Deep into a cold and dewy autumn night, Dave Brock is telling of the mysterious forces that have intertwined his destiny with the memory of the late, great and pervy rock legend Jim Morrison. It’s a story heavy with the elements of destiny, opportunity, luck, foresight, talent, diligence and a man’s willingness to dress and sing like someone known as the Lizard King. The serpentine tale could give you chills . . . you know, if you were listening to it outside, where it’s brisk enough to see your breath. Or if Dave Brock were a weirdo.

But the thermostat is dialed comfortably at Sachi’s nightclub in Long Beach, and there’s a cushy booth reserved where Brock is relaxing between sets of the Doors songs he and his band Wild Child are performing tonight—the latest of thousands of Jim Morrison celebrations Brock has performed since July 3, 1986, when three sold-out shows at the Whisky launched the unlikely career that has supported him for more than 20 years. “From that night to this one,” says Brock, after all this time still amazed, “I’ve never done anything else to make money.”

Brock is holding a beer in one hand and running the other through wavy dark hair that tumbles to his shoulders, propelling your eyes on a head-to-toe tour of his Morrisonesqueness—puffy black shirt and hip-hugging leather pants set off by a belt chunked with turquoise and a cross hanging from his neck, altogether a sexy package of toughness and tenderness summarized by a pair of brushed-leather boots. It’s a Halloween-quality getup. “I didn’t grow up planning to do this, not in my wildest dreams,” Brock assures you, shrugging in bafflement—then interrupting that sentence for a second to pose for a snapshot with a couple of admirers, “and I never thought I’d still be at it. Some morning I’ll probably wake up and just say, ‘That’s it!’”

That didn’t happen this morning, and about the time you begin to wonder whether to feel sorry for Brock, you don’t. Because at some point as he’s talking, or maybe while he posed for the photo, as that mood of potential pity came upon you, something in the angle of Brock’s head and hair and eyes and lips and clothes—basically, something in just about everything about him—comes together in a way that feels as if you . . . maybe . . . just . . . glimpsed . . . Jim Morrison. Spend more time with Brock, and you’ll find that happens often. If anything, getting to know him makes those moments even more profound. Not that they seem to sway him.

“What often happens is that fans call out to me—‘Hey Jim!’—expecting me to jump into character,” Brock responds, hyper-neutrally. “I just calmly tell them, ‘My name is Dave.’”

Dave Brock is no weirdo, and to discover that is a great relief, as well as a little bit of a letdown. Somebody who’s spent two decades inhabiting the clothes, songs and mannerisms of a musician famously obsessed with sex, mysticism, drugs, murder, madness and death ought to be at least somewhat messed up. Not that you’d want him to die in his bathtub or anything.


July 3, 1986, made 15 years since Jim Morrison’s girlfriend found him dead in the bathtub of his Paris apartment—officially of heart failure aggravated by heavy drinking, although other theories range from a heroin overdose to tuberculosis. If there was any symbolism in Brock’s decision to debut Wild Child on that anniversary—introduced by famed Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek at the Whisky, where the band played some of its earliest Los Angeles shows—he doesn’t mention it. By now he’s seen that this music would still be living and breathing today, even if he hadn’t made a life’s work out of personally inhabiting it 60 or 70 times a year. Wild Child is an effect, not a cause, of the Doors’ enduring legend.

“Every generation has its Doors fans,” says Brock. “Although the music comes from the late 1960s, it’s not preachy, not flower-power. The Doors weren’t part of the anti-war movement. They did something totally different—something that young people continue to relate to.”

The summer before that first Wild Child show, on a date Brock never thought would be important enough to remember, he was among those young people—a 20-year-old senior-to-be at Cal State Long Beach who was majoring in business administration, minoring in drama and reading No One Here Gets Out Alive, the shocking Morrison biography by Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman. He wasn’t alone. The Doors were selling about 750,000 albums a year in the early 1980s, prompting Rolling Stone to put Morrison on the cover with the headline, “He’s hot, he’s sexy, and he’s dead.”

“I wasn’t old enough to know about the Doors when they were making those albums, which was only from 1967 to 1971,” Brock recounts. “But when I discovered their music, I quickly adopted it as my favorite. Being close to LA, after growing up in Marin County, kind of added to the excitement for me.”

While listening to KMET on his car radio one afternoon, Brock was excited to hear a commercial for the legendary Sunset Strip club Gazzari’s—as usual, delivered in the gravelly rant of its legendary owner, Bill Gazzari—announcing the performance of a Jim Morrison Rock Opera.

“At least, that’s what I thought I heard,” Brock recalls. “But when I got to the club, the woman at the door with the clipboard asked me, ‘What agency are you from?’ It turned out to be an audition.”

That became disturbingly obvious when Brock got inside.

“The place was crawling with guys—maybe 30 or 40 of them, some lurking in the corners, others slinking around the room—who were thinking that Jim was inside of them,” Brock says. “They were doing the ‘Jim pose,’ or coming by and giving you the ‘Jim stare’ . . . you know, like they were him! I thought it was kind of creepy. But the lasting impression it made on me was actually a good one—after getting such a close-up look at that, it steered me away from ever being that way.”