by hank zevallos

You know that it would be untrue;
You know that I would be a liar;
If I was to say to you;
Girl, we couldn't get much higher;

She looks as if she just stepped out of a devilish costume party. Mostly just standing there, in the corner of my hesitant eye; strange, bizarre, obscene and sexual.

It's either late spring or early summer, 1967, at the now-dead Hullabaloo on Sunset Blvd., in Hollywood.

Almost incredible. The place sweats from a sardined crowd that undoubtly excedes the legal limit. And, outside, two more full houses wait in a restless line. But there'll only be one more show. Yet, that might be too much to ask for. There may not be a first show.

The whole thing came about sort of on the last minute. Just before The Doors leave for New York. There was no time for advertisingor anything.We had found out almost by accident. This crowd is phenomenonal. Not even Doors organist Ray Manzarek knows about this final L.A. gig.

Where is Ray?

Everybody is nervous and tensed. The Doors can't play without him. Ray's gotta be located and here quick. Awful quick.

Behind the stage it's ulcers. Whispers. Demanding questions.

The audience, however, is still unaware. But, as the Sunshine Company does its thing, you can sense the growing impatience.

The Doors.

And Jim Morrison, lead vocalist, doesn't seem to give a damn. He's with that strange chick now. Together, they create a shadowy, electric atmosphere.

Where's Ray? Is he coming?

And Morrison and the girl quietly go further backstage and disappear up a stairway.

My eyes have seen you
Turn and stare
Fix your hair
Move upstairs.

Some time later you see Morrison and the girl slowly walking along together on the backstage groundfloor. He sees you watching and gives you a cold hard stare that disolves all the space between the two of you. Only his eyes are there. And they make you look away.

"Strange eyes fill strange rooms"

Ray finally breezes in the rear entrance with a slender, long-haired Oriental lady he has been entertaining.

"No one even told me about this," he explains in a disinterested manner, " . . .all of a sudden I get a call to hurry over here."

Soon The Doors are making music, Morrison slouches over the rigid microphone and the Hullabaloo's turntable stage slowly begins to spin them towards a widely screaming audience as the curtains pull back.

A wild strobe of Instamatic flash cubes silhouettes frantically waving hands in a lightning sky. Girls press forward against the stage.

Morrison grunts, begins squirming, singing. . .and there's another wild barrage of flash blubs and a harder press towards the stage.

A week or so earlier we sat in a Sunset Strip penthouse. I had asked about the group's wild on-stage theatrics.

"It all just happens," said Ray. "Nobody wants to see mannerism, they want to see just you. We can't help but get wrapped up in what we're doing."

What are the thoughts before a performace? Any nervousness?

"Naw,'' answered Robby Krieger, the guitarist, "...just getting the amps and sound right."

"We're performing about the same now as when we did at the London Fog for $5 a night," added Ray. He thought for a moment then continued; "I get a surge of excitement from the size of the audience. That's good. Exciting .

"You can feel when the audience is with you. Why do they come if they don't try to become part of the music. It should be like Holy Communion. Surrender yourself to the music so we can all be there together, focused on one center point, the music."

The music is your special friend
Dance on fire as it intends
Music is your only friend
Until the end

The music weaves and screams into one climax after another. Morrison is literally raping the microphone between his quivering thighs, advancing towards the hungry girls pressing against the stage. And then he trips on the microphone and falls. It happens, along with a musical peak and the girls scream, thinking this is the way it should be.

The rotten smell of his own sweat no longer bothers John, a young Negro inductee. It's just these fucking bugs that keep eating him. Then suddenly there's a frightening cry and a young Viet Cong charges him with a long bayonet. Quickly he raises his Army rifle and smashes its butt into the enemy's face. A skull crushes and blood shoots out in violent reaction to the impact. And bullets are flying by all over the place. Two men fall dead near him, one's head half blown off. And he begins to run in terror. A blur falls out of the sky. A blinding explosion. A quick burst of eternal agony. And burning flesh is shotgunned into the jungle skies.

Morrison picks himself up off the floor. He shouts the lyrics. Picks up the microphone stand and throws it hard. The girls can't believe it. Few are frightened, most of them have eyes that mirror an erotic spell. And Morrison jumps hard upon the fallen stand. Picks it up again and throws it hard once more. Shouting the lyrics. Screaming. You look at the girls and you'd swear they're having orgasm. Morrison destroys the mike and its stand.

The young Sunset Strip theatre manager looked up from the preview edition of HAPPENING. "I know The Doors too," he said. "One time in the cinematography lab at UCLA Jim Morrison just went wild all of a sudden. Throwing cans of film and stuff all over the place. He really messed it up."

A young Beverly Hills publist put down his coffee and told the young writer sitting across from him about the time Morrison did some wrecking at Columbia Records, kicking in the studio door and things.

Over 3,000 persons were at the Cheetah in Venice when Jim Morrison fell a good 8 feet off the high stage during a wild rage.

A concert promoter laughed as he told the story of Morrison madly swinging the microphone at an audience at the Scene in New York. "Tiny Tim was scared stiff. Morrison just missed his head." Asher Dann, former Doors manager, tried to stop Morrison, resulting in a bloody fist fight on stage.

In New Haven, Connecticut, Morrison was arrested on stage after sharply describing during song how he had been Maced by an over-zealous policeman hired to protect The Doors. Scores of people, including Michael Zwerin, jazz critic for The Village Voice, Yvonne Chabrier, a Life reporter, and Tim Page, a photographer just back from Vietnam, were also arrested. They had "breached the peace."

That day in the penthouse, almost a year ago, Robby picked their first Cheetah appearance as their most exciting show. "We just got back from New York and everybody was waiting for us. `Break On Through' was out and people were turning on to the album. It was our first really large crowd. Over 2,000."

We could be so good together
Yeah, so good together
We could be so good together
Yeah we could, I know we could

Tell you lies
I'll tell you wicked lies

Exhaust invisibly saturates the air and poison slowly builds into the lungs of Free Press vendors along a crowded Sunset Strip. An ugly four-door, yellow Mercury is slowly advancing in the heavy traffic. There are two males in the car. The driver has shoulderlength-plus hair.

It's Jim Morrison.

Always figured him for a sportscar.

Two young girls, weekend hippies, spot the famous Door and run up to the island in the middle of Sunset, in front of where Pandora's Box once was. They giggle with delight and step down to say something . . . anything . . . to Morrison. He sticks his tongue out at them and ignores them.

Unhappy girl,
Fly fast away
Don't miss your chance
To swim in mystery

"Making love to the music of The Doors is an unsettling but illuminating experience. It happened to me by chance: one does not deliberately play the kind of music as a setting for romance. The moment of orgasm arrived as Jim Morrison was screamsinging `Horse Latitudes' - and suddenly I understood the music of The Doors. I broke on through to the other side. It was indeed a strange day. Love scream became the scream of the butterfly.

"The Doors' new album, `Strange Days,' is a landmark in rock music. It ventures beyond the conventional realm of musical expression: it has become theater. The cruel theater of Artaud, and of `Marat/Sade.' The theater of shock, and of McClure's `The Beard.' The theater of the absurd. Grand Guignol in electronic shreiks. The erotic demons of Bosch wiggling across the musical stage."

- Gene Youngblood, Los Angeles Free Press, Dec. 1, 1967.

HORSE LATITUDES
(The Doors)

When the still sea conspires an armor
And her sullen and aborted
Currents breed tiny monsters,
True sailing is dead.

Awkward instant
And the first animal is jettisoned,
Legs furiously pumping
Their stiff green gallop,
And heads bob up
Poise
Delicate
Pause
Consent
In mute nostril agony
Carefully refined
And sealed over.

 

"`Horse Latitudes' is to The Doors' album what `A Day In the Life' is to the Sgt. Pepper collection: a coda, revealing the hard-core unifying meat of the accompanying works. What is only alluded to obliquely in the other pieces is spelled out in gut-clutching horror..." Gene Youngblood again.

The Doors are going to be around for a long time, said David Anderle of Elektra. They've really got their heads into some wild things. Theatrical rock. They're going to be performing drama to rock. "`Horse Latitudes' is just a hint of what's to come," he said, discussing the single "The Unknown Soldier" and an up-coming superDoors epic, "Celebration of The Lizard."

None of us really knew what laid ahead that day in the penthouse. The Doors were the hottest thing in L.A., but they really hadn't had a hit yet and they were still unknown nationally. Robby didn't even think they'd ever make national TV. And so, I asked, what would you do if and when The Doors finally shut.

Ray said he'd like to get into movies. Behind the camera. Writing and directing. He had majored in cinematography at UCLA.

But I feel that what has developed may have been underground to even themselves, excepting that important sculptor - Jim Morrison, the quiet volcano.

"We don't have time for politics," said Ray then. "We are artist and our sole concern is music."

When I questioned them further if there was any theme or message involved, Ray answered simply: "Groove."

One may argue that "groove" was all he had to say. For we are such beings that we find entertainment and sensual satisfaction in such unlikely experiences as those that deal with pain, horror and death. Therefore, a girl can easily "groove" to the erotica of:

But, even then, the old Ray can't answer to the sharp political and social comment that is "The Unknown Soldier," He can, however, be jusitified by his statement then that The Doors were constantly changing, exploring new avenues all the time.

Ray said it was "Groove" then. In the April 12th edition of Life Magazine he was quoted: "Our music has to do with operating in the dark areas within yourself. A lot of people are operating on the love trip, and that's nice, but there are two sides to this thing. There's a black, evil side as well as a .white, love side. What we're trying to do is come to grips with that and realize it. Sensual is the word that best fits it."

Morrison was always there. . .for certain.

In the beginning he said, "I've always been attracted to ideas that were about revolt against authority. When you make your peace with authority you become an authority. I like ideas about the breaking away or overthrowing of established order. I am interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos. . .especially activity that seems to have no meaning. It seems to me to be the road toward freedom-external revolt is the way to bring about internal freedom. Rather than starting inside, I start outside and reach the mental through the physical."

Take the highway to the end of the night
End of the night
End of the night
Take a journey to the bright midnight
End of the night
End of the night

Realms of bliss,
Realms of light,
Some are born to sweet delight.
Some are born to sweet delight.

Some are born to the endless night.
End of the night
End of the night
End of the night
End of the night

The Doors have received the uniqueness of being one of the few rock groups to be listed in "Who's Who." They have become leaders in "egghead" rock. They paint pictures and create experiences most remembered by acid and pot heads while also picking up subscribers fresh out of the "squareness" of adult music.

Their music is that of a Renaissance which caused Fred Powledge to write in his recent Life article that "Gradually my wife and I found that we were no longer moved by what had been our regular music."

You know the day destroys the night,
Night divides the day,
Tried to run.
Tried to hide.

Break on thru to the other side,
Break on thru to the other side,
Break on thru to the other side.

They are a significant and reflecting product of an age loaded with wickedness, hate and nightmares.

 

What have they done to the earth?
What have they done to our fair sister?
Ravaged and plundered
and ripped her and bit her
Stuck her with knives
in the side of the dawn
and tied her with fences
and dragged her down.

The Doors are a far more significant protest of our times than any Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger or Phil Ochs, if only for the frightening realization that we can find pleasure in the evil and wicked

.

Cancel my subscription to the
Resurrection,
Send my credentials to the
House of Detention
I got some friends inside.

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