Mr Mojo by Dylan Jones Page B

sweat pouring down his shirt. He wanders over to John Densmore and tries to interfere with his kit. Densmore ignores him and looks to Krieger for guidance. Morrison then kneels before Krieger’s guitar and simulates fellatio, something that was again copied by David Bowie during his Ziggy Stardust period, when he pretended to give head to his guitarist, Mick Ronson.
    â€˜Light My Fire’ is cold-blooded and immaculate, Morrison’s ad libs and seemingly impromptu scissor kicks only distracting from the gorgeous wall of noise. He makes constant interruptions: during a lull in ‘Gloria’, he shouts, ‘Little girl, how old are you? Little girl, what school do you go to? Little girl, suck my cock?’
    During ‘The End’, his hands covering his face, he laughs to himself behind the microphone, not wanting the crowd to see how silly he thinks it all is. In oneof the quieter sections of ‘When the Music’s Over’ – the audience rapt with attention – he belches into the mike, and laughs. What a gas, he thinks to himself. Are the audience really taking this shit seriously?
    A lot of Morrison’s songs were of course written from a distance, with a deep sense of irony, but this passed a lot of people by. While journalists like Lester Bangs recognised that Morrison occasionally ‘realised the implicit absurdity of the rock and roll bête-noire badass pose and parodied, deglamorised it’, others took it at face value. In 1970 Morrison told the
Los Angeles Free Press
: ‘That piece “Celebration of the Lizard” was kind of an invitation to the dark forces. It’s all done tongue in cheek. I don’t think people realise that. It’s not to be taken seriously. It’s like, if you play the villain in a Western, it doesn’t mean that that’s you. I really don’t take that seriously. That’s supposed to be
ironic
.’
    â€˜Occasionally,’ said Mick Farren, ‘he would even hold up the [Morrison] image and demonstrate just how hollow it was. This was more often in front of an audience than the press. At a 1969 Madison Square Garden concert he pointed dramatically to one half of the audience.
    â€˜â€œYou are life!” He pointed to the other half. “You are death! I straddle the fence – AND MY BALLS HURT.”’
    At the concert in New Haven, Connecticut, on 9 December 1967, the day after Morrison’s twenty-fourthbirthday, the Doors witnessed the first major upset of their career. Before the band’s performance, Morrison met a girl backstage, and took her into one of the shower rooms. A police officer, clearing the area, caught the couple necking and asked them to break up and move on. When Morrison protested, the cop brought out an aerosol canister of tear gas from behind his back and sprayed them both in the face, as nonchalantly as if he was throwing a bucket of water over a pair of fighting cats. Later that night, as the band were ploughing their way through ‘Back Door Man’, Morrison told the crowd his version of the story, repeatedly shouting the word ‘pig’ and talking in a dumb Southern accent, to antagonise the police. But as Morrison told his tale, the house lights went up and the police invaded the stage, arresting the singer for breach of the peace, later adding the charges of indecent and immoral exhibition and resisting arrest. It was ironic that 1967 should finish this way for the band, as the preceding twelve months had been a succession of triumphs. But now they had been conveniently fingered by the establishment.
    Morrison was still seeing Pamela Courson, while continuing to sleep around. He’d graze the bars along Sunset Strip, staying most nights at the Cienega Motel in West Hollywood. Rarely sober, he usually had his first beer of the day with breakfast in one of the many restaurants along La Cienega Boulevard. He continued to get into fights, to abuse the