Wonderland Avenue

"Wonderland Avenue: Tales of Glamour and Excess", first published in 1989, is the personal memoir of late author and Doors manager Danny Sugerman. 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.

"Wonderland Avenue" covers the first eight years of Sugerman's show business career, commencing with his first job at age twelve opening the Doors' fan mail, and concluding just beyond his 21st birthday, where the reader finds him 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 that very nearly killed him. Notable in the book is Sugerman's close personal friendship with late Doors frontman Jim Morrison, who served as a kind of mentor to the younger man, and his post-Doors activities in LA attempting to revive the flagging career (and supervise the behavior of) an increasingly unstable Iggy Pop.

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 1970's.