Jim Morrison's Grave

Even on a gray day in Paris last week, there was one place you could find a crowd of tourists from places as varied as Rome, Siberia and Orlando, Fla.--Jim Morrison's grave in Père-Lachaise cemetery. Forget Frédéric Chopin, Oscar Wilde, Edith Piaf and the hundreds of other luminaries interred among its chestnut trees. The frontman of the Doors has been the cemetery's headline draw ever since the rock star's untimely death in Paris at the age of 27 

Thirty-six years later, the anniversary of his passing is still one of the cemetery's main events, as fans gather around the tombstone to light candles, sing songs and remember an artist and an era that are still very much alive to them. Vandals long ago dismantled the outsize bust of Morrison that once topped the grave. By then, the grave site had been covered in graffiti by fans. Other tombstones, vandalized with arrows labeled Jim that directed the way to Morrison's grave, have since been wiped clean. Cemetery staff blocked off the plot with metal barricades a few years ago. Asked for directions, a staff member sniffs: "We are a cemetery, not a tourist service.

This French history of this cemetary is in direct competition with an industry of rock nostalgia. One block from the cemetery, a café displays old Doors concert posters in its windows. Florists near the site sell Morrison T shirts for $22, along with wreaths. "I listen to his music all the time," says Olesya Sergeeva, a 21-year-old student from Siberia who is in Paris on a summer work program. She had headed to the cemetery on her first day off from waiting tables at a restaurant in the Eiffel Tower.

(article by  VIVIENNE WALT of Time Magazine July 2007)