Jim Morrison
Born on December 8, 1943, in Melbourne, Florida, Jim Morrison was an American rock singer and songwriter. He studied film at UCLA, where he met the members of what would become the Doors. Known for his drinking and drug use and outrageous stage behavior, in 1971 Morrison left the Doors to write poetry and moved to Paris, where he died of heart failure
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."
