Fifty years ago, Jim Morrison died in Paris on 3 July.
He was 27 years old.
The same age as Jimi Hendrix, who died in September of the previous year, and one year older than Janis Joplin, who died in October, also in 1970.
The cursed triad of rock'n'roll.
The definitive truth is known only about the death of poor Janis, struck by a heroin overdose.
Around those of Hendrix and Morrison we continue to discuss: some even believe that, as on the other hand they say about Elvis, the former singer of the Doors is still alive.
Morrison was found dead in the apartment he shared with Pamela Courson, his longtime partner and sole heir. There was no autopsy at the time. Courson died of an overdose three years after Jim, taking with her the secrets about the last night of the Lizard King who was buried at Pere Lachaise, the artists' cemetery in Paris. His tomb continues to be one of the most visited places in the city and today it is cordoned off to contain the excesses of fans.
The past 50 years, if possible, have further strengthened the myth of one of the most powerful icons in the history of popular music. An impressive phenomenon, if you think that the Doors were formed in 1965 and that the first album was released in 1967, the last with Morrison in '71. Altogether they have recorded six studio albums and a legendary live: but the Morrison myth continues to remain untouched.
The reasons for this myth cannot be understood if we do not start from Los Angeles in the 1960s, a laboratory of ideas, music and social and chemical-lysergic experiments that offered the then film student the ideal ground to develop his complex personality.
Jim was the son of a naval officer, who later became an admiral who, just to clarify, advised against his son to continue his career as a singer after listening to his first album. It is no coincidence that his relations with his family were wiped out. Passionate about cinema, but also avid fan of Elvis and Sinatra, avid reader of Rimbaud and Baudelaire, of William Blake, of the Beat (he was a personal friend of Michael McClure), Celine, Nietzsche, admirer of Artaud and scholar of psychology and myths of the American Indians, Morrison managed to transfer this articulated cultural universe into the figure of one of the most cheeky frontmen in history.
It should not be forgotten that in those years rock was taking on a new physiognomy: the heroic phase of the founding fathers had ended and, under the pressure of the British Invasion, a new musical expression was born, which leads straight to today's music. Beautiful, inventor of a look - leather pants, open shirt, studded belt, necklaces and mirrored Ray Ban - which has become the definitive rock look, Morrison was basically the first frontman to wear stage the mysticism of the 'disorder of the senses'. It would be enough to say that it was watching a Doors concert that Iggy Pop was electrocuted on the way to rock'n'roll to summarize the disruptive effect of his presence. So if Jim Morrison is immediatelybecome a symbol of the reaction of the youth universe to institutions, one cannot forget the miraculous symbiosis between his voice and his personality and the music of the Doors, one of the most influential and original bands in history. It is also for this reason that after 50 years the myth of the Lizard King is still so alive.
