If I was better-read as a teenager, I would have also been aware of the chapter from Joan Didion’s epochal 1979 essay collection The White Album that witheringly profiles The Doors during the sessions for their third album, 1968’s Waiting For The Sun. It’s a portrait that syncs with Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman’s 1980 book No One Here Gets Out Of Alive, which ranks with Stephen Davis’ Led Zeppelin bio, Hammer Of The Gods, as one of the most sordid works of rock ‘n’ roll pulp semi-fiction. In the film, Val Kilmer plays Morrison as a hellbent hedonist who is both an immature child and a self-immolating egotist. And, again, that had a lot to do with Oliver Stone’s movie. He drew me in.īut it didn’t take long for me to change my mind about Jim Morrison. Also, he could wear the hell out of a pair of leather pants. He sang in a deep, evocative baritone that seemed to signify a mix of sexual mystique and disturbing morbidity. At first, as an impressionable 13-year-old, I thought Jim Morrison was pretty cool. I came of age as a music fan in the early ’90s, which coincided with a wave of Doors revivalism inspired by Oliver Stone’s bombastic 1991 film, The Doors. Because I used to also hate the guy’s guts. With the exception of Eric Clapton - who to be fair is way, way out in front in this regard - I don’t think that there is a significant figure in classic rock history whose reputation has taken a worse hit in the past several decades than Jim Morrison. On Twitter, he has been linked to the launch of the Vietnam War, of all calamities, and even inspired disgruntled fans to burn his infamous biography, No One Here Gets Out Alive, because he’s “a bad role model for youth.” He has been listed among the worst musicians of all time, and inspired podcasts about how much his band sucks.
The late lead singer of The Doors has been slagged by contemporaries like Jerry Garcia (“I never liked The Doors”), Lou Reed (The Doors were “stupid”), and David Crosby (Jim Morrison is “a dork”).
But even though The Lizard King has been dead now for 50 years, people keep on burying him. On July 3, 1971, Jim Morrison died in a Paris bathtub after he slipped into unconsciousness.
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