Jim Morrison's Final Chapter (2024) Movie Script
Jim Morrison died at the age of 27,
and he died of an overdose of heroin,
and the smack was too strong and he died.
In other words, he took a bad
batch of heroin and it killed him.
But there's another
theory which says he didn't
die at home, he actually died in a
nightclub in Paris, and then his body was
carried from there back to his apartment.
We Americans are facing
exceedingly difficult questions
about our country, about
order, about lawlessness, about
violence, about progress.
Jim Morrison was born in December 1943.
His father was a rear
admiral in the US Navy.
And as a consequence, was brought up in
a very peripatetic
manner, moving from city to
city where his father was stationed.
And actually, he was a commander at the
time of the Gulf of Tonkin, which was
an incident which was
really associated with the
beginning of the Vietnam War.
But his household was, as you'd expect from
a military father, was strict,
it was very conventional.
He seemed to have a
rather traumatic upbringing,
and his martinet-like father
gets some blame for this.
His father was quite
conservative, and if you
think about really what we think of as
a stereotypical military drill
sergeant sort of mentality,
that was very much the sort of
family life that Jim Morrison had.
For example, when he went to see
his father on his ship in San Diego, he'd
got his hair trimmed
and his father immediately
takes him to the ship's barber.
But his mother seems also to have been
rather difficult, in
almost a sort of really
painful way of treating her child.
He was a bed wetter, and instead of
comforting him over
this, she would make him
go back to sleep in the wet bed, and often
he would end up sleeping on the floor.
And in fact, after she came to see
him, The Doors play in Washington DC in
1967, he never spoke to her again.
So there's a complex upbringing there.
From an early age, he
started questioning that
sort of framework for family life.
The time period this is all
happening, the 50s going into the 60s.
So if you look at politically what was
going on, you have birth
control becoming legal,
you have the press talking about very, very
traditional sort of family life that
you're supposed to participate in.
But then slowly, slowly,
other ideas of protest
and sex and these sort of things are
coming in to the foreground as well.
And I think that very much intrigued
Jim Morrison, as well as it was a way
to show rebellion against the
conservative family he'd grown up in.
Jim Morrison had something
to alleviate the relative
trauma of his upbringing, which
was that he was highly intelligent.
And certainly as a teenager, you know, he'd
be reading books which
one would imagine were
far beyond his age, you
know, Nietzsche, Camus.
Nietzsche's adage of,
you know, that which does
not kill you will always make you stronger,
seemed to have a great impression on him.
He compensated for, you know, the way he
was treated by his parents
with his intelligence.
But also, he claimed to have been
abused by a male friend of the family.
And that may also have led to his
complex behaviour, rather, later on.
He claimed that he was molested as a
child and his mother
refused to believe him.
The key thing for anybody that's a victim
and a survivor of sexual abuse of any
sort at any age, the first thing
you've got to do is you've got to affirm
them, you know.
And you've got to sit down and
say, OK, well, what happened here?
Tell me, you know.
Not to say, well, that can't be true.
So who knows what effect that had
on him also and what effect that had on
his music and on his art.
What Jim Morrison said
happened is his family
was driving by and on the side of
the road were some
Native Americans that had
crashed and one of them had passed away.
And he said over and over again in
his writing and in
interviews that that Indian
had passed into him and he was like
the reincarnation, like
his soul had merged with
that dead Native American at that moment.
And you have that narrative as a thread
that runs through so
many different songs by
The Doors and writing by Jim Morrison.
This is recounted in his song called Peace
Frog and that had a
huge influence on his life.
I mean, his sister believed that he made
the whole thing up and his
father believed he exaggerated it.
But whatever the truth of that incident is,
it certainly is something
happened which made a
big mark on him at that point.
And he was perhaps always looking for a
way out of this of his
conventional childhood.
So he went to university, he went to
UCLA, but again that didn't suit
him at all and all he wanted to do was
to get out into the world and find
a way to express himself on his own
terms not the terms of his father.
He was virtually disowned when he wanted to
go to UCLA to study film which was
then, no one studied film, it was a
brand new course.
And his father was appalled by this
and stopped any funding from then on.
He was a student of philosophy and film,
so he had a scholarly background and he
brought that to
definitely the lyrics of The
Doors but also into the whole persona that
he created on stage and in the media.
So it isn't just, oh, I
want to be a singer.
It definitely is more, again, this idea of
a cultural change and using
these philosophical ideas
and having that be part of
the art that you're creating.
And that was, I think, one of the
big driving factors in the
formation and definitely
in the lyrics of The Doors.
When Jim Morrison is at UCLA
he's doing a lot of LSD and a big pothead.
He meets Ray Manzarek first, who's
the keyboard player who's on his course.
I mean, they're kind of bound together in
a way by their love of smoking wheat.
Raymond Daniel Manzarek, 8, born 2-12-39.
- Occupation? - Musician. Organist.
They play off each other.
It's Manzarek who gets him
up on stage the first time.
The pair of them are
smoking a lot of wheat.
And then the course
finishes and Manzarek hasn't
seen him for a bit and Manzarek also
doesn't quite know what he's doing and he's
kind of like hanging out on Venice Beach
a lot in the summer,
working on his tan, basically.
And then on that beach, he runs into
a shirtless Jim Morrison wearing
just a pair of cut-off jeans.
And he says, what have you been doing?
And he says, well, he's been taking LSD
for the last two months and living on
the roof of an abandoned
warehouse and writing songs.
And that's the sort of
genesis of The Doors, really.
That's how they start to
come together because
he's written some tremendous stuff.
For example, he wrote Hello, I Love You
after being on Venice
Beach and seeing some girl.
I don't think he even talks
to her, but that's about her.
You love me, don't you, baby?
I knew you would.
And so he's being inspired
by what's going on around him.
- Name? - Name?
Robbie Kruger.
Age?
22 years old.
Occupation?
Guitar.
And you know who's
responsible for the breakdown
of law and order in this country?
- Name? - John Bensmore.
Age?
Occupation?
Percussionist.
Militant, activist, revolutionary,
anarchist, and communist.
Name?
Jim.
Occupation?
Very interestingly, in
1965, The Doors, they first
met at a transcendental
meditation event organized by
the Maharishi Mahasayogi,
who of course the Beatles
were into, but not for
another two years almost.
So there's a kind of
intellectual stability about
the other three members
created by that meditation.
But they're all into it, and they kept
doing it throughout the
whole course of The Doors.
They're kind of into jazz.
On the occasion that they go to New
York to sign their record deal, Krieger and
Bensmore are knocked out
because Dizzy Gillespie is
playing downtown, and
the first night they don't
go out and get trashed
to go see Dizzy Gillespie.
So there's always that feel to The Doors
of something a little more
intellectually solid, and
it comes from that, I think.
Like Morrison, these are
highly intelligent guys.
It always helps.
The Doors are kind of seen
as a protest group, really.
They're kind of like, they're
part of the underground.
Hey, boss, there ain't much time, is there?
No.
We ain't got long to go.
No.
At the same time, his father has been
stationed off Vietnam,
initially as a captain, but
then as an admiral on an aircraft carrier,
which is every day bombing North Vietnam.
So there's a real contradiction
there for Jim Morrison.
All right.
You men eat your dinner,
eat your pork and beans
I eat more chicken
than any man ever seen
He wanted to justify himself.
Once you take that course, and you take
that course and you go forward, and you
say, I'm not having all those values that
he fought for and believed in, and then
along came the peacenik
movement, and people became
more aware, and there
were communes developing in
San Francisco and LA,
and that whole atmosphere
out there, it wasn't a
communist thing, in a sense.
It wasn't a totalitarian thing.
Sometimes the first
relationships we have are those
that leave the deepest
psychological imprint, and in
some ways that was
interesting with Jim Morrison
because there was Mary
Werveler, who was the
first relationship, proper
relationship, he had when he
was only a teenager, and she obviously left
a real mark on his soul because when
he was recording the fourth Doors album, he
made the point of saying that the first
three were really about her, and
Ray Manzarek, he said the same thing.
He said she had left a deep mark
on his soul, and so before any other
women came along, before
Pamela Coulson, before all
that happened afterwards, Mary left
a big, indelible mark on Jim Morrison.
I think these days,
especially in the States,
you have to be a politician or an
assassin or something
to really be a superstar.
Manzarek saw in Jim Morrison what he saw,
these incredible poetry
and these lyrics, which he
said was rock music
material, and he realized
that Jim Morrison had
an extraordinary talent, an
extraordinary lyricism, and of
course he was a very handsome man.
He had an amazing presence as well, and
so he formed the Doors, and later on,
Bobby Krieger and John
Densmore joined, and that
was the quartet, really,
that became the Doors,
and he always wanted to find his
own way, find his own path, find his own
way, if you want, to cleanse
the Doors of perception.
This idea of seeing things as they really
are, seeing behind the veil of illusion was
something that was really
compelling for Jim Morrison,
especially since he was already
experimenting with hallucinogens
like LSD, and what he wanted to see
was where that would take him, what journey
that would take him on, and to go
on the journey that Aldous Huxley had done,
who of course took
hallucinogen on his deathbed.
There's this incredible contradiction
between an extraordinarily conventional
upbringing with a military
father and this desire
to experiment, to see
the more expansive side
of life, and the Doors, really, was a
band that was dedicated to that vision.
All of our music is really so symbolic
rather than direct to the point, you know.
Everybody's always talking
about rock and roll and jazz.
The way theyre blending, you know?
And I dont think that can really happen,
but if its supposed to, I think were it.
OK, this time, can you look
to me, please, everybody?
In fact, you're a political group.
Yeah.
We're not talking about
politics, we're talking about...
There's such a stigma about
the word, but I really hate it.
Do you think you're a political group?
Or is this a tactic somebody wants to
tie in because of what's happening
in this place at the moment?
I don't know, it's more of... The only
people who follow us were musicians,
writers.
And I think in the new age, this
whole new age that we're homing for is
the thing where there
won't be any separation,
where the artists, the people who are the
greatest artists, will be the
most commercially successful too.
You know the day destroys the night
Night divides the day
Tried to run, tried to hide
Break on through to the other side
Break on through to the other side
Break on through to
the other side, yeah
The Ed Sullivan Show was on
Sunday night on American TV.
It had been running since the late 1950s.
And it was kind of considered the
pivotal breakthrough show for new acts.
Famously, the Beatles had been on it in
1964 when they first went to America and
something like 70 million
people were watching.
So it was a prestigious show to go on.
Out of the door, here they are with
their newest hit record,
People Are Strange.
People are strange
when you're a stranger
The Doors perform on
the Ed Sullivan Show, and
you have to remember, again, the band has
long hair, Jim Morrison's
wearing tight leather pants,
which leave not much to the imagination.
The Doors went on it when
they had Light My Fire out.
Well, Light My Fire is just a
perfect hit single, to be honest.
It's incredibly melodic,
it's sensuous, it has a
hook that just builds into you,
you just can't forget that tune.
One they were very lucky
to have come up with.
I think that was one of the
first songs Morrison wrote.
Ed Sullivan is not
pleased with the original
lyrics, which in Light My Fire,
baby, we couldn't get no higher.
And the TV executives objected
to the line about get much higher.
They wanted the word replaced.
He wants Jim Morrison to deliver the line
as baby, things couldn't get much better.
And Jim Morrison really is not happy with
that idea, and he makes it known that
that's not something he really wants to do,
but just for band harmony and to allow
the performance to go on, he finally
just says fine, we're going to do it.
He's not going to be told what to do.
He has his own ideas of censorship, he
has his own ideas of being an artist,
and he's an artist, he's a true artist.
You know that it would be untrue
You know that I would be a liar
If I was to say to you
Girl, we couldnt get much higher
Come on, baby, light my fire
So it was a massive two fingers
up, F-you, to not just Ed Sullivan, but
to somebody of authority
telling Jim Morrison what
to do and where to do it.
So the law and the line was drawn
in terms of Jim Morrison was not going
to concede to anybody.
Even if that meant
risking the possible success
of the Doors, that wasn't
what was important.
What was important is the art and the
craft remaining intact, but also
Jim Morrison being in control.
Very few of those sort of guys, they
take the whole thing of the rock and
roll culture to a higher level.
What Jim Morrison had going for him was
that he looked like a Greek god, with
those sort of tumbling,
dark locks, and, you
know, classically chiselled face.
And it's very, very overtly sexual.
Again, it's this idea of the, I would
say the female and the male gaze, and
Jim Morrison being
positioned as a sexual object,
that going against
convention, but in a smart
way, doing it because
there's an agenda behind
it, whether it's political
or, again, scholarly, that
comes through in pretty
much everything that he
does in the early stages of the Doors.
But you can see why, with his kind
of leather trouser look,
always wearing the black
leather trousers, why he
became this sex symbol, really.
But actually what's much
greater than that with
Jim Morrison is his art,
because he's a superb poet.
You know, he's playing the part of the
Lizard King, but even
that's a poetic construct.
And his words, his lyrics are
very, very, very good indeed.
And he did publish a volume for poetry
while he was still alive,
which really stand out.
It was quite an incredible
group, actually, whereby
a band that didn't have a bass player.
Obviously it was a very
unique little set -up.
It was very fortunate to have a keyboard
player who could actually
play very good bass
lines, and the bass lines of
the Doors were incredibly good.
I'd like to do a song or a piece of
music that's just a pure expression
of joy.
Pure, like a celebration
of existence, you know.
And like the coming of spring or
the sun rising, or something like that.
Just pure, unbounded joy.
I don't think we've really done that yet.
Well, all your songs are an
expression of joy and potency.
So far.
Yeah, maybe.
What other sort of joy is it
that you want to introduce?
The mood I get from most of
it is kind of a heavy, kind of a
sort of gloomy feeling.
Like of someone not quite at home,
or not quite relaxed and aware of a lot
of things, but not quite
sure about anything.
I'd like to do one just feeling
of being totally at home.
You listen to the Doors, and you realise
that up until then, there'd
been nothing like them.
I mean, there's this kind
of gothic sound of the organ.
There's a space there in which you can
find all manner of moments to project your
own thoughts into, but it is dominated by
Morrison's fabulous lyrics
and his fabulous tone.
Interestingly, his favourite
vocalists were Frank Sinatra and
Elvis Presley, who he
discovered rather late.
That stretch that Presley had, you
know, you can hear that in Jim Morrison.
Yeah, baby.
Always lived very quiet life
I aint never, I aint
never did no wrong
Now, I know I
hear a very gentle sound
Very near yet very far
Very soft and very clear
Come today, babe, come today
Lonely too long
One night with you
The thing about the Doors
was that they were kind
of slightly lucky that they came out when
they did, which was sort of
66, 67, when they first emerged.
And that was the time when album rock,
you know, becomes the dominant form.
It takes over from singles.
It's also seen as being part of the
underground, which they
were, you know, but also
there's the phenomenon of
FM radio emerging at that time.
And the phenomenon of cans, as they were
known, which is headphones,
and people would listen
to that music through
these underground acts on
headphones very often, whether
on their stereos or on FM radio.
And the Doors music was kind of perfect
as a stone listening to on headphones.
That was certainly the reason for
their success, one of the reasons.
Come on, baby, light my fire
Try to set the night on fire
Initially, he's not
really a drinker, but as
time progresses, quite
quickly as time progresses, he
starts to drink a lot and seems to
be buried in booze most of the time.
A funeral pyre
Come on, baby, light my fire
Come on, baby, light my fire
It's Ray Manzarek who defines
him as... There's two characters.
There's Jim Morrison, who's,
like, sweet, sensitive, highly
creative, and there's this
character Jimbo, who's basically
a bit of a drunken monster just
sort of hanging out with idiots.
And there's this constant
conflict that Manzarek sees in him.
Drinking allowed Jim Morrison to tap into a
fearlessness, and I
think he was fearless in
a lot of ways when he was sober in
terms of he could engage with ideas
that might be scary,
but the drinking allowed
him to, again, do things
that he's well-known for,
like walking on ledges of buildings
and seeing and doing outrageous things.
But I think his personality
also changed quite a bit.
He became quite a bit more violent and
unruly and not very appealing to be around.
So, again, not the
philosophical sexual being, but
more an angry drunk in a lot of ways.
For example, when
they've just signed their deal
with Elektra Records,
they go to the producer's
house in New York, and Morrison just gets
outrageously drunk at
this, you know, tries to
hit on the producer's wife, and then, as
the producer's driving
them back into the city,
you know, he's pulling on his hair, and
it's classic attention-seeking stuff.
You know, it's chronically
immature, really.
And then they get back to the hotel,
and he stands out naked on the balcony
and then comes back and, you
know, and urinates on the rug.
I mean, back to his
bed-wetting, some might say!
In December of 1967, it's one of the
first of two incidents
that Jim Morrison becomes
completely intertwined with.
The door's played in New Haven, and before
the show, there's cops
around, and Morrison is,
you know, doing whatever he's doing with a
girl, and the cops have grabbed him, and
he complains, and then he's pepper-sprayed.
He has to go out on stage, and
he just has tears streaming down.
He can barely see.
Not so good for a singer
about to go on stage, actually.
He's really angry about being
pepper-sprayed backstage.
I don't think they recognized him
backstage as being Jim Morrison.
I think they thought he was a
groupie or some sort of hanger-on.
And so he's quite volatile by the time
he gets out in front of the audience.
And then when he goes on stage, he
tells the audience what
has happened, and there's
a near-riot, which I'm sure
he's very pleased about.
Similarly to other stars
that come after him,
he wanted the stardom, but I don't think
he really understood what
the consequences would be,
and that is kind of the first of
two incidents of indecent exposure
that Jim Morrison gets accused of.
Come light my fire, come light my fire
Come light my fire, come light my fire
Come light my fire, come light my fire
He'd often be quite static on stage,
but he'd also be very controversial.
I mean, there's the famous
occasion in Miami in 1969.
He'd missed the flight that the rest
of the group went on, and he had to
get another flight, connecting
flight through New Orleans,
arrived really drunk,
drinking all the time on
those planes, and arrived
just in time to go on stage.
So he's in a mess.
He allegedly takes out his cock and waggles
it at the audience,
for which he's arrested.
They were very heavy, those police
down in the South in those days.
Extremely unpleasant.
Five to one, baby, one in five
No one here gets out alive, now
You get yours, baby, Ill get mine
Gonna make it, baby
John Densmore said
years later that, you know,
in terms of him exposing himself,
that never actually happened.
He seemed to be being fitted up by
the police over this, cos no-one saw
his penis.
His shirt was dangling down in front.
Did this really occur?
Was this just, you know, a bit of
bravado on his part, saying he was doing
this?
I mean, it all seemed very dubious.
The police were definitely out to get him.
The different allegations
against Jim Morrison, whether it
is for revealing his
genitals or for simulating
oral sex, the different things that are put
about him in the press, and
the fact that it goes to a jury in a
court trial, I think it has a really
profound impact on him in a negative way.
He feels hounded by the American media.
The old get old, and
the young get stronger
May take a week, and
it may take longer
They got the guns
but we got the numbers
It's so hard for so many people who become
famous, you know, because this isn't
something that anybody can plan for.
Any teenage kid can say, I want
to be famous or I want to do this
or I want to do that, but having
that ambition is one thing,
but the reality of it is another.
And especially for somebody
who was quite introverted,
like Jim Morrison was,
who was quite cerebral,
who was sensitive, who
actually was quite shy.
The pressure is really
of leaving and trying
to break free from that early childhood of
conformity and steriles of
1950s America was something
that really drove him, yet only to find
himself then, you know,
imprisoned and captured by
the image the world had of him
and an image he had to play up to,
sustain, maintain.
Why, oh yeah, yeah, a back door man
Back door man
The men dont know - In
Florida, it was his home state.
It seemed like, you know,
there was some element of...
He was kind of trying to push things
and, you know, kind of wanting to really
perhaps irritate the people he'd
grown up with and all his relatives.
He feels let down by the justice
system and I think more so than that, the
feeding frenzy that the press has over this
and the way that what
actually happens doesn't
really matter, I think
that's really shocking for
him and very disturbing for him.
So this rupture between
the actuality and what
is in the press, I think, has a
profound effect on Morrison.
You really see that in terms of the
amount of drinking escalating,
the physical appearance starting
to, again, get bloated and
diminish in attractiveness,
and I think that's one of the reasons
he ultimately goes into exile in Paris.
Again, you have this
obsession, if you would,
on kind of the young, pristine, as pristine
as Jim Morrison can be, pictures, him in
the tight leather pants,
him with, again, like
the cheekbones that
could cut things with, but
really the later Jim Morrison
is unfortunately bloated,
quite almost like unrecognisable
Jim Morrison to the
one that we think of now.
Booze seems to be dominant, but
then sort of heroin seems to creep in.
He moves to Paris, the poetic city, but
Paris was known as the heroin
capital of Europe, very easy to obtain.
Maybe Jim Morrison, when he moved
to Paris, did what a lot of people did.
They move physically in the hope they can
move emotionally and
spiritually, but of course the
physical move is easy to make.
You hop on a car, a plane, a train,
a boat, whatever you want to do,
and you move from place A
to place B, so you can relocate.
But as the saying goes,
wherever you go, there you are.
You take yourself with you.
It's almost like he's trying to shuck off
the whole sexualized
image, and so that obviously
took a toll both on his mental stability
and on the relationships in
the band and on his physicality.
So by the time he goes to Paris in
1971, he can basically walk down the
street and nobody
recognizes him because it's not
the Jim Morrison people expect to see.
Jim Morrison has a
relationship with this girl
Pamela Corson for a long time,
and she goes to Paris with him, in fact.
She's effectively his wife.
What's interesting about Jim
Morrison's connection with Pamela
Corson is in a way they share some
similar childhood experiences
because she too was born
in 1946 into quite a
conventional American family,
and she wanted more than that.
One of her friends described her as the
most dangerous girl I know, and yet she
was born into this very
conventional environment in
an attempt to find something
more than she'd been born into.
She left home.
She went to study art in Los Angeles,
but she dropped out because
that wasn't enough either.
It was all too pedestrian for her.
Then she met Jim Morrison at a club
called London Fog, and the
attraction on both parts was instant.
They were both wild.
They were both quite unstable.
They were both incredibly
volatile and incredibly driven
to push the boundaries
of the normal American
youth experience to places where
perhaps it hadn't gone before.
Of course, at that time you were in
the midst of the 1960s
counterculture, and so
it was a very heady mix of impulse
and opportunity, and
this collision of these two
wild, creative personalities
was combustible.
Drugs affected the relationship
between Jim and Pamela
in all sorts of ways because not least
the fact that their
relationship was volatile.
There was infidelity on both parts.
There was loud, violent arguments.
There was violence.
In one case, Jim Morrison set fire to
a room that Pamela had locked herself in.
Pamela punched Jim at
some sort of altercation,
locked herself in a room, and
then Jim tried to set fire to it.
Luckily, he failed.
That gives an idea of what the relationship
was like, and of course that level of
volatility is very difficult to sustain.
There was a difference in the way
that Jim saw his drug use to hers because
it's well documented
that he disapproved of her
using heroin while he used it himself.
She rents an apartment
for herself and Morrison
in Paris, and the idea is
they're going to go to Paris.
He's going to lose some weight.
He's going to detox.
He's going to focus on the writing and
really kind of get back to a
healthier mind and body situation.
To be fair, he does start to lose weight.
He does start engaging
less with the different
substances that have
been detrimental to him, and
he is, I wouldn't say on the road
to recovery, but he is living definitely a
healthier lifestyle in Paris than he was in
his days in Los Angeles, which makes it
that much more, again, confusing
as to what happened in the final days.
Jim Morrison died at the age of 27,
and he died of an overdose of heroin.
Marianne Faithfull said the
smack was too strong and he died.
In other words, he took a bad
batch of heroin and it killed him.
But there's another theory
which says he didn't die at home.
He didn't die in the bathtub at home.
He actually died in a nightclub in Paris,
and then his body was carried
from there back to his apartment.
One that seems most
reliable, and I've heard
this from Marianne
Faithfull, actually, is that it
was her then heroin dealer who supplied him
with the heroin which killed him.
Pamela and Jim had been at the Rock
and Roll Circus, and Jim did an injection
of this China White
heroin that was extremely
potent and had an overdose in the bathroom.
And because he was Jim Morrison, Pamela and
some of the club folk had to smuggle
his body out, and they therefore then moved
the body to the bathtub at the apartment
where Jim and Pamela were staying.
A big flaw in that scenario is that
it was well known that Jim Morrison hated
people that injected
drugs and refused to do it.
Pamela Corson was a long-time heroin addict
and injected the drug, and that was a
massive point of strain
between her and Morrison.
The idea that out of nowhere he'd be
like, I'm just going to inject
this seems quite implausible.
It's hard to imagine it now, but it
was 6 days between
when the funeral happened
and when the Los Angeles media
found out that Jim Morrison was dead.
Jim Morrison, the lead singer for
The Doors, a rock music group, is dead.
He was 27.
His personal manager said he died in Paris,
probably of heart failure last Saturday.
I'm not saying there was a hysteria that
you would think like we see with Elvis,
but there's definitely a
public and communal mourning
which is still going on to this day.
The second and most accepted theory is that
Jim and Pamela were
at the apartment hanging
out watching some Super 8 movies.
They snorted what Pamela said was cocaine.
Pamela ended up going to bed.
Jim stayed up longer watching some Super 8
movies and listening
to old Doors albums, and
he got a bloody nose
and didn't feel very well.
He felt quite ill, and he asked Pamela,
said, Pamela, could you go run me a
bathtub, please?
So she went, ran him
a tub, and he got into it.
Around 6 a.m. in the morning, she
woke up and realized that Jim was not
there.
And she went, she says,
and found him dead in the tub.
Later on, Pamela Corson
does confess that it
was actually heroin that she and Jim had
snorted, and Jim had
thought it was cocaine.
And she was ashamed.
She didn't want him to know
the depth of her addiction.
That does lend that a
little bit more credibility.
The only people that
supposedly see Jim Morrison's
body are Pamela and a friend of theirs
who, within 72 hours of Jim's body being
found in the bathtub,
have already purchased the
cheapest possible casket
and put Jim Morrison into
it, and he's been buried.
So there's no autopsy.
Nobody else sees the body.
With no autopsy, how do we
know what actually happened?
How do we know what the
official, authentic reason was?
I don't think we'll ever know.
There's rumors that they put ice on Jim
Morrison's body as it was sitting in the
bathtub between when Pamela found
him and when they put him in the casket.
That is just anecdotal.
But when the Doors manager flies out to
attend the memorial service,
he doesn't ever see the body.
In fact, as Ray Mazurek has famously
said, how do we know, since it was a
sealed coffin that
wasn't 150 pounds of sand
in the casket, how do we
know it was actually a body?
That is really kind of the pivotal thing.
We don't know the exact demise.
We're believing a
well-known, long-term heroin
addict's story of what
happened, and there is
no physical evidence, one way or the other,
of what actually happened to Jim Morrison.
We accept these things as true when there
has not been any factual
evidence to support it.
Jim Morrison is in the
Pre Lachaise Cemetery
in Paris along with the likes of
Rimbaud, the poet, for example.
It's known as the Poet's Cemetery.
If you look at other people that are
also interned at Pre Lachaise,
you have Edith Piaf, the singer.
You have famously Oscar Wilde.
You have basically a who's who of
20th -century mavericks and thinkers.
Which I think he would
have been pleased about.
People always say this
when people have died,
they, oh, they'd have loved that.
We don't know that, but it seems, you
know, he might have felt honoured
to be there in such exalted company.
In terms of the maintenance
and the evolution
of Jim Morrison's legacy
and who Jim Morrison
was as a poet and a thinker, Pre
Lachaise is a perfect place for him.
In a tragic irony, Pamela
Courson died three
years after Jim Morrison when she too was
27 and she too died of an overdose.
And although in Californian law, being a
common-law wife didn't
entitle her to carry Jim
Morrison's name, she
was a plaque erected with
the name Pamela Susan Morrison,
not Pamela Susan Courson.
And that's really simply
to, you know, affirm
that Jim Morrison, the
significant role that Jim
Morrison played in her life, the love she
obviously felt for him,
despite all the troubles
and all the problems they had and
the tragic fate that they both shared.
Jim Morrison, I think, has
become quite Disney -ified.
A lot of the danger that he represented
at the time, that's what
made him so appealing.
And a lot of that, I think, has been
stripped away by the ideas around him
in terms of, oh, it's all about sex,
it's all about drugs,
it's all about excess.
But he's more about, like, walking
that line between life and death.
He really saw death as always
being right there next to you.
Nothing was excited
about death, he was curious
about death and, like, what
it was, what would happen.
And I think people forget about that.
And in a way, that's a really important
lesson we all need to be thinking about
all the time, is everything
could change like that.
And Jim Morrison was very aware of that.
Jim Morrison also
personifies the troubled artist.
In his death, he almost fulfils
a lot of people's expectations.
Jim Morrison has left a prototype for the
rebellious, thinking rock
star, someone that's willing to
push their personal
limits in terms of their
output and what they're going to put into
the public space, but
also in terms of living.
He was fearless, and at least his public
persona was fearless, and
he was experimental, and
he was smart, and all those things, I
think, are what have made him go on
as a person of interest,
even this long after his death.
And he's the front man of the biggest
group, justifiably the
biggest group in America, in
the second half of the 1960s.
Jim Morrison's legacy is one of
very high art that he left behind him.
I mean, he's a great wordsmith.
People do underestimate
how great his lyrics are.
A song like The End, for example, which
is the final track on the first album,
which is really about some
eatable confrontation with
his parents, is just sensational.
The legacy of The Doors is musical, it's
also cultural, and of
course there's that sacrificial
element to Jim Morrison's
life story, where he
sacrificed himself for his art, where he so
made his life into this work, into this
destructive work of
art, that it's become an
iconic life, really, in
the history of music.
But as a human being, if you take
away the iconography and
symbolism and meaning of
that, in purely human terms, he was a
tragic figure, because,
like all addicts, he got
lost in the drugs that he took.
And in the end, instead of him
taking the drugs, the drugs took him.
and he died of an overdose of heroin,
and the smack was too strong and he died.
In other words, he took a bad
batch of heroin and it killed him.
But there's another
theory which says he didn't
die at home, he actually died in a
nightclub in Paris, and then his body was
carried from there back to his apartment.
We Americans are facing
exceedingly difficult questions
about our country, about
order, about lawlessness, about
violence, about progress.
Jim Morrison was born in December 1943.
His father was a rear
admiral in the US Navy.
And as a consequence, was brought up in
a very peripatetic
manner, moving from city to
city where his father was stationed.
And actually, he was a commander at the
time of the Gulf of Tonkin, which was
an incident which was
really associated with the
beginning of the Vietnam War.
But his household was, as you'd expect from
a military father, was strict,
it was very conventional.
He seemed to have a
rather traumatic upbringing,
and his martinet-like father
gets some blame for this.
His father was quite
conservative, and if you
think about really what we think of as
a stereotypical military drill
sergeant sort of mentality,
that was very much the sort of
family life that Jim Morrison had.
For example, when he went to see
his father on his ship in San Diego, he'd
got his hair trimmed
and his father immediately
takes him to the ship's barber.
But his mother seems also to have been
rather difficult, in
almost a sort of really
painful way of treating her child.
He was a bed wetter, and instead of
comforting him over
this, she would make him
go back to sleep in the wet bed, and often
he would end up sleeping on the floor.
And in fact, after she came to see
him, The Doors play in Washington DC in
1967, he never spoke to her again.
So there's a complex upbringing there.
From an early age, he
started questioning that
sort of framework for family life.
The time period this is all
happening, the 50s going into the 60s.
So if you look at politically what was
going on, you have birth
control becoming legal,
you have the press talking about very, very
traditional sort of family life that
you're supposed to participate in.
But then slowly, slowly,
other ideas of protest
and sex and these sort of things are
coming in to the foreground as well.
And I think that very much intrigued
Jim Morrison, as well as it was a way
to show rebellion against the
conservative family he'd grown up in.
Jim Morrison had something
to alleviate the relative
trauma of his upbringing, which
was that he was highly intelligent.
And certainly as a teenager, you know, he'd
be reading books which
one would imagine were
far beyond his age, you
know, Nietzsche, Camus.
Nietzsche's adage of,
you know, that which does
not kill you will always make you stronger,
seemed to have a great impression on him.
He compensated for, you know, the way he
was treated by his parents
with his intelligence.
But also, he claimed to have been
abused by a male friend of the family.
And that may also have led to his
complex behaviour, rather, later on.
He claimed that he was molested as a
child and his mother
refused to believe him.
The key thing for anybody that's a victim
and a survivor of sexual abuse of any
sort at any age, the first thing
you've got to do is you've got to affirm
them, you know.
And you've got to sit down and
say, OK, well, what happened here?
Tell me, you know.
Not to say, well, that can't be true.
So who knows what effect that had
on him also and what effect that had on
his music and on his art.
What Jim Morrison said
happened is his family
was driving by and on the side of
the road were some
Native Americans that had
crashed and one of them had passed away.
And he said over and over again in
his writing and in
interviews that that Indian
had passed into him and he was like
the reincarnation, like
his soul had merged with
that dead Native American at that moment.
And you have that narrative as a thread
that runs through so
many different songs by
The Doors and writing by Jim Morrison.
This is recounted in his song called Peace
Frog and that had a
huge influence on his life.
I mean, his sister believed that he made
the whole thing up and his
father believed he exaggerated it.
But whatever the truth of that incident is,
it certainly is something
happened which made a
big mark on him at that point.
And he was perhaps always looking for a
way out of this of his
conventional childhood.
So he went to university, he went to
UCLA, but again that didn't suit
him at all and all he wanted to do was
to get out into the world and find
a way to express himself on his own
terms not the terms of his father.
He was virtually disowned when he wanted to
go to UCLA to study film which was
then, no one studied film, it was a
brand new course.
And his father was appalled by this
and stopped any funding from then on.
He was a student of philosophy and film,
so he had a scholarly background and he
brought that to
definitely the lyrics of The
Doors but also into the whole persona that
he created on stage and in the media.
So it isn't just, oh, I
want to be a singer.
It definitely is more, again, this idea of
a cultural change and using
these philosophical ideas
and having that be part of
the art that you're creating.
And that was, I think, one of the
big driving factors in the
formation and definitely
in the lyrics of The Doors.
When Jim Morrison is at UCLA
he's doing a lot of LSD and a big pothead.
He meets Ray Manzarek first, who's
the keyboard player who's on his course.
I mean, they're kind of bound together in
a way by their love of smoking wheat.
Raymond Daniel Manzarek, 8, born 2-12-39.
- Occupation? - Musician. Organist.
They play off each other.
It's Manzarek who gets him
up on stage the first time.
The pair of them are
smoking a lot of wheat.
And then the course
finishes and Manzarek hasn't
seen him for a bit and Manzarek also
doesn't quite know what he's doing and he's
kind of like hanging out on Venice Beach
a lot in the summer,
working on his tan, basically.
And then on that beach, he runs into
a shirtless Jim Morrison wearing
just a pair of cut-off jeans.
And he says, what have you been doing?
And he says, well, he's been taking LSD
for the last two months and living on
the roof of an abandoned
warehouse and writing songs.
And that's the sort of
genesis of The Doors, really.
That's how they start to
come together because
he's written some tremendous stuff.
For example, he wrote Hello, I Love You
after being on Venice
Beach and seeing some girl.
I don't think he even talks
to her, but that's about her.
You love me, don't you, baby?
I knew you would.
And so he's being inspired
by what's going on around him.
- Name? - Name?
Robbie Kruger.
Age?
22 years old.
Occupation?
Guitar.
And you know who's
responsible for the breakdown
of law and order in this country?
- Name? - John Bensmore.
Age?
Occupation?
Percussionist.
Militant, activist, revolutionary,
anarchist, and communist.
Name?
Jim.
Occupation?
Very interestingly, in
1965, The Doors, they first
met at a transcendental
meditation event organized by
the Maharishi Mahasayogi,
who of course the Beatles
were into, but not for
another two years almost.
So there's a kind of
intellectual stability about
the other three members
created by that meditation.
But they're all into it, and they kept
doing it throughout the
whole course of The Doors.
They're kind of into jazz.
On the occasion that they go to New
York to sign their record deal, Krieger and
Bensmore are knocked out
because Dizzy Gillespie is
playing downtown, and
the first night they don't
go out and get trashed
to go see Dizzy Gillespie.
So there's always that feel to The Doors
of something a little more
intellectually solid, and
it comes from that, I think.
Like Morrison, these are
highly intelligent guys.
It always helps.
The Doors are kind of seen
as a protest group, really.
They're kind of like, they're
part of the underground.
Hey, boss, there ain't much time, is there?
No.
We ain't got long to go.
No.
At the same time, his father has been
stationed off Vietnam,
initially as a captain, but
then as an admiral on an aircraft carrier,
which is every day bombing North Vietnam.
So there's a real contradiction
there for Jim Morrison.
All right.
You men eat your dinner,
eat your pork and beans
I eat more chicken
than any man ever seen
He wanted to justify himself.
Once you take that course, and you take
that course and you go forward, and you
say, I'm not having all those values that
he fought for and believed in, and then
along came the peacenik
movement, and people became
more aware, and there
were communes developing in
San Francisco and LA,
and that whole atmosphere
out there, it wasn't a
communist thing, in a sense.
It wasn't a totalitarian thing.
Sometimes the first
relationships we have are those
that leave the deepest
psychological imprint, and in
some ways that was
interesting with Jim Morrison
because there was Mary
Werveler, who was the
first relationship, proper
relationship, he had when he
was only a teenager, and she obviously left
a real mark on his soul because when
he was recording the fourth Doors album, he
made the point of saying that the first
three were really about her, and
Ray Manzarek, he said the same thing.
He said she had left a deep mark
on his soul, and so before any other
women came along, before
Pamela Coulson, before all
that happened afterwards, Mary left
a big, indelible mark on Jim Morrison.
I think these days,
especially in the States,
you have to be a politician or an
assassin or something
to really be a superstar.
Manzarek saw in Jim Morrison what he saw,
these incredible poetry
and these lyrics, which he
said was rock music
material, and he realized
that Jim Morrison had
an extraordinary talent, an
extraordinary lyricism, and of
course he was a very handsome man.
He had an amazing presence as well, and
so he formed the Doors, and later on,
Bobby Krieger and John
Densmore joined, and that
was the quartet, really,
that became the Doors,
and he always wanted to find his
own way, find his own path, find his own
way, if you want, to cleanse
the Doors of perception.
This idea of seeing things as they really
are, seeing behind the veil of illusion was
something that was really
compelling for Jim Morrison,
especially since he was already
experimenting with hallucinogens
like LSD, and what he wanted to see
was where that would take him, what journey
that would take him on, and to go
on the journey that Aldous Huxley had done,
who of course took
hallucinogen on his deathbed.
There's this incredible contradiction
between an extraordinarily conventional
upbringing with a military
father and this desire
to experiment, to see
the more expansive side
of life, and the Doors, really, was a
band that was dedicated to that vision.
All of our music is really so symbolic
rather than direct to the point, you know.
Everybody's always talking
about rock and roll and jazz.
The way theyre blending, you know?
And I dont think that can really happen,
but if its supposed to, I think were it.
OK, this time, can you look
to me, please, everybody?
In fact, you're a political group.
Yeah.
We're not talking about
politics, we're talking about...
There's such a stigma about
the word, but I really hate it.
Do you think you're a political group?
Or is this a tactic somebody wants to
tie in because of what's happening
in this place at the moment?
I don't know, it's more of... The only
people who follow us were musicians,
writers.
And I think in the new age, this
whole new age that we're homing for is
the thing where there
won't be any separation,
where the artists, the people who are the
greatest artists, will be the
most commercially successful too.
You know the day destroys the night
Night divides the day
Tried to run, tried to hide
Break on through to the other side
Break on through to the other side
Break on through to
the other side, yeah
The Ed Sullivan Show was on
Sunday night on American TV.
It had been running since the late 1950s.
And it was kind of considered the
pivotal breakthrough show for new acts.
Famously, the Beatles had been on it in
1964 when they first went to America and
something like 70 million
people were watching.
So it was a prestigious show to go on.
Out of the door, here they are with
their newest hit record,
People Are Strange.
People are strange
when you're a stranger
The Doors perform on
the Ed Sullivan Show, and
you have to remember, again, the band has
long hair, Jim Morrison's
wearing tight leather pants,
which leave not much to the imagination.
The Doors went on it when
they had Light My Fire out.
Well, Light My Fire is just a
perfect hit single, to be honest.
It's incredibly melodic,
it's sensuous, it has a
hook that just builds into you,
you just can't forget that tune.
One they were very lucky
to have come up with.
I think that was one of the
first songs Morrison wrote.
Ed Sullivan is not
pleased with the original
lyrics, which in Light My Fire,
baby, we couldn't get no higher.
And the TV executives objected
to the line about get much higher.
They wanted the word replaced.
He wants Jim Morrison to deliver the line
as baby, things couldn't get much better.
And Jim Morrison really is not happy with
that idea, and he makes it known that
that's not something he really wants to do,
but just for band harmony and to allow
the performance to go on, he finally
just says fine, we're going to do it.
He's not going to be told what to do.
He has his own ideas of censorship, he
has his own ideas of being an artist,
and he's an artist, he's a true artist.
You know that it would be untrue
You know that I would be a liar
If I was to say to you
Girl, we couldnt get much higher
Come on, baby, light my fire
So it was a massive two fingers
up, F-you, to not just Ed Sullivan, but
to somebody of authority
telling Jim Morrison what
to do and where to do it.
So the law and the line was drawn
in terms of Jim Morrison was not going
to concede to anybody.
Even if that meant
risking the possible success
of the Doors, that wasn't
what was important.
What was important is the art and the
craft remaining intact, but also
Jim Morrison being in control.
Very few of those sort of guys, they
take the whole thing of the rock and
roll culture to a higher level.
What Jim Morrison had going for him was
that he looked like a Greek god, with
those sort of tumbling,
dark locks, and, you
know, classically chiselled face.
And it's very, very overtly sexual.
Again, it's this idea of the, I would
say the female and the male gaze, and
Jim Morrison being
positioned as a sexual object,
that going against
convention, but in a smart
way, doing it because
there's an agenda behind
it, whether it's political
or, again, scholarly, that
comes through in pretty
much everything that he
does in the early stages of the Doors.
But you can see why, with his kind
of leather trouser look,
always wearing the black
leather trousers, why he
became this sex symbol, really.
But actually what's much
greater than that with
Jim Morrison is his art,
because he's a superb poet.
You know, he's playing the part of the
Lizard King, but even
that's a poetic construct.
And his words, his lyrics are
very, very, very good indeed.
And he did publish a volume for poetry
while he was still alive,
which really stand out.
It was quite an incredible
group, actually, whereby
a band that didn't have a bass player.
Obviously it was a very
unique little set -up.
It was very fortunate to have a keyboard
player who could actually
play very good bass
lines, and the bass lines of
the Doors were incredibly good.
I'd like to do a song or a piece of
music that's just a pure expression
of joy.
Pure, like a celebration
of existence, you know.
And like the coming of spring or
the sun rising, or something like that.
Just pure, unbounded joy.
I don't think we've really done that yet.
Well, all your songs are an
expression of joy and potency.
So far.
Yeah, maybe.
What other sort of joy is it
that you want to introduce?
The mood I get from most of
it is kind of a heavy, kind of a
sort of gloomy feeling.
Like of someone not quite at home,
or not quite relaxed and aware of a lot
of things, but not quite
sure about anything.
I'd like to do one just feeling
of being totally at home.
You listen to the Doors, and you realise
that up until then, there'd
been nothing like them.
I mean, there's this kind
of gothic sound of the organ.
There's a space there in which you can
find all manner of moments to project your
own thoughts into, but it is dominated by
Morrison's fabulous lyrics
and his fabulous tone.
Interestingly, his favourite
vocalists were Frank Sinatra and
Elvis Presley, who he
discovered rather late.
That stretch that Presley had, you
know, you can hear that in Jim Morrison.
Yeah, baby.
Always lived very quiet life
I aint never, I aint
never did no wrong
Now, I know I
hear a very gentle sound
Very near yet very far
Very soft and very clear
Come today, babe, come today
Lonely too long
One night with you
The thing about the Doors
was that they were kind
of slightly lucky that they came out when
they did, which was sort of
66, 67, when they first emerged.
And that was the time when album rock,
you know, becomes the dominant form.
It takes over from singles.
It's also seen as being part of the
underground, which they
were, you know, but also
there's the phenomenon of
FM radio emerging at that time.
And the phenomenon of cans, as they were
known, which is headphones,
and people would listen
to that music through
these underground acts on
headphones very often, whether
on their stereos or on FM radio.
And the Doors music was kind of perfect
as a stone listening to on headphones.
That was certainly the reason for
their success, one of the reasons.
Come on, baby, light my fire
Try to set the night on fire
Initially, he's not
really a drinker, but as
time progresses, quite
quickly as time progresses, he
starts to drink a lot and seems to
be buried in booze most of the time.
A funeral pyre
Come on, baby, light my fire
Come on, baby, light my fire
It's Ray Manzarek who defines
him as... There's two characters.
There's Jim Morrison, who's,
like, sweet, sensitive, highly
creative, and there's this
character Jimbo, who's basically
a bit of a drunken monster just
sort of hanging out with idiots.
And there's this constant
conflict that Manzarek sees in him.
Drinking allowed Jim Morrison to tap into a
fearlessness, and I
think he was fearless in
a lot of ways when he was sober in
terms of he could engage with ideas
that might be scary,
but the drinking allowed
him to, again, do things
that he's well-known for,
like walking on ledges of buildings
and seeing and doing outrageous things.
But I think his personality
also changed quite a bit.
He became quite a bit more violent and
unruly and not very appealing to be around.
So, again, not the
philosophical sexual being, but
more an angry drunk in a lot of ways.
For example, when
they've just signed their deal
with Elektra Records,
they go to the producer's
house in New York, and Morrison just gets
outrageously drunk at
this, you know, tries to
hit on the producer's wife, and then, as
the producer's driving
them back into the city,
you know, he's pulling on his hair, and
it's classic attention-seeking stuff.
You know, it's chronically
immature, really.
And then they get back to the hotel,
and he stands out naked on the balcony
and then comes back and, you
know, and urinates on the rug.
I mean, back to his
bed-wetting, some might say!
In December of 1967, it's one of the
first of two incidents
that Jim Morrison becomes
completely intertwined with.
The door's played in New Haven, and before
the show, there's cops
around, and Morrison is,
you know, doing whatever he's doing with a
girl, and the cops have grabbed him, and
he complains, and then he's pepper-sprayed.
He has to go out on stage, and
he just has tears streaming down.
He can barely see.
Not so good for a singer
about to go on stage, actually.
He's really angry about being
pepper-sprayed backstage.
I don't think they recognized him
backstage as being Jim Morrison.
I think they thought he was a
groupie or some sort of hanger-on.
And so he's quite volatile by the time
he gets out in front of the audience.
And then when he goes on stage, he
tells the audience what
has happened, and there's
a near-riot, which I'm sure
he's very pleased about.
Similarly to other stars
that come after him,
he wanted the stardom, but I don't think
he really understood what
the consequences would be,
and that is kind of the first of
two incidents of indecent exposure
that Jim Morrison gets accused of.
Come light my fire, come light my fire
Come light my fire, come light my fire
Come light my fire, come light my fire
He'd often be quite static on stage,
but he'd also be very controversial.
I mean, there's the famous
occasion in Miami in 1969.
He'd missed the flight that the rest
of the group went on, and he had to
get another flight, connecting
flight through New Orleans,
arrived really drunk,
drinking all the time on
those planes, and arrived
just in time to go on stage.
So he's in a mess.
He allegedly takes out his cock and waggles
it at the audience,
for which he's arrested.
They were very heavy, those police
down in the South in those days.
Extremely unpleasant.
Five to one, baby, one in five
No one here gets out alive, now
You get yours, baby, Ill get mine
Gonna make it, baby
John Densmore said
years later that, you know,
in terms of him exposing himself,
that never actually happened.
He seemed to be being fitted up by
the police over this, cos no-one saw
his penis.
His shirt was dangling down in front.
Did this really occur?
Was this just, you know, a bit of
bravado on his part, saying he was doing
this?
I mean, it all seemed very dubious.
The police were definitely out to get him.
The different allegations
against Jim Morrison, whether it
is for revealing his
genitals or for simulating
oral sex, the different things that are put
about him in the press, and
the fact that it goes to a jury in a
court trial, I think it has a really
profound impact on him in a negative way.
He feels hounded by the American media.
The old get old, and
the young get stronger
May take a week, and
it may take longer
They got the guns
but we got the numbers
It's so hard for so many people who become
famous, you know, because this isn't
something that anybody can plan for.
Any teenage kid can say, I want
to be famous or I want to do this
or I want to do that, but having
that ambition is one thing,
but the reality of it is another.
And especially for somebody
who was quite introverted,
like Jim Morrison was,
who was quite cerebral,
who was sensitive, who
actually was quite shy.
The pressure is really
of leaving and trying
to break free from that early childhood of
conformity and steriles of
1950s America was something
that really drove him, yet only to find
himself then, you know,
imprisoned and captured by
the image the world had of him
and an image he had to play up to,
sustain, maintain.
Why, oh yeah, yeah, a back door man
Back door man
The men dont know - In
Florida, it was his home state.
It seemed like, you know,
there was some element of...
He was kind of trying to push things
and, you know, kind of wanting to really
perhaps irritate the people he'd
grown up with and all his relatives.
He feels let down by the justice
system and I think more so than that, the
feeding frenzy that the press has over this
and the way that what
actually happens doesn't
really matter, I think
that's really shocking for
him and very disturbing for him.
So this rupture between
the actuality and what
is in the press, I think, has a
profound effect on Morrison.
You really see that in terms of the
amount of drinking escalating,
the physical appearance starting
to, again, get bloated and
diminish in attractiveness,
and I think that's one of the reasons
he ultimately goes into exile in Paris.
Again, you have this
obsession, if you would,
on kind of the young, pristine, as pristine
as Jim Morrison can be, pictures, him in
the tight leather pants,
him with, again, like
the cheekbones that
could cut things with, but
really the later Jim Morrison
is unfortunately bloated,
quite almost like unrecognisable
Jim Morrison to the
one that we think of now.
Booze seems to be dominant, but
then sort of heroin seems to creep in.
He moves to Paris, the poetic city, but
Paris was known as the heroin
capital of Europe, very easy to obtain.
Maybe Jim Morrison, when he moved
to Paris, did what a lot of people did.
They move physically in the hope they can
move emotionally and
spiritually, but of course the
physical move is easy to make.
You hop on a car, a plane, a train,
a boat, whatever you want to do,
and you move from place A
to place B, so you can relocate.
But as the saying goes,
wherever you go, there you are.
You take yourself with you.
It's almost like he's trying to shuck off
the whole sexualized
image, and so that obviously
took a toll both on his mental stability
and on the relationships in
the band and on his physicality.
So by the time he goes to Paris in
1971, he can basically walk down the
street and nobody
recognizes him because it's not
the Jim Morrison people expect to see.
Jim Morrison has a
relationship with this girl
Pamela Corson for a long time,
and she goes to Paris with him, in fact.
She's effectively his wife.
What's interesting about Jim
Morrison's connection with Pamela
Corson is in a way they share some
similar childhood experiences
because she too was born
in 1946 into quite a
conventional American family,
and she wanted more than that.
One of her friends described her as the
most dangerous girl I know, and yet she
was born into this very
conventional environment in
an attempt to find something
more than she'd been born into.
She left home.
She went to study art in Los Angeles,
but she dropped out because
that wasn't enough either.
It was all too pedestrian for her.
Then she met Jim Morrison at a club
called London Fog, and the
attraction on both parts was instant.
They were both wild.
They were both quite unstable.
They were both incredibly
volatile and incredibly driven
to push the boundaries
of the normal American
youth experience to places where
perhaps it hadn't gone before.
Of course, at that time you were in
the midst of the 1960s
counterculture, and so
it was a very heady mix of impulse
and opportunity, and
this collision of these two
wild, creative personalities
was combustible.
Drugs affected the relationship
between Jim and Pamela
in all sorts of ways because not least
the fact that their
relationship was volatile.
There was infidelity on both parts.
There was loud, violent arguments.
There was violence.
In one case, Jim Morrison set fire to
a room that Pamela had locked herself in.
Pamela punched Jim at
some sort of altercation,
locked herself in a room, and
then Jim tried to set fire to it.
Luckily, he failed.
That gives an idea of what the relationship
was like, and of course that level of
volatility is very difficult to sustain.
There was a difference in the way
that Jim saw his drug use to hers because
it's well documented
that he disapproved of her
using heroin while he used it himself.
She rents an apartment
for herself and Morrison
in Paris, and the idea is
they're going to go to Paris.
He's going to lose some weight.
He's going to detox.
He's going to focus on the writing and
really kind of get back to a
healthier mind and body situation.
To be fair, he does start to lose weight.
He does start engaging
less with the different
substances that have
been detrimental to him, and
he is, I wouldn't say on the road
to recovery, but he is living definitely a
healthier lifestyle in Paris than he was in
his days in Los Angeles, which makes it
that much more, again, confusing
as to what happened in the final days.
Jim Morrison died at the age of 27,
and he died of an overdose of heroin.
Marianne Faithfull said the
smack was too strong and he died.
In other words, he took a bad
batch of heroin and it killed him.
But there's another theory
which says he didn't die at home.
He didn't die in the bathtub at home.
He actually died in a nightclub in Paris,
and then his body was carried
from there back to his apartment.
One that seems most
reliable, and I've heard
this from Marianne
Faithfull, actually, is that it
was her then heroin dealer who supplied him
with the heroin which killed him.
Pamela and Jim had been at the Rock
and Roll Circus, and Jim did an injection
of this China White
heroin that was extremely
potent and had an overdose in the bathroom.
And because he was Jim Morrison, Pamela and
some of the club folk had to smuggle
his body out, and they therefore then moved
the body to the bathtub at the apartment
where Jim and Pamela were staying.
A big flaw in that scenario is that
it was well known that Jim Morrison hated
people that injected
drugs and refused to do it.
Pamela Corson was a long-time heroin addict
and injected the drug, and that was a
massive point of strain
between her and Morrison.
The idea that out of nowhere he'd be
like, I'm just going to inject
this seems quite implausible.
It's hard to imagine it now, but it
was 6 days between
when the funeral happened
and when the Los Angeles media
found out that Jim Morrison was dead.
Jim Morrison, the lead singer for
The Doors, a rock music group, is dead.
He was 27.
His personal manager said he died in Paris,
probably of heart failure last Saturday.
I'm not saying there was a hysteria that
you would think like we see with Elvis,
but there's definitely a
public and communal mourning
which is still going on to this day.
The second and most accepted theory is that
Jim and Pamela were
at the apartment hanging
out watching some Super 8 movies.
They snorted what Pamela said was cocaine.
Pamela ended up going to bed.
Jim stayed up longer watching some Super 8
movies and listening
to old Doors albums, and
he got a bloody nose
and didn't feel very well.
He felt quite ill, and he asked Pamela,
said, Pamela, could you go run me a
bathtub, please?
So she went, ran him
a tub, and he got into it.
Around 6 a.m. in the morning, she
woke up and realized that Jim was not
there.
And she went, she says,
and found him dead in the tub.
Later on, Pamela Corson
does confess that it
was actually heroin that she and Jim had
snorted, and Jim had
thought it was cocaine.
And she was ashamed.
She didn't want him to know
the depth of her addiction.
That does lend that a
little bit more credibility.
The only people that
supposedly see Jim Morrison's
body are Pamela and a friend of theirs
who, within 72 hours of Jim's body being
found in the bathtub,
have already purchased the
cheapest possible casket
and put Jim Morrison into
it, and he's been buried.
So there's no autopsy.
Nobody else sees the body.
With no autopsy, how do we
know what actually happened?
How do we know what the
official, authentic reason was?
I don't think we'll ever know.
There's rumors that they put ice on Jim
Morrison's body as it was sitting in the
bathtub between when Pamela found
him and when they put him in the casket.
That is just anecdotal.
But when the Doors manager flies out to
attend the memorial service,
he doesn't ever see the body.
In fact, as Ray Mazurek has famously
said, how do we know, since it was a
sealed coffin that
wasn't 150 pounds of sand
in the casket, how do we
know it was actually a body?
That is really kind of the pivotal thing.
We don't know the exact demise.
We're believing a
well-known, long-term heroin
addict's story of what
happened, and there is
no physical evidence, one way or the other,
of what actually happened to Jim Morrison.
We accept these things as true when there
has not been any factual
evidence to support it.
Jim Morrison is in the
Pre Lachaise Cemetery
in Paris along with the likes of
Rimbaud, the poet, for example.
It's known as the Poet's Cemetery.
If you look at other people that are
also interned at Pre Lachaise,
you have Edith Piaf, the singer.
You have famously Oscar Wilde.
You have basically a who's who of
20th -century mavericks and thinkers.
Which I think he would
have been pleased about.
People always say this
when people have died,
they, oh, they'd have loved that.
We don't know that, but it seems, you
know, he might have felt honoured
to be there in such exalted company.
In terms of the maintenance
and the evolution
of Jim Morrison's legacy
and who Jim Morrison
was as a poet and a thinker, Pre
Lachaise is a perfect place for him.
In a tragic irony, Pamela
Courson died three
years after Jim Morrison when she too was
27 and she too died of an overdose.
And although in Californian law, being a
common-law wife didn't
entitle her to carry Jim
Morrison's name, she
was a plaque erected with
the name Pamela Susan Morrison,
not Pamela Susan Courson.
And that's really simply
to, you know, affirm
that Jim Morrison, the
significant role that Jim
Morrison played in her life, the love she
obviously felt for him,
despite all the troubles
and all the problems they had and
the tragic fate that they both shared.
Jim Morrison, I think, has
become quite Disney -ified.
A lot of the danger that he represented
at the time, that's what
made him so appealing.
And a lot of that, I think, has been
stripped away by the ideas around him
in terms of, oh, it's all about sex,
it's all about drugs,
it's all about excess.
But he's more about, like, walking
that line between life and death.
He really saw death as always
being right there next to you.
Nothing was excited
about death, he was curious
about death and, like, what
it was, what would happen.
And I think people forget about that.
And in a way, that's a really important
lesson we all need to be thinking about
all the time, is everything
could change like that.
And Jim Morrison was very aware of that.
Jim Morrison also
personifies the troubled artist.
In his death, he almost fulfils
a lot of people's expectations.
Jim Morrison has left a prototype for the
rebellious, thinking rock
star, someone that's willing to
push their personal
limits in terms of their
output and what they're going to put into
the public space, but
also in terms of living.
He was fearless, and at least his public
persona was fearless, and
he was experimental, and
he was smart, and all those things, I
think, are what have made him go on
as a person of interest,
even this long after his death.
And he's the front man of the biggest
group, justifiably the
biggest group in America, in
the second half of the 1960s.
Jim Morrison's legacy is one of
very high art that he left behind him.
I mean, he's a great wordsmith.
People do underestimate
how great his lyrics are.
A song like The End, for example, which
is the final track on the first album,
which is really about some
eatable confrontation with
his parents, is just sensational.
The legacy of The Doors is musical, it's
also cultural, and of
course there's that sacrificial
element to Jim Morrison's
life story, where he
sacrificed himself for his art, where he so
made his life into this work, into this
destructive work of
art, that it's become an
iconic life, really, in
the history of music.
But as a human being, if you take
away the iconography and
symbolism and meaning of
that, in purely human terms, he was a
tragic figure, because,
like all addicts, he got
lost in the drugs that he took.
And in the end, instead of him
taking the drugs, the drugs took him.