Jim Morrison by Stephen Davis

From The Week of March 14, 2010

This will not be the last biography of Jim Morrison, the larger-than-life frontman of The Doors, but it must surely be considered one of the most human. Mr. Davis, while revealing himself to be a fan of this most influential of 1960s bands, maintains a certain distance from his subject, presenting the facts as he sees them to his readers while largely withholding judgement of the actions described. It is a difficult stance, occupying a kind of awkward middle ground of neither total objectivity nor total fandom, but I found Mr. Davis' centrism rewarding, animating his chronicle from a collection of facts into portraits of real lives of real people.

Jim Morrison had an amazing and yet difficult life. The son of an admiral in the US Navy, he was expected to follow in his father's footsteps. And when it became obvious that Mr. Morrison wanted nothing less than to serve, the cord that connected him to his family was cut, casting him out into the world of the weird and the wonderful where Mr. Morrison found comfort and kinship. From difficult youth, Mr. Morrison slid ass-first into stardom which seems to have come, to himself and to the band, as something of a surprise. The greater surprise for the rest of the world was how short that stardom was to last, no more than five years from the flickerings of fame to the fateful night in Paris which found the icon dead of an overdose. But those five years... Has anyone ever been on such a fantastic ride? Has anyone been more aware of himself on that ride, the extent to which he was using himself up? To understand that he would die young but refusing to care is an incredibly powerful sentiment which hangs over this whole book as a kind of badge of courage. For say what you will about the man, and many have and many will, Jim Morrison was courageous and heroically alive in a way that 99 percent of us will never be. He was free. His freedom killed him, but what must he have learned in exchange for paying that price? What must he have seen, in and out of his strange and genius mind?

Mr. Davis has penned a balanced look at both the man and the band, hailing their importance in rock while pointing out that they were often a miserable live band, owing to attitude and to drug abuse. His portrayal of the drummer as something of a self-righteous hypocrite is just as memorable as the love-and-hate affair Morrison had with his famous girlfriend. And though we conclude with an icon's premature death, Mr. Davis lingers on the notion that legacy always outlives the man. This is true of Shakespeare and, at least for 40 years, it is true of Jim Morrison. (4/5 Stars)