But my head was saying: Break on Through for a gas-guzzling SUV? No!” “My knees were shaking pretty strong when they upped the offer of $5m (£3.8m) to $15m. “What can I say? Jim’s ghost is behind me all the time,” Densmore says. It is not usual to spend years in court trying to stop yourself from earning millions of dollars to prove a point about the value of artistic integrity over the pursuit of money. I sued my bandmates – am I CRAZY?!” he yells. From the early 2000s, they were embroiled in a vicious six-year legal battle in which Densmore tried to stop Manzarek and the band’s guitarist, Robby Krieger, from touring under the Doors name as well as selling the band’s music for use on a Cadillac commercial. Manzarek’s relationship with Densmore was not smooth either. Next month, a documentary about another of his bandmates, the keyboardist Ray Manzarek, who died in 2013, will be released. “And now I miss him so much for his artistry.” “It took me years to forgive Jim,” Densmore says. To anyone who has read Densmore’s 1990 memoir – a book he says was “written in blood” – this may come as a surprise later the book would form the basis for Oliver Stone’s (dreadful) Doors biopic. This, perhaps, is why, in the decades since Morrison’s death, he has become not only one of the great chroniclers of the Doors, but the fiercest protector of Morrison’s legacy. Why wouldn’t he be? He was smart.”ĭensmore, 75, is a defiant survivor of the music scene he helped build. I used to answer the question: ‘If Jim was around today, would he be clean and sober?’ with a ‘no’. So what if we have one less album? Maybe he’ll live?’” Why did he carry on? “Because I wasn’t mature enough to say that at the time. “Some people wanted to keep shovelling coal in the engine and I was like: ‘Wait a minute. He had lobbied to get Morrison off the road before his death, and even quit the band at one point. “The Dionysian madman,” Densmore has called him – a “psychopath”, a “lunatic” and “the voice that struck terror in me”. Like many alcoholics, he could be reckless, selfish and mercurial. But he was catastrophically bad at the rest of life. Morrison was a man who was spectacularly good at being a rock star – a lithe figure in leather trousers, prophesying about death, sex and magic on some of the biggest hits of the 1960s – Light My Fire, Break on Through and Hello, I Love You. I hated his self-destruction … He was a kamikaze who went out at 27 – what can I say?” “Did I hate Jim?” Densmore pauses, although he is not obviously alarmed by the question. It took the Doors’ drummer, John Densmore, three years to visit the grave of his bandmate Jim Morrison after he was found dead in a Paris bathtub in 1971.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |