Or did he? While the book has many merits (the look at life inside the band, mention made of seemingly every concert performance the band ever made), much of what Davis reports in the early going is based on hearsay, speculation and supposition, and the book contains so many possiblys and maybes and perhapses that it all tends to cast Davis's research into question.įor example, we learn early on (though I'm not sure we really needed to know) that, as a child, Morrison was a bedwetter, a condition for which his mother had no patience. Davis claims that Morrison was molested by his father at a young age, that Morrison had a long series of homosexual relationships, that Morrison was a bully, a lout and a thoroughly unlikable youth, and that he assaulted and abused women on numerous occasions. Life, Death, Legend apart from other Morrison biographies is a series of startling revelations about the bad-boy singer that have only been the stuff of gossip and innuendo to this point. And there is no doubt that his account is as thorough as it's possible to get, picking up the thread of Morrison's life from his earliest days and moving right through until his overdose and death in a Paris bathtub in 1971. Hammer of the Gods, and well-lauded for accounts of The Rolling Stones, Bob Marley, Aerosmith and The Band (co-written with Levon Helm). Davis is an old hand at this sort of thing, best known for his spicy Led Zeppelin bio Band members Ray Manzarek ( Light My Fire) and John Densmore ( Riders on the Storm) have chipped in with their own first-person accounts, and there have been numerous picture books, lyric compilations, unauthorized biographies, speculative fictions and the like.īoston-based rock biographer Stephen Davis, however, has attempted to write the definitive account of the band and its charismatic but troubled lead singer. Rock historian David Dalton published the well received No One Gets Out of Here Alive (a book the band itself referred to as 'No One Here Tells Anything But Lies'). Among the first was Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman's Since the death of Jim Morrison in July, 1971, and the dissolution of The Doors soon thereafter, there have been many, many books dealing with the band and its 'debauched, drunken sot' (as noted groupie Miss Pamela once referred to him) of a lead singer.

Love Unlimited by Reese Morrison