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| Jim Morrison's Biography |
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Musician. Lead singer for the rock group the Doors. Born December 8, 1943, in Melbourne, Florida. When he was a child, Morrison’s family moved extensively, due to his father’s career as a Navy officer. In the late ‘50s, they settled in Alexandria, Virginia, where Morrison completed high school.
In 1964, he moved to the West Coast, and in 1966 he enrolled as a film major at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA). It was at UCLA where Morrison began habitually using psychedelic drugs, such as LSD. He met fellow film student Ray Manzarek, a pianist, as well as guitarist Robbie Krieger, and drummer John Densmore. As the group began to play together, combining Morrison’s poetic lyricism and Manzarek’s classical music training, they formed a style of psychedelic rock and roll that had never been heard before. They borrowed the name of their band, the Doors, from a poem by William Blake, who wrote, “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it is, infinite.”
After signing with Elektra Records in 1966, the Doors released a series of experimental albums based solidly in rock and roll, psychedelia, and blues. Their debut eponymous album the next year featured the hit songs “Light My Fire,” “Break On Through,” and “Twentieth Century Fox.” Also in 1967, they released the album Strange Days, which included the songs “People Are Strange” and “Love Me Two Times.” It was largely Morrison’s charismatic stage presence that invited a cult-like following for the band, and soon Morrison himself had reached nearly iconic status. The Doors continued to produce music at a steady rate, even as they became increasingly absorbed in their drug-addicted world. Waiting for the Sun (1968) and The Soft Parade (1969) were followed with Morrison Hotel in 1970. All three albums continued to illustrate the band’s musical evolution and were somewhat critically successfull, while yielding only sporadic hits. L.A. Woman (1971), the final Doors album featuring Jim Morrison, included the ominous rock lullaby “Riders on the Storm,” and was more blues-influenced than any of the band’s previous releases. Revered by his fans as a type of shaman or god, Morrison named himself the “Lizard King.” His lifestyle, as well as those of his fellow band members, became increasingly saturated with drugs and alcohol. Towards the end of his life he was consuming a fifth of liquor every day. In 1969, following an extreme drinking binge, Morrison appeared on stage before an audience of thirteen thousand in Coconut Grove, Florida. Morrison exposed himself to the audience, outraging community members. Consequently, he was arrested and found guilty of indecent exposure and drunkenness. He was sentenced to six months of hard labor, although the sentence was appealed and he died before there was a new trial. Morrison married longtime girlfriend Pamela Courson, whom he met in 1966. It was his wife who found him dead, on July 3, 1971, in his Paris hotel. His death, most likely due to a drug overdose, was ruled a heart attack, and no autopsy was ever performed. Following a private funeral, Morrison was buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, where his gravesite continues to be attended by droves of fans leaving a variety of personal mementos—including notes, graffiti, cigarettes, photographs, condoms, and drug paraphenelia. The cemetery (in which such luminaries as Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, Edith Piaf, and Frédéric Chopin are also buried) receives 1.5 million visitors a year; a large number of them attributed to Morrison. |