By Steven P. Wheeler

Recently I appeared in a documentary about Jim Morrison and his influence on fans from around the world. In discussing who he really was, I said that Jim Morrison is the ultimate Rorschach Test, in that people only see what they want to see and it is often through a personal myopic view. A singular vision intent on bringing the “Jim” of their choosing closer to themselves.

To some he is forever the leather-clad rebel rock star challenging society and the powers-that-be. To others he is the quiet, introspective poet, and to many raised on the cinematic travesty from Oliver Stone, he is a drug-addled narcissist with no redeeming qualities. You see this dichotomy all over online forums and elsewhere to this very day. There is seemingly no end to the Morrison maze.

Media enhanced myths and long since dispelled rumors are repeated ad nauseam from generation to generation giving them never-ending life; the truth be damned. Sadly, through it all, Jim Morrison the Man has all but disappeared behind the veil of a one-dimensional shell reserved for icons in today’s popular culture where sensationalism and click-bait headlines drown out the calmer voices of reason.

As Jim’s close friend Frank Lisciandro once told me: “The fact is that 90 percent of what I hear about Jim Morrison strikes me as being totally wrong; absolutely and totally wrong. The stories that have been made up about Jim Morrison outweigh the facts by so much that I don’t even know where to begin to remend the fabric of truth because its been so torn apart.”

The labyrinth of information is indeed difficult to navigate and today with the Internet, falsehoods continue to torch the truth like a raging brush fire: impossible to extinguish. So things have only gotten more difficult for those seeking to find the REAL Jim Morrison. Instead of journalistic accuracy, we more often see the ongoing drumbeat of misinformation dispersed with impunity from new authors and filmmakers. Those who continue to subtly choose actual quotes, take them out-of-context and thrust them into inaccurate timelines, do so as a way to bolster a false Morrison narrative of their own creation to unsuspecting readers and viewers.

Now on the 49^th anniversary of Jim Morrison’s untimely death at the age of 27, I put together this article after pulling out numerous taped conversations with Morrison’s friends, band mates, and other key associates that I’ve conducted over the past 25 years. Hopefully this tribute may help shed a keener light on Jim Morrison, along with some history of The Doors, while putting to rest just a few myths that have been told and re-told over the years by a litany of authors and other members of the media bent on selling half-truths and outright lies.

A Rite of Passage

Since the 1980 release of the bestselling Morrison biography No One Here Gets Out Alive, more and more books continue to up the ante of distortions and outlandish stories. How else would you get that elusive publishing deal? The situation is endless and the only thing that suffers is the truth.

The life and times of Jim Morrison has become a rite of passage for generations of teenagers around the globe since the release of No One Here Gets Out Alive, written by Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman, nearly 40 years ago. Perfectly targeted at a readership in the midst of those awkward teenage blues as that is the first cycle of life in which we begin questioning authority, while looking for direction, often with a rock & roll soundtrack as our guide.

NOHGOA set the tone that captured those of us coming of age in the early Eighties and continues to capture the hearts and minds of a significant percentage of each successive generation. Many will stop there and have that one-dimensional version of Morrison forever frozen in their minds. Others will continue to search for that elusive “truth,” like a quest for some sort of Holy Grail. Yet never questioning the continued onslaught of more biographical houses of cards whose foundations are built upon the shaky myth-making of the original Hopkins/Sugerman tome.

Prior to his death in 2005, Sugerman told me: “I may be flattering myself, but I like to think that our book played some role in attracting people to the Jim Morrison legend. His story does have all the elements of a classic Greek drama.”

“Look I don’t try and paint a halo on the guy, but the truth is that Jim’s closest friends find that book very objectionable. I call it ‘Nothing Here But Lots of Lies,’ because it’s full of bullshit.”

(Frank Lisciandro interview by Steven P. Wheeler)

But the book also angered the very people who were Jim’s closest friends and confidantes. Lisciandro, who attended the UCLA Film School with Morrison and Doors’ keyboardist Ray Manzarek, and later worked on two films with Morrison—Feast of Friends and HWY—and also compiled the only published posthumous books of Jim’s poetry on behalf of the copyright holders, said during one of our interviews: “Look I don’t try and paint a halo on the guy, but the truth is that Jim’s closest friends find that book very objectionable. I call it ‘Nothing Here But Lots of Lies,’ because it’s full of bullshit.

“A lot of the scenes in that book in which I was a participant are blown way out of proportion and simply not true,” Lisciandro continued. “Danny was a teenager when Jim was alive. He wasn’t hanging out with Jim. I know for a fact that Jim did not like Danny and told me on numerous occasions that Danny was a nuisance. But because Jim was a nice guy, he was kind enough to give Danny a few minutes of his time. Danny was always pestering Jim for attention.”

Likewise, the Doors’ late producer Paul Rothchild told me during an interview at the time of the Oliver Stone debacle: “That book really pissed me off. I spoke with Jerry Hopkins at one point, but he turned the book over to Sugerman who took my quotes out of context or attributed them to invented characters. That book was disgusting and treated Jim horribly.”

“Jim is Alive” Myth

One of the most outrageous claims in NOHGOA, which amazingly still has believers, is that Jim Morrison faked his own death to live a life of anonymity.

Bill Siddons, who was the Doors’ manager from 1967-1972, was blunt when the issue was brought up during our conversation, saying, “I buried the man, so those ‘Jim may be alive’ rumors never held any water with me. It was all hype for a book. Those were rumors started by people out to make a buck, like Danny Sugerman.”

Ten years after writing that headline-grabbing nugget of sensationalism, which helped sell millions of books worldwide, Sugerman claimed in our talk that he had no idea that readers would take him seriously. “I never believed that Jim was alive,” he said. “With the book, the idea was not to provoke the reaction that Jim was still alive. The idea was to end the book in a way that Jim would have appreciated. Jim always appreciated an ironic ending, like in ‘Moonlight Drive’: ‘Going down, down, down… gonna drown tonight,’ or in ‘Love Street’ when he wrote: ‘I guess I like it fine… so far.’”

Sugerman also went so far as to put in the tale of Jim’s now famous anagram of his name (Mr Mojo Risin) from the classic song, “L.A. Woman,” as being some sort of hidden code for him to contact people after he faked his death. “Putting in the ‘Mr Mojo Risin’ part about Jim using that name when he splits for Africa, that was my wink to Jim,” he said. “I never believed that millions of people would read that and honestly think that I was waiting around for a call from Jim.”

Well, as we know now, if you print it, they will come. And, unbelievably, there are still Morrison fans around the globe still waiting for Mr Mojo Risin to return to us all with a new poetic gospel.

When the Movie’s Over

A decade after NOHGOA, the next phase in carving Jim Morrison’s reputation into a deeply dark and morose stone would take place not in print, but on Hollywood’s silver screen. Ironically, it took nearly a decade for producer Sasha Harari to start and complete that cinematic mission, which, funnily enough, lasted nearly twice as long as The Doors brief recording career.

The eight-year odyssey that preceded the actual filming is a story in itself. Beginning in 1983, Harari spent a few years talking with the three surviving Doors and the Morrison copyright holders—consisting of the parents of both Jim and his longtime girlfriend Pamela Courson—trying to secure the rights necessary to make the film. In 1985, after finally convincing Ray Manzarek, Robby Krieger and John Densmore, Harari ran into problems with the Morrisons and the Coursons.

“There was a pretty big rift between all these factions,” Harari told me in 1991. “After a while I got tired of dealing with all of this by myself, and that’s when I hooked up with Bill Graham.”

Sadly the legendary rock entrepreneur Bill Graham would be tragically killed in a helicopter crash less than six months after we spoke about his role in bringing The Doors film to fruition: “I think during the dialogue between the attorneys and the parents, it was brought up that Jim had good feelings toward me in the early days, so it was suggested that I be contacted,” Graham explained.

“I was somewhat of a mediator; I was someone who could mend the fences. It was like everyone was speaking English, but no one could understand each other. It was my job to translate,” he recalled in his memorable New York accent. “The families were hesitant because they live in the private sector and were initially very reticent to have part of the history of their children—Jim and Pam—exposed more than it already was. Both sets of parents are very private people.”

However, with Graham’s negotiating prowess, all the rights had been secured by 1985, and a deal was made with Columbia Pictures. Oliver Stone was Harari’s first choice to write the screenplay, having been impressed with Stone’s then-recent Oscar win for his Midnight Express script. However, bolstered by his new Oscar-winner status, Stone’s agent was not as impressed with Harari, and the offer never reached Stone’s desk.

“Instead we got a first script from Randy Johnson, but it wasn’t the script that Bill and I were looking for,” Harari explained. “Meanwhile, Oliver had moved to another agency, so I called again in 1986, but he had just begun work directing and writing Platoon.”

By this time, Columbia had lost interest in the Morrison project, so Harari and Graham moved over to Imagine for a time where the project once again waned, before finally going to Carolco, an independent production company that was then riding a streak of box office hits, including the Rambo and Terminator franchises.

Coincidentally, Oliver Stone had just signed a deal with Carolco, where he was to begin work on the film version of the musical Evita. But when the Evita project floundered because actress Meryl Streep kept increasing her salary requests (it wouldn’t be released for another six years with Madonna in the starring role), Carolco owner Mario Kassar told Stone about the Morrison film and things finally began to fall into place. This time around Stone agreed to write the script (Randy Johnson also received screen credit for his original script), and after the huge success of Platoon, he was now also asked to direct.

If you’ve ever wondered why Hollywood and politicians make such great bedfellows, this is a prime example. It’s literally impossible for either faction to get anything done in a timely fashion, or, most often, come up with good results in the end.

Cemented in Stone

While many die-hard Morrison fans love the final product known as The Doors, the truth is that the film was a major box office flop. With a budget of $32 million, the movie barely broke even, dying a death with only $34 million in total gross. Like the other Stone films that are based on true stories—JFK and Nixon—his inability to capture the truth of his subjects to go along with his inarguable talent for powerful visuals, The Doors is an inaccurate and cartoonish portrayal of Jim Morrison.

And more than 25 years later, The Doors remains a glossy and lengthy MTV-styled video that not only largely prevented Morrison from gaining millions of new fans, because so many were turned off by the dark and depressing character that Stone chose to create, but it was also a creative decision that shot down any possibility of cinematic success.

“When I saw the script, I knew that it wasn’t about the Jim Morrison that I knew.”

(Bill Siddons interview by Steven P. Wheeler)

While it’s true that some fans were created by this celluloid mistreatment of Morrison, far more turned away and to those once potential fans Jim’s true life can never be redeemed.

From the very beginning of Stone’s involvement, things went awry. Bill Siddons refused to become involved with the movie saying that he knew it would be a cartoon-like joke as soon as he was given a draft of the script. “When I saw the script, I knew that it wasn’t about the Jim Morrison that I knew.”

Even Danny Sugerman, not one to shy away from spewing myths and rumors about Morrison, admitted: “It’s Oliver Stone’s version of Jim’s life. There is some truth within it, but it’s not the truth, and it contains numerous fictionalized accounts and considerable exaggeration.”

Things got so bad after Stone joined the project that the band’s strongest proponent for the movie, Doors’ keyboardist Ray Manzarek, eventually walked away from it. “There were moments of creative differences at the script stage in 1989,” explained Harari. “But it wasn’t until Oliver walked in as the director that Ray started to freak out. Ray could be very difficult to deal with.”

“Oliver was only interested in the self-destructive, creative, brooding personality—one not unlike his own—so he was focusing on that aspect of Jim. We were always complaining that the script was too dark, and that’s why Ray bailed on the movie.

(John Densmore interview by Steven P. Wheeler)

The other two surviving Doors—John Densmore and Robby Krieger—remained as consultants, working with their actor counterparts to properly mime their musical playing. But even Densmore had issues with the direction that Stone took with the film: “Oliver was only interested in the self-destructive, creative, brooding personality—one not unlike his own—so he was focusing on that aspect of Jim. We were always complaining that the script was too dark, and that’s why Ray bailed on the movie. I let [the truth] go a long time ago during the making of this movie. I mean there’s nudity at our concerts that never happened, but there was nudity at Woodstock in ‘69. Cops beat kids in Chicago outside the Democratic Convention in ’68, so Oliver just took all that unrelated stuff and mixed it all up and made it part of our story. And having a lot of Jim’s dialogue pulled from interviews or poems or lyrics or totally made up, made it all very stilted to me.”

Krieger told me much the same, stating: “Oliver definitely took liberties with the facts and he did make Jim into a caricature. I mean Jim could be a little freaky from time to time, but not all the time like the movie would have you believe.”

As for Frank Lisciandro, who was one of Morrison’s closest friends during the last three years of Jim’s life, the movie is nothing more than stitches of truth interwoven into a blanket of lies: “I found it to be intolerable. Oliver Stone did not know—or maybe he didn’t want to know—who Jim Morrison really was; and he did not come close to capturing the essence of Jim. The quiet, sensitive and extremely intelligent human being that Jim was off and on the stage is never presented in the film.”

“Jim loved to laugh and he laughed all the time, and he was not shy about laughing at himself either. He had such humility that he would do that. Out of all the people that were around us, Jim was the most light-hearted of us all. Now, because of this movie, he’s going to be remembered as this dark, morose guy”

(Frank Lisciandro interview by Steven P. Wheeler)

“Jim had a sensational sense of humor and that is what is entirely lacking in the Stone film,” Lisciandro continued. “The guy was absolutely hilariously funny and he would make himself the butt of jokes. That’s one of the things that all Jim’s friends remember most. Jim loved to laugh and he laughed all the time, and he was not shy about laughing at himself either. He had such humility that he would do that. Out of all the people that were around us, Jim was the most light-hearted of us all. Now, because of this movie, he’s going to be remembered as this dark, morose guy spouting poetry in everyday conversations. Jim never uttered a line of poetry unless he was in front of a microphone. Yes, he did some crazy things on occasion, but he was also a warm and sensitive person a vast majority of the time. There’s a balance that you don’t find in the movie and that imbalance totally eliminates the real Jim Morrison from the screen.”

Even the film’s co-producer Bill Graham admits: “In many ways I’m pleased with the film, but Oliver definitely leaned on the excessive aspects of Jim and did not show to the same extent the private side of Jim. Unfortunately Oliver’s desire was to show what happens to a man when he lets Frankenstein take over and I was troubled by that if I’m going to be honest with you.”

In my separate interview with The Doors’ drummer, Densmore went on to say: “When you have all the crazy things that Jim did packed into two hours instead of being spread out over six years, you get a very unfair picture of the guy. Jim was really sweet and kind and warm most of the time. He grew up in the South and he had this genuine charm; it wasn’t contrived. A tiny bit of that gentle side comes through in the movie, but not as much as I would have liked.”

Val Kilmer as Jim

The one thing that even the film’s harshest critics agree on is that Val Kilmer did a very good job portraying Morrison, the gloomy script notwithstanding. The late Paul Rothchild, producer of all the Doors’ albums except L.A. Woman, discussed with me his role in working with the actor: “Val showed up with about 80 percent of the character learned, and we then spent the next five months in pre-production with me teaching him the nuances and idiosyncrasies of Jim’s vocals.

“I also spent a great deal of time with Val,” he explained, “just telling him stories about Jim and other times answering Val’s own reporter type questions; just like the ones you’re asking me. I filled him up with information about Morrison’s lifestyle, psyche, and his brilliant sense of humor. It just went on and on and on. I just felt like if he knew more about what Jim was like on the inside, he would be able to capture the vocals even better. I thought Val’s performance was fuckin’ awesome, especially when you consider that when you see Val singing on camera, you are hearing Val’s live vocals 95 percent of the time. It is live before-the-camera vocals. There are only five lines in the entire film where you see Val singing on camera and you’re hearing Jim’s vocals. That’s truly amazing.”

Krieger went so far as to tell me that “if I were Jim, I would have freaked out when I saw Val, because sometimes he really captured him.”

Finding the right actor to somehow play someone as well known and unique as Morrison was a major concern for the producers, especially for Graham who had a professional relationship with the real Jim. “I never thought we would find someone who moved so sensually and panther-like as Jim did. My biggest concern was getting someone with that sinewy, sensual, live snake feeling. You can’t create that. It’s either there or it’s not, but Val really captured it. He did a brilliant job.”

Falsehood Fun for the Nerds

As Densmore stated earlier, Oliver Stone took various events and tied them together to give a narrative to his film, false as those episodes may be. Author upon author of Morrison bios have done the same thing over the past four decades as well. Some call it artistic license, others call it the use of reality to create a false narrative in order to tell a story. Here are just a few examples from the Stone film by those who know the truth:

“People have to remember: the movie is fiction, bad fiction, and a fantasy from the twisted mind of Oliver Stone. Bottom line: the Jim Morrison I knew is nowhere present in the Stone film.”

(Frank Lisciandro interview by Steven P. Wheeler)

“Jim would never lock someone in a closet and set the room on fire,” says Lisciandro. “He was never a violent person and this is absolutely not in his nature or personality. Then there’s the famous scene where Jim declares that he’s having a nervous breakdown. Jim did walk into the Doors office one day, sat down, and said, ‘I think I’m having a nervous breakdown.’

“But here’s the thing, Jim used to say that line: ‘I’m having a nervous breakdown’ to get a laugh. It was a comic line he used all the time. It was no different than when he’d get a creative idea and say, ‘Hold on, I think I’m having a cerebral erection.’ Stone took that episode and gave it some deep, dark spin that was totally bullshit.

“And then there’s that scene that shows us all on the roof of the Chateau Marmont where Jim is wildly drunk on the ledge, threatening to kill himself. What really happened is that we were on the roof of the 9000 Building on Sunset Boulevard shooting a sequence for our film, HWY. I was there with the film crew [Paul Ferrara and Babe Hill], but Pamela was not there, Ray and the other Doors weren’t there. Jim didn’t contemplate killing himself by jumping from the roof. We were just shooting a scene for HWY. Oliver Stone’s version of that event is total and complete fiction. And that’s what people have to remember: the movie is fiction, bad fiction, and a fantasy from the twisted mind of Oliver Stone. Bottom line: the Jim Morrison I knew is nowhere present in the Stone film.”

Paul Rothchild, a believer in artistic license, does admit that the scene where Jim throws a television against a wall as a way of showing his disdain of the other three Doors having licensed the song “Light My Fire” to Buick is not true. “Jim did throw a TV in the studio once,” the producer said. “Our recording engineer Bruce Botnick brought the TV in the studio in an attempt to satisfy Jim’s request to have mixed media going on while he was singing. So we were recording and Jim was holding this little TV in his hands while he was singing—he was also on some acid at the time—and at one point he hurled it at the glass in front of the our control booth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bl_kkiP7oTw

“So, no, it had nothing to do with the ‘Light My Fire’ commercial as is shown in the movie, but he did once throw a TV in the recording studio, so Oliver used that as a way to demonstrate Jim’s dissatisfaction with the other three Doors who had licensed the rights of ‘Light My Fire’ to Buick for an ad campaign. I have no problem with this joining together of unrelated events for the sake of a movie.”

The “Light My Fire” Debacle

Following The Doors first and only tour of Europe in September of 1968, Jim Morrison decided to stay in London while the rest of the Doors returned home. While Jim was in England, hanging out with Pamela and poet Michael McClure, and out of communication (remember those pre-cell phone days?), the automotive giant Buick offered the band the equivalent of $500,000 (in 2019 money) to license “Light My Fire” for an ad campaign for their next year’s line of cars, including the Opel.

Krieger, Manzarek and Densmore agreed to the deal and since they were unable to contact Morrison in Europe, his attorney Max Fink (who had Jim’s power of attorney) signed on his behalf. When Morrison returned to the States and was told about the deal, his usual calm and reserve was gone. He screamed at his bandmates for selling out to corporate America.   

“He said that they had made a deal with the devil,” recalled Rothchild, “and that he would smash a Buick onstage if they didn’t kill the deal. Jim eventually got his way and the brief campaign was over.”

Although a television commercial was never created, it’s not well known that Buick did go on with a print campaign for a brief period, having already paid the money. “It’s true that the commercial was never made,” the late producer told me, “but, for a short time, there was a billboard put up about 100 yards from the recording studio and The Doors’ office, saying, “Come on Buick, Light My Fire.” And Jim had to see that every day for a little while and he was infuriated about it.”

Even though the massive advertising campaign with Buick was ultimately scuttled by Morrison’s threats, the trust he once had for the others in the band was gone for good. They would continue on for another two years, recording two of their finest albums—Morrison Hotel and L.A. Woman—and touring around the States from time to time through the end of 1970. But things were no longer like they were between the once close band mates.

Opening of The Doors

Back in the beginning, things were different. Art trumped commerce. It was Jim who suggested that the band split any income equally, even though this would be a major financial loss to the band’s chief lyricist, in terms of the publishing income. But Jim was not about money, he was not about squabbles, he was about creating art with like-minded individuals. And for a brief time, all four were of that same mind. But the desire for more financial success from some of the others put them at odds with Morrison, as did his growing problems with alcohol.

“My love/hate relationship with Jim developed over time,” Densmore revealed during our conversation. “The first few years, 1965-66, we were pretty close. I mean I had a sense that he was really strange from the beginning, but as his substance abuse increased, the love/hate increased proportionately. It was a love for the art; I mean I could just read his lyrics and instantly hear drumbeats in my head. Even with the drugs in the early days, his mind was still there. It was the alcohol that killed him.”

As for the unique sound of The Doors, Krieger laughed and replied, “We actually tried to be like everybody else, but we were so bad at what we were doing, it just came out different [laughs]. But in answer to your question, I think the instrumentation had a lot to do with it, because the fact that Ray played keyboard bass and organ meant that he had to play very simple bass lines with his left hand, so that his right hand could do what it wanted playing the organ parts.

“That made it sort of monotonous and hypnotic, and the fact that there was no rhythm guitarist or bass player made me play a certain way where I had to fill in certain holes. I think that’s what helped make us sound like no other band,” the guitarist explained. “But it wasn’t a conscious attempt to be different in those early days.”

Densmore added his thoughts, noting: “I feel like we were one of the few groups where dynamics were important. Sometimes I wouldn’t even play at all and it would just be dead air, and then I’d hit a shot and it would be like an explosion. That’s what I’m really proud of, our dynamics. We could be really quiet and then we could scare the shit out of you.”

After a few months wood shedding their songs on the famed Sunset Strip at the bleak hole-in-the-wall known as The London Fog, the band became the house band at the legendary Whisky-A-Go-Go, where they eventually caught the ear of Elektra Records founder Jac Holzman and producer Paul Rothchild.

“Unlike the film, I wasn’t at The Whisky at the time that the band got fired when Jim first threw in the Oedipal section during ‘The End,’” explained Rothchild. “But I was at a show there where I saw them perform ‘The End’ and indeed Jac and I did offer them a recording contract right afterwards.”

But it wasn’t love at first sight for the future Doors producer, who recalled that “they sucked terribly during the first set I saw, but the second set was awesome, and the rest is history.”

The Unsung Door

Throughout the short recording career of The Doors from 1966-71, Morrison got all the press and fan attention, but it was guitarist Robby Krieger who wrote many of the band’s biggest hits. The first song he ever wrote was a little ditty called “Light My Fire,” which topped the charts during the Summer of Love in 1967 and set the band on a rapid ascent to the stars.

“Yeah, it’s true that ‘Light My Fire’ was the first song I ever wrote,” Krieger said. “It didn’t bother me too much when people thought that Jim wrote it. But it did bother me a lot when people thought Jose Feliciano wrote it [laughs].” Feliciano’s version of the song became a massive international hit the following summer though, spreading the band’s name to places yet unseen. At this juncture, everything The Doors touched was turning to gold, and fast.

The guitarist, who also penned the #3 hit “Touch Me” and the other memorable hits “Love Me Two Times” and “Love Her Madly,” admitted to me, “Yeah, I felt a little unappreciated at times over the years because people thought Jim wrote all the lyrics. But it didn’t bother me at the time it was happening, because it was a band and we were all in it together. All the songs were ‘by The Doors.’ But, after a while, Jim decided that people would want to know who wrote which songs, so starting with the fourth album, The Soft Parade [released in 1969], we started giving individual credits on the songs.”

In terms of hit singles, Morrison did write the band’s second #1 hit “Hello I Love You,” as well as “People Are Strange” and their final chart salvo “Riders on the Storm,” which was released just a few weeks before his death in Paris.

Changing the Dynamic

As The Doors first three albums sailed up the charts—their third album, Waiting For the Sun, becoming their first to hit #1 in 1968—things within the band were starting to change. Morrison began looking toward other artistic avenues to satisfy his creative spirit, working on poetry and dabbling with two film projects.

In early 1969, Morrison was working with filmmaker Frank Lisciandro on editing the band’s “on the road” documentary Feast of Friends (which was finally released commercially in 2014) and he would soon embark on his personal experimental film HWY (still unreleased) with Lisciandro, Paul Ferrara and Babe Hill. In addition, with the encouragement of poet and friend Michael McClure, Jim would also self-publish his first two books of poetry, The Lords: Notes on Vision and The New Creatures. The following year publishing giant Simon & Schuster would compile these into one book entitled The Lords and The New Creatures, which is still in print 50 years later.

“At first we were good buddies, but then when he started drinking a lot I just couldn’t hangout with him anymore. It became much, much more of just a working relationship. We’d really only see each other if we were doing a concert or rehearsing or recording. Our relationship just wasn’t the same by the end of 1968.”

(Robby Krieger interview by Steven P. Wheeler)

“By 1969, I think Jim was already thinking about other things he wanted to do with himself,” said Lisciandro. “By the time of the Miami concert in March, he had already self-published two of his poetry books and he had filmmaking on his mind. Not fed up with his music career; but surely Jim wasn’t 100 percent dedicated to the band at that point in time.”

There was still also some bitterness from Jim over the “Light My Fire/Buick” situation, but Krieger says the band’s refusal to partake in Morrison’s drinking sessions put up a wall that turned all-for-one into three-against-one. “At first we were good buddies,” the soft-spoken Krieger said, “but then when he started drinking a lot I just couldn’t hangout with him anymore. It became much, much more of just a working relationship. We’d really only see each other if we were doing a concert or rehearsing or recording, which wasn’t a lot of time. Our relationship just wasn’t the same by the end of 1968.”

Densmore echoed those sentiments: “All of [the media hype] was a conscious and unconscious thing that Jim created. He was smart, so he gave the media wonderful quotes like ‘erotic politicians,’ but then the ball gets rolling and it’s a runaway train and the media keeps it going and it gets bigger than you can handle. I was getting increasingly worried about what I felt was Jim’s self-destruction and it was being glamorized by the media. The other three of us sort of pulled away because you can get caught under that cloud yourself.”

Despite the media onslaught of attention, Sugerman believed that “Jim didn’t see himself as any kind of a leader of any movement. I think he was flattered that critics and fans tried to put him in that role and I think he might have even taken it seriously on one or two occasions with songs like ‘Five to One’ and ‘Unknown Soldier,’ but it wasn’t anything he aspired to be.”

The band’s manager in those halcyon days, Bill Siddons, added a personal perspective: “I knew Jim well in that I spent a lot of time with him, but we weren’t best buddies. We didn’t hangout and drink together. I was always the responsible figure while Jim was out doing whatever he was doing. But we were close and I know that I was a trusted confidante that he could speak to openly.

“He was a pretty intense guy when I first met him in ’67, right before ‘Light My Fire’ exploded,” Siddons recalled. “He was very unpredictable in those days. You couldn’t really tell who he was or what he had going on in his mind. Around 1969, he really got a little bored with the whole shamanism thing that he had created with the help of the media. The problem was that in the beginning, Jim went out to have a specific artistic experience with an audience. But the media created a sensationalism around that and effectively destroyed Jim’s artistic intent, because the audiences were now walking in and expecting to see what they had read about in a magazine. When performances were no longer spontaneous, Jim was no longer interested.”

And once he saw their documentary, Feast of Friends, Sugerman believed that Jim had an artistic awakening. “For a while he never seemed to doubt that he was ideally suited for what he was doing, but after seeing some of the filmed concert footage, he commented: ‘I used to think that I was in control of it, but now I realize that I’m just a puppet of forces that I only vaguely understand.’ That’s a pretty astute observation for someone that the media only considered to be a rock singer.”

Lisciandro also points to the fact that Morrison was woefully unprepared for the sudden stardom that came blasting into his life in such a short span of time; from unknown to superstar in a metaphorical blink-of-the-eye. “The whole success thing did make Jim realize that he really was a vital part of this super-structure and that there were obligations and responsibilities drawing on him. But, then again, Jim Morrison was 25 years old at that time; he wasn’t this mature older guy in his forties.

“Here’s the thing. When you get married, have children, etc., there’s an accumulation of responsibilities that build upon you in a gradual or evolutionary way,” he said. “It’s not a sudden thing that explodes on you in the span of eighteen months or two years as it did with Jim and the success of The Doors. Suddenly there was this organizational structure that he had to carry around and support, and I just don’t think he was old enough or mature enough to handle it and, within that context, it’s not overly surprising that something like Miami would happen.”

The Miami Incident

Ah yes, it seems that one can’t talk about The Doors and not discuss the infamous concert at Dinner Key Auditorium in Miami on March 1, 1969, which eventually resulted in Morrison being arrested and later put on trial for lewd and lascivious behavior, indecent exposure, public profanity and public drunkenness. This was the opening show for the band’s first-ever major tour in the States, but it was also at the time when Morrison was following his other artistic dreams that had little to do with music, and now he was on the hook for a lengthy jaunt across America.

“The Doors never toured extensively,” manager Bill Siddons said. “The only extensive tour they did in their entire career was three weeks in Europe in 1968. Other than that, they basically worked weekends because Jim was too unstable. You could never predict what would happen after the third date. He really couldn’t deal with repetitive days on the road and repeating performances the same as the night before. He literally couldn’t do that. He just wasn’t made up to function that way.”

But by early ’69, the time had come to push the envelope and other members of the band really wanted to do a fully fleshed out tour. The band’s fourth album, The Soft Parade,would be released later during the tour, and, at the time of Miami, “Touch Me” had been released as the album’s first single and shot up the charts to #3. And with the band’s third album having topped the charts only months before, The Doors were at their commercial zenith. The sky was the limit, or so it seemed.

Meanwhile Morrison continued his own personal quest to fuel his artistic soul and he attended the controversial stage performances of Judith Malina and Julian Beck’s The Living Theatre just before the tour would begin in Miami. Morrison was mesmerized by the unique stage show in which the performers directly confronted their audience by yelling at and provoking them into action. The goal was to break down and obliterate the invisible wall that exists between performer and audience.

“Jim went to see The Living Theatre several times at USC a week or so prior to Miami,” Lisciandro recalled. “I went to see one of the performances as well; it was amazing what those people were getting into. This was a strip-you-down-and-build-you-back-up-again kind of theater performance, and it was really groundbreaking stuff in 1969. And you can surmise that Jim’s appreciation of The Living Theatre led to some of his over-the-top behavior that night in Miami.”

Add to that mindset, shortly before the concert Morrison had a fight with his longtime girlfriend Pamela Courson and missed his flight to the gig. At the last minute, he had to take a series of connecting flights to make it by the starting time of the concert, and he was drinking all the way there.

In the meantime, Bill Siddons discovered that the unscrupulous promoter had ripped out the seats of Dinner Key Auditorium and illegally sold more than double the original amount of tickets and to make matters worse he was refusing to pay the band more than the original contract called for. When the band threatened to leave, the promoters refused to release the band’s equipment that was locked up in their vans.

The backstage chaos continued until Morrison arrived with about a half-hour to spare, and he was clearly drunk. Discovering that the band was not only being ripped off by the promoters, but also being blackmailed into performing, Morrison went onstage and gave his own version of The Living Theatre to the unsuspecting audience.

Densmore who had been fuming backstage waiting to see if Morrison would even show up was not prepared for what Jim had in mind as they took to the sweltering stage, simply saying: “Jim didn’t tell us that he was going to inject confrontational theater at the Miami concert.”

Siddons explained what he saw happening by saying, “The other guys didn’t know what he was about to do, but Jim knew what he was doing that night. True, he was drunk, but he had a very specific purpose in mind and that was to challenge and confront his audience in a way that he had never really done before. It was Jim directly and verbally asking them specific questions. Instead of making enigmatic statements, he put forth a frontal assault on the audience, asking them, ‘What are you here for? Did you come to see this? Or did you come to learn?’ It was totally intentional and powerful.”

The band lumbered through a handful of songs that would be interrupted time and again by Jim’s taunting of the audience. By the end of the hour-long fiasco of a concert, the band was just happy to get off the stage and try and regroup. They all set out for a quick vacation in the Bahamas, along with their wives (with the exception of Pamela), and while they were sunning themselves on the white sand beaches, back home political forces were galvanizing and attempting to close The Doors forever.

The Miami Aftermath

While no arrests were made by any of the 30 police officers who were on duty that night in the Dinner Key Auditorium, once word reached the ears of the local politicians and law enforcement officials over the next few days, politics reared its ugly head. Miami Herald reporter Larry Mahoney kept the event in the news with outraged commentary that whipped residents of the conservative city into a frenzy. It wasn’t until four days later that arrest warrants were issued for James Douglas Morrison.

“The kids didn’t have a problem with it,” insisted Siddons, “but it was not acceptable to the parents in that part of the South. And once the acting police chief and acting mayor and other ‘dignitaries’ discovered that something may have happened that night that would offend them, they launched a campaign to bury Jim. It was absolutely a political circus.”

As the news of Morrison’s pending arrest hit the national media, every single city on the upcoming tour pulled the plug, and some radio stations began removing The Doors from the airwaves. The impact was an atomic blast on the business of The Doors and a devastating blow to the already fragile relationship between Jim and the other three band members.

“That concert was a major turning point in our career, but the band was splintered before that. After Miami, we weren’t able to tour for a while and I was actually really happy about that. Not being able to go out on the road really cooled things out a bit. Whereas other people within the group were screaming, ‘We’re losing money!’ I mean, how much money do you need?”

(John Densmore interview by Steven P. Wheeler)

“Miami did hurt the band,” Krieger explained, “because we had 25 or 30 shows lined up all over the East Coast, which all got cancelled. That was the biggest tour we were ever gonna do. After Miami we couldn’t get a decent hall to play in.”           

“The incident divided the band and it really hurt Morrison personally,” Siddons maintained. “That he could be put through all that while essentially doing what he felt his job was as an artist. The Miami concert was the single most destructive thing in the band’s career and their ability to relate to one another and be responsible to one another.”

One member of The Doors, John Densmore, was actually relieved at the forced break of activity, telling me: “That concert was a major turning point in our career, but the band was splintered before that. After Miami, we weren’t able to tour for a while and I was actually really happy about that. Not being able to go out on the road really cooled things out a bit, so I liked it. Whereas other people within the group were screaming, ‘We’re losing money!’ I mean, how much money do you need?”

Lisciandro spoke to Jim a few times about Miami afterwards, noting: “He was basically telling the audience that ‘I’m not here to entertain you, we’re going to have an experience together.’ He got a little carried away with it, and things got out of hand a bit [laughs]. Jim told me that he didn’t expose himself, and there was never any photographs that showed him doing it and there was conflicting testimony throughout the trial.”

The Miami Trial

The so-called obscenity trial of Jim Morrison would take place in Miami a year and a half after the now infamous concert, from August to October in 1970. Between the concert and the trial, Jim worked on and completed his film HWY, the band recorded and released the very successful Morrison Hotel album, featuring the classic “Roadhouse Blues,” and they began playing live dates sporadically; most of which were recorded and resulted in the Absolutely Live album.

Charged with one felony count of lewd and lascivious behavior, and three misdemeanor counts of indecent exposure, public profanity and public drunkenness, Morrison faced up to three years in prison. He was ultimately convicted of two of the misdemeanors—indecent exposure and profanity. He was sentenced to six months in jail and a $500 fine. His attorney Max Fink immediately filed an appeal and Morrison was released on $50,000 bond.

The sham of a trial was led by Judge Murray Goodman, who only a few years later would be charged for accepting a bribe in exchange for reducing the prison sentence of a convicted sex offender to mere probation. In short, he gave a pedophile probation, but sentenced Jim Morrison to six months in prison.

Closing of The Doors

The band wound up the recording of the final album due on their recording contract with Elektra Records, L.A. Woman, at the beginning of 1971. At this point, Jim was done with the band as an obligation. “Our contract was up, so we had some time to think about the future,” explained Densmore, “and Jim did want to write and do some other things, but we had really enjoyed making the L.A. Woman album.”

Krieger also insisted to me that Jim was merely taking a sabbatical: “When Jim left for Paris, it wasn’t the end of The Doors. We had every intention of resuming whenever he came back. There’s no way we wouldn’t have done another album after L.A. Woman because that was a big turnaround for us.”

However, while the other three Doors maintain that Jim did not quit the band, their manager at the time Bill Siddons insisted to me in no uncertain terms that Morrison was done. “Jim did quit the band. That’s not a rumor, that’s a fact. Jim said that he was leaving the band and was going to pursue other avenues for the foreseeable future. In my mind, Jim had left, but because he hadn’t defined his new future as a screenwriter or whatever he wanted to do, he may come back. Either way, I was wise enough to recognize that Jim needed a break. And whenever that break was over, he’d let us know. It might have been a year, it might have been ten years.”

In March of 1971, Morrison went off to Paris, and despite the denials of Densmore and Krieger, Siddons also revealed this shocking news to me: “While Jim was in Paris, the other three Doors auditioned other singers because they knew that Jim might never come back. A friend of mine at A&M Records had recommended this guy that he had heard and I even ended up managing this guy who was going to replace Jim as the lead singer of The Doors. His name was Mike Stull. Jim left for Paris in March and he died in July, so there ended up not being enough time to make it happen.”

Following Jim’s death, the three Doors decided to go it alone and released two post-Morrison albums with Krieger and Manzarek handling vocal duties before eventually closing The Doors for good in 1972. Incidentally, Mike Stull, who passed away in 2002 at the age of 53, did later appear as the singer on Krieger and Densmore’s 1975 Butts Band album, Hear & Now.

Densmore is the only one of the three Doors who spoke with Jim during his time in Paris, and says, “I was the last one in the band to speak with Jim, because he called me from Paris and he expressed interest in making another record. So I wouldn’t say that Jim quit the band.”

Jim’s Move to Paris

Near the end of the final mixing of the L.A. Woman album in early ’71, Morrison began to tell people he was leaving for Paris to spend some time with Pamela, do some traveling, work on his poetry and possibly pursue some film endeavors. Since Jim’s death, various biographers have said that Morrison was deeply depressed at this period of time and fearful of having to serve six months in jail, he secretly fled to Paris to avoid his prison sentence.

All of this makes for a good story by authors trying to sell books, but nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, those who knew Jim all have the same story: “He actually became a lighter human being at this time, not a darker one,” said Siddons. Danny Sugerman agreed, “My personal experience is that he got more friendly and less driven right by the time he left for Paris.”

Lisciandro added: “I don’t understand all this talk about depression or unhappiness. I don’t know where to locate that Jim Morrison. Sure, he sometimes had an intense quality but that was because he had a deep-seeded need to absorb and create, but he was a pretty happy-go-lucky guy. I spent a lot of time with Jim during the last three years of his life and I never saw Jim depressed. Never. I honestly never did. It just wasn’t part of his character.

“Jim had a very positive experience making the L.A. Woman album,” Lisciandro continued. “In fact when I look at all the photos I took during those sessions I see a happy and content guy. He was really at his friendliest and at his most open during that time.”

In fact, two weeks before Jim left for Paris, Lisciandro, Doors concert promoter Rich Linnell, Jim’s closest friend Babe Hill, a teenage Danny Sugerman, and others got together for a game of football in Manhattan Beach. The photos of that day show a happy and revitalized Jim Morrison really enjoying himself with his friends.

“At that time, Jim just seemed happier,” Lisciandro said. “He seemed lighter about everything. It was like he finally had some freedom to really do whatever he wanted, and what he wanted to do was go off to Paris and be with Pam. He was really enthusiastic about the possibilities of what he could do with the rest of his life. The possibilities could have ended up being music, it could have been films, it could have been poetry, or any combination of those things. The important thing—and the reason he was so relaxed and easy-going—was because he was free from any obligations that may have been keeping him from pursuing his own journey.”

While Jim may have stunned his bandmates when he told them he was moving to Paris, it was something that he had been talking with friends about for quite some time. “We discussed his move to Paris a few times actually,” continued Lisciandro. “He didn’t have to do any kind of sell on me at all. I encouraged him to go, because I had lived in Paris for a time during my wayward youth in Europe and I thought it would be great for him to go. And we planned on me joining him over there at some point, either for a visit or to work together if he was able to put together a film project. He was taking HWY with him to show to some French film people that he had met previously—Agnes Varda and Jacques Demy—to get their feedback and opinions as a way to maybe find some funding to make some films. There were multiple reasons and objectives for his going and it was an obvious solution that I thought, ‘Why did it take you this long to do this?’ [laughs].”

The Missed Flight

When Jim was finally ready to close the book on L.A. and leave for Paris, his closest friends all went to the airport to see him off. Pam was already in Paris waiting for him. Frank, along with his then-wife and Doors secretary Kathy and Babe Hill all took Jim to LAX, where they were also joined by another former UCLA film student Alain Ronay.

“We got to the airport early, so we went to the bar and had some drinks,” Lisciandro recalled during our lengthy conversation. “We talked about what Jim was gonna do in Paris. Alain was giving him suggestions about things to do when he got there, and since Kathy and I had been in Paris a year or two before, we were giving him names of people and places we really enjoyed. You know, all that kind of last minute chatter between friends.

“And then in typical Morrison fashion, Jim missed the plane!,” Lisciandro said with a hearty laugh. “They didn’t announce his flight in the bar or we didn’t hear it because we were all talking or it was a combination of all of that. At one point, we looked at our watches, saw what time it was, and rushed over to the gate, but the plane was already on the runway and wasn’t gonna come back.

“So Jim had to spend another night in L.A. I don’t remember how he got to the airport the next morning; whether he took a taxi or what, but he left that next day and he was gone, and we never got to see him again.”

“He was not escaping the country. Jim was determined to finish the legal process. He fully understood that the judge in the Miami trial had acted improperly dozens of times throughout the proceedings and that the verdict was going to be thrown out on appeal and he told me that on a number of occasions. He wasn’t running away or fleeing the country; that’s just not true.”

(Frank Lisciandro interview by Steven P. Wheeler)

This nonchalant attitude of missing his flight would fly directly in the face of those who claim that Jim was fleeing to Paris because he was frightened by the Miami verdict and was going to become a fugitive of justice. Lisciandro laughs at that notion: “I’ve heard people say that but it’s absolutely not true, and I was with him right up until he left and we were talking about everything that was going on with him and why he wanted to go to Paris.

“Jim acted with the full knowledge of his lawyer, Max Fink. He was not escaping the country,” Lisciandro makes clear. “Jim was determined to finish the legal process. He fully understood that the judge in the Miami trial had acted improperly dozens of times throughout the proceedings and that the verdict was going to be thrown out on appeal. There was little doubt in Jim’s mind that he was going to win on appeal and he told me that on a number of occasions. He wasn’t running away or fleeing the country; that’s just not true.”

On a side note, on what would have been Jim Morrison’s 67^th birthday on December 8, 2010, Florida Governor Charlie Crist and the clemency board voted unanimously to posthumously pardon The Doors’ lead singer for his 1970 conviction.

The Mysteries of Paris

When it comes to Jim Morrison’s nearly four months in France, which culminated in his death on July 3, 1971, the narrative that comes from various biographies is that Jim was vastly overweight, was drinking more than ever before, and seriously depressed, which resulted in him overdosing on heroin—accidentally or purposely.

There are a few events that some biographers have used to bolster this assertion, but what most unsuspecting readers don’t realize is that some of these “facts” are completely untrue. Let’s start with the so-called “Lost Paris Tapes.”

The Lost Paris Tapes

In his over-the-top sensationalistic book, Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend (published in 2004), Stephen Davis devotes three full detailed pages to an incident in a Paris recording studio, in which an out of control drunken Morrison brings two Parisian street musicians in to record some songs with him. This would become known as the “Jomo and the Smoothies” tape, which is the name Morrison wrote on the box of this 12-minute recording.

The first published mention of this story appears to have been put out by Rainer Moddemann in the early Nineties in The Doors Quarterly Magazine. Not coincidentally, it was published when the tapes first began to be bootlegged and sold as The Lost Paris Tapes. The tale of how the tapes came to be discovered as well as the totally bizarre and concocted story about it being recorded in Paris would then be repeated through the years by journalists and authors who never questioned the original story, as bizarre as it was on its face.

Davis’ 2004 account was the most outrageous as he put together a completely fictional account of the incident as a way of showing that Morrison was totally lost—both personally and creatively—and drinking heavily throughout his time in Paris. Davis not only gives an actual date, June 15, for this event, he even describes the actions of the French recording engineers as if he’s in the room with them: “The studio people were unhappy that [Jim] was obviously drunk. They ran a businesslike operation that usually recorded jingles and classical musicians, and told Jim archly that they were very busy and he could have a half hour maximum with the two freaks he had brought along.”

This lengthy scenario in his book perfectly played into the narrative that Davis’ dark and gloomy tome went out of its way to portray, but there’s one simple problem: It’s complete fiction; an utterly complete and total lie.

These are not journalistic errors. These are absolute and total falsehoods created to sell books. And with so many Morrison bios now in the marketplace, the only way you’re going to get a publisher to do another is to raise the stakes. Good marketing, terrible journalism.

Thanks to leading Doors historian Len Sousa, we now know that the infamous Jomo and the Smoothies tape was actually recorded in Los Angeles two full years earlier with Morrison and his good friend and iconic beat poet Michael McClure. While some researchers had questioned the validity of the “Paris recording” story for many years when people began to hear Doors’ producer Paul Rothchild’s voice on the tape, saying, “I got your action, Jim,” which alone proved the truth as Rothchild was never in Paris with Jim. Yet the myth still continued, bolstered by Davis’ 2004 written account.

Fortunately, because of Sousa’s excellent investigation in 2013, we finally received confirmation that it was McClure with Morrison and that the tape was recorded in 1969 in Los Angeles, not in 1971 in Paris. Yes, it’s a rather useless recording, and McClure and Morrison are obviously hammered, but when you see it through the prism of two friends having a good time in Los Angeles, rather than some crazy and insane Jim Morrison struggling to deal with life in Paris less than a month before his death, you have to question everything else that is being said.

True to form in this day of headlines first and facts second, Davis’ completely false story of a drunk-out-of-his-mind Jim Morrison recording in Paris with two street musicians continues to be repeated, including in Classic Rock Magazine’s 2014 “investigation” into Morrison’s time in Paris. The one featuring the grocery story tabloid headline: “Forget what you think you know. How Jim Morrison REALLY died, by the people who found the body, moved the body and buried him…” Probably sold a lot of copies, but the insanity never ends.

The point being that when one contrived story is proven false, readers must seriously begin to question what else an author is telling you. And the stories have continued to get more and more bizarre with slight new twists or new anonymous sources who provocatively claim to be worried about legal jeopardy nearly half-a-century after alleged incidents were said to have occurred. Time to raise those questioning eyebrows, kids.

Letters Back Home

By most published accounts, Jim Morrison spent his days in Paris, lost, lonely, highly intoxicated, depressed and ill at ease. Since he spoke no French and this was a time when English wasn’t spoken as prevalently as it is in today’s Paris, things indeed must have been tough for someone like Morrison who loved to talk with people in all walks of life, exchanging thoughts and ideas and thoughts.

Yet all the correspondence that he shared with friends and associates during his time in Paris don’t reflect any sort of depression at all. A postcard written to his attorney Max Fink in June reflects some typical Morrison humor, imploring the lawyer to “take a vacation!” and noting that in the “City of Love… the women are great & the food is gorgeous.”

Additionally, the letter he wrote to his buddy Frank Lisciandro is anything but sullen: “I had written Jim a letter in May of ’71 saying that Kathy and I were coming to Europe in July,” stated Lisciandro. “We were going to visit our friend—Eva Gardonyi in Hungary—and would be touring around France, Italy, and then go to Greece.

“The letter I got back from Jim was very upbeat and optimistic. He said he had been traveling and he was really looking forward to our visit. Kathy and I were to arrive in Paris in mid-July, and Jim told us to stay with him and Pam while we were there. So we had a good feeling from his letter. It was no different than how he normally interacted with Kathy and I—friendly and always positive. I think we got his letter in early June.”

As stated in his letter to the Lisciandros, during his and Pam’s journey to Spain in May, he had lost his credit cards (“money”). This was somewhat typical of Jim’s nature, since his idea of a wallet was usually just two pieces of cardboard sandwiching a credit card and wrapped with rubber bands.

So in late June or early July, Jim wrote to his accountant Bob Greene. This letter in particular shows Jim being clear headed as he was making plans for the future and moving on from the past. He inquired as to the status of new credit cards (“What’s the problem?”) and that house bills were catching up and to send over $3,000 ($20,000 in today’s money). For someone whose estate was worth approximately $500,000 (or $2.5 million in today’s money) at the time of his death, Jim wasn’t living crazy or high on the hog in Paris.

He asks Greene to come up with a financial plan and figure out how long they can stay in Paris, living at their current rate. Jim apparently has no plans to return to the States anytime soon, which he says he has already told the band’s manager Bill Siddons. Interestingly enough, he also asks about his Partnership Agreement with the other three Doors. Could this be a request for dissolution?

Then he talks about the clothing store Themis, which he bought for Pam in late 1968 for her to run as her own business. The boutique, which featured expensive imported clothing from Morocco and France, was never really a successful venture, and eventually served as more of a private hangout than an actual functional business. In the letter, Jim is asking Greene to take steps to turn ownership of Themis over to Pam’s sister Judy and her husband Tom, so that they can get a loan against the property, and then he asks his accountant to begin the process of getting him and Pam out of the business entirely. He also wants Greene to send $100 to Pam’s parents for taking care of their dog, Sage, while they’ve been away.

Does this sound like a man who is depressed? Who has given up on life and is suicidal? It just doesn’t add up to the narratives that have been circulating for decades.

“Last Word, Last Words…Out”

Another questionable “fact” has to do with some of Jim’s writings, which were brought back from Paris by Pamela. One page ripped from a book, like many others, is the brief passage of “Last Words, Last Words, Out,” which auctioneers and biographers have turned into a literal statement of Jim’s final written words.

Was this truly Morrison’s final statement?

The fact that this simple statement is something that Morrison wrote in various notebooks a handful of times over the years would put this in a far different perspective; most likely it’s nothing more than a Morrison-esque salutation that he would put at the end of a particular notebook before moving on to a new one. One thing is certain: it was not any sort of self-written epitaph or death statement penned in Paris on his last day. So save your money at that auction.

The Paris Journal

Despite what has been said about the so-called “Paris Journal,” one of Jim’s many notebooks and other writings that he had with him in Paris, there is more evidence that it was not written during his fateful trip in 1971. Rather, it could very well have been written during his Paris trip a year earlier in 1970 or not in Paris at all.

The fact is that after Jim arrived in Paris in March, he called Kathy Lisciandro at the Doors office and asked her to send him some notebooks and other things he had left behind, which she did. So at the time of his death, Jim had a wide selection of writings and notebooks with him in Paris that had been written as much as years before. However biographers continue to claim that all of these notebooks and loose pages were written during his time in Paris as a way to create a contemporaneous mindset of his final days.

The notebook in question also contains a section of a poem that Jim recited onstage with The Doors in 1970. The writing in the journal reflects other things that Jim was writing during that time frame as well. Frank Lisciandro, who has spent years compiling, categorizing and organizing every page and every notebook of Jim’s writings on behalf of the copyright holders, is firm in his belief that at least some part of what is written in the “Paris Journal” was written prior to Jim’s final visit to Paris. “It could very well have just been a name or a title of that particular notebook. It isn’t what people are making it out to be: Jim’s final words.”

The End

When it comes to the death of Jim Morrison, the never-ending parlor game of how he died rivals events like the JFK assassination in popular culture. Over the years, many fans are now convinced that the late icon died of a heroin overdose. It fits in with the trademark rock & roll narrative of a troubled artist and drugs, but what many people don’t realize is that Jim Morrison was never a user of heroin.

“He did take drugs. I’ve seen him do it; we did it. But the man was definitely not into drugs on a regular basis. We did acid maybe six to eight times total. We did a lot of cocaine for about eight to ten days, when he and Michael McClure were working on that screenplay. Heroin? Never.”

Jim’s closest friend Babe Hill, from our book Jim Morrison: Friends Gathered Together.

In our book, Jim Morrison: Friends Gathered Together, Babe Hill, who was Morrison’s closest companion during the last three years of his life, and candidly admits to dabbling in all sorts of substances over the years, states unequivocally: “He did take drugs. I’ve seen him do it; we did it. But the man was definitely not into drugs on a regular basis. He drank more than I did and I smoked pot. We did acid maybe six to eight times total.

“Jim wasn’t too much into marijuana,” Hill explained. “He said, ‘It turned on me. I don’t enjoy it any more.’ We did a lot of cocaine for about eight to ten days, when he and Michael McClure were working on that screenplay about the cocaine dealer: St. Nicholas [based on McClure’s book, The Adept]. Heroin? Never.”

“I never thought Jim would die,” said Doors’ guitarist Robby Krieger. “People had said that Jim was dead before, so we just thought it was another bullshit story. But we sent our manager Bill Siddons to Paris and he called to say it was true, even though he didn’t see the body, which became the root of all the controversy.”

Contrary to another widespread rumor is that Jim was buried in a cheap casket. Siddons recalled seeing the sealed coffin in Jim and Pam’s Paris apartment describing it as a “beautiful white oak casket with big brass bolts that screwed it closed.” Jim would be laid to rest a few days later in the famous Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris on July 7.

For Jim’s closest friends Babe Hill and Frank Lisciandro, the fateful call they received from the Doors manager in Paris was a shock. “We got a call at our house from Bill Siddons on the Fourth of July,” said Lisciandro. “It was a Sunday. Babe was over for a barbeque and we were just hanging out, drinking a few beers on the holiday weekend. Bill called us in the afternoon that day.

“The house was pretty empty,” he explained, “because we had boxed up a lot of personal belongs because Kathy and I were leaving for Europe that week, and we would be seeing Jim in Paris at some point during our vacation there.”

Hill, the first one to speak with Siddons, picks up the narrative of that tragic phone call: “I couldn’t even tell [Frank] about it. I put down the phone and walked out. I said, ‘Bill, you tell them.’ Just shock and tremendous sadness, where you just have to go away somewhere and cry about it.”

Lisciandro added: “We sat there in shocked silence for several hours. We cried and we probably cursed him as well. Did we expect it? No. I honestly felt that somehow Jim would survive, that although he drank very heavily he would live on.”

Conspiracies

As noted previously, many people believe that Morrison died as a result of a heroin overdose. There are numerous such tales, from the ridiculous, like Jim overdosing in a nightclub and being secretly whisked away and carried back to his apartment by mysterious people in the dead of night where he is placed in his bathtub.

Then there’s Danny Sugerman, who later wrote in his book Wonderland Avenue that Pamela Courson had told him that Jim snorted some of her heroin, thinking it was cocaine and overdosed. Of course Pamela died 15 years before Sugerman published this particular story; a story, incidentally, which he never bothered to mention in his 1980 Morrison biography No One Here Gets Out Alive, even though he had to have known this story by that time since Pamela died in 1974.

More recently, Marianne Faithful came out with a book declaring that her boyfriend (and Pam’s occasional boyfriend) Jean de Breiteuil was the drug dealer who sold the heroin to Pam that killed Jim.

Conversely, Jim’s good friend and poet Michael McClure, who was also close with Pamela stated in our book, Friends Gathered Together: “[Pam] was in a state of ecstatic grief; I’ve never seen anybody in a greater state of grief. I believe most of what Pam told me and nothing about heroin ever came up [in regards to Jim’s death].”

Ockham’s Razor

Ockham’s Razor is a principle that generally recommends that when faced with competing hypothesis that are equal in other respects, you must select the one that makes the fewest assumptions.

With this principle in mind, one of the most ignored facts of what was happening with Jim just prior to leaving for Paris is that he injured himself after falling from a ledge at the Chateau Marmont, while hanging out one last time with his on-again/off-again friend, the late actor Tom Baker.

“Tom was very much unbridled,” explained Frank Lisciandro, who was friends with both men. “He did what he wanted to do whenever he wanted to do it. When Tom Baker was drunk, he really didn’t know any boundaries. I know there are people who had problems with Tom, but on the other hand, he was a wonderful guy. He was very creative and very talented. But when Jim and Tom were together and they were both drunk, it was a disaster.”

This potent combination of craziness led to the previously mentioned incident at the Chateau Marmont, which very well could have played a role in Jim’s ultimate death a few months later. As Michael McClure described in our book: “Shortly before Jim left for Paris, Jim was doing one of his catwalks along one of those high walls and he fell. He fell flat almost [on the pavement below].

“Then while Jim was in Paris he went to a doctor [for respiratory problems he was having],” McClure went on to say, “and the doctor looked at him in regard to the childhood problems he had with asthma, which almost had an embolism-like quality. It was almost as if something would float around in your lungs.”

Jim was coughing up blood in April, soon after arriving in Paris, and saw a doctor. But things didn’t improve and his respiratory difficulties continued. He was still coughing up blood in June and now also fighting bouts of uncontrollable hiccups throughout the month, resulting in another doctor visit. It was during this appointment that Jim was prescribed the drug Marax.

As we revealed in our book, Friends Gathered Together, upon learning that Morrison was prescribed Marax, we discovered that the drug is no longer available in the United States. The key ingredient in Marax, Ephedra, had long been linked to a high rate of serious side effects and death and was banned by the FDA in 2004. It was also a very dangerous drug to mix with alcohol, Jim’s drug of choice.

Knowing that Jim never used heroin, despite experimenting with a wide array of drugs during his days in Los Angeles, and that he had a negative view of the drug because of Pamela’s usage of it, one has to question if heroin ever entered the picture in relation to Jim’s death.

What we do know for certain is that Jim had a disastrous fall only days before he left for Paris. He experienced intense respiratory issues throughout his time in France, including the coughing up of blood and being overcome with severe hiccups over his final month. We also know for a fact that Jim was prescribed and taking a now-banned drug that was known to have caused serious side effects including death, whether or not it was even mixed with alcohol.

Welcome to Ockham’s Razor. The choice is up to you.

Steven P. Wheeler is an award-winning journalist and former Editor of Music Connection Magazine, Happening Magazine and L.A. Vision Magazine. In 2014, he collaborated with Jim Morrison’s close friend, film partner and photographer Frank Lisciandro on the myth-shattering book Jim Morrison: Friends Gathered Together.

For more on Jim Morrison, be sure to read my extensive nine-part interview with Frank Lisciandro, The Calm Calculus of Reason.

For a revealing glimpse into Jim Morrison the Man, take a listen to this lengthy and often humorous interview with journalist Howard Smith from November of 1969 that took place in the Doors office. Jim can be heard talking with the Doors secretary Kathy Lisciandro, as well as a couple of his friends like Tom Baker.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiQnqA6zRkE