Q: Fans of The Doors see you as a savior, the leader who’ll set them free. How do you feel about that? It’s a heavy burden, isn’t it?

Mojo: It’s absurd. How can I set free anyone who doesn’t have the guts to stand up alone and declare his own freedom? I think it’s a lie – people claim they want to be free- everybody insists that freedom is what they want the most, the most sacred and precious thing a man can possess. But that’s bullshit! People are terrified to be set free – they hold on to their chains. They fight anyone who tries to break those chains. It’s their security. How can they expect me or anyone to set them free if they really don’t want to be free?

Q: Why do you think people fear freedom?

Mojo: I think people resist freedom because they’re afraid of the unknown. But it’s ironic…, that unknown was once very well known. It’s where our souls belong. The only solution is to confront them – confront yourself – with the greatest fear imaginable. Expose yourself to your deepest fear. After that, fear has no power, and fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free.

Q: What do you mean when you say “freedom”?

Mojo: There are different kinds of freedom – there’s a lot of misunderstanding. The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your senses for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can’t be any large-scale revolution until there’s a personal revolution on an individual level. It’s got to happen inside first. You can take away a man’s political freedom and you won’t hurt him – unless you take away his freedom to feel. That can destroy him.

Q: How can anyone else have the power to take away from your freedom to feel?

Mojo: Some people surrender their freedom willingly – but others are forced to surrender it. Imprisonment begins with birth. Society, parents – they refuse to allow you to keep the freedom you are born with. There are subtle ways to punish a person for daring to feel. You see that everyone around you has destroyed his true feeling nature. You imitate what you see.

Q: Are you saying that we are brought up to defend and perpetuate a society that deprives people of their freedom to feel?

Mojo: Sure – teachers, religious leaders, even friends, or so-called friends, - take over where parents leave off. They demand that we feel only the feelings they want and expect from us. They demand all the time that we perform feelings for them. We’re like actors – turned loose in this world to wander in search of a phantom… endlessly searching for a half-forgotten shadow of our lost reality. When others demand that we become the person they want us to be, they force us to destroy the person we really are. It’s a subtle kind of murder…the most loving parents and relatives commit this murder with smiles on their faces.

Q: Do you think it’s possible for an individual to free himself from these repressive forces on his own – all alone?

Mojo: That kind of freedom can’t be granted. Nobody can win it for you. You have to do it on your own. If you look to somebody else to do it for you – somebody outside yourself – you’re still depending on others. You’re still vulnerable to those repressive, evil outside forces, too.

Q: Isn’t it possible for people who want that freedom to unite – to combine their strength, maybe just to strengthen each other?

Mojo: Friends can help each other. A true friend is someone who lets you have total freedom to be yourself – and especially to feel. Or not to feel. Whatever you happen to be feeling at the moment is fine with them. That’s what real love amounts to – letting a person be what he really is… Most people love you for who you pretend to be…To keep their love, you keep pretending, performing. You get to love your pretense…It’s true, we’re locked in an image, an act – and the sad thing is, people get so used to their image – they grow attached to their masks. They love their chains. They forget about who they really are. And if you try to remand them, they hate you for it – they feel like you’re trying to steal their most precious possession.

Q: Don’t they see that what you’re trying to show them is the way to freedom?

Mojo: Most people have no idea what they’re missing. Our society places a supreme value on control – hiding what you feel. Our culture mocks “primitive cultures” and prides itself on suppression of natural instincts and impulses.

Q: Do you mean that it’s not human beings in general but our particular society that’s flawed and destructive?

Mojo: Look at how other cultures live – peacefully, in harmony with the earth, the forest – animals. They don’t build war machines and invest millions of dollars in attacking other countries whose political ideals don’t happen to agree with their own. W live in a sick society and part of the disease is not being aware that we’re diseased. Our society has too much to hold onto, and value – freedom ends up at the bottom of the list.

Q: Isn’t there something an artist can do?

Mojo: I offer images – I conjure memories of freedom that can still be reached – like the Doors, right? But we can only open the doors – we can’t drag people through. I can’t free them unless they want to be free – more than anything else. Maybe primitive people have less bullshit to let go of, to give up. A person has to be willing to give up everything – not just wealth. All the bullshit he’s been taught – all society’s brainwashing. You have to let go of all that to get to the other side. Most people aren’t willing to do that.

Q: What’s it like to be a sex symbol?

Mojo: For some reason I’m not fully sure of, certain archetypal roles exist in human society, which society demands be filled, and I think it’s just a matter of chance who comes along to fill them. Anyway, the only place where that kind of thing has any reality at all is in a few magazines and newspapers.

Q: What about being hailed as the “King of Orgasmic Rock”?

Mojo: I consider it a high compliment. Music is very erotic. One of the functions is a purgation of emotions. To call our music orgasmic means that we are able to move people to a kind of emotional orgasm through the medium of words and music.

Q: Aren’t a lot of your songs pointing the way to freedom through sex?

Mojo: Sex can be a liberation. But it can also be an entrapment.

Q: What makes the difference?

Mojo: It’s all a question of how much a person listens to his body – his feelings. Most people are too busy covering up their feelings to listen to them.

Q: Isn’t sex a way to amplify feelings?

Mojo: Sex is full of lies. The body tries to tell the truth. But it’s usually too battered with rules to be heard, and bound with pretenses so it can hardly move. We cripple ourselves with lies.

Q: How can we break through the rules and the lies?

Mojo: By listening to your body – opening up to your senses. Blake said that the body was the soul’s prison unless the five senses are fully developed and open. He considered the senses “the window of the soul”. When sex involves all the senses intensely, it can be like a mystical experience. If you reject your body, it becomes your prison cell. It’s a paradox – to transcend the limitations of the body, you have to immerse yourself in it – you have to be totally open to your senses…It isn’t so easy to accept your body totally – we’re taught that the body is something to control, dominate – natural processes like pissing and shitting are considered dirty…Puritanical attitudes die slowly. How can sex be a liberation if you don’t really want to touch your body – if you’re trying to escape from it?

Q: What was your state of mind when you went into the Miami obscenity trial?

Mojo: I think I was just fed up with the image that had been created around me in which I sometimes consciously and most of the time unconsciously cooperated with it. It just got too much for me to stomach and so I just kind of put an end to it in one glorious evening.

Q: What exactly did you do in the “glorious evening”?

Mojo: Oh, I basically think it was more of a political than a sexual scandal. I think they picked up on the erotic aspect because there would really have been on political charge they could have brought against me. It was too amorphous.
      I think what it was, really, a life style that was on trial more than any specific incident. I guess what it boiled down to was that I told the audience that they were a bunch of fucking idiots to be members of an audience, you know. What are they doing there anyway, you know, and that was…I think the basic message was that you realize that you’re not really here to listen to a buch of songs by some very good musicians but you’re here for something else and you might as well admit it and do something about it.

Q: If you had the whole thing to do over, where would you go and what would you do?

Mojo: I’m not denying that I’ve had a good time these last three or four years and met a lot of interesting people and seen a lot of things in a short space of time that I probably wouldn’t of run into in twenty years of living. So I can’t say I regret it. If I had it to do all over again, I think I would have gone more for the quiet, undemonstrative little artist plodding away in his own garden trip. (Pause) Aren’t you going to ask me about my drinking?

Q: Well, yes; what’s your reputation as a drinker?

Mojo: I went through a period where I drank a lot. I had a lot of pressures hanging over me that I couldn’t cope with. I think that drinking is a way to cope with a crowded environment and also a product of boredom. I enjoy drinking. It loosens people up and stimulates conversation sometimes. It’s like gambling somehow; you go out for a night of drinking and you don’t know where you’re going to end up the next day. It could work out good or it could be disastrous. It’s like the throw of the dice. (pause) I don’t want to answer any more questions, man. Thanks.