In Search of Jim Morrison in Paris

Normally Lonely Planet never disappoints, so when I got my copy on France it had the usual tips on what to see, what to eat, where to live, how to travel and as a footnote it also had a paragraph on Père Lachaise Cemetery or what is now famously known as the final resting place of rock legend Jim Morrison. Every year the cemetery gets more than 3.5 million visitors, making it the most visited cemetery in the world.

Even I wanted to visit Morrison’s grave and I was pretty sure that once I reached the cemetery it won’t be too difficult to locate the gravesite which is almost like a pilgrimage for rock enthusiasts.

So on a rainy Paris morning I took the underground metro line 2 to the Philippe Auguste station – the cemetery is just a 5-minute walk from the station. My wife and daughter also tagged along, thinking we would get done in half an hour. How much more time can a quick visit to a grave take? Clearly we were not prepared for what lay ahead.

Right at the entrance of the cemetery there is a board with all the famous names and the number of their graves on it. Jim Morrison shares his final resting place with other famous personalities like Oscar Wilde and Marcel Proust. His grave number is 30 in Zone 6.

But I soon realised, finding one specific grave in a cemetery with thousands of graves spread across 44 acres is no easy task. As we went around the cobbled paths of Père Lachaise Cemetery, the grandeur of some of the tombs convinced us that Morrison’s grave will also stand out. After all it’s in Paris that he died of heart failure on 3 July 1971. So the city had to pay a fitting tribute to the rock legend.

After looking around for almost half an hour, we still couldn’t find Zone 6 of the cemetery, forget about the grave. By this time it had started raining, and my wife and daughter had started losing their patience.

As a last ditch effort we tried the time-tested formula of following a pack of tourists. We left the main pathway of the cemetery and entered a narrow passage between graves. And there it was in front of us, Jim Morrison’s grave, minus all the grandeur we had expected, barricaded by metal fences.

Had it not been for the stream of his fans and the flowers placed on his grave, it would have been impossible to find. The simplicity of the grave surprised me, it just has a bronze plaque bearing his name and the Greek inscription: ΚΑΤΑ ΤΟΝ ΔΑΙΜΟΝΑ ΕΑΥΤΟΥ or "according to his own daemon, i.e., guiding spirit." Perhaps the spirit of free will that guided Morrison.

What actually stands out is the bark of a tree near the grave where Morrison’s fans have been sticking gums for years now. Perhaps a much better thing to do rather than defacing the grave with graffiti and carvings by hordes of fans, which used to happen before it was barricaded.

I have to confess that the simplicity of the grave initially disappointed me. But perhaps that’s exactly how Morrison and his family wanted the world to remember him, not through his grave site, but through his music and poetry.

There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors.

Jim Morrison

And I think that’s where I should have been looking for Morrison, in his songs, not in Paris.