The Unforgettable Fire: Rolling Stone 2001

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The Unforgettable Fire

Thirty years after Jim Morrison's death, his life and music still haven't revealed all their secrets.

In the strange, wondrous year that was 1967, in the middle of a season in which rock & roll was seeking to define itself as the unifying force of a new youth community, Jim Morrison of the Doors proclaimed to anybody willing to listen, "Can you picture what will be?/So limitless and free. . . ./And all the children are insane. . . ." You heard that assertion - midway through the "The End," the long, startling track that closed the band's debut album - and either you took those words as confirmation of your worst fears, or you were emboldened by their promise. If you were worried about where youth culture was headed, "all the children are insane" likely came across as a threat. But if you were one of those children that Morrison was singing about at that time (me, I was sixteen in those days), then you were hearing a voice that recognized and embraced you - that gave implicit support to your "insanity." In effect, the Doors were asserting themselves as the archetypal band for an American apocalypse that we didn't even know was creeping up on us.
Thirty years have passed since Jim Morrison died in Paris on July 3rd, 1971, at age twenty-seven, the apparent victim of heart failure and of personal and artistic disappointments that manifested themselves in severe and sustained alcoholism. Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin died a few months before Morrison - both also only twenty-seven. Despite the fact that Hendrix and Joplin died of drug overdoses - and were well-known for their indulgences - their deaths nonetheless came as seismic shocks to the rock & roll world. By contrast, Morrison's sad end did not come with such mind-stopping unexpectedness. He had long been viewed as a man who had devoured his own dreams of excess with such a rapacious appetite that there probably wasn't much growth, experience or time left to him. And yet here we are again, trying to assess Morrison's life and loss, and his enduring legacy. Was he a visionary, as many of his devotees and comrades have claimed, or was he "a drunken clown in a leather suit," as one of his detractors contended? Could his death have been avoided? Or were all his excesses in fact the logical end of his unflinching and intoxicated vision? The truth is, we can't solve these questions - just as we apparently can't resist them. But the real question isn't so much whether we can find the virtue in Jim Morrison's art despite the waste of his life. Rather, the question finally is: Can we separate the two? And if not, what do we make of that?

It's unlikely that anybody who knew James Douglas Morrison in his earlier years might have predicted that he would be a titanic rock & roll star, for good or ill. He was born in the middle of World War II, in Melbourne, Florida, on December 8th, 1943, to Steve and Clara Morrison. His father was a career U.S. Navy officer and eventually rose to the rank of admiral. Consequently, the family moved many times and over great distances - from Florida to Washington, D.C., from New Mexico to California, then to Virginia - during Jim's childhood. His father tried to bring a military-style sense of discipline to the home life, and Jim resented these attempts. He began acting out a rebellion against his father's authoritarian bearing - and that dynamic became one of the driving patterns of his life. In any event, Morrison was unusually intelligent - he scored in the "genius" range in his school IQ tests - and he was a voracious reader. In the sixth grade he wrote his first poem, "The Pony Express," and in high school he wrote the words to "Horse Latitudes" (which would eventually appear on the Doors' second album). "I always wanted to write," he told Jerry Hopkins in a 1969 Rolling Stone interview, "but I always figured it would be no good unless somehow the hand just took the pen and started moving without me really having anything to do with it."

There is also much that isn't known about Morrison's childhood and family life. His parents have never commented extensively on his early years. Apparently, Morrison's parents disapproved when, in 1963, he announced that he wanted to attend UCLA film school. When Morrison decided to make the move anyway, he did so without his family's knowledge and support. Reportedly, his father disowned Jim at that point. In the Doors' early publicity statements and interviews, Morrison claimed that his parents had been killed in a horrific automobile accident (Morrison had in fact witnessed a fatal car accident as a child while traveling with his family in New Mexico, and the incident left a lasting impression on his imagination). Later, he told Jerry Hopkins, "I just didn't want to involve them." When Morrison's mother showed up without warning at a 1967 Washington, D.C., show, he wouldn't see her, and never spoke with her again.

Whatever the reasons for the rupture with his family, the estrangement has never been explained or documented. This is simply one of those key areas in Jim Morrison's biography that, even after all these years and research, remains a fundamental mystery. Still, Morrison clearly fixated on certain impressions and experiences of childhood in his work. Many passages in his lyrics and poetry make reference to abandoned houses and destinies either found or lost on the seas. His most infamous commentary about family appeared in "The End": "The killer awoke before dawn/He put his boots on. . . ./And then he walked on down the hall/And he came to a door/And he looked inside/Father?/Yes, son/I want to kill you/Mother, I want . . . " Morrison himself later said that he intended the passage as a metaphor for bidding goodbye to childhood and creating your own lot in life. That's hardly an uninteresting or an improbable reading - especially given how many young people shared a similar sense in the 1960s - though the recitation also seems to depict both a lethal rage and psychic damage that possibly even Morrison himself didn't want to explore much once they had been given voice.

Morrison didn't particularly stand out among his peers at UCLA. He made an experimental film about sexual neurosis and mass hysteria (now lost) that received scorn from other film students, though Morrison went on to graduate from UCLA with a bachelor's degree in cinematography. In addition to film, Morrison remained a devoted student of philosophy, literature, poetry and history. He had a particular ken for Friedrich Nietzsche's writings on aesthetics and morals, for the visionary art and verse of William Blake, for the fatalistic writings of Franz Kafka, and for the form-changing poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, among others, and he developed a deep knowledge of Greek tragedy. For the duration of Morrison's life - even when he was heavily drunk (which eventually was much of the time) - Morrison relished the times when he could talk late at night about poets and philosophers. Still, you get the sense that he was most confident at his own versions of ethics and metaphysics in his disquieting songs and their performances, and in the more disquieting manner in which he lived his life.

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When Morrison graduated UCLA in 1965, he told friends that he planned to leave for New York City; he had hopes of establishing himself as a poet or playwright on the burgeoning scene - or even as a sociologist-philosopher. Instead, Morrison ended up spending the summer living on the rooftop of a forsaken office building in the L.A.-area beach town of Venice, where he experimented with whether it was possible to stay high on the hallucinogenic drug LSD for days and nights in a row and began writing new poetry in earnest. This was at the height of the mid-1960s transformation of rock & roll: The Beatles were turning from exuberant pop anthems to writing more complex works; the Rolling Stones were mixing blues and libido to terrific effect; Bob Dylan was rapidly changing all the possibilities of what could be done with language and metaphors in twentieth-century songwriting; and a vibrant youth culture, replete with bands like the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield and Love, was blooming in L.A. Morrison followed these trends to one degree or another, but he always insisted that he had never been especially drawn to the dream of performing rock & roll.

Nevertheless, as he spent nights on that Venice rooftop, Morrison found that he was beginning to write poems that had definite melodies and cadences. He later said, "I was just taking notes at a fantastic rock concert that was going on inside my head. And once I had written the songs, I had to sing them."

One afternoon that summer, Jim Morrison took a stroll on the Venice beach, where he ran into Ray Manzarek, a film-school acquaintance. Manzarek was a classically trained keyboardist with a zeal for blues piano and the progressive jazz of pianists Bill Evans and Lennie Tristano, and yet like countless other young musicians of the time, he was caught up in the protopsychedelic style of garage rock sweeping American and British pop music. Morrison told Manzarek that he had been writing his own songs and proceeded to sing an a cappella version of one of them: "Moonlight Drive." Manzarek was taken with the song's odd moodiness and thought he heard a natural dramatic, even spooky, quality in Morrison's unpolished baritone. The two agreed to start playing music together. In the next several weeks, Manzarek recruited John Densmore - a drummer inspired by jazz trendsetters Art Blakey and Elvin Jones - and a classical- and blues-steeped guitarist named Robby Krieger. By January 1966, the band - named the Doors by Morrison, after a line by William Blake ("If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear as it is, infinite") - was regularly playing a dive bar on the Sunset Strip.

Initially, Morrison was a painfully introverted performer. In fact, he would often sing with his back to the audience. In time, Morrison found that the regular use of drugs, combined with the musical impetus of his band mates, helped him find an astonishing boldness that quickly earned the Doors a reputation as the essential new band to see in L.A.'s club scene.

Soon, the Doors secured a position as the house band at the Sunset Strip's hottest club, the Whisky a Go Go. This was when Morrison and the Doors began forging their singular sound - tense and tough rock & roll song structures, mixed with freestyle jazz inventiveness and Morrison's own increasing penchant for improvisatory word flights. One night, reputedly while on a massive dose of LSD, Morrison began a story riff during "The End" - an atonal dirge that he had been working on about a failed romance. The music began to stretch and give up its predictable rhythmic sway, and as Morrison moved into progressively stranger lyrical territory, the legend goes, the club's audience and employees became transfixed. When Morrison got to the passage about the killer and his Oedipal quest, he teased the audience's interest with well-timed pauses - and then held nothing back: "Mother?" he said calmly, then shouted, "I want to f--- you," as the band played frenziedly behind him. The Whisky's management fired the Doors on the spot. It was Morrison's first adventure in meeting resistance to what he wanted to do as a performer onstage, and the first time he would be reproached for uttering an obscenity to an American audience.

Similar conflicts had, of course, taken place in America's literary subcultures and other quarters for some time. But on that 1966 night at the Whisky, Morrison crossed a decisive line on the cultural battlefield of rock & roll. Whereas in the 1950s Elvis Presley had provoked outrage with his suggestive gyrations (and his mix of black and white musical styles) on nationwide TV, and while in more recent years Bob Dylan's political songs and drug references and the Rolling Stones' sexual innuendo stirred expected complaints, Jim Morrison simply pulled out all stops in one motion. He blew a hole through the walls of that time, and today there are still many people climbing through that hole, to the revulsion of various social critics.

"All the children are insane," Morrison intoned, only moments before launching into his deliberative rant about killing Dad and f------ Mom. Perhaps in those moments Jim Morrison decided not only to help foment and celebrate such generational insanity but to find his own place in the hazards afforded by such an ambition. It was a liberating moment, but it would not come without a considerable price.

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In the mid-1960s, Elektra - a folk-based label - was trying to expand its roster with rock & roll bands. The company had already signed the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and another L.A. Sunset Strip group, Love, who enjoyed hits with "My Little Red Book" and "7 + 7 Is." Despite Elektra president Jac Holzman's initial reservations, in 1966 he signed the band to a multi-album contract and assigned Paul Rothchild to produce them. Rothchild wanted to capture the Doors' sound in a straightforward production style, without any gimmicky recording effects. Meantime, his challenge was to convince Morrison that he simply could not use words like f--- on a record release or make overt references to drug experiences. He also realized that, despite the impressive musical prowess of the band's three musicians, the Doors' crucial magic depended largely on Morrison. Recalling the night the band recorded "The End" in the studio, Rothchild later said, "We were about six minutes into it when I turned to Bruce Botnick [the Doors' career-long sound engineer] and said, 'Do you understand what's happening here? This is one of the most important moments in rock & roll. . . .' Jim . . . said, 'Come with me,' and I did. And it was almost a shock when the song was over. . . . It felt like, yes . . . that's the end, that's the statement, it cannot go any further." After everybody had left, Morrison went back and hosed down the studio with a fire extinguisher. He was drunk, he later admitted, and felt that unless he extinguished the fire he'd set loose earlier that evening, he wouldn't be able to find any rest.

The Doors was released in January 1967 - at the outset of one of the most epochal years in popular-music history. The first single, "Break On Through," enjoyed moderate radio acceptance - but in the spring, FM radio began playing the full-length jazz-inflected version of "Light My Fire." Elektra edited out the track's improvised parts and turned the song into a wildly popular single. Indeed, "Light My Fire" was the dominant song of the summer of 1967, and its urgent - even desperate - vision of desires, pleasures and a heedless, blazing temper made it one of those songs that defines a generation in its time. On July 29th, 1967, "Light My Fire" became the Number One song on the pop charts, and its success buoyed the album, which climbed to Number Two, just behind the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper on Billboard's album chart.

In short, The Doors' impact on 1967 was enormous - and singular. Bands such as the Beatles, like many artists from the Bay Area scene, were touting a fusion of music, drugs and idealism that they hoped would reform and redeem a troubled age - and benign as those intentions may have been, they were still troubling to many observers. By contrast, the Doors were fashioning music that looked at prospects of hedonism and violence, of revolt and chaos, and embraced those prospects unflinchingly. Clearly, Jim Morrison understood that these were dangerous times - and dangerous not only because youth culture was under fire for breaking away from established conventions and aspirations. On some level, Morrison realized that the danger was also internal - that the "love generation" was hardly without its own dark impulses. Morrison seemed to understand that any generation so bound on giving itself permission to go as far as it could was also giving itself a permission for destruction, and he seemed to gain both delight and license from that understanding.

Consequently, when Morrison sang about wanting to destroy his father and violate his mother, he not only made the moment sound convincing but also somehow fair. Even more than the songs of Bob Dylan or the Rolling Stones, Jim Morrison's lyrics were a recognition that an older generation had betrayed its children and that this betrayal called for a bitter payback. After all, if your parents - and the commanding and powerful adult society around you - were treating a daring part of its youth as an alien force, then why not kill those "parents" - even if only in a metaphorical outburst? It's hardly surprising that the Doors' music became such a meaningful favorite among the Americans fighting in Vietnam, where children had been sent to kill or die for an older generation's frightened ideals. Other groups were trying to prepare their audience for a world of hope and peace; the Doors, meanwhile, were making music for a ravenous and murderous time, and the effect was thoroughly scary, and thoroughly exhilarating.

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The band's second album, Strange Days (released in the fall of 1967), was less musically propulsive, but its moods ran deeper. Several of the songs were meditations on dread, loss and aberration, and even some of the tracks' titles - such as "I Can't See Your Face in My Mind," "You're Lost Little Girl," "People Are Strange" and "Unhappy Girl" - conveyed alienation and uncertainty. Within the coming seasons - during the tumultuous year of 1968 - the war in Vietnam would become deadlier abroad and more divisive at home. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would be shot to death in Memphis, triggering massive rioting across America. Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy would be gunned down in Los Angeles; the broken hopes of millions of people would erupt in violence at the Chicago Democratic National Convention in Chicago, at which police brutally bludgeoned American youth. And rock & roll - like so much else in America - was becoming a field of hard options and opposing arguments. Certainly the Doors weren't the only band offering harder music for more merciless times. The Velvet Underground, Iggy Pop and the Stooges, and MC5 were also making plain that underneath the veneer of altruism and idealism, the Sixties youth scene was riddled with some restless and shadowy realities. Increasingly, the best late-Sixties music was music about fear, doubt and the possibility of devastation. Consequently, when Jim Morrison paused near the end of Strange Days' ambitious closing track, "When the Music's Over," and announced, "We want the world and we want it, now/Now?/Now," the moment heartened its audience. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Jefferson Airplane would all make more overt and complex statements about the necessity or wisdom of revolution and resistance than the Doors, but in the late 1960s, nobody embodied threat more palpably than the Doors - or at least Jim Morrison.

A friend of Morrison's, Robert Gover, later wrote, "His charisma was such that your ordinary upholder of the established order could be infuriated merely by the sight of Morrison strolling down the street - innocent to all outward appearances but . . . well, there was that invisible something about him that silently suggested revolution, disorder, chaos."

That's where a certain part of the Doors' story seems to end: They recorded two remarkably imaginative and successful albums, and by late 1967 they were among America's biggest rock & roll bands. Plus, they had a reputation for delivering brilliant live performances. Even though part of their new larger audience attended the band's shows mainly to see Jim Morrison, the volatile sex symbol, the musicians continued to extend their sound. It's worth noting that the Doors were jazz fans and had come of age when many modern innovators had made their most significant strides. Manzarek, Densmore and Krieger could lay legitimate claim to playing their own amalgam of jazz and rock & roll.

Then, the Doors slipped into a bewildering, even cataclysmic, decline. This is where an equally important, though more troubling, part of the band's story begins: in the particulars of how and why that deterioration took place, and the effect it had on the band's standing and on the group members themselves - in particular, Jim Morrison.

When the time came to make their third album, Waiting for the Sun, the Doors had recorded much of the backlog of polished material they had been developing since their formation. As a result, they felt pressure to produce a third masterwork that, as it turned out, wasn't ready to materialize. Indeed, a large-scale musical poem they had planned, "The Celebration of the Lizard," wasn't cohering in the studio. When Waiting for the Sun was finally released, in July 1968, it struck most critics as slight and lacking focus. Also, the band was criticized for the transparent commercial appeal of the new hit single, "Hello, I Love You," which struck many as a blatant takeoff on the Kinks' "All Day and All of the Night" (though today, "Hello, I Love You" plays as a refreshing blast of pop fury). The album's best track was "Five to One"; a violent song about both a failed love affair and a disintegrating and dangerous nation, it was Waiting for the Sun's clearest statement of menace.

But greater problems were piling up. Morrison had exhausted the inspiration he felt he could draw from hallucinogens and had quickly adopted a new drug of choice: alcohol, which had long been favored by many writers and poets. Morrison, in fact, was drinking pretty much on a regular basis and was becoming notorious for his inebriated antics. He had also taken to trying to record his vocals while drunk, which resulted in tension with the other Doors and in much wasted time. (Paul Rothchild later said that after the first two albums, Morrison's vocals were so erratic that they had to splice together words and phrases from various takes to create acceptable final tracks.) Indeed, Morrison was rapidly becoming embroiled in the patterns of alcohol abuse and public misconduct that eventually proved so disastrous to him and those who depended on him. To some degree, this sort of behavior was simply expected of the new breed of rock hero: In the context of the late 1960s and its generational schisms, youth stars often made a point of flaunting their drug use, or of flouting mainstream morality. "I obey the impulses everyone else has but won't admit to," Morrison told Creem magazine. In Morrison's case, this impudence was sometimes merely ostentatious, or naive, though on certain other occasions - such as a December 1967 incident at a concert in New Haven, Connecticut - these gestures helped bolster (and justify) the rock audience's emerging spirit of defiance. In New Haven, Morrison had been sprayed in the face backstage by a police officer after an argument. During the show, when Morrison told the audience what had just happened, he was promptly surrounded by policemen and forced from the stage (as a result, Morrison became the first rock performer arrested onstage). Afterward, outside the range of the audience, several officers punched and kicked Morrison.

As often as not, though, many observers began to suspect that Morrison's unruliness wasn't so much a show of countercultural daring as it was a sign of the singer's own appetite for disruption. In March 1969, at a notorious performance in Miami, this cheerless fact came across with catastrophic results. The concert had been delayed nearly an hour due to a quarrel with the show's promoters. By the time the Doors arrived onstage, Morrison was already intoxicated. "You're all a bunch of f------ idiots," he told the audience. "Let people tell you what you're gonna do. Let people push you around. How long do you think it's gonna last? How long are you gonna let it go on? Maybe you love getting your face stuck in the s---. You're all a bunch of slaves . . . letting everybody push you around. What are you gonna do about it? What are you gonna do about it?" Later, Morrison said, "I wanna see some action out there. I wanna see you people come up here and have some fun. No limits. No laws. I'm not talking about guns and riots, I'm talking about love. Take your clothes off and love each other." And then, critically, Morrison pulled on the front of his weatherworn leather jeans and said, "Do you want to see my c---?" Oddly enough, though thirty-two years have passed, and more than 10,000 people witnessed Morrison's performance, including band members and police officers onstage, it has never been clear whether Morrison actually exposed himself that night. Toward the end of the show, Morrison persuaded audience members to swarm onstage. The platform began to collapse, and fights broke out among security, police and fans.

Most people involved with the band saw the episode as an embarrassment - and as further proof that when Morrison took to a stage drunk, the results could be too precarious. (In 1968, Morrison showed up drunk at a club where Jimi Hendrix was playing. In the middle of one of Hendrix's solos, Morrison crept onstage, wrapped himself around Hendrix's legs and announced, "I want to suck your c---." Janis Joplin appeared onstage and clubbed Morrison with a bottle of liquor, and all three artists wound up rolling on the floor, fighting. Later that same year, in Amsterdam, Morrison appeared at a Jefferson Airplane performance, dancing and spinning until he crashed to the floor, passed out drunk, leaving singers Grace Slick and Marty Balin convulsing in disgusted laughter.) About Miami, Morrison would later claim that in part his behavior that night was a reaction to what he saw the Doors' live shows becoming. During its club days, the band had found room for a more intellectualized brand of experimentation that invoked the audience's participation. Now, the Doors found themselves playing arenas, surrounded onstage by policemen who weren't there to protect the band so much as to contain it. Morrison said that he saw these performances as invitations to provocation - though he also saw them as rituals in creative futility. He later told Rolling Stone, "I think that was the culmination, in a way, of our mass performing career. Subconsciously, I think I was trying to get that across in concert - I was trying to reduce it to absurdity, and it worked too well."

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It would be difficult to overstate how important the Miami event proved to the Doors' history - and to Morrison's own state of mind. Within days of the show, the Miami Herald and some political-minded city and legal officials had inflated the sad fiasco into a serious affront on Miami and the nation's moral welfare; in addition, Morrison himself was designated as a foul embodiment of youth's arrogant indecency. The Doors' touring schedule ground to an immediate halt, and it appeared the band's performing days could be over. Interestingly, amid all the controversy that followed, almost nobody saw the unfortunate truth of that evening: the Doors' lead singer - who only two years before had been one of rock's smartest, scariest and sexiest heroes - was now a heart-rending alcoholic, with little control over his problem and little memory of its worst effects (Morrison himself had no idea whether he'd really displayed his penis that night). Morrison needed help; he did not merit the horrid, moralistic-minded brand of jailhouse punishment that the state of Florida hoped to impose on him.

And the punishment Florida intended was significant. Morrison was eventually charged with lewd conduct, open profanity, indecent exposure and public drunkenness, and faced as much as three and a half years' imprisonment at the state penitentiary in Raiford, Florida, one of the South's toughest prisons. Morrison told friends that he viewed the possible incarceration as a virtual death sentence. During the six-week trial (from August to September 1970), Judge Murray Goodman admitted to Morrison's attorneys (out of earshot of the jury) that they had "proven that Mr. Morrison didn't expose himself." Still, the judge declined to instruct the jury on this point, and Morrison was convicted of indecent exposure and profanity. An appeals court would almost certainly have thrown out the verdict, and so in a sense Morrison won his case, though the damage was lasting. While the Doors would go on to deliver some of their most inspired performances (as evident on 1997's Doors Box Set, and in an ongoing series of live albums now being released by the band's Internet label, Bright Midnight Records, in conjunction with Rhino Handmade), they never escaped the expectation that they were now a vehicle for shock theater. Also, the strains of the ordeal certainly contributed to the confused nature of the band's 1969 effort, The Soft Parade. More disturbingly, Morrison received little support from others in the rock community or from the rock press itself. The Miami trial wasn't seen as an argument about free speech (though clearly that was a pivotal issue at stake), nor was Morrison viewed as somebody who had been targeted by legal moralists, in much the same way that comedian Lenny Bruce had been hounded only a few years before. It seems Morrison had simply alienated too many people with his drunken misadventures and with the band's recent bungled albums. Also, around this time, Morrison was gaining weight from his daily alcohol consumption and had grown a full beard. He now more closely resembled a lumberjack than the gaunt and mysterious rock star he'd personified in 1967. This transformation seemed to be what Morrison wanted - or at least what he convinced himself he wanted. Near the end of his 1969 interview with Jerry Hopkins, Morrison discussed the virtues of his submission to alcohol. "Getting drunk . . . you're in complete control up to a point," he said. "It's your choice, every time you take a sip. You have a lot of small choices. It's like . . . I guess it's the difference between suicide and slow capitulation. . . ." In one of his poems, he wrote, "I drink so I/Can talk to assholes/This includes me."

It is all the more noteworthy, then, that the Doors' final recordings as a quartet were unqualified triumphs. In February 1970, the band rebounded artistically with Morrison Hotel - a blues-indebted work composed largely by Jim Morrison. In the album's opening moments ("Roadhouse Blues"), Morrison summed up all the visions of fate that characterized his best earlier music, but with a clarity devoid of clever wordplay: "Well, I woke up this mornin'/I got myself a beer/The future's uncertain/And the end is always near." The band's April 1971 album, L.A. Woman, was even stronger: as dark and imaginative as the band's first albums, but showing new musical strengths that few critics now expected from the band. It's also a fascinating portrayal of dissolution. Whereas The Doors and Strange Days were largely about fear and loss, L.A. Woman actually seemed to emanate from those conditions. And yet like much of the best blues music, it expressed its terrors with the sort of fervor that might also chase dread away. In songs like the title track, you hear Morrison's voice push and fray and gain a new credibility as it actually struggles not to fall apart. Morrison had always claimed that his biggest vocal influence was Frank Sinatra, and L.A. Woman demonstrated that influence, in Morrison's determination to sing as if it were the latest hours of the night and he was sharing a few final words with sympathetic friends. In Sinatra's case, it took decades to achieve that brandy-tone world-weariness. Morrison, though, had acquired it in four short years that must have felt like a lifetime. But the pressures and excesses had taken a toll. According to his friends, the Miami experience had knocked much of the verve out of Morrison, and he was drinking more than ever. By this time, he had already published some of his poetry, and he had been recording a solo spoken-word album (parts of which would appear later on An American Prayer). Also, Morrison was growing disillusioned with his life in Los Angeles - and in America. He wanted to pursue his writing more attentively, and he also had some hope of turning his life around. As the Doors were mixing L.A. Woman, Morrison announced that he was taking an extended leave from the band, and that he didn't know when or if he might return. In the spring of 1971, accompanied by his longtime lover, Pamela Courson, Morrison moved to Paris, home to some of the most respected authors, poets, philosophers and musicians in history and the favored haven of many twentieth-century American literary expatriates. Morrison was clear on this much: He was going to take time away from the demands of rock & roll and remake his life, one way or another.

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Jim Morrison's brief time in Paris comprises the final mystery period of his life. According to some who knew him, Morrison was writing new inspired works in the flat he shared with Courson on Paris' Right Bank, and he was attempting to come to terms with his alcoholism. According to others, his drinking in fact only got worse - he was worried that there might be no way out of it - and his writing was not progressing as he had hoped. The best information indicates that Morrison lapsed into severe depression over his inability to reinvoke his poetic muse, and had taken instead to writing desperate notes. In one notebook, he simply scrawled for page after page: "God help me."

There are even diverging accounts of his last hours. According to Courson, Morrison had been ill with a respiratory problem - possibly caused by a fall he had taken before leaving L.A. Courson said that on the night of July 2nd, 1971, Morrison went to see a Robert Mitchum movie, Pursued, came home late and went to sleep. At 4 a.m., he awoke, vomited some blood, complained of pains and went to take a bath. But according to accounts that appear in James Riordan and Jerry Prochnicky's Break On Through: The Life and Death of Jim Morrison, Morrison might have taken heroin around this time. (Morrison had never used opiates heavily and had never taken drugs intravenously, though Courson did.) One rumor claims that Morrison ended up in a late-hours Paris club that night, snorted some heroin and immediately overdosed. This version of events has Courson and others somehow taking Morrison secretly back to his flat, where Courson placed him in a tub of ice, hoping to revive him.

Rumor and myth may always attend Morrison's death. It has often been claimed, for example, that the only person to have seen Morrison's corpse was Courson herself - though it's clear that policemen also examined his body and that a doctor did so before preparing a death certificate. In any event, Courson declined the need for an autopsy, and Morrison's parents never requested one. At first, Courson denied rumors that Morrison was dead. Her aim was to have Morrison buried at Paris' Pere-Lachaise cemetery with absolutely no media attention or public spectacle. Eventually, the news officially broke: James Douglas Morrison was dead.

In the years after Morrison's burial, Courson's grief only deepened. So did her drug problems. She eventually returned to Los Angeles, and on April 25th, 1974, she died in her Hollywood apartment, of a suspected heroin overdose, also at age twenty-seven. It is possible that Courson took some secret about the final phase of Morrison's life to her own grave, but it is also clear that her consuming anguish in the intervening years only attested to the inescapable truth: Jim Morrison died of heart failure on July 3rd, 1971, in Paris, France, smiling into the face of a slow-coming void that, long before, he had decided was the most reassuring certainty of his life. The day after his death, Pamela Courson found Morrison's final writing, in the form of a poem. Its end read, "Last words, last words/Out."

In reading about the Doors again at length, I've repeatedly come across those inevitable statements of tribute and disdain that pertained to Jim Morrison through his life and his death. I even came across my own, from an article I wrote for this magazine in 1991, upon the occasion of Oliver Stone's film The Doors. "It's almost as if," I wrote, "somewhere, somehow, a macabre deal were struck: If Morrison would simply have the good grace to die, then we would remember him as a young, fit, handsome poet; we would forgive him his acts of disregard and cruelty and drunkenness, and recall him less as a stumblebum sociopath and more as a probing mystic-visionary."

Well, time can change various things - but it certainly hasn't reduced the Doors' stature in rock & roll history. From time to time - first, aided by Francis Ford Coppola's incendiary use of their music in his film Apocalypse Now, then by the late-1970s L.A. punk scene embracing the band as its rightful local antecedent - the Doors have undergone interesting bouts of cultural resurgence. Plus, marketing ploys on behalf of the band's label and former members and associates haven't hurt matters. More important, though many of the issues that characterized the Doors' history are still vital concerns in today's popular and media culture - for example, a continuing apprehension on the part of many parents and adults that the children just might be insane after all. Some social critics will tell you that there are not really any comparable conditions between the youth culture of the 1960s and that of today - that today's dangers have different contexts and causes. But part of what is different is that we now live in a time when the media and society have infantilized adolescents - that is, regard them more as susceptible children than as near-adults. This may not be designed to protect the children so much as to protect the adults. It is unlikely that American society will ever again allow adolescents the kind of empowerment they briefly enjoyed in the 1960s and 1970s.

Instead, youth's power today is largely confined to marketing power - and even then, if kids buy too many Eminem CDs or disturbing video games, alarms go off loudly and virtuously about what is becoming of our children. Have they become dangerous? Are they going . . . insane?

This much, though, has changed: These days the culture would never tolerate the idealization of a famous drug user or drinker like Jim Morrison - as we've seen, for example, in the massive attention given to actor Robert Downey Jr. and his problems. Recovery (or abstinence), not indulgence, is today's standard of living - which, of course, many of us regard as a healthy turn of affairs. As somebody who has had to discover for himself the ruin that can come from unbridled alcohol abuse, I can't help but have compassion and hope for those people who struggle to live in ways that are healthier both for themselves and for those who care about them.

But there's an old saying: Hindsight is a motherf-----. Modern-day concerns and ideals aside, things clearly didn't work out that way for Jim Morrison. He didn't recover. He didn't pull back from the abyss. He succumbed to it, and that truth is inseparable from any meaningful examination of his life's work and worth, no matter what our final judgments may be. Clearly, Morrison found something in his acquiescence to alcoholism - something other than just his own death (though that may have been part of what he was seeking). Like Jim Morrison said, "It's the difference between suicide and slow capitulation."

Naturally, I can't help but wish Morrison had found a way out of that slow capitulation. For all his bravado and his awful behavior, I think that not just a fierce heart beat inside the man, but also a fiercely loving and compassionate one. Morrison had some of the same sort of improbable humanity and deep reflection that you find in the work of Louis-Ferdinand Celine or Jean Genet: Their writing may seem nihilistic, but behind it lies a recognition that bringing the unmentionable to the surface might help free us of some of our fears or cruelties. In any event, Morrison had a great capacity to sing for those who felt wayward and deserted and angry - indeed, he was a bit fearless in how far he would go in that regard.

Fearless, and also a bit foolish, because in the end Morrison failed to draw any saving distinctions between the temper of his art and the intensity of his life. As a result, his visions ultimately helped destroy him. He must have understood he was headed that way - he certainly told enough people he didn't expect a long life. But even when the alcohol and other excesses were wreaking their consequences, Morrison still knew well the meanings of the experiences he was describing, and there was a courage and dignity in his best efforts at those disclosures.

It's true, Morrison might have had a longer life, but that's not the way he chose it. He defied everything that might have contained his nerve, and he decided to grow by negating himself. Some people, as many of us learn, simply cannot be saved, or forced to recover themselves. Their decline becomes part of the object of their life. Just the same, Jim Morrison had the determination to overcome his self-negation through a body of dark and beautiful work that, thirty years past his death, endures - and still heartens - with good reason. Let's give him that due, even as we hope to find our own kinder ends. After all, he had the grace to sing to people in times when they felt like insane children in a desperate land, desperately in need of some stranger's hand.

MIKAL GILMORE
Rollins Stone August 30th 2001