#A TWISTED TALE COLLECTION DRIVER#

Stricker in turn called the San Francisco Chronicle, which reported in an article on Nov. Later they displayed the manuscripts to Prior`s girlfriend, his mother, Doors biographer Danny Sugerman and musicians David Crosby and Graham Nash.Īnd they contacted Robert Stricker, a Berkeley literary agent, to help them sell the manuscripts. Jacobs and Prior also showed the manuscripts to Doors manager Bill Siddons and the other two band members, Robbie Krieger and John Densmore. Some of it was quite valuable: different versions of very early Doors classics-`Break on Through` and `Soul Kitchen`-that even the band had never seen.'' There were songs Jim had worked on for years. ''We sat down in their apartment and in the next six hours read through this amazing collection of Jim`s poems. Then Prior and Jacobs showed the manuscripts to former Doorsman Manzarek and veteran record producer Paul Rothchild. The deal to buy the ''127 Fascination'' manuscripts went down on Wednesday, Oct. According to federal prosecutors, Farhadi and his sister had been smuggling money and family jewelry out of Iran for five years. Farhadi, an Iranian immigrant and former UC Berkeley student with a history of drug and weapons convictions, had the cash. Shokrollah Farhadi, an acquaintance of Jacobs`, was brought in to finance the purchase. He asked Prior and Jacobs for $30,000 in exchange for a two-thirds share in the manuscripts. Late in the summer of 1986, Prior and Jacobs made their pitch to Vejraska: They wanted to buy into ''127 Fascination'' and claimed they knew the right people to publish the Morrison poems. The two men decided this was their big chance. Jacobs left the party that night and called an old friend and fellow Doors fan, Reed Prior.

#A TWISTED TALE COLLECTION DRIVER#

Jacobs, who had boasted of a few connections in the rock world, might just be the guy to handle the material, which was now owned by a cab driver named Mike. Then, in the summer of 1986, Grant Jacobs, a longtime Doors fan and veteran of the psychedelic glory days of San Francisco`s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, was approached at a party in San Francisco by someone who knew Vejraska.įlashing a red-and-white TransWorld Airlines luggage label with Morrison`s name on it, he excitedly told Jacobs that there was a lot more Morrison stuff to be had, including the Lizard King`s journals from Paris and Los Angeles and a number of unpublished poems. His only contact with the Coursons came less than a month after Pamela`s death, when he returned her VW bus, record collection and a box of Morrison`s photocopied poems and journals. Her parents quietly took them home, and Vejraska, who had heard the news of her death over the radio, now found himself the caretaker of the rest of Morrison`s unpublished writings in San Francisco. Scattered throughout her apartment were photocopies of Morrison`s poems and journals.

On April 25, 1974, Pamela was found dead in her Hollywood apartment of a heroin overdose this was a month before the settlement of Morrison`s will, which affirmed Pamela as Morrison`s sole heir. She was depressed, living on a modest stipend provided by The Doors while Morrison`s will moved through Probate Court. That fall, however, she returned home to Los Angeles. McClure returned the poems to Pamela, and insisted that she edit them for publication herself. I kept the material for six or eight weeks, but I was very busy at the time, I didn`t have time to work with (it).'' ''It was a beautiful piece of poet`s work. ''There were thousands of sheets of unpublished poetry, all of it neatly typed,'' McClure recalled. In San Francisco, Pamela again contacted poet Michael McClure and asked him to read some of Morrison`s poems and edit them for future publication. A thin adhesive label near the handle read ''127 Fascination.'' On the night before she moved in with Vejraska, she gave her new lover a box of Morrison`s writings, which she had removed from the satchel and placed in a 12- by 17-inch gray metal strongbox.

A twisted tale collection