Jim Morrison

Jim Morrison: The Lizard King and the Library

In 1990, a retired United States Navy admiral flew to Paris and laid a flat stone on his son's grave at Père Lachaise. The inscription he chose was Greek: ΚΑΤΑ ΤОΝ ΔΑΙΜОΝΑ ΕΑΥΤОΥ — true to his own spirit. George Stephen Morrison had commanded American naval forces during the Gulf of Tonkin incident of August 1964, the pretext for the Vietnam War. His son had spent the intervening years becoming the most famous argument against everything his father represented, and had been dead for nineteen years by the time the stone was set.

An Admiral's Son

James Douglas Morrison was born in Melbourne, Florida, on 8 December 1943. A naval childhood meant no fixed address: schools in San Diego, Fairfax County, Kingsville, Albuquerque, Alameda, and finally George Washington High School in Alexandria, Virginia, where he graduated in June 1961 with an average of 88 and a tested IQ of 149 — the top tenth of one per cent.

The story he told about himself concerned a road in New Mexico. Aged three or four, he said, he witnessed the aftermath of a crash involving an overturned truck and injured Native Americans, and called it the most formative event of his life. It surfaces in "Peace Frog." His family remembered it differently. His father allowed only that they "went by several Indians" who "made an impression on him." His sister was blunter: "he says we saw a dead Indian on the side of the road, and I don't even know if that's true." Researchers later dated the accident to 17 October 1947 and established that the one person who died was not Native American. The myth was better than the event, which is a useful thing to know about Morrison.

UCLA, and the Reading List

He studied at St Petersburg Junior College, then Florida State — where in September 1963 he was arrested drunk at a football game — and finished at UCLA's film school with a degree in theatre arts in 1965. He took Jack Hirschman's course on Antonin Artaud, refused to attend his own graduation, and had the diploma posted to his mother.

The reading was the real curriculum. Nietzsche, found in adolescence, gave him the Apollonian and Dionysian scheme he would perform for the rest of his life. Rimbaud shaped his short prose poems. Blake, Baudelaire, Burroughs, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Joyce and Céline all left marks — "End of the Night" is a direct nod to *Journey to the End of the Night*. Artaud's *The Theatre and its Double* supplied the theory of cruelty and spectacle that he took onto a rock stage.

The Doors

He and Ray Manzarek, fellow UCLA film students, formed the band in Venice in the summer of 1965 after Manzarek heard his lyrics on the beach and told him they were rock group material. Robby Krieger and John Densmore completed it. Morrison named them from Aldous Huxley's *The Doors of Perception*, itself quoting Blake: "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite."

Six albums followed in four years, from *The Doors* (1967) to *L.A. Woman* (1971). "Light My Fire" — largely Krieger's composition — spent three weeks at number one in the summer of 1967. Morrison played no instrument on stage beyond maracas, tambourine and occasional harmonica. He was the voice and the theatre.

The theatre got him arrested. On *The Ed Sullivan Show* in September 1967 he sang "girl we couldn't get much higher" after the censors had demanded it be changed; Sullivan cancelled six bookings. Morrison's response: "Hey, man. So what? We just did the Sullivan Show!" That December in New Haven he was maced backstage after telling a policeman "Eat me," then narrated the encounter from the stage and became the first rock performer arrested mid-performance.

The Lizard King on Trial

On 1 March 1969 at Miami's Dinner Key Auditorium, a visibly drunk Morrison harangued the crowd and, prosecutors said, exposed himself. Every other member of the band, and road manager Vince Treanor, insisted he had not; no photograph or film ever confirmed it. A six-person jury convicted him on 20 September 1970 after a sixteen-day trial and sentenced him to six months and a $500 fine. He was free on $50,000 bond when he died. Judge Murray Goodman told him he was "a person graced with a talent." Florida's governor Charlie Crist granted a full posthumous pardon on 8 December 2010, which would have been his sixty-seventh birthday.

What Morrison took from the trial was not martyrdom. "There were guys down there, black guys, that would go each day before I went on," he said. "It took about five minutes and they would get twenty or twenty-five years in jail."

By then the drinking had won. He was arriving at sessions intoxicated from 1968; by early 1969 he had gained weight, grown a beard and abandoned the leather trousers entirely. In March 1971 he took leave from the band and joined Pamela Courson in an apartment on the Rue Beautreillis in the Marais, writing letters about long solitary walks through the city. He shaved, lost weight, and telephoned Densmore to ask how *L.A. Woman* was selling. Courson found him dead in the bath at around six in the morning on 3 July 1971. The stated cause was heart failure. French law required no autopsy, and none was performed, which is why the heroin theories have never gone away.

Why Jim Is Called a Genius

The claim has an unusually literal foundation and an unusually weak superstructure. The foundation is that Morrison was measurably, verifiably clever: an IQ of 149, the top 0.1%, a degree from UCLA, and a reading habit that ran from Nietzsche to Artaud with genuine comprehension. Manzarek, who knew him best, described a split: "Jim really was two very distinct and different people. A Jekyll and Hyde. When he was sober, he was Jekyll, the most erudite, balanced, friendly kind of guy." The surviving Doors made the specific complaint that his interest in "revolt, disorder, and chaos" was read as nihilism when "hardly anyone noticed that Jim was paraphrasing Rimbaud and the Surrealist poets."

That word — paraphrasing — is where the case gets difficult, and it comes from his own bandmates. Morrison brought a serious literary education into a form that had none, and the transposition itself was original. But the poems he published in his lifetime, *The Lords* and *The New Creatures* (both 1969), have never established him in the canon he was quoting from; his reputation as a poet rests substantially on posthumous collections and on the mystique of dying at twenty-seven. He wrote lyrics, not music, and could not play an instrument on stage. His producer Paul Rothchild's assessment of the actual instrument was deflating: "a Rock and Roll Bing Crosby." And the last three years of his life were a documented slide into alcoholism that wrecked performances and ended in a Paris bathtub with no autopsy.

The honest verdict is that Morrison possessed a real, tested intelligence and a rare theatrical instinct — Stephen Davis called him "the greatest American rock star of his era," and that is defensible. Whether he was a great poet is a claim his admirers make far more often than critics do, and the evidence for it is thinner than his legend requires.

Legacy

He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with the Doors in 1993, placed fifth in a 2011 *Rolling Stone* readers' poll of the best lead singers, and left a vocal style that Simon Reynolds identified as the prototype for gothic rock. Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, Ian Curtis and Siouxsie Sioux all claimed him. His grave is among the most visited in Paris, a few paths from Oscar Wilde and Édith Piaf, though only four or five people attended the burial. Manzarek's verdict on Oliver Stone's 1991 film doubles as a verdict on the legend generally: "It was about 'Jimbo Morrison', the drunk. God, where was the sensitive poet and the funny guy?"

Achievements

• Instruments: keyboard instrument, percussion instrument and maraca
• Genres: rock music and psychedelic rock