About this time in our relationship, the editor of the Times Sunday Magazine called to find out how I was coming on the article, and to deliver the news that Jim Morison was, as the editor put it, “a puppet of management.” I said that was not possible. The Doors had just split with their management, and the idea that anyone controlled Jim was absurd. Jim danced to music no one else heard or understood. He was so outrageously independent, the other members of The Doors could barely tolerate it. And who could blame them? They had recording dates to keep and when Jim failed to show, it could waste thousands of dollars. They had shows to put on and when Jim arrived drunk, or when he decided in the middle of a song to improvise a bit of drama he'd spontaneously conceived, there was no telling how damaging the next day's headlines might be, as would famously happen in New Haven and Miami. It wasn't that Jim was malicious. It's just that he became absorbed in whatever he was doing at the moment and often forgot about everything else.
        I tried to convince the Times editor that Jim was an exceptionally free spirit, nobody's puppet, definitely his own man. But the editor had been convinced otherwise and believed I'd been misinformed. He took me off the assignment. I've often thought my article would have made a difference in both Jim's life and mine.
        I was later told that “the guys in the tower,” as corporate execs were then called, were not happy with Morrison and The Doors because they'd dumped their management, an unthinkable breach of industry protocol. From the perspective of those who controlled the music business, The Doors represented the inmates running the asylum.

        As I lay on the steel bunk in the Vegas jail watching a big clock in the huge office area outside the cell, and Jim continued to climb up and down the bars and bellow, I telepathed Bev and the others to spring us before midnight, because I was sure those two cops were mad as hell and wanted to bash our brains to mush. I couldn't talk Jim out of his self-destructive zone, but I tried to distract him with questions and idle chatter. He was having none of it and relentlessly continued to taunt the police. I got the impression that he was determined to make it impossible for the LVPD to ever forget the night they arrested Jim Morrison.
        Bev and our friends did spring us a few minutes before midnight, although Jim wanted to stay in the cell until he was permitted to call his lawyer in LA. He felt wrongly arrested. So did I, but he was ready to lay his head under their clubs in protest, and I was not. This was at the height of rancorous emotions for and against the war in Vietnam, when long hair meant you were against the war, and cops were trained to view long haired guys as a communist menace.

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