When I was 12, Jim Morrison lit my fire. I could not put down Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugarman’s biography, No One Here Gets Out Alive (1980), which I hid in my textbooks like a fake ID. The Lizard King was, I learned, a poet, a satyr, a drunk, a mystic, who sang things such as “There’s a killer on the road / His brain is squirmin’ like a toad.”
Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen wrote way better lyrics, but they did not wear leather pants, get arrested, or pose shirtless. Morrison advertised a sexy anarchy, although this had its downside. According to No One Here Gets Out Alive and Oliver Stone’s biopic The Doors (1991), this rock god, a healthy man in his mid-20s, needed to be dangled outside a hotel window for functional coitus. Reading this in my bar mitzvah year, I learned to be careful of what I wished for.
