Whatever happened to Jim Morrison?

A few weeks ago I caved, and purchased a BlackBerry. I figured it would make my life easier, and boy was I right! The only downside is that I now have access to the Internet twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. When I can’t sleep at night, I have started randomly “Googling” people. Usually, I Google a name, place or event I heard about during the day. One site usually prompts me to connect to another, and before I realize it, two hours have elapsed and it’s 2 a.m. This has happened quite a few times as of late. But, instead of running away from this waste of time, I have decided to embrace it. Each and every time I stumble upon someone or something interesting in my late night Google sessions, I will blog about it. The first blog of this section is Jim Morrison, front man for The Doors.

I found the DVD “The Doors” starring Val Kilmer and Meg Ryan in my basement yesterday. It still had the plastic on, and I don’t think anyone remembered it was there. My boyfriend and I love watching movies about rock stars, so we brought it over to his place. I also had my BlackBerry handy, and Googled additional information while the movie was playing. Needless to say, I feel I am well-versed in Morrison's life story, and have a few things I would like to discuss about him.

Jim Morrison was an interesting character, to say the least. Both the movie and the websites I visited talked about his off-kilter mannerisms and insightful, slightly crazy outbursts. Much of his extreme character can be attributed to copious amounts of drugs and alcohol, but I like to believe that he was naturally a "different" kind of guy. In addition to writing music and singing for The Doors, he wrote poetry. When asked about it once, Morrison replied: "If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it's to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel."

Morrison was born in 1943, and he died in Paris, France in 1971. Pam Courson, his long term girlfriend, found him dead in a bathtub. There was no autopsy performed because French authorities did not suspect foul play. The cause of death on his birth certificate was listed as "heart failure." There are still a number of conspiracy theories surrounding his death. There is also a picture on the Internet that features "Morrison`s ghost," but I don’t believe it's real and refuse to post it for that reason. Morrison in buried in Pere-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, and his grave has become both shrine and tourist attraction.

It's tragic, but many people around Morrison commented later that he seemed like he always knew he was going to die young. He died at 27 years old, the same age Courson was when she died three years later of a heroin overdose. Also, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Kurt Cobain were 27 when they died in similar drug and alcohol related circumstances.

I will end this post with a video of The Doors performing on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1967. They were performing their hit song Light My Fire. The show wanted Morrison to alter the line "Girl, we couldn't get much higher," because drug references were not allowed on public television. Morrison – true to form – ignored the request, and sang the song as it was originally written. Sullivan was so furious he refused to have The Doors on his show ever again.

Unfortunately, I could not copy the video directly into this post. Visit the website below, and check it out for yourself:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LtPVBqQsf8