Rumination and Ruination

By JAY COCKS

Leaves of gas from Harrison and Morrison

Acting against the best counsel of Chuck Berry -- "Want me to marry, get a home/ Settle down, write a book/ Too much monkey business!" -- publishers have been doing a brisk trade in books about rock. Two recent ones -- George Harrison's I Me Mine and No One Here Gets Out Alive, a fisheyed life of the late Jim Morrison -- have only rock in common. The Morrison opus, which has remained high on the trade paperback bestseller list for three months, is a sort of titillation special that reads like the hi-fi equivalent of the similarly successful memoirs of Shelley Winters. The Harrison book, on the other hand, is so baroque that it seems like the whimsical indulgence of a laird with enough money to buy into NATO.

Jerry Hopkins and Daniel Sugerman have a fertile subject in Morrison, a reckless and unreconstructed mythomaniac who made the Doors into a band better known for their own notoriety than their reheated acid rock. Before he bloated his body with booze and fried his brain with various combinations of pharmacological excess, Morrison, the son of a rear admiral, was as stunning as a model. He was also the self-appointed model for the self-destructive rock idol.

The authors drag Morrison along from his military-brat childhood to his frenetic rambling around the Los Angeles music scene of the '60s, where he knew how to hold center stage, even lying on his back. Hopkins and Sugerman relate how Morrison, spread out on the studio floor, prepared for the first Doors recording session by chanting a primal litany of incest and patricide. The authors provide little evidence that Morrison grew much in the five years following this session, not emotionally, certainly not aesthetically.

He remained a hip poetaster, a psychedelic pushcart salesman hawking Oedipal nightmares like Good Humors. No One Here Gets Out Alive portrays Morrison not as he was but in the image that he built. He died in Paris in 1971 at the age of 27, still playing Rimbaud the way a young actor cannot shake off a role even after he has lost the part.

The appeal of Morrison and the Doors is rooted both in a high school home-room taste for excessive behavior (one episode details how Morrison and a mistress frolicked in her blood, extracted with a dull razor and caught in a champagne glass) and in the insatiable adolescent craving for getting the older folks steamed. There is no steam in George Harrison's / Me Mine; most of the excess is in the price. Available by subscription, the book is hand-bound in fine leather, its pages gilded like some special presentation edition of the King James. It sells for -L-148 ($355), a sum that could bankrupt most remaining Beatles fan clubs.

The book, hefty enough to double as a good barbell for beginning weight lifters, is a collection of Harrison's photos, reflections and lyrics. Many of these are printed not only in elegant type but also in their original scribbled state, with inks and stationery letterheads reproduced with the craft and fidelity usually reserved for a Monet. Though he wrote Here Comes the Sun and Something, Harrison was not the foremost of the Fab Four as everyone -- perhaps including George himself -- would agree. "The small change of a short lifetime" is the way he describes the contents in a foreword. "I have suffered for this book; now it's your turn."

This larkish, disarming tone remains at odds with the object itself. Harrison reveals that he got the notion of collecting his jottings and memories when "two drunkards cornered me in a hotel room near Heathrow Airport" and pressed on him a copy of Captain William Bligh's Log of H. M.S. Bounty, put out by a firm in Surrey called Genesis. This, and a televi sion program on the making of fine books, gave George the idea of "having these trivial bits of paper dignified in this way."

Too trivial, some will surely say; and too dignified as well. Only 2,000 copies of I Me Mine exist and over half are sold. There will not be a second run. The question of a paperback has not come up.

Meanwhile, from St. Louis, comes word that the singer himself is no longer heeding his song. Disregarding his own cautions, and no man to buck a trend, Chuck Berry is writing a book. An autobiography. What happened to monkey business?

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