Hey girls, it’s time to giggle again...
OFF TO GET the booster shot. “How
are you feeling today?”, said medic, prior to inserting the needle. “Fine thanks,” I said mechanically. “Some people take that as an invitation for a two-hour monologue,” she said with a weary smile. I can imagine.
Among the many things we can blame on social media is the impulse to tell the world about your ailments. I’ve promised myself it’s something I’m never going to do as it’s a sure sign of getting old.
Do I want to read ontwitter that some total stranger suffered from a bout of diarrhoea after his booster jab? No thanks. It’s neither interesting nor important.
Though one of the funniest comments I read about the Covid booster was also on blastedtwitter and went as follows: “The nurse said ‘where would you like your jab?’ I said, in the Bahamas please. She packed and we left for the airport. I have nothing but praise for the NHS.”
JOANNA Lumley’s take on the climate crisis is to bring back rationing with a “voucher system” of food, goods and services to help people cut down. Jolly good. So it’s encouraging to see Chanel is rationing sales of its to-die-for quilted handbags in China and South Korea, limiting shoppers to one per year. Tough times call for tough measures. Though this is not to save the planet but to prevent unscrupulous consumers reselling on ebay.
Still, every little helps, as they say.
IT APPEARS the number of people testing positive for Covid is going down, though a couple of days before it was going up, up, up.the vaccination programme which was the wonder of the world a few weeks ago has now stalled. In Europe they’re jabbing away like mad after a slow start, so Britain can stop feeling pleased with itself and put its mask back on.
Meanwhile, Israel – which had got rid of Covid in a trice – is now suffering a fourth wave, or is it a fifth? New Zealand is closed down for ever. France which was the land of anti-vaxxers is now off le naughty step.
If there’s one thing we should have learnt by now it’s that no country has had a perfect Covid response... and the good news will always be followed by a “but”.
IN THE MIDDLE Ages there were often public conveniences on the bridges of Britain’s cities. Holes basically – allowing all the waste to fall into the river below. Better than doing it in the road, as they would have said to each other. The lavatorial arrangements of our ancestors are so entertaining.
Except that as last week’s events have shown, modern Britain’s sewage system is in a state of collapse.water companies are allowed to squirt waste into the waterways as a “last resort” if heavy rainfall threatens to overwhelm the sewers. But that happened 400,000 times last year, which is a lot of last resorts. Meanwhile, hugely profitable private water companies often find it is cheaper to pay fines for breaches than improve their infrastructure.
And you still fancy wild swimming?
A GAME called Wonder Woman Bingo which features “inspirational women” has been withdrawn from sale from Oxfam shops. You might think this is because it sounds like the most boring game ever devised. But you’d be wrong.
Wonder Woman Bingo contains illustrated cards of 48 women of note. Among them are writers JK Rowling and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (above), who have both been criticised for comments on transgender people.
Said Oxfam in a statement spewed out by the twaddle-speak generator: “We took the decision to remove the game from sale following concerns raised by trans and non-binary colleagues who told us that it didn’t live up to our commitment to respect people of all genders.”
Just a reminder that not so long ago Oxfam’s “commitment to respect people of all genders” (“all genders” indeed) necessitated an investigation into abuse of girls by its staff in earthquake-hit Haiti and alleged sexual harassment of young women who worked in Oxfam shops.
Once a beacon of hope, Oxfam has become an embarrassment.
THEY’RE having laughter lessons at Brighton Girls School, given by a “laughter yoga” teacher. It’s reckoned the girls need it because of Covid and climate change making all the young people anxious and miserable. You start off with an imaginary bar of “laughter soap”. Everyone mimes washing themselves with the laughter soap and goes ha ha ha. It doesn’t sound funny but apparently it sets people off.and laughing is of course infectious, like yawning.
When I was at school the problem wasn’t that we weren’t laughing. It was that we couldn’t stop. Especially in church where we spent an inordinate amount of time.
There you were, piously kneeling in an attitude of prayer and desperately repressing a scream of laughter brought on by what your best friend had just produced from her blazer pocket.
Basically it was hard not to laugh in any situation where laughter was decidedly inappropriate, such as trigonometry or that biology lesson when we did
“reproduction”.
The main problem with laughing at school was keeping it in, restraining those awful snorts of mirth and weepy howls. One stopgap remedy was to lift your desk lid and pretend you were searching for an exercise book so that Miss Whoever couldn’t see your shaking shoulders. Was anyone fooled? I doubt it
We laughed till we sobbed and our sides ached. The spluttering, heaving volume of hilarity that an adolescent girl can produce would be hernia-inducing were it not for those firm young abdominals.
When laughter was actually permissible, on a school outing or when someone in authority made a joke, we let rip with abandon.
Coach trips to educational places of interest passed in a blur of giggling, cackling, guffawing and hooting.
When nothing actually funny was happening we set each other off with sadistic pleasure. One girl had perfected the trick of rolling back her upper eyelids (don’t try this at home) and turned round to present this hideous vision to the rest of the class.
It worked every time. Instant hysteria. Hiccups of hilarity.the tears poured down our faces.
What idiots. How annoying giggling girls are. Yet nothing beats laughing with your friends. And the laughter wasn’t cruel or directed at anyone. It was simply the sheer pleasure of being alive, young and care-free.
And there are few things better than making another person laugh.
So I’m sorry that today’s girls need lessons in laughter. It’s become a badge of honour among the young to be in a state of sullen fury about pretty much everything.
But even climate activist Greta Thunberg’s cross little face was transformed when – a couple of weeks ago – she did a karaoke dance number to Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up at some Stockholm climate conference.and she… yes… laughed.wonder to behold.
IT WAS the greatest gig of their career, the night The Doors headlined the Hollywood Bowl in July 1968. But guitarist Robby Krieger reveals that their triumphant hometown performance was almost sabotaged by the band’s iconic singer Jim Morrison overdoing LSD.
And Mick Jagger’s libido didn’t help either.
“We’d gone out to dinner with Mick Jagger before the show, and Jagger came on to Jim’s girlfriend, Pam,” Krieger tells me.
“There was flirting going on and Jim wasn’t happy about it, but he couldn’t say anything because that would have been uncool.
“So Jim did acid just before we went on stage. He probably felt it’d help but he took too much... or too little... and stayed glued to his mic stand for most of the show.”
The sold-out night was being filmed for posterity and the stage was swathed in bright, blinding lights.
“Jim kept saying ‘Turn the lights out!’ over the mic, and we had to tell him, ‘We can’t, we’re filming’.”
He seemed to understand, but, flying higher than William Shatner, a little later he’d ask for them to be turned off again.
“It was a big deal for us. The Hollywood Bowl is the place to play in LA, it’s like Wembley in England, so we decided to film it.
“We’d never filmed anything before, never had a full film crew and 16-track sound mixer.and we’d actually rehearsed, which we never usually did – we hadn’t done that since the early days.”
The amplifiers were another problem. “We had 36 speaker cabinets on stage from our sponsors,” Robby recalls. “It looked fantastic but only a few were functioning because the Hollywood Bowl had a decibel limit. My volume knob was turned down to two instead of 10 although no one has ever complained about the sound.”
The film of the legendary concert in front of 17,500 fans hits cinemas on Thursday.
And despite Krieger’s niggles it’s remarkable. The band manage to rein in Morrison’s ramblings so he stays on the right side of poetic.
“The practice paid off and Jim’s voice sounds strong,” says Robby.
Incredibly, just two and a half years before, the Doors were playing LA’S tiny London Fog club to just 50 people. Their rise, was “meteoric” Krieger agrees. “A lot quicker than most, and sometimes that’s not good.we got a little full of ourselves, we thought we were as good as the Stones or the Animals.”
They were though. Encouraged by Morrison, Krieger started writing original songs. His first was 1967’s Light My Fire, which topped the US charts and was Top Ten in Britain. “It’s been downhill ever since,” Robby jokes.
When they played the Bowl, Hello I Love You was also racing to Number One. Other memorable hits included Riders On The Storm, Touch Me and People Are Strange.
The Doors – Jim, Robby, keyboardist Ray Manzarek and drummer John Densmore – combined musical ability with Morrison’s poetic lyrics.
The rock’n’roll Rimbaud was hailed as “the first major American male sex symbol since James Dean died”, and was described variously as a “leather tiger”, a “shamanserpent king” and “the king of orgasmic rock”.
Female fans would sometimes surround their car and reach through the windows “to try and grab Jim’s crotch”.
LSD was part of the image. “Sometimes it made him better on stage,” says Krieger. “It depended on how much he took and if it was the good stuff. When he was doing acid and marijuana, he was great. It was when he was drinking, he could turn into an asshole sometimes.
“I got the real good stuff, Sandoz. They were a Swizz company who developed it as an experimental drug taken in the army. Other acid wasn’t as good.
“I moved on to transcendental meditation. I’d try it today if I had Sandoz, though. But it wasn’t good for me on stage – you’d forget stuff and get tripped out.” He adds with a laugh: “If you were the Grateful Dead that didn’t matter so much.”
ONCE, Krieger got a call in the early hours from a tripping Morrison saying, “Robby, this is God speaking and we’re going to throw you out of the universe.” He hung up. Inevitably the band attracted “crazies”.
After Jim died of heart failure in a Paris apartment in 1971, aged just 27, the band tried to carry on with
out him. “We were in the rehearsal studio and we would hear a voice through the door singing Doors songs,” Robby recalls.
“It was a guy who, in order to sound like Jim, stuck a lit cigar down his throat.
“He wasn’t very good, but he thought he was. Let’s say he was a little off.we used to call him Cigar Pain. One time I was driving down the street in Hollywood and a guy recognised me and said, ‘You and I have to take acid together and die’. I replied, ‘I really don’t have time this week’.”
Robby’s new memoir, Set The Night On Fire, aims to debunk a few Doors myths – particularly ones stemming from Oliver Stone’s 1991 film The Doors.
The fictions include the band taking peyote together in Death Valley, Jim strolling around reciting his poetry out loud and climbing on to a car and screaming about being “the lizard king” to a crowd outside the Whisky-ago-go inwest Hollywood.
Robby says the band never played a night-time gig with fans dancing naked around a bonfire, and there is no evidence that Morrison ever flashed on stage – “a rumour” – or that he locked Pam in a closet and set it on fire.
ROBBY writes: “Oliver didn’t tell the story of The Doors. He told his own original story based on his personal interpretation of what The Doors were… his job wasn’t to document but to entertain.”
Son of an engineer, Robby grew up in Los Angeles and was sent to a boarding school called Menlo. He didn’t want to go but he was drifting into petty vandalism and had been busted twice for cannabis possession. He took LSD at 17 and met the Maharishi before the Beatles did, along with future fellow band members John and Ray.
His first instrument was the trumpet, but he took up the guitar at 13 – famously playing flamenco style in The Doors.
Robby was the youngest band member and looked on Jim as an older brother.
Morrison’s death shocked them all: “We expected him to come back eventually, so we kept rehearsing and writing songs.”
The surviving Doors moved to England and auditioned new singers. “Ray’s wife wanted to go home and the three of us weren’t getting on – John and I wanted to do hard rock, but Ray wanted to do jazzier stuff and in the end he left.” Their posthumous “poetry and jazz” album, 1978’s American Prayer, cemented their legend.
Krieger formed his own Robby Krieger band, but in the Noughties he and Ray toured as The Doors of the 21st Century with The Cult’s Ian Astbury on vocals and Stewart Copeland replacing John on drums.
“The shows were great,” he says. “But Ian wanted to get back to The Cult.”
Robby continues to make new music, releasing a solo album called The Ritual Begins At Sundown last year.
And he says he is actually really pleased with the Hollywood Bowl film.
“The magic that has been done to enhance the picture and sound quality will make everyone feel as though they have a front row seat,” he enthuses.
His only regret is that they didn’t shoot more shows.
“We had a riot in Chicago two months before,” he says wistfully.
“And I sometimes wish we’d filmed that too…”
The Doors: Live At The Bowl ’68 Special Edition hits cinema screens for one-night-only on Thursday November 4. Tickets from thedoorsfilm. com
Set The Night On Fire by Robby Krieger (White Rabbit, £20) out now.