BOOK: ‘Love Becomes a Funeral Pyre: A Biography of the Doors’ by Mick Wall
Let me lead into this with some background about how I decided to review this book, then almost didn’t, then decided I really had to.
From time to time, our editor lets us know about important books related to the REBEAT culture — obviously, they’re most frequently about ’60s and ’70s music — and then asks if anyone on the staff is interested in reviewing a particular title. On one such occasion, she asked if anyone wanted to take on Love Becomes a Funeral Pyre: A Biography of the Doors by Mick Wall, and I said I’d like to. After all, though I’ve never been an obsessive fan of the Doors’ music — I like most of what they released as singles but haven’t developed much affection for their album cuts and the like — I have always been intrigued by Jim Morrison’s wild-man reputation and thought I’d like to read a book about it rather than just take for granted the many factoids I’ve heard based on God-knows-what over the years. However, when I got my review copy, I was so busy I just didn’t see any way I could work it into my schedule during the following weeks and get the review done. Ultimately, I decided to read just a few pages so I could honestly say I had tried but just didn’t have the time to get it done, and then I’d offer it up to the other REBEAT staffers.
But something strange happened — after reading just two chapters, I was hooked. I found myself reading it during lunch, before I went to bed at night, even at breakfast in the morning. That may not sound unusual to some of you, but I haven’t been that engrossed in a book in a long, long time. Having now finished it, I can say quite honestly that Wall’s book is one of the best biographies — and I don’t mean just biographies about rock figures, I mean any biography — I have ever read.
The very first thing Wall does is clarify that while Jim Morrison is most certainly dead (and not, as some would have you believe, merely in hiding for four-plus decades), he did not die in the bathtub in the Paris apartment he shared with Pamela Courson, and he did not simply die of heart failure or any common medical ailment. Morrison actually died of a heroin overdose in a bathroom stall in a nightclub and was moved to his apartment and placed in the tub to avoid embroiling the nightclub in a bad-for-business scandal. This sets the tone for the rest of the biography: no bullshit, no “let’s keep the myth alive,” no “let’s write another book deifying Morrison and the Doors.” Wall’s approach is a refreshing take, and he never indulges in hero worship; he simply shoots straight and tells it like it is (or was).
Right up front you can also tell that he won’t let the Doors publicity machine, for decades led by band member Ray Manzarek, continue to perpetuate the Doors myth at the author’s or reader’s expense. In fact, along the way I started to get the sense that Wall got a bit annoyed with Manzarek’s BS. Here’s a sample, where he refers to a conversation he had with Manzarek:
But when he gave me the Jim-might-not-be-dead shtick, I was surprised, then disappointed, then faintly disgusted. He was insulting my intelligence. He thought I was there to write another meaningless chapter in the bible of the Doors, the one that ends with Jim dying in a bathtub while his loving girlfriend sleeps peacefully in the next room. Then I realized, no, he wasn’t putting me on. Ray was simply doing his job, the same one he’d been doing faithfully for more than 40 years. Feeding the fires that kept him and the remaining Doors and their dependents warm these many winters, keeping the myth alive for each successive generation of teenage existentialists….[Ray had been] relating this fable for so long he had actually come to believe it and embrace it himself.
Manzarek did seem to spew a lot of happy-hippie-in-the-60s rhetoric, and this is not the only place I’ve read that. In another section, Manzarek tells him, “We were so fueled with life and potential possibilities that we were bursting at the seams, mentally and certainly semen-wise, we were bursting with life.” As Wall notes, “OK, Ray. If you say so man.”
I love this about the book. Wall wants the story, not the myth, not what people hope happened, and certainly not the “Jim might be alive” stuff. Good for him. I assure you if that had been his game I would have quit reading in the first chapter. Here’s to an author who understands journalistic integrity — there doesn’t seem to be enough of that these days.
I always thought Morrison was a talented but eccentric individual who marched to the beat of his own drummer in a Thoreauvian sense of the expression. But after reading this biography, I see now he was clearly a screwed up, selfish, egocentric person, enabled by yes-men, messed up by drugs, and seduced by the availability of scores of young women eager to share his bed. Ultimately, he alone was responsible for the group’s demise, and no amount of sugarcoating and revisionist history can make a sane person think he was simply a misunderstood artiste. He missed rehearsals regularly and frequently deliberately jeopardized almost every success the group had. Guitarist Robby Krieger and drummer John Densmore seemed a lot more aware of this than Manzarek, and were a lot more put out by Morrison’s self- and group-destructive actions as well. Despite all the success the Doors had in terms of records sales and the like, after reading Wall’s book I felt sorry for Krieger and Densmore. While no doubt the charismatic Morrison was in many ways largely responsible for the group’s success, at the same time had he turned it down just a bit (his personal excesses, I mean), who knows how far the group could have gone? I have to imagine that these two surviving members must feel that as well.
Something else I’ll tempt potential readers with is the appearance of many, many famous people whose lives intersected with the band’s. One of the most interesting people who pops up a good bit early in the Doors story is Gloria Stavers. I mention her because in October 2014, Allison did a piece on her for REBEAT, and as it’s written, my guess is our editor admires Stavers for what she did for music journalism. I came away from Allison’s article feeling the woman was almost a maternal mentor figure to many pop and rock artists in the ’60s. Wall’s book disabused me of that notion pretty quickly. Apparently she was a woman of voracious sexual appetites, and, well — I think I’ll let you read it for yourself if you’re interested. I don’t see her as a mother figure now. She was hardly alone among Morrison’s conquests however, and given how dearly so many REBEAT staffers and readers seem to idolize Paul McCartney, I was quite surprised to learn that Morrison also bedded Linda Eastman. I’ve always thought of her as Mrs. Paul McCartney, but clearly there was a pre-Paul period.
But I don’t want your last impression to be that this is some gossipy tell-all, because it’s not. What it is is a great book, that pretty much lays bare the lives and careers of the Doors, the good and the bad. If you buy into all the Jim Morrison mythology that proclaims he’s a misunderstood rock god you may not care for it. But if you want to read the real story and learn about one of America’s most controversial and enigmatic groups, you’ll really enjoy this book. Highly recommended.
To get your copy of Love Becomes a Funeral Pyre, head over to Amazon.com!
