Interview Q&A Jerry Hopkins, Dean of the Rock Bio
Pop-quiz: name the definitive biography on Jim
Morrison and the Doors? There really isn't any argument, is there? No One
Here Gets Out Alive by Jerry Hopkins. It's the only choice, and the author
is alive and well, and living here in Bangkok. Where should we begin? Well, how
about his own biography? Jerry Hopkins has published more than 1,000 magazine
articles and 27 books, including three international best sellers.
Additional books about popular music include a history (The Rock Story), and
books about music festivals (An American Celebration) as well as Groupies and
Other Girls). His other books cover a wide range of subjects including humour,
journalism, the environment, Hawaiian history, behavior modification and strange
foods.
For over three decades, Hopkins served as a correspondent and contributing
editor for Rolling Stone magazine in Europe, Africa, the US, and Asia, and
published articles in the New York Times, Far Eastern Economic Review, Islands,
and numerous in-flight magazines. He has also worked as a feature writer,
reporter, and music critic for daily and weekly newspapers, including the
Village Voice and Los Angeles Times. And he’s worked as a radio news editor; and
as a writer-producer in television for Mike Wallace, Steve Allen, and Mort Sahl,
among others. For the past 10 years, he’s been based in Bangkok.
Recently Scott Murray had a chance to sit down and rap with Hopkins about his
life and work.
Why did you decide to stay in Thailand?
"I decided to stay for a number of reasons, not the least of which is I’m
married and have a Thai family in Surin. Much to my delight I discovered that
Thailand was able to continue to surprise me on a weekly basis. This is part of
the country’s charm and I think that’s what holds a lot of expats’ attention and
loyalty to the country. There’s no place I’d rather be.”
“I met a woman named Lamyai about seven years ago, and we became an item about
three years ago. We built a house on her family’s rice farm outside of Surin, in
what is predominately an ethnic Khmer neighborhood. We were married earlier this
year, twice actually in four languages. I’ve never been so married in my life.
The first ceremony was held in our home and was conducted by a Khmer ajarn (the
Thai word for teacher, which has a more priest-like connotation in Khmer). We
also had a couple of Buddhist monks come and chant in ancient Pali in the
afternoon.
“Then three days later, with 13 of Lamyai’s family members traveling to Bangkok
by train, we did it again this time at Father Joe Maier’s Mercy Centre with
Father Joe conducting the service in English and Thai. Afterwards, we had a
reception, attended by 40 of Father Joe’s street kids. So we asked all of our
guests to bring stuffed animals, which they could then present to the kids.
“Our arrangement sees me spend a week, or 10 days out of each month in Surin
with Lamyai doing the same in Bangkok so that gives us two to three weeks of
every month together and gives her most of her time in Surin with her family. I
sit on the balcony of our house there, but Lamyai doesn’t have ‘balcony’ in her
English vocabulary yet so she calls it the place ‘where papa sit down, drink
beer’ and I look out on a rice paddy that’s about half the size of France. It’s
flat as a billiard table and nothing much but rice.”
You are known for writing so many great books about music, how did you
get into Strange Foods?
“I still write about music but I tend to write about gamalan and mor lam sing
and other local music. And what the Strange Foods book represents isn’t really
that much of a deviation. I have always been interested in the road less
traveled; I have always marched to a different drummer. Strange Foods was just
one of those things I was always interested in but never thought of in terms of
it being material for a book.
“Over the years, even going back to my teenage years, when I encountered unusual
foods I would want to try them. In 1972, when my son was born in London I took
the placenta home from the delivery room, cooked it, made it into a pate, and
served it to my guests the next day, who came to meet my new child. I recently
got a letter from the Ripley’s Believe It or Not TV show in New York and they
asked me if they came to Thailand would I recreate that for them. I told them
when I did that back in 1972, it was a hell of a long time before anyone had
ever heard of AIDS, and I was using my then wife’s placenta. Can you possibly
imagine my calling up a local hospital in Bangkok and asking for a placenta? I
think it would be the first recipe that included an HIV test.
“The idea for Strange Foods came about from two small book proposals; one was to
be called The Complete Crocodile Cookbook, which would then be reprinted with
one word changed as The Great Alligator Cookbook; the other would be called The
Great Shark Cookbook. I visualized this as a large format paperback that would
be sold where crocodile, alligator and shark show up on the menu on a regular
basis. I submitted it to a publisher in Singapore who said he wasn’t interested
but said he would be if I expanded the scope of the book to include even more
unusual foods.
“Then I heard from a friend that Michael Freeman has a collection of photographs
of strange food. It turned out that we had both spent significant parts of our
lives chasing the same subject. So with the publisher’s approval, we became
collaborators but the project was delayed for a year as Michael continued to
take pictures while piggybacking assignments. So if he went to Japan, I would
say while you’re there, go to Shimonoseki because I’m going to do a chapter on
fugu [a poisonous kind of pufferfish] and whale and both of those fishery
industries are in that city. Then when he went to Paris, I told him to put aside
a Saturday to photograph the markets and restaurants that sell horse. So over a
period of a year or so, the text was cut considerably to make room for Michael’s
great photographs. It’s strange foods from the entire world and throughout
history. The chapter that starts out with my cooking a placenta goes back and
really is in large part a history of cannibalism.”
“Oliver Stone bought the rights to my book, and he bought the rights to my
research material, which were essentially the transcripts to 200 interviews I
had done. That was the extent of my involvement in the film. I have mixed
feelings about the movie. Mainly that it was so one-sided. Jim was a drunken
fool, but that wasn't all he was. I knew Morrison. I knew him to be a man who
had a sense of humour about himself. He was a man of staggering intelligence. He
read enormously, and he remembered everything he read. The man put things
together in an interesting manner, and he was a great conversationalist. Very
little of that comes out in the movie. Forty percent of the movie is sheer
fiction. Stone merged characters. He ignored chronology. It was Stone writing
his version of the sixties. Stone has done this before. Born on the Fourth of
July also had some major pieces of fiction in it; JFK, as brilliant as it was,
had me almost laughing.
“Hollywood never has let the facts get in the way of a good story. People credit
Rolling Stone with inventing gonzo journalism but Hollywood was way ahead of
them. The way Hollywood portrays the American West wasn't the way it was. Oliver
was just being Oliver. He is a terrific filmmaker. What brothers me most about
Stone is that most young people today use movies as their major information
sources and he knows it.
"If they get misinformation from film they won’t even bother to crosscheck with
a book. Oliver's dishonesty, and he is not alone in this, is a disservice to
young people whose ideas are formed by what they see in the movies.”
Is there any truth to the rumour you introduced Lenny Bruce to Groucho
Marx?
“From 1962-64 I worked for Steve Allen as his ‘Vice-President of Left
Fielders’ – his kook booker. We did five shows a week, and I had to come up with
someone off the wall for every show. Then one of the nights we weren’t filming I
arranged for stand-up comedian and satirist Paul Krassner to host a show at our
theater, and most of the big-time comedians in Hollywood were invited. Then near
the end of the evening I just happened to be standing close to two people who
had never met each other and I said, ‘Lenny meet Groucho, Groucho meet Lenny.’”
I also heard that you dated a movie star for a couple of years?
“Yeah, well, sort of. That was in 1965 when I was booking acts on a
syndicated rock n’ roll show for ABC TV in the States, and we had three go-go
dancers on platforms above the stage, and all the top groups lip-synched to
their hits. I went out with one of them. She called herself ‘Terry Garr, Movie
Star’ although at the time all she had going was a Dial soap commercial. Later
she shortened her name to Teri and became famous for her role in Young
Frankenstein, and was nominated for an Oscar for her role as Dustin Hoffman’s
girlfriend in Tootsie.”
What about the Yoko Ono book?
“I didn’t want to do the Yoko book, I wanted to do a book about Cher, but my
publisher didn’t and he suggested Yoko. I had been writing about Yoko’s artwork
years before she met John Lennon. And though she remained a minor figure in art,
I thought she was underrated and I also believed she had nothing to do with the
Beatles breakup. I also thought she deserved a biography, if for no other
reason, than she was John Lennon’s wife. So I wrote the book and I blew it.
There were two important themes in her life that I gave short shrift. One was
how an ex-Japanese national who had grown up in Japan, had become so westernized
that she was no longer accepted in Japan. She was loathed for going blue-eyed.
At the same time, she was loathed in the West for breaking up the Beatles, and
for being Asian. Being between a rock and a hard place had a lot to do with her
story, and I didn’t cover it adequately.”
And weren’t you supposed to do a book on Raquel Welch?
“It was actually her manager’s idea. She was the great sex symbol of the 60s
and he had read my Elvis biography and wanted me to do the same thing for her,
but with her cooperation. So I hung out with her for a year, even went with her
to Rio when she was doing a round-the-world nightclub tour. She’d just broken up
with her longtime boyfriend and my wife had just walked out on me, so when we
went dancing in Rio’s nightclubs, the newspapers called me the ‘mysterioso
barbudo Americano,’ [the mysterious bearded American]. But when I finished a
draft of the book, she hated it and I never heard from her again, only from her
lawyer, who said if I even so much as told a story about Raquel at a cocktail
party he’d come after me with hedge clippers.”
“My then wife was taking a yoga class in LA when a young black guy made a
move on her and said he was with Jimi Hendrix and would she would like to meet
him. She said, ‘Yeah, and so would my husband who is a writer for Rolling
Stone.’ The guy had the class to introduce us both. So that afternoon, we went
to Jimi’s hotel, the Beverly Rodeo, on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, and he was
gracious enough to give me an interview. Jimi was inarticulate except when it
came to his guitar, and I don’t know why anyone ever expected him to speak as
well as he could play. He had decided to break up the Jimi Hendrix Experience
and start what he called Skychurch Music, so I got that story for Rolling Stone.
There was another guy in the room who had just gotten out of the army, and he
was going to be the bass player in Jimi’s new band. So at the end of the
interview Jimi said, ‘My friend and I are just going to jam for awhile, if you
want to hang out that would be alright.’ So we sat there and listened to Jimi
Hendrix jam for an hour.”
How did you end up having the first head shop in L.A.?
“I was working in TV in L.A. and became quite disenchanted and I had a buddy
who was just as unhappy as I was. So in 1966, a year before the summer of love,
we quit our jobs and opened up a store. We decided to call it ‘Headquarters’ and
we opened up shop in Westwood, which was close to UCLA and not far from
University High School, where we figured most of our clientele would come from
(it was the third in the country, with others in New York and San Francisco).
Newsweek got on to us, and came to interview us and I’m not sure how happy I am
about this but I feel I have to take some credit or blame for what happened
next. I told their reporter, and he dutifully told the world, that if we
continued to take in money at the rate we had in the first six months of our
business we would gross US$50,000 a year. As soon as the issue came out, all
across America, I could hear, ‘Hey man, let’s open a head shop.’ Then just like
mushrooms they sprang up everywhere across the country.”
How did the idea for the book No One Here Gets
Out Alive come about?
“Jim was not a friend of mine, but he was more than an acquaintance. Our
paths crossed, we drank in some of the same bars. I was the Rolling Stone
correspondent in LA, and I interviewed him a number of times. He invited me to
poetry readings and screenings. After the infamous Miami concert, where he
allegedly dropped his pants, and I am convinced he did not, he refused to give
interviews for a while, even with Rolling Stone who he was upset with for
portraying him as a ‘drunken clown.’ Eventually I got the interview though, and
I wanted to do it because I knew that Jim had a lot more to him than the media
was painting. During the course of the interview we discovered that we had the
same literary agent.
“The idea of doing a biography had appealed to me. I considered doing Frank
Zappa. I had known him pre-rock n' roll, and I thought he was intelligent and
articulate. Jim said he would like to read a book about Elvis, so I wrote a book
about Elvis back in 1969. People said, "What are you writing about Elvis for?"
He hadn't even gone back to Vegas yet. He was still making all those dumb
movies. The book was sold to the same publisher that Jim had (Simon & Schuster),
the same editor as well. The book was dedicated to Jim; unfortunately he died
before it was published. Two days after Morrison's death our mutual editor at
Simon & Schuster, Jonathan Dolger, called me and asked me to do a book on Jim. I
told him I had already decided to do one, and when he asked why I said it was
because I was more affected by Jim's death than our relationship warranted, and
I wanted to find out why.
“Jim Morrison was an interesting guy who wasn't given the respect that he and
his group deserved. Today most of my fan mail comes from teenagers. I think it
is one of those rites of passage books. The continuing new readership is a
youthful one, just as the majority of the recordings are sold to young people
who are just discovering Jim Morrison.
“The music holds up, and at the end of it all, it's the music people remember. A
lot of the hits of the 60s are nostalgia now, and that's all. The Doors' music,
however, is just as easy to listen to today as it was 20 years ago. The themes
that Morrison wrote about, however dark some of them may have been, were
universal themes: rebellion against one’s parents, the search for identity,
taking risks. Morrison appeals to people looking for answers. Not that he ever
thought he had any. His whole point was to, ‘By God, ask questions, take risks.’
Morrison cut a figure that many have emulated since. An interesting point about
The Doors is that even though Jim Morrison or Robbie Krieger may have written
the songs, the songs always said written by The Doors, and the royalties were
split four ways even though one individual may have written the song.”
What are your favorite Doors' albums?
“My favorite Doors albums are The Doors and Strange Days, which came out
in 1967. I also liked the last LP, LA Woman, which came out in 1971, and
Morrison Hotel from 1970 if for no other reason than the song ‘Roadhouse Blues.’
‘I woke up this morning and I got myself a beer, the future is uncertain, and
the end is always near.’ Words to live by.”
How has journalism changed since you first started in the business?
“Checkbook journalism is anathema. When people are being paid for a story,
they make a hell of a lot more of it than they should because they want to
please the guy who has given them a lot of money. For example, in the OJ Simpson
case, the guy who sold him a knife was paid US$10,000 by a supermarket tabloid
for his story. What story? There is no story there.
"The sensationalist approach to the news bothers me. The trivialisation of major
issues bothers me. Many developments are to be applauded though, as well.
Whatever flaws CNN may have, it is a brilliant accomplishment. It has created a
world community… something that even the BBC World Service couldn't pull off.”
Which writers have influenced you the most?
“The writer who influenced me the most was a World War II correspondent
named Ernie Pyle, who was shot by a sniper on Ie Jima in the final days of the
war. He is buried at a cemetery called the Punchbowl in Oahu. He wrote about the
little guys, the foot soldiers, and he wrote about them with humanity and
dignity. I was reading him when I was nine years old and I decided then that I
wanted to do what he did: travel around the world, meet interesting people and
write about them. I never changed my mind. Authors I admire include Ernest
Hemingway for his sense of adventure, and Thomas Wolfe for his lust for life.”
“Rock n' roll has been very good to me. Both of my kids went to college
thanks to Jim Morrison and the book continues to provide income, but it is not
enough to cover everything. I’ve led a life that was blessed and I have taken
advantage of every opportunity that was offered, which is the better part of
success very often. But there’s a great deal to be said about being in the right
place at the right time.”
Photos courtesy of Jerry Hopkins
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