Stephen Davis. Jim Morrison:Life, Death, Legend

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Stephen Davis...Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend

For me the laziest Doors related book ever written as Davis turns everything we know on its head and using the tools of innuendo and gossip casts Jim as a rather pathetic fool who was molested as a child and grows up to become a sad depressed gay impotent half mad spoilt brat. Taking the work of other authors and placing his own 270 degree spin on thier words he portrays Jim Morrison in the exact opposite light to that which we have become accustomed to therefore ensuring that Doors books rather than delving into the true nature of the much missed poet will simply explore the more loony side of his character and not worry about research or evidence when selling thier insane theories.
The stupidest book ever written about The Doors and Jim Morrison...


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As an artist and persona, Jim Morrison epitomized the late 1960s, bridging a burgeoning counterculture and popular culture, while acting out the iconoclastic rage, rampant libido, and spectacular flameout of a tumultuous era. The music he created with The Doors has sold over 50 million records worldwide—with over 13 million in the last decade alone, as their songs have been embraced by a new generation. But despite Morrison's seminal importance, there has not yet been an authoritative biography that does justice to him and his creative legacy. Until now.
Stephen Davis, the preeminent rock biographer and author of the classic Led Zeppelin history Hammer of the Gods (over 600,000 copies sold in three editions, and a #1 New York Times bestseller), has uncovered never-before-seen documents, conducted dozens of original interviews, and scoured Morrison's unpublished journals and recordings to write the definitive biography of a misunderstood legend. Jim Morrison is packed with startling new revelations about every phase of his life and career, from his troubled youth in a strict military household to his blossoming as a rock icon among the avant-garde LA scene to his voracious drug abuse and secret sexual experiments. Davis also investigates one of the greatest mysteries in rock history—the circumstances surrounding Morrison's mysterious and unsolved death—as he pieces together new evidence to tell the true and heartbreaking story of Morrison's last tragic days in Paris.

'Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend' (talking book) CD Review.

Jim Morrison was a complete nut job. And that comes from a guy who loves The Doors' music. But what a self-destructive, insane genius he was. Maybe an all-too-short life riddled with drugs, alcohol and madness is the price to pay for such brilliance.
According to the Stephen Davis work "Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend," fans actually got the best of the deal. We got to enjoy Morrison’s music but never had to tolerate the man. Davis writes that Morrison's fellow members of The Doors, especially drummer John Densmore, lived in fear of Jim's sometimes brutal, physical freak-outs.
Davis, who also wrote biographies of the Rolling Stones, Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin, delivers a fascinating work that explores the on and offstage life of one of America's most outrageous and troubled poets.
The fact that "Jim Morrison" is so compelling in spite of the mediocre reading by Paul Michael is a testament to the skill of the author. Michael tends to … read three or four words … and pause whether he needs to or not. He shows no emotion in his delivery, which is sad since Morrison's life was all about passion.
In a solo performance at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland a few years ago, Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek said he was troubled by Oliver Stone's movie on Morrison's life. If that troubled him, this book will drive him crazy.
But the work rings true, very true. Davis interviewed dozens of people and pieced together stories about Morrison from many sources. When he is unable to come up with a definitive version of events, he says so. That makes me feel more confident that Davis knows what he's talking about.
Even when he describes Morrison as a loud-mouthed, obnoxious, drunken jerk most of the time, Davis is reverential of the music, that blessed music.
Davis says it was difficult to be Jim's friend because friends and lovers were the first ones to feel the brunt of his brutal emotional and physical assaults.
Davis said Manzarek, Densmore, and brilliant guitarist Robby Krieger never knew if Jim would show up for a concert or a recording session. And if he did show up, they did not know what kind of condition he would be in. One time he could be a consummate professional, polite and friendly. The next day he could be a bestial drunk, smashing everything in sight.
Once, completely unprovoked, he smashed a beer bottle over the head of his road manager. When poet Mike McClure (one of the very few people who could almost control Morrison) said "That was not cool," Jim responded by smashing another bottle over his own head.
The band wasted thousands of dollars of studio time because Jim was AWOL, or too drugged or drunk to perform.
Then there's the love of his life, his own personal Yoko Ono, a heroin addict named Pamela Courson. She was a black hole for Jim's money and emotion. Actually, she was a female Jim Morrison. He cheated on her with both women and men, did drugs and drank to incredible excess. So did she, except for the sex with females.
One not-so-big revelation in the work was that Morrison had a fetish for anal sex. The big surprise is that America's hairy-chested, leather-clad, sexual icon of the late 1960s was bisexual. Another surprising revelation was that Morrison "had trouble with black people." When he got drunk he would hurl racial slurs at perfect strangers, which sometimes got him into fights.
The biography is a wonderful play-by-play of the creation of many Doors songs, wonderful background stories about what the songs mean. "Touch Me," one of the greatest Doors songs of all time, was written after the band witnessed a brutal fight between Krieger and his girlfriend in the studio. During the fight, Krieger was taunting, "Hit me, babe, I'm not afraid." and some of the other lines that actually became part of the song. Morrison suggested changing the lyrics from "Hit me" to "Touch me." The rest is rock and roll history.
There are many other stories about the creation of songs like "Light My Fire," "Love Street" (written about Morrison's funky rock star neighbors in Laurel Canyon) and the anthemic "Five To One," which was as much about his girlfriend's heroin habit as a cry for revolution.
The work is 11 CDs long and could have gone on another 11. It's something that any self-respecting Doors fan has to hear.
Reviewed by Michael Sangiacomo - September 23, 2004
“Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend,” by Stephen Davis (Penguin Audio; nonfiction; 11 CDs; 14 hours;
read by Paul Michael).

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

AUTHOR: MORRISON WAS MOLESTED AS A CHILD
Rock legend JIM MORRISON was molested as a child, according to the author of a shocking new expose into the tragic THE DOORS star's life.
In his new tome, JIM MORRISON: LIFE, DEATH, LEGEND, rock biographer STEPHEN DAVIS claims Morrison revealed his traumatic secret when he was interviewed by attorney MAX FINK as the pair worked to win an indecency charge against the iconic star in 1969.
The author recently took charge of the transcript of the Morrison interview, which was written up by Fink's wife after the lawyer's death.
Davis writes, "The lawyer said that he asked Jim why he had chosen to expose himself onstage in his home state of Florida. 'I thought it was a good way to pay homage to my parents,' Jim replied.
"Fink then asked what his parents had done to him... (He) then let slip that he'd been molested by a man when he was a boy. Jim refused to tell Max Fink who had molested him, except to say it was someone close to the family.
"When Jimmy tried to tell his mother, Fink claimed, she had gotten angry, called him a liar and insisted such a thing never could have happened.
"Fink said that Jim began to cry as he told him the story, and claimed Jim had said that he could never forgive his mother for this."



Book excerpt...
Jim didn’t take [his girlfriend] Pamela to screenwriter Gavin Lambert’s big party for Andy Warhol in Santa Monica Canyon. It was a Young Hollywood crowd, with oddball musician Tiny Tim performing for movie stars Warren Beatty, Julie Christie and Tuesday Weld.…Jim met director Roman Polanski and his stoned starlet wife, Sharon Tate. Janis Joplin — the hot, gravel-voiced singer of Big Brother and the Holding Company — was there too, dressed in handmade crushed velvet clothes and peacock feathers, holding her trademark bottle of Southern Comfort.

Jim sat down next to Janis and threw his arm around her. He was drinking Scotch. Jim asked Janis about herself, and she blurted a few phrases about her troubled high school years in Texas, where she had been mocked and shunned because her family wasn’t well off. After an hour, and after many more drinks and some pills, just as Janis was laughing a little too raucously at something Jim had said, he grabbed her by her hair and suddenly forced her face down into his crotch.

It was an awful moment. People near them backed off. Furious at this humiliation, Janis hit Jim in the face and walked away, calling him an asshole over her shoulder.

“I know I’m an asshole,” he said to her back.

Later, as she was leaving, an even drunker Jim stopped her car in the driveway and tried to speak to her. Witnesses said she rolled down her window and, when Jim bent down to apologize, she smashed her Southern Comfort bottle over his head before driving off, cursing him.

Excerpted from Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend, by Stephen Davis, 2004. Gotham Books.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

THREE DOLLAR BILL
By RICHARD BURNETT

Back door man
I was 15 years old in 1981, when I read the sensational, over-the-top Jim Morrison bio No One Here Gets Out Alive. I even sported a Morrison-circa-1967 haircut. That same year Rolling Stone put Morrison on their cover with the banner headline, “He’s hot, he’s sexy, he’s dead.” I remember looking at Jim and thinking, “I wouldn’t mind sucking his dick.”
But Jim was straight, so he might as well be dead. I mean, you couldn’t pick up a book or magazine without reading how many women the Lizard King fucked before his heavy drinking prevented him from even getting it up. But last week, after reading Boston-based rock biographer Stephen Davis’s just-published book Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend (Gotham Books), I was not surprised to discover that Morrison was, in fact, a closeted bisexual.
Davis writes that Morrison copped Marlene Dietrich poses (aha!) while posing in his leathers in the early days of the Doors, and Morrison’s girlfriends often bitched that he liked to take them up the ass. (Gives new meaning to the Doors’ cover of Willie Dixon’s “Back Door Man,” doesn’t it?) “He really preferred women from the backside,” Morrison friend Miranda Babitz explains in Life, Death, Legend. “[Morrison’s longtime girlfriend] Pam [Courson] was pissed off about that, but she stuck with it. It was part of the reason she was always snarling at him. One time when living in her apartment with them, she got pissed off at him because she thought he was running around with someone else, so she took his favourite vest that he liked to wear onstage and wrote FAGGOT on the back of it with a Magic Marker.” It wouldn’t be the last time Courson called Morrison a faggot.
Rumours of Morrison’s taste for men made the grapevine when he hung around Andy Warhol’s Factory crew. “I first heard about Morrison’s bisexuality on the street in New York City on the off, off outer fringes of Warholism,” Davis told me this week. “You never knew what to say because they said everybody was gay.”
What is beyond dispute, though, is Morrison’s affair with a Hollywood hustler in June 1968. Davis writes that Morrison “reportedly had a fleeting relationship with a well-known male prostitute who worked along the strip. This hustler then tried to extort money by threatening to expose Jim’s secret sexual habits. Jim’s lawyer, Max Fink, arranged for a meeting between the hustler and an intermediary, who was a private detective and leg-breaker. The hustler was left bleeding and missing teeth in an alley behind a motel near the Los Angeles airport, and the blackmail attempt stopped.”
Morrison, as everybody knows, was an angry young man. (He was just 27 when he died of a heroin overdose on July 3, 1971. His dealer, Frenchman Jean De Breteuil—who also supplied Keith Richards and sold Janis Joplin her fatal dose—fled to Morocco with his then-girlfriend Marianne Faithfull, where they told my friend Roger Steffens, now the chair of the Grammy Awards reggae committee, what really happened that fateful night.)
Anyway, Morrison’s efforts to subvert authority make all the more sense when you consider that in those pre-Stonewall days there wasn’t an alternative to the closet. I tell Davis I believe Morrison’s anger was fueled by his inability to deal with his sexuality. “I think that’s astute,” Davis says. “I didn’t really think of that. I think he had [more of] a heterosexual life than a homosexual life. His heterosexual life was so public. There were likely quite a few boys. I’m going with my gut: why wouldn’t Jim Morrison be gay and so what if he was?”
But Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek hates Davis’s book. “Woof! This is a strange story by a weird guy turning Morrison into an Oliver Stone-like stranger,” Manzarek told me over the phone this week from his Los Angeles home. “I don’t know the Jim Morrison he writes about. There are some things that are true. Why the guy wrote this book I have no idea unless he wanted to get into that supposed bisexual action himself. It’s Freudian.”
Davis shoots back, “I was doing a radio interview last week and one of the DJs said, ‘Ray Manzarek is really slagging your book and no way was Jim bisexual,’ and I didn’t know what to say. Well, bring it on, Ray.”
Manzarek tells me, “If Jim was a bisexual I never saw him with a beautiful young man as [Hollywood gay hustler turned literary icon] John Rechy would write. I read City of Night—it is Hollywood, after all. I had no awareness [of Morrison’s alleged bisexuality]. I always saw him with girls.”
That, of course, is the problem with the closet, whether one is gay or bisexual: you only know what you see. I have no doubt Morrison loved men as much as he loved women, but I give the last word to Manzarek, the man who discovered Morrison and to this day maintains the myth of the Lizard King. “I never had sex with Jim,” he says, “and you know what? Neither did you. But what a fine and thick member he had!”
Edmonton VueWeekly 2004
Stephen Davis book Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend

[stuart]

The Book to me is 99% SHIT it seems to be cobbled together from other morrison/doors books.

The ONLY saving graces of this book are the paris pics and the Chapter"Last Tango In Paris" which i found really good and he had interviewed a guy i had not found interviewed in any other doors/morrison book(has he ?) was philip dalecky, the chap who jim left his tapes with.

[jym]

If Jim was homosexual he sure didn't get that you're supposed to sleep with women. & I remember the ascertain that Jim was gay because some of the poets he hung out with were gay, hate to tell ya if you're a poet other poets are going to be homosexual.

Let me just say I gave this book away to a really cute girl because she wore low cut blouses & filled them out!

[thebadcowboy]

i just finished reading this book and i found quite a few inaccuracies that i know of in it....
where did this guy get his information from.... a lot of it is obviously just bits and pieces from tho other books out there, but there are quite a few times where he states things about morrison but does not give a source for his information.... did he just make it all up...?
i also noticed that the book was fucked up with its chronology in that he kept slipping back in forth in time which made it difficult to maintain a particular train of thought....!


arthur rimbaud died in ethiopia at 27....................! no he didnt.... ;D

[ensenada]

I havnt read it yet. but considering there are blatant inaccuracies in it and untrue facts..there is no way you can count any of the other material in it as being true and genuine...thats scientific theory at work there regarding truth and evidence etc!
as for jim being gay, i heard the author got his facts from people who have come foward supposedly to say jim payed for sex with them or something. ok then show these people, what bollox!
seeing that jim was true to himself throughout his life, then why would he hide the fact that he was gay from himself by shagging countless women? of course even if he was gay, I would see jim in the same light. so whats is this author aiming to do to jims credibility and why? obvioulsy just making a name for himself and leaching of Jim's name like all the other scum that do it!

[wyldlizardqueen]

thebadcowboy said:

i just finished reading this book and i found quite a few inaccuracies that i know of in it....
where did this guy get his information from.... a lot of it is obviously just bits and pieces from tho other books out there, but there are quite a few times where he states things about morrison but does not give a source for his information.... did he just make it all up...?
i also noticed that the book was fucked up with its chronology in that he kept slipping back in forth in time which made it difficult to maintain a particular train of thought....!


arthur rimbaud died in ethiopia at 27....................! no he didnt.... ;D

I second that --i noticed where he has kept slipping back and foruth in time, i like to give him a peice of my mind!!! When i get through reading it, i am going to burn my copy!! ;D

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

To be perfectly honest it would not alter my perception of Jim Morrison one iota if it was now suddenly revealed he was in fact GAY!
Maybe it would have in 1971 (I'll never know) but most of us have grown up a bit since those days of intolerance.
And as Rick mentions Jim did not care a toss what people thought so why hide it?
Davis' revalations would be interesting if they were backed up with any kind of facts but all he does is spread juicy gossip without any kind of evidence.......
Character assasination by innuendo is all this silly book is. Dylan Jones has lost his crown as writer of the stupidest Morrison book and it would take a truly monumental pile of toss to beat this crap.
All Davis has done is create controversy to sell a book.....a useful tool for a writer but that does not make it an authoritive work to be mulled over by scolars.....just another trash 'novel' where the subject being dead can't find 'you' in a resteraunt and twat 'you' in the mouth.
Davis is your typical gutless coward who would trash someones reputation knowing he could never face them in the flesh.

[stuart]

Is this like Albert Goldman with his elvis and lennon books then!.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

stuart said:

Is this like Albert Goldman with his elvis and lennon books then!.

Yes but Goldman did the decent thing and died!

[stuart]

Has anybody bought the 11 cd's of someone reading davis book??! hmmm well i do need something to get me to sleep at nights.......

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

The Last Days of Jim Morrison

A rare look into the rock god's journals

By STEPHEN DAVIS


The retired Hollywood lawyer who played golf with Max Fink -- the attorney who defended Jim Morrison on the 1969 Miami obscenity and indecent-exposure charges -- said in 2002 that he believed Fink might have received a warning concerning Morrison about a month before Jim left for Paris, which would have been in early February 1971. According to this attorney, who spoke on condition of anonymity, Fink was given a tip by an associate of Mickey Rudin, the prominent Beverly Hills attorney whose clients included Frank Sinatra and who had ties to the Nixon administration. This retired lawyer was given to understand that Fink was quietly told that his famous client would be neutralized in prison -- murdered or incapacitated -- and should get out of the country before his legal appeals were exhausted and his passport confiscated. France, which has no extradition treaty with the United States for so-called sex crimes, was suggested as a logical place for Jim to take refuge. No direct or documentary evidence for this warning exists, only the unverifiable word of a respected former associate of both Rudin and Fink. Whatever the accuracy of this account, within one month Jim Morrison was in Paris, living incognito as a lodger in an apartment house, under the assumed names of James Douglas and/or Douglas James.
Pamela left for Paris first, on February 14th. The next day she checked into the Hotel George V and hooked up with her sometime boyfriend, Count Jean de Breteuil, a playboy and classy dope dealer -- his hashish and opium supposedly came from a Moroccan chauffeur attached to the French consulate in L.A. The de Breteuil family owned all the French-language newspapers in North Africa. When his father had died a few years earlier, Jean inherited his title of Comte de Breteuil, so he was an actual French count whose lineage went back 700 years.

Jim himself left four weeks later. He didn't pack much. He took prints of his two films, Feast of Friends and HWY; as many notebooks as he could find; the typed manuscripts of his unpublished poetry; the two quarter-inch-tape reels of his solo poetry readings; his Super-8 movie camera; a few copies of his poetry books; his personal photo file (including color transparencies of himself, a recent publicity photo of Joan Baez, pictures from the Miami trial and selected Elektra eight-by-ten-inch promotional glossies of himself); and a few precious books and clothes. He left his library and some files in Pamela's apartment and told the Doors' accountant to pay the rent while they were gone.

Pamela was by now a familiar figure in upscale Saint Germain hangouts like Cafe de Flore, Les Deux Magots and Brasserie Lipp as a companion of Count Jean de Breteuil. Her acquaintances included young models and actors, a few diplomats and cafe habitues such as les minets (gay fashion kids) and les michetons (handsome young men, impeccably dressed and groomed, who hung around le Drugstore and were employed as gigolos by fashionable but lonely women of the quarter). Through de Breteuil, Pamela had become friends with the gamine model and starlet Elizabeth Lariviere, known professionally as Zozo. Zozo lived in a large apartment on the Right Bank, and when Pamela learned Zozo had a job coming up in the south, she arranged for Jim to rent the flat while Zozo was away that spring.

Sometime in the middle of March 1971, Jim moved into the second-largest bedroom of a fourth-floor apartment in a handsome nineteenth-century Beaux Arts building at 17 rue Beautrellis, in the Fourth Arrondissement. The slightly shabby flat was furnished with the typically overstuffed antiques of the bourgeoisie. There were elegant marble fireplaces, parquet floors and plaster reliefs on the walls, and the ceiling of the salon was painted with a blue sky and puffy clouds. The leaky bathroom, smelling of old-fashioned French plumbing, had a bidet, a toilet and a narrow tiled wall tub that was equipped with a hand-held shower. (Zozo had padlocked her bedroom while she was away.) Jim's room faced the morning sun, and he moved a leather-covered writing table to the big window. As the day progressed, he would move the table to the other side of the flat, so he could sit in the sun as it warmed the courtyard in the rear of the building. A concert pianist lived across the courtyard, and the sound of her daily exercises seemed to please Jim. On the apartment's lobby mailbox, he taped a handwritten label for the postman: "James Douglas."

Jim cut down on alcohol when he first arrived in France, but after a month he was back at it, and the heavy, compulsive smoking began to take its toll. When Jim coughed up blood in April, Pamela took him to see a doctor at the American Hospital in Neuilly. A physical exam and a lung X-ray turned up nothing obvious, and Jim was told to get some rest in a warm climate, if possible. He wanted to see Spain and more of Morocco, so he and Pamela left Paris in a rented car on April 10th and headed south into the lush and wet European spring.

Their trip lasted around three weeks. On May 3rd, 1971, Jim and Pamela flew from Marrakesh to Casablanca, and then on to Paris. When they got to their apartment, Zozo and some friends were in temporary residence, so Jim and Pamela checked into l'Hotel, an exclusive small hotel on the rue des Beaux-Arts. L'Hotel was famous for its discretion, and many celebrities felt comfortable there. It was also famous because Oscar Wilde had died in one of its rooms. (His famous last words: "Either that wallpaper goes, or I do.")

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

From the book "Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend," by Stephen Davis.

Pamela had a huge problem now, because Count de Breteuil was in London and she wanted heroin. Jim told a friend of Zozo's that he didn't want Pamela scoring on the street, and anyway, he supposedly said, "Scoring is a man's job." Around that time, a Paris-Match photographer saw a friend sitting with Jim at the Cafe de Flore and said hello. A few minutes later, the friend came over to his table, explained that Jim Morrison wanted some heroin, and did he know where they could find some?

The upscale, junk-using denizens of Paris usually ended up at the Rock and Roll Circus, very late at night. The Circus was a big discotheque on the rue de Seine, modeled on the American electric ballrooms of the Sixties. The walls were decorated with large murals of English rock stars (and Jimi Hendrix) dressed as clowns. It was often packed with le jet set and French movie stars, and the new Chinese heroin ("China White") was sold openly in the club's dark corners. One prominent notebook entry of Jim's was published by his literary executors after his death: "The Chinese junkies will get you in the end."

One evening early in June, Jim and Alain Ronay -- a friend from UCLA who'd arrived in Paris in May -- were standing on the top step of the long staircase leading up to Sacre-Coeur, the great white church at the summit of Montmartre in northern Paris. A band of black African musicians was banging away, and Jim stopped to listen a while. Gazing off to the east, Jim asked Ronay about the large green hill he could see, all the way across the city. Ronay explained that it was Pere-Lachaise, Paris' great cemetery. It dated from Napoleon's time and was where honored citizens like Chopin, Balzac and Edith Piaf were buried. Jim insisted they visit immediately, but their taxi took an hour to fight through heavy traffic, and the gates were shut by the time they arrived.

Jim and Ronay returned to the cemetery a few days later. They walked among the impressive monuments of the great artists and the florid nineteenth-century tombs of the stolid bourgeoisie. When Ronay said he found the place a morbid experience, Jim protested that he liked the cemetery's spooky tranquillity in the midst of the city, and that he definitely wanted to be buried in Pere-Lachaise when he died.

Throughout June 1971, Jim Morrison carried a white plastic shopping bag from the Samaritaine department store with him whenever he went out. There were usually one or two spiral notebooks inside, plus a file of Jim's personal photographs, the quarter-inch-tape reel of his 1970 birthday poetry reading, a pack of Marlboro cigarettes, a Bic lighter, two or three ballpoint pens, a photocopy of an interview with Jean-Luc Godard ("Film and Revolution," by Kent Carroll) that had been published in Evergreen Review and an article about the Doors ("Morrison Hotel Revisited") torn from Jazz and Pop. One of the notebooks was titled "Tape Noon." It was filled with death-haunted poems, prayers, obscenities, a version of his poem "American Night" and phrases about the street riots he saw in Paris. One of the final pages bore a single, seemingly desperate line: "Last words, last words -- out." Jim Morrison obviously sensed that his time was nearing its end.

Early in the month, Jim and Pamela flew to London for a few days. Alain Ronay was already in London and reserved a room for them at the Cadogan Hotel, near Sloane Square. Pamela immediately disappeared for a while, probably to Cheyne Walk in nearby Chelsea, where Jean de Breteuil was living in Keith Richards' riverside mansion, doling out heroin to former pop star Marianne Faithfull, who had abandoned her career (and boyfriend Mick Jagger) for the life of a full-time addict.

Faithfull later wrote in her memoirs, "Jean was a horrible guy, someone who had crawled out from under a stone. I met him at Talitha Getty's house. He was her lover, and somehow I ended up with him. What I liked about him was that he had one yellow eye and one green eye -- and a lot of dope. It was all about drugs and sex. He was very French and very social. He was only with me because I'd been with Mick Jagger. In that froggy way, he was obsessed with all that."

One night in London, as Jim and Ronay were riding down the Kings Road in a black cab, Ronay told Jim that Oscar Wilde had been arrested for the crime of sodomy at the Cadogan Hotel and later had died at l'Hotel in Paris. "You better watch out that you don't follow too closely in his footsteps," Ronay teased. "You might end up like Oscar."

Jim didn't laugh, and turned away as if he'd been hurt. Ronay felt like an idiot.

Back in Paris a few days later, unable to concentrate on his writing, Jim again went to see a doctor at the American Hospital. Jim was now heavier than on his previous visit because he was drinking and eating more than usual. Again, Jim was told to stop smoking and cut down on alcohol, and (according to hospital records) was prescribed an antispasmodic medication to curtail the coughing spells. These pills often left him groggy and unable to write. An entire page of one of Jim's Paris notebooks, which possibly dates from this month, was filled with a tortured, repeated scrawl: "God help me."

One day around June 15th, Jim Morrison went out walking. It was high summer in Paris and everything was green, but there was also a brisk northern chill in the air. He crossed over to the "le Saint-Louis, then made his way to the quai d'Anjou. He stopped at the house marked No. 17 and sat on the parapet overlooking the river, making a note about Charles Baudelaire, who had once lived in a garret at the top of the house. Then Jim crossed to the Left Bank and made his way to the Odeon, where he bought a paper. Nearby was a cheap second-floor recording studio that he'd come across on an earlier walk. He went upstairs and hired the studio for an hour so he could listen to his poetry tape, which he was carrying around with him. The studio engineer played back sections of the tape for Jim, some of them twice. Before he left, Jim said he might want to do some fresh recording, and the owner told Jim he could come back anytime.

Jim walked on to the Cafe de Flore, where he sometimes found Pamela and her friends. He went out to the Flore's terrace and proceeded to order straight-up whiskeys until he had gotten his alcohol fix. Noticing an annoying racket nearby, he focused on two young American street musicians who were working the cafes for spare change. The guitarist wore a buckskin jacket, and the singer wore a cowboy hat. They were murdering Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young songs, one after the other. Jim, pretty drunk, loved them immediately. After they performed "Marrakesh Express" and nobody gave them any money, Jim introduced himself and graciously invited them to have a drink. He told them about the nearby recording studio and asked if they felt like walking over with him and doing a session. The two guys couldn't believe it.

"Wait, man, hold on," one said. "You are shitting us, right? Are you really Jim Morrison?" An hour later, they found themselves in the studio. The fifteen-minute tape has survived.

Jim was running real loose. His American accent sounded very stoned and very Southern. The studio people were unhappy that he was obviously drunk. They ran a businesslike operation that usually recorded jingles and classical musicians and told Jim archly that they were very busy and he could have a half-hour maximum with the two freaks he had brought along. Jim spent the first five minutes amiably cajoling the two guys, trying to get a sound out of them. The guitar player, a droll hippie troubadour, was only semicompetent, and the mind-blown singer ("I'm cutting a track in Paris with Jim Morrison!") was hopeless when they handed him a studio guitar. They couldn't even get in tune.

Jim asked the two hippies what they wanted to do. The guitar player suggested three obscure songs, but Jim had his own plan. He said, "Let's try something. I wrote this one myself" -- and launched into an astounding version of "Orange County Suite," the unfinished, unrealized paean to his old lady that had been rejected from at least two Doors albums.

It was a drunken, and mostly ad-libbed, recording. Yet, listening carefully (to one of the bootleg versions of the tape that have since sold thousands of CDs), one hears the authentic last of Jim Morrison, two weeks before he died, as he roars spontaneous verses and imagery about his hard-hearted woman, his anguish and his obsessions, easily deploying a poetic champion's compositional facility for the natural cadence and spontaneous rhyme: "Well, her father has passed over/And her sister is a star/And her mother's smoking diamonds/And she's sleeping in the car."

Jim gave the two hippies all the money he had on him after he paid for the studio time. The engineer handed him the box of quarter-inch tape. In a shaky scrawl, Jim inked in the name of his ad hoc Left Bank street band: Jomo and the Smoothies.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

From the book "Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend," by Stephen Davis.

The last notebook Jim Morrison worked in is now in a private collection in Paris. He had obviously started the spiral-bound steno pad before he left L.A., since the first entry is "Cahuenga Auto 466-3268." The first twenty pages of the notebook are full of stanzas and imagery written in Jim's large-lettered handwriting. There are almost no cross-outs, as if the notebook represented a confident and finished sequence of poems.

Several pages are variants of older poems, such as The Ancient Ones, Winter Photography and The Hitchhiker. Other pages contain only one or two lines, but variations in the writing style indicate they may have been thought over for days. The notebook contains both wonderful new poems and scabrous jottings: JERK-BAIT SCROTUM, INC and Fuck Shit Piss Cunt. A previously unknown poem, Impossible Garden, refers to "a beautiful savage like me" and "the most insane whore in Christendom." A new song lyric, "Now You Are in Danger," seems to sum up Jim's Paris idyll: "Let the piper call the tune/March, April, May, June." The next page contains short lyrics for a blues song: "We're two of a kind/We're two of a kind/You want yours, and I want mine."

Page 17 contains one line: "She'll get over it."

Page 18: "What can I say? What can I do? I thought you found my sexual affection stimulating"

Page 19: "UMHM/Glorious sexual cool/I'm finally dead"

Page 20: "In that year we were blessed/By a great visitation of energy."

This notebook was in Jim's plastic bag, along with two tape boxes, Jim's photo file and some random papers, when Jim ran into Philipe Dalecky, Zozo's boyfriend, in the street. Jim thought he had recorded something interesting in "Orange County Suite" but couldn't listen to the tape reel because he only had a cassette player at home.

Dalecky: "I remember that I was walking along rue de Rivoli when I ran into Jim. We had a drink together in a bar, and he said he needed to make a cassette from a reel-to-reel tape he had in his bag. I said I could help him, and we went over to my place [5 rue Chalgrin] near the place de l'Etoile, about a five-minute walk from the bar. I had a little home studio with a Revox [tape recorder] and a K7 [cassette] deck, so I did the job. We had another drink, then Jim quickly left with the cassette, like he was really excited to listen to it. I went back to the studio and noticed Jim's plastic sack on the floor. I ran to the window, but he was already halfway down the block. I shouted, 'Hey, Jim! You forgot this!' He looked back at me, over his shoulder, and he shouted, 'All right -- keep it -- see you later -- bye!' "

Dalecky put the bag in a drawer. The next day he went to Saint Tropez with Zozo, who had a film job. He never saw Jim Morrison again.

No one still alive can say with complete confidence what took place in the fourth-floor apartment at 17 rue Beautrellis on the morning of July 3rd, 1971. Only two people, Pamela Courson and Jean de Breteuil, were fully party to the tragic death of Jim Morrison, and both died soon after. But it is accurate to say that in the frenzied days immediately following July 3rd, an improvised, risky, remarkably skillful and cynical cover-up, abetted by determinedly lax procedures by the local authorities, enabled an American rock star's sordid and potentially scandalous heroin overdose, with obvious but messy criminal implications and enormous financial consequences, to be officially decreed a common heart attack by the City of Paris.

Pamela Courson told several versions of her story: one to the police, one to Alain Ronay and French filmmaker Agnes Varda, and others to friends in California over the next three years. Jean de Breteuil blurted out his story in Morocco, where he felt safe, three days after the events. Parisian rock critic Herve Muller published findings that indicated Jim had really died in the toilet of the Circus a day or so earlier. Taking all of these sometimes dubious, thinly sourced narratives into account, one can construct a speculative timeline that considers all the variants of the painful, heartbreaking final hours of Jim Morrison's life.

Pamela Courson said they went to the movies. On a bright and warm summer's night, they walked through the village Saint-Paul, past the crumbling old city wall, down the narrow passage Charlemagne and found a cab at the Saint-Paul taxi stand. Pursued was director Raoul Walsh's attempt to inject a film-noir sensibility into the standard Hollywood western format. After the movie, they ate some sweet-and-sour Chinese food at one of the late-night restaurants on the rue Saint-Antoine. Jim washed his food down with several beers. At one o'clock, they called it a night and went back to their flat.

Jim was restless. He was sipping whiskey out of the bottle, possibly in pain from his various injuries and ailments. He sat at his desk with an open notepad but couldn't focus. Pamela was cutting lines of heroin on a mirror with a credit card. They both began snorting the drug, using rolled-up money. Jim started threading Super-8 films of their travels into the projector. Pamela said they sang together as they watched their dark, jerky, out-of-focus movies of Spain, Morocco and Corsica on the wall. Jim (according to Pamela in all her narratives) played old Doors records -- even "The End" -- far into the night. Between reels, they broke for lines of the strong Chinese junk.

If the neighbors can be believed, early that morning Jim Morrison became very upset. Raging, he opened the apartment's door and went into the hall before someone dragged him back in and slammed the door. A year later, the woman who lived directly upstairs told Dalecky and Zozo that on the night their friend had died, she had been awakened by a disturbance. She had opened her door with the chain on and had looked out to see "Monsieur Douglas" -- naked and screaming on the staircase.

According to Pamela, Jim started coughing again and had trouble clearing his throat. Pamela eventually told Jim they should go to bed. It was three o'clock on Saturday morning.

Jim asked Pamela for another line, or two, before bed. It was her stuff, bought from de Breteuil, and at home she was the one who doled it out (although she also maintained that Jim had his own stash as well). Jim was still awake when Pamela nodded off in a heroin stupor.

She woke up with a start, maybe an hour later. Jim, lying next to her, was gurgling horribly. It sounded like he was drowning in his own mucus. But she had heard this before and tried to wake him up. She couldn't rouse him. She slapped his face. Nothing. She hit him hard, again and again, until he began to come to.

An awful scene ensued. Rousing himself, in obvious pain, Jim staggered to the bathroom. Someone -- Pamela couldn't remember who -- turned on the water in the tub, and Jim lowered himself in. Pamela went back to bed and passed out again. She awoke, in a cold sweat, to terrible retching sounds. Jim, still in the bath, was now vomiting up chunks of pineapple and vivid clots of blood. Pamela rushed into the kitchen, fetched an orange Le Creuset saucepan and ran back into the bathroom. Jim vomited some more into the saucepan. When the nausea passed, she flushed the stuff down the toilet. She later said she thought she had to empty and wash out the saucepan three times. She said that Jim told her he felt better and to go back to sleep. Sometime around five o'clock, as the sky was turning light, Pamela, overcome with heroin and fatigue, fell back into bed. As she was drifting off, she thought she heard Jim calling out to her, "Pamela -- are you there?"

Perhaps an hour later, Pamela woke up again. Jim hadn't come back to bed. Morning light filtered through the louvers covering the windows. She got up and went to the bathroom. The door was locked from the inside. She shouted at Jim, rattled the heavy door, but there was no response.

At 6:30, Pamela called Jean de Breteuil, who was in bed with Marianne Faithfull. Faithfull was stoned on Tuinals but remembered when the call came in.

"I got to go, baby," de Breteuil said. "That was Pamela Morrison."

That woke Faithfull up. "Jean, listen to me. I've got to meet Jim Morrison."

"Not possible, baby. Not cool right now, OK? Je t'explique later. I'm right back."

He was at the flat within half an hour. Pamela, dressed in her white silk djellaba, was out of her mind and incoherent. The count calmed her down, gently broke a glass pane in the bathroom door, turned the lock and let himself in.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

From the book "Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend," by Stephen Davis.

They found Jim Morrison, dead, still in the bathtub. Blood was still drying under his nose and mouth, as if he had violently hemorrhaged. There were two large and lividly purple bruises on his chest. The bath water was dark pink, as if Jim bled out until his heart stopped. Pamela later said that he looked relaxed for the first time in months, his head turned slightly to his left, a small smile on his lips. "He had such a serene expression," Pamela said. "If it hadn't been for all that blood . . ."

Pamela started slapping Jim, talking to him, freaking out. Then she got halfway into the tub with Jim before the count pulled her away and dragged her out of the bathroom. With cool calculation, amid terror and considerable anguish, de Breteuil told Pamela that he was leaving town. (The Paris police had already opened a dossier on his drug-dealing activities.) He and Faithfull would leave for Morocco that night. De Breteuil told Pamela that if she could get to Morocco, where his family had great influence, he would be able to protect her if any legal questions arose. Jim had no track marks on his body. Autopsies were performed in France on suspicion of murder only. De Breteuil told Pamela that police would soon be in the house and to flush any drugs she had. She could tell the medical examiner that Jim had heart disease. Pamela asked de Breteuil what to do next.

"Call your other friends," the count said. "Get them to help you. I will see you again before I leave. I'm sorry, darling. I love you. Goodbye."

De Breteuil left 17 rue Beautrellis around 7:30 on Saturday morning. Pamela padded back into the bathroom to talk things over with Jim Morrison, who had died, miserably and alone, about ninety minutes earlier at the age of twenty-seven.

At an all-night disco called La Bulle, on the rue de la Montaigne-Sainte-Genevieve, there was a weird announcement made over the sound system that morning by the American DJ Cameron Watson. Sometime around eight o'clock, after a word with a couple of dope dealers who had stopped by his booth, and with only a handful of customers left in the club, Watson stopped the music and said, "Jim Morrison died this morning." Then he repeated the news in French.

He was, mysteriously, the first person to announce Jim Morrison's death.

Agnes Varda's phone rang at about 7:30 on Saturday morning. Alain Ronay awoke and answered it. It was Pamela Courson, speaking very softly. Ronay told her to speak up and then heard the fear in her voice. "Jim is unconscious, Alain. . . . He's bleeding. . . . Can you call an ambulance for me? . . . You know I can't speak French. . . . Oh, please hurry. . . . I think he may be dying." Pamela couldn't say anything else because she was sobbing. She hung up.

Ronay dressed and crossed Varda's courtyard to wake her. She immediately called the Paris fire department's emergency line. The rescue squad was the best chance anyone in a medical crisis in Paris had of staying alive. She ordered Ronay to write down Jim's address for her and told him to bring his American passport, because he would need it when the police arrived.

Varda drove them in her old VW Beetle. Ronay was almost pissing himself in fear. Weaving through traffic, Varda finally got them to rue Beautrellis at about 9:30. Fire trucks, an ambulance and a small crowd held back by a police officer were in front of No. 17. When they got upstairs, Pamela was in the apartment's foyer, still dressed in her wet djellaba, surrounded by firemen.

"My Jim is dead, Alain," she said. Then: "I want to be alone now. Please -- leave me alone."

Ronay was stunned. He glanced over at Jim's empty boots in the hallway, one in front of the other, as if he'd just stepped out of them.

When the fire-rescue squad had arrived a few minutes earlier, they had lifted Jim out of the bath and laid him out on the floor. They tried cardiac massage briefly, but the body was already cold. They carried Jim to his bedroom and placed him on the bed. Pamela covered Jim with a blanket.

Varda asked the fire chief if he was sure Jim was dead. With tender courtesy, the chief replied that the resident had been dead for at least an hour before they had arrived. Varda went into the bedroom to be with Pamela. A police inspector arrived and began to grill Ronay. "How did you know Mr. Douglas Morrison?" After establishing that Ronay was an American citizen, he asked about Jim's age, nationality and occupation. What about the girlfriend? Did they use drugs? He turned and asked the paramedics to write a full statement. Ronay then told him, "My friend's name was Douglas Morrison. Douglas James Morrison. An American. He was a poet. He was an alcoholic, but, no, he didn't use drugs."

The inspector was skeptical. Looking around the flat, he remarked that poets don't usually live in such bourgeois surroundings. "If he was really a poet, as you say, how could he afford some place like this?" Ronay replied that Mr. Morrison lived on a private income, then pleaded that he was traumatized and couldn't answer questions. The inspector backed off a bit and said that if the medical examiner's report was satisfactory, the police would certify a death certificate and a burial permit. Otherwise, there would be an inquiry. Then he left.

Pamela assured Ronay that all the dope had been flushed. She went into the bedroom, carrying a pile of papers and copies of his poetry collection An American Prayer, and locked them in Jim's desk. When Varda left that afternoon, Pamela started to burn papers in the fireplace. Anything with Jim's name on it went up in smoke. She also burned some of her own letters, a journal and files relating to Jim's various arrests in Los Angeles. Ronay said he thought the cops would smell the fire, on what was turning out to be the hottest day of the summer, and ask questions. Pamela didn't care. Some of her letters, she explained, were like diary entries about Jim and drugs. She then produced an application for a marriage license from Denver in 1967. She asked, "Will they accept this? Do they know English?" Ronay assured her that it wouldn't work.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

From the book "Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend," by Stephen Davis.

Next, Pamela broke into Zozo's padlocked bedroom with the fireplace hatchet and emerged wearing a full-length mink coat. "It's mine now," she told Ronay. "I'm taking it with me. She'll never give me back all the money we paid her in advance." Ronay said later that he convinced Pamela that she was in enough trouble already, and she hung the fur coat back in the closet.

The doorbell rang. It was the doctor, a short, stocky, middle-aged man carrying a black bag. "Where's the corpse?" he asked. Ronay pointed to the bedroom. Following legal procedure, the doctor demanded that Ronay accompany him to lay out the body. Ronay begged off because he didn't want to see Jim. But then Pamela appeared, apparently in a trance. Speaking in an artificial voice, she took the doctor's arm. "This is my very beautiful man, sir," she said as she took him into the bedroom.

The exam was completed in less than five minutes. The doctor came out and asked Ronay to translate Pamela's answers to his questions. He asked Jim's age, and was shocked when he was told twenty-seven. "I was going to write fifty-seven," the doctor told Ronay. He asked if Jim ever used drugs and was told no, never. Ronay tried to tell him about the coughing spasms, but the doctor waved him off. "All right. I understand," he said. He filled out a form and handed it to Ronay with an envelope. "Take this to the civil registry of the Fourth Arrondissement," he said, "and show it to the clerk. They will give you the death certificate." Then he offered his condolences to Pamela and left abruptly. It was now around noon. Ronay said that they went out for something to eat.

Then they went to get the death certificate. The office was closed, so they went back later. The lone woman on duty on a sleepy Saturday afternoon scanned the papers and told them that their request for a death certificate due to natural causes would be denied. She made a phone call and handed the receiver to Ronay. The prefect of police angrily told Ronay to get back to No. 17 within ten minutes.

The police arrived half an hour later. They found Pamela sitting demurely in the bedroom, next to Jim's body. She was holding hands with Jim, talking to him quietly. The inspector, Captain Berry, was brisk and unsympathetic. Jim had been cleaned up, with no traces of blood or any needle marks. The police quickly inspected the apartment and found nothing. The fresh ashes in the fire grate went unnoticed. But Captain Berry was bothered by the scene. He obviously smelled something very wrong, and twenty years later he told an interviewer that he thought Mr. Morrison had overdosed on drugs. He arranged for the senior medical examiner to arrive later to look at the corpse. Finally he told Pamela that if the new doctor found nothing amiss, they would receive the death certificate and burial permit.

Dr. Max Vassille arrived around six o'clock, carrying a black leather bag. Jim had been dead for twelve hours now. Vassille was an older gentleman, relaxed, and he smiled at them. He walked briskly into Jim's room and walked out again within a minute. He had a quick look at the bathtub. In the dining room he told Pamela and Ronay that he thought it strange that so young a man, who seemed to be in good condition, should just die in the bathtub like that. Ronay told Vassille about the heavy drinking and the violent coughing spells he had witnessed.

Vassille stood up. He told them that if their statements were accurate, and could not be immediately proved otherwise, he was inclined to say that Mr. Douglas Morrison had died of a heart attack caused by blood clots in the cardiac artery. He was now going to the Arsenal station to file his report. He advised them to rest for an hour -- "You both look very tense" -- and then join him at the station. After he left, and it looked for the first time that day that they might be in the clear with the authorities, Pamela fell apart and began to cry. Then, when her tears were dry, she had a tantrum. "Valium!" she screamed at Ronay. "I want Valium. Give some to me now." Ronay said he'd flushed his pills down the toilet. Pamela started crashing around the apartment until she found a few that she had stashed herself.

After she calmed down, Pamela said she wanted Jim cremated and his ashes scattered someplace he liked. Ronay said cremation was very rare in France and that an autopsy was always required first. Ronay told Pamela about Pere-Lachaise and suggested they try to bury Jim there, near Chopin, Sarah Bernhardt, Moliere or Debussy. This seemed reasonable to her. Pamela began going through the pockets of Jim's clothes, collecting about $200 in francs in a glass jar.

Captain Berry received them coolly at the Arsenal station. At 7:30 he handed them the death certificate (backdated to 2:30 that afternoon) and the burial permit.

"What about the body?" Ronay asked.

"Leave him where he is for now," Berry said and picked up the phone.

The doorbell rang at eight o'clock, only a few moments after Pamela Courson and Alain Ronay returned to the flat where Jim Morrison lay dead. Ronay was making tea, so Pamela answered the door. After a commotion, she shouted to Ronay, asking if he had ordered some ice cream. When he went to investigate, he found a small mortician in a dark suit, carrying a plastic bag and twenty-five pounds of dry ice. The police inspector had sent him. Shown into Jim's room, he wrapped the corpse in the bag with the ice. On the way out, he gave his card to Ronay and told him he would visit regularly until the funeral. "Believe me," he said, "I'll do my best. But this heat is against us."

Ronay told him that Pamela wanted to sleep next to the body. The mortician looked pained and said that he strongly advised against it. Ronay left also to get some badly needed rest.

Pamela seemed better when Ronay returned late the next morning. The iceman had already been and gone. Pamela was exhausted but told Ronay that having Jim in the house made her feel secure. She said that if she could do it, they would live like this forever.

The iceman came again, late in the day. He repacked Jim and explained to Ronay that, with the continuing heat wave Paris was enduring, the current situation would become impossible to sustain by Tuesday.

On Monday, after a second night spent lying next to her decomposing boyfriend, Pamela consented to a burial as soon as possible. Ronay walked across the river and found the house of Bigot, the undertaker, in the shadows of the twin spires of Notre Dame Cathedral, where an old monastic cloister had once stood. Mr. Guirard, the director, explained that everyone wanted to rest in Pere-Lachaise, and there were very few spaces left. Ronay pleaded that Douglas Morrison had been a famous young American writer. Guirard brightened. "A writer? I know a space -- in Division Eighty-nine, very close to another famous writer: Mr. Oscar Wilde."

Ronay was shocked. "No, I beg you, not next to Oscar Wilde! Please -- can you find another space?" A small double plot was found, near a memorial to victims of Nazi oppression in Paris, in a less desirable location on the other side of the hill. The funeral was arranged for Wednesday morning, July 7th. On Monday afternoon, the undertakers came to the flat, dressed Jim in a too-large dark suit and stuffed him into a too-small wood-veneer coffin, the cheapest one Bigot offered. Pamela gathered all the pictures of herself that she had and placed them in the coffin. The coffin was then sealed tightly with screws to retard further decay in the hot, dark apartment.

Pamela later said she had never seen Jim in a suit before. She said she thought he looked kind of cute.

From the book "Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend," by Stephen Davis. (c) 2004 by Stephen Davis. By arrangement with Gotham Books, a member of Penguin Group.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

JIM MORRISON* Life, Death, Legend
by Stephen Davis ...Reviewed by Nick Haynes

Published in 2004 overall I found this a slightly dark read, as dark as the black cover of a hard back book with a picture on the front cover of a lifeless looking Jim eyes open staring into the Infinite from what might have been his death bed. It has been a while since I have read a book about Jim and the Doors but Stephen Davis’ treatise on Jim Morrison was a constant bedtime companion from the time of it’s arrival as a Christmas present until early March and some 477 pages later.
All in all I found it a very detailed and comprehensive book full of information and facts which chronicled in considerable depth his life from his birth in Melbourne, Florida on December 8 1943 through to his untimely death in Paris on July3 1971. There was a great amount of additional background information not only to the development of his life but also that of the band, the music and their gigs, the social and artistic backdrop of the period than I remember from other books on Jim and the Doors that I have read.

The book came across to me as being written almost in the style of a diary probably because of the sequential time references and the overall writing style. The early part of the book deals extensively with Jim’s childhood although he was known by his family as “Jimmy” and apparently would answer to this name from intimates throughout his life. It describes a rather dysfunctional boy who would appear to have reflected throughout his life the considerable chaos and disorder that he may have suffered as a result of an absent father whose life was the Navy and the ever-changing academic and domestic circumstances that a career in the Navy brought.

Interestingly I liked the author’s reflection as he briefly explores a psychological theory for Jimmy’s behaviour in which he says, “ Several ideas taken from the fields of psychology and child development might help to illuminate Jim Morrison’s behaviour later in life. Attachment Theory, for instance, suggests that children who receive insensitive, neglectful, or inconsistent care can develop difficulties with controlling their emotions, and often turn to drugs and alcohol to soothe themselves. Such children often have trouble with trusting other people and maintaining consistent relationships, and may also become impossible to control. They often exaggerate their behaviour to get the attention they crave, with negative attention being better than none.”
Around the age of eighteen the author introduces us to a recurring theme throughout the book with apparent evidence that Jim may have engaged in bisexual encounters from time to time throughout his remaining years and that he certainly liked his women to be open to the theme of the song Backdoor Man.

According to Davis Jim’s relationship with the band degenerated fairly quickly from ’69 onwards in terms of the respect that Jim held them in and I felt that the author possibly slightly unfairly portrayed them as rather weak and insipid or that their artistic relationship did not have more resilient depths.
Having said that obvious tensions did emerge particularly with a lead singer as
“erratic as Jim was” as Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane has been quoted as saying. Overall though I doubt that the relationship on the inside was as clearcut as Davis would have us believe.

All in all I found it a very detailed and comprehensive book full of information and facts which chronicled in considerable depth his life from his birth in Melbourne, Florida on December 8 1943 through to his untimely death in Paris on July3 1971. There was a great amount of additional background information not only to the development of his life but also that of the band, the music and their gigs, the social and artistic backdrop of the period than I remember from other books on Jim and the Doors that I have read.
The book came across to me as being written almost in the style of a diary probably because of the sequential time references and the overall writing style. The early part of the book deals extensively with Jim’s childhood although he was known by his family as “Jimmy” and apparently would answer to this name from intimates throughout his life. It describes a rather dysfunctional boy who would appear to have reflected throughout his life the considerable chaos and disorder that he may have suffered as a result of an absent father whose life was the Navy and the ever-changing academic and domestic circumstances that a career in the Navy brought.
Interestingly I liked the author’s reflection as he briefly explores a psychological theory for Jimmy’s behaviour in which he says, “ Several ideas taken from the fields of psychology and child development might help to illuminate Jim Morrison’s behaviour later in life. Attachment Theory, for instance, suggests that children who receive insensitive, neglectful, or inconsistent care can develop difficulties with controlling their emotions, and often turn to drugs and alcohol to soothe themselves. Such children often have trouble with trusting other people and maintaining consistent relationships, and may also become impossible to control. They often exaggerate their behaviour to get the attention they crave, with negative attention being better than none.”
Around the age of eighteen the author introduces us to a recurring theme throughout the book with apparent evidence that Jim may have engaged in bisexual encounters from time to time throughout his remaining years and that he certainly liked his women to be open to the theme of the song Backdoor Man.
According to Davis Jim’s relationship with the band degenerated fairly quickly from ’69 onwards in terms of the respect that Jim held them in and I felt that the author possibly slightly unfairly portrayed them as rather weak and insipid or that their artistic relationship did not have more resilient depths.
Having said that obvious tensions did emerge particularly with a lead singer as “ erratic as Jim was” as Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane has been quoted as saying. Overall though I doubt that the relationship on the inside was as clearcut as Davis would have us believe.
As you would expect with a book of this length the reader is given a fair amount of information about Jim’s time and stay in Paris and the events that may have provoked his untimely death in a bath in a flat at 17 Rue Beautreillis.
In the song Cars Hiss By My Window on the LA Woman album some people have wondered whether Jim was having a premonition when he sang “ a cold girl will kill you in a darkened room”.

The words of the song are referred to by Stephen Davis in this book as being possibly prophetic in the sense that he believes Jim died from factors precipitated by jointly taking heroin with his girlfriend Pamela that was provided by her although according to Davis Jim took it knowingly.

I said at the start of this review that overall I found the book a little dark and I have spent some time reflecting whether that might be because I read it through the eyes of a Doors fan and saw it a certain way rather than somebody who approached the book as a relative stranger to Jim Morrison and the Doors. To tell you the truth I don’t know because it is difficult to be objective. What I can say is that it came across to me as a very factually intense and quite unemotional account of the circumstances of Jim’s life both before and during the Doors. I found it quite difficult to read more than a few pages at a time because of the amount of factual information presented. It painted him as a quite dysfunctional and not very nice adolescent, an extremely erratic but very charismatic performer who was extremely self-centred towards his fellow performers who in this book are rightly the backdrop for the central character but I thought presented rather harshly as weaker and less effective than they probably were as members of one of America’s leading bands of the era.
At the end of the day most of us like our heroes to be portrayed as charming, lovable and their lives meaningful. Whilst I do not think that for a moment that Stephen Davis thinks that Jim Morrison lacked charm or could not be loving or lovable I felt the book was written in a style that left me feeling slightly depressed and dark. Here for me was a central character who was principally shown to have had an unhappy childhood that left him stained and injured by the experience and who gradually unravelled in an extremely restless and self-injurious manner to the point when he died hopelessly young essentially by himself in a bathtub in Paris. There was not a lot of love and light that I got from this book and that is why it came across to me in the way it did. Having said that arguably Jim Morrison manifested the struggle between the angel and the demon in us all
I would certainly recommend this book….. for the amount of additional detail and information on Jim, the band and their music that the author appears to have painstakingly researched and presumably accurately reported. However the effect that you get if you read this book is very much going to be up to you and how you see it through your eyes……………

My eyes have seen you,
My eyes have seen you,
My eyes have seen you
Stand in your door,
Meet inside,
Show me some more,
Show me some more,
Show me some more.

Review by Nick Haynes former singer with The Doors Are Open tribute band
from Bicester, England

From Scorpywag fanzine June 2005

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Another controversial book and one which I still have not read the last third as I thought it so bad.
Something I have never done with a Doors related book.
Any views from members?

[gizmo]

i just finished it and must say that i think the author is gay and had a crush on jim. where in the world did he get so much proof to state that jim was more into men than woman?
if you checkt he selected sources at the end you'll find ppl like linda ashcroft, david dalton and patricia keneally. how truthfull are those ppl?he's even checked the biography of andy warholl for info about jim (not that that biography was bad but there where some mistaken parts over jim in that)
so if you want to write a good documented book about the doors, read wild child and strange days,
if thats the truth i'll eat my shoes