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Cover of a bootleg album of Jim Morrison's The Lost Paris Tapes.

The Lost Paris Tapes is the title given to a recorded collection of unedited poems and songs by rock musician and poet Jim Morrison of The Doors. Although Morrison intentionally made the recordings, they are considered bootlegs because they were never officially released to the public in their unedited form by Morrison or his heirs.

The title of the collection is something of a misnomer because most of the recordings were made in Los Angeles in March 1969, long before Morrison traveled to Paris (where he died under mysterious circumstances in 1971). However, he appears to have taken the Los Angeles recordings with him to Paris,^[1] where they were found among his belongings after his death.

[edit] Los Angeles session (March 1969)

The Los Angeles session features a serious but relaxed Morrison taping spoken-word versions of his own written poetry. Morrison can be heard repeating certain sections of poems for technical or aesthetic reasons, and he can be heard giving occasional production cues, such as when certain sound effects should be added at a later date. Morrison's efforts to obtain clear recordings and his additional verbal directions suggest that he planned to use the recordings in a much more ambitious project that would merge his smoothly edited voiceovers with background sounds and music.^[2]

Cover of the official Doors album An American Prayer, which combined tracks from The Lost Paris Tapes with new music recorded by surviving Doors members.

Some of these recordings were later mixed with new music tracks recorded by surviving Doors members Ray Manzarek, Robbie Krieger, and John Densmore, and released as the official Doors album An American Prayer.

[edit] Paris session (16 June 1971)

The only recording on the collection that Morrison actually made in Paris is a segment featuring an apparently drunken Morrison playing around in a studio with two equally inebriated American street musicians. Morrison had befriended the street musicians only a short time earlier, when he found them performing Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young tunes on a Paris sidewalk.

Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek has referred to this recording as "drunken gibberish," observing, "If you haven't heard them, you're missing nothing."^[3]

However, once Morrison gave up trying to perform with the two street musicians, he broke into a solo performance of "Orange County Suite." A writer for Rolling Stone magazine later called this piece "an astounding version of . . . [an] unfinished, unrealized paean to his old lady (Pamela Courson) that had been rejected from at least two Doors albums. . . . It was a drunken, and mostly ad-libbed, recording. Yet, listening carefully . . . , one hears the authentic last of Jim Morrison, two weeks before he died, as he roars spontaneous verses and imagery about his hard-hearted woman, his anguish and his obsessions, easily deploying a poetic champion's compositional facility for the natural cadence and spontaneous rhyme."^[4]

Morrison offhandedly labeled the resulting reel-to-reel tape of the session "Jomo and the Smoothies" (Jomo being a pseudonym for Morrison).

[edit] Track listing

Track listing for the Los Angeles poetry session:

• "Far Arden"
• "Radio Dark Night" (Take 1)
• "Radio Dark Night" (Take 2)
• "A Vast Radiant Beach" (Awake)
• "Moonshine Night"
• "Frozen Moment By A Lake"
• "Bird Of Prey" (song)
• "Dawns HWY"
• "Under Waterfall" (song)
• "The Hitchhiker"
• "Winter Photography" (song)
• "Whiskey, Mystics And Men" (song)
• "Orange Country Suite" (song)
• "All Hail The American Night"
• "Far Arden Poem"
• "Texas Radio & The Big Beat #1 (Letter From Shirley)"
• "Tales From The American Night"
• * "The American Night"
• "The Holy Shay"
• "Hitler"
• "Latino Chrome"
• "To Come Of Age/Black Polished Chrome"
• "Search On, Man"
• "Indian, Indian" (Sirens And Horns Honking)
• "Woman In The Window" (song)
• "A Vision Of America":
  • "From The Book Of Days"
  • "A Vision Of America"
  • "Motel, Money, Murder, Madness"
• "Earth, Air, Fire, Water"
• "Discovery (Angels And Sailors)"
• "Now Listen To This" ("Texas Radio & The Big Beat" #2)
• "Stoned, Immaculate"
• "White Blind Light (Thank You, O Lord)"

Track listing for the Paris session:

• "Guitar Tuning And Chats"
• "Orange County Suite"

Total elapsed time: 51m:14s

[edit] Footnotes

[edit] External links

• The Lost Paris Tapes bootleg - full streaming
• Stephen Davis, "The Last Days of Jim Morrison: A Rare Look into the Rock God's Journals," Rolling Stone, 16 June 2004.
• A Brief Analysis of the Lost Paris Tapes
• Jim Morrison's Quiet Days in Paris