I was the first official photographer of the Doors, and this shot was taken early on. It was 1967 and we were heading to Venice Beach to take some publicity shots but got hungry, so Jim recommended stopping off at Lucky U Cafe, his favourite place in Los Angeles to grab breakfast. It was a tiny Mexican restaurant owned by a Chinese man, pretty much just a counter with no tables. Jim ordered a beer and a menudo – a beef and chilli soup – to line his stomach. It wasn’t uncommon to see him sink six beers in an hour.

I’ve always enjoyed shooting people when they’re eating because it creates an intimacy. So I got behind the counter and started snapping away. Jim was beautiful. He looked like Michelangelo’s David. He was checking me out: “Who the hell is this guy?” He didn’t suffer fools, and this was early on in our relationship. There’s an intensity in his eyes: he was totally serious about being seen as a credible poet.

In the car back home, Jim and the rest of the band heard Break on Through – their debut single – on the radio for the first time and everyone cheered. They got an inkling of what it would be like to have a hit.

Jim was irreverent and mischievous. One time we were shooting outside and he suddenly disappeared. He came back with this cheeky smile and I took his picture. Only later, when I got the photos developed, did I realise what he had been doing: he’d hidden behind a tree, got himself aroused and, through his trousers, was pointing his erection right at my camera.

Jim and I were around the same age, and we clicked intellectually. He and his girlfriend Pam Courson moved into a place next door to where my wife and I lived in Laurel Canyon. I remember one evening we spent together, smoking a load of hash and listening to a vinyl import of Sgt Pepper. That was a great night.

One night, Pam came over late, claiming Jim had tried to kill her. She said he had pushed her into the closet and set it on fire when he found out she had been sleeping with this phony prince who had supplied her with heroin. Jim hated heroin so was maybe trying to scare her into going clean. She ended up staying with us for a few weeks. One night in the early 1990s, I had Oliver Stone, Val Kilmer and Meg Ryan over for dinner and told them this story. Oliver ended up putting it into his Doors movie, which starred Val as Jim.

The last time I saw Jim was in 1971, when the Doors played at the closing party we had for the Black Rabbit Inn, an organic restaurant I had launched with Jack Nicholson four years earlier. Jack invested $10,000 in it. Jim was very drunk and having a great time. But he was never a slurring, hopeless drunk. That’s one thing Oliver’s film got wrong. Jim could easily function on alcohol. He was always stimulating to speak to: a visionary who would predict things that happened years later.

Jim died in July that year. Later, Paul Rothchild, who was the band’s producer, and I became close friends. He told me about Jim’s death in Paris. He said Jim had come home drunk and found some powder on the dresser. He assumed it was cocaine and snorted a couple lines. But it was heroin and he faded real fast. Pam put him in the bath to try to revive him, but it was too late. With his passing, our happy hippie days were over.

Bobby Klein’s CV

Born: Los Angeles, California, 1943.

Trained: “I had zero training. If I didn’t know how to do something, I asked the guys at the photography store. I shot on black and white as I wasn’t sure how to do colour.”

Influences: “Henri Cartier-Bresson for documenting his time and Man Ray for his technique – he’d set up a portrait and all it would take was one click.”

High point: “Working with Igor Stravinsky in 1967. I turned up at his house with my long hair, wearing hippie beads. He came down the stairs clutching his own bead necklace and, in a thick Russian accent, said: ‘Stravinsky is a hippie too!’”

Low point: “The early 1970s, when the record companies started hiring art directors and it all got too corporate.”

Top tip: “Give up on technique and just shoot. I photographed Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison – and I wish I had taken more shots. You never realise how important people will become.”