A fan holds a Doors album to commemorate Jim Morrison's death in this undated file pic. 
First published in the Daily Maverick 168 weekly newspaper.
It’s 3 July 2021. The world is a mess. The pandemic is still brutalising the rapidly heating planet, and the billions are still hungry, and unvaccinated. The war in the Horn of Africa appears close to exploding. US forces are pulling out of the seemingly endless war in Afghanistan, a move that will in itself precipitate untold deaths as the Taliban moves in. The possibility of war over Taiwan lurks in the background, not yet happening, but not too far either. Democracies of the world are under concerted attack from the reactionary forces, all of them using the same autocratic playbook that threatens to pull us back at least half a century.
The world exactly 50 years ago was not a fun place either. The Vietnam War was to continue needlessly, and meaninglessly shed lives for four more years. Not too far from there, Bangladesh was being born out of East Pakistan at the cost of up to three million lives (estimates vary). China’s disastrous Cultural Revolution was in full swing. Europe was gripped by a wave of anarchist terrorism.
On 3 July 1971, another horrible thing happened: a young man died in Paris. His name was Jim Morrison. To me, he was always, of course, Jim Morrison of The Doors.
By the time he died, aged 27, Morrison and his friends Ray Manzarek, Robby Krieger and John Densmore had managed to squeeze six albums into four years of unbelievable artistic heights. They were true revolutionaries who pushed the barriers of modern music and expression like few did before, or after.
Morrison was a shooting star who, we can say now with the benefit of hindsight, could never have lasted for long. His raw emotions were spilling into his lyrics with an intensity that had to burn the material body that contained such a restless soul. The Doors’ first big hit on the first album, The Doors, Robby Krieger’s Light My Fire, got a final spicing up by Morrison, who added, to an already daring song, this line:
… And our love become a funeral pyre.
It had not been done before. Even in the revolutionary year that was 1967, the songs were not supposed to be dark and murderous, love was not supposed to lead to death.
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To allay any doubts of The Doors not being just another hit-making band, the first album’s other big hit, The End, announced the arrival of the daring, the brilliant, and clearly tortured genius of Morrison. Just listen to it. It was several generations ago, and yet it is still shockingly strongly concentrated and raw. He was just 24 at that moment, but could have been 24,000 years old.
