How Jim Morrison Died

Time.com ^ | July 16, 2007 | VIVIENNE WALT

[RDTF]

Even on a gray day in Paris last week, there was one place you could find a crowd of tourists from places as varied as Rome, Tokyo and Orlando, Florida — gathered at the Pere Lachaise cemetery, around the graveside of Jim Morrison. Forget Chopin, Oscar Wilde, and the hundreds of other luminaries interred among its chestnut trees, the frontman of The Doors has long been the cemetery's headline draw. Part of the attraction is the almost mystical magnetism he exuded in life; part is the macabre mystery of his demise: How did one of the legends of the rock age die in a Paris bathtub in 1971 at age 27, of what the Paris police report said were "natural causes"?

He did not, according to Sam Bernett, whose French book The End — Jim Morrison has just appeared here. Bernett, then 21, ran the hottest Paris club, the Rock 'n Roll Circus, which (as the name suggests) drew a nightly crowd of stoners. After midnight on July 3, Bernett claims he discovered Morrison's lifeless body in the club's bathroom, having clearly overdosed on heroin. Angelic images of Morrison still grace countless T-shirts ($22 at funeral stores around Pere Lachaise), but Bernett paints an uglier picture. "There was foam coming out of his lips," the former nightclub owner told TIME. A doctor who was in the club that night concluded that Morrison had overdosed, and "said Jim was dead," he says. "I wanted to call the police or rescue people to help. They [Morrison's drug dealers] said no," and instead had the body driven back to the apartment the singer had rented with his girlfriend, Pamela Courson. It was then soaked in the bath tub.

-snip-

[jwh_Denver]

They tried in “Other Voices” and it stopped there. Without Morrison it became a no hope band.

[jwh_Denver]

Trust me, that was the studio version. Heard it hundreds and hundreds of times.

[coop71]

“(He was awfully cute, though!)”

Yes he was. Sigh. Yes... he... was...