On The Road

Once we got out on the road, distance and motion seemed to lose all meaning. The odometer turned and signs whizzed by. The horizon was always just out of reach, we were riding the snake of American commerce and dreams, the highway, I’d always watched trucks and cars pass on the highway and I’d felt as if life was being transacted, and now I was on that road. But somehow it didn't seem real, it felt like we were standing still, like we were in a simulator or something, but we were having a good time. After all, we were a rock band touring on the road! The radio was blaring, the boys were goofing around, joking, playfully throwing things around. We were about half way to Chicago when the van started to slow down.
"Hey guys! Tom said, "there's a hitchhiker, should we pick him up?" The boys leaned up from the back to look. The hitchhiker looked like he could've been Tom's twin brother in torn jeans, plaid shirt and backpack. The boys all looked at each other, and yelled,
"No, man! That could be the killer on the road, step on it!" We all laughed as Tom hit the accelerator.

The time and distance gave me a lot of time to think. Since Kerouac, America has become convinced that some existential truth about itself can be found on the road. Morrison himself bought into the theme. In his songs, poems, and HWY, the movie he made was about a serial killer as existential metaphor. The randomness of death on the highway of life, the killer on the road we'll all eventually meet. Travel as catharsis and transcendence. When asked what Doors songs were about, Morrison said "sex, travel, and death," they were meant to be a journey. We think there are no worlds to discover, we forget about the monsters that lie just under the surface. What would we find at the end of this road? I didn't know, maybe visions, sex, madness, some great promised adventures in the American wilderness, and maybe we were going to find out some truth about ourselves. Kerouac and Morrison saw it as a search, I thought of this as transformation.

I pushed back in the passenger seat across from Tom, my boot resting on the dashboard. Johnny and Brian got the two seats behind us, while in the back Mitchell and Ian were variously draped over the equipment or sitting braced against it. I guess a new pecking order had been established. My leather pants creaked against the seat whenever I moved. With the money I had leftover from the sale of my trailer, and selling off the last of my collection I bought more leathers and other clothing that had the right look. The boys called it my Morrison uniform. Morrison lived the role. He didn't differentiate between real life and the stage. To him Rock ‘n’ Roll was a stark theatre, a place where life and death are enacted, it wasn’t safe on the edges, it was dangerous and you could die and that’s what makes life real. To Morrison, theater and life weren't separate. Shakespeare said, "all the world's a stage," and Morrison wrote, "this ancient and insane theater," so if I was going to be Morrison, I needed to live the role too. Writers have always been identified with the lifestyles they’ve lead. Hemingway let the man and the myth become inseparable and convoluted until even the man couldn’t remember what was myth and what was truth, and that’s the problem with an image, sooner or later it turns on you and is used against you, Morrison discovered this. But I knew all those pitfalls, I read all the biographies and learned from the mistakes of others who’ve gone down this road, I could see the traps and landmines ahead and avoid them, a real artful dodger.

Chicago was the first stop of the tour. The club was actually in a suburb of Chicago. We veered around the outskirts of the city, as the skyline came into view. "Sweet home Chicago," I sang under my breath. I remembered that L. Frank Baum had used Chicago as the description of Oz in the book The Wizard of Oz. I could kind of see it, a cluster of buildings hiding in the opacity of haze, which seemed to form a bubble around the city. I remembered the line from a song by America, "Oz didn't give anything to the tin man that he didn't all ready have." I felt like I was the man behind the curtain, at the same time controlling everything, but still a fraud. I hoped like hell the boys didn't find out.

Morrison had sung about Chicago, or at least included a reference in the song Peace Frog. "Funny name for a song, huh?" Morrison used to ask in concert. "Because even The Doors, in 1970, couldn't name a song Abortion Stories," Ray answered years later in an interview. I sang a verse from the song, "there's blood in the streets, it's up to my knee, blood in the streets of the town of Chicago," probably one of Morrison's most personal songs, it includes a lot of autobiographical details. There's a reference to New Haven, where he managed to be the first rock star arrested on stage. Also mentioned is Venice, California where he had lived on a friend's rooftop and by all reports ingested an extraordinary amount of LSD while writing the poems that would make up most of the first two albums worth of songs. And there’s the incredible Indians bleeding on dawn’s highway section, which recounts an incident from Morrison’s childhood. So, why in the face of all those autobiographical mentions is there a reference to Chicago? It’s a minor Rock 'n' Roll mystery. A lot of people like to think it's a reference to the police riot at the Democratic convention in '68, but Morrison wasn't there. Why mention places and events that have a deeply personal autobiographical connection, and one that has no personal connection? Morrison, if anything, was the master of his own mythology. So, why the Chicago mention? What people tend to forget is Chicago is where Morrison consciously provoked his audience to riot for the first time.

Besides Swifty buying ads in the local papers, the plan was as we hit each city the boys would run around plastering the local neighborhood with fliers. They would get the artsy, trendy neighborhoods with the coffee shops and bookstores, and then to the club areas, while I would give interviews to the local papers.

The living accommodations for the tour were supposed to be the band would share two rooms, and Tom and I were to share a room. I was the star, and the boys were at the age where they would be sleeping on friends' couches, anyway. I was a little passed that. Since I had the money, I got a room of my own and paid the difference between a single room and a double out of my own pocket. Tom was the inheritor of the unexpected luxury of his own room.

(The Last Stage is available on Kindle, Nook Books, or if you would like a signed copy of The Last Stage they're available from my website (only $20!) at Jymsbooks via Paypal (jymwrite@aol.com, please don't forget your mailing address!)

Chapter 25: Illinois Entertainer Interview