Jim Morrison and the Youthful Reverence of Tortured Artists
Revisiting the myth of Mr. Morrison through my aged eyes
In my youth, I revered Jim Morrison. What classic rock-loving teenager didn’t? He was the ultimate rock ’n roll combination of charisma, confidence, physical beauty and high intellect, and his persona was soaked in mystery and myth. That iconic black-and-white photo screamed cool: his chiseled jawline, his deep, soulful eyes, his thick, wavy hair brushing his shoulders, his sculpted arms outstretched, ribs outlined. A nondescript necklace hung around his neck, harkening the Earth in its simple beads.
He was Adonis recalling the crucifix.
(A separate essay could be written on that sentence alone. Watch this space.)
I learned of the Doors when I was small: around Grade Three, thanks to my brothers in their teens who listened to the band. I was 8 years old and knew most of the words to Light my Fire and Riders on the Storm and parts of The End (the non-explicit version), and I boasted to my friends that the Doors was my favourite band, which, oddly enough, impressed not one of my 8-year-old classmates. I so badly wanted a band T-shirt like one of my brothers had, and as I grew, I drank in the words on the bottom of another brother’s poster of the aforementioned iconic photo: AN AMERICAN POET.
Of course, I did not truly discover and then idolize Jim Morrison until my teen years. Jim was, before finding his voice as a rock star, a writer. First and foremost, he saw himself as a poet. I, too, loved the written word, and had been writing short stories and poems, and filling journals with my thoughts, ideas and doodles for as long as I could remember; I therefore decided that I was also an American Poet, and that a kinship existed between the Lizard King and me. I relished in the fact that my nickname from my brothers was “Lizard”—a happy accident that only further strengthened my likening of myself to this beautiful creature of masterful composition. While the act of being a writer has always been awarded a special status of intrigue and respect in the art world, Jim somehow amplified the romanticism for me: he was naturally gifted at spinning prose, and he also had an aura that was saturated in intelligence and brooding and melancholy. He was a Tortured Artist through and through, and given my propensity for introspection, writing and the dramatic arts, my youthful reverence of mythological figures was aimed nowhere else.
Fortunate to have a record player at home and Doors records collected by my parents and brothers, I relished in afternoons when no one else was home; hours when I could ceremoniously lower the needle to the vinyl and shiver at those first few crackles before getting lost in the melancholic strains of The Crystal Ship or the shriek-singing in The Unknown Soldier. The volume was cranked, and the speakers blasted the tunes through the house and beyond, to the miles of countryside surrounding our rural house. The notes of sadness in the songs and Jim’s soulful eyes on album covers and in photos struck a deep chord with me, and I imagined myself having existential conversations with him in a “If you could talk to anyone living or dead for 20 minutes, who would it be?” daydream.
In my carefree high school days of long hair straightened with an iron on an ironing board, I was often at parties on weekends, usually in someone’s poorly lit basement when their parents were out of town. Friends milled about, others played pool, and some of us sat and talked, incense burning quietly in a corner. Anecdotes about our Lizard King were shared excitedly amongst the classic rock aficionados. For instance, Jim was instructed prior to the band’s live 1967 performance on the Ed Sullivan show to change the lyrics from “Girl we couldn’t get much higher” to something that did not reference drug use.
Famously, our Lizard King sang the lyrics as written, and the Doors were never allowed on the show again.
What a rebel! thought I at these gatherings, now in university, whenever a Doors song started to play. One of my best friends and I proudly danced around wearing our Jim Morrison-emblazoned T-shirts, excitedly discussing his poeticism and beauty. My T-shirt—yes, I finally had my own, some 10 years after admiring that of my brother’s—featured a black and white shot of Jim lying on a stage, head tucked downwards slightly, microphone in his hands. Behind him, audience members stared, waiting for his next move. The image struck me as deep; here was this man, this poet, this gorgeous shaman-like creature, lost in his words and thoughts, a whole auditorium of people there almost exclusively for him…because, let’s be real, the Doors without Jim Morrison is three highly talented musicians, but no “It” factor. The It Factor of that band was Jim. No Jim, no Doors. The back of my shirt featured a section of lyrics from People Are Strange. I lost that shirt in my fourth and final year of undergrad and was quite devastated about it.
Jim’s love life—oh, those photos of Jim and Pamela Courson outside in all their Earthy, hippie glory, their relationship called “stormy” and “passionate”, with Pam well-known to be Jim’s “muse”—it was so romantic. He was a rock ’n roll hero with a soft side, and she was his redhaired companion, sticking by him through the fame and alcohol and drugs. How utterly tragic that it was she who found him dead, I thought mournfully. The anecdote of Pam finding Jim dead in their bathtub was repeated in the 2009 film "When You’re Strange", which I drove from Sherbrooke, Quebec to Boston to see at age 21 with my boyfriend at the time, because how could I live with myself if I did not see it on its opening weekend? (The film eventually screened in select theatres in Canada, of course, but I now had this funky story to share that, if nothing else, proved my elite status as one of Jim’s top fans.)
When a Doors song started to play at a party, I lost myself in the expert musical artistry of Manzarek, Krieger and Densmore, and I melted deliciously into Jim’s voice, my long light brown hair framing my face, some eyeliner under my eyes and my skinny teenaged body either swaying to the music or splayed across a sofa or stretched out on the floor. Lying still with my eyes closed and floating away in my mind to the Doors was a favourite party pastime of mine. Jim Morrison, I thought dreamily. The ultimate Tortured Artist! Such rebellious Jim anecdotes as the one on the Ed Sullivan show, in combination with video footage of his legendary performances, where he sang, spoke, jumped, screamed, shrieked, tripped, writhed, twisted, pulled faces, free formed and sometimes almost fell unconscious from whatever was in his system—all in his signature leather pants—cemented his status as Rock God in the eyes of us, his young worshippers.
Our Rock God died in Paris at age 27 on July 3, 1971, becoming one of the founding members of the “27 Club”. Famously, in 1970 and at a severe juncture in his alcoholism and public personal spiral, Jim commented to friends in a bar in reference to the recent deaths of Joplin and Hendrix: “You’re drinking with number three.” Our Lizard King’s self-fulfilling prophecy, combined with the murky circumstances surrounding his death, only added further mystique and allure to the singer and poet, ensuring his death would be as romanticized as his life.
“Death makes angels of us all and gives us wings where we had shoulders smooth as raven’s claws.” – A line from A Feast of Friends from the album An American Prayer
I visited my Rock God’s grave in Père Lachaise Cemetery at 22, fresh out of university and gallivanting around Europe with the same boyfriend who had trekked to Boston with me. I was very serious about visiting my rock ’n roll poet’s final resting place. I stood quietly. I took in the sight of the grave. Multiple bouquets were placed along the marble headstone and plot. It was raining. There was no one else there. Silently, I repeated that line to Jim about wings and raven’s claws. Post-visit, my now-ex and I sipped coffee at a small café. The exquisite romantic poeticism of it all!
I am now in my 30s and decided to revisit my old infatuation.
He is not the Lizard King. Or Mr. Mojo Risin’. Or a Rock God.
James Douglas Morrison was a person.
Not only that, but he was a young person. I have outlived him by several years, and this is a strange realization. He was a young person who began a dangerous affair with alcohol as a teenager and who relied on it absolutely under the pressures of massive, overnight fame. This addiction, blended with drug use and with what seems to have been a pervasive lack of love of self, killed him. Jim was a Tortured Artist, this is true—but by all accounts, deep down, he did not want this label, and he used alcohol as a means of quelling his inner turmoil and giving him confidence. The nearly passed out singer onstage, microphone in his hands, captured in black and white who I wore on a T-shirt in undergrad? I had viewed it as a deep and beautiful image of an otherworldly poet. What it truly depicted was a broken young writer drowning himself in downers to quiet his pain. He wanted admiration for his writing in his lifetime, and what he mostly got was legions of people who adulated his mythical shaman-like persona, continuing to repeat the lore of his drunken actions and arrests as if these actions are to be admired and emulated.
To have even a vague understanding of how or why Jim began using alcohol as a self-soothing mechanism, it is necessary to look at who he was before the Doors existed. Jim clearly had a unique personality that set him apart from others his whole life, and he would have had such a quality with or without the Doors. Unfortunately, becoming famous did not nurture his uniqueness, but exploited it mercilessly. Accidentally becoming lead singer of a wildly successful band catapulted him unexpectedly into heights of public fawning and public demands with which his sensitive soul simply could not cope—and that is the crux of the issue that ultimately led to Jim’s path of self-destruction: he was a quiet, shy, introspective, kind and polite person who suffered a trauma and a heartbreak and, combing those events with his sudden fame, his spirit simply broke (more on the heartbreak later).
Through my young eyes, I saw only a supremely confident and talented singer and poet who admirably commanded attention in every photo and video. The other band members are easily overlooked in photos with the four of them together, with the viewer’s eyes drawn naturally to Jim’s physical beauty and soulful presence. The reality behind his ultra-confident, performative persona—the reality behind that mask—may be much darker. Jim’s lawyer, Max Fink, stated that Jim had allegedly confided in him that he was a victim of molestation as a boy at the hands of a male close to his family, but that Jim refused to name who it was. Horrific. I am not a psychologist and neither do I have first-hand knowledge of any of these claims; but, if Fink is to be believed, then this traumatic childhood event, combined with his strained relationship with his father and his alleged underlying anger at his mother, could reasonably shed light on why he began abusing alcohol as a teenager. It was alcohol in excess that allowed Jim to have confidence—and from that confidence, outlandish, self-destructive behaviour, which was perhaps the crying out of pain he had buried deep down.
Retrospective interviews with people who knew teenaged Jim in Florida, pre-L.A., pre-Doors, pre-Whiskey a Go Go, pre-Pamela Courson, pre-Paris, pre-all of it, collectively attest to his shy, sweet, thoughtful nature. He was known for being a highly intelligent, voracious reader with a photographic memory, and an introvert, with a small social circle and a quiet disposition. He was not known for the kind of brash, brazen conduct he became famous for as a Door. His wild, destructive, thoughtless words and actions that grew steadily worse as the band’s popularity grew were made possible by his concurrent increasingly heavy abuse of alcohol. Manzarek, after all, nicknamed Jim’s drunk alter-ego “Jimbo”, so wildly distinct and out of control was this version of Jim from the shy, introverted intellectual of only a few years earlier.
At 21, Jim suffered a heartbreak from which he did not recover. This experience, occurring not long before the beginning stages of forming the Doors, gave the world some of the greatest hits to come out of the 60s, but also helped to destroy the writer and singer as a person. Having leaned on alcohol for so many years already to self-soothe, Jim turned to it again to help numb the pain from having his heart broken, and simultaneously to gain the confidence he needed to perform onstage—an unsustainable combination. Youthful, wide-eyed me knew of Pamela Courson as Jim’s true love and muse. Now, I have learned that Pre-Pam, Jim had a woman in his life named Mary Werbelow.
Mary, not Pam, was Jim’s first love. She was also his true love.
They met on a beach in Florida as teenagers and quickly became an item. Jim described Mary as his soulmate; Mary described Jim as her soulmate. Mary reiterated this bond in a 2005 interview, when she mentioned never again finding a connection like she had with Jim. They matched intellectually and shared a deep bond. When Jim decided to attend UCLA’s film school, Mary followed him to L.A. Their breakup in 1965 after 3 years devastated him. It was about Mary that some of the earliest Doors hits were written, initially scribed by a heartbroken Jim living on rooftops in Venice Beach under the Southern California moon after Mary asked him to move out. Ray Manzarek, who knew Jim from UCLA, recognized Jim’s talent for prose and invited Jim to join him, Robby Krieger and John Densmore to form the Doors, and the rest is history.
The End, that legendary part-song, part-spoken word poem, was written by Jim and was about the end of his relationship with Mary (excluding the Oedipal lines; those were added later). Listening to The End now in my 30s, knowing why it was written, creates a whole new listening experience. Why did this pair of soulmates split up? Allegedly, Mary saw Jim indulging too regularly in drinking alcohol and indulging in psychedelics, with no professional or academic movement forward post-UCLA graduation and pre-Doors. They were also, quite simply, quite young, and Mary wished to take a break and let them each explore and grow, hoping that Jim would find some direction and not self-destruct. Later, they could get back together.
They would, of course, never get the chance to reconcile.
Getting your heart shattered is difficult enough, but when you’re young, an alcoholic, and have high, isolating intelligence, innate shyness, suddenly robust finances and a growing audience of transient admirers and hangers-on and enablers, but few people, if any, who are truly looking out for the preservation of your mind and heart and soul, well…this is not a recipe for great personal peace and stability—but it was an ideal recipe for great music and artistry, and for the creation of a legendary cultural icon.
It was easy when I was young to gawk at photos of Jim and Pam and to envy their union, which was, from what I heard and read, passionate and stormy and volatile; all very literary and romantic terms to someone young and inexperienced in the world and with a draw towards melancholy and the arts. Embarrassingly, my long-ago self described one of my relationships to my friends as “tumultuous”. It sounded cool and gave our arguments, lack of commonalities and on-again/off-again relationship status a rock ’n roll factor, according to my young brain. In my ancient wisdom now, I recognize the Jim and Pam relationship as toxic, and so, too, was my old “tumultuous” union. Pam, a heroin addict, sadly died of a heroin overdose also at age 27 (adding to the tragic poeticism of it all) in 1974.
Jim and Pam moved to Paris in the Spring of 1971. Young me glossed over his arrest in 1969 and dismissed any criticism of his poor behaviour; now, I wonder how much of it was a cry for help and how much was Jim trying to do himself in. His move to Paris indicates a renewed will to live: he wanted to carve out his identity as Jim Morrison the writer and poet, and shuck his persona of Jim Morrison the out-of-control rockstar. Paris allowed him anonymity that he could never have had in the U.S., and he was trying to improve his health and find himself again; indeed, one of Jim’s goals was purportedly to stop drinking, and while he certainly did cut back, he did not live long enough to experience a sober life.
Why or when he began dabbling in Pam’s heroin is unclear, but Pam found a supplier quickly enough in Paris: a man with whom she was having an affair named Jean de Breteuil, French Count and drug dealer to the stars. The details surrounding Jim’s death will never be precisely known, but Marianne Faithfull spoke candidly in 2014 about how her boyfriend at the time, the very same de Breteuil, provided the heroin that killed Jim in an accidental overdose. The Count would die of a heroin overdose the following summer in Morocco at 22.
It has been suggested that the years of abuse Jim put his body through had taken a potentially irreversible toll; that is, even if he had not died how and when he did, his body may still have been giving out. Through my young eyes, I paid no mind to his large, unkempt beard and changed physique. He was Jim Morrison, man! The coolest rebel and Tortured Artist to walk the Earth. He could be a chameleon in his appearance however he liked; it was all part of his mystique, his otherworldliness. Now, I recognize that while the change in his appearance was partly due to weight gain, it was also a result of bloating from the damage he’d caused his organs through such serious drinking. Alain Ronay, a close friend of Jim’s who spent time with the poet the evening before he died, famously described seeing a flash of a “death mask” upon Jim’s face during a coughing fit while they sat at a café together. It is a cruel, incomprehensible twist of fate that when Jim had begun feeling better and had taken interest in his health, shaved his beard, cut back on drinking, lost a bit of weight and begun writing again, he died.
It is all a very sad end to what was ultimately a short life of a beautifully gifted, but perpetually emotionally tortured, soul. Were I in Paris now, I would visit the cemetery with a much greater understanding and appreciation of who is really buried there: not a mythical shaman, not an otherworldly Rock God, not a cool rebel half-passing out on stage and causing trouble, but a writer, intellectual, friend, lover, brother, and son, who suffered from unresolved trauma and heartbreak and drank and drugged himself into his grave before the age of 30. I no longer see his death as something to be romanticized. Jim died a scary and lonely death, and the world lost a rare gem: a gifted, intelligent and sensitive artist devoted to his craft, and the years of writing and art he may have created for us had he lived.
It is natural, I think, that the young gravitate towards these mystical, larger-than-life figures. Young people are discovering their freedoms as they enter adulthood, and while sorting out who they are, tend to look to famous figures to admire or emulate. We find in these figures, perhaps, parts of ourselves that we wish we could fully explore or let out, and we arguably live vicariously through them by singing their songs, and reading and repeating their words and studying their art. The heavy glamorization of explosive relationships and self-destructive spirals? That I cannot quite explain, but it is pervasive, nonetheless. I certainly had a steadfast, youthful idolization of Jim Morrison: his ability with words and his soulful eyes, his physical beauty and his status as Rebel Rock God, and, absolutely, his romantic immortalization as a Tortured Artist.
Of course, the uncomfortable truth is that without his life’s pains, without Mary, without his broken heart, without the Doors, without Pam, without Paris, it is likely no one would have heard of him—or at least, not millions around the world. Perhaps he would have lived an under-the-radar existence as a writer and educator, sharing his wealth of knowledge with generations of learners. Perhaps he and Mary would have rekindled their relationship and built a happy life together. Alas, there is no alternate reality of Jim Morrison staying in Florida and pursuing a quiet life; there is only the reality of what was, and this is a hard truth for all of us when we look back at our lives and start asking that dreaded, useless question: “What if?” followed often by: “If only…”
About the Creator
Eliza
Writer, artist, dreamer, teacher.
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Comments (1)
Beautifully written tribute. Thank you for reminding me how human this incredible man was. Loved his music.