Mr Mojo by Dylan Jones Page A

objectivity was suspended. His histrionics, the prowling, the long insolent stares, the lunges at the mike, and the spasmodic twitching leaps, ceased to be absurd.’
    Yet these epiphanies were rare, and mostly the performances were only conceits orchestrated to inflame the audience. Morrison was acting, inflicting his persona on the crowd, enacting his primitive ritual. And acting like a bit of a dick. He was never the real Jim Morrison onstage, but then he was no longer the real Jim Morrison offstage, either.
    Ray Manzarek, always Morrison’s most fervent defender, remained convinced of the singer’s integrity: ‘Jim’s contribution to music was that he was real onstage. He was not a performer, he was not an entertainer, he was not a showman . . . He was possessed by a vision, by a madness, by a rage to live, by an all-consuming fire to . . . make art.’
    Perhaps Paul Rothchild was nearer the truth when he said, ‘The Doors always tried to be unique, to be different . . . avant-garde. There was a conscious attempt to be new.’
    â€˜The Jim Morrison thing started out as an act, but so many people believed it, that he became that,’ said Danny Fields. ‘They returned to him what they saw, and he started acting out their fantasy. After all, what does it take? What is a shaman? There were no mystical rays coming from heaven, he wasn’t surrounded by an aura – it was just a psychological relationship between him and his admirers. It was all a pose, and he became his own invention. He knew he had a special quality – a kind of dangerous, threatening, menacing sexuality that women went berserk over – and he used that to cover up.’
    In the band’s early days, Morrison had two set pieces which he would incorporate into their live shows: the first was the Oedipal section of ‘The End’, the second a dive into the audience. He would just let go and dive into the crowd like it was a pool ofwater, and the audience would catch him and carry him back to the stage. Though the audience quickly began to expect it, and it is now common, back then no rock performer had ever done such a thing. The jump has since been copied by, among others, Iggy Pop, Peter Gabriel and (unsuccessfully) David Bowie.
    â€˜The first time I ever saw him do the dive was in Bido Lido’s in May 1967,’ said Pamela Des Barres, ‘a little ditty place which only held about two hundred people. I was sitting way up in a booth and saw it all. Jim was so dynamic, so brave. He was saying “Fuck it” – he pushed it as far as anyone could. He wanted an adverse reaction, he wanted people to be involved with the show, he wanted them to respond. He would just let go and career into the audience, who would eventually put him back onstage. No one had ever seen anything like it, and Jim didn’t even consider the consequences. But it was like he turned it on – he put everything he had into performance.
    â€˜It was very black, the way he moved. No one, not even Mick Jagger, had been as overtly sexual as Jim was onstage. It was very James Brown – ripping off his clothes an’ all. It was filthy.’
    In 1971, when asked by Dan Knapp of the
Los Angeles Times
about the sexual overtones of his performance, Morrison said, ‘Sometimes they just happen, and sometimes it’s just part of the act.’
    By this time he had stopped jumping. He was now so famous he was scared what the crowd might do.
    A hypnotic figure dressed in black – Gene Vincent with a college degree – he controls the audience from the safety of the stage. The girls are screaming louder now, as he squirms and vamps in his impossibly tight leather trousers, the human phallus about to reach his climax. The group crashes into ‘Light My Fire’ and the crowd goes berserk. The king of acid-rock hops in front of Manzarek’s piano, pumping the air with his fists, his eyes closed,