Jim Morrison always had trouble answering the question “Where you from?” Like all children in military families, he grew up a nomad.
Dad was a naval officer, so Jim was regularly uprooted during child‑
hood. As a teenager, he attended George Washington High School in Alexandria, Virginia, where he was a classmate of Ellen Cohen, still a couple of years away from becoming Cass Elliot.
Jim was the weird kid in school—whichever school he attended.
Pudgy, angry, and insulting, he was a trial for teachers and parents.
His father was on his way up the ranks, but Jim continued to embar‑
rass him at required military family gatherings, so he and his wife sent Jim to live with his grandparents in Clearwater, Florida.
Once in the Tampa Bay area, he began dating Mary Werbelow, a beautiful first runner‑ up for Miss Clearwater in 1963. Statuesque, with a considerable Jackie Kennedy bouffant, she was enamored of Jim’s new persona as a literary madman. Her support and encouragement made him feel secure about pursuing an artist’s path. He carried notebooks wherever he went and frequently pulled them from his ass pocket to scrawl new insights or revelations. When Jim was driving, Mary took custody of his notebook. “Write this!” he’d yell, then dictate a Great Thought or two, which she obediently wrote down.
Music was not part of Jim’s developing art. He showed no more than routine interest in song and was rhythmically impaired, hopelessly Caucasian, and incapable of dance. “He didn’t sit around and sing,”
Mary said. “Jim, no, he was a poet. He wrote poetry.”
What he was doing was . . . different. He didn’t fit the candy‑
striped Beach Boys model of an American male in 1964. When the Beatles came along, Jim grew his hair, but to prove his severe love for Mary, he bucked fashion and got a crewcut at her request.
“He was a genius,” Mary recalled. “He was incredible.” As she recalled, the writers he most admired—and imitated in his early days—
were William Burroughs, William Blake, Norman Mailer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Arthur Rimbaud, and Jack Kerouac.
He attended nearby St. Petersburg Junior College, then transferred to Florida State University. Mary accompanied him to Tallahassee, over the objection of her parents. Things did not go well. He was arrested for being drunk and disorderly at a Seminoles football game.
Beyond the crime of underage inebriation, he committed Tallahassee’s greatest sin: in the South, where football is religion, he yelled insults at godlike players.
Morrison transferred to UCLA later in 1964. Again, Werbelow defied her parents and announced she would go with him. Their chaste relationship became sexual. They arrived in Los Angeles as another beautiful, sunny young couple in the world’s entertainment capital. Both of them had aspirations in the arts. For his part, Jim embraced Hollywood life, began studying film, and expected to make his mark onscreen. Mary watched as he transformed, changing colors like a chameleon.
And then Jim met Ray. Ray Manzarek was four years older and already in graduate school. Ray knew Jim as a chubby junior varsity blowhard, so full of shit it poured from his ears. But the more time they spent together, the more Ray became fascinated with the kid.
Jim mocked nearly everyone he saw, without having accomplished anything himself. He was arrogant without portfolio.
Manzarek invited Morrison to see Rick and the Ravens and coaxed him on stage—not hard, considering how drunk Jim was—to belt out the frat‑ rock anthem “Louie Louie.” He was terrible, but he had fun and a presence.
Ray and Jim circled each other as casual acquaintances, and in early summer 1965, when Ray finished his master’s, they went differ‑
ent directions. But somehow, those directions led them to a meeting on Venice Beach later that summer.
As soon as he arrived in California, Jim began gobbling acid like M&M’s, and his personality went from aloof to extrovert. He was always stoned or tripping, and Mary began to think the Jim she knew was gone. A couple months after their arrival, she found him with another woman and knew it was over. He helped her move into a new apartment, and she told him they needed to take a break. “He clammed up after that,” she recalled. “I really hurt him. It hurts me to say that. I really hurt him.”
Ray Manzarek thought Jim’s breakup with Mary Werbelow was a turning point. “She was a great girl, and she really seemed to be in love with him,” he said. “But that was also the summer Jim went through some kind of transformation—physical, mental, emotional, on every level—and I don’t think any relationship he’d had could have survived that.” Everyone who knew Mary loved her, he recalled. “She was Jim’s first love. She held a deep place in his soul.”
Determined to finish college, Jim buried himself in school. As artist and writer Eve Babitz recalled in a memoir, “My friend Judy Raphael, who went to film school, too, remembers Jim as this pudgy guy with a marine haircut who worked in the library at UCLA and who was supposed to help her with her documentary term paper one night but ended up talking drunkenly and endlessly about Oedipus, which meant she had to take the course over that summer.”
Jim graduated, but in order to prove he was not another sheep, he skipped his commencement ceremony.
When Jim and Ray ran into each other on the beach, they played catch‑ up and soon realized they were both busy doing nothing. Jim was cut off from the UCLA meal plan—he used to gorge on the student trough—and so he’d lost more than twenty pounds. Ray said he was unemployed. God bless Dorothy for having a job. He told Jim he was just woodshedding with his brothers’ band, trying to get something going there. He said they might record a demo, but they needed original material and it wasn’t happening.
“I’ve been writing some songs,” Jim said, squinting into the sun.
Really? Ray asked Jim to sing, but he demurred. After a few min‑
utes of hemming and hawing, Jim closed his eyes and began reciting, not singing, his words.
Let’s swim to the moon, let’s climb through the tide
“This is incredible,” Ray said. “Do you have anything else?”
In his delicate, high voice, Morrison began softly singing his pseudo–beat poetry. Wheels spun in Manzarek’s head. Rock music was changing. This was the summer of the Byrds, whose “Mr. Tam‑bourine Man” winked openly about LSD: “Take me for a trip on your magic swirlin’ ship.” Gone were striped shirts and matching suits and simple boy‑ girl songs. Ray conceived of a band that would push boundaries and combine theater and cinema with rock ’n’ roll.
Jim’s words certainly pushed those limits. No “da do ron ron” here.
Ray saw Jim as his ticket. Since his parents had cut him off, Jim needed a place to stay, so Ray told Dorothy they had a roommate. Jim boosted steaks from the local market to earn his keep. Ray brought him to Rick and the Ravens gigs, pushing him up front to sing. Ray’s younger brothers weren’t sure about Jim, but deferred to big brother.
The Ravens were unhappy with their drummer, and Ray suggested a jazz player he’d met named John Densmore, a much better drummer than the Ravens deserved. Eventually the younger Manzarek brothers realized they were in danger of losing their group and suggested to Ray that he take his friends and start his own band.
Morrison named the new band the Doors, from his infatuation with William Blake and Aldous Huxley ( The Doors of Perception). One fan theory claimed the name was because the band members were swingers and had big knobs.
The name beat the hell out of Rick and the Ravens, Ray thought.
They’d found Robby Krieger, a skilled slide guitar player with a dazed, perpetually stoned look. Robby figured this was just another band, but as his first rehearsal ended, a dope dealer showed up and suddenly Jim Morrison went wild—he went off, with a fierce anger that stunned Robby. “Jim just went nuts,” he said. “I thought, ‘Jesus Christ, this guy’s not normal.’” Rather than being scared off, Robby saw the band as a way to maintain his equilibrium, thanks to Ray Manzarek’s maturity and steadiness behind the keys. “Jim was just so out there,” Robby said. Ray could bring things back to earth. His methodical personality “created a good balance.”
The band decided to go without a bass player until the right one came along, but Ray covered the low parts on the organ, which they figured was OK for stage performances. Their demo tape was rejected by every label. One record executive gave the tape minimal attention, then blithely said he couldn’t use it. Jim bellowed, “We don’t want to be used anyway!”
The Doors hoped for word of mouth, so they played any gig they could get. Morrison grew confident and even charismatic in performance, allowing his inherent weirdness to come forward, crafting with the band songs unlike anything on the radio. Happiness was absent. The songs were bitter and scornful. Even Jim’s attempt at a love song, “Hello, I Love You,” was snide.
The band’s darkness and its sneering songs set it apart from other groups. Crowds came to their gigs, which got better and better. Jim, Ray, Robby, and John began playing around town, still without a bass player.
By early 1966, the Doors were the house band at the London Fog on the Sunset Strip. It was a wretched dive that stunk of rotting beer and had a floor sticky with spilled drinks, gum, and, no doubt, bodily fluids. The stage was ten feet above the dance floor, and the band had to climb a ladder to play. But they had a steady gig (forty bucks a night), and word spread.
This is where Jim became Jim Morrison. Four nights a week, five sets a night, they played everything from dumb frat rock to original tunes. Jim performed his somber ballad “The End,” about his breakup with Mary. Onstage, Jim improvised, made space for bandmates to solo, and called down from the gods spontaneous bursts of rhyme, turning the short, simple dirge into an epic prose poem. Robby con‑
tributed a song with a South American rhythm called “Light My Fire.”
Again, onstage, Jim toyed with it, improvising lyrics and pushing the band and the song in another direction. The London Fog audience became lab rats for musical experimentation.
The rats loved the band: John Densmore, enigmatic behind the drums; Ray Manzarek, mad professor at the keys; Robby Krieger, frizzy‑ haired, slack‑ jawed stoner on guitar; and Jim Morrison, leather pants, no shirt, all sex. “Like everyone back then, Jim hated his parents, hated home, hated it all,” Eve Babitz wrote. “If he could have gotten away with it, Jim would have been an orphan.”
The live act came together, and Jim was a presence. He’d been on the LSD diet, eating acid instead of cheeseburgers, and the new, slimmed‑ down Jim Morrison drew arched eyebrows from Babitz. “He had the freshness and humility of someone who had been fat all his life and now suddenly a morning glory. I met Jim and propositioned him in three minutes even before he so much as opened his mouth to sing.”
He had allure. Ronnie Haran, a young woman who booked bands for the Whisky a Go Go—premiere venue on the Strip—secured an audition for the Doors and then marshaled friends to deluge the owner, Elmer Valentine, with requests to book the band with “that sexy motherfucker with the black pants.” Indeed, Jim spent his offstage hours roasting his broomstick all over Hollywood.
The Whisky was a cosmic leap from the London Fog, and the band—so unlike any other rock band until that time—drew the amorous, the furious, and the curious.
The Doors soon had a large, loyal following, and as the members continued to work through their original repertoire onstage, the songs continued to evolve. “The End” radically matured from a simple breakup song to balls‑ out Oedipal drama. One night at the Whisky, Jim improvised a segment that ended with the cry “Mother, I want to fuck you!” That was it for Elmer Valentine, who suddenly decided he needed a new house band.
