Take Out A Subscription To Resurrection 1991

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TAKE OUT A SUBSCRIPTION TO THE
RESURRECTION: JIM MORRISON
by Steve Taylor

The Independent
March 23, 1991

Jim Morrison arrived in Paris in March 1971. He partly wanted to escape his idenity as a rock 'n' roll star by regaining his anonymity and by writing poetry rather than songs. He partly wanted to dry out. At the age of 27 he was a terrible alcoholic whose celebrated wild behaviour was now more by accident than design.

Paris was a good place to shake off his celebrity. He dressed down, let his hair grow wild, put on weight and pounded the streets unrecognised. But Paris was not a good place to dry out, especially when you have arrived with a head full of Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Hemingway and
Fitzgerald.

Micheal McClure, a San Francisco poet who became a close friend of Morrison, is one of the few people to see
almost everything he wrote in Paris. "He was mostly
writing poetry," he recalls. "His ambition was to write
for the theatre. I don't think he had any prose problems. I've seen things of Jim's which I am afraid are
now lost. A major work of his was lost."

It was while living on Rue Beautreillis that he stumbled
into the life of Herve Muller, then a 22 year old
economics student. Very early one morning in May 1971,
Muller was asleep with his girlfrienbd in their
top-floor apartment at 6 place Tristan-Bernard, in the
l'Etoile district, when there came a loud knock at the
door. "It was a friend of mine called Gilles Yepremian," remembers Muller, "and he said he was with Jim Morrison. It was pretty strange. Morrison was absolutely drunk and had been carried up the six flights of stairs. He had his washed-out fatigue jacket on and
looked like a hippy tourist." He had been discovered by
Yepremian on the pavement of the Rue de Seine after having been ejected from the Rock 'n' Roll Circus, a club
that would later play a significant role in the rumors
surrounding his death. "He just managed to wave his hand and say, "Hi everybody and then he crashed on our bed near the door and went to sleep. I was baffled!

I was thinking: this is Jim Morrison and he's asleep at the foot of my bed?" He woke up at eleven o'clock with no recollection of the events that had led him there and decided to take his new-found friends out for a meal at the Bar Alexandre, 53 Avenue George V, where he was
already known to waiters who had learned to tolerate his loud behavior. They took a table outside and Morrison sat looking towards Champs-Elysees.

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Here Muller began taking some of the only photographs of Morrison in Paris. "We had a great time" says Muller, "but then he started to get weird. He was paranoid. It was obvious that he was very lonely and very lost. When he was drunk, all his problems came out. One moment he was asking Yvonne to get a woman for him the next he was crying on her shoulder."

"After we left he sat on a bench and wouldn't move. We got him back to our apartment but at the third floor he started getting aggressive again. It was as though he was fighting his own demons. He sat on the stairs and shouted racist remarks. It was because of his behaviour that day that I eventually lost my apartment."

The following weekend, Muller was invited to lunch at
Morrison's apartment. He still has the peice of square
notebook paper on which Morrison wrote his address in
capital letters. "I remember Jim was sober that day and
we sat together in the front room," says Muller. "He
talked about art, eastern European cinema and French
literature. he hardly ever mentioned rock and roll except to say that he thought the Doors might get together every couple of years to make an album and that 27 was too old to be a rock star. It was in that room on another day that I first heard the album LA Woman. Jim had just received it and was very excited by it. Rightly so, in my opinion. Jim was trying to get LA out of his system. He loved Paris because to him it was
this mystical, intellectual city. He liked to walk alot, just go in the streets and follow his own curiosity."

His final poems show that he visited Notre-Dame and
started at the guttering rows of candles that brighten
the natural gloom of the towering cathedral and it
seems unlikely that he would have missed the opportunity to browse in Shakespeare and Company, a
wonderfully eccentric English language book store at 37 Rue De La Bucherie.

The cafe Saint-Germain excited him. He loved the legends of Sarte, Picasso and Gide that still clug to the brown panelled interior of Les Deux Magots at 6 Place Saint-Germain Des Pres. The fact that he had put on a lot of weight and was wearing cheap clothes meant that he was almost never recognised in these places. He could have been mistaken for a college senior from middle America. "I think there was a deliberate attempt on his part to destroy that angelic look," says Muller. "I never saw him in leather. Only once at the Rosebud Bar (11 Bis Rue Felambre) did someone recognize him and that made him nervous and he said, 'Let's go.'"

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But it was also in Saint-Germain that he became reacquainted with the downward pull. He
spent nights with Pamela at the Rock N Roll Circus,
located among chic art galleries at 57 Rue De Seine. It
had been the top Parisian rock club of the late
sixties but by 1971 it had lost its reputation and had
become a haven for heroin addicts and pushers. Today it is the Whisky A Go Go, with a garish pink neon sign
on the street outside and fresh faced clients in
duffel coats and Manchester sized deniums who pay a FF90 entrance fee and stay through until 6 a.m. Dance music is played in the vaulted cellars where the walls and ceilings have been coated with sparkling purple
crust.

According to one widespread rumor it was in this cellar
that Jim Morrison died during the early hours of 3rd
July 1971 after sniffing a line of pure heroin while
in an alcoholic haze. His body was then passed
through the rear of the building and into L'Alcazar de
Paris, a saucy nightclub at 62 Rue Mazarine whose
kitchens backed directly on to the Rock N Roll Circus.
From there it was discreetly driven back to 17 Rue
Beautreillis and placed in the bathtub.

Muller recently tracked down the doctor who was one of only four people known to have seen the body. He has also spoken to figures from the drug-smuggling underground who have talked of Chinese heroin arriving in Paris the day before his death. He showed me a copy of the death certificate that had taken him three years of tugging at French red tape to get ahold of. Filed under the name of Douglas Morrison, he was described as an 'ecrivain.

The official version remains that Morrison had a
heart attack while taking a bath. To the fans who
gather at Pere Lachaise, where he is buried in the
presence of five mourners on 7th July, it hardly matters
which is true. The point is that Morrison died of hard
living. He didn't let death intimidate him into living a
life of moderation.

That is why his resting place is the scene of such irreverence. If Jim had no respect for death why should they? After all, images of the Virgin Mary and the crucified Jesus, which abound Pere Lachaise, would be inappropriate on the grave of the man whose best known song line was "Cancel my subscription to the resurrection."

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