Fifty years ago, on July 3, 1971, Jim Morrison, eminently charismatic leader of the American rock group The Doors disappeared in Paris, found lifeless in the bathtub of his apartment ...

Fifty years since the death of Jim Morrison: "Poetry justifies provocation"

Jim Morrison on stage, 1970 © Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images

Text by: Nicolas Sanders Follow

6 mins

Fifty years ago, on July 3, 1971, Jim Morrison, eminently charismatic leader of the American rock group The Doors disappeared in Paris, found lifeless in the bathtub of his apartment in the early morning by his companion Pamela Courson.

He is buried at Père-Lachaise, where his grave has become a place of pilgrimage.

Meeting with Jean-Marie Rous, philosopher and writer, author of

Jim Morrison, the lizard

(Renaudot).

Publicity

RFI: Where is Jim Morrison today?

It is a metaphysical question rather than a geographical one.

Jean-Marie-Rous:

Jim Morrison is dead, there is no problem and no question to ask about it. People who claim otherwise are not serious. But Jim Morrison is still very much with us. There are always a lot of people at his grave in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, and there are still records being released all over the world. Although they often do not live up to him, current music groups are under the influence of the singer of The Doors. In rock, many people refer to him, but they fail to understand why Jim Morrison was important for a whole generation. Now, several generations have passed, it is no longer the 1960s, but his figure is omnipresent because he is like an unsurpassable horizon, where he has gone no one will go.It is the universality of Jim Morrison's character that explains his current omnipresence.

For a majority of people, Jim Morrison is a singer, while he himself defined himself as a poet.

Musical groups only talk about music. Jim Morrison, with The Doors, was talking about poetry. We don't often meet a poet in the rock world. The Doors singer had a hard time getting people to accept that rock rhymes with poetry. Bob Dylan will have waited almost fifty years to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature… In his time, we didn't see him as a poet because, in the end, we didn't see rock as a place of poetry, Elvis up to the Beatles… But the Doors have a music which can guide you directly towards readings of poets, philosophers… These are all the influences of Jim Morrison, returned in a way towards the public. The Rolling Stones, as talented as they are, lack the intellectual power of The Doors music. The Doors are not Jim Morrison, they are three excellent musicians,to which is added the spontaneity of Morrisonian poetry.

A poet who cultivated an extraordinary sense of provocation.

If we keep the idea that the Doors were still rock, which was the case at the time when they played together, Jim Morrison embodied with his public persona a mixture of provocation and poetry, because the poetry justifies provocation, a raw sincerity.

He looked for poetic directions, and when he found one, he looked for another.

By stopping folk for rock, Dylan also provoked, but while remaining in the musical sphere.

Morrison had the taste to provoke everywhere and permanently, for him it was the price to pay not to be afraid of the unknown.

You have to see that on Rimbaud's side, it is the taste of making yourself monstrous!

How can Jim Morrison stand out from other artists of his time?

As an artist, Morrison was to seduce with the attributes of grace and beauty, which he possessed.

He added eroticism, revolt, and above all meaning, that is to say his poetry.

It is in this that it surpasses all the old figures of rock, because it is the culmination of rock.

Since then, "Rock is dead" had written Morrison, paraphrasing Nietzsche and his "God is dead".

Jim Morrison's poetry integrates in a raw, artificial way, the spectacular elements of the reality which surrounds him.

The mismatch between the objective description and the interior landscape creates a flamboyant, melancholy style that was wonderfully highlighted by Ray Manzarek's organ and Robby Krieger's guitar.

What state of mind was Jim Morrison in Paris, before dying there at the age of 27?

At the end of his life in Paris, Jim Morrison regretted having left The Doors, which he planned to find again. He realized that he wasn't doing much, his poetry wasn't springing up like before. He thought he would find a refuge in Paris which he did not find. But the paradox is that he couldn't stay in Los Angeles, the city he loved, and to which he paid tribute in the group's latest album,

LA Woman.

, but who had rejected him since his legal troubles after the famous Miami concert in 1969 where he was accused of showing his genitals in front of the public.

In Paris, Morrison had to foresee his end, when he understood that the Paris of Balzac, of Baudelaire, was no more.

In 1971, there was only one cruel town left.

And we now know that the Miami trial included more than troubled areas insofar as false testimony was produced there.

It wasn't until 2010, forty years after his death, that the state of Florida pardoned Jim Morrison and cleared him of the charges on which his trial was based in 1970.

Fifty years since the death of Jim Morrison: "Poetry justifies provocation"

Fifty years since the death of Jim Morrison: "Poetry justifies provocation"

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