Jim Morrison, Accidental Icon

Even within the loose rules of rock mythmaking, the Jim Morrison story is odd, devoid of the details that enliven other rock star biographies even in this heavily curated age. Yet somehow, if you care about rock music, this story still resonates.

By the Way, Which One’s Jim

The Jim Morrison story never takes on different tones as time passes. Ray Manzarek, for example, spent decades rehashing a Jim-as-Shaman conceit that was tired by 1969, locking down a story so tight and airless that it blankets the band rather than reveals it. 

Comparing Jim Morrison to Janis Joplin makes the problem clear. Despite her equally short life Janis Joplin left behind a rich biography and rates serious inquiries that link her saga to second-wave feminism and the history of women in rock music. The Janis Joplin timeline checks out and her reactions and decisions follow plausibly from the events of her life. 

We read about Joplin at Monterrey and Woodstock, see her surrounded by managers, bandmates, romantic partners, and family members. We know that she hated Port Arthur, Texas, where she grew up, and we watch as her bravado at her tenth high school reunion quickly dissolves into tears.

Janis Joplin, in other words, lived a remarkable but mappable life. Yet Morrison is like a character in a folktale. He drops fully formed into the public sphere in late 1966, coming across like rock’s idiot savant, talented but devoid of forethought or agency. Yet this accidental icon just happened to front the biggest American rock band of 1967 and 1968 in an era when that designation mattered pretty much to the whole culture.

They’re Gonna Love You

Morrison’s image—slinky, sexy, and louche—was so fundamentally fit-to-purpose that Michael Hutchence could lift it two decades later and take INXS from funky college-radio band to international pop phenomenon upon the release of Kick in 1987. Morrison sometimes seems like a cliché in hindsight but that is only because his look and attitude have been recycled endlessly since then. 

Langdon Winner wrote in 1968, “The closest Western Civilization has come to unity since the Congress of Vienna in 1815 was the week the Sgt. Pepper album was released.” The Doors hit the record charts at the exact moment that the music industry was self-consciously building a new market niche known as Rock (later to become Classic Rock). The concept of rock star was new when Morrison arrived on the scene, so he set the parameters. The Doors first album became one of the essential artifacts of 1967, due to the popularity of “Light My Fire.” 

Commercial success of this magnitude, at this moment, meant that the band was expected to function like The Beatles. Yet the Fab Four started at the top of their game in 1963, achieved escape velocity with Revolver in 1966, and just kept getting better. The Doors, while very good at their finest, were a considerably less reliable or gifted band and never had the cohesion The Beatles forged in their early days.

Mikal Gilmore later wrote, “Jim Morrison simply pulled out all the stops in one motion. He blew a hole through the walls of that time.” Yet Morrison had neither a band nor an ego secure enough to pull him through the rubble to the next phase. Audiences may have worshipped Morrison at first, but they didn’t really like him, nor did the press, meaning that the moment of acclaim lasted approximately nine months before it all started to go wrong.

You’re Never Gonna Die

Anyone trying to make sense of Jim Morrison invariably runs into a cul-de-sac: either he was remarkably astute at maintaining his privacy despite his fame and carelessness, or he was as constructed a figure as the mythical Lee Harvey Oswald of Oliver Stone’s fever dreams. Since biography to date does not tell us anything reliable about the real Jim Morrison, we have to ask different questions about why writers create the Jim Morrisons that they do, and what functions these Morrisons serve in popular culture. 

Was Jim Morrison, as Stephen Davis contends, “the true avatar of his age,” which implies that if we understood Jim Morrison we would finally understand the 1960s. Or perhaps Lester Bangs was right when he called him a “Bozo Prince,” a clown with great cheekbones and middling talent who drowned whatever potential he may have had in a stew of arrogance, chronic drug abuse, and willful psychopathology. 

The glib answer is that he was both of these things, but this only restates the problem. As Mikal Gilmore writes, “there is something about Morrison’s story that makes no sense. Where did such a perplexing combination of extraordinary talent and unwavering self-destruction truly come from?”

Conclusion

The key to making sense of Morrison is to stop trying to make sense of his life, giving up any attempt to weave these wayward fragments of biography into a plausible narrative. Despite the elusiveness of the real person, buried now under layers of media sediment, hype, and fabrications, Morrison made punk rock possible, just as he made the gender-bending antics of David Bowie, Iggy Pop and T-Rex possible. Rock Star wasn’t a cliché when he did it, because he did it first and indelibly. 

His persona was neither gay nor camp, and he didn’t live long enough for the “are they or aren’t they” posturing of glam rock. Yet the top-to-toe black leather Morrison wore was not mainstream Beach Boys/fraternity house heterosexual either. The Warhol crowd liked to claim that Morrison stole the leather look from Gerard Malanga, but no matter. Even if that is true, taking the look above ground, taking it to the Ed Sullivan Show, even, was a far riskier thing to do in 1967, and Morrison did it without the insularity of Warhol’s Factory to protect him.

Morrison’s idol, Elvis Presley, dropped into mass culture with such ferocious force that he had to be humiliated, drafted, and then spit back out of the Army to enact a sanitized version of himself for Hollywood and Las Vegas. Jim, who could have been Elvis’s middle-class cousin, the one with a Dad in the professional military, a better education and nicer house, also got his moment on the Ed Sullivan Show. In his case it took less than five years in the American spotlight, compared to twenty for Elvis, for this strange young man to disintegrate. 

In that short span of time, there were at least three Jims: Rock Star Jim, Poet Jim, and Jimbo the Alcoholic, and maybe even a fourth, Posthumous Jim, who flew out of the story as mysteriously as he had flown into it five years earlier. At this stage, we will never know who Jim Morrison really was, what motivated him, nor how he managed to be in the exact right place at the right time with the right face to define American rock music. 

Nevertheless, despite all the vitriol thrown at him at the end, the 1960s seem impossible without him. Had Jim Morrison not existed, we would have had to invent him.