Contents; Club27.
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Jim Douglas Morrison
2-3
27 Years Earlier.
4-7
The Doors.
8-13
Images
14-19
Pamela & Jim
20-23
Death of Jim Morrison.
24-28
T
he 27 Club, also occasionally known as the Forever 27 Club or Club 27, is a name for a group of influential rock and blues musicians who all died at the age of 27. The 27 Club consists of two related phenomena, both in the realm of popular culture. The first is a list of five famous rock musicians who died at age 27, names includings Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, Rolling Stones, Brian Jones, Most talented man to pick up a guitar, Jimi Hendrix, Solo talent Janis Joplin, & The Doors, Jim Morrison. The second is the idea that many other notable musicians have also died at the age of 27. The impetus for the club’s creation were the deaths of Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison. Kurt Cobain, who died in 1994, was later added by some. With the exception of Joplin, there is controversy surrounding their deaths. According to the book ‘Heavier Than Heaven,’ A book based on the life of Kurt Cobain, when Cobain died, his sister claimed that as a kid he would talk about how he wanted to join the 27 Club. On the fifteenth anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death, National Public Radio’s Robert Smith said, “The deaths of these rock stars at the age of 27 really changed the way we look at rock music.”
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Club27
jim douglas morrison. 1943 - 1971 James Douglas “Jim” Morrison, born December 8, 1943 – died July 3, 1971. Jim Morrison was the lead singer and lyricist of American band The Doors. Morrison was ranked number 47 on Rolling Stone’s “100 Greatest Singers of All Time”and is widely regarded as one of the most iconic frontmen in rock music history. Morrison was born in Melbourne, Florida, the son of a naval officer, he adopted a bohemian lifestyle in California while attending UCLA while literally homeless, sleeping in any convenient place handy, friends couches, rooftops, in cars and under the pier at Venice Beach. His life style leaned on mysticism while engaging in drugs, alcohol and bizarre behavior leading to many legal confrontations with the law. There have been many speculations to his death.
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Jim Douglas Morrison
27 years earlier. BEFORE The doors, Drugs & Pamela
James Douglas Morrison was born in Melbourne, Florida, to future Rear Admiral George Stephen Morrison and Clara Morrison. Morrison had a sister, Anne Robin, who was born in 1947 in Albuquerque, New Mexico; and a brother, Andrew Lee Morrison, who was born in 1948 in Los Altos, California. He was of Irish and Scottish descent. Morrison reportedly had an I.Q. of 149.
was very upset by it. The book The Doors, written by the remaining members of The Doors, explains how different Morrison’s account of the incident was from the account of his father. This book quotes his father as saying, “We went by several Indians. It did make an impression on him. He always thought about that crying Indian.” This is contrasted sharply with Morrison’s tale of “Indians scattered all over the highway, bleeding to death.” In the same book, his sister is quoted as saying; “He enjoyed telling that story and exaggerating it. He said he saw a dead Indian by the side of the road, and I don’t even know if that’s true.”
In 1947, Morrison, then four years old, allegedly witnessed a car accident in the desert, where a family of American Indians were injured and possibly killed. He referred to this incident in a spoken word performance on the song ‘Dawn’s Highway’ from the album An American Prayer, and again in the songs ‘Peace Frog’ and ‘Ghost Song.’
With his father in the United States Navy, Morrison’s family moved often. He spent part of his childhood in San Diego, California. In 1958, Morrison attended Alameda High School in Alameda, California. He graduated from George Washington High School (now George Washington Middle School) in Alexandria, Virginia, in June 1961. His father was also stationed at Mayport Naval Air Station in Jacksonville, Florida.
Morrison believed the incident to be the most formative event of his life, and made repeated references to it in the imagery in his songs, poems, and interviews. His family does not recall this incident happening in the way he told it. According to the Morrison biography No One Here Gets Out Alive, Morrison’s family did drive past a car accident on an Indian reservation when he was a child, and he
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Molière also interested Jim, along with most of the French existentialist philosophers. Jim’s senior-year English teacher said that; “Jim read as much and probably more than any student in class, but everything he read was so offbeat I had another teacher, who was going to the Library of Congress, check to see if the books Jim was reporting on actually existed. I suspected he was making them up, as they were English books on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century demonology. I’d never heard of them, but they existed, and I’m convinced from the paper he wrote that he read them, and the Library of Congress would’ve been the only source.”
Jim was inspired by the writings of philosophers and poets. He was influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche, whose views on aesthetics, morality, and the Apollonian and Dionysian duality would appear in Jim’s conversation, poetry and songs. He read “Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks” (Parallel Lives). He also read the French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud, whose style would later influence the form of Jim’s short prose poems. Jim was also influcened by Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Kenneth Patchen, Michael McClure and Gregory Corso. Jim’s English teacher once commented; “I felt that Jim was the only one in the class who read Ulysses, and understood it.” Honoré de Balzac, Jean Cocteau, and
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27 Years Earlier
Morrison went to live with his paternal grandparents in Clearwater, Florida, where he attended classes at St. Petersburg Junior College. In 1962, he transferred to Florida State University (FSU) in Tallahassee, where he appeared in a school recruitment film. While attending FSU, Morrison was arrested for a prank, following a home football game. In January 1964, Morrison moved to Los Angeles, California, to attend the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He attended Jack Hirschman’s class on Antonin Artaud in the Comparative Literature program within the UCLA English Department. Artaud’s brand of surrealist theatre had a profound impact on Morrison’s dark poetic sensibility of cinematic theatricality. Morrison completed his undergraduate degree at UCLA’s film school and the Theater Arts department of the College of Fine Arts in 1965. He made two films while attending UCLA. First Love, the first of these films, made with Morrison’s classmate and roommate Max Schwartz, was released to the public when it appeared in a documentary about the film Obscura. During these years, while living in Venice Beach, he became friends with writers at the Los Angeles Free Press. Morrison was an advocate of the underground newspaper until his death in 1971.
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27 Years Earlier
The Doors Strange Ways Waiting For The Sun Soft Parade Morrison Hotel L.A Women Other Voices Full Circle An American Prayer
the doors
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JIM MORRISON. Vocals. December 8, 1943 – July 3, 1971. was the lead singer and lyricist of American band The Doors. Morrison was ranked number 47 on Rolling Stone’s “100 Greatest Singers of All Time” and is widely regarded as one of the most iconic frontmen in rock music history.
ROBBY Krieger. Guitar. Born January 8, 1946) is an American rock guitarist and songwriter. He was the guitarist in The Doors, and wrote some of the band’s best known songs, including ‘Light My Fire,’ ‘Love Me Two Times,’ ‘Touch Me,’ & ‘Love Her Madly.’ He is listed as number 91 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time.
John Densmore. Drums. Born December 1, 1944. John is an American musician and songwriter. He is best known as the drummer of the rock group The Doors.
RAY MANZAREK. Keyboard. Born February 12, 1939, Ray is an American musician, singer, producer, film director, writer, co-founder and keyboardist of The Doors from 1965 to 1973, and The Doors of the 21st Century (renamed ManzarekKrieger) since 2001. He is the oldest former member of the Doors.
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The Doors
The Doors were an American rock band formed in 1965 in Los Angeles, California, with vocalist Jim Morrison, keyboardist Ray Manzarek, drummer John Densmore, and guitarist Robby Krieger. The band took its name from Aldous Huxley’s book The Doors of Perception, the title of which was a reference to a William Blake quotation; “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.” They were among the most controversial rock acts of the 1960s, due mostly to Morrison’s wild, poetic lyrics and charismatic but unpredictable stage persona. After Morrison’s death in 1971, the remaining members continued as a trio until finally disbanding in 1973 Although The Doors’ active career ended in 1973, their popularity has persisted. According to the RIAA, they have sold over 32.5 million albums in the US alone. The band has sold 90 million albums worldwide. Ray Manzarek and Robby Krieger continue to tour as Manzarek-Krieger, performing Doors songs exclusively. Three of the band’s studio albums, The Doors, 1967, L.A. Woman, 1971, and Strange Days, 1967, were featured in the Rolling Stone list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, at positions 42, 362 and 407 respectively. In 1993, The Doors were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
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The band recorded their first album from August 24 to 31, 1966 at Sunset Sound Recording Studios. ‘The Doors’ self-titled debut LP was released in the first week of January 1967. It featured most of the major songs from their set, including the nearly 12-minute musical drama “The End”. In November 1966, Mark Abramson directed a promotional film for the lead single ‘Break On Through (To the Other Side)’. To promote the single, the Doors made their television debut on a Los Angeles TV show called Boss City, circa 1966, possibly early 1967 and then on a Los Angeles TV show called Shebang, miming to ‘Break On Through,’ on New Year’s Day 1967. This clip has never been officially released by the Doors. Since ‘Break on Through’ was not very successful on the radio, the band turned to ‘Light My Fire’. The problem with this song was that it was seven minutes long, so producer Paul Rothschild cut it down to a three minute song. The band’s second single, ‘Light My Fire’, became the first single from Elektra Records to reach number one on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, selling over a million copies. ‘Light My Fire’ was the first song ever written by Robbie Krieger and was the beginning of the band’s success.
Strange Days; The Doors spent several weeks in Los Angeles’ Sunset Studios recording their second album, Strange Days, experimenting with the new technology they now had available. The commercial success of Strange Days was middling, peaking at number three on the Billboard album chart but quickly dropping, along with a series of underperforming singles. The chorus from the album’s single ‘People Are Strange’ inspired the name of the 2010 documentary of The Doors, When You’re Strange. Strange Days would be the first album to use a bass player for its recording, and every studio album following it would as well. Manzarek explained that his keyboard bass was well-suited for live situations but that it lacked the “articulation” needed for studio recording. Douglass Lubahn played on Strange Days and the next two albums; but the band utilized several other musicians for this role, often using more than one bassist on the same album. Kerry Magness, Leroy Vinnegar, Harvey Brooks, Ray Neopolitan, Lonnie Mack and Jerry Scheff are credited as bassists who worked with the band. Waiting For The Sun; Recording of the group’s third album in April 1968 was marred by tension as a result of Morrison’s increasing dependence on alcohol and drugs, and the rejection of his new epic, “Celebration of the Lizard”, by band producer Paul Rothchild, who deemed the work not commercial enough. Approaching the height of their popularity, The Doors played a series of outdoor shows that led to frenzied scenes between fans and police, particularly at Chicago Coliseum on May 10. The band began to branch out from their initial form for this third LP. Because they had exhausted their original repertoire, they began writing new material. Waiting for the Sun became their first #1 LP, and the single ‘Hello, I Love You’ was their second and last US #1 single. With the 1968 release of ‘Hello, I Love You’, the rock press pointed out the song’s resemblance to The Kinks’ 1964 hit, “All Day and All of the Night”. Kinks guitarist Dave Davies was particularly irritated by the similarity. In concert, Morrison was occasionally dismissive of the song, leaving the vocal chores to Manzarek, as can be seen in the documentary The Doors are Open.
Waiting For The Sun; 1968
Strange Ways; 1967 Morrison Hotel; 1970
L.A Women; 1971
The Doors; 1967 The Soft Parade; 1969
A month after riotous scenes took place at the Singer Bowl in New York, the group flew to Britain for their first venue outside of North America. They held a press conference at the ICA Gallery in London and played shows at The Roundhouse Theatre. The results of the trip were broadcast on Granada TV’s The Doors Are Open, later released on video. They played dates in Europe, along with Jefferson Airplane, including a show in Amsterdam where Morrison collapsed on stage after a drug binge.
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The Doors
Soft Parade; The Doors’ fourth album, The Soft Parade, released in July 1969, contained pop-oriented arrangements and horn sections. The lead single ‘Touch Me’ featured saxophonist Curtis Amy.
Circus magazine praised it as; “Possibly the best album yet from the Doors” and “Good hard, evil rock, and one of the best albums released this decade”. The album also saw Jim Morrison returning as main songwriter, writing or co-writing all of the album’s tracks. The 40th Anniversary CD reissue of Morrison Hotel contains outtakes and alternate takes, including different versions of ‘The Spy’ and ‘Roadhouse Blues’ (with Lonnie Mack on bass guitar and The Lovin’ Spoonful’s John Sebastian on harmonica).
While the band was trying to maintain their previous momentum, efforts to expand their sound gave the album an experimental feel, causing critics to attack their musical integrity. According to John Densmore in his biography Riders On The Storm individual writing credits were noted for the first time because of Morrison’s reluctance to sing the lyrics of Robbie Krieger’s song ‘Tell All the People’. Morrison’s drinking made him difficult and unreliable, and the recording sessions dragged on for months. Studio costs piled up, and The Doors came close to disintegrating. Despite all this, the album was immensely successful, becoming the band’s fourth hit album. Morrison Hotel; The Doors staged a return to form with their 1970 LP Morrison Hotel, their fifth album. Featuring a consistent, hard rock sound, the album’s opener was ‘Roadhouse Blues’. The record reached US #4 and revived their status among their core fanbase and the rock press. Dave Marsh, the editor of Creem magazine, said of the album; “The most horrifying rock and roll I have ever heard. When they’re good, they’re simply unbeatable. I know this is the best record I’ve listened to ... so far”. Rock Magazine called it; “Without any doubt their ballsiest album to date.”
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L.A Women; The Doors set to reclaim their status as a premier act with L.A. Woman in 1971. The session included guitar work by Marc Benno, and bass by Jerry Scheff. The album contained two top-20 hits and has gone on to be their second best-selling studio album, surpassed in sales only by their debut. The album explored their R&B roots, although during rehearsals they had a falling-out with Rothchild. Denouncing ‘Riders on the Storm’ as ‘cocktail jazz’, he quit and handed the production to Botnick. The singles ‘L.A. Woman”, ‘Love Her Madly’ (the Doors’ last top-ten hit), and ‘Riders on the Storm’ remain mainstays of rock radio programming, and the latter, as of November 25, 2009, was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame for its special significance to recorded music. In the song “L.A. Woman” Jim Morrison scrambles the letters of his own name to chant “Mr. Mojo Risin”. During the sessions, a short clip of the band performing “Crawling King Snake” was filmed. So far as known, this is the last clip of the Doors performing with Morrison. On March 13, 1971, following the recording of L.A. Woman, Morrison took a leave of absence from the Doors and moved to Paris with Pamela Courson. He had visited the city the previous summer and was interested in moving there to become a writer in exile. While in Paris, he was again drinking heavily and using other drugs. On June 16, the last known recording of Morrison was made when he befriended two street musicians at a bar and invited them to a studio. This recording was finally released in 1994 on a bootleg CD entitled The Lost Paris Tapes.
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The Doors
Pamela & Jim Morrison met his long-term companion, Pamela Courson, well before he gained any fame or fortune, and she encouraged him to develop his poetry. At times, Courson used the surname “Morrison” with his apparent consent or at least lack of concern. After Courson’s death on April 25, 1974, the probate court in California decided that she and Morrison had what qualified as a common-law marriage. Morrison’s and Courson’s relationship was a stormy one, with frequent loud arguments and periods of separation. Biographer Danny Sugerman surmised that part of their difficulties may have stemmed from a conflict between their respective commitments to an open relationship and the consequences of living in such a relationship.
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Pamela & Jim
In 1970, Morrison participated in a Celtic Pagan handfasting ceremony with rock critic and science fiction/fantasy author Patricia Kennealy. Before witnesses, one of them a Presbyterian minister, the couple signed a document declaring themselves wedded, but none of the necessary paperwork for a legal marriage was filed with the state. Kennealy discussed her experiences with Morrison in her autobiography Strange Days: My Life With and Without Jim Morrison in an interview reported in the book Rock Wives. Morrison also regularly had sex with fans and had numerous short flings with women who were celebrities, including Nico, the singer associated with The Velvet Underground, a one night stand with singer Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane, an on-again-off-again relationship with 16 Magazine’s Gloria Stavers and an alleged alcohol-fueled encounter with Janis Joplin. However rock musician and rock star expert, Alice Cooper, declared on his syndicated radio show that Jim was scrupulously true to Pamela on tour, eschewing all sexual encounters. Linda Ashcroft in her book “Wild Child: My Life With Jim Morrison” details her life with Morrison as well. Judy Huddleston also recalls her relationship with Morrison in Living and Dying with Jim Morrison. At the time of his death there were reportedly as many as 20 paternity actions pending against him, although no claims were made against his estate by any of the putative paternity claimants.
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Pamela & Jim
DEATH OF Jim Morrison 1971 Morrison flew to Paris in March 1971, took up residence in a rented apartment on the rue Beautreillis on the Right Bank, and went for long walks through the city, admiring the city’s architecture. During that time, Morrison shaved his beard and lost some of the weight he had gained in the previous months. The last studio recording was with two American street musicians — a session dismissed by Manzarek as “drunken gibberish”.- The session included a version of a song-in-progress, “Orange County Suite”, which can be heard on the bootleg The Lost Paris Tapes.
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Morrison died on July 3, 1971. In the official account of his death, he was found in a Paris apartment bathtub by Courson. Pursuant to French law, no autopsy was performed because the medical examiner claimed to have found no evidence of foul play. The absence of an official autopsy has left many questions regarding Morrison’s cause of death. In Wonderland Avenue, Danny Sugerman discussed his encounter with Courson after she returned to the U.S. According to Sugerman’s account, Courson stated that Morrison had died of a heroin overdose, having insufflated what he believed to be cocaine. Sugerman added that Courson had given numerous contradictory versions of Morrison’s death, at times saying that she had killed Morrison, or that his death was her fault. Courson’s story of Morrison’s unintentional ingestion of heroin, followed by accidental overdose, is supported by the confession of Alain Ronay, who has written that Morrison died of a hemorrhage after snorting Courson’s heroin, and that Courson nodded off instead of phoning for medical help, leaving Morrison bleeding to death. Ronay confessed in an article in Paris Match that he then helped cover up the circumstances of Morrison’s death. In the epilogue of No One Here Gets Out Alive, Hopkins and Sugerman write that Ronay and Agnès Varda say Courson lied to the police who responded at the death scene, and later in her deposition, telling them Morrison never took drugs. In the epilogue to No One Here Gets Out Alive, Hopkins says that 20 years after Morrison’s death, Ronay and Varda
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broke silence and gave this account: They arrived at the house shortly after Morrison’s death and Courson said that she and Morrison had taken heroin after a night of drinking. Morrison had been coughing badly, had gone to take a bath, and vomited blood. Courson said that he appeared to recover and that she then went to sleep. When she awoke sometime later Morrison was unresponsive, and so she called for medical assistance. Courson died of a heroin overdose three years later. Like Morrison, she was 27 years old at the time of her death. In the epilogue of No One Here Gets Out Alive, Hopkins and Sugerman also claim that Morrison had asthma and was suffering from a respiratory condition involving a chronic cough and throwing up blood on the night of his death. This theory is partially supported in The Doors (written by the remaining members of the band) in which they claim Morrison had been coughing up blood for nearly two months in Paris. None of the members of the Doors were in Paris with Morrison in the months before his death. In the first version of No One Here Gets Out Alive published in 1980, Sugerman and Hopkins gave some credence to the rumor that Morrison may not have died at all, calling the fake death theory “not as far-fetched as it might seem”. This theory led to considerable distress for Morrison’s loved ones over the years, notably when fans would stalk them, searching for evidence of Morrison’s whereabouts.In 1995 a new epilogue was added to Sugerman’s and Hopkins’s book, giving new facts about Morrison’s death and discounting the fake death theory, saying “As time passed, some of Jim and Pamela’s friends began to talk
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Death of Jim Morrison
about what they knew, and although everything they said pointed irrefutably to Jim’s demise, there remained and probably always will be those who refuse to believe that Jim is dead and those who will not allow him to rest in peace.” In a July 2007 newspaper interview, a self-described close friend of Morrison’s, Sam Bernett, resurrected an old rumor and announced that Morrison actually died of a heroin overdose in the Rock ‘n’ Roll Circus nightclub, on the Left Bank in Paris. Bernett claims that Morrison came to the club to buy heroin for Courson then did some himself and died in the bathroom. Bernett alleges that Morrison was then moved back to the rue Beautreillis apartment and dumped in the bathtub by the same two drug dealers from whom Morrison had purchased the heroin. Bernett says those who saw Morrison that night were sworn to secrecy in order to prevent a scandal for the famous club, and that some of the witnesses immediately left the country. There have been many other conspiracy theories surrounding Morrison’s death but are less supported by witnesses than are the accounts of Ronay and Courson.
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Death of Jim Morrison
1943 - 1971