When you're strange
Jerry Hopkins has built a career on the bizarre - and a book about The Doors singer Jim Morrison. The cult biographer talks to Gary Jones about chemical highs, financial lows and his fascination with the transsexuals of Bangkok
The brazen hedonism of Bangkok agrees with American writer Jerry Hopkins. Cult author of No One Here Gets Out Alive - widely accepted as the definitive portrait of 1960s psychedelic rock band The Doors' iconic frontman Jim Morrison - Hopkins has been described as "the dean of pop biographers". He laughingly refers to himself as a free-spirited "bottom feeder" and a fortunate "Jerry Gump".
"I've been in the right place at the right time often in my life, just like Forrest Gump," says the 77-year-old, who also penned the first ever bio of Elvis Presley, as well as accounts of Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie and Yoko Ono. As Los Angeles correspondent for Rolling Stone magazine in the late 1960s, Hopkins experienced the highs and lows of flower power in full bloom.
"Being in LA in the 1960s was the right place if you were going to write about music and the youth revolution, or whatever you want to call it, and that's what I did, and that's where I was, and I had a helluva good time."
Four times married and with two grown-up children in the United States, Hopkins has lived in Thailand since 1993, and his Bangkok apartment nestles on a restful downtown side street. Fragrant frangipani blossoms float over garden walls, and scarlet-backed flowerpeckers, white-vented mynas and other tropical birds perch in its knotted banyan trees. With his thinning grey hair and trimmed beard, thick spectacles, beige slacks and gaudy, open-necked shirt, the writer has the avuncular air of a retired civil servant.
A short stroll from Hopkins' hideaway, however, lies the Thai capital's main sex-tourism drag of Sukhumvit Road, where street-side stalls ply hardcore porn DVDs and Viagra (about 10 bucks for four of grandpa's little helpers), as well as chromed knuckledusters, ninja throwing stars and equally dangerous-looking sex toys.
"Being a bottom feeder has a long literary tradition," says Hopkins. "There's a whiff of danger about Bangkok. I hate to romanticise dirt, but we're talking whores and drugs and the fun things in life. Life's more fun as a bottom feeder."
Over almost half a century, Hopkins has delivered three-dozen books covering everything from rock-chick groupies and the history of the condom to spoof astrology. He has, by his own admission, enjoyed an unconventional career by chasing down the bizarre. Originally rejected by 30 publishers over seven years, No One Here Gets Out Alive - the first rock biography to reach No1 on The New York Times best-seller list - has never been out of print since 1980, selling in the millions worldwide.