Mighty Mercury

Over the last fifty years,  Alan Graham, who now lives in the San Diego area, had first hand experience of a number of late twentieth century pop-cultural hot-points. He witnessed the Beatles' hometown heyday via their lunchtime sessions at the Cavern Club on Matthew Street in his home town of   Liverpool, England; became brother in law to American poet and rock and roll superstar Jim Morrison of the Doors; served as assistant and spokesman for Hustler publisher Larry Flynt under the name "Captain Pink"; was falsely accused of making a bomb threat

against former U.S. president Ronald Reagan--and that's just a brisk overview.  Whatever the reason, Graham is an unerring lifelong bystander to noteworthy people and events in the latter portion of the 20^th century, as if predestined to that coordinate somehow.

After moving to London, where his brother John was managing the rock group Johnny Kidd and the Pirates (of "Shakin' All Over" and "I'll Never Get Over You" fame), Graham met his American girlfriend, Anne Morrison, daughter of a career Navy man, Admiral George Stephen Morrison. Graham married Anne in 1967, which was being touted in newspapers as the "summer of love," and almost right away, her brother Jim became incredibly famous as the vocalist and frontman for a rock group based in Los Angeles called the Doors. Jim was touted in the press as an "erotic politician," well known for his provocative lyrics about breaking through and getting higher.

Contrary to this volatile, dangerous image, the Jim Morrison Alan Graham knew and loved was his friend, his wife's brother, and the son of her family. All his recollections of Jim are colored by this affinity, even those concerning Jim's penchant to upset his own apple cart. "On Thanksgiving morning, 1969, Anne, [Jim's brother] Andy, and I drove from Coronado to Jim's house in the Hollywood hills. We brought a big cooked turkey and spent the day visiting with Jim and his ‘girlfriend,' Pam Courson, until a simmering feud from the night before suddenly erupted into a knockdown, drag out fight. In the movie, The Doors, Oliver Stone cut and pasted that scene from my manuscript with another piece of mine entitled The Japanese Restaurant."

When Jim died young of apparent heart failure in 1971, after the conclusion of his trial for indecent exposure while onstage in Miami and the completion of what turned out to be the last Doors album, L.A. Woman, rumors appeared in the mainstream press that he had faked his death, something he'd reportedly spoken of wanting to do in the past. Even Graham agrees this is possible.  "In this day and age, I don't know . . . The only person who knows is Pamela Courson (who died of a drug overdose in 1974). Don't forget the body was put on ice overnight. The morgues were closed. It was left on Saturday and Sunday night till Monday morning and his body was really blue. She never saw it. Nobody saw that body till it came from the morgue in the coffin, ready for the funeral. Pamela wouldn't look at it. Nobody looked at it. The likelihood that it could've been somebody else is extremely high and Morrison could've seen it and went into hiding and said this is my chance to get away from my life and the people around me."

But Graham has no patience for things like the "Jim Morrison's baby scam" being perpetrated by Lorraine Widen and her son, soundalike Cliff Morrison who refuses to consent to a DNA test to prove Jim's paternity (supposedly because he'd rather "let people decide for themselves") or the ongoing exposure of Cliff's fraudulence conducted by Cliff's former manager Floyd Bocox-but without any feeling of malice or offense, both of these derivative outgrowths are simply beneath his notice. "You know I heard Cliff's actually come to believe the whole fantasy now. To him it's not even a scam anymore, but for her, it's the worst possible form of child abuse." Graham hosts a podcast called "House of Detention" on the Ghost Radio Network, and his Ghost Radio International Paranormal Investigation Team (GRIPIT) regularly tracks down and investigates opportunists claiming to be the real Jim Morrison or his son or his daughter.

Every identifiable aspect of a rock star like Jim Morrison is parceled out and marketed as a signature trait for the fans' efficient consumption, and after Jim dies or disappears, anything can happen to the image he left in the world. Cliff and Lorraine are by no means alone in their attempt to assert a connection with Morrison after formal declaration of his death. Oregon rodeo photographer Gerald Pitts claims to be Jim Morrison's agent. He even claims to have convinced former Doors Robby Krieger and John Densmore that his "client" (a rancher named Jim Loyer, owner of the Jim Morrison Sanctuary Ranch, who has long since denied any connection with Gerald Pitts) is Morrison, and to have almost arranged a Doors reunion, only to have been prevented by  Ray Manzarek, who "want(s) to see Jim personally and Jim will not tolerate it . . . when that game started, I knew there was no use for him to come over here because if he came over to meet with me, he'd want to go up and talk to Jim on his own and I'd be left out of the project." (In other words, demand proof and the deal's off). Even more fantastic, British author David Icke, who believes the world to be controlled by extraterrestrial reptilians disguised as kings and queens and presidents, has proposed Jim was an experimental individual in the service of these reptile overlords, since Morrison wrote a few songs about lizards.

Jim's immediate relatives, the likeliest authorities on who he really was, have remained aloof from biographical representations of their deceased loved one because they feel themselves bound by a military code of privacy and decency, and as a result have generally been excluded from the manipulation of Jim's image since his departure from the public eye. As evidenced by the role he played as consultant in the making of Oliver Stone's film, The Doors, Alan Graham has been steadfast in his efforts as the "odd man in" to redeem Jim Morrison's image. In addition to co-producing with Anne a four-phase documentary project about Jim called Poeté Somnolant "Sleeping Poet" (Sylvester Stallone and John Travolta both vied unsuccessfully for the starring role), Graham has written a book called I Remember Jim Morrison intended to include the humanizing element noticeably absent from bestselling portrayals of Jim like the one in Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman's No One Here Gets Out Alive, and counteract all the attempts to sensationalize the dark side of Jim's image as rock god dead by misadventure.

During Hustler publisher Larry Flynt's fifteen minutes of infamy in the 1980s Graham served as Flynt's assistant, his  job to promote Fynt's antagonism to the status quo however he could, armed with a stachel of cash to hand out or fund pranks as Captain Pink in the gray town of Springfield, MO. Flynt said he felt his stay at the U.S. Medical Centre For Prisoners for contempt of court and desecration of the U.S. flag was "cruel and unusual punishment," since he was not receiving adequate medication and food after refusing prison food upon reportedly surviving a poisoning attempt, and Graham told the press, "Someone in the kitchen informed him that [the food] was tainted, and he refused it." Next Flynt stated,  in an impromptu jailhouse phone interview with CNN, "I have confessed to putting a contract out on President Reagan's life--I want to kill him," adding, "I have threatened to kill both federal judges who have sentenced me . . . I've threatened to kill at least a half dozen employees at the prison in Butler. I just got 152 days in the hole for hitting a priest between the eyes with an orange."

Flynt's brother, Jimmy, filed a conservatorship petition in Los Angeles Superior Court, claiming the publisher suffered from a mental illness "consistent only with an irrational drive to destroy or lose all his holdings," and that he had "drained the company of millions of dollars in cash for bizarre and imprudent personal expenditures." Somewhere in all this uproar, two former security guards of Flynt's told federal authorities they believed Graham was "behind the bombings," presumably referring to the bomb threat against Reagan, which he successfully dismissed as a fantastic story, though it provided a convenient hook for Floyd Bocox's statement in an interview years later that Graham was "known for making bomb threats."

Alan and Anne were divorced in 1986, but his time as James Douglas Morrison's brother in law has obviously left an indelible impression on Graham despite the years he spent as aide and mouthpiece for the erratic, colorful Flynt after Jim's passing. Graham has always been bothered by the grossly inadequate portrait of Jim Morrison that has been growing in the public eye all these years. Says his sister, Norma, "After reading each and every book, I would call Alan and ask him, 'Is this true or fiction?' His reply would always be the same. 'Norma it is lies, all lies. Nobody outside the Morrison family ever knew the real Jim. One day when the time is right, I am going to write my own book and tell it like it really was, who the real Jim Morrison was'. Like a mantra he would repeat, 'One day when the time is right I will tell it like it really was'.''

With the Admiral's death in 2008, the time was finally right. Graham's I Remember Jim Morrison stands forth as the only retrospective on Jim Morrison with a tangible core of emotional obligation to its subject. Where other biographers are moved to turn Jim's story into a train wreck and charge admission, Alan Graham's inspiration is to commemorate the emotional effect of their time together. "More than forty books have been published about him, and each one reveals nothing more than the last. The reason for this is because no one in the Morrison clan has ever revealed the true details (nor will they ever) about Jim's life inside the family. My personal account of these events provides rare glimpses and intimate insights into the other side of Jim Morrison and the people who loved him."

 

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