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| Jim Morrison |
Today, The Grandma has been relaxing at home listening to some music.
It is December, 8 and on a day like today in 1980, at approximately 5:00 p.m. John Lennon autographed a copy of Double Fantasy for fan Mark David Chapman before leaving The Dakota with Yoko for a recording session at the Record Plant.
After the session, Lennon and Ono returned to their Manhattan apartment in a limousine at around 10:50 p.m. EST. They exited the vehicle and walked through the archway of the building when Chapman shot Lennon four times in the back at close range. Lennon was rushed in a police cruiser to the emergency room of Roosevelt Hospital, where he was pronounced dead on arrival at 11:00 p.m.
John Lennon is an icon of world music that was killed the same day that Jim Morrison, another myth, could have celebrated his thirty seven anniversaries if he had not died by a heart failure ten years before.
The Grandma wants to remember Morrison, the American singer, songwriter and poet, who was the lead vocalist of the rock band the Doors. The end of his life became the beginning of the myth.
Before talking about Morrison, The Grandma has read a new chapter of Mary Stewart's This Rough Magic.
James Douglas Morrison (December 8, 1943-July 3, 1971) was an American singer, songwriter and poet, who served as the lead vocalist of the rock band the Doors.
Due to his poetic lyrics, distinctive baritone voice, wild personality, unpredictable and erratic performances, and the dramatic circumstances surrounding his life and early death, Morrison is regarded by music critics and fans as one of the most iconic and influential frontmen in rock history. Since his death, his fame has endured as one of popular culture's most rebellious and oft-displayed icons, representing the generation gap and youth counterculture.
Together with Ray Manzarek, Morrison co-founded the Doors during the summer of 1965 in Venice, California. The band spent two years in obscurity until shooting to prominence with their number-one single in the United States, Light My Fire, taken from their self-titled debut album.
Morrison wrote or co-wrote many of the Doors' songs, including Light My Fire, Break On Through (To the Other Side), The End, Moonlight Drive, People Are Strange, Hello, I Love You, Roadhouse Blues, L.A. Woman, and Riders on the Storm. He recorded a total of six studio albums with the Doors, all of which sold well and received critical acclaim. Though the Doors recorded two more albums after Morrison died, his death severely affected the band's fortunes, and they split up in 1973.
In 1993, Morrison was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Doors.
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| Jim Morrison & The Doors |
Morrison was also well known for improvising spoken word poetry passages while the band played live.
Morrison was ranked number 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. Manzarek said Morrison embodied hippie counterculture rebellion.
Morrison developed an alcohol dependency during the 1960s, which at times affected his performances on stage. He died unexpectedly at the age of 27 in Paris. As no autopsy was performed, the cause of Morrison's death remains unknown.
James Douglas Morrison was born on December 8, 1943 in Melbourne, Florida, to Clara Virginia and Rear Admiral George Stephen Morrison, USN. His ancestors were Scottish, Irish, and English. Admiral Morrison commanded United States naval forces during the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which provided the pretext for the US involvement in the Vietnam War in 1965. Morrison had a younger sister, Anne Robin, who was born in 1947 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and a younger brother, Andrew Lee Morrison, who was born in 1948 in Los Altos, California.
A voracious reader from an early age, Morrison was particularly inspired by the writings of several philosophers and poets. He was influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche, whose views on aesthetics, morality, and the Apollonian and Dionysian duality would appear in his conversation, poetry and songs. Some of his formative influences were Plutarch's Parallel Lives and the works of the French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud, whose style would later influence the form of Morrison's short prose poems.
He was also influenced by William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Louis Ferdinand Celine, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Charles Baudelaire, Molière, Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Honoré de Balzac and Jean Cocteau, along with most of the French existentialist philosophers.
In January 1964, Morrison moved to Los Angeles to attend the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Shortly thereafter on August 2, 1964, Morrison's father, George Stephen Morrison, commanded a carrier division of the United States fleet during the Gulf of Tonkin Incident.
At UCLA, Morrison enrolled in 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 within the Theater Arts department of the College of Fine Arts in 1965.
At the time of the graduation ceremony, he went to Venice Beach, and the university mailed his diploma to his mother in Coronado, California. He made several short 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.
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| Jim Morrison |
During these years, while living in Venice Beach, he befriended writers at the Los Angeles Free Press, for which he advocated until his death in 1971.
He conducted a lengthy and in-depth interview with Bob Chorush and Andy Kent, both working for the Free Press at the time (approximately December 6–8, 1970), and was planning on visiting the headquarters of the busy newspaper shortly before leaving for Paris.
In the summer 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 old UCLA cinematography friend, Dennis Jacobs, 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 Manzarek, he lived on canned beans and LSD for several months. Morrison and fellow UCLA student Ray Manzarek were the first two members of the Doors, forming the group during that summer. They had met months earlier as cinematography students. The story claims that Manzarek was lying on the beach at Venice one day, where he accidentally 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. Krieger auditioned at Densmore's recommendation and was then added to the lineup. 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 took their name from the title of Aldous Huxley's book The Doors of Perception (a reference to the unlocking of doors of perception through psychedelic drug use). Huxley's own title was a quotation from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in which Blake wrote: If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.
Although Morrison was known as the lyricist of the group, Krieger also made significant lyrical contributions, writing or co-writing some of the group's biggest hits, including Light My Fire, Love Me Two Times, Love Her Madly and Touch Me.
On the other hand, Morrison, who did not write most songs using an instrument, would come up with vocal melodies for his own lyrics, with the other band members contributing chords and rhythm.
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| Jim Morrison |
Morrison did not play an instrument live except for maracas and tambourine for most shows, and harmonica on a few occasions or in the studio excluding maracas, tambourine, handclaps, and whistling. However, he did play the grand piano on Orange County Suite and a Moog synthesizer on Strange Days.
By the release of their second album, Strange Days, the Doors had become one of the most popular rock bands in the United States. Their blend of blues and dark psychedelic rock included a number of original songs and distinctive cover versions, such as their rendition of Alabama Song, from Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's opera, Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. The band also performed a number of extended concept works, including the songs The End, When the Music's Over, and Celebration of the Lizard.
In 1968, the Doors released their third studio album, Waiting for the Sun.
Morrison began writing in earnest during his adolescence. At UCLA he studied the related fields of theater, film, and cinematography. He self-published two separate volumes of his poetry in 1969, titled The Lords/Notes on Vision and The New Creatures. The Lords consists primarily of brief descriptions of places, people, events and Morrison's thoughts on cinema. The New Creatures verses are more poetic in structure, feel and appearance. These two books were later combined into a single volume titled The Lords and The New Creatures. These were the only writings published during Morrison's lifetime.
Morrison befriended Beat poet Michael McClure, who wrote the afterword for Danny Sugerman's biography of Morrison, No One Here Gets Out Alive. McClure and Morrison reportedly collaborated on a number of unmade film projects, including a film version of McClure's infamous play The Beard, in which Morrison would have played Billy the Kid.
After his death, a further two volumes of Morrison's poetry were published. The contents of the books were selected and arranged by Morrison's friend, photographer Frank Lisciandro, and girlfriend Pamela Courson's parents, who owned the rights to his poetry.
Morrison joined Pamela Courson in Paris in March 1971, at an apartment she had rented for him at 17-19, rue Beautreillis in Le Marais, 4th arrondissement, Paris. In letters, he described going for long walks through the city, alone. During this time, he shaved his beard and lost some of the weight he had gained in the previous months.
He died on July 3, 1971, at age 27. He was found by Courson in a bathtub at his apartment. The official cause of death was listed as heart failure, although no autopsy was performed, as it was not required by French law. His death was two years to the day after the death of the Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones, and approximately nine months after the deaths of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin.
Morrison was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, one of the city's most visited tourist attractions, where Irish playwright Oscar Wilde, French cabaret singer Edith Piaf, and many other poets and artists are also buried. The grave had no official marker until French officials placed a shield over it, which was stolen in 1973. The grave was listed in the cemetery directory with Morrison's name incorrectly arranged as Douglas James Morrison.
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. This is a king lizard, and he was the lizard king, so it just fit, said Jason Head, a paleontologist at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.
Expose yourself to your deepest fear;
after that, fear has no power,
and the fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes.
You are free.
Jim Morrison
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