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soon becoming inseparable. Jim would often refer to Pamela as his ‘cosmic mate’, and their relationship continued right up until his death. For Morrisonit was a perversely normal relationship – he read her his poems and lectured her on what books to read, while she taught him how to dress. And together they plunged into Mondo Hollywood.
    By the end of 1965, Los Angeles was awash with freaks. Every proto-hipster came equipped with his own emotional baggage and newly adopted convictions. Every new arrival had an angle; Morrison’s was poetry. Pamela Zarubica (aka Suzy Creamcheese), the infamous Frank Zappa acolyte, remembers Morrison’s arrival, courting the famous and the influential, the notorious and the hip, desperate to be liked: ‘That Jim Morrison sure was a drag, always play-acting and making everybody listen to his poems.’ Captain Beefheart (Don van Vliet), a genuine Californian bohemian, was amused by Morrison’s lust for approval. He remembers him turning up in LA, looking like a weekend hippie, with his very own ‘bongo speech’, gauche and eager to make friends, trying to penetrate the underbelly of hip LA.
    By fleeing to LA, Morrison left behind his white-bread upbringing. Dismissive of the cradle-to-grave security of his father’s world, he revamped himself for public consumption. To quote journalist Mick Farren, LA ‘provided him with a backdrop to act out his fantasies’. The Los Angeles that Morrison found was a movie set full of failed actors, freaks, beatniks, weirdos and drug fiends. If San Francisco had the ultimateutopian Zeitgeist, Los Angeles was a more hungry city, a town where fame and fortune were still desirable, tangible things. LA was the ultimate synthetic city, an unholy sprawling town with no real sense of community. In LA, people didn’t understand good or evil – only success or failure. Many had come looking for fame and fortune, though few had been chosen. The unlucky ones were destined to prowl the bars along Sunset Strip, dreaming of what might have been.
    Morrison the actor was at home in LA. In San Francisco his dreams would have appeared callous and shallow, but in a city full of aspiring luminaries his ambitions weren’t noticed. He had found his city. LA was the twentieth-century manifestation of the Apollonian–Dionysian split, where reality and unreality went side by side, bumper to bumper: the rich and the poor, the famous and the invisible.
    Morrison naturally gravitated towards the hipper, seamier side of the city, hanging out with winos and hookers, as well as with the young hippies who littered the beaches and the bars. He could remake himself here, he thought, and no one would notice, because no one particularly cared; in LA, everyone looked out for himself.
    Before Manzarek was lucky enough to hook up with Morrison, Rick and the Ravens had signed a contract with Aura Records. Their first single died, so rather than release another potential disaster, Auraoffered them free studio time. The Ravens, who were practically now the Doors, gratefully accepted. One September evening in 1965 the group spent three hours in World Pacific Studios on 3rd Street recording six prototype Doors songs: ‘Hello I Love You’, ‘Moonlight Drive’, ‘My Eyes Have Seen You’, ‘End of the Night’, ‘Summer’s Almost Gone’ and ‘Go Insane’ (which was later incorporated into ‘The Celebration of the Lizard’). They hawked the demos around to various record companies, until Columbia eventually offered them a small deal.
    Morrison called the band the Doors in homage to William Blake and Aldous Huxley; Blake had written, ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it truly is, infinite,’ which inspired the title of Huxley’s book about his mystical experiences with mescaline,
The Doors of Perception
(1954). For a cocky college