The Death Chronicles is a new series of articles that will run for 12 months. Each week I will pick two music celebrities who passed away within the month we are in. This week I’d like to feature two who were taken from us on the same day, Jim Morrison and Brian Jones.

Jim Morrison was clearly not in a good way when he headed off for Paris during the mixing of the Doors' L.A. Woman album in early 1971. But for a time, those close to him held out hope that he'd be able to sort through his personal issues and find his way back to a state of physical, emotional, and creative well-being. Those hopes were dashed on July 3, 1971, when the singer's body was discovered by his girlfriend Pamela Courson in the bathtub of the apartment they shared.

Last July 3, 2015 was the 44th death anniversary of Jim Morrison, the lead singer of that transcendent rock band, the Doors. A month before, after years of planning to visit Morrison’s gravesite at Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Eastern Paris, I got to do so and commune with one of the fallen idols of my youth.

One afternoon while visiting Grandpa after we had moved to the big house over on Park Street in Oaktown, the CBS Evening News, ol' Walter Cronkite was talking about a rock singer named Jim Morrison.