Jim Morrison

Jim Morrison was the singer of The Doors and one of the most magnetic and unsettling frontmen rock has ever had.

He did not sing: he officiated. He stood onstage like a shaman in a trance, with that deep baritone voice and that dangerous presence, and turned a concert into a rite, a ceremony between pleasure and menace.

The Doors' songs were dark, long, theatrical: "Light My Fire", "Break On Through", "The End", "Riders on the Storm". And they had an oddity for the time: there was no bass player onstage. Ray Manzarek played the bass lines with his left hand, on a Fender Rhodes keyboard bass, while his right hand played the organ. In the studio they did use session bass players, but live they were four, and that gap was part of the sound.

In barely five years, between 1965 and 1971, Morrison left a mark that lasts to this day, and a legend that devoured him.

The poet before the singer

The key to understanding Morrison is that he did not see himself as a rock star, but as a poet.

He studied film at the University of California, Los Angeles, and graduated in 1965—though he refused to attend the ceremony. That is where his sense of theatricality comes from, of image, of the show as a work of art.

He read the French cursed poets, Rimbaud, and Blake, and he wanted to be one of them. In fact, he took the band's name from "The Doors of Perception", the book by Aldous Huxley, which in turn borrowed a line from William Blake about cleansing the doors of perception to see the world as it is, infinite.

Morrison published books of poetry, directed short films, and always felt that music was only one of the forms of his real vocation, which was the word.

"The Lizard King" came out of a poem of his, "Celebration of the Lizard", not from a rock star pose.

His father was in the Gulf of Tonkin

And here is one of the least known facts in the whole history of rock, although it is almost always told wrong.

People repeat that Jim Morrison was the son of an admiral who helped set off the Vietnam War. Both halves of that sentence need correcting, and what is underneath is more interesting.

George Stephen Morrison was not an admiral in 1964: he was a captain, and he commanded the aircraft carrier USS Bon Homme Richard, the flagship of his division. He would only be promoted to rear admiral in 1967. In August 1964 he was in command of the United States naval forces present in the Gulf of Tonkin, during the incident that served as the pretext for escalating the intervention in Vietnam.

But what he did there was not set off anything. He and his staff reported to the naval command in Hawaii that the radar echoes detected by the destroyers on 4 August were probably false, generated by the bad weather. That is: Jim Morrison's father reported that the second attack, the one used as the justification, probably never happened.

That report did not reach the president. The war escalated anyway.

Meanwhile, the son was becoming an icon of the counterculture, of the pacifist movement, of the young people who repudiated that war.

And Jim cut ties with his family in a radical way. In the promotional biography Elektra Records asked him to write, distributed with The Doors' first album, he declared that his whole immediate family was dead. Years later he explained to Rolling Stone why: to protect his own people, and in particular his father's naval career.

It was not only legend-building. It was, in its twisted way, an act of care.

The fall

The same intensity that made him hypnotic onstage was destroying him off it.

Morrison drank more and more, got into trouble with the law over his behaviour at concerts, and his body and his music began to suffer.

In 1971, worn out by the rock circus, he went to Paris to try to be, at last, only a poet.

And there, on 3 July 1971, Pamela Courson found him dead in the bathtub of his apartment, at six in the morning. He was twenty-seven.

The official cause was heart failure. There was no autopsy, and it is worth saying why, because that defuses half the theories: French law did not require one, as there was no sign of foul play.

With him, rock lost the fourth member of the tragic "27 Club" in barely two years: first Brian Jones, in July 1969; then Jimi Hendrix, in September 1970; then Janis Joplin, in October of that same year; and now Morrison.

The detail in the calendar is chilling: he died exactly two years after Brian Jones, on the same day.

And there is another coincidence that seems scripted. On 2 July 1971, his father was the main speaker at the decommissioning ceremony of the USS Bon Homme Richard, the aircraft carrier he had commanded in Tonkin.

His son died in Paris the next day.

He is buried in the Père-Lachaise cemetery, and his grave is still one of the most visited in the world.

What to remember

Jim Morrison is the proof that sometimes the legend swallows the man.

He wanted to be a poet and the world made him a god of rock. He wanted the doors of perception and he found the doors of self-destruction.

If you put on "Riders on the Storm", "Light My Fire" or "The End", you will hear something almost no band managed: rock that sounds like a ceremony, like a journey, like danger, with a man singing as if he were summoning something.

Behind the myth of the Lizard King there was a reader of poetry, a son who turned his back on his father's world—and who lied about him to protect him—and a young man who went out too soon trying to live up to his own legend.

Listen to him for the music, which is enormous, and remember him whole.

Sources

James Douglas "Jim" Morrison (Melbourne, Florida, 8 December 1943 – Paris, 3 July 1971), singer, songwriter and poet, vocalist and leader of The Doors, with Ray Manzarek on keyboards, Robby Krieger on guitar and John Densmore on drums. The Doors had no bass player onstage: Manzarek played the bass lines with his left hand on a Fender Rhodes keyboard bass, while in the studio the group turned to session bass players such as Doug Lubahn, Jerry Scheff, Carol Kaye and Harvey Brooks. Morrison studied film at UCLA and graduated in 1965, refusing to attend the ceremony. The band's name comes from "The Doors of Perception" (1954) by Aldous Huxley, a title that in turn quotes William Blake. The nickname "the Lizard King" comes from his poem "Celebration of the Lizard", whose fragment "Not to Touch the Earth" was released on the album "Waiting for the Sun" (1968). His father, George Stephen Morrison, was not an admiral in 1964: he was a captain in command of the aircraft carrier USS Bon Homme Richard, the flagship of his division, and was promoted to rear admiral in 1967. In August 1964 he was in command of the United States naval forces present in the Gulf of Tonkin. He and his staff reported to the naval command in Hawaii that the radar echoes detected by the destroyers on 4 August were probably false and attributable to the bad weather, that is, that the second attack had probably not happened; that assessment was not passed on to the president and the escalation went ahead. Jim claimed that his whole immediate family was dead in the promotional biography Elektra Records asked him to write, distributed with the group's first album in 1967; in 1969 he told Rolling Stone that he had done it to protect his family and, in particular, his father's naval career. The relationship between the two was broken. Morrison died in Paris at the age of 27; the official cause was heart failure and no autopsy was performed, since French law did not require one as there was no sign of criminality. He was found by Pamela Courson at around six in the morning. He was part of the so-called "27 Club" alongside Brian Jones (3 July 1969), Jimi Hendrix (18 September 1970) and Janis Joplin (4 October 1970); he died exactly two years after Jones, on the same calendar day. On 2 July 1971, a day before his death, his father was the main speaker at the decommissioning ceremony of the USS Bon Homme Richard. He has been buried in the Père-Lachaise cemetery since 7 July 1971. Externally authored text, edited and verified for Rebobinados. Interpretations of the meaning of his work are offered as the author's reading. No song lyrics are reproduced, for copyright reasons. Information drawn from Wikipedia, Biography, Britannica, Rolling Stone, Ultimate Classic Rock and other press coverage.