Is James Douglas Morrison really dead, or does he just want us to think that?
The Doors-
The excitement Jim Morrison elicits nearly thirty years after his death is just one of the many fascinating and seemingly eternal aspects of the Doors. Lest it be forgotten, the band also recorded some of the darkest and most challenging music of their time. What is so distinctive about the L.A. monster group is how the musicians -- especially the multifaceted Ray Manzarek -- successfully melded rock, jazz-inspired improvisation, and Weill-esque angularity into dramatic settings for Morrison's haunting baritone and acid-damaged poetry. Their amazing range set them apart from their Psychedelic brethren, as they moved seamlessly from the propelling rock of "Break on Through," the breathy beauty of "Indian Summer," the manic blues of "Five to One" and the Coltrane-flavored "Light My Fire" to the funky edginess of "Peace Frog" (it could be argued that the latter was the single biggest influence on the 1980s "Madchester" scene). Whether you feel that Morrison was a brilliant and complex modern-day shaman or a second-rate pretty-boy poet who lost it to alcohol and pills, it's impossible to deny the long-lasting impact the Doors have had on rock 'n' roll.
JIM'S HEIGHT WAS 5' 11"...HEY! THE SAME AS ME (HEHE)
'If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.' This quote from poet William Blake, via Aldous Huxley, was an inspiration to Jim Morrison (b. James Douglas Morrison, 8 December 1943, Melbourne, Florida, USA, d. 3 July 1971, Paris, France), a student of theatre arts at the University of California and an aspiring musician. His dream of a rock band entitled 'the Doors' was fulfilled in 1965, when he sang a rudimentary composition, 'Moonlight Drive', to fellow scholar Ray Manzarek (b. Raymond Daniel Manzarek, 12 February 1939, Chicago, Illinois, USA; keyboards). Impressed, he invited Morrison to join his campus R&B band, Rick And The Ravens, which also included the organist's two brothers. Ray then recruited drummer John Densmore (b. 1 December 1944, Santa Monica, California, USA), and the reshaped outfit recorded six Morrison songs at the famed World Pacific studios. The session featured several compositions that the band subsequently re-recorded, including 'Summer's Almost Gone' and 'End Of The Night'. Manzarek's brothers disliked the new material and later dropped out. They were replaced by Robbie Krieger (b. Robert Alan Krieger, 8 January 1946, Los Angeles, California, USA), an inventive guitarist, whom Densmore met at a meditation centre. Morrison was now established as the vocalist and the quartet began rehearsing in earnest.The Doors' first residency was at the London Fog on Sunset Strip, but they later found favour at the prestigious Whisky-A-Go-Go. They were, however, fired from the latter establishment, following a performance of 'The End', Morrison's chilling, oedipal composition. Improvised and partly spoken over a raga/rock framework, it proved too controversial for timid club owners, but the band's standing within the music fraternity grew. Local rivals Love, already signed to Elektra Records, recommended the Doors to the label's managing director, Jac Holzman who, despite initial caution, signed them in July 1966. The Doors, released the following year, unveiled many contrasting influences. Manzarek's thin sounding organ (he also performed the part of bassist with the aid of a separate bass keyboard) recalled the garage-band style omnipresent several months earlier, but Krieger's liquid guitar playing and Densmore's imaginative drumming were already clearly evident. Morrison's striking, dramatic voice added power to the exceptional compositions, which included the pulsating 'Break On Through' and an 11-minute version of 'The End'. Cover versions of material, including Willie Dixon 's 'Back Door Man' and Bertolt Brecht / Kurt Weill 's 'Alabama Song (Whiskey Bar)', exemplified the band's disparate influences. The best-known track, however, was 'Light My Fire', which, when trimmed down from its original seven minutes, became a number 1 single in the USA. Its fiery imagery combined eroticism with death, and the song has since become a standard. Its success created new problems and the Doors, perceived by some as underground heroes, were tarred as teenybop fodder by others. This dichotomy weighed heavily on Morrison who wished to be accepted as a serious artist. A second album, Strange Days, showcased 'When The Music's Over', another extended piece destined to become a tour de force within the band's canon. The quartet enjoyed further chart success when 'People Are Strange' broached the US Top 20, but it was 1968 before they secured another number 1 single with the infectious 'Hello I Love You'. The song was also the band's first major UK hit, although some of this lustre was lost following legal action by Ray Davies of the Kinks, who claimed infringement of his own composition, 'All Day And All Of The Night'. The action coincided with the Doors' first European tour. A major television documentary, The Doors Are Open, was devoted to the visit and centred on their powerful performance at London's Chalk Farm Roundhouse. The band showcased several tracks from their third collection, Waiting For The Sun, including the declamatory 'Five To One', and a fierce protest song, 'The Unknown Soldier', for which they also completed an uncompromising promotional film. However, the follow-up album, The Soft Parade, on which a horn section masked several unremarkable songs, was a major disappointment, although the tongue-in-cheek 'Touch Me' became a US Top 3 single and 'Wishful Sinful' was a Top 50 hit.Continued commercial success exacted further pressure on Morrison, whose frustration with his role as a pop idol grew more pronounced. His anti-authoritarian persona combined with a brazen sexuality and notorious alcohol and narcotics consumption to create a character bedevilled by doubt and cynicism. His confrontations with middle America reached an apogee on 1 March 1969 when, following a concert at Miami's Dinner Key auditorium, the singer was indicted for indecent exposure, public intoxication and profane, lewd and lascivious conduct. Although Morrison was later acquitted of all but the minor charges, the incident clouded the band's career when live dates for the next few months were cancelled. Paradoxically, this furore re-awoke the Doors' creativity. Morrison Hotel, a tough R&B-based collection, matched the best of their early releases and featured seminal performances in 'Roadhouse Blues' and 'You Make Me Real'. Absolutely Live, an in-concert set edited from a variety of sources, gave the impression of a single performance and exhibited the band's power and authority. However, Morrison, whose poetry had been published in two volumes, The Lords and The New Creatures, now drew greater pleasure from this more personal art form. Having completed sessions at the band's workshop for a new album, the last owed to Elektra, the singer escaped to Paris where he hoped to follow a literary career and abandon music altogether. Tragically, years of hedonistic excess had taken its toll and on 3 July 1971, Jim Morrison was found dead in his bathtub, his passing recorded officially as a heart attack. He was buried in Paris' Pere Lachaise cemetry in the esteemed company of Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust, and Honore de Balzac. L.A. Woman, his final recording with the Doors, is one of the band's finest achievements. It was also their first album recorded without producer Paul A. Rothchild, with engineer Bruce Botnick tackling co-production duties. The album's simple intimacy resulted in some superb performances, including 'Riders On The Storm', whose haunting imagery and stealthy accompaniment created a timeless classic. The survivors continued to work as the Doors, but while Other Voices showed some promise, Full Circle was severely flawed and the band soon dissolved. Densmore and Krieger formed the Butts Band, with whom they recorded two albums before splitting to pursue different paths. Manzarek undertook several projects as either artist, producer or manager, but the spectre of the Doors refused to die. Interest in the band flourished throughout the decade and in 1978 the remaining trio supplied newly recorded music to a series of poetry recitations, which Morrison had taped during the LA Woman sessions. The resultant album, An American Prayer, was a major success and prompted such archive excursions as Alive, She Cried, a compendium of several concert performances and Live At The Hollywood Bowl. The evocative use of 'The End' in Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 Vietnam war movie, Apocalypse Now, also generated renewed interest in the Door's legacy, and indeed, it is on those first recordings that the Doors' considerable reputation, and influence, rest. Since then their catalogue has never been out of print, and future generations of rock fans will almost certainly use them as a major role model. Director Oliver Stone's 1991 movie biography The Doors, starring Val Kilmer, helped confirm Morrison as one of the 60s' great cultural icons.
Hometown: Los Angeles, CA, United States
JIM'S NICKNAME WAS The Lizard King
Many people believe that Jimmy is still alive. I'm not sure if this is just an unvalidated wish projected onto a great rock legend, but it would be pretty cool if he could pull it off. Within his lifetime, James Morrison made many statements about his plans to resurrect himself from the dead. In The Doors last album, "L A Woman", Jim's lyrics repeat the verse "Mr. Mojo Risin". This is Jim's anogram which he supposedly planned to use after he was dead. In records it shows Jim as saying that he didn't like all of the un-welcome popularity his fame had brought him, and would rather fake his death and move to the African bush under his alias, as did his hero Rimbaud. Wether he is dead or not, there is a hell of a lot of mystery surrounding his death.
JIM'S father was a U.S. Naval Officer who fought in World War II.
It all happened within the city of Paris, France one night in a hotel room him and his lover Pam Courson were occupying. About a week or so prior to Jim's departure to Paris, he had fallen from the infamous hotel that Marilyn Monroe stayed at (I forget the name at this time) and broke a rib and punctured a lung then refused any medical attention. But that night, as Pam said, Jim told her he was sick and got up from bed to go to the bathroom and take a bath. The physics of this situation were sheerly that through his heavy drug use after so many years had damaged his heart and body mechanics so badly that in this fragile state, the temperature of the room contradicting the drastic change in the water could have surely given him a heart attack, not to mention the injuries he had sustained. Pamela was a known heroine user and it is speculated that she some how tricked him into using it that night, Jim wasn't into needles. If this was true, then this much pressure on his body would have unequivacally done him in as well. But the way he died may not be as important as why.
Through the span of his musical career, it was quite apparent that he had a fixation with death. So when he began to drink himself to death, nobody objected. It was simply his will. But was Jim so callous to the world that he would litterally deprive them of his presence? Or was he murdered, perhaps. No one knows, and will probably never know since the only witness, Pam, died three years after Jim. After the notorious DADE county incident, Jim was pretty much hunted down by every officer and law enforcement official in the country. On an airplane a couple of days before he left, Jim had asked a stewerdess (Flight Attendant) for a drink and five minutes later the plane prematurely landed so the police could make an emergency arrest of the rock star for "interfering with FAA regulations". However, he was buried in Pere Lachaise, a cemetary that he shares with other notables as Oscar Wilde. But Jim was quoted as saying, "First of all, I am an American. Second, a resident of California. And last, a resident of L.A." He would've wished to be buried in America. The death certificate was written in French and was very cloudy towards the details of his death. Pam had said she found Jim naked in the bathtub and that the water was room temperature. It is also said by many people of Paris that on that date Jim had snuck out of his room and went to a local night club where he allegedly OD'd on heroine in a bathroom and a woman had wanted to free his soul from his body by cutting out his eyes. There have supposedly been many accounts stating that they have witnessed coroner's photographs of the corpse without its eyes in their sockets. (CRINGE!!) Of course this is an insane theory based on nothing concrete so don't put a lot of faith into such vulgar rumors. The coroner's report said that when he arrived, the body was fully clothed and lying on the bed.
If he had a decoy body in his coffin or he was in there himself was to be determined On July 6th, of 2001 when his body was to be exumed and buried in America, but this was cancelled due to the enormous tourist attraction the grave site had become. So now the mystery is never to be solved, and the theories of his death will carry his name long after he died. However, with the fact that he had the motivation and the intelligence implied in such an attempt at fooling the entire world, there is still an open investigation by the American authorities into the death of James Morrison which have turned up no results so far.
