📍17-19 Rue Beautreillis, 75004 Paris, France
1971“My father was a navy officer, later an admiral, so I grew up moving from base to base across America, never staying long enough to belong anywhere. Books became my home: Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Blake, Kerouac, and the French poets I read in borrowed translations. By the time the Doors had made me famous, I was tired of the role of rock star and wanted to be taken seriously as a poet. In March 1971, after recording L.A. Woman, I left Los Angeles and flew to Paris to join Pamela Courson. We took a third-floor apartment at 17 rue Beautreillis, a handsome old Haussmann-era building in the Marais, between Saint-Paul and the Bastille. The flat belonged to a young model who was away, and it had tall windows, worn floors and a quiet courtyard feeling that Los Angeles never had. I grew a beard, wore ordinary clothes and walked the old streets almost unrecognised. I wrote in notebooks in the cafés around the Place des Vosges and along the Seine, sat in bookshops and visited the places Rimbaud and Baudelaire had known. For a few months Paris gave me what I had wanted for years: anonymity, time and the company of the poets I admired. I talked about staying on and writing books. The notebooks from that spring became part of the poetry published after me. Paris kept me: I rest at Père Lachaise among the city's writers, painters and musicians, and admirers still walk the Marais to stand outside the building on rue Beautreillis where I spent that spring writing.”
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