|
|
When You're a
Stranger: Fragrance de CHAOS -- Investigative Findings on the
Death of Jim Morrison
THERE IS MENACE
UNDER THE MUSIC, BUT SOMETHING IS BEING HELD BACK. A
SENSE OF ANGER, RAGE AND BETRAYAL. BENT OVER THE MIKE, MORRISON, WHO FOUR DAYS LATER WOULD GIVE HIS LAST CONCERT THEN ABANDON THE BAND,
LEAVING ROCK BEHIND, IS AT HIS PROVOCATIVE, INFLAMMATORY,
CONFRONTATIONAL
BEST, REPEATING HIMSELF OVER AND OVER AGAIN "ROCK IS DEAD. ROCK IS DEAD.
IT'S DYING. IT'S OVER. IT'S OVER. ROCK 'N' ROLL IS DEAD."
IF NOSTALGIA ISN'T WHAT IT USED TO BE, NEITHER IS ROCK. WEIGHED DOWN BY
ITS OWN MYTHOLOGICAL PAST, TOP-HEAVY BECAUSE OF THE UNNATURAL LONGEVITY
OF TOO MANY BANDS, BLOATED BECAUSE OF THE SIZE OF THE CORPORATIONS THAT
DOMINATE THE INDUSTRY, ROCK MUSIC HAS BEEN WAY TOO SUCCESSFUL FOR ITS
OWN GOOD. MICHAEL EPIS, AUSTRALIAN CRITIC
Jim Morrison's
body was found by Pamela Courson, Morrison's common-law wife in the
bathtub at their flat
in Paris, France in the early
morning hours of July 3, 1971 -- exactly two years after the death
of Brian Jones. [1] The New York Times reported, "Jim Morrison, lead
singer of The Doors rock group, died last Saturday in Paris, his
public relations firm said today." The death was initially attributed
to "natural causes," "pneumonia," and finally (but by no means conclusively) "heart failure."
[2] "Details were withheld pending the
return of Mr. Morrison's agent from France. Funeral services were
held in Paris today. In his black leather jacket and skin-tight vinyl
pants, Jim Morrison personified rock music's image of superstar as
sullen, mystical sexual poet."
The surviving Doors, Robbie Krieger, Ray Manzarek and John
Densmore, discussed Morrison's death in an interview conducted on
February 11, 1983 by BBC-2's Robin Denselow at the Institute of
Contemporary Arts in London. Manzarek recalled his state of denial
upon learning of Jim Morrison's death, and weighed the possibility of
political assassination.
Manzarek: We got a phone call. I got a phone call Saturday morning
saying Jim Morrison is dead in Paris. Yeah, yeah, yeah ... sure, right
John had talked to him a couple of weeks beforehand and he's dead ...
Q: What about CIA involvement?
Manzarek: Well, I've heard that theory, yeah, Janis Joplin, Jim
Morrison, Jimi Hendrix. Black man, white man, white woman. You
know the flowering of American youth in poetry and art and music ...
trying to stop it all. It's conceivable
Densmore: There was definitely some political weirdness at Miami,
that [obscenity charge] coming down.
Krieger: And there was an FBI file on Morrison that we got a hold of,
so the government was aware of The Doors ...
Morrison's spontaneous political outbursts in rock press interviews attracted FBI attention.
"I like ideas about the breaking away or overthrowing of
established order," he announced. "I am interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos
-- especially activity
that seems to have no meaning. It seems to me to be the road toward
freedom -- external revolt is a way to bring about internal
freedom." [3]
In another interview, Manzarek considered possible motives for
eliminating the anarchistic Lizard King:
They were going to stop all of rock 'n' roll by stopping The Doors. As
far as Americans were concerned, he was the most dangerous.
Janis Joplin was just a white woman singing about getting drunk and
laid a lot, and Jimi Hendrix was a black guy singing, 'Let's get high.'
Morrison was singing, "We want the world and we want it now."
There was plenty of hounding. [4]
FBI harassment, in fact, rendered Morrison so anxiety-ridden that
he contracted an ulcer by his mid-'20s -- a condition not exactly conducive to overthrowing the established order. "Paranoia" struck deep,
and biographers James Riordan and Jerry Prochnicky confirm that
Morrison was a "marked" man.
The busts took their toll on Morrison. By 1970 he was still reeling
from the effects of one federal trial and about to face another. And the
FBI had marked him. It was they who made the charges in Miami
stick. Morrison was guilty before he was arrested. But the particular crimes were not the problem. The real issue was because he was
guilty of being Jim Morrison, a larger-than-life symbol of rebellion to
the youth of America, and thereby a threat.
The busts cost Morrison a great deal of money, but more than that
they wore him down and sapped his enthusiasm for life. "The vice
squad would be at the side of the stage with our names filled in on the
warrants, just waiting to write in the offense," Manzarek recollected.
"Narks to the left, vice squad to the right, into the valley of death
rode
the four. They wanted to stop Morrison. They wanted to show him that he
couldn't get away with it. [5]
Like Brian Jones and Jimi Hendrix before him, and many rock
musicians to follow, Morrison was consumed by "paranoia," as historian Marianne Sinclair observes.
Inevitably, Morrison and The Doors became a focus for attack and
victimization by the conventional forces of society. Doors' performances were frequently canceled at the last minute through the
efforts of local do-gooders, and audiences were regularly clubbed by
policemen during concerts. This was too much for Morrison,
within whom the forces of destruction had already been long at work.
A heavy user of LSD and an alcoholic who could get drunk at any
time of the day or night on whatever happened to be handy, Morrison
seemed hell-bent on killing himself young. He once described his
drinking as 'not suicide, but slow capitulation.' What he was capitulating to was his own need to block out the sense of frustration,
despair and growing paranoia. [6]
Morrison's death was followed by press reports noting federal
interest in Morrison's life, political views and, significantly, all independent investigations of his death.
Researcher Thomas Lyttle gathered up leads in the international
press.
One of the more explicit appeared in the Scandinavian magazine
Dagblatte. This article detailed French intelligence efforts to
assassinate Jim Morrison in Paris. [7]
In France, the Documentation Exterieure et De Contre Espionage
(SDECE) performs internal security functions. Under DeGaulle, it
was SDECE's policy to resist and oppose the CIA, with the exception
of a small contingent within the bureau enlisted to collaborate
secretly with Langley. Under Pompidou and d'Estang, the domestic
French intelligence service was ordered to cooperate fully with US
intelligence agents and would have been drawn into any assassination
plans in Paris conceived by the CIA. [8]
SDECE assassins are highly-trained and were certainly capable of
killing Morrison discreetly, leaving no trace of their complicity.
There are precedents. In 1962, an SDECE agent code-named Laurent
rigged the Rome-bound flight of a plane, and Italian oil millionaire
Enrico Mattei died in the crash. The magnate's offense: a planned
take-over of French interests in Algerian oil. Time magazine reporter
William McHale was also killed. [9] At the behest of their American
counterparts in Virginia, the "murder committee" of de Centre
Espionage was undeniably capable of eliminating a troublesome rock
celebrity and burying the evidence.
Bob Seymore pieced together official documents for The End, his
book on the peculiar circumstances surrounding Morrison's death,
and soon found himself immersed in a sea of contradictions and
unanswered questions. One of the most troubling was his belief that
Pamela Courson withheld evidence, and that friends Alan Ronay,
Agnes Varda and Bill Siddons "know more than they have revealed
in public." Morrison biographer Danny Sugarman told Seymore that
he had government documents through Freedom of Information Act
request for files pertaining to Morrison's death. Seymore writes:
I asked if Danny had seen such documents, then why were there no details
of any of them in his book? He said that Pamela had told him things
about Jim's death that he promised her he would never divulge. ...
[10]
Sugarman is married to indicted Contragate co-conspirator Fawn
Hall, Oliver North's secretary at the National Security Council, who
shredded an 18-inch file of documents linking the Reagan administration to the diversion of funds from Iran arms sales to the
Nicaraguan contras on November 21, 1986, and quipped before a
Congressional committee, "Sometimes you have to go above the law" (ironic in
light of her admission to the DEA during a federal
drug investigation in 1989 that she "used cocaine many times" in her
three years as an NSC staffer) -- and he has concealed evidence that
would shed light on Morrison's death.
Why suppress
evidence of this significance to the historical
record? Supposedly because Sugarman "promised Pam" he would
conceal and suppress certain facts, as he explained to Seymore.
Danny Sugarman predictably rejects all "conspiracy theories" out of
hand, but he is himself is involved in a conspiracy of silence, ignoring
not only official intelligence files but the aforementioned public
reports on prior attempts by French intelligence agents to murder Jim
Morriso -- -a documented "finger on the trigger," a conspiracy
-- and
instead stating that Morrison did, per the official verdict, suffer some
sort of cardiopulmonary arrest at the tender age of 27 in Paris. But
when pressed to account for the gaping discrepancies in the case -- for instance, heart failure causes anguished thrashing and ordinarily
does not leave a smile, such as the one reported by Courson and the
paramedics, on the victim's face -- Sugarman concedes that
Morrison's death "could have involved a number of factors," and
when cornered by Seymore, reluctantly conceded:
You could say that the CIA and other intelligence agencies may have
had a hand in the deaths of Hendrix, Janis Joplin and then Morrison.
Simply for the reason that they were leaders of a generation during the
1960s. [11]
You could also say that Morrison was viewed as an anarchistic
defiler of "restless youth" in some loops on the Washington Beltway,
according to Sugarman's own best-selling biography:
Jim was certainly popular enough, and more threateningly, smart
enough to cause the powers that be ample reason to take some sort of
action to prevent his subversive influence. Surely the authorities were
wary of him." [12]
Doors of Deception
How wary? Enough to keep secret files on Morrison. Enough to
spread false rumors to the effect that he had faked his own death
to deflect attention from political assassination. The "conspiracy,"
as charted by Sugarman and others, was a hoax hatched by
Morrison to "fake his own death." A book, The Bank of America of
Louisiana, appeared in 1975, supposedly written by Morrison, the
source of the rumor. [13] In No One Here Gets Out Alive, a sensational
history larded with drug-and-sex debauchery, Sugarman and
Hopkins devote an entire chapter to "evidence" that Morrison had
survived Paris and launched a new life free from the encumbrances
of celebrity and the FBI.
The rumor was a deliberate obfuscation concocted by unknown
covert operators The proper question is "Who killed Morrison?" not
"Is he still alive and working for the Bank of America?"
Author Thomas Lyttle writes:
In the first few years after Morrison's death, the owner of B of A
Communications, named James Douglas Morrison, claimed to be
operating as an intelligence agent for a number of domestic and international groups including the CIA, NSA, Interpol, Swedish
Intelligence and others.
There are also connections
between James
Douglas Morrison and
various occult groups with
probable intelligence connections ... JM2 also
claims to be the "dead"
rock star and former
singer for The Doors. The
new JM2 dropped the old
JM1 rock and roll identity to become "James Bond."
This author has in fact
seen what appear to be
stacks of official-looking
documents and letters
between the CIA, various
government agencies,
national news groups like
CNN and NBC and JM2,
involving what looked like
personal meetings, projects and ephemera. Of
special interest is that
when I viewed parts of the
files, all the reports had a paper-thin metallic band affixed to them
with colored UPC bar codes. There is no way for me to authenticate
the claims of JM2, but everything looked extremely official and very
elaborate. ....
THE PUBLICATION OF THE BANK OF AMERICA
OF LOUISIANA IN 1975 PROMPTED FALSE
RUMORS THAT JIM MORRISON FAKED HIS OWN
DEMISE, AN ALLEGATION THAT SURVIVES TO
THIS DAY
A courtroom transcript which I have seen implicates the FBI and
CIA in several coverups regarding JM2's intelligence career. These
show that there seems to be a systematic destruction of files relating
to JM2's spy activities. Also in my possession are files concerning
JM2's rogue financial activities with the Bank of America, and news
reports regarding lawsuits by and against JM2 for bank fraud and
espionage.
There also appear to be hundreds if not thousands of miscellaneous
files. These involve the CIA, Danish intelligence, and others.
There are also an active passport and banking IDs under the name
James Douglas Morrison.
Is this all for real or is this an elaborate hoax?
... The important
thing to note for the sake of this study is that someone or some group
is actively pursuing and setting up a mass "urban legend" regarding
James Morrison. They are painstakingly documenting it also. Whether
this is a hoax or not is not as important as the fact that a lot of official-looking information is being generated surrounding the myth and
legend of Jim Morrison. [14]
Any account of the second Morrison's career (according to Daniel
Brandt's NameBase website, an index of names related to intelligence
activity, the CIA employs one James Douglas Morrison, an active
agent stationed in France) would be incomplete without the names
of the Morrison double's Agency contacts, particularly William
Colby, a CIA director under Richard Nixon. Since 1972, Morrison's
double has left a surreal international trail of paper. The documents
include letters to and from Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards and
late CIA Director William Colby, through the Washington, DC law
firm of Colby, Miller and Hanes.
The day before his death, the original Jim Morrison sent a
telegram to Jonathan Dolger, a publishing contact in New York,
about changing the cover of a book of poetry written by the Door.
Bob Seymore, trying to piece together Morrison's final days in Paris,
phoned Dolger and discovered that someone else was interested in that
telegram:
"Oh, my God," [Dolger] said. It was as though he had been woken up
from an old nightmare. I asked him about the telegram but he said he
no longer had it. At first he thought maybe his former employers had
it in their files. Then he realized that a man whose name he had
forgotten contacted him to ask if he could have the telegram Jim sent.
This was a month after Jim died and the person said he was with Jim
when he died. ... [15]
There are a score of unknowns to resolve before writing Morrison
off as a crazed narco-rocker bent on self-destruction:
-
The cause of Jim Morrison's death was an unspecified "heart
failure," so states the forensic examiner's report, not an "attack" or
"seizure." The heart failed, quit. Dr. Vasille noted "a little blood
round the nostrils," indicating a hemorrhage, inconsistent with
heart failure. Paramedics from the local Fire Brigade reported that
Morrison was still smiling when they arrived, also not consistent
with the officially-stated cause of death.
-
Dr. Derwin, the singer's personal physician, told representatives of
the media industry: "Jim Morrison was in excellent health before
traveling to Paris." [16] Pam Courson, the last person to see him
alive, wrote in her signed statement to Paris police that the night
before his death, Morrison "looked in good health, he seemed
very happy." [17]
-
No autopsy was performed
-- a probable violation of French law
and certain violation of French custom.
-
Two persons could answer questions about the odd death. Ms.
Courson died of "apparent overdose" herself on April 24, 1974
-- a few days before a judge would have ruled in her favor concerning a dispute over the distribution of the Morrison inheritance, a decision that would have brought her, as Morrison's
common-law wife and sole heir, a quarter of the Doors' income
and an immediate payment of half a million dollars [18] -- and Dr.
Max Vassille, the medical examiner, consistently turns down all
interviews related to Morrison's death. [19]
-
Pamela's friends, James Riordan reports in
Break On Through,
believe she was murdered: some "suspect foul play, saying that
although Pam had been using heroin, she could not shoot herself
up. She always had to have someone else do it. Whoever did it,
they claim, knew he or she was injecting her with a lethal [dose],"
a "hot- shot." [20]
JIM
MORRISON'S CURSORY REPORT, PREPARED BY DR. MAX VASSILLE, PARIS, ON JULY
3, 1971. NO OFFICIAL AUTOPSY WAS CONDUCTED, IN VIOLATION OF FRENCH
LEGAL STRICTURES.
Jim Morrison died in a bathtub, this much is certain based on the
statements of Courson, friends of Morrison close to the case, and
Paris officials.
Dr. Vassille estimated the time of death to be 5:00 AM. Paramedics
arrived at the flat at exactly 9:24 AM, an interval of nearly four and a
half hours, but the bath water, they reported, was still "lukewarm." So
Morrison probably died two- three hours later than the death certificate claims. This would place the time of death closer to 7-8 AM.
Pamela Courson told police that Morrison had choked in his sleep, that she shook him awake. He was in wretched condition and
told her that a bath might make him feel better. This was roughly
2:30 in the morning. Courson told police that she fell asleep and
awoke to discover the body in the bathtub at about 5 AM. The timeline revised by water temperature leads to the inescapable conclusion
that he was alive after the estimated time of death.
The statements of witnesses and officials clash, and this often
happens when fear or coercion forces them to fabricate cover stories.
It's entirely possible that Courson was threatened, or feared to implicate others, and this is why Sugarman mumbles that she and all close
to the case "knew more about Morrison's death" than they ever
revealed -- exactly as witnesses to the murder of Brian Jones did
under duress for thirty years. Dr. Vassille may have been forced by
Pamela Courson's statements to find the time of death at 5 AM. This
and his refusal to talk to the press suggest that the medical examiner
was also under pressure -- orders from superiors, threats to himself or
his family -- and suppressed information regarding Morrison's death.
What were they concealing? Patricia Kennealy Morrison believes
that her husband-by-pagan-ceremony overdosed on heroin. She
sides with the late Albert Goldman on this particular point, although
in general she steadfastly rejects the "noxious lie-o-rama" allegations
that "Albert Goldigger" made concerning the deceased Door.
Dr. John Morgan written more than 100 articles and books on
clinical pharmacology, and "declares Jim to have quite likely died, in
his opinion, of a prolonged heroin overdose, an overdose drawn out
into respiratory depression over several hours because Jim did not
shoot the smack but snorted it," Patricia wrote in 1997. Other
medical specialists consulted by her agreed with this diagnosis,
finding "nasal or esophageal varices as the likely cause of Jim's
reported profuse bleeding." Dr. Morgan: "Pam's versions certainly
indicate that he was snorting heroin. A nasal or oral dose would
delay the decline into respiratory death." [21] The OD was gradual and
evidently not traumatic, to judge by the smile on his face when
found.
The consensus
among most investigative reporters, medical consultants, and Morrison's circle of friends is also that he
overdosed on
heroin. Pamela's closest friend at the time of Morrison's death, Diane
Gardiner, told biographer James Riordan that Courson had "confessed " to her. Courson "told me a lot about Jim's death. It's true that
he got into some of Pam's drugs and overdosed." [22]
Pamela told Sugarman that Morrison
-- who mortally feared the
narcotic after the death of Janis Joplin and ordinarily avoided it -- was
deeply depressed and intended to numb the pain by helping himself
to her provisions. "She started telling me something about Jim's death
being her fault and that he had found out that she was doing heroin,
and 'You know Jim, of course he wanted to try it.' Then she looked
at me and said, 'It was my stash -- Jim didn't know how to score. He
knew how to drink.' She said that later he didn't feel well and decided
to take a bath and she nodded out. But when I pressed her for details
she suddenly denied the whole thing." [23]
A similar account was told by Alan Ronay, a friend of
Jim Morrison's since UCLA film school, one of the last to see the rocker
alive. Ronay told a reporter for Paris Match in 1991 that Morrison was
still alive when Pam awoke and found him in the bath, a version that
conforms to the revised timeline. Ronay said that Pamela pulled him
aside after the medical examiners arrived and confided that Morrison
had been snorting heroin for 48 hours when she and Morrison fell
asleep listening to the first Doors LP. He was choking in his sleep and
struggling for air, and she woke him up and helped him to the bath.
She fell asleep and woke up again to find that he hadn't returned to
bed, discovered him bleeding from the nose and vomiting blood into
a pot. Then he told her that he felt better and she should go back to
bed. He died shortly thereafter. Pamela told Ronay, "Jim looked so
calm. He was smiling." [24]
Did he ingest poisoned opiate or a "hot shot?" If the posthumous
revelations are correct, Jim Morrison and Pamela Courson were both
killed by lethal doses of heroin. The absence of an autopsy report
precludes any attempt to determine the true cause of Morrison's
death, and some of the troubling questions raised here may never be
resolved completely if Danny Sugarman, the CIA rumor mongers,
and an indifferent press have their way, which raises one more pertinent question What's it to them?
NOTES
1. Laura Jackson, Golden Stone: The Untold Life and Tragic Death of Brian
Jones,
New York. St Martin's, 1992, p. 214. Jackson places the exact time of
death sometime between 11:30 on July 2 and midnight on July 3, the
official date.
2. Doctor Max
Vassille, forensic doctor, stated in his medical report
that
Morrison's death was "natural due to heart failure" -- Bob Seymore, The
End The Death of Jim Morrison, London. Omnibus Press, 1991, pp. 61, 63.
3. Quoted in the original Elektra Records bio release, 1967.
4. James Riordan and Jerry Prochnicky, Break On Through: The Life and
Death
of Jim Morrison, New York William Morrow, 1991, p. 375.
5. Riordan and Prochnicky, p 376.
6. Marianne Sinclair, Those Who
Died Young, London Plexus Publishing,
1979.
7. Thomas Lyttle, "Rumors, Myths, and Urban Legends Surrounding the
Death of Jim Morrison: in Secret and Suppressed, Jim Keith, ed,
Portland.
Feral House, 1993, p 117.
8. Henrik Kruger, The Great Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence &
International
Fascism, Boston South End Press, 1980, p 49.
9. Kruger, p 47.
10. Seymore, p 44, 78.
11. Ibid.
12. Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugarman, No One Here Gets Out Alive, New
York Warner, 1981, p. 372.
13. Jim Morrison, The Bank of America of Louisiana, [no city
listed].
Zeppelin
Publishing Corp., 1975.
14. Lyttle, pp. 117-18. The impersonations, Lyttle explains, "were part
of
sociological experiments like Artichoke or MKULTRA" (p. 119), CIA
mind control projects of the 1950s.
15. Seymore, p. 77.
16. Lyttle.
17. Seymore, p. 56.
18. Hopkins and Sugarman, pp. 376-77. Also, Pamela des Barres, Rock Bottom
Dark Moments in Music Babylon, New York. St. Martin's, 1996, p. 211.
19. Seymore, p 77.
20. Riordan and Prochnicky, p. 484.
21. Patricia Kennealy Morrison, "An Open Letter to Jim's Fans," October,
1997.
22. Riordan and Prochnicky, p. 458.
2. Ibid.
2.4 des Barres, p. 211.
Go to Next Page
|
