In Paris, a drunken poet lives forever

Bob Hickey arrived in Paris and went straight to the cemetery.

“I had heard that there was a joint constantly burning at Jim Morrison’s grave,” said Hickey, a sound technician on tour with James Taylor. “I thought, ‘Great, I will go there and see if I can catch a buzz.'”

Attendants at the Père Lachaise Cemetery, the cities largest, handed Hickey a map written in French that he was unable to decipher. Fortunately, finding his way was easy. Spray painted arrows led him along and graves marked with mystical lyrics and messages like “Jim this way” confirmed the route. At Morrison’s headstone, he encountered a strange man with a Band-Aid on his chin, smoking a joint. “He was sharing it with Jim,” said Hickey.

Jim Morrison’s grave is not only the most popular one in the cemetery, which includes the graves of Marcel Proust, Frédéric Chopin and Maria Callas, but it has become one of the most visited sites in Paris, according to several travel websites. “He is just so big,” said Hickey, who grew up listening to The Doors and Frank Zappa and spent the latter half of the rock and roll era touring with groups like Pink Floyd and Eric Clapton. “He is simply overshadowing.”

Morrison studied film at the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote poetry and smoked joints on Venice Beach and co-founded the psychedelic rock band, The Doors, with fellow UCLA student, Ray Manzarek. The Doors exploded out of Los Angeles and wowed and terrified the world. Morrison composed most lyrics, passionate and poetic verses about drugs, incest and mysticism. His looks, talent and charisma cemented the band’s fame. But there was another side to Morrison, something much darker.

On a family road trip through New Mexico, at age four, Morrison observed a truckload of Indians, freshly wrecked. “There were Indians scattered all over the highway, bleeding to death,” Morrison later wrote. “The souls of those dead Indians — maybe one or two of them — were just running around, freaking out, and just landed in my soul, and I was like a sponge, ready to sit there and absorb it.”

The scene appears in the bands’ songs and opens Oliver Stone’s movie, The Doors. The eerie desert accident seems to have hung like an omen through Morrison’s own life. He attained unimaginable success but drifted toward doom, over drinking, abusing drugs and becoming languorous. On July 3, 1971, he was found dead in the bathtub of a Paris apartment. He was 27.

The official report listed heart failure as the cause of death although many suspected a drug overdose. Some suspected far stranger. “Rumors still abound that Morrison committed suicide, was assassinated by the CIA, murdered by a witch, died in a toilet at the notorious Rock and Roll Circus (a nightclub in Paris) or any number of variations. Add to that persistent rumors that he is still alive and living in India, Africa, South America, as a cowboy in Oregon, above a Quik-Check in New Jersey, or in North Dakota anonymously and the ‘Morrison legend’ has taken on a life of its own,” reads a website on Hollywood stars.

The mystique of Morrison is linked to the mystique of the rock and roll era, said Hickey, who grew up in Fort Worth, Texas, in the 1960s. “My whole education came from the mythology of rock and roll records,” he said.
But there were dozens of wildly popular rock musicians in the 1960s and 1970s, many who led lives just as glamorous and destructive as Morrison’s—why is his grave the one that gets visited by the masses?
“He was a great poet,” said Hickey. “His lyrics were good. He was talented, and, I don’t know how to put this into words…he was one of music’s first dark hero-figures.”
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Click here for more of Bob Hickey’s photos of Jim Morrison’s grave.