Free Mr Mojo by Dylan Jones Page A

she was used to. She consequently became intrigued by, and then obsessed with, the singer.
    Fields’ ruse worked, and not only did Morrison and Stavers become lovers, but he became a visible inhabitant of
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, extending his career substantially. Predictably, though, Morrison treated her badly. Once he had a date with her in New York: after arriving at the Chelsea Hotel from LA, he called her up and invited her over. They hadn’t seen each other for a while, and Gloria was tremendously excited, so she rushed down to the hotel. Though she was tough and terse in business, she could be like a little girl when she was in love.
    When she got to his room, the door was open so she went in. She looked for him, called out his name, but he was nowhere to be seen. She called his name for over fifteen minutes and then left. When she got back to her apartment the phone was ringing. It was Morrison. ‘Where are you?’ she asked.
    â€˜In my room,’ he said.
    â€˜I was just there,’ Gloria explained, ‘and I looked everywhere for you . . .’
    â€˜Not under the bed,’ he said.
    Morrison was full of silly little tricks. Rothchild and Fields took him to dinner once in LA, and he didn’t say a word all night, pointing at things he wanted on the menu. Even when they insulted him, he just stared at his food, gulping down huge quantities of wine and belching when appropriate. For America’s biggest pop star, being difficult was the easiest thing in the world.
    By the time of their second LP,
Strange Days
, released in November 1967, the Doors were as big as the Beatles and, in the eyes of the press, twice as subversive. Treated with reverence by their fans and with muted respect by the establishment, the band were beyond criticism, and all they had to do was consolidate that position.
    Strange Days
certainly didn’t rock the boat, being a virtual photocopy of their debut, a madcap medley of discontent, with plenty of gothic orchestration. But if their first record had been an invitation to glimpse the dark side of life,
Strange Days
was a guided tour. The sex and death motifs were still in abundance, as were the quirky little love songs and the apocalyptic overtures. The record may have been portentous and melodramatic, but it had great tunes. ‘People Are Strange’ is perhaps the finest piece of post-acid paranoia ever recorded. With this track the Doors captured that sense of what happened
after
drugs: when acid really hit Los Angeles, the Doors’ music was the most appropriate soundtrack, as it spoke to those people who were
really
changing their lives with drugs. Their musiccaptured too the sleaze and furtiveness of the times. The Beach Boys and the Doors spoke for two different sides of Los Angeles, and in 1967 it was the Doors who were talking the loudest. This was the end of an endless summer. Morrison always felt there was something deeply disturbing and bogus about the so-called Summer of Love (to his credit, Jefferson Airplane’s Paul Kantner said that the Summer of Love should have simply been called the golden age of fucking), and he used this theme like a mantra in his songs. On
Strange Days
, with its eerie underwater organ sound, backward tapes and lethargic tone, he sounds like a drugged beast stalking through paradise.
    â€˜I offer images,’ Morrison said at the time. ‘I conjure memories of freedom that can still be reached – like the Doors, right? But we can only open the doors – we can’t drag people through. I can’t free them unless they want to be free . . . A person has to be willing to give up everything, not just wealth. All the bullshit he’s been taught, all society’s brainwashing. You have to let go of all that to get to the other side. Most people aren’t willing to do that.’
    The only tell-tale sign of things to come was the opus that ended side two: ‘When the Music’s Over’. A distillation