Jim Morrison's Final Chapter (2024)

[bunniefuu]

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 k*lled 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 w*r.

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 k*ll 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 c*ck 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 p*nis.

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 g*ns

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 k*lled 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 k*lled 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.