Free 27: Jim Morrison by Chris Salewicz

time with her at her apartment. Dates followed in San Francisco, Long Beach, Cleveland and Chicago.
    Later that month, Jim Morrison reluctantly attended a party at Elektra’s new West Hollywood offices. Egged on by Tom Baker, he began to wreck the place, until he was pushed out of the door onto the street.
    On 7 April 1970
The Lords and the New Creatures
was published by Simon & Schuster. These were the poems by Jim Morrison that Michael McClure had read in London. Now they had been picked up by a major publisher. McClure found Jim Morrison sitting with a pile of the just-delivered books, in tears of gratitude. ‘This is the first time I haven’t been fucked,’ he told the writer.
    Although his Miami trial had been scheduled for April, it was now postponed until August. This meant it remained hanging over his future, a permanent weight on his mind. He began to suggest that once the trial was over, he might move to another country to live.
    On Saturday 29 August 1970, The Doors co-headlined the Saturday night show at the UK’s Isle of Wight festival, sharing the top slot with The Who. Jim Morrison had to be in court on Monday morning in Miami. During his performance, the singer seemed desperately introverted, even refusing a blast on Roger Daltrey’s then exotic peppermint schnapps. He performed like an unmoving statue. ‘Jim was in fine vocal form,’ wrote Ray Mazarek. 67 ‘His voice was rich and powerful and throaty. He sang for all he was worth but moved nary a muscle. He remained rigid and fixed to the microphone for the entire concert. Dionysius had been shackled. They had killed his spirit. He would never be the same in concert again. They had won … He knew it was over.’ Jimi Hendrix, who would be dead within three weeks, was also on the Isle of Wight bill.
    Jim Morrison’s Miami court case lasted – with occasional breaks – for almost two months. On 30 October 1970, he was found guilty of vulgar and indecent exposure and vulgar and indecent language. 68 He was found not guilty of gross and lascivious behaviour and drunkenness – absurdly, as this was all he was actually guilty of. He was sentenced to six months hard labour in jail and given a $500 fine. He was, however, allowed out on bail to appeal.
    Midway through the trial, Jimi Hendrix had died, aged twenty-seven, on 18 September 1970. This sent Jim Morrison into a fit of depression that was only exacerbated when Janis Joplin, who was the same age, also passed away, on 4 October. ‘You’re drinking with number three,’ Jim would inform friends.
    Back in Los Angeles, The Doors immediately began work on their next album,
LA Woman
. The title track contained the phrase ‘Mr Mojo Risin’, an anagram of Jim Morrison. Paul Rothchild was no longer at the helm as producer: he had complained he thought some of their new material sounded like ‘cocktail jazz’. But there was a larger, more complex reason for Rothchild pulling out of this job: he had been producing
Pearl
, the Janis Joplin album that would be released posthumously, and felt so stunned from her death that he wasn’t up to a return to the studio. 69 Bruce Botnick, their longstanding engineer, said he would help The Doors co-produce the record, which they decided to make at their rehearsal space.
    One evening Michelangelo Antonioni, the celebrated Italian film director who had made the epochal
Blow-Up
, came to see them. He was finishing
Zabriskie Point
and was searching for music for it. One of the tunes The Doors were readying for
LA Woman
was ‘L’America’, and it was felt this might be appropriate. 70 ‘The apostrophe after L is short for Latin America,’ John Densmore remembered Jim explaining the song to the film director, ‘or Central America, or Mexico, for that matter. Anywhere south of the border.’
    â€˜During his monologue,’ Densmore wrote in his book
Riders on the