Birth: 
BIOGRAPHY
The Doors were formed in Los Angeles in 1965 by UCLA film students Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek. Manzarek, an organist, had just formed an R&B band named Rick And The Ravensask with his two brothers and was searching for a vocalist and drummer. He was immediately impressed with Morrison after hearing him sing a song he had written, "Moonlight Drive" and ask him to join his band. They then recruited drummer John Densmore and recorded six Morrison songs shortly after. After the recordings Manzarek's brothers were unhappy with its outcome and left the band. They both were replaced by Densmore's friend, guitarist Robbie Krieger. A new bass player was never found. The bass would be handled by both Krieger and Manzarek, who would play it on his organ. Also at this time the band was renamed "The Doors" by Morrison.
The Doors' first residency was at the London Fog on the Sunset Strip, then later at the Whisky-A-Go-Go. Even early on Morrison was a contrverseial frontman as the band was fired from the latter establishment in 1966 after performing a oedipal composition called "The End". The song was too far out for the club owners, but it brought attention to Morrison and the Doors as they were signed by Elektra Records. In '67 their first album The Doors was released. A tremendous debut album, one of the best first-time outings in rock history, introducing the band's fusion of rock, blues, classical, jazz, and poetry. The album would produce what would be their biggest single, "Light My Fire". The song went straight to number one after the album's version, which clocked in at over seven minutes, was trimmed down a bit for the single so it would get more air play.
Their next few albums seem to lack a bit of what the debut had, but still each one had a few stand out songs and hit singles, including another number one song, "Hello I Love You". During this time Morrison would become know as 'the Lizard King' for his outlandish performances and radical lifestyle. He was very much an anti-authoritarian and that combined with his notorious alcohol and narcotics consumption created problems, as he would bring this entire package with him on stage. He would be arrested more than once in 1969, in Hartford, Connecticut for assaulting a police officer back stage and then on stage at Miami's Dinner Key auditorium, after being accused of indecent exposure, public intoxication and profane, lewd and lascivious conduct.
In 1970 the band released Morrison Hotel which was full of power with most of it's material as strong as their first album. That was followed with the April, 1971 release of LA Woman, which was just as powerful an album and had a little more of a blues-oriented feel to it. Considering that tension in the band was real high between Morrison and the others during its recording (due to Morrison's drug and alcohol problems, which were getting worse), this album still turn out to be one of their best. With its seven-minute title track that celebrated both the glamour and seediness of Los Angeles and its closing number, "Riders On The Storm", which also clocked in over seven minutes and was the perfect closer for the album with its haunting vocals.
After the sessions for LA Woman, Morrison headed to Paris, France to live. Although he love the limelight he got as a pop star, he also hated the fact that was what he was know as. He wanted to be looked upon as a poet and hoped to start a literary career there. Tragically on July 3, 1971 he was found dead in his bathtub by his common law wife Pam. Officially he died of a heart attract but all kinds of stories would abound, including one that he died at a Paris nightclub of a drug overdose and his body was brought back to his apartment and the cause of death was covered up.
The surviving band members decided not to replace Jim and go on as a trio with Manzarek on vocals. They released two more albums that were not that bad, but without Morrison's writing and singing it wasn't the same. They disbanded in 1973. But the Doors were not entirely dead. There was just something about Morrison that would linger and years later bring in new fans. In 1978, Manzarek, Krieger and Densmore reunited to recorded new music for a series of poetry recitations which Morrison had taped during the LA Woman sessions. The resulting album, An American Prayer, was a big hit. That lead to the live album Alive She Cried in 1983, which was from archived material. It also sold well and all the older material also continued to sell, which lead to Morrison's picture on the front cover of Rolling Stone magazine in 1985 with the caption "He's Young, He's Hot, He's Sexy and He's Dead". Finally, in 1991 director Oliver Stone made a feature film about Morrison and the group called The Doors starring Val Kilmer as Morrison and it too was a hit. Even as the new century dawns, almost 30 years since his death, Morrison is still a major role model to a new generation of rock fans.
The Doors, one of the most influential and controversial rock bands of the 1960s, were formed in Los Angeles in 1965 by UCLA film students Ray Manzarek, keyboards, and Jim Morrison, vocals; with drummer John Densmore and guitarist Robby Krieger. The group never added a bass player, and their sound was dominated by Manzarek's electric organ work and Morrison's deep, sonorous voice, with which he sang and intoned his highly poetic lyrics. The group signed to Elektra Records in 1966 and released its first album, The Doors, featuring the hit "Light My Fire," in 1967.
Like "Light My Fire," the debut album was a massive hit, and endures as one of the most exciting, groundbreaking recordings of the psychedelic era. Blending blues, classical, Eastern music, and pop into sinister but beguiling melodies, the band sounded like no other. With his rich, chilling vocals and somber poetic visions, Morrison explored the depths of the darkest and most thrilling aspects of the psychedelic experience. Their first effort was so stellar, in fact, that the Doors were hard-pressed to match it, and although their next few albums contained a wealth of first-rate material, the group also began running up against the limitations of their recklessly disturbing visions. By their third album, they had exhausted their initial reservoir of compositions, and some of the tracks they hurriedly devised to meet public demand were clearly inferior to, and imitative of, their best early work.
On The Soft Parade, the group experimented with brass sections, with mixed results. Accused (without much merit) by much of the rock underground as pop sellouts, the group charged back hard with the final two albums they recorded with Morrison, on which they drew upon stone-cold blues for much of their inspiration, especially on 1971's L.A. Woman.
From the start, the Doors' focus was the charismatic Morrison, who proved increasingly unstable over the group's brief career. In 1969, Morrison was arrested for indecent exposure during a concert in Miami, an incident that nearly derailed the band. Nevertheless, the Doors managed to turn out a series of successful albums and singles through 1971, when, upon the completion of L.A. Woman, Morrison decamped for Paris. He died there, apparently of a drug overdose. The three surviving Doors tried to carry on without him, but ultimately disbanded. Yet the Doors' music and Morrison's legend continued to fascinate succeeding generations of rock fans: In the mid-'80s, Morrison was as big a star as he'd been in the mid-'60s, and Elektra has sold numerous quantities of the Doors' original albums plus reissues and releases of live material over the years, while publishers have flooded bookstores with Doors and Morrison biographies. In 1991, director Oliver Stone made The Doors, a feature film about the group starring Val Kilmer as Morrison.
As the lead singer and lyricist for the Doors, Jim Morrison is one of the most legendary and influential figures in rock & roll history. The disturbing, image-rich poeticism of Morrison's lyrics, perfectly supported by the Doors' swirling, eclectic psychedelic rock, have assured him continuing icon status, while his fondness for theatrical shock tactics and nihilistic angst have influenced countless imitators.
Unlike other psychedelic artists, who tended to favor whimsy or mysticism, Morrison saw expansion of consciousness as a way of gaining access to the subconscious mind's dark, unacknowledged desires; his rampaging id dominated his songs with a lust for violence, sex, alcohol, drugs, self-destruction, anything forbidden for any reason by the authority of conservative middle America, and he tried to live out that lifestyle as best he could.
Some of Morrison's work has been criticized -- both during his lifetime and afterwards -- as too melodramatic and calculatedly outrageous, but even at his most frustrating, Morrison's ideas have achieved a lasting resonance with newer generations as well as his initial fans, and his best material remains some of the most original and visionary rock music ever recorded.
James Douglas Morrison was born on December 8, 1943, in Melbourne, Florida. His father was a rear admiral in the U.S. Navy, and the family thus moved around a great deal. A strict authoritarian, Morrison's father was probably a major source of the outlandish rebellion that his son later acted out on stage; when Morrison began his climb to stardom, he would falsely claim that both of his parents were dead.
After attending St. Petersburg Junior College and Florida State University for a year apiece, Morrison moved to the West Coast to study film and theater at UCLA in 1964. He became infatuated with the poetry of William Blake and the writings of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and he gradually drifted away from school to work on his poetry and experiment with drugs, particularly LSD.
In 1965, Morrison so greatly impressed film-school classmate Ray Manzarek (a classically trained keyboardist and member of a local blues band) with his early attempts at lyric writing that the two decided to form a band. Robbie Krieger and John Densmore were soon recruited from the Psychedelic Rangers, and the Doors were born; the name was Morrison's idea, taken from The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley's book on mescaline, and its introductory William Blake quote. Morrison was a tentative frontman at first, avoiding eye contact with the audience and sometimes even singing with his back to them, but he soon came out of his shell, flinging his mike stand around and using it as a phallic symbol.
As the Doors rose to stardom with their 1967 debut and struggled to maintain that status, Morrison's ever-increasing withdrawal and simultaneous indulgence in hedonistic excess threatened the band's stability. He destroyed some of the band's studio equipment in a drunken outburst of temper, and he designed his ever more erratic concert behavior -- miming sex, barrages of profanity, and similar antics -- to provoke intense, frenzied audience reactions.
This did not go unnoticed by law enforcement officials in the locales where Morrison performed; he was maced by police in New Haven, Connecticut who caught him backstage with a female fan, and after taking the stage and baiting the officers, he was arrested on obscenity charges, of which he was later acquitted. Venues in Phoenix and Long Island subsequently banned the Doors after Morrison allegedly incited audience riots; the whole mess finally boiled over in March 1969, when Morrison exposed himself to an audience in Miami and was arrested for displaying "lewd and lascivious behavior."
After a two-month trial, he was found guilty, depleting the band financially and mentally and nearly causing their breakup. The Doors retreated to the studio, where they sounded musically rejuvenated on the hard-rocking Morrison Hotel (1970) and L.A. Woman (1971).
Supporting tours were marked by continued police harassment, and afterwards, a depressed Morrison left the country with his wife Pamela, eventually settling in Paris to unwind and write poetry (he had had his first collection of poems, The Lord and the Creatures, published in 1970).
But without the support of his bandmates, Morrison spiraled irrevocably out of control, and he was found dead in his bathtub on July 3, 1971, the victim of an apparent heart attack. He was only 27 years old. Morrison was buried in the Poets' Corner of Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, an area shared by Balzac, Moliere, and Oscar Wilde. Live recordings, greatest-hits collections, and recordings and books of Morrison's poetry have appeared frequently in the years since, and his legend has only grown with the passing of time.
Morrison was buried at the historic Pere LaChaise cemetery in Paris, where his grave has become a popular destination for rock-n-roll pilgrims... Morrison nicknamed himself "Mr. Mojo Risin'" (an anagram of Jim Morrison) and was also called the Lizard King, a name taken from his poem "The Celebration of the Lizard King," which was included in the 1968 album Waiting For the Sun.
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