Jim’s Ghost and Pre-War Beirut

Photo Blog by Marwan Tahtah

Text by Hassan Chakrani

It’s not Jim Morrison and The Doors but Willie Scott and The Doors Alive attempting to recreate the scene with impeccable accuracy.

DRM in Beirut felt like Whisky a Go Go.

A veteran rock fan infatuated with the band sings along The End and screams: come back Jim. A teenage girl humming Touch me storms the stage. She's not afraid, and she knows well all the promises she made.

We all made promises to ourselves, forgot some of them and recycled others.

We all wanted the lizard king to resurrect from the tunes of his wannabes. You could have smelled the ashes of that poetic soul of the Rock & Roll god, the pure lover, the romantic whose karma encompasses all of a rock's shades. His revolution was for love, for creating that awkward mixture of freedom and indulgence.

Jim was born in the same year as this country gained independence and passed away four years before its civil war's flames started. We went back to the sixties and hoped that we never come back. The photographs, black and white as they are, resemble our lives or how we want them to be. Because frankly, there are two types of people in the world: those who love and the others.

Cheers.