Rare But Serious

Jeff Finn’s new film Before The End: Searching for Jim Morrison is the first to consider the late poet and Doors frontman as a possible survivor of childhood sexual abuse. The claim is plausible, given the testimony of one woman about Jim’s eyes going black during an attempted rape, which sounds a lot like the behavior of a Highly Sensitive Person likely abused as a child. There are lyrical clues, like the game called go insane, which sounds like somebody’s attempt at a creepy hypnosis session, potentially to precede such an act. I’ve heard others reframe the same lyrics as potentially being Jim’s attempt to communicate secrets about MK-Ultra. More than twenty years ago, your reporter found himself closely connected to the life and death of Jim Morrison when I started working for his Liverpudlian brother in law of 22 years Alan Graham as an editor and sometime ghostwriter and publicist, which gives me a particular perspective on that mystery. As long as I knew him, it was one of Al’s passions to go after all the “grifters” out to milk the seven years of Doors fame and call it an accurate portrait of his brother-in-law, whose ghost he felt himself the agent of. Finn’s film deliberately considers its subject from outside of that narrow focus, though I can understand why Al didn’t like it, and maybe he was right, but maybe not. Grown cynical after years up-close with a lot of self-appointed chroniclers who let him down like Oliver Stone and Albert Goldman and the guys who wrote No One Here Gets Out Alive, Al saw himself as the spearhead he used to be more often than he was as he got older, and caused a lot of disturbance among Jim’s would-be biographers, including Mr. Finn. This interview is a step in the direction of healing that nuclear wound. We’ll see if it works. I never met Jim Morrison. I remember Al, who I think would have known, saying it’s not Jim. But after hearing about lawyer Max Fink’s transcript, and seeing a few phots comparing Jim to Mr. X, an elderly man of similar physicality portrayed in Finn’s film as in fact being the surviving Morrison, I think maybe it is, and I hope no one’s after him. Jeff answered a few of my questions by email recently.

1/ A lot of Doors fan don’t realize the Morrisons are a military bloodline going back at least as far as Scottish clan wars, and as such, given to a strict code of non-disclosure. What was your experience researching Jim’s immediate family and background?

My independent research into Jim Morrison’s life and alleged death began in October 1985 when I was 18-years-old. Given that, over the last 39 years, I’ve worked hard to leave no stone unturned, and by the time I broke ground on my 3-part docuseries, Before the End: Searching for Jim Morrison, in July 2012, I was acutely aware of the Morrison military through-line, which of course, hit the proverbial wall with Jim and his younger brother, Andy. Full stop.

2/ The Morrison mythos post-mortem includes a lot of satellite stories you’ve probably encountered in your research. Jim’s would-be son Cliff Morrison and his on-and-off manager/promoter Floyd Bocox are always working on something, currently an unfinished film project called Morrisonland. I have friends in common with Patricia but we haven’t spoken. Cliff is currently in prison and Floyd Bocox was the first grifter Al told me about in a series of grifters he went after like a bulldog. It seems he went after your project with the same deadly zeal, and may have been mistaken.

By the time I was in preproduction on Before the End, I was nearly 27 years into my granular research. I was aware of both Cliff Morrison and the now-late Patricia Kennealy, but I wasn’t interested in interviewing either for my project. I felt Kennealy had been granted more than enough mainstream exposure over the decades. And as for Cliff Morrison and how he may or may not have been related to Jim, I was only interested in confirmed blood relatives, which resulted in my interviews with Andy Morrison, and Jim and Andy’s cousins, Ellen Edwards and David Backer. I also met with Anne Morrison-Chewning, who was quite kind, but beyond her well-known “shyness,” she seemed to have been advised against sitting down with me, formally, much like over a dozen other Morrison insiders in what later proved to be a case of Hollywood collusion. Sad but true.

Ultimately, I wanted to give a voice to those who knew Jim the real person, and not merely his Doors persona. That meant seeking out many people who’d never been interviewed in print, let alone on-camera, and a number who’d long been relegated to fairly-obscure names in dusty Morrison biographies. And on that note, Before the End is a Jim Morrison documentary, not yet another “Doors doc,” or “rock doc.” Naturally, the Doors are a part of Jim’s story, but he lived 21 years before the band formed. BTE is about the full span of James Douglas Morrison’s life and alleged death, which is why I call it a “documystery.” In many ways, his experience was like real-life Twin Peaks, particularly his adolescence.

3/ Speaking of collusion, why do you think so many sons and daughters of military intelligence families (including Jim and everyone else you can think of) congregated in Laurel Canyon in the sixties to make that flower power scene? Was it some kind of op, and if it was, were they in on it, or was it an accident? — -in a nutshell, what do you think about allegations Jim Morrison may have been under government oversight in some sense, given his status as the “only” or at least currently most renowned scion of that clan not to go the military route?

I can’t speak for the contextual experiences of Jim’s military-brat peers and fellow Laurel Canyon denizens the likes of Frank Zappa, John Phillips, or Jim’s nemesis, David Crosby, but during my Before the End interviews, a former UCLA classmate of Jim’s, Richard Blackburn, told me Jim had read A Clockwork Orange and was interested in mind control, which the CIA covertly studied via MK-ULTRA. That tracked for me, because Jim had studied the psychology of crowds in college, and he was deeply interested in EVERYTHING and EVERYONE. But I don’t believe he was part of any PsyOp in Laurel Canyon or elsewhere, mainly due to his visceral hatred of the US military and, in particular, his own father. But two things, however contradictory, can simultaneously be true.

Jim did have loose connections to Charles Manson and members of the Manson family, but then apparently so did nearly every other 60s rock entity, from The Beach Boys to Love to the Monkees. Tom O’Neill, the independent journalist and author of the brilliant CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, turned tinfoil hats into crunched-up balls of confusion by proving MK-ULTRA was legit, and that its nefarious tentacles reached from San Francisco to Los Angels at the height of the late 60s. At present, I believe the jury’s still out on what really went down, or not, in Laurel Canyon.

Working from a different vantage point, I delve into the above themes in my forthcoming SciFi novel, TH3 H0U53 0F 94U7, which springs from the real-life “Paul-Is-Dead” phenomenon that swarmed around Paul McCartney and the Beatles like murder hornets in the Fall [pun intended] of 1969, to the point “PID” even made the cover of Life Magazine. And in case you were wondering, Jim makes more than a few stealth appearances in that book.

4/ Alan Graham had a habit of going after everyone he found out was trying to write a book or make a movie about Jim Morrison and doing everything he could to oppose whoever it was, driven by his certainty that no one knew the truth and was just trying to profit off Jim’s name. He seems to have made a mistake in applying this zeal to your own project, which gives the impression of a serious undertaking not confined to rehashing the years of Jim’s fame, as is usually the case. Al modeled himself on the character of Elmer Gantry (as played by Burt Lancaster) all his life. To him grifting was really a high ideal, if you did it in the style of Elmer Gantry or Jim Morrison or Larry Flynt. From his perspective he was the only one doing it correctly, out of true dedication to a sense of adventure, and everyone else was just a grifter, which may give you a sense of his humanity, whether or not it makes sense, but he was a hard-ass, and it must have sucked.

Firstly, I always underscore that there’s a distinction between “the truth” and the REAL truth. And for me that doesn’t speak to tinfoil-hat asininity, but rather healthy skepticism and courteous criticism. There’s a great longtime meme that nails as it informs the toxic presence of Hydra-like online haters/trolls. We live in a Bizzaro age where the corporate puppet masters of oligarchy have hypocritically appropriated free speech, the US flag, patriotism, and even rebellion. There’s an entire generation coming of age that can’t doomscroll past Donald Trump’s latest 24/7 narcissistic drama. And all the while, the grifter-in-chief’s brainwashed PR team spins the real truth in an attempt to paint him, ironically, as a rebel. Like Jim. Or John Lennon. The fucking lunatics not only have taken over the asylum, but they’ve even assumed the mantle of today’s rock stars which, given their conservative suits and ties alone, is ridiculous just on the surface.

But the American Psychos are getting away with it because, outside of American Kompromat [by the way, if you haven’t, please read that book/mind bomb STAT] protecting Trump and his MAGA cult, today’s youthful music scene apparently has no Morrison or Lennon with which to hold their hypocritical asses accountable, to say nothing of their misogyny, racism, authoritarianism, etc. Bikini Kill and Pussy Riot have long-been awesome, but Kathleen Hanna’s my age. Where are the new, young, hungry rock musicians who will write and perform razor-edged protest songs the likes of “Five to One” and “Revolution”? The 2020s = our 1960s. We’re in the “World War 3” mind war Marshall McLuhan predicted over 50 years ago.

But I digress until I want to scream out a requiem for the slow death of empathy, which systematically is taking the human race down with it, along with the planet.

Back to your question. My condolences regarding the loss of your friend. Unfortunately, Alan Graham was no friend to me, but that wasn’t my doing. I had never met him, but Graham reached out to me early in my process. Of the over 1,000 people with whom I communicated during my dozen years of work on Before the End, Graham was the only one who insisted — demanded, even — that I interview him. That was a turn-off from the jump, and when I added that to the handful of Jim’s friends who warned me to avoid Graham at all costs, you can do the math. One of those friends called Alan Graham “insufferable,” and claimed Jim concurred. I can’t prove that, but it certainly spoke to my noxious Graham experience.

I emailed Alan Graham back and made it clear that in terms of interviews with Jim’s family, I only was interested blood relatives. He seemed pissed and, indeed, he later chose to viciously attack me via social media, print media, and podcasts, or so I was told. He even used different Facebook accounts under different names each time I blocked him. My attorney finally said I had every right to sue for defamation, slander, and libel, but I refrained, just as I’d done with certain Doors powers-that-be regarding the aforementioned proven collusion, because I was knee-deep in my documentary work. The irony in their case, as a Jim friend noted, is that my work with Before the End will only help bring new fans and fresh income to the Doors’ corporate machine. That same Morrison friend told me that “instead of attacking you, they should be giving you a hug.” Imagine that. It felt like the worst aspects of high school, if John Hughes had made a film about 1980s teenagers studying to be in the Military-Industrial-Entertainment Complex. [sic]. It was sickening and reflected the worst cliches of cutthroat Hollywood.

5/ It looks like you’ll be getting excellent exposure for your project later this month. How was it working with Amazon Prime, AppleTV, Google Video, etc. distributors like that as an independent filmmaker?

Aligning with Apple TV, Google Play, and YouTube TV via an aggregator entailed fixing a number of initial glitches in the matrix, as it were. I’m grateful things eventually smoothed out, but, unfortunately, it took Amazon Prime Video nearly three weeks to place Before the End on their streaming platform, and in those three weeks, I had to run damage control in terms of responding to irate emails, public comments, and private messages from around the world. What should’ve been one of the happiest days of my life, the January 13, 2025 release date, proved to be a logistical nightmare. It sucks, but I’ve now joined the ranks of indie filmmakers who’ve experienced the obligatory once over twice. But the silver lining is that my frustrating experience dovetails with the fact that DVDs, like vinyl, have been making a comeback. Fans want tangible media, not digital content that can burst like a goddamn cloud looming invisible somewhere above their heads. I’m looking into a limited-edition DVD box set which would function as my director’s cut and also serve as an outlet for the endless miles of footage and myriad interviews I shot.

6/ Fame is blame and the truth is always moving. Reading Al’s book I was struck by the forceful presence of Jim’s mother Clara Morrison, a character little-known by Doors fans because of the non-disclosure policy referenced earlier, and fans’ preference for the mythos. Apart from this, crucial meanings are misconstrued and blatant statements go unheard, all because of public relations. In Jim’s case, there was active obstruction. What forms did it take, and where is the truth to be found?

I think the bulk of available Jim Morrison-media, which now dates back 44 years to the blueprint publication of No One Here Gets Out Alive by Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman, has painted a fairly clear and horrific picture. Incidentally, as I’ve pointed out elsewhere, the late Hopkins and Sugerman were gaslit a million-fold beyond yours truly, even by some of Jim’s “friends,” and I’ve been gaslit a metric shit-ton over the last 12 years via my BTE Facebook page alone. Again, there’s that aforementioned extinction of empathy.

And then there’s the infamous Max Fink transcript of 1986, which later was corroborated, independently and indirectly, by Linda Ashcroft and Salli Stevenson, via Before the End. I’ve seen the actual transcript and, despite detractors, it’s’ the real deal. Max, Jim’s lawyer and father figure, was in the process of writing his autobiography, which he dictated to his wife, Maggie, who transcribed his words via electric typewriter. Many of Fink’s words regarding Jim’s demons, specifically as they related to his apparent childhood sexual abuse, were harrowing.

I go into further granular detail in my forthcoming book, 127 Fascination: Jim Morrison Decoded. Meanwhile, I recently addressed the topic of Jim’s probable childhood molestation in a recent post on my Before the End Facebook page. I’ll encapsulate here by underscoring that Jim’s often-overlooked formative years hold the key, no pun intended, to his later despair. I never met Clara Morrison, but after having studied everything written and produced about her son over the last four decades, and having interviewed her youngest son, Andy, niece, Ellen, and nephew, David, I feel I’ve made a deeply-informed assessment. Jim came of age in Mid-Century America, which many refer to as the last phase of the post-Victorian era, when “children were to be seen and not heard,” and anything that remotely entailed childhood trauma, by and large, promptly was swept under the rug as “nuclear families” danced on eggshells in a desperate attempt to “keep up with the Joneses.” It was, horrifically, a time of unquestioned patriarchy, where one of the top TV programs was Father Knows Best. Boys were taught not to cry or express sadness. Religion. Military. Neither were questioned by the masses who experienced Stockholm Syndrome and likely went to their graves unawares. Meet the new cult. Same as the old cult. Kids in the US were programmed to recite the “Pledge of Allegiance” to start each school day. The inability or unwillingness to directly address psychological problems, especially those of a familial and/or sexual nature, never saw the light of day, certainly in the Morrison household, and that censorship included, in Jerry Hopkins’s still-chilling words: “the raw wounds of Jim’s profound despair.”

All of the above is to say I agree with Salli Stevenson and Linda Aschcroft, in that Jim surely was sexually abused beginning when he was a young boy and periodically throughout his childhood into adolescence. And that goes a long way toward explaining not only his extreme behavior, but also his 1965 break from both of his parents, a strategic move that I believe savagely transcended a microcosm of the Generation Gap.

I’ll end with what Jim’s Florida State University roommate, John McQueen, stated when I interviewed him on-camera in Before the End:

“Oh, he [Jim] hated his father. He hated him in a big way. He felt really limited and held back by his father. His father was military, just the exact opposite… It seemed more than just rebellion, more than teenage rebellion. He [Jim] had it hardwired into him somehow to be just the opposite of that.”