July 3 – The ’27 Club’ Added Another Voice 50 Years Ago

50 years ago today and three years to the day after The Doors released their only American #1 album (Waiting for the Sun), their outlandishly-charismatic front man Jim Morrison was found dead in a tub in his Paris apartment. The “Lizard King” was 27at that point in 1971.

It came less than a year after both Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin also died, also at age 27, leading to the establishment of the macabre “27 Club” (celebs who pass away when 27 years old) in popular culture. Morrison had been living in France with his girlfriend Pamela Courson for several months, apparently trying to shed his wild rock star image and concentrate more on poetry. The cause of death was listed as a heart attack although no autopsy was done. Fittingly for such an outlandish and controversial entertainer, he’s buried in the same cemetery as Oscar Wilde in Paris.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame call The Doors “among the most intense and revolutionary bands of the Sixties” largely due to Jim, whom they consider “a brooding, charismatic frontman in the classic mold of Elvis Presley and Mick Jagger.” Probably true. Parents might not have liked The Beatles back then, but it’s not likely they really found Paul McCartney menacing or a significant threat to their kids. Morrison, like Jagger though with his unrestrained sexuality and dangerous image notched up by a number of arrests scared parents like no one else until Alice Cooper, or perhaps Sid Vicious came along.  Rolling Stone listed Jim as the fifth best lead singer ever in 2011, and list three of their albums among the 500 greatest ever,  proving Robby Krieger of the band was wrong. He recalls thinking “a couple of years (after Jim died) and people are never gonna think about us anymore.”