Mr Mojo by Dylan Jones Read Free Book Online

York Morrison was a frequent visitor to the club, even when the band weren’t performing, quickly embroiling himself in the scene. The Doors played at Ondine’s again the following spring, the singer treating the club as a second home. His behaviour was becoming predictable: he would drink himself into unconsciousness, often having to be carried home.
    Andy Warhol, in
POPism
, remembers it well: ‘Jim would stand at the bar drinking screwdrivers all nightlong, taking down[er]s with them, and he’d get really far gone – he’d be totally oblivious – and the girls would go over and jerk him off while he was standing there.’ Warhol also pinpointed part of Morrison’s appeal: ‘It was obvious just from watching these kids operate that there were new sex-manoeuver codes. The girls were only interested in the guys that didn’t go after them. I saw a lot of girls pass on Warren Beatty, who was so good looking, just because they knew he wanted to fuck them, and they’d go looking for somebody who looked like he didn’t want to, who had “problems”.’
    Morrison had agreed to be the star of Warhol’s first blue movie, but when the time came he didn’t show up. The following summer he was also meant to appear in another Warhol movie,
I, a Man
, with Nico, but again the proposed collaboration came to nothing.
    It was in New York that Morrison first met Danny Fields, the Elektra press agent who would work with the band for most of their career. ‘When I first met him,’ said Fields, ‘I thought he was intriguing, but sullen. At the time I pretty much thought he was another singer – a bit shifty, a little difficult, a little stubborn, but another singer. But after spending time with him I knew he was different, I knew he’d be trouble. Very quickly his character began to take shape. I realised he wasn’t very nice – he wasn’t very warm, he wasn’t very giving, and he began adopting the persona he inventedfor the stage – you know, dark, brooding, mysterious. That’s when he became an asshole.’
    At one of the soundchecks at Ondine’s, Steve Harris, the Vice President of Elektra, also had his first glimpse of the star: ‘He sauntered over to me from the bar – where else – and I thought to myself, if this guy can recite the phone book, he’s going to sell a million records. He had a way of moving, a way of looking at you, and a way of projecting himself; he was gorgeous, magnetic. He knew he had the goods, and he knew how to use them. He was very clever, and though he was often a slob, whenever he was introduced to a journalist or a record-company person at a party or whatever, and they had their wife with them, he would always try and conquer the wife first. And he usually did. I know he grew to hate the sex-symbol thing, but at the beginning he was always after the adoration. And he unified that image onstage, and off.’
    It was during their first stint at Ondine’s that Morrison’s mother tried to contact him. After getting through to Steve Harris, and finding out where he was staying, she called Morrison direct, at the Henry Hudson Hotel on West 57th Street. Morrison talked briefly with her on the phone, and then went off in a tantrum. In the years to come members of his family, usually his mother or brother, would try to get in touch with him, more often than not to little or no avail, Morrison refusing to speak to them and then goingoff in a rage, often to get blind drunk. The old life was behind him now, and he didn’t want his family interfering with his new personality. He had reinvented himself, and there was no going back.
    This new image enveloped Morrison completely. Immediately after a particularly successful concert at the Fillmore West early in 1967, the singer took Steve Harris aside and asked him if he thought it would be a good publicity stunt if Morrison