Background

Ethnicity: Jim Morrison was of Scottish, Irish, and English descent.

Jim Morrison was born James Douglas Morrison on February 8, 1943, in Melbourne, Florida, United States to the family of a naval aviator Lieutenant George Stephen Morrison who would rise to the rank of Rear Admiral, and a homemaker Clara Virginia Clarke. George Morrison was the commander of the United States naval forces aboard the flagship United States Ship Bon Homme Richard during the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Incident that helped ignite the Vietnam War. Admiral Morrison was also a skilled pianist who enjoyed performing for friends at parties. Jim Morrison's younger brother Andy remembered, "There was always a big crowd around the piano with my dad playing popular songs that he could pick up by ear."

During his early years, Jim Morrison was a dutiful and highly intelligent child, excelling at school and taking a particular interest in reading, writing, and drawing. He underwent a traumatic but formative experience around the age of five when driving with his family through the New Mexico desert. A truck packed with Native American workers had crashed, leaving dead and mutilated bodies of the victims strewn across the highway.

Morrison recalled: "...all I saw was funny red paint and people lying around, but I knew something was happening, because I could dig the vibrations of the people around me, 'cause they're my parents and all, and all of a sudden I realized that they didn't know what was happening any more than I did. That was the first time I tasted fear." Although his family members have since suggested that Morrison exaggerated the incident, it nevertheless made a deep impression on him that he described years later in the lyrics of his song "Peace Frog": "Indians scattered on dawn's highway bleeding/ Ghosts crowd the young child's fragile eggshell mind."

Morrison moved frequently as a child due to his father's naval service, first from Florida to California and then to Alexandria, Virginia.

Education

Being a child of a military family, Jim Morrison spent part of his childhood in San Diego, then in northern Virginia where he studied at Fairfax County Elementary School, and attended Charles H. Flato Elementary School in Kingsville, Texas, while his father was stationed at NAS Kingsville in 1952. He continued at Saint John's Methodist School in Albuquerque, and then Longfellow School Sixth Grade Graduation Program from San Diego. In 1957, Morrison studied at Alameda High School in Alameda, California.

Jim Morrison attended George Washington High School in Alexandria, Virginia since 1959. As a teen, Morrison began to rebel against his father's strict discipline, discovering alcohol and women and bristling at various forms of authority. "One time he told the teacher he was having a brain tumor removed and walked out of class," his sister Anne recalled. Nevertheless, Morrison remained a voracious reader, an avid diarist, and a decent student. When he graduated from high school in 1961, he asked his parents for the complete works of Nietzsche as a graduation present - a testament to both his bookishness and rebelliousness.

Upon graduating from high school, Morrison returned to his birth state. He started living with his paternal grandparents in Clearwater, Florida, where he attended classes at St. Petersburg Junior College. In 1962, he shifted to Florida State University in Tallahassee. After making the Dean's List his freshman year, Morrison decided to transfer to the University of California at Los Angeles to study film. Because film was a relatively new academic discipline, there were no established authorities, something that greatly appealed to the freewheeling Morrison. "There are no experts, so, theoretically, any student knows almost as much as any professor," he explained about his interest in film.

Morrison also developed an increasing interest in poetry at the University of California at Los Angeles, devouring the Romantic works of William Blake and the contemporary Beat verse of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac while composing his own. Nevertheless, Morrison quickly lost interest in his film studies and would have dropped out of school altogether if not for his fear of being drafted into the Vietnam War. He graduated from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1965 only because, in his own words, "I didn't want to go into the army, and I didn't want to work - and that's the damned truth."

Career

In 1965, Jim Morrison joined the Rick & the Ravens bands which already included classical pianist Ray Manzarek, guitarist Robbie Krieger, and drummer John Densmore. Manzarek, also an organist, along with Morrison, guitarist Robbie Krieger, and drummer John Densmore decided to form their own rock band to put those songs to music. The young men decided to call their group the Doors, a name inspired by a quote from nineteenth-century English poet William Blake: "If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear as it is, infinite." As Morrison was fond of saying, "there are things known and things unknown and in between are the Doors."

Although the Doors had signed a record contract with Columbia, the label showed little interest in the new band. In 1966, their luck changed when the Doors were offered a recording contract with Elektra Records. They accepted, and, under the management of Bill Siddons, released their self-titled debut the following year. After the release of The Doors, the group went back into the studio and cut Strange Days, which also came out in 1967. Other albums would include Waiting for the Sun (1968), The Soft Parade (1969), Morrison Hotel (1970), Absolutely Live (1970), and L.A. Woman (1971). Morrison, caught up in Native American lore and the images of the American deserts, dubbed himself the "Lizard King" and wrote several songs, including "Celebration of the Lizard," in reference to his reptilian alter ego.

On March 1, 1969, Morrison and the Doors were booked for a concert at Dinner Key Auditorium, in Coconut Grove, in Morrison's home state of Florida. Late for his scheduled flight to Miami, Morrison waited in the airport lounge, drinking heavily, until the next flight was called. When he missed the stop over flight in New Orleans, he again spent the time in the airport bar. By the time Morrison arrived in Miami, he was barely able to stand. During his performance before thirteen thousand screaming fans, Morrison, totally inebriated, exposed himself briefly, to the audience. Nothing was done until pressure from disgusted Miami-area residents forced local police to issue a warrant for Morrison's arrest. The singer, who had been vacationing out of the country, turned himself in to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and returned to Miami, where he went on trial on August 12, 1970. Found guilty of a misdemeanor for profanity and drunkenness, he was sentenced to six months of hard labor, although the sentence was stayed, while his attorney appealed the conviction. Morrison would not live to see the outcome of that appeal.

After the trial in Miami, Morrison's life grew more chaotic, his relationships with band members more strained. He began to consider leaving the group to return to film studies. Searching to recover a sense of himself, he went back to the poetry that he had loved while a college student. In 1970, he published his first book of verse, The Lords [and] The New Creatures, which had been privately printed the year before.

On July 3, 1971, Morrison was found dead in his bath tub, by his girlfriend.

Achievements

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  Jim Morrison was, and continues to be, one of the most popular and influential singer-songwriters in rock history. To this day Morrison is widely regarded as the prototypical rock-star. The leather pants he was fond of wearing both onstage and off have since become stereotyped as rock-star apparel. In 2011, a Rolling Stone readers' pick placed Jim Morrison in fifth place of the magazine's "Best Lead Singers of All Time." In June 2013, a fossil analysis discovered a large lizard in Myanmar. The extinct reptile was given the moniker Barbaturex morrisoni in honor of Morrison. Morrison was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (as a member of The Doors) in 1993. He was ranked #47 on Rolling Stone's list of the 100 Greatest Singers of All Time, and number 22 on Classic Rock magazine's 50 Greatest Singers in Rock. He and The Doors were awarded a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for Recording at 6901 Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, California. Morrison ranked #7 on VH1's 100 Sexiest Artists. Morrison's grave in Paris, France, is reportedly the city's fourth most popular attraction after the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame and the Louvre.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Lords and the New Creatures

    (Intense, erotic, and enigmatic, Jim Morrison's persona is...)

    1969
  • Wilderness: The Lost Writings of Jim Morrison

    (Compiled from the literary estate of the singer who broug...)

    1988
  • An American Prayer 1970
  • Arden lointain 1988

• music

  • The American Night: The Writings of Jim Morrison

    (The celebrated lead singer of The Doors, Jim Morrison is ...)

    1990
  • Strange Days 1967
  • Waiting for the Sun 1968
  • The Soft Parade 1969
  • Morrison Hotel 1970
  • L.A. Woman 1971
  • An American Prayer 1978
  • The Doors 1967

Religion

Morrison was raised in a Christian home, but his interests in the occult and Native American culture influenced his spirituality, creating a unique worldview. Morrison considered himself a shaman.

Politics

Morrison was a hippie and a man of his time. He didn't involve himself much in traditional politics but certainly lived a free - and one might say liberal - lifestyle.

Views

Combining Morrison's darkly poetic lyrics and outlandish stage presence with the band's unique and eclectic brand of psychedelic music, the Doors released a flurry of albums and songs over several years.

Although Morrison's new lifestyle as a rock musician was a radical break from growing up in the uneventful fifties or life as a college student, images of his past, particularly his childhood, haunted many of Morrison's works, including his poetry and song lyrics. In Peace Frog, recorded on the album Morrison Hotel, he recalls an event from childhood, singing of "Indians scattered on dawn's highway bleeding/Ghosts crowd the young child's fragile eggshell mind."

Meanwhile, a long-term gig at the Whiskey-a-Go-Go on Hollywood's Sunset Strip allowed the Doors to develop their stage presence, and it eventually drew the attention of talent scouts searching for new recording acts. Not the least of the group's attractions was Morrison, who sang in a husky baritone, wore skin-tight pants, and went even further than Elvis Presley had in incorporating sexually suggestive movements into his on-stage performances. With lyrics like "Come on baby, light my fire," Morrison held young women enthralled.

In Morrison's Elektra biography, released in conjunction with the group's debut album, he stated, "I like ideas about the breaking away or overthrowing of established order. It seems to me to be the road toward freedom-external revolt is a way to bring about internal freedom. Rather than starting inside, I start outside-reach the mental through the physical." Such ideas reflected the attitude of a generation raised under the repressive conventions of the 1950s and rebelling against what they viewed as unwarranted hostilities of an older generation in Vietnam.

Quotations: "I think, in these days, especially in the States, you have to be a politician or an assassin or something, to really be a superstar."

"People are afraid of themselves, of their own reality; their feelings most of all. People talk about how great love is, but that’s bullshit. Love hurts. Feelings are disturbing. People are taught that pain is evil and dangerous. How can they deal with love if they’re afraid to feel? Pain is meant to wake us up. People try to hide their pain. But they’re wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain. It’s all in how you carry it. That’s what matters. Pain is a feeling. Your feelings are a part of you. Your own reality. If you feel ashamed of them, and hide them, you’re letting society destroy your reality. You should stand up for your right to feel your pain."

"They can picture love affairs of chemicals and stars, a romance of stones, or the fertility of fire. Strange, fertile correspondences the alchemists sensed in unlikely orders of being. Between men and planets, plants and gestures, words and weather."

"I've always been attracted to ideas that were about revolt against authority. When you make peace with authority, you become an authority."

"A friend is someone who gives you the complete freedom to be yourself."

"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 crucial moments."

"Erotic politicians, that's what we are. We're interested in everything about revolt, disorder, and all activity that appears to have no meaning."

"Expose yourself to your deepest fear; after that, fear has no power, and the fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free."

Personality

Caught up in a wave of popularity, the young band found itself carried into a new world, where drugs, alcohol, and sex played a major role. Morrison, whose status as a celebrity had begun almost overnight, found it difficult to handle the change: his growing dependence on alcohol would dim his talent in the years that followed, and the superstar status made him believe he was immune to normal authority.

Throughout the band's brief tenure atop the music world, Morrison's private life and public persona were spiraling rapidly out of control. His alcoholism and drug addictions worsened, leading to violent and profane outbursts at concerts that provoked the ire of cops and club owners across the country.

Morrison's drug use, violent temper, and infidelity culminated in disaster in New Haven, Connecticut, on the night of December 9, 1967. Morrison was high, drunk and carrying on with a young woman backstage before a show when he was confronted by a police officer and sprayed with mace. He then stormed onstage and delivered a profanity-laced tirade that led to his arrest onstage, which then sparked area riots. Morrison was later arrested in 1970 for allegedly exposing himself at a Florida concert, though the charges were posthumously dropped decades later.

In an attempt to get his life back in order, Morrison took time off from the Doors in the spring of 1971 and moved to Paris with Courson. However, he continued to be plagued by drugs and depression. On July 3, 1971, Courson found Morrison dead in the bathtub of their apartment, apparently of heart failure. Since the French officials found no evidence of foul play, no autopsy was performed, which has in turn led to endless speculation and conspiracy theorizing about his death. In 2007, a Paris club owner named Sam Bernett published a book claiming that Morrison died of a heroin overdose at his nightclub and was later carried back to his apartment and placed in the bathtub to cover up the real reason for his death. Jim Morrison was buried at the famous Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, and his grave has since become one of the city's top tourist destinations. He was only 27 years old at the time of his death.

Physical Characteristics: Jim Morrison was 5' 11" (1.8 meters) of height.

Quotes from others about the person

• The Doors were successful. It was Jim Morrison as the centre and the figure and the spokesman, the figurehead, but we were all into the same thing. That's why we were a band. - Ray Manzarek
  
  "The ancient Egyptians used to say: if you say a man's name, he is alive. I take this opportunity to say, Jim Morrison." - Ray Manzarek
  
  "I liked Jim Morrison a lot as a person. He was this very poetic character, and death was always on his mind. And it showed up in his songs - I mean, almost every song he wrote had something to do with dying. He was an American treasure that went way too soon." - Alice Cooper
  
  "Two of the guys that were honorary Vampires - Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix - had died at 27. And they were certainly archangels in our group [Hollywood Vampires]." - Alice Cooper
  
  "The quality of our lives is diminished every time we lose a great artist. It's a different world without Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Curtis Mayfield, Brian Jones and the rest." - Steven Van Zandt
  
  "What I wanted to do in rock 'n roll was merge poetry with sonic scapes, and the two people who had contributed so much to that were Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison." - Patti Smith
  
  "I didn't love Jim Morrison 'cause he was self-destructive. I loved him because of his work. Because of the way he merged poetry and rock-and-roll. Because he did something new." - Patti Smith

Interests

• Celtic mythology

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Friedrich Nietzsche, Plutarch

• Writers

  William Blake, Arthur Rimbaud, William Seward Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Louis Ferdinand Celine, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Charles Baudelaire, Molière, Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Honoré de Balzac and Jean Cocteau

• Artists

  Josef von Sternberg, Jean Renoir

• Sport & Clubs

  swimming

• Music & Bands

  Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra

Connections

Morrison spent nearly the entirety of his adult life with a woman named Pamela Courson, and although he briefly married a music journalist named Patricia Kennealy in a Celtic pagan ceremony in 1970, he left everything to Courson in his will. (She was deemed his common-law wife by the time of his death.) Throughout his relationships with Courson and Kennealy, however, Morrison had a reputation of womanizer.

Father:

George Stephen Morrison

George S. Morrison never became a 4-star Admiral, and Doors drummer John Densmore believes that Jim’s notorious reputation was a key reason why. The navy, Densmore suggests, was reluctant to give the father of the Doors’ lead singer a higher profile. During his son's Miami obscenity trial, his defense team admitted a supportive letter from the admiral in which he vouched for his son’s good character while acknowledging that he had barely spoken with him for years. He had followed Jim’s career, he wrote, “with a mixture of amazement and in the case of Miami, great concern and sorrow.”

Mother:

Clara Virginia Clarke

Sister:

Anne Robin Morrison

Brother:

Andrew Lee Morrison

Partner:

Pamela Courson

By the times of Morrison's death Courson was deemed his common law wife.

Partner:

Patricia Kennealy-Morrison

Kennealy and Morrison exchanged vows in a Celtic handfasting ceremony in June 1970. Before witnesses, the couple signed a document declaring themselves wed. The marriage was never legally recognized, but Patricia did change her last name to "Morrison."

Friend:

Ray Manzarek

Friend:

Robby Krieger

Friend:

John Densmore

Friend:

Michael McClure

References

• Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend
  2005
• Riders on the Storm: My Life with Jim Morrison and the Doors
  1991
• No One Here Gets Out Alive
  1995
• Jim Morrison: Friends Gathered Together
  2014
• The Lizard King: The Essential Jim Morrison
  2010