Jim Morrison, iconic singer of the band, The Doors, would have been 70 years old this week. The film clips of his performances are still compulsively watchable: he writhes onstage, his thighs encased in leather trousers, his hair a corona under the lights. There is no denying the power of his voice which ranges from a seductive croon to a throaty roar. There is no denying the invitation into his song-scapes, apocalyptic realms where one may be incinerated by rage or desire. He was beautiful and magnificently wrecked.

   His songs began as poems and evolved into performance pieces. His fellow band members still recall that every performance was different and that they never knew what might happen. The audiences always seemed to be at the brink of delirium or riot. In this information-saturated age, he left us only his best and that still beguiles us. The contemporary recording engineer, now in his 70s, looks up in wonder as he turns the dial and replays an early demo. Morrison’s voice leaps out from five decades ago, still huge and growling like a tiger. Then there is that photograph: Morrison’s bare torso splayed like a crucified christ. His mouth is impossibly sensuous, his stare is feline and rapacious. How many times have we seen this picture? It is pasted up permanently in the teenage bedroom of the zeitgeist.

   Morrison’s family settled in the 70s in the same little California beach town where I grew up. A conservative place, with two military bases, it first learned of what happened to upright Admiral Morrison’s wastrel poet of a son on the night the Doors appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. The sensation this caused in America’s youth was reflected by a ripple of horror in my town, then deliberately repressed, but the park bench where Jim had reputedly carved his name became a spot of pilgrimage for misfit kids in my high school. Morrison’s grave in Pere Lachaise cemetery, Paris, still attracts a queue of incense-burning acolytes.

Commentators who mention the song ‘The End’ as a relevant to the Vietnam War are more correct than they know. Morrison’s short and incendiary life can be seen as the most complete rebellion from the military values of his childhood, the ethos that sustained and propagated a disastrous war that corrupted or destroyed many who took part in it. If the gods of war brought death and dishonour, he was our Dionysus, offering us an overflowing cup and the dark, poetic grandeur of his songs.  – Amy Wack