IT’S AMAZING WHAT can happen when you live right off the Sunset Strip. About 15 years ago on a warm balmy December night, I was in my living room of my apartment, watching a movie on my laptop when suddenly a breeze blew into my window. I was startled and then inexplicably began to say in my mind “Jim Morrison.” I said this over and over again. I then began to think Jim Morrison is here, and I stopped my movie.
I was so perplexed especially as I was not a fan of the Doors or Jim Morrison nor did I know much about him. But there I was feeling that Jim Morrison’s spirit and energy was here with me now in my living room.
I Googled Jim Morrison only to discover that the night he visited me, December 8th, was his birthday.
Then I began to look at a lot of articles and videos, and I wondered why would Jim Morrison be with me in my apartment?
I soon realized that he frequently played two blocks from me at The Whisky and that he stayed at that Alta Cienega motel four blocks from me on La Cienega. Not to mention that his recording studio where he recorded “LA Woman” is about five blocks from me on Santa Monica Boulevard, next door to the current Shake Shack location. Jim Morrison also lived on Norton Avenue in West Hollywood back then.
As he walked down Sunset Boulevard back in the 1960s he would have passed by my street many nights a week. I know my apartment building had many celebrities in the 1950s and 1960s who stayed and visited here, so it would not be a surprise if Jim Morrison had friends who stayed here and whom he often visited.
Now here is where it gets even crazier. About eight years ago I found my first cousins who live in the Philadelphia area on Facebook. One day my cousin Danielle said to me out of the blue on the phone: “I had a dream about Jim Morrison, and we were at a graveyard.” And I was like what? She says: “Yeah, it was really real and he spoke to me for a while.” And I said to her: “Danielle, Jim Morrison visited me one night in my apartment seven years ago.
I then realized that the only thing my cousin Danielle and I had in common today was that we were both visited by Jim Morrison. And Jim Morrison could see that these two people, my cousin on the East Coast and me on the West Coast, were somehow connected and related.
Even “The Doors” movie directed by Oliver Stone was filmed at The Whisky in 1990 on the Sunset Strip two blocks from me.
Now whenever I walk down the street I think of my visitor Jim Morrison, and it’s kind of cool knowing I have a rock legend who I believe somehow connected my cousin and me with his presence.
As he sometimes said, this is the strangest life I’ve ever known.
Jerome Cleary is a longtime West Hollywood resident and business owner. He can be contacted at JeromeCleary@aol.com
