Jim Morrison biography

Synopsis

Rebellious Youth

Singer and songwriter. Jim Morrison was born as James Douglas Morrison on December 8, 1943 in Melbourne, Florida. His mother, Clara Clarke Morrison, was a homemaker, and his father, George Stephen Morrison, was a naval aviator who rose to the rank of Real Admiral. George Morrison was the commander of United States naval forces aboard the flagship USS Bon Homme Richard during the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Incident that helped ignite the Vietnam War. Admiral Morrison was also a skilled pianist who enjoyed performing for friends at parties. Morrison's younger brother Andy remembered, "There was always a big crowd around the piano with my dad playing popular songs that he could pick up by ear."

During his early years, Jim Morrison was a dutiful and highly intelligent child, excelling at school and taking a particular interest in reading, writing and drawing. He underwent a traumatic but formative experience around the age of five when driving with his family through the New Mexico desert. A truck packed with Indian workers had crashed, leaving dead and mutilated bodies of the victims strewn across the highway. "All I saw was funny red paint and people lying around, but I knew something was happening, because I could dig the vibrations of the people around me," Morrison recalled. "And all of a sudden I realized that they didn't know what was happening any more than I did. That was the first time I tasted fear." Although his family members have since suggested that Morrison greatly exaggerated the incident, it nevertheless made a deep impression on him that he described years later in the lyrics of his song "Peace Frog": "Indians scattered on dawn's highway bleeding/ Ghosts crowd the young child's fragile eggshell mind."

Morrison moved frequently as a child due to his father's naval service, first from Florida to California and then to Alexandria, Virginia, where he attended George Washington High School. As a high school student, Morrison began to rebel against his father's strict discipline, discovering alcohol and women and bristling at all forms of authority. "One time he told the teacher he was having a brain tumor removed and walked out of class," his sister recalled. Nevertheless, Morrison remained a voracious reader, an avid diarist and a decent student. When he graduated from high school in 1961, he asked his parents for the complete works of Nietzsche as a graduation present – a testament to both his bookishness and his rebelliousness.

Upon graduating from high school, Morrison returned to his birth state of Florida to attend Florida State University in Tallahassee. After making the Dean's List his freshman year, Morrison decided to transfer to the University of California at Los Angeles to study film.