Mr. Mojo Risin' (ain't dead) Read online

  Ron Clooney is an ex-journalist; ex-teacher of English; and ex-construction worker.

  Ron lives in Southampton England with his artist girlfriend and two dogs, Daisy and Biscuit.

  He spends his time writing novels and poetry and recording music.

  At the present time he is working on another crime novel.

  www.ronclooney.com

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Pancardi’s Pride

  A Measure of Wheat for a Penny

  Gothique Fantastique

  mr.

  mojo

  risin

  aint dead

  Ron Clooney

  Copyright © 2011 Ron Clooney

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

  Matador

  5 Weir Road

  Kibworth Beauchamp

  Leicester LE8 0LQ, UK

  Tel: (+44) 116 279 2299

  Fax: (+44) 116 279 2277

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador

  ISBN 978 1848767 577

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Typeset in 11pt StempelGaramond Roman by Troubador Publishing Ltd, Leicester, UK

  Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

  For

  The gift of

  The Doors & the Music

  Thank you

  This book is dedicated to you

  Everything you are about to read in this book is true: Absolutely true.

  However:

  Some of the names and places have been altered to protect the innocent

  Is everybody in?

  Is everybody in?

  Is ev-reeee-bod-deeee in?

  The ceremony is about to begin.

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Preface

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  One

  Help…

  The first time I saw Jim Morrison was in the summer of 1970. The Doors were playing at the Isle of Wight Festival, they were flying in from Miami despite the fact that Morrison was in the middle of a huge court case for public indecency, profanity and lewd and lascivious behaviour. I was fifteen – well just about to be. Morrison was twenty six.

  The next time I saw him was in Paris, France. I met and spoke with him on a few occasions after that.

  In a small bar at the back of rue something or other – there was a band playing: The Lizard Kings. A bunch of lads from East Germany and there he was; sometimes tapping on the bar and sometimes humming along under his breath. Occasionally a rich baritone came through in snatches and I knew it instantly, that could not be changed. The weight had gone and the face shape had changed, but it was Morrison alright. There were scars and the shape of the nose was wrong. It was the eyes that gave him away – they were slightly too close together and just that little bit too intense. The only trouble was he was supposed to be dead, and not old like me. I had a real problem with it because the records showed he died in July 1971; that he was buried around the corner in Pere Lachaise cemetery.

  You see for as long as I could really remember, The Doors had been bubbling away at the back of my mind. From the time when we were kids and our freedom was about camping out, smoking dope and challenging the teachers of the 1960s. I remember playing ‘Light My Fire’ and the day some blue pills, which were some joker’s medication, were found in the toilets at school.

  Now, that was a place like something out of the dark ages. A terrible place, a place where boys with any spark of inspiration had it crushed out of them. A place where the strive for mediocrity was paramount; a place to subjugate and disintegrate; a place for you to, ‘learn your place,’ become a small cog in the big wheel. The best days of your life – were they? Nostalgia certainly isn’t what it used to be and memories are always mixed and jaundiced by re-evaluation. When I look back now, it’s mostly in anger, but with an understanding of how my nihilism took root and began to grow.

  In 1966 I discovered pirate radio, The Beach Boys and The Byrds. In 1967 I discovered The Doors and in 1969 Ten Years After. Magical times which I remember as probably far better than they actually were. Still, for me the festivals and the nights spent sleeping in the rain could not have been better. There was no responsibility and the crushing weight of adulthood had not flattened me. My mother let me be free; free to think and develop my own ideas, a simple thing, for which I shall be eternally grateful. I don’t know if I was anywhere near the garden but I thought I was.

  Once I was talking to two ex GIs, Vietnam vets, somewhere near Colchester they had done their time and were now taking a long walk to freedom through Europe, picking grapes and olives and then turning on and tuning out. It was bizarre, surreal even. There I was trudging along with my military sleeping bag and a friend, when around a corner in the path up to the festival site sat two naked guys. All their gear was covered by a sheet of polythene and they were sharing a pipe. I was soaked and miserable, but they were laughing, wet and stoned. They seemed not to care about their flaccid nudity, and neither did the many girls who passed, but I was still of an age when it really stunned me. Naked flesh, naked girl flesh, that was what I wanted to see and as much of it as possible. Looking back now I must have seemed young and naïve, and as one guy pulled out a harp and began to play ‘Rollin’ and Tumblin’, the other sang. “I was smokin’ and drinkin’, stoned the whole night long.” It was like I had stepped through the gates of heaven to hear Muddy Waters play.

  When the rain stopped they put on dry clothes but I was still wet. They laughed and I was miserable. Sometimes I wonder if I ever existed at all after that.

  “How long you been in Paris?” I asked as I approached the bar.

  He shrugged and made hand signals as if he spoke no English; I could tell from his reflection in the mirror, behind the compact bar, that his eyes were alert and he was comprehending. I had found my ghost.

  “I came to see Morrison’s grave,” I said. “Like all the tourists, I came too. I expect he’d be laughing his head off if he could see how people were reacting. Star quality, that’s what he had and he didn’t even know it.” I was looking for any glimmer of a reaction. “There was a girl,” I smiled as I talked, “well a woman really, who had tattoos all over her back. The first few lines of ‘People are Strange’ and two pictures of Morrison, one on each shoulder blade, and The Doors logo emblazoned across the small of her back. Amazing really, crazy but totally amazing, and you know what? She wasn’t even old enough to have seen him liv
e. Told me she was thirty four – makes her birth 1972. How could she be so in love with a dead guy?” I was watching him. “You know all this tourist razzmatazz. Hey maybe he started a new religion after all? The religion of fame and we all come to worship at the alter? A July heist instead of the Easter one?”

  The stranger nodded, recognised the word tourist, and I wondered how good an actor he might be. He grinned widely, but still remained silent. I tried again to draw him out into the open. I had a real feeling about this guy; call it a hunch, a reporter’s hunch. But this was more than that; there was a real pulling in my guts. Sometimes ideas came for no reason and then zap, they worked and I got a big story. I was getting that feeling again, a sort of soft nudge in the groin – a nudge of expectancy and I wasn’t about to get laid.

  I had nearly pieced the whole story together. I had the endings and I knew which one I was going to use, and now, like a bolt out of the blue, this. I hadn’t expected it – I couldn’t believe it. That’s the thing about a story, it just arrives and sometimes it takes over – like some giant leviathan, until it consumes you.

  “You know today there were a couple of German girls there and they had thrown some flowers on his grave, a bouquet marked The Lizard King – all red and gold. They were listening to ‘Light my Fire’ on the headset of an ipod. Each had one headphone and they told me that they came every year. They’d been coming for the last twenty years. It was like they came to worship. They were only thirty six, but celluloid allowed them to worship, post mortem so to speak.” I had a brief flashback of Jesus Christ on film and wondered if his philosophy or fame had made him. “One of them was crying and you want to know what the real irony is?” No reaction. “Robby Krieger wrote that song.” I was trying to anger my listener, goad him, incense him – it wasn’t working. “Yeah, Jim added the funeral pyre verse and Ray Manzarek played the intro and solo, but it wasn’t really a Morrison song – it was a Krieger song. Like all the really popular songs were. Morrison the poet, front man, the exhibitionist risk taker; the exhibitionist needed Krieger, and marketing man Manzarek needed them both. Well maybe Dorothy knew what the real answer was, she was smart and stayed in the background, but she was their first sponsor. She was the real powerhouse and she had that thing which a man can hold on to, she was supportive; she believed in her man and boy she wasn’t disappointed.”

  I stopped talking as the man ordered another drink; my goading was failing miserably. Either the guy genuinely didn’t care or was just intrigued. There was no alcohol and no soft sweet coke, his drink was a fresh orange juice topped up with soda water. I’d seen alcoholics take that drink.

  Somehow I needed to spark a reaction. Suddenly it came to me; I opened a pack of gum and started to unwrap a stick. Jim Morrison detested chewing gum and all those that used it. I was real obvious, made it easy to see, just like I was a habitual masticator. I was hoping that the reaction I got would happen. Casually he placed his hand over mine and said one word, “Non.”

  The gum went into my pocket and at that moment I knew I was right. I’d found him. You see, people can change their faces, change their clothes, they can even change their habits, but it’s the little things that stick, these are the things that give them away. I read somewhere, I can’t remember where, that in France there was this murderer who was a wealthy socialite. Hey I’m wrong! It was the Lucan case. That was it, yes. Lucan liked a certain wine and they found this guy in the Philippines, or somewhere, who had died. Well this guy had no past, but he loved this one type of wine and he is supposed to have looked just like Lord Lucan. Now some people might say that’s a bunch of bull, but I kinda hung onto that idea and when I started on this case, oh yeah, it’s a case – the idea sorta came back. You know, like when you forget the name of someone or thing and then like hours later it just pops up. It’s like the window froze and then suddenly it’s back online. Where was I? Oh yeah.

  “Well,” I joked, “Is that what happens when you’ve got your kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames?”

  There was no reply from the man, but his eyes lit up and I wondered once again how anyone could simply walk away from a massive fortune and fame. I know I couldn’t, I’d be fickle, I’d change my mind and maybe be riddled with doubt and guilt.

  What if you did something that gave you no way back? What then? Jim was one of those people who tested the boundaries. If he’d been a prisoner of war, he’d have continually been up at the wire, looking, testing for weaknesses. He’d have been part of the great escape. Seeing which way the lights fell and where the gaps were, fearless to the point of lunacy, or bouncing his endless ball – Hilts Morrison, ‘the cooler king.’

  I mean, John Densmore said he learnt a valuable lesson on greed from Jim; a lesson about Buick and the ‘Light my Fire’ ad. Morrison was all for purity and non-corruption and like he said, it was only money. There was a sort of band of brothers attitude in The Doors, and that emanated from Mr. Mojo Risin. The cake got cut four ways – simple, whatever each member did they got just a quarter. He wasn’t like Brian Jones in The Stones, taking that bit extra because he was the leader, or the front man. It was never Jim Morrison and The Doors and he hated when anyone announced them as such to an audience. Together they simply were The Doors, though The Doors and their music were never simple. The whole thing was like a diamond and each point was covered by one man, each needed the other. That was what made them so good as a team.

  So could someone just give it up, walk away and never look back? Maybe Morrison was the man who could, a Rimbaud of the rock world and anyway, there have been others since. What if he really was, sick of his stinky boots? If he didn’t care about the money? If the only really important thing was freedom? Not just mock middle-class, leisure play freedom, but real freedom; freedom to step outside of the bars of the prison and why not? He knew that iron bars do not a prison make; the only real prison is in the mind. Jim Morrison was smart, real smart; he managed to reach conclusions that some of us take a lifetime to establish, and he was only twenty seven years old. That is frightening.

  This was 1971 and things were changing, the whole damn world was in flux. Vietnam was still going and they’d been shooting presidents for years. Maybe he could just walk away. Maybe he needed to put down the torch and sit in the dark for a while, let someone else have a go at being the standard bearer.

  This was still the sixties and would be until about 1973. That sounds crazy but the decade didn’t really start on the 1st January 1960, you know, like the opening of a new day and the new wave of global optimism? 1962 – 1973, that was the decade, well that’s what I always thought anyhow. Maybe, just maybe, this guy had the guts to do it. Had the guts to let go. After all, he’d been the one that was the trailblazer, maybe he was already way out ahead, knew what television and fame could do. Even on the Ed Sullivan show he didn’t capitulate; the wild and devil may care Rolling Stones did.

  They altered their lyrics to avoid public outrage, but Jim didn’t change his. Like Morrison said, it’s only words. Maybe it is just a bunch of bullshit, but I had spent months piecing this together and suddenly, like a puzzle, all the pieces seemed to fall into place of their own free will. Yeah there were holes, great big ones, bloody great big ones, but the gaps were getting smaller and the sense was getting bigger. Morrison was more than Mr. Mojo Risin and I knew he was a very clever and highly observant man. A man who could start a religion, or commit a murder and if he did, he’d get away with it.

  He smiled and I knew he understood. Understood the references to Morrison and the music. His attempt to stop me chewing gum, well I thought that proved it. He knew precisely what I was saying, and yet he was choosing to ignore me. His actions were speaking louder than words.

  “Like Morrison?” I said nonchalantly.

  He nodded and raised his glass as if giving a toast but still remained silent.

  We talked for a long while, well I talked, gibbered really, and he listened – patiently. We drank, again that w
as mostly me, the band played and played and the crowd danced and finally I went to the toilet; had to, the imperative was too strong. When I came back, the man had gone and so had his glass. I checked the street outside, in both directions, he had vanished. It was like he had never been there.

  I asked the barman about the man, he shrugged. Claimed he had no idea who he was, never seen him before, he said.

  And me – I wondered what and who I had seen.

  At this point I ought to explain what I was doing in Paris and why I had gone to Morrison’s grave in the first place. You see I loved The Doors music; I thought for years that it had been well before its time. It was jazz and blues and rock and theatre and revolution and punk and goth and…well there were so many things I really loved about it. Then there were the influences that Morrison created in living form: Iggy Pop and the whole of the punk movement. Goths, the gothic and the dark side, that was something that my editor wanted me to explore.