Review: Jim Morrison – Life, Death, Legend – by Stephen Davis

 love Jim. The Doors are my most favourite band and I’ve read a lot of material that has been released about them since their emergence in the 1960s rock movement out in Los Angeles, USA. This is probably the most definitive and largest biography that I have yet encountered on the short life of Jim Morrison. The author has allowed time to develop his sources and has expanded in many of the areas and filled in missing details of the Doors story that I had known up until now. There is quite a lot of detail on his family life as a youngster and the creative genius that emerged from a rather traumatic upbringing can be traced to the psychology of adolescence. The book aims to explode myths and provide facts although it is perhaps not definitive and may contain gaps or unverified facts in some points. The detail of the founding stages of the band represent the most freeflowing and entertaining part of the story. The initial club band days in the Whiskey-a-g-go on LA’s Sunset Strip is a zenith of their meteoric success. There is a lot of detail on Jim’s rather hedonistic sex life and the author mentions various homosexual encounters in addition to the vast swathe of young groupies who were always a bone of contention in Jim’s relationship with his soulmate and true love the equally wild Pamela Courson. The internal politics of the band as they dealt with an often drunken lead singer, out of his mind on acid, cocaine, heroin or anything else that could help him escape from the prison of the mind, can often be quite sad to discover. It was ultimately a surprise and indeed a gift to posterity that the band lasted as long as it actually did leaving a powerful legacy for the world of music. Various affluential Sixties characters from Andy Warhol to Mick Jagger feature in the tale. I was seduced by the relationship Jim had with Nico who made her music fame with Lou Reed’s notorious Velvet Underground. Jim’s intelligence and creativity could never be doubted and he aspired to be recognised as a poet. His various influences are covered well and the final stages of the Paris migration lead up to his tragic death at 27 in a bathtub allegedly from a heroin overdose although the death was registered as just simple heart failure. I enjoyed the book and wouldn’t exploring some of the author’s other music biographies.