“My personal belief is that Jim Morrison is a god,” former Doors manager Danny Sugarman let us know on page 1 of No One Here Gets Out Alive, the 1980 bestseller which minted the myth of Morrison the Dionysian dark lord.
Stephen Davis’s Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend (2004) gave a more vivid yet sober account. Now Classic Rock’s Mick Wall breaks all the way through to the other side, blowing away every bit of stardust to offer Morrison the insufferable alkie.
Wall takes too heavy a hatchet to hippie utopianism generally, while angrily demolishing the late Ray Manzarek’s ‘Jim’s-not-dead’ spiel. Morrison’s last days in Paris were a typical alcoholic’s demise. But this is also where Wall’s Morrison is warmest: scribbling drunkenly in boulevard cafes, enjoying the pose of being a poet.
Even if he died on a scuzzy club toilet, as believed here, there are worse ways to go./o:p
