‘The Lost Paris Tapes’: Listen to the final recording of Jim Morrison
Before slipping away into the 27 Club, Jim Morrison tumbled out The Doors and tiptoed his way to Paris, where his unofficial solo endeavours became the last known recordings of his voice.
After wrapping up their album LA Woman in 1971, the Doors’ frontman told the band he needed some time away and joined his partner in Paris. The two had rented out a flat in the bohemian Le Marais district, and he wrote to his friends that he spent a lot of his time taking long walks along the city’s streets, alone. Whether this time led to a surge of creative inspiration is unknown, but the buzzing beehive of a poet’s brain is known to sleep not.
In fact, his final studio recording was a kind of poetry reading. Now known as The Lost Paris Tapes, they’re a jumbled accumulation of the last written songs, feelings and poems of a now sanctified musical genius.
The raw, unfinished sound was a combination of Morrison’s singing and stone-cold poetry reading, accompanied by a few unknown street musicians from Paris. A large chunk of the tapes had long before been recorded, however, in Los Angeles, but Morrison brought them with him to Paris to be found among his possessions after his death.
Its recordings had been sent to composer Fred Myrow, since they were set to work on a theatre project together. In a 1994 interview with GASP Magazine, Myrow revealed that his plans to collaborate with Morrison eventually evolved into an idea for a musical: “We were well along in the plans for a musical that he was going to write the text and lyrics for, and I was going to do the music. It was all planned for me to join him in France, he was going to rent a chateau and we were really going to move into the next phase of work on this piece that we very thoroughly discussed; but, unfortunately, we all know what happened… [It was] the worst shock of my life.”
The recoding hadn’t attracted public notice for a couple of decades, dismissed by Doors colleagues as “drunken gibberish”, as keyboardist Ray Manzarek allegedly described it to be. Although there’s some truth to the discombobulation of the performance’s semblance, the unfiltered vein it took is why so many Morrison fans clung onto its element of memorabilia.
The crude, undressed performance invites listeners to imagine a street performer recording on their solitary intersection, rid of masterly studio technology. It portrays an artist without everything he became enveloped in, free of public expectations, the pressures of fame, and the need for his words to make any sense at all.
Some of these recordings were later mixed with new instrumentation recorded by the surviving band members and released as the ninth and final official Doors album, An American Prayer, in 1978. Doors fans then unlost and circulated The Lost Paris Tapes since 1994, in recognition of its drunk pathetic fallacy, its honest stream of consciousness, and its brutish unravelling of a troubled genius’ state of mind.
