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James Douglas 'Jim' Morrison (1943-1971) |
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American rock singer and rock lyric who achieved after his death a cult position among fans. Morrison wished to be accepted as a serious artist, and he published such collections of poetry as An American Prayer (1970) and The Lords and The New Creatures (1971). The song lyrics Morrison wrote for The Doors much reflected the tensions of the time – drug culture, the antiwar movement, avant-garde art. With his early death Morrison has been seen as a voluntary victim of the destructive forces in pop culture. However, he was not ignorat about the consequences of fame and his position as an idol. Morrison once confessed that "We're more interested in the dark side of life, the evil thing, the night time." Why the desire for death. James Douglas Morrison was born in Melbourne, Florida, on December 8, 1943. His father, George “Steve” Morrison, was a U.S. Navy admiral, born in Georgia in 1920. In 1942, after graduating from the Naval Academy, he had married Clara (Clarke) Morrison, the daughter of a lawyer. In 1946 he returned from the Pacific and during the following years the family moved according to his numerous postings. Jim was their eldest son. When he began performing in public, he broke with his father and mother and never saw them again. George Morrison died in 2008. Morrison
was early interested in literature, he excelled at
school, and he had an IQ of 149. Through high school and college, he
kept notebooks, but threw them all away when he left school. "I think
if I'd never gotten rid of them I'd never been free," he wrote in
'Prologue: Self-interview' in Wilderness (1988). Morrison studied theatre arts at the
University of California, where he remained something of a shy loner. With his fellow student Ray Manzarek,
keyboardist, John Densmore, drummer, and Robbie Kriger, guitarist who had just learned how to play with the bottleneck, he
formed a group which was in 1965 christened The Doors. They never added
a bass player to their group. Its name was taken from Aldous Huxley's book on mescaline, The
Doors of Perception, which quoted William
Blake's lines from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
(1790-1793). Originally Blake's words were, "If the doors of perception
were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite." (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Boston: John W. Luce and Company, 1906, p. 26) All the members of the band read much, not only Morrison. Their first album, The Doors (1967), mixed performances from Bertolt Brecht/Kurt Weil's 'Alabama Song (Whisky Bar)' to Willie Dixon's 'Back Door Man'. It also included such Doors classics as 'Break on Through (to the Other Side)' and 'The End,' about death, probably Morrison's favorite subject. (This is the end, beautiful friend / This is the end, my only friend, the end) The lyrics Morrison wrote in 1965 dominated the first two Doors albums. In July 1967 the band had its first single chart success with 'Light My Fire'. Like in the late 1950s when the beatniks
tried to unite jazz and poetry, Morrison found from music a
channel to project his poetry, and add to it a theatrical aspect. Thus
improvising and unpredictableness was a part of the band's show on
stage. The mythical Lizard King, Morrison's alter ego, appeared first
in the best-selling record Waiting for the Sun (1968) in a poem
that was printed inside the record jacked. I was entitled 'The
Celebration of the Lizard King'. Part of the lyrics were used in 'Not
to Touch the Earth' and the complete 'Celebration' appeared on record Absolutely
Live (1970). Morrison's drinking, exhibitionistic performances, and
drug-taking badly affected his singing and input at recordings. "Let's
just say I was testing the bounds of
reality," he confessed in 1969 in Los Angeles. "I was curious to see
what would happen. That's all it was: just curiosity." Even FBI
Director J. Edgar Hoover was familiar with the band, saying: "It is
repulsive to right-thinking people and can have serious effects on
young people." Subsequently, the Doors and Morrison in particular, were
targeted for harassment. Before the infamous New Haven concert in
December 1967, a police allegedly sprayed him with Mace. Morrison was
arrested onstage. In Miami in 1969 the audience thought it saw Jim's "snake" – he was charged with exposing himself in full view of 10.000 people. This time the police did not arrest him on the spot, for fear that it would cause a riot. Next year Morrison was sentenced 8 months' hard labor and a $500 fine for "profanity" and "indecent exposure", but he remained free while the sentence was appealed against. The Soft Parade (1969), which experimented with brass sections, was received with mixed emotions but it had a hit single, 'Touch me'. After Miami everything changed and Morrison put his leather pants in closet. He grew a beard, started to take distance to his fans, and devote more time with projects outside the band. John Densmore has later told in an interview, that although he knew Jim well, there was so much about him that he could not find out. Possessed by his inner visions and urge to write and create music, Morrison also had troubles to explain his aims. He also felt that his time was running short: "O great creator of being, grant us one more hour / to perform our art and perfect our lives." In April 1970 Morrison Hotel hit the lists in the U.S. and England. It was hailed as a major comeback. One song on it, 'Queen of the Highway', was dedicated Pamela Courson (1946-1974), his common-law wife, who called herself Pamela Morrison. Jim called Pamela his "cosmic mate". Morrison had also an affair with Linda Ashcroft from 1967 to 1971. With Patricia Kennealy, a rock critic, he had romance which started in 1969; supposedly they were joined in a Wiccan ceromony, known as a Handfasting. Morrison did not take the ritual seriously. On his 27th birthday, Morrison made the recordings at Elektra's LA studio of his poetry, which later formed the basis of An American Prayer. The Doors played their last concert with Morrison in New Orleans. It was a disaster – Morrison smashed the microphone into the stage, threw the stand into the crowd and slumped down. After finishing sessions for a new album, L.A. Woman,
Morrison escaped to Paris, where he hoped to follow literary career – he considered himself first and foremost a writer.
"See me change," he sang. He never came back from Paris. Allen Ginsberg's Howl!
had a major influence on Morrison's writing. Morrison had listened
Ginsberg recite his poems and once they met in a Jefferson Airplane
concert. Ginsberg
knew Morrison through the beat poet, playwright and novelist Michael
McClure, with whom Morrison worked together on a screenplay adaptation
of McClure's novel The Adept. "It reminds me of The Treasure of Sierra Madre. It’s about three cats in search of a psychic treasure," Morrison said in a RollingStone interview. This project never realized. Morrison's The Lords and The New Creatures (1971), published by Simon
and Schuster, had been private printed as two separate collections of poetry in 1969. After selling 15.000 in
hardback, it went into paperback. An earlier book, An American Prayer, self-published in the summer of 1970, was not made widely available until 1978. On 3 July 1971, Morrison was found death in his bathtub. He had regurgitated a small amount of blood on the night of July 2, but claimed he felt fine. Recently he had consulted a local doctor concerning a respitory problem. Morrison was buried at Pére Lachaise cemetary in Paris, which houses remains of many famous artists, statesmen and legendaries from Edith Piaf to Oscar Wilde. In 1990 his graffitti-covered headstone was stolen. Pamela Courson Morrison, died in Hollywood of heroin overdose on April 25, 1974. In 1979 Francis Ford Coppola used The Doors' performance of 'The End' in his Vietnam War film, Apocalypse Now. The director Oliver Stone made the film biography The Doors, (1991), starring Val Kilmer, who became so obsessed with the role that he ended up in therapy after the production was closed. "Because of Kilmer, and because of extraordinary location work with countless convincing extras, the concert scenes in "The Doors" play with the authenticity of a documentary," said Roger Ebert in his review of the film. Frank Lisciandro, Morrison's close friend, has recalled that almost everything Morrison wrote was first set down in a notebook or a scrap of paper, whatever was around. Many of these notebooks were brought back from Paris to the United States after Morrison's death and stored by Columbus "Corky" Courson, the father of Pamela Courson. Wilderness: The Lost Writings of Jim Morrison and The American Night (1991) were compiled from the Morrison literary estate by his friends. For further reading: No One Here Gets Out Alive by Danny Sugerman (1980); Mr. Mojo Risin': Jim Morrison, the Last Holy Fool by David Dalton and J.C. Suares (1991); Riders On The Storm by John Densmore (1990); The Lizard King by Jerry Hopkins (1992); Strange Days by Patricia Kennealy-Morrison (1992); The Doors Complete Illustrated Lyrics by Danny Sugerman (ed.); Break On Through by James Riordan and Jerry Prochnicky (1992); Rimbaud and Jim Morrison: The Rebel As Poet by Wallace Fowlie (1994); Angels Dance and Angels Die: The Tragic Romance of Pamela and Jim Morrison by Patricia Butler (1998); Light My Fire by Ray Manzarek (1998): Wild Child: Life With Jim Morrison by Linda Ashcroft (1998); The Poet in Exile by Ray Manzarek (2001); Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend by Stephen Davis (2005); Dead Celebrities, Living Icons: Tragedy and Fame in the Age of the Multimedia Superstar by John David Ebert (2010); The Doors: Unhinged: Jim Morrison's Legacy Goes on Trial by John Densmore (2013); Love Him Madly: An Intimate Memoir of Jim Morrison by Judy Huddleston (2013); Gaze Into the Abyss: The Poetry of Jim Morrison by William Cook, foreword by Jim Cherry (2020); Set the Night on Fire: Living, Dying, and Playing Guitar with The Doors by Robby Krieger with Jeff Alulis (2021); The Lizard King Was Here: The Life and Times of Jim Morrison in Alexandria, Virginia by Mark Opsasnick (rev. ed., 2022) Poems and other fiction and non-fiction by Jim Morrison:
Selected discography:
Videos and films:
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