Jim Morrrison

Jim Morrison is one of the most influential figures in the history of Rock music. Though he died in 1971, at the age of 27, his records sell better 25 years after his death than they did when he was alive. His band, the Doors, had a unique style, that was largely due to Morrison's song writing and performing. But, although the Band was extremely popular, Morrison's great influence is not primarily musical. Instead, it was Morrison's rebellion that made him a star. Because Jim Morrison embodied the spirit of teenage rebellion of the 1960s, in his life and in his death, he became a major cultural hero, and has remained one ever since.

Morrison was born in 1943, and his father was a career naval officer who eventually became an admiral. The family moved around a great deal, but Morrison led the life of a "product of a Southern upper-middle-class family" (Curtis 178). Like most middle-class American teenagers in the 1960s, Morrison attended college. He dropped out of Florida State University, and then dropped out of the University of California at Los Angeles, where he had studied film-making. In the summer of 1966, Morrison spent his time writing poetry and taking psychedelic drugs. He met a fellow film-school student, keyboard player Ray Manzarek, and sang some of his poetry to him. Manzarek suggested that they form a band, and Morrison chose the name "The Doors" from The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley's book about his "mystical experiences" with drugs (Jones

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zsche, and writers, such as Arthur Rimbaud, William Blake, and Antonin Artaud, were his inspirations. From them, Morrison took the idea of a world in which there was a constant struggle between the forces of reason, represented by the ancient god Apollo, and the forces of sensual ecstasy, represented by Dionysius. The arts of the Western world had been divided by a "split between mind and body," between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, and visionary artists needed to heal this division (Curtis 178). The performer who released himself to the full range of sensual experience would be able to see things that were denied to conventional human beings who only saw the surface of the world. Morrison consciously saw himself as a Dionysian performer. He adopted the ideas of the French poet Rimbaud who argued that the artist had to become a true visionary. But, Rimbaud believed that this could happen only through "a long, boundless and systematic disordering of the senses" (Jones 43). In the world of Rock and Roll, this idea became the "mythology of romantic self-destruction" that Morrison embodied to a greater degree than any other performer (Jones 43). Morrison's tendency towards self-destruction became clear over time. But, t

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