Arts & Entertainment

Jim Morrison: 50 years of a ‘perfect’ legend

Paris, Jul 2 (EFE).- Saturday marks 50 years since Jim Morrison, American musician, poet and one of the greatest rock legends, died in Paris.

Morrison was found dead in an apartment in the neighborhood of Le Marais, where he had moved to recover from his drug addiction and be inspired by the artistic spirit of the French capital.

With six albums in just five years, Morrison’s The Doors band became one of the greatest rock groups in history to combine the “perfect” pop songs like Light My Fire with darker music like The End, according to one of Spain’s top music critics, Diego Manrique.

The lyricist was famed for his provocative, wild and dramatic concert performances often guarded by heavy police presence. Dressed in black leather and often singing topless on stage, Morrison became not only a music idol, but a global sex symbol.

The Doors music even made it to the big screens and became the soundtrack of iconic movies like Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.

But after years of success, accompanied by excess, the rock legend moved to Paris in March 1971. Four months later he was found dead in his rented apartment due to heart failure. He was 27 years old.

According to witnesses and acquaintances, Morrison died of a heroin overdose, but an autopsy was never performed, and the cause of death never investigated.

Today, Morrison rests in peace in the emblematic Paris Père Lachaise cemetery, closing the full circle of the “perfect myth”, Manrique tells Efe.

Morrison’s world-renowned grave is one of the most famous and visited in the cemetery, with fans traveling all the way to Paris just to lay flowers and statues close to their legend’s tomb.

Amid the 70,000 graves and 27,000 urns at Père Lachaise lay Oscar Wilde, Federic Chopin and Edith Piaf among other celebrities.

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