Doors Drummer John Densmore: ‘It Took Me Years To Forgive Jim Morrison’
- by Jenny Stevens
WHEN HE WAS AT THE CENTRE OF THE U.S. COUNTERCULTURE, HE LIVED IN TERROR OF HIS BANDMATE. YET AFTER THE SINGER’S DEATH, HE FOUGHT FEROCIOUSLY TO PROTECT HIS LEGACY. BUT, HE SAYS, HE STILL REGRETS NOT CALLING OUT MORRISON ON HIS ABUSIVE RELATIONSHIPS WITH WOMEN
It took the Doors’ drummer, John Densmore, three years to visit the grave of his bandmate Jim Morrison after he was found dead in a Paris bathtub in 1971. He didn’t even go to the funeral. “Did I hate Jim?” Densmore pauses, although he is not obviously alarmed by the question. “No. I hated his self-destruction… He was a kamikaze who went out at 27 – what can I say?”
Quite a lot, it transpires. Morrison was a man who was spectacularly good at being a rock star – a lithe figure in leather trousers, prophesying about death, sex and magic on some of the biggest hits of the 1960s – "Light My Fire", "Break on Through" and "Hello, I Love You". But he was catastrophically bad at the rest of life. Like many alcoholics, he could be reckless, selfish and mercurial. “The Dionysian madman,” Densmore has called him – a “psychopath”, a “lunatic” and “the voice that struck terror in me”.
