13 June 1991
Do tourists to Paris visit Jim Morrison’s grave any more? Certainly during my Seine-side years in the ’00s and ’10s the bigger attractions of Père Lachaise were Chopin, Edith Piaf and Oscar Wilde; just once I went to Morrison’s tomb and aside from two nearby security guards I was the only person there. Back in the ’90s, though, after Oliver Stone’s biopic had created new interest in The Doors among impressionable teenagers, a pilgrimage to Jim was de rigueur. A class of third years from the girls’ secondary school near our CBS went to Paris on a school tour and made sure to take in Père Lachaise. One girl told us that she took a handful of earth and stones from Jim’s grave, which for us was as good as bringing back moondust. ‘Wow’, we said; liking The Doors and idolising Jim Morrison means that you are already quite gullible.
That Oliver Stone film, with Val Kilmer doing a Jim Morrison impersonation almost as well as the guy from the Australian Doors, is the reason ‘Light My Fire’ was re-released, went top ten in the UK, and made number one in Ireland. Morrison himself, if not quite doing a Mick Jagger impersonation, was at least following Mick’s lead with his showy, aggressive performance in this new idiom of ‘rock’. The rest of the band, though, were no Stones. Take away Morrison’s vocal and ‘Light My Fire’ is the sound of an American Herman’s Hermits: nice kids playing bland mid-’60s blues-pop, singing a love song, rhyming ‘fire’ with as many other words as they can find in the rhyming dictionary but leaving out the apposite ‘dire’. The cult of Jim really went a long way in dressing up some fairly boring and pompous music. But hey, we all made some questionable fashion choices in our teens, right? The important thing is that we are now older, wiser, and no longer listening to The Doors.
