American Singer & Songwriter
Jim Morrison
Jim Morrison (1943-1971) was an American singer and songwriter who found fame in his role as the lead vocalist and primary songsmith for the rock band The Doors.
Morrison was born on December 8th 1943 to his mother Clara Virginia (1919-2005) in the small settlement of Melbourne, Florida at a time when its population was only about 3,000 [it has since become a city with over 87,000 inhabitants], Jim was the eldest of three siblings in his family, which had English, Scottish and Irish ancestry.
His father George (1919-2008) was a career serviceman in the United States navy, who eventually rose to the rank of Rear Admiral. George’s naval career led to postings in different locations, which required frequent moves during Jim’s childhood, as a result of which his elementary education was split between schools in Virginia, Texas, New Mexico and San Diego, before he attended high school partly in Alameda, California and partly in Virginia.
During his time at George Washington High School in Virginia, Morrison took an IQ test and was found to have a very high IQ in the top 0.1% of the population. He was also noticed by his English teacher for citing books on Renaissance demonology, an unusual interest for a teenager.
Morrison read widely in philosophy and classic literature, including works by French poets and philosophers, but it was the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche that struck a particularly strong chord with him.
Following his graduation from High School, Morrison moved to stay with his father’s parents in Florida, where he successively attended St. Petersburg Junior College and Florida State University. But in 1964, he returned to California to take his studies further, joining a film course within the Theater Arts department of the College of Fine Arts at UCLA for his final year as an undergraduate. While studying on this course, he met fellow cinematography student Ray Manzarek, who would soon become his first bandmate. Jim’s degree was awarded in absentia in 1965.
Morrison then moved to the Venice neighbourhood of Los Angeles, which is famed for its beach known as Venice Beach. Here, he shared accommodation with another friend he had made at UCLA, Dennis Jakob, and began writing songs. At the time, he was actively using the fashionable psychedelic drug LSD; and he broke off all contact with his family, supposedly to protect his military father’s reputation from being tainted as his musical career developed.
That very summer, Jim randomly encountered Manzarek again on the beach at Venice, L.A., and told him about his songs. Impressed by the lyrics, Manzarek suggested that they were worthy of a rock band. Together, the two of them founded The Doors, in which they were soon joined by two other members, Robby Krieger on guitar and John Densmore on drums, both of whom were already known to Manzarek through a meditation class they all attended.
By the following summer, The Doors had been booked as the opening act for the band Them, featuring the young Irish singer-songwriter Van Morrison, during a residency held by Them at a fashionable Hollywood nightclub called Whisky a Go Go. Although Van Morrison was two years younger than Jim, and would reach his 21st birthday only in August 1966, he had been involved in music since his childhood; and by that time, Them were already an internationally successful band, with two Top 40 hits in the US and two Top 10 hits in the UK to their credit. Van Morrison was therefore by far the better-established performer of the two Morrisons who convened to play at that club that summer, and he is thought to have influenced Jim’s stage manner, with his air of sullen, brooding menace and devil-may-care wildness rubbing off on Jim.
I think of myself as an intelligent, sensitive human being with the soul of a clown which always forces me to blow it at the most important moments.
Another formative influence on Jim’s stage manner, his habit of wearing black leather trousers, is dated to this time, but its source is disputed, with his bandmates Manzarek and Krieger citing Marlon Brando as Morrison’s influence for this look, although the artist Andy Warhol (q. v.) later expressed the differing belief that a dancer named Gerard Malanga who had performed in similar attire at a Velvet Underground gig held in Los Angeles in May 1966 was in fact responsible. Regardless of which account may be correct, the wearing of black leather trousers on stage subsequently became a staple look for generations of rock stars, more especially so in harder forms of rock such as heavy metal, and with Bono Vox from the Irish stadium rock band U2 having been among the later converts.
In 1967, the band was signed to Elektra Records, which led to a spate of single releases. The first, ‘Break on Through to the Other Side’, failed to reach the US Hot 100, although it became a Top 10 hit in France; but it was followed by Light My Fire, which topped the charts in both the USA (where it spent three weeks at No. 1) and France, and reached No. 2 in Canada, although it narrowly failed to reach the UK Top 40, stalling at No. 49 that summer. The Doors’ third single, ‘People are Strange’, reached No. 1 in Canada but only No. 12 in the USA, and did not chart in either France or the UK, although a later cover version by Echo and the Bunnymen became a UK Top 30 hit in 1988.
Prior to a performance in Connecticut in December 1967, Morrison was sprayed by a police officer with the chemical aerosol self-defence product Mace after being mistaken as a backstage intruder and ordered to leave, to which he had responded defiantly. The concert, though delayed, went ahead, but Jim reported what had happened to him beforehand to the crowd using expletives that were perceived by police as violating obscenity laws, resulting in his arrest while on stage, although the charges raised against him in the heat of the moment were not ultimately pursued further.
The Doors’ fifth and sixth singles, the double A-sided ‘Love Me Two Times’/’Moonlight Drive’ and ‘The Unknown Soldier’, enjoyed more moderate success, both reaching the Top 40 in the USA and Canada, but neither attaining a Top 20 position in any territory.
Greater success returned later in 1968, with the double A-sided ‘Hello I Love You’/’Love Street’ giving them their second US chart-topper and also incidentally their second Canadian No. 1 hit, and their first Top 40 hit in the UK, where it reached No. 15. It was perhaps no coincidence that in September 1968, the band embarked on their first European tour, including four performances at the Roundhouse in London alongside Jefferson Airplane, one of which was recorded for a documentary by Granada Television. The following Doors single, another double A-sided production, ‘Touch Me’/’Wild Child’, was also a success in the USA and Canada, where it peaked at No. 3 and No. 1 respectively, although it failed to chart at all in the UK.
1969 and 1970 proved to be a lean period for the band commercially, with none of their four singles in these years reaching the Top 40 in the USA or charting at all in the UK, although three of them reached the Top 40 in Canada. During these years, Morrison also got into more serious trouble with the law. In March 1969, following a drunken, obscenity-laced performance in Miami, Morrison was served with multiple arrest warrants relating to the concert, including one for indecent exposure. This time, the charges were pursued, and when the case came to trial before a jury 18 months later, in September 1970, Morrison was convicted of both indecent exposure and profanity. He was sentenced to a prison term of six months, but bailed on a $50,000 surety – equivalent to over $400,000 in 2025 after inflation – pending an appeal.
In the summer of 1970, The Doors performed at the Isle of Wight Festival (q. v.) a performance that was recorded and released many years later in 2018 as Live at the Isle of Wight Festival 1970.
A few months after becoming a convicted offender, Morrison went on hiatus from touring and working with the Doors in March 1971, taking time to stay in Paris with his long-term girlfriend Pamela Courson (1946-1974), who had been involved with him romantically in an open relationship since they first met in 1966, and for whom he had purchased a fashion shop in 1969.
Unfortunately, Courson had also been involved in a relationship with a heroin dealer named Jean de Breteuil, which led to her having a ready supply of heroin for her own use and facilitating access to the drug for Morrison. He was found dead in the early hours of July 3rd, 1971, with multiple eyewitnesses reporting that the cause of his death was a heroin overdose. No autopsy was carried out, leading to official uncertainty over the true cause of his sudden death at the age of just 27 – one of several rock stars now notorious for having died at that age, with the result that they are often collectively referred to as being in the ’27 Club’, although death at such a young age is hardly something to which any sane individual would aspire. Jim’s death was initially hushed up by those close to him, and he was privately buried in a sparsely attended ceremony before his passing was even announced to the wider world.
Paradoxically, however, there was a return to form in terms of commercial success for The Doors in 1971, the last year of Morrison’s life, when the double A-sided ‘Love Her Madly’/’You Need Meat (Don’t Go No Further’ peaked at No. 11 in the USA and No. 3 in Canada; and another double A-sided release, ‘Riders on the Storm’/’Changeling’, reached No. 14 in the USA, No. 7 in Canada and No. 22 in the UK, giving them their second and final UK Top 40 hit on original release, albeit three months after Morrison’s untimely death that July.
In the circumstances of Morrison’s departure from the land of the living, the outcome of his appeal against his judicial conviction was unresolved, as no decision had been taken on this at the time of his death. Morrison died a free convict who had avoided jail time despite his conviction. Over four decades after his criminal conviction, in December 2010, he was posthumously pardoned by the serving governor of Florida, with the support of its state clemency board.
Between 1971 and 1983, three further posthumous singles charted within the US Hot 100 for the Doors, but none of them reached the Top 50.
In 1991, at least three Doors singles were reissued in the UK to mark the 20th anniversary of Morrison’s death. Of the three that charted in the UK Top 75, only ‘Light My Fire’ reached the Top 40, rising all the way to No. 7 to become the Doors’ third and final UK Top 40 hit, and also the biggest hit of their career in the UK, 24 years after it had initially stalled at No. 49.
Although their success as a singles act was inconsistent and decidedly limited outside the USA and Canada, The Doors were popular with buyers of vinyl albums, all six of their LPs released during Morrison’s lifetime reaching the Top 10 in the US albums chart, and two of the later ones also reaching the Top 20 (though not the Top 10) in the UK. In chronological order, their six studio albums to which Morrison contributed were ‘The Doors’ (January 1967), ‘Strange Days’ (September 1967), ‘Waiting for the Sun’ (July 1968), ‘The Soft Parade’ (July 1969), ‘Morrison Hotel’ (February 1970), and ‘L.A. Woman’ (April 1971).
Three further LPs were released by the surviving members of The Doors but were greeted with indifferent chart success, none of them reaching the Top 30 in the USA and none of them even charting in the UK. The commercial failure of these records underlined that for most fans, The Doors without Morrison front and centre were just an empty shell of their former glory.
Less than three years had passed after Jim’s death when Courson sadly followed him to an early grave at the age of 27, after overdosing on heroin herself while staying in Los Angeles.
Separately from his musical career, Morrison had written poetry from a young age, two volumes of which were published in 1969, under the respective titles of ‘The Lords / Notes on Vision’ and ‘The New Creatures’. He was also noted for sometimes reciting poetic stanzas he had written while on stage with The Doors. He made friends with Michael McClure (q. v.), with whom he had planned to work on some film projects before he died.
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Two volumes of previously unpublished writings by Morrison were released posthumously under the titles of The Lost Writings of Jim Morrison, with Volume I appearing in 1988 and Volume II in 1990.
Many later rock musicians have cited Morrison as a major influence on their own performance style, including a particularly large contingent with gothic leanings.
Morrison’s life and work with the Doors was the subject of a film directed by Oliver Stone called The Doors, which was released in 1991 to a mixed reception, with many of Morrison’s friends complaining that the portrayal of their late associate was a paper-thin caricature that did not bring out his character at all accurately or in a rounded fashion.
Nonetheless, Morrison himself remains a rock legend on a par with fellow 27 Club members Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin (both of whom q. v.); and The Doors’ best-known singles in the UK, ‘Light My Fire’, ‘Hello, I Love You‘ and ‘Riders on the Storm’, have continued to enjoy radio play deep into the early 21st century.