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Jim Morrison at Midlife

Dave Brock and wild child break on through to the other side of 40

By DAVE WIELENGA

Thursday, November 16, 2006 - 3:00 pm

Brock as Morrison: "I make a conscious effort to separate my personal life from the show." Photo by Jennie Warren

Deep into a cold and dewy autumn night, Dave Brock is telling of the mysterious forces that have intertwined his destiny with the memory of the late, great and pervy rock legend Jim Morrison. It’s a story heavy with the elements of destiny, opportunity, luck, foresight, talent, diligence and a man’s willingness to dress and sing like someone known as the Lizard King. The serpentine tale could give you chills . . . you know, if you were listening to it outside, where it’s brisk enough to see your breath. Or if Dave Brock were a weirdo.

But the thermostat is dialed comfortably at Sachi’s nightclub in Long Beach, and there’s a cushy booth reserved where Brock is relaxing between sets of the Doors songs he and his band Wild Child are performing tonight—the latest of thousands of Jim Morrison celebrations Brock has performed since July 3, 1986, when three sold-out shows at the Whisky launched the unlikely career that has supported him for more than 20 years. “From that night to this one,” says Brock, after all this time still amazed, “I’ve never done anything else to make money.”

Brock is holding a beer in one hand and running the other through wavy dark hair that tumbles to his shoulders, propelling your eyes on a head-to-toe tour of his Morrisonesqueness—puffy black shirt and hip-hugging leather pants set off by a belt chunked with turquoise and a cross hanging from his neck, altogether a sexy package of toughness and tenderness summarized by a pair of brushed-leather boots. It’s a Halloween-quality getup. “I didn’t grow up planning to do this, not in my wildest dreams,” Brock assures you, shrugging in bafflement—then interrupting that sentence for a second to pose for a snapshot with a couple of admirers, “and I never thought I’d still be at it. Some morning I’ll probably wake up and just say, ‘That’s it!’”

That didn’t happen this morning, and about the time you begin to wonder whether to feel sorry for Brock, you don’t. Because at some point as he’s talking, or maybe while he posed for the photo, as that mood of potential pity came upon you, something in the angle of Brock’s head and hair and eyes and lips and clothes—basically, something in just about everything about him—comes together in a way that feels as if you . . . maybe . . . just . . . glimpsed . . . Jim Morrison. Spend more time with Brock, and you’ll find that happens often. If anything, getting to know him makes those moments even more profound. Not that they seem to sway him.

“What often happens is that fans call out to me—‘Hey Jim!’—expecting me to jump into character,” Brock responds, hyper-neutrally. “I just calmly tell them, ‘My name is Dave.’”

Dave Brock is no weirdo, and to discover that is a great relief, as well as a little bit of a letdown. Somebody who’s spent two decades inhabiting the clothes, songs and mannerisms of a musician famously obsessed with sex, mysticism, drugs, murder, madness and death ought to be at least somewhat messed up. Not that you’d want him to die in his bathtub or anything.
 

"He's got it down, down, down." Photo courtesy Dave Brock

July 3, 1986, made 15 years since Jim Morrison’s girlfriend found him dead in the bathtub of his Paris apartment—officially of heart failure aggravated by heavy drinking, although other theories range from a heroin overdose to tuberculosis. If there was any symbolism in Brock’s decision to debut Wild Child on that anniversary—introduced by famed Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek at the Whisky, where the band played some of its earliest Los Angeles shows—he doesn’t mention it. By now he’s seen that this music would still be living and breathing today, even if he hadn’t made a life’s work out of personally inhabiting it 60 or 70 times a year. Wild Child is an effect, not a cause, of the Doors’ enduring legend.

“Every generation has its Doors fans,” says Brock. “Although the music comes from the late 1960s, it’s not preachy, not flower-power. The Doors weren’t part of the anti-war movement. They did something totally different—something that young people continue to relate to.”

The summer before that first Wild Child show, on a date Brock never thought would be important enough to remember, he was among those young people—a 20-year-old senior-to-be at Cal State Long Beach who was majoring in business administration, minoring in drama and reading No One Here Gets Out Alive, the shocking Morrison biography by Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman. He wasn’t alone. The Doors were selling about 750,000 albums a year in the early 1980s, prompting Rolling Stone to put Morrison on the cover with the headline, “He’s hot, he’s sexy, and he’s dead.”

“I wasn’t old enough to know about the Doors when they were making those albums, which was only from 1967 to 1971,” Brock recounts. “But when I discovered their music, I quickly adopted it as my favorite. Being close to LA, after growing up in Marin County, kind of added to the excitement for me.”

While listening to KMET on his car radio one afternoon, Brock was excited to hear a commercial for the legendary Sunset Strip club Gazzari’s—as usual, delivered in the gravelly rant of its legendary owner, Bill Gazzari—announcing the performance of a Jim Morrison Rock Opera.

“At least, that’s what I thought I heard,” Brock recalls. “But when I got to the club, the woman at the door with the clipboard asked me, ‘What agency are you from?’ It turned out to be an audition.”

That became disturbingly obvious when Brock got inside.

“The place was crawling with guys—maybe 30 or 40 of them, some lurking in the corners, others slinking around the room—who were thinking that Jim was inside of them,” Brock says. “They were doing the ‘Jim pose,’ or coming by and giving you the ‘Jim stare’ . . . you know, like they were him! I thought it was kind of creepy. But the lasting impression it made on me was actually a good one—after getting such a close-up look at that, it steered me away from ever being that way.”

After observing the scene for a while, Brock decided to audition, too.

“I still don’t really know why—I’d never sung before anybody, I’d never sung with a band,” he says. “I sang ‘L.A. Woman’ because it was the only Doors song I was sure I knew by heart.

“When I finished, Jim’s sister rushed onto the stage with a photographer to get a picture of us together. The next day, they told me I got the lead—and that they’d been having auditions for six months. Within a week I’d been interviewed by Rolling Stone, and in the next issue I was in the magazine’s Random Notes section, between Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger. There was massive publicity—the front of the Times Calendar section, BAM magazine . . . on and on.”

Brock began to study Morrison intensely, reviewing records and film, training to reproduce everything from his vocal style to physical mannerisms. But the Jim Morrison Rock Opera never made it to the stage.

“The people behind it really weren’t professional entertainment people,” says Brock. “They were just members of Jim’s family who wanted to give a rebuttal to the portrayal of Jim that had taken hold since No One Here Gets Out Alive was published. The book had cast him in a sensationalist light, making him seem like little more than a drug-crazed lunatic, leaving out his tremendous sense of humor and wit—and his generosity, from what I have heard. The Morrison Opera was a labor of love. They just didn’t have the expertise or the financial backing.”

But there was still a lot of interest in Morrison, however, mostly among people who wanted to make a movie. Brock had met a lot of them—from Dennis Hopper to Larry Flynt—during the flurry over the Morrison Opera.

“But then suddenly, poof, it all went away,” he says. “Although I’d gotten a ton of publicity, the fact was I didn’t have any evidence of what I could do—no actual singing or acting credits at all.”

That’s when Brock decided to put on a showcase at the Whisky—to put together a band and perform Doors songs as Jim Morrison—in hopes of giving Hollywood an inkling of his abilities. He sent out invitations to people in the industry, but just in case he also left fliers at ticket outlets.

“We planned on doing one show,” Brock says, “but we ended up turning the house three times—a triple sellout. The experience paralleled my day at the audition. After that night there was a tremendous buzz on the street. I had national clubs calling to book us. The Coach House was one of the first, and we went on to do the Hollywood Palace, the Roxy, back to the Whisky, a steady string of shows, right up to this day.”

As Wild Child returns to the stage at Sachi’s, the bar’s Boho-nouveau accoutrements—heavy, sweeping draperies and quirky red lanterns—seem to fit the opening procession of organ notes that sound straight from a horror-film Mass. It’s the introduction to “Light My Fire,” and clubgoers can’t help but shout in joyful recognition, even though few of them were born when Ray Manzarek first played them in 1967.

Kit Potamkin is playing the organ tonight, expertly, and as the slithery chords fade, Brock walks languidly up to the microphone, folds his hands prayerfully across the stand, half-closes his eyes, leans forward and sings, “You know that it would be untrue, you know that I would be a liar . . .” And with little fanfare, but total attention to detail, he has stepped into a Jim Morrison suit so flawlessly fitting that you don’t see the seams, and don’t really want to waste time looking.

The band moves through two more songs—“20th Century Fox” and “Hello, I Love You”—as the crowd’s rapt attention intensifies. Finally, Brock gives them a little break.

“Everybody having a good time tonight?”

They roar the obvious answer.

“Anything in particular you want to hear?”

Everybody bellows the name of a different song, and all of them are unintelligible, but Brock nods softly, apparently listening, until they have shouted themselves out.

“Naturally,” he says, as if they’ve all requested the same song, as if he knew they would, all along. And when the band swings into “Whisky Bar,” everybody screams as if their wish is coming true.

It’s difficult to know what to make of this scene, especially when it is repeated, in one form or another, every week at Sachi’s.

“Friday night is our tribute and celebration night,” confirms Barbara D’Angelo, who books impersonation acts with names like Lights (Journey), Sticky Fingers (Rolling Stones), The Chain (Fleetwood Mac) and Pennyroyal (Nirvana) and manages one called Led Zepland. “It’s great for business because these bands tend to draw crowds of all ages—people who drink a shitload, eat a shitload and don’t destroy the property. They are there to have fun.”

It’s definitely a good time, but it leaves you wondering what it says about our time—this particular time in music. Wild Child was nearly unique 20 years ago, preceded only by the hit Broadway show Beatlemania and the first wave of Elvis impersonators in the late 1970s, and accompanied by tributes to the Beatles (Rain) and Jimi Hendrix (Randy Hansen). These days, tribute bands play every night of the week.

When did this type of entertainment become so popular?

“When the bands started to get so good,” says D’Angelo. “It’s amazing with some of these bands—you can close your eyes and feel as though the artists were there.”

Okay, so maybe the better question is: Why are so many of our popular acts reenactments? And now that D’Angelo mentions it: Does what these performers do make them artists?

“I think it’s just another aspect of the fashion our society prefers right now,” says D’Angelo, who built her career as a club booker while supporting herself in the fashion and design industries. “Everything is vintage, from Levi’s to Liz Claiborne’s Lucky brand. Go out shopping for hip-huggers with a peace patch. You won’t have to look too long.”

On stage, Brock is wandering through the Doors catalogue, hitting mostly the high points—“Back Door Man,” “Touch Me,” “Soul Kitchen”—but indulging his marvelous band with a few powerfully extended jams along the way, and exploring some obscure songs, too. It’s an impressive performance.

“Listen to him!” exhorts D’Angelo. “He’s got it down, down, down. Not just the voice, not just the physical resemblance, but the movements—even the eye movements! That is why Wild Child has been successful for so long. That is the standard that the best celebration bands have to meet. That is why people love these shows—they want to reach back to what feels good. Music today isn’t what it used to be.”

 

Brock: "I've never done anything else to make money." Photo by Cynthia A. Duvall

Classic rock station 106.9 FM, known to listeners around Palm Springs as the Eagle, is co-sponsoring a free outdoor concert by 1960s pop group the Turtles. One of the station’s DJs, Brad Mercer, is opening the show with his cover band, and he has invited Wild Child keyboardist Kit Potamkin to kick back on a blanket in Palm Desert’s Civic Center Park and enjoy a still-comfortable autumn evening in the desert. The men got to know each other when Wild Child played a smashingly received show at the Morongo Casino. Brock decides to go along for the ride.

“I need a little break, to hear somebody else playing some music,” he confesses, having followed up his show at Sachi’s with a next-night gig at the Coach House. “There’s always a show I could be doing in some city or town—Wild Child has played all over the world—but people who do that don’t last very long. I like to keep things comfortably under control.”

If anybody thinks Brock looks like Jim Morrison this evening, it doesn’t show. Nobody’s asking him to pose for any photos, anyway. He looks a lot like any other guy in his mid-40s who has maintained a modicum of earthy cool. His hair has lost its wave in the desert dryness and lies on the collar of the blue denim jacket he wears over a deep-brown shirt with a subtle floral design. He’s wearing blue jeans, too, and well-worn hush-puppy boots.

“Who I portray when I’m working doesn’t really enter much into my everyday life,” Brock says. “Those clothes, those mannerisms, they are part of the work, part of the stagecraft. They are what people pay to see. I don’t live with those things at all. I never felt I had to do that. In fact, I make a conscious effort to separate my personal life from the show. I have a pretty normal life.”

Brock is married and lives in Huntington Beach, where he helped coach his kids’ Little League baseball and football teams. He won’t say much more than that about his family.

“There are a lot of creepy people out there,” he reasons. “But coaching was a blast, and I was into it. For a while I had to look at my coaching schedule when I was booking show dates to see if I was open. But I never told people what I did for a living. If anybody asked, I said I was in promotions. But once when I was onstage at the Coach House, I looked out in the crowd and there was one of the other coaches. His mouth was open, amazed, and he was shaking his head. We got a good laugh out of it later.”

The Brad Mercer Band begins to play, and the set list hopscotches across a lot of classic rock songs. Brock is an enthusiastic fan, joining in sing-alongs, answering rhetorical is-everybody-all-right-tonight questions from the stage, applauding loudly as the band finishes its encore. Does he ever wish he had that kind of latitude onstage—the freedom to sing any song?

“You know,” Brock responds, then stares in silence for a moment, “that never crossed my mind. I think we’ve got some pretty good ones to pick from.”

And as if on cue, the public-address system fills the intermission with the timeless opening to “Light My Fire.” But if Brock notices, he doesn’t show it. Finally, you’ve got to ask—how does he feel when he hears that song?

“It feels good,” he answers evenly. “But with this music, if you have a radio you hear it every day. It’s not really obscure. It’s probably more popular now than when the original members were playing it.”

Such nostalgia is proving lucrative for a lot of musicians that have followed in Wild Child’s footsteps. Brock gets a little tense when that subject comes up.

“I don’t know why so many musicians have gotten into tribute bands, and I don’t want to be critical,” he says. “But you kind of know some are doing it because their original music didn’t work out, or because ‘Hey, we can make a few hundred bucks,’ or because ‘Hey, I’m learning to play guitar so let’s start a band and do Led Zeppelin.’ I know my story is almost too crazy to believe. Whether that is a valid reason, either, is debatable.”

There’s also the possibility that rock & roll has reached the end of the creative line, that it has been fused with just about everything, that there is nothing left to do.

“You might have something there,” says Brock. “Wild Child has existed through three or four distinct changes in rock music—New Wave, heavy metal, glam, grunge, alternative—before tribute bands took over. But I think there is still good music to be made; the problem is getting exposure. Radio playlists are nationally programmed and nightclubs have found it cheaper to put on tribute bands. That’s probably squeezing out some very talented original artists.”

By now, Dave Brock and Wild Child have been doing Jim Morrison and the Doors a lot longer—and, an all-things-considered case could be made, more successfully—than the originals did. Brock doesn’t even consider such comparisons. “I never even announce my name, whether I’m Dave or Jim, from the stage,” he says. “I leave out banter between songs, too. People aren’t there to hear what I think.”

In fact, Brock points out that Wild Child’s versions of the Doors’ songs are not note-by-note recreations of any single recording or performance. Rather, after listening to countless records and bootlegs of concerts, Brock snipped the best patches of the various ways the Doors changed their songs from one show to the next and made a quilt of them. “From that,” he says, “I have tried to come up with definitive live versions.”

The only hole in that approach is that the material from the Doors’ final album, L.A. Woman—songs like “The Changeling,” “Love Her Madly” and “Riders on the Storm”—had barely been released when Morrison died.

“The Doors with Jim Morrison never played those songs in concert,” says Brock. “These are the only times when we in Wild Child say, ‘This is something they might have done, but never got the chance to do.’”

That’s the main validation for the double-disc CD that Wild Child finally recorded a couple of years ago, says Brock. “Well, that and to document what I’ve been doing with my life for the past 20 years,” he acknowledges. “Little thoughts come into my head from time to time, and I don’t know how long I am going to keep doing this. When it’s over, it’s over, but I’d still like some evidence of it. I don’t want somebody to say, ‘There used to be this great band, Wild Child. You should have heard ’em.’”

But Brock emphasizes that he is not done, yet. He is tending to his website (www.wildchild.mu) and excited about a New Year’s Eve show at the Whisky and even hyping a Feb. 2 gig at the House of Blues in Anaheim.

“See, this is just an opportunity I kind of fell into,” he says. “I did well and adopted the philosophy ‘Don’t fix it if it’s not broken.’ And it’s still notbroken.”