Fans of The Doors may have been grief-stricken at the news of Jim Morrison’s death, but his detractors weren’t. Chief among them was Lou Reed, who said: “Somebody got a phone call saying Jim Morrison had died in Paris in a bathtub. And I said: ‘How fabulous, in a bathtub in Paris!’ I had no pity at all for that silly Los Angeles person.”
Ever since his early Velvet Underground days, Reed’s attitude to The Doors had been one of antipathy, symptomatic of his mistrust of the West Coast scene in general. Reed’s basic argument was that the VU were “really, really smart” and the California bands were “really, really stupid. It was purely a matter of brains.”
