large American-Indian belt.
    Wearing his familiar studied frown, Jim Morrison glides across the stage towards the microphone. ‘Hi,’ he says, in his best Brando growl. He looks out at the sea of fans, then down to the stage, then quickly behind to his three comrades, and then he cocks his head, shakes his hair, closes his eyes and opens his mouth – the defiant melodramatic gasps of ‘Break On Through’ at last filling the night air.
    He stares off into the darkness, as a crowd of squirming, sweaty girls peer back from the stalls. He gropes himself and screams, internalising for all to see. He grabs the microphone with one hand, wraps one thin leather leg around the skinny steel stand, and places the other on its base, while rubbing his crotch with his spare hand. He rocks back and forward, gently swaying . . . and the girls groan with delight. He stalks the stage, singing, little muscles popping in his throat. He jerks, twists, hopping from one foot to the other, jumping like a frog; but he is stilted, unable to express himself fully with his body, finding it difficult to dance. His psychosexual energy manifests itself all the same, his partially erect penis clearly visible through his trousers. The band create their familiar wall of sound as Morrison rolls out his catchphrases: ‘Cancel my subscription to the resurrection.’ ‘We want the world and we want it now.’ ‘I am the Lizard King, I can do anything . . .’
    During ‘The Unknown Soldier’ Morrison enacts the obligatory shooting scene while Krieger holds his guitar like a machine gun, suffering from splenetic fits and dropping to the stage, his suggestive body movements and incendiary lyrics provoking a typically enthusiastic response. But this time he grabs a cigarette from the audience before acting out his death – the little leap and the dramatic, dead-bird fall. He slumps to the floor and folds over like a wind-blown leaf. Then he jumps up again, startled, embarrassed by his own phoney seizure.
    When he was onstage Morrison underwent a transformation, bringing the cartoon Lizard King to life. Up in front of his public, his usually composed face managed to express the most emotions, ‘a thousand masks of tensions’. Onstage, he tried to act out his life.
    His dancing was always ungainly, and he hopped about as though he was summoning the gods, in a rain dance of less than epic proportions. His head bent forward, he would jig around the stage, never actually dancing, always aloof, never becoming part of the music. He set himself up as a healer. All hail Morrison! He is here to cure our ills, to feed our poor and fill our souls. All hail the King! Oh lordy, the drunk King!
    And then he’d belch and scour the front row for bottles of wine, possibly bumming a cigarette as well. Morrison pretended to be possessed, acting out images from his lyrics, working the crowd into a frenzy beforedoing something calculatedly silly and deflating the whole situation. For his fans he embodied physical magnetism and spiritual restlessness, and he never failed to exploit this.
    Sometimes he genuinely seemed to enjoy it: he told
Newsweek
’s John Riley in 1967, ‘The only time I really open up is onstage. I feel spiritual up there.’
    When he believed in himself he saw these shows as a celebration of existence, of pure unbridled joy: an expression of potency. Mick Farren, in
The Hunting of the Lizard King
(an article in the
NME
in 1975), said what Morrison did ‘was present a rhetoric and mime that exactly typified the thoughtless, emotive confusion of the sixties youth revolt. Unlike Dylan, he didn’t question. He saw no other point of view than that of the Lizard King’s narrow perspective. Onstage, for the few moments Morrison had total control,