Jim Morrison Profile, Detailed Biography, Facts

Jim Morrison remains one of the most popular and influential singers in rock history, as The Doors' catalogue has become a staple of classic rock radio stations. To this day, he is widely regarded as the prototypical rock star: surly, sexy and mysterious. The leather pants he was fond of wearing onstage have since become stereotyped as rock star apparel.

Jim Morrison Biography:

James Douglas Morrison was born in 1943 to a Navy admiral, of all people, and he grew up as an army brat, moving around from base to base and rarely forming lasting friendships. His father was a strict disciplinarian, which just goes to show that strict discipline is a pretty useless parenting technique. As a child, Morrison's family had a jarring experience when they drove past a truck accident in the desert which had killed several Indians, who lay dying along the side of the highway. In Morrison's own words:

"Me and my mother and father, and a grandmother and a grandfather, were driving through the desert, at dawn, and a truck load of Indian workers had either hit another car, or just — I don't know what happened — but there were Indians scattered all over the highway, bleeding to death. So the car pulls up and stops. That was the first time I tasted fear. I musta' been about four — like a child is like a flower, his head is floating in the breeze, man. The reaction I get now thinking about it, looking back — is that the souls of the ghosts of those dead Indians... maybe one or two of 'em... were just running around freaking out, and just leaped into my soul. And they're still in there."

Early Years of Jim Morrison:

Certainly, the incident left lasting scars on the young Lizard King's psyche; he would return to the incident again and again in his writing, most famously in the Doors song "Peace Frog".

By the time Morrison was a teenager, he was showing signs of Lizard Kingliness. In high school (one of his classmates was Mama Cass), he read Friedrich Nietzsche, William Blake and Jean-Paul Sartre, terrorized his teachers and fellow students, and discovered the joys of alcohol.

After a brief stint at a Florida college, Morrison trekked to UCLA in 1964, where he studied filmmaking with such prestigious classmates as Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas. Among the lesser cinematographic lights in attendance was a young hippie named Ray Manzarek, whose chief claim to fame as a director came from convincing his Swedish girlfriend to pose nude in one of his student films.

Career with The Doors:

But then, neither Manzarek nor Morrison were destined to be known as filmmakers. The two met on a beach one day, where Morrison was scrawling an ode to a fabulous babe in a bikini, under the title, "Hello, I Love You." Manzarek, a keyboardist, thought the poem was catchy, and a collaboration was born. After some false starts, they recruited drummer John Densmore and guitarist Robbie Krieger, and took the name "The Doors," after Aldous Huxley's "The Doors of Perception."

Morrison's preferred method of opening the "doors of perception" was chemical, including mainly alcohol and LSD, although he indulged in a smorgasbord of anything he could get his hands on — and this being Southern California in the 1960s, that was rather a lot.

The Doors got off to a slow start, partly due to the fact that Morrison couldn't "sing" per se, in the sense of carrying a tune. With a lot of practice, he soared to the level of... adequate. But then the technical singing performance wasn't the reason for the band's success. Morrison brought two major qualities to enhance the unquestionably excellent musical abilities of his bandmates: Charisma and dark poetry.

While performing at the Whiskey A-Go-Go, an L.A. dive famous as a first stop for future superstars, the band worked out the kinks and discovered Morrison's powerful stage persona. A student of psychology, Morrison was fascinated by crowd dynamics and enjoyed working masses of people into frenzies. Morrison was also a student of obscenity; the Whiskey's management threw the band out on a regular basis for his profanity-laced ad libs, finally firing the band for a particularly florid performance of "The End" in which Morrison chanted "fuck the mother kill the father" for several minutes.

In 1967, the Doors were signed with Elektra Records and released their first single, "Break on Through." Written by Morrison, the song was a smash hit, drawing critical raves as well as fan adulation. Their second hit, "Light My Fire," written by Krieger, was an even bigger hit later in the year, and their first album went gold. The Doors had arrived.

Success didn't agree with Morrison, or rather it agreed with him a little too much. Drunk with power and drunk on whiskey, Morrison began experimenting more aggressively with manipulating crowds, while his personal life wheeled out of control. His estranged family only discovered his new fame from the media; they attended a Doors concert at which Morrison gave a particularly enthusiastic performance of the "fuck the mother kill the father" vignette, and that was pretty much it for the family.

Morrison decorated the nation from coast to coast in the colors of his vomit and piss. He reportedly had a date with Janis Joplin which left the latter in tears. As the band worked on its second album, Morrison's lyrics took a turn toward the militant, with "Five to One" and "The Unknown Soldier." In concerts and offstage, Morrison became increasingly antagonistic toward authority figures, and in New Haven, CT, he suffered his first in a series of arrests for "public indecency" in concert.

Morrison's drinking increased along with the band's success, and Doors concerts were often marred by his drunken incoherence and the damage alcohol was doing to his singing voice. At the same time, however, the Doors successfully began undertaking more ambitious musical projects, such as "The Celebration of the Lizard," a half-hour fusion of music, drama and poetry that left crowds stunned into utter silence by its conclusion. Morrison also became more adept at manipulating crowds; it was not unusual for a Doors concert to end in a near-riot or an over-the-top orgy. Concert hall floors were routinely littered with discarded clothes at the end of a concert, which in turn brought the band under increasing scrutiny by promoters and local authorities.

On a night in Miami, in an overbooked concert hall, Morrison's various demons converged to create a spectacle that would haunt the remainder of the Lizard King's days. Drunker than ever, which was saying a lot, Morrison goaded the crowd throughout the concert, at one point directly confronting them with their own adulation for him. The band left for its next concert date the following morning without a second thought. The usual Morrison antics, perhaps jacked up a notch or two, but then that was what the people were paying to see. Except that the story didn't end there. A story in the Miami Herald about the concert fanned public outrage with what may or may not have been an exaggeration of the obscenity of Morrison's performance.

More alcohol, more drugs:

He also whiled away the time hanging out with a New York City witch named Patricia Kennealy, whom he married in a pagan ceremony that year in which the happy couple drank each other's blood in a magical ceremony. The wedded bliss came to an end a couple weeks later, and Morrison urged the now-pregnant Kennealy to have an abortion, before riding off into the sunset to reunite with Pamela Courson.

With a jury composed entirely of people over 40 and a stridently unfriendly judge, Morrison's two-month trial in 1970 was a fiasco which ended in conviction. Morrison filed an appeal as the band finished production on its final album, the critically acclaimed "L.A. Woman."

As "L.A. Woman" burned up the charts, Morrison and Pamela Courson decided it was time for a break. According to various accounts, Courson was worried about Morrison's drinking and Morrison was worried about Courson's heroin use. For one or both of these reasons, as well as the mounting toll stardom was taking on Morrison's never-stellar sanity, the two decided to take a break with an extended stay in Paris in 1971.

Death of Jim Morrison:

Morrison died in Paris on July 3, 1971, in his bathtub at the age of 27; many fans and biographers have speculated that the cause of death was a drug overdose, but the official report listed "heart attack" as the cause of death. Morrison is buried in the famous Le Père Lachaise Cemetery in eastern Paris: because his fans there are generally perceived as nuisances, leaving litter and graffiti behind them, it has been suggested that a new burial site will have to be found. Today the tomb is surrounded by a fence and the original grave was changed due to the large amount of graffitti not only on Morrison's grave, but on the nearby graves.

Some people believe Morrison is still alive to this day living in seclusion with his wife, Pamela Courson, although little evidence exists.

Poetry by James Douglas Morrison:

An American Night

The Lords

The New Creatures

Wilderness

Actor Filmography:

HWY: An American Pastoral (1969)

Intoccabili, Gli (1968)

The O'Keefe Centre Presents: The Rock Scene - Like It Is! (1967)

Induction (1965)

Composer Filmography:

Ramones Raw (2004)

The School of Rock (2003)

Someone Like You... (2001)

Girl, Interrupted (1999)

The Doors Collection (1999)

The Waterboy (1998)

The Basketball Diaries (1995)

Forrest Gump (1994)

The Doors: Live in Europe 1968 (1991)

The Doors: The Soft Parade (1991)

Air America (1990)

The Jeff Healey Band: See the Light - Live from London (1989)

Rude Awakening (1989)

Road House (1989)

The Doors: Dance on Fire (1985)

Apocalypse Now (1979)

The Doors: The Doors Are Open (1968)

Who's That Knocking at My Door (1967)

Jim Morrison Quotes:

The first time I discovered death...me and my mother and father, and my grandmother and grandfather, were driving through the desert at dawn. A truckload of Indians had either hit another car or something- there were Indians scattered all over the highway, bleeding to death. I was just a kid, so I had to stay in the car while my father and grandfather went to check it out. I didn't see nothing- all I saw was funny red paint and people lying around, but I knew something was happening, because I could dig the vibrations of the people around me, and all of a sudden I realized that they didn't know what was happening any more than I did. That was the first time I tasted fear...and I do think, at that moment, the souls of those dead Indians- maybe one or two of them-were just running around, freaking out, and just landed in my soul, and I was like a sponge, ready to sit there and absorb it.

I've always been attracted to ideas that were about revolt against authority.

The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on and individual level. It's got to happen inside first. You can take away a man's political freedom and you won't hurt him- unless you take away his freedom to feel. That can destroy him. That kind of freedom can't be granted. Nobody can win it for you.

A hero is someone who rebels, or seems to rebel, against the facts of existence and seems to conquer them, but obviously that can work at moments. It can't be a lasting thing...but that's not saying that people shouldn't keep trying to rebel against the facts of existence...Who knows, someday we might conquer death....and disease and war...

I like any reaction I can get with my music. Just anything to get people to think. I mean if you can get a whole room full of drunk, stoned people to actually wake up and think, you're doing something.

Drugs are like a bet with your mind.

Each generation wants new symbols, new people, new names. They want to divorce themselves from their predecessors.

I see myself as a huge fiery comet, a shooting star. Everyone stops, points up and gasps "Oh look at that!" Then - whoosh, and I'm gone... and they'll never see anything like it ever again, and they won't be able to forget me - ever.

Whoever controls the media, controls the mind.

It's like gambling somehow. You go out for a night of drinking and you don't know where you're going to end up the next day. It could work out good or it could be disastrous. It's like the throw of the dice.

I think that more than writing and music, my greatest talent is that I have an instinctive knack of self-image propagation. I was very good at manipulating publicity with a few little phrases like 'erotic politicians'. Having grown up with TV and mass magazines, I knew instinctively what people would catch on to, so I dropped those little jewels here and there, seemingly very innocently; of course, I was just calling signals.

(after the deaths of Hendrix and Joplin) You're drinking with number three.

I wouldn't mind dying in a plane crash. It'd be a good way to go. I don't want to die in my sleep, or of old age, or OD...I want to feel what it's like. I want to taste it, hear it, smell it. Death is only going to happen to you once; I don't want to miss it.

They call me the Lizard King—whatever that means.

I like ideas about the breaking away or overthrowing of established order. I am interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos, especially activity that seems to have no meaning. It seems to me to be the road towards freedom - external freedom is a way to bring about internal freedom.

I am the Lizard King. I can do anything.

That's what real love amounts to- letting a person be what he really is. Most people love you for who you pretend to be. To keep their love, you keep pretending- performing. You get to love your pretence. It's true, we're locked in an image, an act- and the sad thing is, people get so used to their image, they grow attached to their masks. They love their chains. They forget all about who they really are. And if you try to remind them, they hate you for it, they feel like you're trying to steal their most precious possession.

When you make peace with authority you become authority.

I think there's a whole region of images and feelings inside us that rarely are given outlet in daily life. And when they do come out, they can take perverse forms. It's the dark side. Everyone, when he sees it, recognizes the same thing in himself. It's a recognition of forces that rarely see the light of day. The more civilized we get on the surface, the more the other forces make their plea."