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| Morrison gazes from the cover of his group’s first album. |
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| Morrison gazes from the cover of his group’s first album. |
On July 3, 1971, Jim Morrison, rock ‘n’ roll’s voluptuous dark angel, was found dead in a bathtub in Paris. He was 27 years old, and the coroner declared the cause a heart attack, the result of a desperate, chemical-stoked race with death. It was a sordid and sad finish to a brief career marked by both brilliance and failure, a cautionary tale of promise both fueled and broken by addiction.
Morrison graduated from the University of California’s film school during a time of great rock ’n’ roll innovation. It was 1965, and the Beatles were leaving behind pop tunes for more sophisticated songwriting, Bob Dylan was defiantly blending disparate musical styles, and new-sounding bands like the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield were springing up. Meanwhile Morrison lived in an abandoned building in Venice Beach, California, experimenting with how long he could remain high on LSD. He started writing songs. “I was just taking notes at a fantastic rock concert that was going on inside my head,” he later said.
He shared those notes with Ray Manzarek, a former classmate and classically trained keyboardist who was taken with the burgeoning garage rock scene. Manzarek recruited the drummer John Densmore and the guitarist Robby Krieger, both skilled musicians and avid jazz fans. They started a band that in 1966 Morrison christened the Doors, after an Aldous Huxley study on psychedelic drugs.
They played a regular gig at the popular Whisky a Go Go in Los Angeles and developed a unique sound, with muscular rock melodies driven by Manzarek’s relentless organ and fractured by epic improvisational riffs. Morrison, sometimes an intellectual braggart, spewed spontaneous meditations drawing on the work of Rimbaud, Blake, Nietzsche, Greek myth, and Freudian psychology. His bold, sexually aggressive performances made the Doors notorious.
The band was fired from the Whisky a Go Go when Morrison screamed during a set that he wanted to kill his father and have sex with his mother. Elektra, a folk label looking to expand into rock, scooped them up, releasing their first album, The Doors, in 1967. With songs like “Break on Through” and “Twentieth Century Fox,” the record is widely considered the band’s best and one of rock’s greatest. Its biggest hit, the song that launched the Doors into stardom, was “Light My Fire,” written by Krieger and featuring Manzarek’s seductive organ and Morrison’s frantic plea for carnal pleasure.
But there is also heavy listening with songs like “The End,” a spooky atonal dirge that runs more than eleven minutes. The producer remembers recording that song: “I turned to [the sound engineer] and said . . . ‘This is one of the most important moments in recorded rock ’n’ roll. . . . Jim . . . said ‘Come with me,’ and I did. And it was almost a shock when the song was over . . . I felt like, yes . . . it’s the end, that’s the end, that’s the statement, it cannot go any further.”
Morrison was a master performer who kept a crowd in his thrall. “A Doors concert is a public meeting called by us for a special dramatic discussion,” he announced. He called his band “erotic politicians.” He screamed that “all the children are insane” and urged his audiences to throw off the strictures of the older generation and use sex, drugs, alcohol, and music to open the doors of perception. His behavior became increasingly disturbing. In one drunken fit he hosed down the recording studio with a fire extinguisher. His untrained baritone was just as erratic.
His theatrics descended from somewhat cogent rebellion into the inchoate foibles of an addict. He attacked fellow performers at rock festivals, called his audience “idiots,” and in 1969 was arrested for exposing himself onstage in Miami.
The band did manage to cut two more noteworthy albums, Morrison Hotel and L.A. Woman, both blues-inflected attempts to return to their roots, but Morrison continued to decline into alcoholism. In 1971 he moved to Paris with his longtime lover, Pamela Courson, to try to concentrate on writing and curb his drinking. Instead he stayed on a steady diet of whiskey and filled entire pages of his notebook with the phrase “God help me.” On the night of July 3 he was at home with Courson, perhaps snorting heroin, when he started to cough convulsively and decided to take a bath. Courson woke to the sound of him retching and watched in horror as he vomited blood. The next morning she found him dead in the tub.
The news of his death took a few days to travel overseas, and he was buried with little fanfare in the Père Lachaise Cemetery, home also to Frédéric Chopin, Oscar Wilde, and Edith Piaf. Rumors spread that he had died of an overdose, but as there was no autopsy there is no way to be sure.
What was the legacy of the Doors’ strange music? Was Jim Morrison in fact the prophet of a new, chaotic creative age? On the thirtieth anniversary of his death, Mikal Gilmore, of Rolling Stone, called the Doors “the archetypal band for an American apocalypse that we didn’t even know was creeping up on us.”
“Wake up!” Morrison would scream. But what were we supposed to wake up to? Whatever it was, or even if it was nothing, his influence is undeniable. It’s there in the intense performances of people like Iggy Pop, Trent Reznor, and Eddie Vedder. For them and for all the pilgrims who flock to his grave every year, he was the guiding genius of a band whose complex songwriting pushed rock music into a daring and dark new age.
—Elizabeth D. Hoover is a former editor at American Heritage magazine.
July 3, 2006
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