A Seer and a Drunk
- by David Flusfeder
DAVID FLUSFEDER REVIEWS JIM MORRISON: LIFE, DEATH, LEGEND BY STEPHEN DAVIS
Jim Morrison was, as lead singer of the Los Angeles band the Doors, the yelping baritone voice of a brief, very unbuttoned era. The group released their first album in 1967. Morrison died in a Paris bathtub in 1971. His grave, at Père Lachaise cemetery, has been ever since a pilgrimage site for generations of youth with tastes for narcotics and alcohol and for handsome men declaiming adolescent, liberationist poetry.
In the latest Morrison biography, Stephen Davis, who has previously turned his attentions to such rock dinosaurs as Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones and Aerosmith, makes ludicrous claims for his man: "He was a seer, an adept, a bard, a drunk, a bisexual omnivore… a prophet with terrible eyes and rigid features, clad in black leather. He was arguably the major poet to emerge from the turmoil of the legendary American 1960s."
