Forty-one years ago today, Jim Morrison was lowered into a Paris burial plot (on July 9, 1971). The Doors frontman would have been 68 years old if he were alive today, but instead died of a heroin overdose at the tender age of 27.
Where once the Lizard King slithered across the country, spitting his cryptic poetry like a flickering reptile tongue, these days his legions of still-adoring fans treat locations related to his life as ashtrays and/or bar-bathroom urinal troughs.
While it is obvious that The Doors created some very interesting music, it has always bothered me that the majority of Morrison’s work is fairly uninteresting and unoriginal. I appreciate the fact that people like a good-lookin’, hard-livin’ rock star, but it seems like the majority of Morrison’s time (and art) was spent in hedonistic, self-absorbed navel-gazing. Maybe that’s cool to some folks, but inebriation doesn’t immediately equate to spiritual transcendence. In fact, it usually just leads to shitty poetry.
But there is no escaping (for better or worse) that the man is an American icon. Here’s some locations related to the life and work of Jim Morrison, lead singer of the rock band, The Doors. I’ve tried to group them into US states, and then somewhat chronologically.
