Watch Jim Morrison Predict the Future of American Music in 1969
- by Jordan Potter
At school, Jim Morrison’s teachers could see that he was a little different. He was a notable bookworm and his senior year English teacher once recalled: “Jim read as much and probably more than any student in the class, but everything he read was so offbeat I had another teacher (who was going to the Library of Congress) check to see if the books Jim was reporting on actually existed.”
Such was Morrison’s imagination, the teacher “suspected he was making them up, as they were English books on 16th and 17th-century demonology. I’d never heard of them, but they existed, and I’m convinced, from the paper he wrote, that he read them, and the Library of Congress would’ve been the only source.”
In 1964, Morrison moved to California to attend UCLA, where he enrolled at the film school within the Theater Arts department of the College of Fine Arts. During his time here, he began to experiment with drugs, and his experiences with LSD began to rub off on his poetry and songwriting. By the summer of 1965, he had left university, and one day, he bumped into Ray Manzarek on Venice Beach in a chance meeting that led to the formation of The Doors just a couple of months later.
