On the evening of July 2, 1971, Jim Morrison was in Paris. He had been to France three months earlier, when he had completely lost touch with himself. There was nothing left to remind him of who he was. Whatever he wanted. What did he want.
During the recording of the Doors' last album (LA Woman) he drank 36 beers a day. His voice was not coming out. He had a huge issue with writing lyrics which in earlier years was what he 'came' most easily - as he questioned the 'being' of the Puritan country in which he lived. He couldn't get his mind in order. He decided to leave Hollywood to "clean up" and find himself again. In the letters he sent to his friends, he wrote about the endless walks he took in the city, alone. He had informed that he had also lost some of the weight he had gained in the last months in Los Angeles.
After all certainty, on 7/2/1971 he was in Paris. It is also certain that the next morning he was dead. He was 27 years old. It was preceded by the deaths of Brian Jones (guitarist of the Rolling Stones), Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. They all 'left' at the age of 27. Here are 27 things about James Douglas Morrison, the American singer, musician, songwriter and poet who was the ultimate rock star, but also the ultimate loner.
✔ One script wanted him to be in the apartment he lived in with the woman who accompanied him almost all of his adult life (Pamela Courson), having a strong cough, "draining" blood, refusing to call a doctor, filling the bathtub and sink into it.
✔ In the second scenario he was at home watching a documentary (Death Valley).
✔ In a third, he was in the club toilet located on the other side of the city and injected heroin.
✔ In the quarter where he was walking in the 'city of light' he was shot by junkies. On the fifth he had just boarded a flight to an unknown destination.
The first case was valid. He was with Courson in the apartment on the Rue Beautreillis, at No. 17, when the cough he had had since the afternoon became more severe. He woke up his partner, who told him to call a doctor. He asked her to accompany him to the bathroom, where she filled the tub with hot water and suggested that he get into it to relax.
✔ Then he went to sleep. The last thing she remembers is Morrison asking her “Pam are you here?”. Woke up shortly after 6am. The man of her life was not by her side, in bed. She called him. He got no answer. She found him in the bathroom. He seemed to be sleeping. He looked happy - he had a smile. She called him. He didn't open his eyes and Courson thought he was joking. He understood that this was not the truth. He called the fire department and then the police. It was late.
✔ His body was left in his apartment - wrapped in plastic and heavily iced - for three days, until the casket Courson had ordered was prepared. It was the cheapest he could find. It cost $75. In those 72 hours, a doctor had visited the apartment and signed the death certificate. He wrote 'heart failure' as the cause. No autopsy was performed - it was not required by French law. Several who claimed to be eyewitnesses insisted that she had died of a heroin overdose.
✔ When Morrison's manager arrived in France, from the US he found the coffin sealed and the death certificate on it. The announcement of the death and the funeral took place at Père Lachaise (home to Oscar Wilde and Edith Piaf - among others) on July 7. That is, six days after his death. The contract signed by Alain Ronay, a friend of the couple who helped Courson with the arrangements, with the cemetery was for 30 years. Ended in 2001. Extended for a few more decades.
✔ The day after the funeral, Courson returned to the US, along with the legend's manager, Bill Siddons. The latter stated to the media that "I can say that Jim died of natural causes". He had, however, no answer for the questions that followed. That is, if there had been a police investigation, if there had been an autopsy, who was the doctor who examined him - the signature on the death certificate was illegible and why no one had informed the parents of the deceased - Crouson had lied to the American Embassy that the Morrison had no immediate living relatives, so the funeral was quick and no questions asked and not even attended by a priest. There wasn't even a tombstone. The French authorities put one. Stolen in 1973. Listed in cemetery as 'Douglas James Morrison'.
✔ On the ten year anniversary of Morrison's death (1981) the Croatian sculptor Mladen Mikulin obtained permission from the cemetery to make and install a marble bust. It was abused by vandals and stolen in 1988. Two years later, his father placed a flat stone. On it was a copper plate on which he had written the Greek 'against the devil himself'. As 'demons of the self' was called the divinity that lived inside each person from the moment he came to life until he left and took care of evolution and well-being. The phrase was chosen by his father, as it means that his son always acted according to the dictates of his conscience - and not society.
✔ Back in July 1971, Siddons couldn't answer for sure if it was Morrison in the coffin he saw in front of him. And that's how the theory arose that he didn't die. That it disappeared. Courson had told him that Jim had started using hard drugs. His friends disputed it. They were unable to vindicate Morrison in court, as Courson died of a drug overdose in 1974. She was 27.
✔ When Morrison died, three paternity suits were pending against him. He did not hide that he often had sex with groupies, musicians, writers and photographers. There was not even one claim to his property by the plaintiffs. He had designated Courson as his sole heir - even though she didn't 'owe' them anything, legally. In his will he had also mentioned himself as a 'single man'.
✔ Among the conspiracy theories that had arisen, the most famous one wanted him to have pretended to be dead in order to escape from everyone and everything. The basis of this theory had to do with the related plates he made himself. The second most popular theory is that of his murder - done by the drug dealer Jean de Breiteuil. That was something the merchant's ex-partner had said.
But enough, with his death that became part of his legend. Let's see some things about his life. First, how he had introduced himself in the note requested by Elektra, the record company that gave the Doors their first contract (1966) from all members.
✔ “You could say that I happen to be ideal for the job I do. It is something like the feeling of a bowstring, drawn back for twenty-two years and suddenly let go. I am an American first, a Californian second, and a Los Angeles resident third. I was always attracted to ideas that had to do with rebellion against authority. I like ideas that were about escaping the established order or subverting it. I'm interested in anything related to revolution, disorder, chaos. Mostly the activities that seem to have no meaning, as it seems to me that this is the path to freedom. That external rebellion is a way to provoke internal freedom. I'm a Sagittarius and, most importantly, we're the Doors. The world we propose is a new Wild West. An emotionally evil world. The night. The sea. The Pacific Ocean, violence and peace, the way between the new and the old".
✔ On the same list, he noted that what he liked to do on his dates was talk and that his favorite artists were Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley. Next to 'names of family members' he had written 'dead'. It was not. His father, George Stephen was an admiral in the US Navy. A fact that meant he had transfers. The whole family followed him in them. In the first 16 years of his life, Jim had experienced more than seven changes of home, school and friends.
✔ His mother was named Clara Virginia, his sister Anne Robin and his brother Andrew Lee. The way their dad followed, to teach his children to be disciplined, was the same one he had in his work:he would scream in front of them, reduce them until they 'break', that is, until they burst into tears and admit their mistake.
✔ He read every book he could find in front of him from a young age. He especially liked philosophers and poets. He was greatly influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche and the way he saw aesthetics, ethics, Apollonia and Dionysian duality - which you can find in his lyrics. One of the earliest influences was Plutarch's Parallel Lives. He also enjoyed the writings of the French existentialist philosophers - for what they had to say about human existence. His high school teacher had said that he was the student who read the most in the class. "I had to enlist the help of another professor to check if the books he told me Jim was reading actually existed."
✔ Once he got his BA from UCLA (he began his studies in Pittsburg, continued in Florida and finished in California - with degrees in English and theater and Professor Antonin Artaud defining the dark poetic sensibility of his theatricality) he cut and good morning to his family. He did not mention them in the meantime, never anywhere. An additional reason was that his father did not approve of the career he had chosen to pursue. Later, George Stephen admitted that one of the main reasons for the lack of communication was his assessment of his son's talent (he had described him as a total talent).
✔ He never had anything to say about his parents and siblings. He talked about his Irish and Scottish roots constantly, as he believed they had a say in the way he wrote music and poetry. According to Celtic Family Magazine, his family was descended from the Isle of Lewis in Scotland and the Clelland clan of Ireland. They were united through marriage.
✔ From the beginning of the 60's he started to depend on alcohol. The first time he was arrested was in 1963. He was 19. He had disturbed the peace while drunk and taunted the players at a football match he had attended. In January 1966, after a trip with his fellow students, he confessed that he had killed one and buried him in the desert. An investigation that was ordered showed that he had kissed a 14-year-old girl. He was arrested for sexual assault, before the charges were dropped - with the reappearance of the classmate he allegedly killed.
✔ In late 1967 he became the first rock artist to be arrested on stage, during a performance - in Connecticut. Authorities said he had incited riots by taunting police. There had been a fight with a police officer backstage.
✔ In the first month of 1968, he was arrested for public drunkenness and disturbing the peace, in Las Vegas, where he was again mocking and swearing at police officers. By March 1969 he was causing a stir at every appearance, with questions such as 'do you want to see my...' (you can guess which one) he made at what has been recorded as the beginning of his end, in Miami. Three days later, six warrants were issued for his arrest in Dade County - for indecent exposure, among other things.
✔ Convicted on 9/20/1970 by a jury of six after a trial that had 16 days of testimony, to six months in prison and a $500 fine. He was released on $50,000 bail and said, “I wasted a lot of time and energy on this trial. It lasted a year and a half. I guess it was a valuable experience, because before the trial I had a very unrealistic schoolboy attitude about the American justice system. After the trial my eyes were opened a little. I saw black guys going to court every day. They needed five minutes to 'eat' 20 and 25 years of detention. If I didn't have unlimited funds to continue with my own case, I would have been sentenced to three years in prison.
“If you have money you don't go to jail”
The degrees, the Doors and the end
✔ In 1965 and while he had received a bachelor's degree in cinematography from UCLA, he lived as a bohemian in Venice Beach, on the roof of a building where a fellow student lived. There he wrote the lyrics to the Doors' first songs. As his fellow student - and later member of the Doors, Ray Manzarek - had revealed, he fed on canned beans and LSD. Morrison and Manzarek became the first two members of the Doors. They grew to four when they met Robby Krieger (guitar) and John Densmore (drums). Besides Morrison, the others had in common their love of meditation. They didn't miss a lesson. Jim wasn't going to class.
✔ The name Doors was found in Aldous Huxley's book, entitled The Doors of Perception - it was a reference to the unlocking of the doors of perception, after the use of psychedelic drugs). Huxley was inspired by William Blake's "Marriage of Heaven and Hell", who wrote that "if the doors of perception are cleared, all will appear to men as they are:infinite".
✔ In one of his first interviews, he had narrated an accident he had seen when he was 4 years old. A truck with Indians had overturned and many had lost their lives. He wrote about this incident in the lyrics of Peace Frog. His father did not confirm the fact. He had said that indeed, when Jim was young, the family passed through an Indian colony and he did see an accident, but it was very minor. "But he was very upset. Every time he thought of the Indian, he cried." His sister's story is similar.
✔ In July 1969, during an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, he was asked why he had said his parents were dead. He replied "I didn't want to involve them. And after all, if you wanted to find out if they were alive or dead, you could do that. In any case, I don't see any of my family. And what I'm saying now, is the most I've ever said about them".
He had begun to get trapped in the image he had created - of the ultimate rock star - and according to his favorite habit, he began the deconstruction. He gained weight, grew a beard and dressed only in baggy clothes. Regarding the crisis he had suffered, at the appearance in Miami, which ended ingloriously with his arrest, while he was on stage, Manzarek had explained that "he was angry, because people demanded to see madness and not to listen to good music". Before the proposal he made to show his genitals, he had told the audience "you are a bunch of... idiots, who let others tell you what to do and oppress you". After the incident, the Doors were banned from all concert venues. Morrison would soon leave Hollywood in a last-ditch effort to save his soul. He did not make it. This year marks 50 years that he is no longer with us. Or at least we don't know that they are near us.