A response to Jeff Finn’s Before The End docu-series
It’s proving to be one of those years when Jim Morrison and the band he famously fronted seem to be everywhere in the media. In honour of The Doors’ 60th anniversary, there have been elaborate vinyl reissues of their old LPs and a ‘lost’ early mix of the Strange Days album released for Record Store Day. The man who so brilliantly portrayed Morrison in Oliver Stone’s dubious 1991 Doors biopic, Val Kilmer, passed away of cancer on April 1st. There will be a screening of the 2009 documentary When You’re Strange at the Tribeca Film Festival on June 14th, complete with a follow-up Q&A with drummer John Densmore. And Netflix has been promising a comprehensive documentary (or something) on Morrison for months now. Still, the biggest and most sensational Morrison and Doors event of the year so far—indeed, the car crash that is both horrifying and impossible to turn away from—has been Before The End: Searching for Jim Morrison.
Before The End is the long-promised brainchild of one Jeff Finn (born February, 1967 in Chicago). It is a three-part Apple TV documentary series that director-narrator Finn refers to as a ‘docu-mystery’.
Finn originally finished his intended documentary on Morrison nearly a decade ago; but then, supposedly in 2016, he encountered a Facebook photo of The Doors’ John Densmore with a bearded and long-haired elderly man who bore a striking resemblance to L.A. Woman-era Jim Morrison. Finn subsequently spent the next few years tracking down and interviewing the Morrison look-alike in question, one Frank X (as he is referred to in the series) from Syracuse, New York, allegedly, and doing follow-up investigations with professionals and Morrison intimates.
The three episodes are respectively entitled ‘Life’, ‘Death’ and ‘Afterlife’, but their coverage is far from linear, and Morrison’s story—if not Finn’s—is all over the place. “I’ve spent nearly forty years attempting to bring Jim Morrison, the human being, to light,” states Finn in the introduction to the second episode. Maybe so, but there’s quite a few facts and theories that he’s missed or flubbed along the way.
Before The End on the IMDb
Take Morrison’s early sexual development for example. In the first two episodes, Finn focusses heavily on the claim made by Morrison intimate Linda Ashcroft that the singer had confided in her that his father molested him repeatedly from the time he was a small boy. The account is—or was—found in Ashcroft’s 1997 memoir Wild Child: Life with Jim Morrison, the first edition of which was withdrawn after Morrison’s parents, Admiral G. Steve and Clara Morrison, successfully sued publisher Hodder & Stoughton (London). In the second episode, much fuss is made over Morrison’s MAD-inspired teenaged drawings of man-boy fellatio scenes and the like (preserved by boyhood friend Girard ‘Fud’ Ford), complete with a present-day cognitive behavioral therapist’s blind assessment that child protective services should be contacted immediately in regards to the case.
But no mention is made of Patricia Kennealy’s impression that it was actually the failure of at least one of Morrison’s parents to address the “alleged abuse by an adult”—not necessarily a close family member—that impacted the young singer and estranged him from his family (Kennealy-Morrison, p. 38). In fact, despite tying the knot with Morrison in a Wiccan ceremony in 1970, no mention is made of the intellectually formidable Kennealy (1946–2021) or her Strange Days memoir throughout the entire series. Not that the late novelist and music critic in question was exactly a bastion of veridicity, mind you, in light of all that’s come to light in recent decades regarding her, her relationship with Morrison, and the alleged Morrison baby she aborted in 1970. (After she referred to Yours Truly as a “pretentious ass” several years ago, I emailed her, pointing out that it was probably the most accurate she’d been in well over four decades.) However, Kennealy (originally Kennely) was undeniably close to Morrison, and understandably privy to his “hints” as she called them (Strange Days, p. 407). Furthermore, judging from her scathingly frank assessments of such Morrison intimates and associates as Pamela Courson and Danny Sugerman, there’s little chance Kennealy would have held her tongue if she had heard convincing evidence of father-son incest. Also, in all fairness to Admiral Morrison, one must find it somewhat puzzling that an abusive father would refuse his grown son the money to record his band’s demo—as noted in the second episode—for fear of incurring his wrath, legal or otherwise. It bears pointing out that Kennealy also seemed to suggest that Morrison’s aforementioned dubious girlfriend, Pamela Courson, may have been a victim of abuse or neglect, as well (Strange Days, p. 398).
Much ado is also made about the fourteen-year-old Morrison and his friend Fud Ford spying on classmate Joy Allyn (or Allen—spellings tend to vary) and her mother as they changed into their bathing suits. But no mention is made of Morrison’s contrived molesting of a ten-year-old girl on a public bus during his time at Florida State University in the early 1960s; or, on Hallowe’en night, his ‘flashing’ young trick-or-treaters at the house he shared with fellow FSU students. Nor is there mention of the unspecified ‘embarrassing situation’ that a Clearwater uncle of his had to bail him out of when he became drunk after registering for the draft on his eighteenth birthday in December, 1961. This in spite of such episodes having been documented in No One Here Gets Out Alive and other biographies.
In the first episode, a Clearwater, Florida acquaintance, Bob Delack, insists that Morrison preferred heroin when visiting the third-floor ‘smoke room’ of coffeehouse Beaux Arts during his time at St. Petersburg junior college; and that the establishment’s proprietor, painter-dancer Tom Reese (1917–2006), allowed Morrison to read his poetry at the venue. John Balcomb, who is described as a “Beaux Arts expert”, also suspects that Reese talked Morrison into bed on occasions. However, Finn fails to note the fact that in No One Here Gets Out Alive the bohemian hangout is referred to as the Renaissance Gallery and Coffeehouse, and its owner, Allen Rhodes. Also, no connexion is attempted between Morrison’s alleged homosexual activities and FSU roommate Nick Kallivokas’s account of him “contemplating his anus” while crouching naked above a mirror. At the end of the day, one cannot help but suspect that the gay-Morrison and youthful heroin anecdotes were included to compete with the account of a teenaged Lou Reed scoring smack and taking his girlfriend to a gay bar in Todd Haynes’s 2021 Velvet Underground documentary.
Finn’s mind is apparently “blowing” as former Morrison schoolmate Bonnie Randall Boller relates how Morrison, Fud Ford and another classmate or two played together as a musical group while attending Alameda High in 1957–58—“nearly a decade” before rising to prominence with The Doors. Oddly enough, though, Finn doesn’t acknowledge the various accounts of Morrison and fellow UCLA film student Dennis Jakob toying with the idea of forming a band called The Doors: Open and Closed as early as 1964. As for previous singing experience specifically, Finn fails to note that Morrison’s former brother-in-law, Alan Graham, has insisted in an undated interview for the American Legends website that Morrison fairly regularly sang hymns and popular songs with his family “around the piano until about junior college and perhaps [on] a few occasions after.” According to the former husband of Anne Morrison, “[brother] Andy, Jim, and the Admiral could harmonize like professionals.”
Similarly, Finn uses a story about Morrison taking an interest in Mick Jagger’s wardrobe and stage presence (at a Californian Rolling Stones concert that some friends had attended) as a segue into his account of The Doors’ formation and their swift rise to success. But Finn is seemingly unaware of Morrison’s strong dislike for the British singer (“Jim hates Jagger.” – Strange Days, p. 161), as well as his preference for The Kinks, The Animals and The Who. It seems he is also unaware that Morrison most likely lifted the idea for his leather stage outfit and much of his onstage antics from poet-dancer Gerard Malanga, after witnessing him perform with The Velvet Underground as part of Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable multimedia show when the New York troupe performed in San Francisco in 1966 (Rock and Roll, Episode 7: ‘The Wild Side’, 1995).
Finn also briefly discusses, with former Doors booking agent Todd Schiffman, how the ‘Lizard King’ was a contrived stage persona; that Morrison was “a smart guy” who knew he was “putting the world on”. But no consideration is given to the Lizard King’s origins; to Morrison’s film and theatre studies at FSU and UCLA; his proposed set design for Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and doubtless familiarity with Williams’s The Night of the Iguana—the 1961 dramatic vehicle for antihero T. Lawrence Shannon: a drifting and sexually permissive defrocked Episcopal priest turned tour guide (portrayed by Richard Burton in the 1964 cinematic version), who is experiencing a nervous breakdown in the midst of a group of Baptist schoolteachers, an underaged seductress, a chaste female painter, an elderly dying poet, and a titular lizard at a cheap Mexican hotel.
Even more curiously, Finn insists in the early minutes of the first episode that Morrison “had no formal musical training”. It is documented, however, that Morrison received piano lessons in his early years. “When I was a kid I tried piano for a while,” he told Jerry Hopkins in the 1969 Rolling Stone interview, “but I didn’t have the discipline to keep up with it. Only a few months. I think I got to about the third grade book.” Morrison obviously had enough affinity with the instrument to improvise confidently while adlibbing a spoken-word piece during the filming of the Feast of Friends documentary in 1968. He also supplied the backing piano when recording his ‘Orange County Suite’ and ‘American Night’ poems at Elektra Sound Recorders in February of ’69.
At one point in the second episode Frank X talks briefly about his liking for Brian Jones, including how he was intrigued by the “native recordings” that Jones had made in Morocco shortly before his 1969 death. “Did Frank […] imply that he listened to Rolling Stones demos directly from Brian Jones?” asks narrator Finn. “How would a supposed maintenance man from somewhere in New York have access to such insider knowledge?” What Finn doesn’t seem to realise is that Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka (recorded 1968) was readily available from Rolling Stones Records by 1971. A CD edition was released by Point Music in 1995.
The contentious Facebook photo of Frank X and John Densmore that sent Finn down the rabbit hole
Doors roadie Gareth Blyth (1952–2025) maintains in the second episode that he had been informed by road manager Vince Treanor that Morrison was to be “thrown out of the band” if he “act[ed] up one time” onstage during the upcoming tour of 1970–71. However, the ‘tour’ in question was actually nothing more than two consecutive dates: December the 11th in Dallas and the following night in New Orleans. Furthermore, these shows were more or less a trial ‘one-off’ – Morrison having announced some three months previous that the band’s dreary early-morning set at the ill-fated Isle of Wight festival in late August had been his final public performance. Yes, there was an obvious indication that the other Doors had at least a backup plan to carry on as a trio in the event of Morrison’s incarceration or exile—their Other Voices album appeared in October of 1971, only some three months after Morrison’s (supposed) death. But Morrison expressed his interest in recording further albums with the band, both in a phone call from Paris to (a non-receptive) John Densmore in June of ’71 (Riders on the Storm, p. 7), and in a conversation with Patricia Kennealy in January of the same year – making it clear in the latter that “no touring” would follow the annual albums he was envisioning (Strange Days, p. 267).
Finn quotes Morrison ‘assistant’ Robin Wertle and a doctor that the singer, in his final weeks and days in France, was not an alcoholic, and was as “healthy as a horse”. But this is in stark contrast to the pathetic exiled man revealed in a postcard and three lengthy letters that he mailed to Patricia Kennealy in April, May and June of 1971. The Morrison that reportedly wrote to Kennealy had been ill, was despairing, and unable to write properly. The one long, twisting reflective poem that comprised his ‘Paris Journal’, published posthumously in The American Night: The Writings of Jim Morrison, Volume II in 1990, bears out the latter claim.
In his response to Pamela Courson’s claim that Morrison had been treated for asthma while living in Paris, Finn insists that Andy Morrison had told him that he has no recollection of his brother ever having asthma. But this is contrary to the claims of Morrison’s former brother-in-law, Alan Graham, who has stated in an undated interview with Gary James (ClassicBands.com) that Morrison suffered from asthma from a young age, and that his family’s early moves to New Mexico and California had been prompted in part by his ill health.
In a February ’25 interview with Zack Kopp for Medium, Finn conveniently insists that he didn’t seek out Patricia Kennealy in his investigations because he felt that she “had been granted more than enough mainstream exposure over the decades”. Finn’s failure to acknowledge Kennealy’s presence in Morrison’s life also entails the omission of an anecdote pertinent to the possibility of him having faked his death. According to Kennealy, in October of ’71 a package was mailed to her containing a sealed envelope bearing her name (“Patricia-Kennely-Morrison”) in Morrison’s handwriting. In it, strung on Morrison’s long gold neck-chain, was the gold claddagh wedding band she had given him for their Wiccan wedding, or handfasting. Interestingly, this was in keeping with a promise he had made to her in a letter from Paris: that he would be back to settle with her in Manhattan no later than October. To the best of my knowledge, no-one has ever come forward to claim responsibility for mailing the ring to Kennealy.
Of course, speaking of Morrison’s potential for disappearance, the majority of the series is dedicated to Finn’s search for clues and evidence that the singer faked his death in July of 1971, and that he is still alive in the person of one Frank X. It is a recurring and predominant theme—for lack of a better word; all roads and trains of thought lead to this supposition. What is truly amazing, though, is how, on his quest to discover all the pieces of the puzzle and put them together, Finn has carelessly overlooked the most vital and revealing pieces—pieces shaped and cut by Morrison himself, with or without the knowledge and participation of the other Doors; pieces that have been hiding in plain sight for over half a century. Naturally, I’m referring to the clues that are inherent in the L.A. Woman album.
The Doors’ final album with Morrison may indeed possess the Mona Lisa of album covers; and any hardcore Doors fan worth his or her oats knows that one need look no further than that front cover for the teasing breadcrumbs of a possible Morrison plot or ruse. To begin with, there’s the name of the band: DOORS, as opposed to THE DOORS with the definite article setting it off. This suggests that now (in 1971) or going forward, we are not dealing with the same band or situation here. Furthermore, unlike all the other letters, the two Os in ‘DOORS’ and the O in the titular ‘WOMAN’ are on a slant, suggesting the keyholes of the original band insignia. The three ‘keyholes’ are all slanted counterclockwise, suggesting that three doors are unlocked and open—i.e., that Densmore, Krieger and Manzarek are free to do as they please. Also, please consider the coverage of the word ‘DOORS’: it covers almost exactly the heads of Manzarek, Densmore and Krieger beneath, and does not extend to Morrison on the viewer’s far right. As well, it appears as if a spotlight is shining on the three musicians with Densmore at the centre—Morrison’s black shirt helping define the lower-right arc of the circular form. In stark contrast, Morrison appears purposely slumped beneath the others in the shadows, a discernible smirk upon his face. What’s even more telling is what lies inherent in the album’s title, which is curiously devoid of a space between ‘L.A.’ and ‘WOMAN’—almost as if a jumble of letters and periods had been preferred. If one looks closely, the letters M-A-N lie directly beneath Morrison, the central letter A forming an arrow pointing to his head. The remaining letters and periods can be construed as a common acronym with just a minimum of reassembling. At this point it should be noted that Morrison was quite adept at contriving anagrams. With this in mind, the album’s hidden or secretly intended title becomes obviously apparent: MAN A.WO.L.
If Jeff Finn in all his alleged expertise hasn’t spotted these pertinent peculiarities and contrived anomalies, then he mustn’t have been looking very hard.
The image on the inner sleeve of a young naked ‘L.A.WOMAN’ crucified on a telephone pole only drives home the idea of the persecuted Morrison, convicted (crucified) in Miami, finding deliverance by becoming a ‘MAN A.WO.L’.
Finn demonstrates no real awareness of relevant anagrams, symbolism or even coincidences in ‘L.A. Woman’ the song either. The repeated line “L.A. Woman [‘Man A.WO.L’], Sunday afternoon” strikes no chord with Finn, despite the fact that if Morrison actually flew the coop in Paris in the summer of ’71, then the afternoon of Sunday, July the 4th would be as logical a time as any for initiating such an undertaking. Nor do lines about “Motel money / Murder madness” and the idea of changing “the mood / from glad to sadness” have any resonance for the conspiracy-minded Finn, apparently. Not even the notion that “Mr. Mojo Risin’” (J-I-M M-O-R-R-I-S-O-N) is “gonna keep on risin’” (from the dead?) seems to lend any support to Finn’s proposal that Morrison faked his death. Well….
It’s a similar story with other ‘suspicious’ lyrics found throughout the album. For example, the fact that ‘The Changeling’ is written from the perspective of a wealthy man-about-town as he prepares to leave his city and take on a new identity—his legacy and legend continuing to permeate society (“I’m the air you breathe / food you eat / friends you greet / on the swarming street”)—is lost on Finn.
Being ‘Down So Long’ and pleading for someone to “set me free” also bears no significance for the investigative director. Nor does the notion of a “cold girl” killing someone “in a darkened room” (‘Cars Hiss by My Window’).
The whole self-created legend of Morrison ‘the killer hitchhiker’ that is perpetuated by ‘Riders on the Storm’ (e.g., “If you give this man a ride / Sweet family will die / Killer on the road”), and its importance to the faked-death narrative, eludes Finn, as well. Derived primarily from the character he portrays in the 1969 experimental featurette HWY: An American Pastoral—which was co-produced by Morrison and inspired by his university hitchhiking adventures in addition to those of early-1950s American murderer Billy Cook—the legend indirectly serves to provide a fictional motive for self-imposed exile or disappearance. It was greatly substantiated by the fact that the phone-booth call that the protagonist makes in the film, informing an unseen party that he has killed the driver of the Shelby Mustang, was an actual phone call that Morrison made on the spot to beat poet Michael McClure, who was completely unaware that the scenario was being recorded.
Still from HWY: An American Pastoral
Ironically, on the one occasion in the series when Finn finds clues in the album’s lyrics, it involves an interpretation of lines from ‘Hyacinth House’ as evidence that Morrison had been fired from the band and was resultantly melancholy (“Why did you throw the Jack-of-Hearts away? / It was the only card in the deck that I had left to play.”). The fact that the number in question contains the premonitionally ominous lines “I see the bathroom is clear / I think that somebody’s near / I’m sure that someone is following me” doesn’t even warrant Finn’s recognition, let alone the correlation between the “Jack-of-Hearts” lyric and the alleged heart attack from which Morrison was initially said to have died.
I could probably rattle on with other lyrical examples from the album, but I think I’ve sufficiently established at this point that Finn can’t see the bathroom for the bathtub any more that what he could be bothered to find better sources for his research.
As for the matter of one Mr. Frank X, I’d prefer to say as little as possible for the time being. There can be no question about it: from certain angles—and certainly in the older photo cited as the ‘restart’ point for Finn’s docu-series—the gentleman does look like an elderly version of Jim Morrison. To put it bluntly, Frank X may be Jim Morrison incarnate or he may simply be a victim of circumstances who was nice enough to play along—I don’t know. What I do know is that the notion of tracking down and interrogating an elderly man based on his looks and Facebook friends and connexions is a rather questionable one. And the idea of zooming in on his eyes for signs of blue-tinted contact lenses (to match Morrison’s eye colour)—to say nothing of collecting his fingerprints from a restaurant tumbler for lab analysis without his permission—is an invasive and reprehensible one, beyond any doubt. I can only hope that the said Mr. X has been properly compensated for his dubious appearance—preferably receiving a decent cut of the royalties from Apple.
I should point out by way of conclusion that I reached out to Jeff Finn on social media, offering him the opportunity to clarify and extrapolate on his contentions and respond to my criticisms. Finn, however, refused to reply to my private Facebook messages; and when I attempted to make my concerns known via a comment on one of his Before The End posts, he subsequently blocked me from said Facebook group—a group I had been following for well over a decade. What a charming and professional fellow.
Finn has been a serious fan of The Doors and Jim Morrison for about as long as what I have, supposedly. As I’ve demonstrated herein, though, he appears to have been paying very little real attention to their albums, poems, films and general creative output over the years. Exacerbating matters, his investigations and theories tend to proceed with tunnel- vision from whim and conjecture rather than empirical evidence and biographical accounts. To put it smugly, he’s been in town a long time, but still can’t see which way the wind blow.
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R. W. Watkins
R. W. Watkins is a Canadian poet, and creator and editor of poetry journals Contemporary Ghazals and Eastern Structures. His short fiction, comics criticism and interviews have appeared most prominently in Gen-X literary journal Pattern Recognition. His latest solo works are the haiku collections Insight (2021) and Insight (1996–2005), and the essays collection Exposing the Emperor, Consoling the Harem. In 2022 he edited Early Journeys, Forgotten Logs: The Nocturnal Iris Anthology of Ancient Ghazals in English. He resides with his partner in rural northeastern Newfoundland.
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