Was Jim Morrison a Poet?

Did you have a good world when you died?
Enough to base a movie on?

James Douglas Morrison died in Paris on July 3, 1971 at the age of 27. He had fled to Paris to seek solitude and write poetry. He had finally worn himself out on rock and roll. The music of freedom had turned into his biggest trap.

Alice Cooper, who hung out with The Doors in L.A. as a teenager, theorized to Jim Ladd about people who are unsatisfied on this plane of existence and long to be somewhere else. “Look at the things he wrote. It was so obvious in his lyrics that he was going to be going out pretty soon.” Manzarek adds, “He wasn’t 27; he was 77 when he died. He lived life to the fullest.”

He was buried in an ancient Parisian cemetery-Pere Lachaise-alongside Balzac, Moliere, Wilde and other literary greats whom Jim had long admired. Or perhaps, as The Doors seem to want us to believe, he’s living in Africa. “Maybe I’m charmed by the romantic idea that he’s still alive,” Manzarek told Ladd in 1979. “But I have to say, if there’s anybody who’d do it, he’d do it. He’s the only guy I’ve ever known in my life that I could think of that would do something like that.”

The Doors would pay him the ultimate tribute with 1979’s American Prayer, a collection of Morrison’s previously recorded poems set to newly created music. Manzarek remembers, as the band gathered together trying to decide whether or not to go ahead with the project, a bird flew into the room. The bird is a mythological symbol for the soul. Jim Morrison was in the building. They decided to proceed.

“What they did was what they did from the first time they played together,” Doors manager Bill Siddons told Ladd. “They took Jim’s poetry…to that extra level so everybody can experience it…The Doors as the three musicians were Jim’s vehicle for reaching people. He would have never accomplished what [he] did without him. And vice versa.”

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“He wasn’t done,” Patti Smith told a reporter in 1977. “He was just on the threshold of being a really great poet. Now, Hendrix-he was so out there with such furious physical energy, he just died. Morrison was much sadder. He was also desperate. Rock ‘n’ roll was so new then. It was so heavy. There was no precedent for Jim Morrison. It’s a lot different for me. I’ve profited from the fact that he came first.”

Would there have been a Patti Smith without Jim Morrison? Or an Iggy Pop? Could punk rock itself have existed without him? Or heavy metal, without his dark energies?

His influence can be found in the artful musings of Jane’s Addiction, Modest Mouse, the Afghan Whigs and Marilyn Manson. Eddie Vedder and Julian Casablancas are musical descendents. Bono assimilated his rock star poses.