BIOGRAPHY :


 

From Origional Elektra Records bio, 1967:


FULL NAME: James Douglas Morrison
BIRTH DATE & PLACE: December 8, 1943, Melbourne, Florida
HEIGHT: 5"11
WEIGHT: 145lbs
HAIR: Brown
EYES: blue-grey
FAMILY INFO: dead
HOME INFO: Laurel Canyon, L.A. - nice at night
SCHOOLS ATTENDED: St. Petersburg Junior College, Florida State U., UCLA
MARRIAGE INFO: single
INSTRUMENTS PLAYED/PART SUNG: lead voice
FAVORITE SINGING GROUPS: Beach Boys, Kinks, Love
INDIVIDUAL SINGERS: Sinatra, Presley
ACTORS & ACTRESSES: Jack Palance, Sarah Miles
TV SHOWS: news
COLORS: turquoise
FOODS: meat
HOBBIES: horse races
SPORTS: swimming
WHAT YOU LOOKED FOR IN A GIRL: hair, eyes, voice, walk
WHAT DO YOU LIKE TO DO ON A DATE?: talk
PLANS/AMBITIONS: make films

 

Jim Morrison
Jim Morrison

From the Elektra Records Bio 1967:

You could say it was an accident that I was ideally suited for the work I am doing. It's the feeling of a bowstring being pulled back for 22 years and suddenly being let go. I am primarily an American, second a Californian, third a Los Angeles resident. I've always been attracted to ideas that  were about revolt against authority. I like ideas about breaking away or overthrowing of established order. I am interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos, especially activity that seems to have no meaning. It seems to me that the road toward freedom, external revolt, is a way to bring about internal freedom. Rather than starting inside, I start outside, reach the mental through the physical.
    I am a sagittarian, if that has anything to do with it - the Centaur - the Archer - the Hunt, but the main thing is we are The Doors.
We are from the west/The whole thing is like an invitation to the west
The sunset     This is the end
The night
The sea
The world we suggest is a new wild west. A sensuous evil world. Strange and haunting, the path of  the sun, you know? Toward the end. At least for our first album. We're all centered around the end
of the Zodiac. The Pacific/violence and peace/the way between young and old.

In 1981, Rolling Stone magazine printed a photograph of Jim Morrison on its cover with the title: "Jim Morrison - he's hot, he's sexy and he's dead". Jim Morrison became famous at the age of 23 with the group The Doors. He was a poet, a rebel, a rock singer, and a leader. He was also one of rock's sexiest stars. Three years later he was fat, an alcoholic, and lying dead in a hotel bath in Paris. But his death, in 1971, wasn't the end of the story. Like James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, public interest in the star increased over the following years.
James Douglas Morrison was born in  Melbourne (Florida) on December 8, 1943. His father was an officer in the US navy and was often away from home for long periods of time. Jim's relationship with his parents was strange and he often claimed they were dead. When he was four years old, he experienced what he later described as the most important moment of his life. The Morrison family were driving along a desert road and came upon a fatal road accident involving a truck carrying Native Americans. As they drove away, Jim claimed that one of them died and that his soul passed into his body. Many years later, Morrison sang about the experience in Peace Frog: "Indians scattered on dawn's highway bleeding/Ghosts crowd the child's fragile eggshell mind".
At school Jim had a constant need to show off and be the centre of attention. He took a course on crowd psychology and revolt at college where he wrote papers on obscure books, many of which his tutors had never heard of. Jim loved reading and found the name of the group the Doors in a William Blake quote that he found in an Aldous Huxley book - "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it truly is, infinite".
After a brief period at the University of Los Angeles where he studied film, Morrison decided to become a singer. It was the combination of poet and rock singer that made Jim Morrison different from other rock singers of the time. The Doors reached the top of the US charts in the summer of 1967 with their second single Light My Fire. Six albums followed that included classic songs such as Riders On The Storm and L.A. Woman. The two themes that constantly appeared in Morrison's lyrics were sex and death.
The group's live performances were famous for the singer's outrageous behaviour on stage and his control over the audience (many concerts ended in riots). But in Miami in 1969, Jim Morrison suddenly turned against his audience. He abused them and then, according to some witnesses, exposed  himself on stage; others testimoned  there was no exposure . The doors couldn't find another concert for six months and Morrison was given an eight-month jail sentence although he died before serving it.
His friends at the time say that he tried to maintain the ecstatic state that he experienced on stage in his private life as well. Under the influence of drugs and alcohol he lived dangerously, playing matador with moving traffic, crashing cars, and provoking the police. His addiction to drugs and alcohol also changed his looks and caused his death while in Paris with his companion, Pamela Courson. A cocktail of alcohol and heroin was too much for his body and he died while having a bath.
There was no autopsy and Morrison was buried in Père Lachaise cemetery near the graves of Edith Piaf and Oscar Wilde. Over the following years, the grave was often visited by Doors fans who spread the rumour that Jim Morrison wasn't dead and had in fact disappeared to India or Africa.


Ray Manzarek
Ray Manzarek

From the ElektraFULL REAL NAME: Raymond Daniel Manzarek
BIRTH DATE & PLACE: February 12,1939, Chicago
PERSONAL DATA: 6', 160 lbs, blonde, blue
FAMILY INFO (parents names, brothers, sisters): Raymond, Helen, Rick, Jim
HOME INFO: Hollywood
SCHOOLS ATTENDED: UCLA
MARRIAGE INFO: Married
INSTRUMENTS PLAYED/PARTS SUNG: Organ, piano, bass
FAVORITE SINGING GROUPS: No good new groups at this date
INDIVIDUAL SINGERS: Muddy Waters, Jaques Brel
ACTOR & ACTRESS: Marlene Dietrich, Orson Welles
TV SHOWS: Documentaries, news, sports
COLORS: Blue
FOODS: Oysters, snails, prime rib
HOBBIES: Projecting the feel of the future
SPORTS: Tennis, swimming
WHAT I LOOK FOR IN A GIRL: Compatibility, reality
WHAT DO YOU LIKE TO DO ON A DATE: Dinner, movies, walk, ice cream, drive to beach
PLANS/AMBITIONS: Films 

 

Records Bio 1967:

I grew up in Chicago and left when I was 21 for Los Angeles. My parents gave me piano lessons when I was around nine or ten. I hated it for the first four years, until I learned how to do it, then it became fun, which is about the same time I first heard negro music. I was about 12 or 13 playing baseball in a playground; someone had a radio tuned into a negro station. From then on I was hooked. I used to listen to Al Benson and Big Bill Hill, they were disk jockeys in Chicago. From then on all the music I listened to was on the radio. My piano playing changed; I became influenced by jazz. I learned how to play that stride piano with my left hand, and I knew that was it: stuff with a beat, jazz blues, rock
    At school I was primarily interested in film. It seemed to combine my interest in drama, visual art, music and profit motive. Before I left Chicago I was interested in theatre. These days I think we want our theatre, our entertainment to be larger than life. I think the total environmental thing will come. Probably Cinerama will develop further.
    I think the Doors is a representative American group. America  is a melting pot and so are we. Our influences spring from a myriad of sources which have almalgamated, blending divergent styles into our own thing. We're like the country itself. America must seem to be a ridiculous hodgepodge to an outsider. It's like the Doors. We come from different areas, different musical areas. We're put together a lot of sweat, a lot of fighting. All of the things people say about America can be said about the Doors.
    All of us have the freedom to explore and improvise within a framework. Jim is an improviser with words.


Robbie Krieger

FULL REAL NAME: Robert Allen Krieger
BIRTH DATE AND PLACE: January 8, 1946, Los Angeles
PERSONAL DATA: 5' 9", 135 lbs, brown hair, green eyes
FAMILY INFO (names of parents, brothers, sisters): Stu, Marylyn, Ron
HOME INFO: Laural Canyon
SCHOOLS ATTENDED: Uni High, Menlo UCLA, Cal at Santa Barbara
MARRIAGE INFO: no
INSTRUMENTS PLAYED/PARTS SUNG: guitar
FAVORITE SINGING GROUPS:
INDIVUDIAL SINGERS: Van Morrison, Jimmy Reed, James Brown
ACTOR ACTRESS: Brando, W.C. Fields
TV SHOWS:
COLORS: all
FOODS: peanuts
HOBBIES: music
SPORTS: surfing
WHAT LOOKED FOR IN A GIRL: soul
WHAT DO YOU LIKE TO DO ON A DATE: do as much as possible
PLANS/AMBITIONS: produce

 

From the Elektra Records Bio 1967:

The first music I heard that I liked was Peter and the Wolf. I accidentally sat and broke the record (I was about seven). Then I listened to Rock-n-Roll, I listened to the radio a lot, Fats Domino, Elvis, The Platters...
    I started surfing at fourteen. There was lot's of classical music at my house. My father liked march music. There was a piano at home. I studied trumpet at ten, but nothing came of it. Then I started playing the blues on the piano, no lessons though. When I was seventeen, I started playing the guitar. I didn't own one until I was eighteen. It was a Mexican flamenco guitar. I took flamenco lessons for a few months. I switched around from folk to flamenco to blues to rock-n-roll.
    Records got me into the blues. Some of the newer rock-n-roll, such as the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. If it hadn't been for Butterfield going electric, I probably wouldn't have gone rock-n-roll
    I didn't plan on rock-n-roll. I wanted to learn jazz, I got to know some people doing rock-nroll with jazz, and thought I could make some money playing music.
    In rock-n-roll you can realize anything that you can in jazz or anything. There's no limitation other than the beat. You have more freedom than you do in anything except jazz, which is dying, as far as money making is concerned.
    In the Doors we have both musicians and poets, and both know of each others art, so we can effect a synthesis. In the case of Tim Buckley or Dylan you have one man's ideas. Most groups today aren't groups. In a true group all the members create the arrangements among themselves.
 


John Densmore

 

FULL REAL NAME: John Paul Densmore
BIRTH DATE AND PLACE: December 1, 1944, Santa Monica, California
PERSONAL DATA: 5'9", 135 lbs, white-light?
FAMILY INFO(names of parents, brothers, sisters): Ray Densmore, Margaret Densmore,
    Ann Densmore, Jim Densmore
HOME INFO: 10610 Wilkins Avenue, Los Angeles, California
SCHOOLS ATTENDED: University High, Santa Monica City College, Los Angeles City
    College, San Fernando Valley State
MARRIAGE INFO: not married!!
INSTRUMENTS PLAYED/PARTS SUNG: drums, piano, tympani, vibes
FAVORITE SINGING GROUPS: none in particular, Beatles are the best
INDIVIDUAL SINGERS: Van Morrison, Jimmy Reed
ACTOR & ACTRESS: Charles Bronson, Peter Sellers, & Claudia Cardinale
TV SHOWS: old movies, rock-n-roll shows
COLORS: blue
FOODS: vegetables, chinese food, Zen macrobiotics, meat, fish
HOBBIES: listening to all kinds of music
SPORTS: tennis, basketball
WHAT LOOKED FOR IN A GIRL: sensitive
WHAT DO YOU LIKE TO DO ON A DATE: communicate in one way or another
PLANS/AMBITIONS: musical production or engineering (musical) or management or something

 

From the Elektra Records Bio 1967:

I've been playing for six years now. I don't really have much to say about all of this. I took piano lessons when I was ten. They tried to get me to play Bach. They tried for two years. When I was in junior high I got my first set of drums. I played symphonic music in high school (tympani snare), then I played jazz for three years. I used to play sessions in Compton and Topanga Canyon. Since last year it's been rock-n-roll and these creeps.

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