The Collected Works of Jim Morrison, Review: A Rather Too Comprehensive Survey
- by John Aizlewood
MORRISON’S ABSTRACT PRONOUNCEMENTS DO NOT SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES – THEY NEED A VOICE BEYOND HIS GRAVE
Shaman? Poet? Dionysus of his age? Pub bore? Musical trailblazer? A literal and metaphorical hitchhiker? Jim Morrison was all of these, sometimes more, sometimes less.
In 1980, Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman’s enthralling No One Here Gets Out Alive told the admiral’s son’s tale with sufficient vim and detail to corner the Morrison biography market for the next 30 years.
Hopkins and Sugerman dealt with Jim Morrison, lead singer and primary lyricist of The Doors, whose influence would come to outweigh their actual music. This Collected Works, on the other hand, is the entire existing canon of James Douglas Morrison—︎the name he preferred for his prose, poetry and lyrics.
This beautiful, 582-page labour of devotion is chiefly sourced from 28 notebooks which accompanied Morrison from his schooldays and hundreds of loose, handwritten pages.
