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Link to Post Back to Top Post by darkstar on From the book, "Pearl – The Obsessions and Passions Of Janis Joplin"

a biography by Ellis Amburn (1992)



Jim Morrison was another rough character who came into her life in 1967. From the beginning their bands had been linked in people's minds. The Doors were known around San Francisco as "Hollywood's

version of Big Brother," and in LA, Janis was referred to as "the female Jim Morrison."



"The Doors came north and we went south," Sam (Andrew) says. Big Brother started gigging at LA's Whisky-A-Go-Go and the Golden Bear Club

in Huntington Beach, and the Doors came up the coast regularly to play the Matrix and Winterland. Says Sam, "They were a slithery crew even

then. We were playing the Matrix one weekend when we heard about the Doors coming to town. This was when we first met all of them. They were in an incubation period just as we were, still sweet and

innocent."



James Gurley, recalling the night he and Janis first saw the Doors, takes a more acerbic view. "Janis and Morrison were two big egos clashing in the night," he says. "They never got along from the first

time we saw the Doors at the Matrix. She didn't like Jim Morrison and he didn't like her. They were too much alike – two monstrous egos."



In January 1967, the Doors were playing Winterland, and Paul Kantner of the Jefferson Airplane told them they should catch Janis' act at the Avalon between their sets. The Doors complained that the Avalon

was two miles across town, but John Densmore would never forget the trip. Said John, "The female lead singer was so good, we were told it

would be worth the hassle of getting back for our last set. I remember thinking that a girl who called herself `Big Brother' must be kind of butch."



Robby Krieger and Densmore arrived, "in the middle of a torching rendition of `Down On Me'" and later went backstage to tell Janis how sensational she was. Said Densmore, "She thanked me kindly and

offered me a slug of her gallon of rotgut wine. Seeing Janis Joplin up close wasn't as appealing as from a distance, but she was warm and friendly, and that deep, husky voice kept reminding me how powerful

she could belt the blues."



In June 1967, Jim Morrison was in New York, complaining bitterly that he had not been invited to participate at Monterey Pop. The weekend

of the festival was practically a national holiday in the rock world, and the Scene, the hip club in Manhattan where the Doors would usually played, closed so that everyone could go to California. The Doors were reduced to playing dumpy little clubs in Philadelphia and

Long Island, and Morrison began to nurse a grudge against the San Francisco bands. "My flower-child half strongly wanted to be tripping and dancing at the Festival," said the Door's Densmore, "but I was in

the demon Doors."



"Morrison took it personally," according to his biographers, feeling he was being discriminated against because of his identity as an LA rocker. By the time Janis and Morrison got together after Monterey,

she'd returned to Haight-Ashbury a star. Rolling Stone, which started publishing in 1967, called her "the major female voice of her generation," and Ralph Gleason said she was "easily the most exciting singer of her race to appear in a decade or more." Alternately happy

and puzzled by the big splash she'd made, she said she was enjoying fame but was acutely mindful that "before this, nobody ever care whether I lived." A social outcast since puberty, she was bewildered by the world's sudden adulation and frankly didn't know what

to do with it. But there was one aspect of fame that she embraced instantly and wholeheartedly" It was an aphrodisiac. Some of the most attractive men of her time were now available to her.



Jim Morrison was in her apartment one night with a group that included Dave Richards, Sam Andrew, Morrison's girl, Pamela Courson, and his tailor. "When I got there, Morrison was already there

with some hippie guy who was his clothing designer and traveled all around with him, making Morrison's leather pants," says Dave Richards. "Morrison was very drunk. We all were. Sam was, I was, Janis was. Only Morrison's girlfriend wasn't drunk. She was a

little uptight, actually. She didn't want to be there. Both Sam and I had designs on her. They only other woman there was Janis and we both knew that Janis had designs on Jim Morrison."



At Janis's apartment that night in San Francisco, Janis went over to Dave Richards after a while and whispered, "I'm going to go in there in my bedroom. Why don't you tell Jim to come in there? I want

to talk to him for a minute."



"Oh," Dave said, "Okay." Then he went over to

Morrison and said, "Hey, Jim." Morrison glanced up and said, "Yeah?"



"Janis wants to talk to you for a minute."



Morrison got up and walked into the bedroom, Says Dave, "The door closed and I heard lock – clank! And that was that. The girlfriend sat there and sat there. Hours passed."



Janis's boudoir was a soft and seductive seraglio, with velvet, satin, lace and silk everywhere. Bob Seidemann's nude poster of her adorned one wall, and there were incense, lubricating lotions, booze,

dope, water pipes and needles.



Morrison may well have struck her as the ultimate catch. Writers of the sixties out did themselves attempting to capture his sensuality.

Biographers noted that in black leather he "looked like a naked body dipped in India ink." Journalists referred to him as a "surf-born Dionysus" and a "hippie Adonis." Rock critic Lillian Roxon wrote adulatingly, "The Doors are unendurable pleasure prolonged." Richard

Goldstein lionized him as a "sexual shaman" and a "street punk gone to heaven and reincarnated as a choir boy."



