How John Densmore believes “psychopath” Jim Morrison may have stayed alive
The Doors inter-band relationships appeared strained at the best of times. In Oliver Stone’s 1991 biopic of the band, we saw that drummer John Densmore arguably had the most conflicting friendship of its members with their singer Jim Morrison. Whilst the film is an excessive portrait of what took play in the late 1960s, its claims contain elements of truth.
The fact is that Densmore, compared to his other bandmates, was something of an outsider. He was not a literary nor artistic person in the same way that the UCLA-attending Morrison and Ray Manzarek had been. In fact, he has been reflective of how such types could be more prone to the dangers of excess, particularly Morrison.
“Some people wanted to keep shovelling coal in the engine, and I was like: ‘Wait a minute. So what if we have one less album? Maybe he’ll live?’” Densmore said. “I wasn’t mature enough to say that at the time. I wasn’t trying to enable him. It was another era. I used to answer the question: ‘If Jim was around today, would he be clean and sober?’ with a ‘no’. Kamikaze drunk. Now I’ve changed my mind. Of course, he would be sober. Why wouldn’t he be? He was smart.”
Ultimately, Densmore believed Morrison to be something of “a psychopath, a lunatic, a Dionysian madman, a voice that struck terror”. Indeed Morrison often took things as far as they could go. The band, after all, were named after an Aldous Huxley book entitled The Doors of Perception, in which Huxley documents his experience with the psychoactive drug mescaline.
Yet perhaps the best mantra to sum up Morrison comes from the poet William Blake, “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom”, something that Morrison himself was keen to tell his friends at every opportunity. However, this excess would ultimately lead to Morrison’s tragic and untimely death. For Densmore, “It took me years to forgive Jim. And now I miss him so much for his artistry.”
Yet the band’s brush with hallucinogenic drugs would contribute to their unique sound. Densmore notes that as a group, and perhaps even as a society, they were wary of certain substances taking it too far. He said, “When we took LSD, it was legal. We were street scientists exploring the mind.”
He added, “I experimented with cocaine during the ’70s and ’80s. But it wasn’t my drug of choice. Ugh, drug. I hate that word. I was shocked when heroin became popular. Even Jim knew heroin was a serious drug. Heroin tried to make you forget everything. It scared me. So I stayed away.”
