Book Review : A Smart Book on the Rock Life Featuring Danny and the Doors

Wonderland Avenue: Tales of Glamour and Excess by Danny Sugarman (William Morrow: $19.95; 409 pages)

“Wonderland Avenue” is a book of reminiscences by a young man who spent his extreme youth--from the age of 12 to 21--in a perfect ‘60s dream nightmare. By a series of crazy coincidences and accidents, Danny Sugarman landed right in the middle of the business and social life of Jim Morrison and his marvelously innovative rock group, the Doors. When Sugarman was 12, the blurb says, he was already answering fan mail for the group. Even stranger, sadder and more emblematic of the times, when he was 15, Sugarman was living alone in a room at the Tropicana motel. (And nobody in his family got it together enough to bring him home.)

This book is terrifically solid and fine. It will no doubt be marketed, satisfactorily enough, to surviving Doors fans (I found three old albums and played them as I read), but its real market lies elsewhere. Drug abuse centers ought to buy up cartons of “Wonderland Avenue.” It should be read by care-givers, irate parents, alienated siblings and drug users themselves.

I don’t think I’ve ever read a more eloquent explanation of the glamour, the pull, the loveliness, the insistence, of the drug life--and then a more convincing argument for stopping, on the grounds that, when the chips are down, the only thing more enchanting than drug-wisdom is life, life itself. This is such a smart book.

Sugarman, except for his eloquent exhortations at the end, keeps to his own story. He was one of three children. His father split. His mother, in one of those acts as quintessential as a fairy tale, married an unpleasant man with children of his own. She didn’t want to be left alone in her old age, she explained to Danny, and by this account, sold out her own kids for her own long-term security. Danny’s siblings go to live with his birth father. But Danny is “hyperactive,” hard to be around. At his stepfather’s insistence, he’s put on tranquilizers. (Again, the pure ‘60s-ness of this is astounding--parents fighting clear of emotional bonds they can’t stand, and then blaming their children for not being upright citizens. . . .)

A Doors Concert

When he’s only 12, Danny gets taken to a Doors concert by a guy who takes care of their equipment, and in that five hours, all life is changed for Danny from a hideous, skittering nightmare into a place of focus, mystery, enchantment, purpose: “The way a man dying of thirst heads towards water, I started toward Morrison.”

Morrison is far more than a mindless stone-junky. Like a father, he lectures young Danny: “. . . there is a certain breed of man that emphatically embraces all aspects of life. They are all for growth and learning and love, but there’s more to it than that. . . . There is nowhere they will not go, nothing they will not do. But the ultimate goal is knowledge; the kicks are just an added bonus.”

Morrison lectures Danny against cocaine. He turns Danny on to Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Antonine Artaud. Morrison takes him to the Self Realization Fellowship Shrine. Morrison acts as mentor and dad--as opposed to Danny’s stepfather who gets the kid in a back bedroom and tries to bribe him to sever all ties with his mother.

Of course, because the ‘60s were as destructive as they were life-affirming, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and finally Jim Morrison perish. Danny, not even 20, is left with rock-riches: a fine house, an expensive car, a stunning girlfriend, but he’s in deep mourning. The dark side, the heavy-duty drug side, takes over his life. But when he’s 21, he stops, because, he says here, his real father admits he loves him unconditionally. Danny decides to live for Jim Morrison, not die for him; to live for what Morrison stood for: “Nobility and pride. Liberation. Ecstasy. Freedom.”

About being straight for the last 12 years, Sugarman can say “. . . the good news is it’s not that bad .” Words that transcend cheap sermonizing because of all that came before.

A satisfying last footnote; a warning to stepparents everywhere. That whining tot you take such pleasure in tormenting may grow up to be a writer. If so, you’re going to look pretty silly in 20 years. Think about it!