Hope I die before I get old, The Doors legend Jim told manager

FOR a man who spent years managing rock stars, Richard Loren learned his trade from an unlikely source Liberace!

Now 72, New Yorker Richard was just a teenager when he got involved with music, doing everything from avoiding drugs busts at airports to finding replacement guitar strings.

But it was a spell persuading closed restaurants to open again for Liberace’s late-night dinners with friends after concerts that convinced him the music business would be an endlessly-fascinating career.

“He was a really kind, caring, humble guy, and I had a good relationship with Liberace,” reveals Richard, who would go on to manage The Doors, The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and others, rubbing shoulders with The Beatles, the Kennedys, Bob Dylan and everyone who was anyone.

“Liberace was one of the first entertainers I met, and he taught me that they are real people like the rest of us. He kicked off my career, because he recommended me to others.

“When a guy like Liberace tells you to arrange a big dinner party for him and many friends after a concert, you just put one foot in front of the other and get it done.

“I saw him in a T-shirt and jeans, quite casual, but even then, he was flamboyant, and he’d never dress that way on stage.

“By the way, could he perform! He would play for more than three hours, have the crowd standing up, and he would play some Mozart, but ‘only the most beautiful bits’!

“It blew you away, a Liberace concert. But there was nothing prima donna. He wanted things to go well, perfectly-timed lights and costume changes.

“Diametrically opposed, you might say, to The Grateful Dead, where everything was loose and each show was different.”

As a young kid, slightly overawed, wasn’t it hard for Richard to go from that ultra-professional beginning, to a world where bands might ask you to sneak dope through Customs, and even have some yourself?

“No, it wasn’t hard at all,” Richard stresses. “People talk about the 60s, and it’s drugs, drugs, drugs. But you know, back then, we didn’t think of marijuana as a drug.

“Acid, LSD, wasn’t like heroin or cocaine. Some people drank a Manhattan or a Scotch, others would light up a joint, it was just relaxing.

“In my later years with The Grateful Dead, whose main man was Jerry Garcia, cocaine did come into the picture, and then things got very heavy in the mid-1970s. Cocaine skyrocketed and it wasn’t so nice.

“As I understand it, Bob Dylan came down to meet The Beatles at their hotel, showed them a joint and lit it, and they decided to get Ringo to try it first.

“After that, you can see how their songs went from pop tunes to the classics.

“But in their Hamburg days, The Beatles had taken other drugs, to keep them awake so they could play in the bars all night.

“When The Grateful Dead used cocaine to stay up and work, it became a bit of a problem for me to deal with.”

Another band who caused him great joy and a fair bit of struggle was The Doors, with the iconic Jim Morrison as their frontman.

“Jim Morrison was an incredible singer,” Richard says. “He was a wonderful poet, in a rock band full of brilliant musicians.

“He was also a strikingly- handsome guy, with those dark ringlets of long hair, and everywhere he went, women were staring at him.”

In Richard’s new book, in fact, he also relates a hilarious tale of the late pop artist, Andy Warhol, who also seemed to fall instantly in love with a highly-amused Morrison!

“Jim was beautiful, unique on stage,” says Richard. “You had to see how he could bewitch an audience, and we never knew what he would do next.

“Of course, he got arrested on stage, almost started riots, but as I said, you never knew what to expect!”

Morrison, of course, now attracts endless streams of adoring fans, to his graveside at Paris’s Pere Lachaise cemetery.

He died in the French capital in 1972, at 27, having become a rock icon to match any of them. Eerily, Richard can recall Morrison saying he wouldn’t be on this planet for long.

“He got tired of playing, performing, doing the same thing, and he drank more, got crazier, angrier, and almost cancelled several tours I had booked,” Richard reveals.

“Jim just wanted to write his poetry he was a shooting star, like Jimi Hendrix or John Belushi. They say their thing, and then they are gone. Jim said to me once: ‘You know, I never want to get old and die. I want to get out of here young.’

“I said: ‘What do you mean? You’re a young guy, you’re good!’ Jim replied: ‘Ah, you do your thing and then it gets . . . you know . . .’ Funny, now I think about it, I just cannot imagine an old Jim Morrison, Jim as an old man.”

Bobby Darin, it seems, was terrified of being seen as an old man to the hip young things he approached Richard about doing a protest-song style record, to show he was still cool in the Dylan era, but mysteriously never came back to discuss it again!

“Bobby had been an incredible performer, too, and came into my life in an odd way and left in an odd way!” laughs Richard.

“He came to see me, told me about his friendship with Bobby Kennedy, and how he wanted to change his career.

“He was famous as the snap-your-fingers guy, the Rat Pack and all that.

“When he took his toupee off and tried to be a cool guy in the 60s, I thought maybe it was a piece of opportunism. I had seen him as a teenager and he’d been sensational, so it was a shame.

“I never heard from him again, but I did bump into Bobby Kennedy. Bobby Darin had been a big friend, and in fact he was with Bobby when he was assassinated.

“I met Kennedy at a party for Jefferson Airplane and, for some reason, he was left on his own, so we got talking.

“I noticed this cool wristband under his suit and thought: ‘Wow, he’s actually a cool guy!’ But then he said his kid had put it on him that morning, and he’d forgotten to take it off!”

For wonderful stories from a pivotal time in music, Richard Loren’s book, High Notes, is out now, published by East Pond. ISBN Nos. are 978-0-9709407-1-1 for the paperback, and 978-0-9709407-0-4 hardback.