It's meant to be the grave you can't miss, but I admit to having twice toured the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris and failed to find Jim Morrison's resting place, or shrine. No bad thing, according to Wikipedia, which sniffily points out: "Permanent crowds and occasional vandalism surrounding this tomb have caused tensions with the families of other, less famous, interred individuals".
I'm sure on both occasions that there were plenty of semi-stoned, curious Morrisonites I could have asked, but maybe, as a pretentious sixteen-year-old, I wanted to appear less naff and ghoulish and pretend I was after troubled chanteuse Edith Piaf, Resistance hero Jean Moulin or Oscar Wilde. The latter could probably have got some good copy out of Morrison, alive or dead, particularly his (alleged) death in the bath. Surely better than collapsing on the loo, à la Evelyn Waugh, although you do wonder if it was a bubble bath and whether he had a pleasant soaking before choking.
As rock bores will quickly tell you, Morrison was in the '27' club, the age at which Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix also left us, mainly through 'susbtance abuse', or misreading prescriptions. Kurt Cobain came much later, (allegedly) shot by his own gun in April 1994, an event which for sadder rock fans registered more profoundly than the mass slaughter going on in Rwanda at the time.
I supect that Jimi, Janis and Kurt all have a bit more cred and kudos with the cognoscenti these days than poor Jim. Why? Some not very good later albums when the Doors were running out of steam (Waiting for The Sun springs to mind, or have I got that wrong?). Too much myth-making by admirers, including Danny Sugarman's overheated biography 'No One Get Out of Here Alive' (did he just mean the bathroom?). A less-than-enthralling Oliver Stone movie with the unloveable Val Kilmer woefully miscast as the Lizard King. The Doors did little service to their own reputation by hiring Ian Astbury of The Cult as a latter-day stand-in vocalist, offering an even more pointless combo than From The Jam or a Lynott-less Thin Lizzy. There was also that initimate exposure business. Was Jim victim or visionary when he (allegedly) whipped it out in concert? Should he have been given a pardon or a plaque? Joan Didion contributed a quietly withering account of the Doors in rehearsal, getting the vibe together while waiting for their erratic-erotic vocalist to turn up. Give me Joy Division any day. The Doors certainly needed a Peter Hook.
But still...... there were those of us who did hold a bit of a torch for Jim, particularly in the early 1980s when The Doors were hip again, helped by Coppola's heavy-handed, but effective use of 'The End' in Apocalypse Now. Several British bands of that era were self-consciously Doors-influenced. At the top end creatively, there were Echo and the Bunnymen, whose own 'Heaven up Here' frankly knocks socks off anything that Jim, Ray, Robbie and the other one came up with. A month in Crete in 1981 included listening over and over again to The Doors on cassette. Maybe the Greeks also liked that first album's fierce, destructive poetry. "You know the day destroys the night, night divides the day" and off we went, with Zeus nodding his approval. Never mind that the Daily Telegraph later performed critical surgery on Break on Through and found nothing but hot air and empty, very Morrisonian pretension, typical fodder for lazy baby-boomer camp-followers wanting something dark and meaningful without injecting. Anyone for The Crystal Ship? There is still nothing in the fabulous word of rock quite like 'The End'. How many other rock epics give you that Oedipal let's go kill Dad and get dirty with Mum feel?
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