Age, Biography, and Wiki
- Birth Date: December 8, 1943
- Death Date: July 3, 1971
- Birth Place: Melbourne, Florida, USA
- Occupation: Singer, Poet, Songwriter
- Known For: Lead vocalist of The Doors
Jim Morrison was a pivotal figure in the 1960s rock scene, celebrated for his poetic lyrics and charismatic stage presence. His life was marked by excess and controversy, yet his legacy continues to captivate audiences worldwide.
| Occupation | Rock Singer |
|---|---|
| Date of Birth | 8 December 1943 |
| Age | 81 Years |
| Birth Place | Melbourne, Florida, U.S. |
| Horoscope | Sagittarius |
| Country | France |
| Date of death | 3 July, 1971 |
| Died Place | Paris, France |
Height, Weight & Measurements
- Height: 6 feet 1 inch (185 cm)
- Weight: Approximately 170 lbs (77 kg)
Though specific measurements at the time of his death are not detailed, Morrison was known for his slender yet imposing stage presence.
By early 1969, the formerly svelte Morrison had gained weight, grown a beard, and begun dressing more casually, abandoning the leather pants and concho belts for slacks, jeans, and T-shirts. The Soft Parade, the Doors' fourth album, was released later that year. It was the first album where each band member was given individual songwriting credit, by name, for their work. Previously, each song on their albums had been credited simply to "The Doors".
| Height | 185 cm |
| Weight | 170 lbs |
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Dating & Relationship Status
Morrison was in a long-term relationship with Pamela Courson, whom he considered his common-law wife. She was named the sole heir to his estate upon his death.
Morrison's family does not recall this traffic incident happening in the way he told it. According to the Morrison biography No One Here Gets Out Alive, his family did drive past a car crash on an Indian reservation when he was a child, and he was very upset by it. The book The Doors, written by the surviving members of the band, explains how Morrison's account of the incident differed from that of his father, who is quoted 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 another book, his sister says that his version of the event is likely exaggerated, writing that, "he says we saw a dead Indian on the side of the road, and I don't even know if that's true." Subsequent research has established that the accident occurred on October 17, 1947, in which a truck was struck. One passenger, actually not an Indian, was killed on his way home to retire after finishing his last day of work.
Raised a military brat, Morrison spent part of his childhood in San Diego, completed third grade at Fairfax Elementary School in Fairfax County, Virginia, and attended Charles H. Flato Elementary School in Kingsville, Texas, while his father was stationed at NAS Kingsville in 1952. He continued at St. John's Methodist School in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and then Longfellow School Sixth Grade Graduation Program in San Diego.
Morrison completed his undergraduate degree at UCLA's film school within the Theater Arts department of the College of Fine Arts in 1965. Refusing to attend the graduation ceremony, he went to Venice Beach in Los Angeles, and the university later mailed his diploma to his mother in Coronado, California.
After recording "L.A. Woman" with the other members of the Doors in Los Angeles, Morrison announced to the band his intention to go to Paris. His bandmates generally felt that it was a good idea. In March 1971, Morrison took a leave of absence from The Doors and joined girlfriend Pamela Courson in Paris at an apartment she had rented at 17–19 Rue Beautreillis, in Le Marais, 4th arrondissement. In letters to friends, he described going alone for long walks through the city. During this time, he shaved his beard and lost some of the weight he had gained in the previous months. He also telephoned John Densmore to ask him how "L.A. Woman" was doing commercially; he was the last band member to ever speak with him.
Morrison's early life was the semi-nomadic existence typical of military families. Jerry Hopkins recorded Morrison's brother, Andy, explaining that his parents had determined never to use corporal punishment such as spanking on their children. They instead instilled discipline by the military tradition known as "dressing down", which consisted of yelling at and berating the children until they were reduced to tears and acknowledged their failings. Once Morrison graduated from UCLA, he broke off most contact with his family. By the time his music ascended to the top of the charts (in 1967) he had not been in communication with his family for more than a year and falsely claimed that everyone in his immediate family was dead (or claimed that he was an only child). However, Morrison told Hopkins in a 1969 interview for Rolling Stone magazine that he did this because he did not want to involve his family in his musical career. His sister similarly believed that "he did it to protect my dad, who was moving up in the Navy, and to keep his life separate, not to shake it up on both sides."
Morrison's father was not supportive of his career in music. One day, Andy brought over a record thought to have Morrison on the cover, which was the Doors' debut album. Upon hearing the record, Morrison's father wrote him a letter telling him "to give up any idea of singing or any connection with a music group because of what I consider to be a complete lack of talent in this direction." In a letter to the Florida Probation and Parole Commission District Office dated October 2, 1970, Admiral Morrison acknowledged the breakdown in family communications as the result of an argument over his assessment of his son's musical talents. He said he could not blame his son for being reluctant to initiate contact and that he was proud of him.
One of Morrison's early relationships was with Mary Werbelow, whom he met on the beach in Clearwater, Florida, when they were teenagers in mid-1962. In a 2005 interview with the St. Petersburg Times, she said Morrison spoke to her before a photo shoot for the Doors' fourth album and told her the first three albums were about her. She also stated in the interview that she was not a fan of the band and never attended a concert by them. Werbelow broke off the relationship in Los Angeles in mid-1965, a few months before Morrison began rehearsals. Manzarek said of Werbelow, "She was Jim's first love. She held a deep place in his soul." Manzarek also noted that Morrison's song "The End" was intended originally to be "a short goodbye love song to Mary", with the longer oedipal middle section a later addition.
Morrison spent the majority of his adult life in an open and at times very charged and intense relationship with Pamela Courson. Through to the end, Courson saw Morrison as more than a rock star, as "a great poet"; she constantly encouraged him and pushed him to write. Courson attended his concerts and focused on supporting his career. Like Morrison, she was described by many as fiery, determined and attractive, as someone who was tough despite appearing fragile. Manzarek called Pamela "Jim's other half" and said, "I never knew another person who could so complement his bizarreness."
After her death in 1974, Courson was buried by her family as Pamela Susan Morrison. Her parents petitioned the court for inheritance of Morrison's estate. The probate court in California judged that she and Morrison had what qualified as a common-law marriage. Morrison's will at the time of his death named Courson as the sole heir.
Morrison dedicated his published poetry books The Lords and New Creatures and the lost writings Wilderness to Courson. A number of writers have speculated that songs like "Love Street", "Orange County Suite" and "Queen of the Highway", among other songs, may have been written about her. Though the relationship was "tumultuous" much of the time, and both also had relationships with others, they always maintained a unique and ongoing connection with one another until the end of Morrison's life. Throughout his career, Morrison had regular sexual and romantic encounters with fans (including groupies) such as Pamela Des Barres or Poppy Martins (according to Zouzou), as well as ongoing affairs with other musicians, writers, and photographers involved in the music business. They included Nico; Eve Babitz, singer Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane; and editor Gloria Stavers of 16 Magazine, as well as an alleged alcohol-fueled encounter with Janis Joplin. David Crosby stated many years later that Morrison treated Joplin cruelly at a party at the Calabasas, California, home of John Davidson while Davidson was out of town. She reportedly hit him over the head with a bottle of whiskey during a fight in front of witnesses, and thereafter referred to Morrison as "that asshole" whenever his name was brought up in conversation. During her appearance on the Dick Cavett Show in 1969, when host Dick Cavett offered to light her cigarette, asking "May I light your fire, my child?", she jokingly replied, "That's my favorite singer... I guess not."
The concluding stanzas of this poem convey disappointment in someone with whom he had had an intimate relationship, perhaps using the relationship as a metaphor as the relationship with life itself, and contain a further invocation of Billy the killer/Hitchhiker, a common character in Morrison's body of work: This is my poem for you Great flowing funky flower'd beast ... Tell them you came & saw & look'd into my eyes & saw the shadow of the guard receding Thoughts in time & out of season The Hitchiker stood by the side of the road & leveled his thumb in the calm calculus of reason.
In 1990, Morrison's father, George Stephen Morrison, after a consultation with E. Nicholas Genovese, Professor of Classics and Humanities, San Diego State University, placed a flat stone on the grave. The bronze plaque thereon bears the Greek inscription: ΚΑΤΑ ΤΟΝ ΔΑΙΜΟΝΑ ΕΑΥΤΟΥ, usually translated as "true to his own spirit" or "according to his own daemon".
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Net Worth and Salary
At the time of his death in 1971, Morrison's net worth was approximately $400,000, equivalent to about $2.5 million today after adjusting for inflation. However, his estate's current value is estimated to be significantly higher, with some sources suggesting it could be around $200 million due to the enduring success of The Doors' music and merchandise.
During a concert on March 1, 1969, at the Dinner Key Auditorium in Miami, a visibly intoxicated Morrison attempted to spark a riot in the audience, in part by screaming, "You wanna see my cock?" and other obscenities. Three days later, six warrants for his arrest were issued by the Dade County Public Safety Department for indecent exposure, among other accusations. Consequently, many of the Doors' scheduled concerts were canceled. On September 20, 1970, Morrison was convicted of indecent exposure and profanity by a six-person jury in Miami after a sixteen-day trial. Morrison, who attended the October 30 sentencing "in a wool jacket adorned with Indian designs", silently listened as he was sentenced to six months in prison and had to pay a $500 fine. However, Morrison remained free on a $50,000 bond while the verdict was being appealed. At the sentencing, Judge Murray Goodman told Morrison that he was a "person graced with a talent" admired by many of his peers.
Career, Business, and Investments
Morrison was best known as the lead singer and lyricist of The Doors, one of the most influential rock bands of all time. The band's success was not limited to their active years; posthumously, they have generated tens of millions of dollars annually from royalties and merchandise. Morrison's poetry and literary works have also contributed to his estate's wealth through licensing deals.
Several individuals who say they were eyewitnesses, including Marianne Faithfull, claim that his death was due to an accidental heroin overdose. Sam Bernett, founder and manager of the Rock 'n' Roll Circus night club, affirmed that he had found Morrison unconscious in the club's bathrooms after a purported heroin overdose around 2:00 and that his body was taken away from the club by two men supposed to be the drug dealers. Because of the lack of an autopsy, however, these statements could never be confirmed. According to music journalist Ben Fong-Torres, it was suggested that his death was kept a secret, and the reporters who had telephoned Paris were told that Morrison was not deceased but tired and resting at a hospital. Morrison's friend, film director Agnès Varda, admitted that she was the one who was responsible for hiding the incident from becoming public. In her last media interview before her death in 2019, Varda confirmed that she was one of the only four mourners to attend Morrison's burial.
Some poetry recorded from the December 1970 session remains unreleased to this day and is in the possession of the Courson family. Morrison's best-known but seldom seen cinematic endeavor is HWY: An American Pastoral, a project he started in 1969. Morrison financed the venture and formed his own production company in order to maintain complete control of the project. Paul Ferrara, Frank Lisciandro, and Babe Hill assisted with the project. Morrison played the main character, a hitchhiker turned killer/car thief. Morrison asked his friend composer/pianist Fred Myrow to select the soundtrack for the film.
* An American Prayer (1970) privately printed by Western Lithographers. (Unauthorized edition also published in 1983, Zeppelin Publishing Company, ISBN 0-915628-46-5. The authenticity of the unauthorized edition has been disputed.)
Social Network
As Morrison passed away in 1971, he did not have a presence on modern social networks. However, his legacy is actively commemorated by fans and managed by his estate.
In 1947, when he was three to four years old, Morrison allegedly witnessed a car crash in the desert, during which a truck overturned and some Native Americans were lying injured on the side of the road. He referred to this incident in the Doors' song "Peace Frog" from their 1970 album Morrison Hotel, and in his spoken word performances "Dawn's Highway" and "Ghost Song" on the posthumous 1978 album An American Prayer. Morrison described this incident as the most formative event of his life, and made repeated references to it in the imagery in his songs, poems, and interviews. Morrison believed the spirits or the ghosts of those "dead Indians leaped into [his] soul," and that he was "like a sponge, ready to sit there and absorb it."
Morrison and Manzarek, who had met months earlier as cinematography students, were the first members of the Doors, forming the group during that summer. Manzarek narrated the story that he was lying on Venice Beach one day when he coincidentally encountered Morrison. He was impressed with Morrison's poetic lyrics, claiming that they were "rock group" material. Subsequently, guitarist Robby Krieger and drummer John Densmore joined. All three musicians shared a common interest in the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's meditation practices at the time, attending scheduled classes, but Morrison was not involved in these series of classes.
The Doors achieved national recognition in 1967 after signing with Elektra Records. The single "Light My Fire" spent three weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in July/August 1967, a far cry from the Doors opening for Simon and Garfunkel or playing at a high school as they did in Connecticut that same year. Later on, the Doors appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, a popular Sunday night variety series that had given the Beatles and Elvis Presley national exposure. Ed Sullivan requested two songs from the Doors for the show, "People Are Strange" and "Light My Fire". Sullivan's censors insisted that the Doors change the lyrics of the song "Light My Fire" from "Girl we couldn't get much higher" to "Girl we couldn't get much better" for the television viewers; this was reportedly due to what was perceived as a reference to drugs in the original lyrics. After giving reluctant assurances of compliance to the producer in the dressing room, in one version of the story, an angry and defiant Morrison told the band he wasn't changing a word and sang the song with the original lyrics deliberately; in another, Morrison sang mistakenly the unaltered lyric out of anxiety from performing on live television. Either way, Sullivan was unhappy and refused to shake hands with Morrison or any other band member after their performance. He then had a producer tell the band they would never appear on his show again, and their planned six further bookings were cancelled. In a defiant tone, Morrison said to the producer, "Hey, man. So what? We just did the Sullivan Show!"
In 2013, another of Morrison's notebooks from Paris, found alongside the Paris Journal in the same box, known as the 127 Fascination box, sold for $250,000 at auction. This box of personal belongings similarly contained a home movie of Pamela Courson dancing in an unspecified cemetery in Corsica, the only film so far recovered to have been filmed by Morrison. The box also housed a number of older notebooks and journals and may initially have included the "Steno Pad" and the falsely titled The Lost Paris Tapes bootleg, if they had not been separated from the primary collection and sold by Philippe Dalecky with this promotional title. Those familiar with the voices of Morrison's friends and colleagues later determined that, contrary to the story advanced by Dalecky that this was Morrison's final recording made with busking Parisian musicians, the Lost Paris Tapes are in fact of "Jomo & The Smoothies": Morrison, friend Michael McClure and producer Paul Rothchild loose jamming in Los Angeles, well before Paris 1971.
Iggy and the Stooges are said to have formed after lead singer Iggy Pop was inspired by Morrison while attending a Doors concert in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Pop later said about the concert: "That show was a big, big, big influence on me. They had just had their big hit, 'Light My Fire' and the album had taken off... So, here's this guy, out of his head on acid, dressed in leather with his hair all oiled and curled. The stage was tiny and it was really low. It got confrontational. I found it really interesting. I loved the performance... Part of me was like, 'Wow, this is great. He's really pissing people off and he's lurching around making these guys angry.'" One of Pop's most popular songs, "The Passenger", is said to be based on one of Morrison's poems. Layne Staley, the vocalist of Alice in Chains; Eddie Vedder, the vocalist of Pearl Jam; Scott Weiland, the vocalist of Stone Temple Pilots and Velvet Revolver; Glenn Danzig, singer and founder of Danzig; Ian Astbury, the frontman of the Cult; Siouxsie Sioux, the lead singer of Siouxsie and the Banshees; Michael Gira, the frontman of Swans; Ian Curtis, the lead singer of Joy Division; Julian Casablancas, the vocalist of the Strokes; Billy Idol; and Patti Smith have said that Morrison was their biggest influence. Music journalist Simon Reynolds noted that the "deep, heavy alloys" in Morrison's voice, served as a prototype for the gothic rock scene.
On an album by CPR, David Crosby wrote and recorded a song about the movie with the lyric: "And I have seen that movie – and it wasn't like that." In general, the film received underwhelming to poor reviews, which largely focused on the many inaccuracies and problems with the narrative. However, Kilmer received some praise for his performance, with some members of the Doors reportedly saying that at times they could not distinguish whether it was Kilmer or Morrison singing on some of the sequences. Overall, the group members praised Kilmer's interpretation. Regardless of the widespread acclaim surrounding Kilmer's performance, he did not claim any award.
The lead character of a 2011 Bollywood film, Rockstar starring Ranbir Kapoor, was inspired by Morrison. The 2007 film Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story has numerous references to Morrison. Morrison's grave is featured in The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon Season 1, episode 3.
Education
Morrison attended George Washington High School in Alexandria, Virginia, and later studied at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he developed his interest in poetry and film. He dropped out of UCLA to pursue a career in music.
In 1957, Morrison attended Alameda High School in Alameda, California for his freshman year and the first semester of his sophomore year. In 1959, his family returned to Northern Virginia, where he graduated from George Washington High School, now a middle school in Alexandria, in June 1961. While attending George Washington High School, Morrison maintained a grade average of 88 and tested in the top 0.1% with an IQ of 149.
Morrison's senior year English teacher later said, "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."
Morrison went to live with his paternal grandparents in Clearwater, Florida, and attended St. Petersburg Junior College. In 1962, he transferred to Florida State University in Tallahassee, and appeared in a school recruitment film. At Florida State, Morrison was arrested on September 28, 1963, for disturbing the peace and petty larceny while drunk at a home Florida State Seminoles football game at Doak Campbell Stadium.
Morrison soon transferred to the film program at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he enrolled in Jack Hirschman's class on Antonin Artaud in UCLA's Comparative Literature program. Artaud's surrealist theater brand profoundly impacted Morrison's dark poetic sensibility of cinematic theatricality.
In the middle of 1965, after graduating with a bachelor's degree from the UCLA film school, Morrison led a bohemian lifestyle in Venice Beach. Living on the rooftop of a building inhabited by his UCLA classmate, Dennis Jakob, he wrote the lyrics of many of the early songs the Doors would later perform live and record on albums, such as "Moonlight Drive" and "Hello, I Love You". According to fellow UCLA student Ray Manzarek, he lived on canned beans and LSD for several months.
Although Morrison's early education was routinely disrupted as he moved from school to school, he was drawn to the study of literature, poetry, religion, philosophy and psychology, among other fields. Biographers have consistently pointed to a number of writers and philosophers who influenced his thinking and, perhaps, his behavior. While still in his adolescence, Morrison discovered the works of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Densmore has mentioned that he believed Nietzsche's ideas of a world with no objective order or structure "killed Jim Morrison".
While he was still at school, his family moved to New Mexico where he became familiar with the landscape and some of the iconography important to the Indigenous peoples of the American Southwest. These interests appear to be the source of many references to creatures and places such as lizards, snakes, deserts and "ancient lakes" that appear in his songs and poetry. His interpretations and fantasies of Native American ceremonies and ceremonial leaders (which, based on his readings, he referred to by the anthropological term "shamans") influenced his stage performances, notably in his seeking of trance states and vision through dancing to the point of exhaustion. In particular, Morrison's poem "The Ghost Song" was inspired by his readings about the Native American Ghost Dance.
Wallace Fowlie, professor emeritus of French literature at Duke University, wrote Rimbaud and Jim Morrison, subtitled "The Rebel as Poet – A Memoir". In this, he recounts his surprise at receiving a fan letter from Morrison who, in 1968, thanked him for his latest translation of Rimbaud's verse into English. "I don't read French easily", he wrote, "...your book travels around with me." Fowlie went on to give lectures on numerous campuses comparing the lives, philosophies, and poetry of Morrison and Rimbaud. The book The Doors, by the remaining Doors, quotes Morrison's close friend Frank Lisciandro as saying that too many people took a remark of Morrison's that he was interested in revolt, disorder, and chaos "to mean that he was an anarchist, a revolutionary, or, worse yet, a nihilist. Hardly anyone noticed that Jim was paraphrasing Rimbaud and the Surrealist poets".
* Peter Jan Margry, The Pilgrimage to Jim Morrison's Grave at Père Lachaise Cemetery: The Social Construction of Sacred Space. In idem (ed.), Shrines and Pilgrimage in the Modern World. New Itineraries into the Sacred. Amsterdam University Press, 2008, p. 145–173.
Conclusion
Jim Morrison's impact on music and culture is profound, and his financial legacy continues to grow. Despite his untimely death, his work remains timeless, attracting new generations of fans and contributing to his estate's substantial wealth.
