Wonderland Avenue

Wonderland Avenue: Tales of Glamour and Excess, first published in 1989, is the personal memoir of late author and The Doors' publicist Danny Sugerman, who went on to manage the emergence of Ray Manzarek's solo-career and first album. It is one of several books Sugerman wrote about The Doors.

Synopsis

In the book, Sugerman recounts his life, beginning with his privileged but troubled childhood in Beverly Hills, which he asserts set the stage for his later self-destructive addictions and behavior. According to his autobiography, after the premature death of his adolescent friend and "teacher", Jim Morrison, Danny Sugerman become friends with and then went on to manage Iggy Pop, before they both ended up in Californian State mental hospitals suffering with severely excessive drug and alcohol addiction syndrome.

Wonderland Avenue covers the first eight years of Sugerman's show business career, commencing with his first job at age 12 opening the Doors' fan mail, and concluding just beyond his 21st birthday, when he is a frail and severely drug-addicted mental patient who has been given less than a week to live. His exposure to the decadent music industry world of parties, groupies, and drugs at such a young age would facilitate a relentless heroin addiction [among other addictions] that nearly killed him. Notable in the book is Sugerman's close personal friendship throughout his adolescence with late Doors frontman Jim Morrison, who served as a kind of mentor to Sugerman, and his post-Doors activities in L.A attempting to manage the flagging career (and supervise the behavior of) an increasingly unstable Iggy Pop. This section of the book reads as "the blind following the blind".

The book chronicles, in graphic detail, the decadence of the LA rock and roll lifestyle, lived to its most degrading and shocking extremes, in the early to mid-1970s.