Jim Morrison developed an alcohol dependency, which at times affected his performances on stage. In 1971, Morrison died unexpectedly in a Paris apartment at the age of 27, amid several conflicting witness reports. Since no autopsy was performed, the cause of Morrison's death remains disputed. Although the Doors recorded two more albums after Morrison died, his death greatly affected the band's fortunes, and they split up two years later.
Paris July 2, 1971, early evening. Jim Morrison and his girlfriend Pamela Courson went to the cinema to see Pursued, a western starring Robert Mitchum. At another theater, Jim Morrison sat alone, watching a documentary called Death Valley. Across town, at the Rock ’n’ Roll Circus nightclub, Jim Morrison scored some heroin and OD’d in the bathroom. At the same time, Jim Morrison walked the streets of Paris and shot up with some junkies on skid row. Meanwhile, at Orly Airport, Jim Morrison boarded a plane for an unknown destination.
No one knows for sure where the 27-year-old Jim was or what he did that evening, but by the next morning, one thing was certain: He was dead.
Three months earlier, he had fled Hollywood. Bloated, bearded and out of control with his drinking, the once-svelte Lizard King had become a sad parody of his former self. During the difficult recording sessions for the Doors’ final album, L.A. Woman, Morrison would guzzle as many as 36 beers in a single day. His voice was giving out, and he was struggling with his lyric writing.
On March 11, 1971, he went to Paris for a sabbatical. He intended to get clean, lose some weight and reconnect with his muse.
Of the possible scenarios on the night he died, the first has become the most accepted. After the movie, he and Courson returned to their apartment at No. 17 Rue Beautreillis. They watched some Super 8 films of a recent Moroccan vacation before Courson went to bed. Jim stayed up for a while, listening to old Doors albums, trying to suppress a coughing fit that had started earlier in the evening. When he came to bed, he woke Courson, complaining that he felt sick.
He was up an hour later, feeling worse. When he vomited a small quantity of blood, Courson suggested they call a doctor. Jim instead asked her to run a bath for him. While he stretched out in the tub, she went back to bed. The last thing she remembered hearing Jim say was, “Are you there, Pam? Pam, are you there?”
Courson awoke a little after 6 a.m. and realized Jim wasn’t in bed. She called his name. No answer. In the bathroom, she found him submerged in the water. He had a smile on his face. At first she thought he was playing a joke. She shook him. When he didn’t respond, she called the fire department and then the police. They arrived too late.
Jim Morrison’s corpse, wrapped in plastic and packed in dry ice, remained in the apartment while Courson and Alain Ronay, a friend of the couple’s, made funeral arrangements. Three days later, the undertakers finally delivered the coffin that Courson had ordered (the cheapest possible model, the equivalent of $75 USD). Sometime during those 72 hours, a doctor visited the apartment and signed a death certificate. The official cause was listed as heart failure. No autopsy was performed.
By the time Doors manager Bill Siddons arrived from the United States on July 6, he found a sealed coffin and the death certificate. Only Courson and Ronay had seen Jim’s body before it was buried in Pere La Chaise Cemetery on July 7. When Ronay negotiated the deal to get an American into the famous French graveyard, he accepted a 30-year lease. It expired in 2001. As of this writing, the body has not been exhumed.
Siddons and Courson returned to Los Angeles the next day. Siddons told the press, “I have returned from Paris where I have attended the funeral of Jim Morrison. I can say he died peacefully of natural causes … ” This came six days after Morrison’s death (imagine that in today’s minute-by-minute media world). Questions started: Was there a police investigation? Why was there no autopsy? Who was the examining doctor? (Incredibly, Courson couldn’t remember the doctor’s name, and his signature on the death certificate was illegible). Why weren’t Jim’s parents told? (Courson lied to the American Embassy and said Morrison had no immediate family, which allowed for a quick, no-questions-asked burial. There wasn’t even a priest.)
Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek asked Siddons, “How do you even know Jim was in the coffin? How do you know it wasn’t 150 lbs. of fucking sand?”
Putting aside that notion for a moment, what was it that killed Jim Morrison? There were many theories, from the possible (sexual disease) to the paranoid (he was a victim of a government conspiracy aimed at wiping out counterculture heroes) to the preposterous (a spurned ex-girlfriend killing him with a Wiccan hex).
Danny Sugerman, Doors insider and co-author of the best-selling biography No One Here Gets Out Alive, proposes a plausible theory. He says that Courson told him she had been doing heroin and lying to Jim that it was coke and downers (she would end up dying of an overdose in 1974).
On the fateful evening, they had snorted heroin together (Morrison was terrified of needles). That summer in Paris, there was a potent version of the drug making the rounds, known as China White. “It’s not unusual when someone does heroin for the first time, for them to feel ill,” Sugerman told MOJO. “Jim was sick, he took a bath, he died. There was no more mystery than that.”
Many of Jim’s closest friends dispute Sugerman’s theory, saying that despite his penchant for excess, Jim never did hard drugs, and in fact, had a disdain for them.
As for the bigger question of whether he’s still alive, Jim once talked seriously about faking his own death as a publicity stunt, and he often joked to friends that one day, he’d split for Africa and change his name to Mr. Mojo Risin’ (an anagram for Jim Morrison). Over the years, he’s been spotted in Tibet, the Australian outback and the American mid-west, where he supposedly rides rodeo and writes poetry on the side.
As Manzarek has said, “We don’t know what happened to Jim in Paris. To be honest, I don’t think we’re ever going to know. Rumors, innuendoes, self-serving lies, psychic projections to justify inner needs and maladies, and just plain goofiness cloud the truth. There are too many conflicting theories.”
The Lost Paris Tapes is the title given to a recorded collection of unedited poems and songs by rock musician and poet Jim Morrison, lead singer of the Doors. Although Morrison intentionally made the recordings, they are considered bootlegs because they were never officially released to the public in their unedited form by Morrison or his heirs.
The title of the collection is however a misnomer, because the bulk of the recordings were made in Los Angeles in February 1969; long before Morrison traveled to Paris. Morrison took these Los Angeles recordings with him to Paris,[1] where they were found among his belongings after his death.
An almost identical copy of the February 1969 original recording with the very same track listings, that had been in Morrison's possession during his final stay in Paris, was given to composer Fred Myrow in May of 1969.
Myrow who had composed original music for Morrison's film HWY: An American Pastoral, was provided with the only known copy possibly to "give Myrow a better sense of Morrison's own work, either while he composed music for HWY or perhaps with plans to have him work on his upcoming poetry album."
In a 1994 interview, Myrow recalled: “As a result of doing HWY for Jim, as well as some discussions, we were well along in the plans for a musical that he was going to write the text and lyrics for and I was going to do the music. It was all planned for me to join him in France – he was going to rent a chateau and we were really going to move into the next phase of work on this piece that we very thoroughly discussed – but, unfortunately, we all know what happened. In fact, it happened just two or three weeks before I was supposed to come over. It was the worst shock of my life.”
The bootleg also contains Earth, Air, Fire, Water, a poetry piece taken from Feast of Friends, a film produced by Paul Ferrara, Jim Morrison, and the Doors, as well as Dawn's Highway and Phone Booth, both taken from HWY: An American Pastoral.
According to producer, John Haeny, the spoken word part of the recordings were worked on at Elektra West Coast studios on February 9, 1969. The segment was in fact recorded in Los Angeles and not in Paris as previously thought. Morrison offhandedly labeled the resulting reel-to-reel tape of the session Jomo and the Smoothies, Jomo being a pseudonym for Morrison. The final pieces of spoken word were recorded almost two years later at Village Recorder Studio C, on December 8, 1970, which was Morrison's birthday.
Previously it had been believed the segment of the tape featuring an apparently drunken Morrison playing around in a studio with two equally inebriated American street musicians was recorded in Paris due to a surprise everchanging promotional storytelling by Philippe Dalecky, who came into possession of a number of Morrison's belongings.
Avid listeners however have determined that recording session took place in the spring of 1969 during the recording of The Soft Parade.
The people present at the recording were Morrison, poet Michael McClure on auto-harp, and a so-far unidentified musician. Paul A. Rothchild recorded the session and can be heard on the tape. The February 1969 recording session features a serious but relaxed Morrison taping spoken-word versions of his own written poetry.
Morrison can be heard repeating certain sections of poems for technical or aesthetic reasons, and he can be heard giving occasional production cues, such as when certain sound effects that should be added at a later time.
Morrison's efforts to obtain clear recordings and his additional verbal directions suggest that he planned to use the recordings in a much more ambitious project that would merge his smoothly edited voice-overs with background sounds and music.
Some of these recordings were later mixed with new music tracks recorded by surviving Doors members Ray Manzarek, Robby Krieger, and John Densmore, and released as the official Doors album An American Prayer.
The February 1969 recording of Orange County Suite with Morrison on piano was later used and mixed with new music recorded by the surviving Doors members, and released as part of their 1997 4 CD "Box Set". This new Doors version also appears on the 1999 box set compilation CD Essential Rarities.
Jim Morrison hanging out in Paris
…who's that little ghost in the window?
Once Morrison gave up trying to perform with the two musicians, he broke into a solo performance of Orange County Suite.
A writer for Rolling Stone magazine later called this piece: “An astounding version of an unfinished, unrealized paean to his old lady (Pamela Courson) that had been rejected from at least two Doors albums....It was a drunken, and mostly ad-libbed, recording. Yet, listening carefully...one hears the authentic last of Jim Morrison, two weeks before he died, as he roars spontaneous verses and imagery about his hard-hearted woman, and his obsessions, easily deploying a poetic champion's compositional facility for the natural cadence and spontaneous rhyme.
In 2002, Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek, who was not aware of the true origin of the recording at the time, has often referred to the Lost Paris Tapes as "drunken gibberish," observing, “If you haven't heard them, you're simply missing nothing."
Those who were there in the studio still would like to find a way to understand what Morrison was attempting to create while in his fragile state of mind
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