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Date Posted: 03:19:08 03/30/00 Thu
Author: LUXTON (COPYRIGHTED 2000) PERSONAL USE ONLY
Author Host/IP: spider-to025.proxy.aol.com / 152.163.204.13
Subject: EXERPT FROM "COLOURED LIGHTS CAN HYPNOTIZE"

It’s not absolutely clear in my memory when I first heard a Doors record. Long before These Eyes changed things for the Guess Who, we were doing People Are Strange and Love Me Two Times on stage. I guess the first thing I heard by them could have been Light My Fire, but it never made much of an impression on me. I fully realize it was their breakthrough song and their immortalizing anthem, but I never much cared for the song. The organ riff never made sense to me. Jim’s power never seemed to emerge in Light My Fire as far as I was concerned. It was the Strange Days album, and in particular Horse Latitudes and When The Music’s Over, that converted me into a Doors fanatic. Something irreversible happened to me after tuning in to Morrison. I played Horse Latitudes for Randy Bachman once when he and his first wife were living in that tiny house on Luxton...he looked at me, bored with and unaffected by what he heard. Bachman NEVER got the Doors. About this time LSD came into my life. The first night I ever did it, my friend the late Nathan “Woody” Kryger gave me a hit of what he called STP. Woody and I and a third guy, the late Chuck Stokoloff, each did a full hit of STP (or some fuckin’ thing), jumped into my blue and black 1964 Ford Galaxie two door hardtop and went to see Planet Of The Apes at the Drive In. It was far too heavy. We should never have been confined to a car, much less trying to follow and get involved in Planet Of The Apes. Mind you, we finally did immerse ourselves in the story while sumultaneously getting further and further out into space. By the time we finally saw the spikes from the head of the Statue of Liberty on the beach in that final scene, we were fried beyond anywhere any of us had been ever before. What an eerie thought...the first time I ever did acid in my life I was with two friends that are both dead now. I did acid with both these guys many more times after that night, the most notable being the time in 1968 when seven of us drove almost five hundred miles from Winnipeg to Minneapolis to see the Doors in person.
Our pal Harold had sent a money order months in advance to secure tickets for us. We took two cars, mine and Woody’s. Harold agreed to “carry” over the border. Bless his heart, did he have guts. He put about fifteen hits of rocket fuel acid in his sock and actually kept his pulse down when we crossed the border. One thing you HAVE to remember here...it was 1968. If guys could get six months in jail for a bit of hash, think what could have happened to Harold if they had caught him taking fifteen hits of acid across an international boundary. He might be getting out of jail just about the turn of the century. Anyhow, we got there hassle free and got one dingy hotel room for the five of us. We parked the two cars in the hotel lot and each did our share of the acid. Good acid always took about an hour to hit so we all went for dinner. During dinner the acid began to come on and by show time we were all lunched. One of our friends, Lee, had a particularly bad time dealilng with being in a crowd of fifteen thousand on acid. He started going over the edge and Harold had to talk him down for a good twenty minutes. It could have been a very bad scene for Lee and all of us, but Harold pulled him out of it before show time. We were way up in the nosebleed section of one of the balconies, and Woody kept whining about wanting to be right down front. Suddenly, there they were...the fucking Doors. I was never the same after that night. No performer I have ever seen in my life had the unique charisma Jim Morrison had. At one point he told the crowd to shut up, and ten seconds later you could have heard a pin drop in that building. The girls all wanted to fuck him and the guys all wanted to be him or hang around with him. During a particularly long number he sang “Fuck me girl, fuck me girl, Suck my cock, around the world.” I had never heard that done right out in the open in front of fifteen thousand people before. I had never heard blood curdling screams like Jim’s before...and Robbie and Ray were LOUD man, I mean feeazucking loud! The show was hypnotic and shaman-esque...to this day I’m not really sure how long they played, but it sure as hell opened my eyes a bit. After that, I became almost a deciple of the Doors, Morrison in particular. A year later, the Guess Who played all three days at the Seattle Pop Festival and late into the third night the Doors showed up and played a set. This time there were 150,000 people watching them.
Sometime between those two events, an astounding set of circumstances allowed me to spend a whole night with Jim Morrison. Every word of this story is true, I swear on my Grandmother’s grave. The Guess Who flew to Los Angeles for the very first time (at least since I had joined the band). I HAD NEVER SET FOOT ON CALIFORNIA SOIL IN MY LIFE BEFORE THIS PARTICULAR NIGHT. We landed around eight in the evening, and by the time we had checked into our hotel it was about nine thirty. We were staying in Hollywood on Sunset Blvd. at a place called the Hallmark House. It’s a Travelodge these days. There I was in Los Angeles, right on Sunset Boulevard, where Dino’s and where the Whiskey stood. Randy, Jim, and Gary were content to stay in their rooms but I just took off walking...I knew that Dino’s and the Whiskey were both on Sunset and that if I kept walking long enough I was bound to see them. I walked miles up Sunset...from just west of Highland to the Whiskey. When I first saw Dino’s it seemed surreal to me...how many times had I watched 77 Sunset Strip and seen Kookie Byrnes park the cars there in all those exterior shots ? I continued West on Sunset and eventually approached the Whiskey. When I first stared up at it, I had a semi religious experience right there on the sidewalk. This place was a mecca of the rock music world. It had been home and training ground to the Byrds, The Buffalo Springfield, and the Doors. Johnny Rivers had done those great live versions of Memphis and Maybelline here. I stared wide-eyed for quite a while until I eventually regained enough composure to venture inside. It was now some time after midnight...I had been in California for a total of less than four hours. As I stood inside and looked around, I noticed a rather drunk Eric Burdon at a table in the corner. The band seemed to have finished temporarily, whoever they were, and there was some sort of mass exodus going on. Many people were leaving and they all seemed to have a common destination in mind. I stayed at the Whiskey for about half an hour, gulping in the vibes and trying to imagine all the historic moments in pop music that had occurred within its walls. Then, replete with experience, I went outside onto Sunset to hail a cab back to the Hallmark House in Hollywood. It was 1969...I was 21.
I managed to get a cab rather quickly right outside the front door and as soon as my ass hit the back seat the driver said “So...I guess you’re going to the party too, huh...?” Reacting quickly I nodded in the affirmative. The driver went down Sunset about a block and a half and suddenly made a turn up into the hills above Hollywood. I was on my way to some house in Los Angeles where I didn’t personally know a living soul . As we twisted and turned up the winding streets of the hills, I started to panic. I came clean with the driver and told him that I had no idea where he was taking me, much less who was giving or attending the party he was talking about. He told me that I was his third fare there in the last hour. I was now dying with curiosity. I told the driver that if he would take me to the party, I would pay his full fare up to that point and try to get in the door. I asked him kindly to wait and see if I got in. He said he would wait and see whether I did, and if I was turned away, he would take me back to the Hallmark House and nobody would be much the worse for the experience.
We pulled up to the gate of one of those houses that looks like the one the Beverly Hillbillies lived in...the gate was wide open and it sounded as if all Hell was breaking loose inside the house. I handed the driver twenty bucks and walked up to the huge door and rang the bell. Somebody very drunk opened the door and shrieked “Come on in” with a thick British accent. I was now inside some mansion in the hills with a real shaker going on, STILL only having been in California for about four hours. There was loud music...there were a lot of people, all of whom were blitzed on various things...I had no fucking idea what I was doing there, so I sauntered into the kitchen and grabbed myself an ice cold Budweiser.
I walked back out into the living room and spied a cutoff upright piano. No one was sitting at it, so I graced the piano stool and started fingering the keys while surveying the room and the guests. No one could hear me playing with all the noise, so momentarily I guess I just faded right in to my surroundings. I had been there about twenty minutes when a fairly drunk guy with long hair stumbled in, a girl on each arm kind of holding him up to steady him. Upon first glance he looked familiar ...then it hit me...it was Jim Morrison. Ladies and gentlemen, it was 1969, I was 21, I had first set foot on California soil less than four hours previously, and here I was in some mansion in the Hollywood hills in the same room with Jim Morrison. No one seemed to notice him...well, maybe they did, but just didn’t care. I sure noticed him. The whole night had become surreal at that point, and unbeknownst to me, it was just beginning.
Jimbo had recently faced the charges of showing his cock on stage in Florida, and many people thought the Doors might just be on a final downward spiral. They hadn’t played live for a while due to all the negative publicity and craziness that seemed to surround them. When I saw him swill down the remaining beer in his can and go to the kitchen for more, I got up and followed him. In the kitchen, after we’d both gotten a new beer, I went up and asked him “So, how’s the trouble...how’s the shit, man...?” He looked at me and said “Oh, it’ll all be ok...” not volunteering much information or willingness to talk. Not wanting to get in his face in any fucking way, I left the kitchen with my new beer and went back over and sat down on the piano bench. I had talked to Jim Morrison. Now I could die happily, although I already knew that nobody in the world would ever believe me.
Being somewhat overwhelmed by the evening’s events, I just took a long cold swill of beer and began playing the piano softly. About two minutes later a guy sat down on the bench to my right and started doodling along on one of the higher registers of the keys. It was Jim. We actually “played piano together” for a few minutes and to this day I have no idea what I was thinking during that period of time...perhaps even sodium pentathol could never retrieve those minutes from my memory...I seem to have blanked permanently with regards to our “duet”. But I swear by all that’s Holy, it really happened and I’m recalling it as best I can.
Jim got up suddenly. He was very drunk and almost fell over when he reached his feet. He said to the two girls “Let’s go...gimme my keys...” For reasons still unknown to myself, I stood up and said “Hey man, you shouldn’t be driving...let me drive you where you’re going...just tell me where to take you, and when we get there I’ll hop out and get a cab or a bus.” One of the girls handed Jim his keys and he promptly handed them to me. Off we went. We piled into Jim’s GTO, he and the two girls in the back seat and me at the wheel. I had touched California soil for the first time in my life at about 8:45 pm that night...it was now about 1:45 am and I was driving Jim Morrison around in his GTO through the hills and streets of Los Angeles.
There were about forty cold beers in the trunk and one of the girls had brought about a dozen of them into the back seat when we all loaded in. Jim drank fast. The girls barely drank anything. Every so often he’d say “Some for the driver...some for the driver...” whereupon one of the girls would hand me a cold beer...I think they were Millers but I couldn’t swear to it...I think Jim’s GTO was silver with a black roof, but it’s decades ago and some details have faded. I kept hearing “Go left here...go right here...just go straight for now” and other directions from the back seat.
I drove the three of them around until after sunup. During those hours I spoke very little to the back seat. I was more than content to listen. I never once mentioned that I was a musician, much less “the biggest Morrison fanatic in North America”. After all...how many million other people thought the same thing, and how many fucking times had Jim heard that already...? He spoke about physics, existentialism, Magritte, the blues, and Edgar Allan Poe among other things that night. Surreal, surreal, surreal.
I think it was about eight in the morning when they decided one of the girls should drive and I should be cut loose from the herd. I never argued over the decision...I had already lived a personal dream, and wanted to do absolutely nothing to taint it. They dropped me off right where the Sherman Oaks Galleria now stands and took off due west on Ventura Blvd. A series of busses and a cab got me back to my motel by about ten thirty in the morning. I had no idea of the geography of LA, but I managed to get back before any pressing Guess Who business that day. I was rooming with Jim Kale that trip and when I came in that morning, I told him how I had spent my first night ever in California...he never believed a word of it...neither did Randy or Gary...
Less than eighteen months later, Jim Morrison was dead. I now live about five minutes from where he dropped me off that morning. Coincidence...? You be the judge...
Over two decades later, in the early nineties, I was invited to a basketball fanatics’ party at a lawyer’s house in Los Angeles to watch an NBA playoff game involving Jordan and the Bulls. Ray Manzarek was at this gathering. At half time a friend of mine asked him if he remembered the Seattle Pop Festival, seeing as how it was “the last time Ray and I had worked together”. Ray said he recalled arriving at the site by helicopter and he remembered the crowd being huge. He and I talked for a while about those days of large festivals and I briefly told him about my first night in LA and how I had driven Jim around till dawn. Manzarek laughed and said I had “certainly been introduced to LA in fine style”. Robbie Krieger and John Densmore had the same business manager/money mover as I did for about ten years. As a matter of fact, for several years at one point John Densmore and I both owned shares in the same apartment complex in Palmdale California. If someone had told me in 1968 on the way to Minneapolis that I would one day have that much to do with the Doors, I would never have believed a word of it. Time certainly has a way of altering things in surprising ways. You never know what’s around the corner. I am still a huge fan of the Doors’ recordings and I still love Strange Days and The Soft Parade. Many Doors fanatics thought the band had sold out somehow on The Soft Parade, but I never felt that way. I loved hearing Jim’s voice bathed in strings on Touch Me and Wishful Sinful. After all, “the monk...bought...lunch ! ” The Doors drastically woke me up and fanned the fire inside which made me want to be more of an artist. They, in particular Douglas James Morrison, made one guy from the north end of Winnipeg try much harder.
Before leaving the subject of the Doors, I must relate one more story of probable interest to any of their fans. Around 1972 I was staying at the Hyatt House on Sunset Blvd. I was back into the blow pretty good at this time and I had almost an ounce of it in my room. I had been up for about two days, snorting and philosophizing with one of Alice Cooper’s road managers. Through some fluke, I’m not entirely sure how, I ran into Lynn Krieger and ? Densmore. I didn’t recognize them, but Lynn volunteerd the sentence “We’re the Doors’ old ladies.”
They both ended up in my hotel room, shoveling as much blow up their respective noses as time and the laws of physics would allow. This was the morning of the third straight day of my being awake. I remember thinking to myself “Shit, I feel like a piece of wood”, but once again I was fascinated by being somewhat involved with the Doors’ inner circle. For some reason, Densmore’s wife suggested we all go to her house. I forget who drove, but a short time later I found myself in John Densmore’s house with his wife and Lynn Krieger. If memory serves me correctly it was a rather small but cool house on Apian Way in the hills above Sunset. There was a piano there, upon which sat a folio of all the band’s most famous songs. I was far too stoned and I really didn’t know what the hell I was doing there. These girls weren’t after a circus or any kind of sex scene, they just loved their blow and I had a shitload at the time. I don’t recall taking any with us to the Densmore household. As a matter of fact I don’t recall very much more than what I’ve just told you, but it’s almost eerie in retrospect how my life kept crossing the path of the band. I repeatedly wondered what these two wives of legends were doing running around with a total stranger snorting their brains out, and I never did find out. I don’t even remember how I got back to the hotel or how long I kept going without sleep. I never saw either of them again, and they both have been divorced from each Door for quite some time. There’s not much more to say about the Light My Fire boys right now, but I certainly had my share of experiences involving them.

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Replies:

[> Re: EXERPT FROM "COLOURED LIGHTS CAN HYPNOTIZE" -- Scott, Winnipeg, 03:47:45 03/30/00 Thu [1] (cflow3.mts.net/205.200.28.46)

FANTASTIC story!
I agree with you on STRANGE DAYS. Eerie songs like "You're Lost Little Girl" ("think...that you know...what to do"), "People Are Strange" and the dreamy "Moonlight Drive". Speaking of which, I always thought it was cool how you fit the title of that song into a line in "Clap For The Wolfman". You're definitely the only songwriter to ever refer to songs by The Crystals, Gene Chandler and The Doors within a ten second gap! (And have a top ten hit with it yet!) Brilliant!


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[> Re: EXERPT FROM "COLOURED LIGHTS CAN HYPNOTIZE" -- Brit, 04:00:17 03/30/00 Thu [1] (spider-th062.proxy.aol.com/152.163.213.72)

Wow Burt...what a strange trip it's been, huh? For some reason the Fates allowed you to encounter the band that you respected and idolized. The Fates have been kind to me too lately. I feel so priviledge to be the first to read your book excerpts on this site. Thanks for giving me the heads up. I'll be tuning in to read the next installment of the fascinating life you lead. Can't wait till the book comes out. It promises to be very, very interesting reading. Keep it coming, Doll.


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[> Re: EXERPT FROM "COLOURED LIGHTS CAN HYPNOTIZE" -- TimoV, 04:21:12 03/30/00 Thu [1] (taykpc99.uta.fi/153.1.23.169)

Great story, been Doors fan (would that be ovituuletin in Finnish...bad joke) almost all of my life. Got tons of bootlegs from them and the Doors also did a version of Mack the Knife, so there's another connection to the Doors.


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