Danny Sugerman

Danny Sugerman was a young reporter/student when he met Jim Morrison.

He started out being Jim's "boy Friday". Helping out at the Doors office, sorting mail, answering letters--he became the Doors' manager--but basically he just lived for the next concert.

Morrison convinced Danny to become a writer. Danny set about keeping records and notes for a book about Jim. (Morrison joked that it was the best way he knew to shut the kid up; just transfer the talk to paper.) Danny did an interview with Jim, which Jim taped and Jim took to the San Diego Rock Weekly. Daniel's first sold paper was this *interview* with Morrison.

Danny's friendship with Jim was ridden with alcohol and confusion. He deeply admired Jim, although he had a huge problem understanding the genius and the despair and the seeming self-destruction that was James Douglas Morrison.

Here's a short story of an experience Danny had with Jim Morrison:

Jim sat in his big purple-velvet reading chair, looking very dignified in his leather pants and white Mexican wedding shirt. He was making notes in one of his notebooks, drinking Coors. I was bored shitless and it showed. So Jim picked up on it and said: "Don't you have any homework to do?"
I lied: "I did it all." I wasn't about to let homework, or anything else, interfere with going out.
"Don't you have any books ? Anything to read, ya know, with pages?" "Not here, Jim."
"And you have nothing left to learn, huh? You know it all?"
I looked down at my feet. Jim was very good at making people feel uneasy.
"Don't you have any notes,?" I shook my head. "Nothing to write either, I suppose." "No, Jim, nothing. I told you, I finished everything."
He groaned; then he got up and lumbered slowly, like he did everything offstage slowly, over to the bookshelf, made up of boxes with their tops ripped off, turned on their sides, and stacked against and on top of each other. Jim must have saved every book he ever read. Kneeling in front of the boxes, he picked up a few books and peered at the titles.
"Hmmmm. let's see what we have here that might possible interest the inquisitive mind of a growing boy." The smirk was becoming broader. He started pulling books out and stacking them beside his knee. After gathering a significant pile, he picked them up and returned to his velvet throne. He set the books down on the little wicker table near his chair and picked up the top copy, turning it over in his hands, inspecting it. "Jack Kerouac." And he threw me On the Road.
"I liked that when I was your age," he said.
I flipped through a few pages. It seemed old to me.
"Baudelaire," he said, sailing two more books my way, "and if you like those, you'll love this," he continued, tossing over Rimbaud's A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat. I became more and more uncomfortable. A copy of Edith Hamilton's Greek mythology volume then landed at my feet, followed rapidly by books by Jack London ( A Sailor on Horseback), John Rechy (Cry of Night, which I am still shocked he gave me to read), and finally Sinclair Lewis' Main Street . I looked at the Hamilton mythology book, indignant. "This is the same shit they gave me in school to read!"
At that Jim's smirk cracked into a smile as his satisfaction increased.
"Exactly right. Now shut yer hole and do your homework like a good boy. And I want you to remember what you've read because when you're finished I am going to test you."

And Danny wrote some of Jim's last words to him:

"Listen to me....you know that fall I took out the window at the Chateau Marmont last week? That one really hurt me....Usually I just kinda bounce...and continue on unscarred. I must be getting old.....brittle or something.....that one really hurt me. Anyway, the way I calculate it, that was the eighth time I've had a serious accident and come out of it relatively unscathed. What I'm saying is that I'm like a cat, you know, the nine-lives trip? That's me, I swear. Falling out that window onto the awning was the eighth time I've been saved. But the point I'm trying to make is, I might not ever come back from Paris. And you gotta be prepared for that, man. And if I don't, then you'll know the cat's run outta lives. At any rate, it sure would make a helluva ending for your book here."

**************

I sincerely hope you will read:

No One Here Gets Out Alive
Warner Books, 1980
and
The Doors: The Illustrated History
William Morrow and Co., 1983
and
Wonderland Avenue
New American Library,1988

all by Danny Sugerman