Where Are They Buried? (7 page)

The next two years saw the release of two more albums, each as successful as the debut, but by that time Jimi’s life had devolved into confusion as disagreements among managers and band mates created a revolving door of personnel. Some fans, not content to just let Jimi stand and play guitar, pressed him to take a political stance and make a public commitment to his roots.

In his mid-twenties, it was easy for Jimi to lose direction, and he did. Drinking and drugs became a normal part of his routine until, finally, his girlfriend woke to find him dead beside her in their London apartment. The cause of death was listed as the now-classic “suffocation due to inhalation of vomit during a heavily intoxicated sleep.” Jimi was 27.

He was buried at Greenwood Memorial Park in Renton, Washington.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From I-405, take the Bronson Way exit to Sunset Boulevard. Turn onto 3rd Street NE, go back under the interstate, and after four traffic lights the cemetery is on the right.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery and go to the circular drive in the cemetery’s southwest corner. You won’t miss Jimi’s 20-foot-high granite dome trimmed in rainbow marble.

OCTOBER 17, 1938 – NOVEMBER 30, 2007

Flying high through the air must have been hard-wired in stuntman Robert “Evel” Knievel’s psyche; in 1959 he was the Northern Rocky Mountains Men’s Ski Jumping champion, and during a later stint in the Army, he pole vaulted for their track team. But his true calling originated in 1965 when he announced, in a bid to attract customers to his Washington state motorcycle shop, that he’d jump his motorcycle 40 feet over parked cars and a box of rattlesnakes. Before 1,000 people, he did the stunt as promised, but failed to fly far enough. His bike landed hard on the rattlesnakes but the audience was completely thrilled. “Right then,” he said, “I knew I could draw a big crowd by jumping over weird stuff.”

So began his red-white-and-blue-spangled motorcycle daredevil career as the showman barnstormed the West, riding
through fire walls, jumping over live mountain lions and being towed at 200 mph behind dragster race cars with his own Evel Knievel Motorcycle Daredevil Touring Show. At first he’d jump over a couple cars, but the stakes and the obstacles grew exponentially higher until he was nearly killed when he jumped 151 feet across the fountains in front of Caesar’s Palace in 1968. He cleared the fountains but, flung like a rag doll after crash landing, he suffered seventeen broken bones and spent a month in a coma. “It was terrible,” he said afterward. “I lost control of the bike. Everything seemed to come apart. I kept smashing over and over and ended up against a brick wall, 165 feet away.” Nonetheless, the jump, and especially the ensuing crash, made Evel bigger-than-life, a 1970s cultural icon who picked up where Houdini and Superman left off.

After recovery, when a lesser man (or a saner one) may have considered a different career, Evel hit the jump circuit anew. Jumping a dozen cars for $25,000 became weekly routine and, as imitators edged into his celebrity, Evel raised the stakes with bigger and bigger jumps. When cars got boring there were Pepsi delivery trucks followed by buses, then double-decker buses and, predictably, a shark-filled tank. After a failed attempt on Idaho’s Snake River Canyon, he planned to launch his rocket-powered motorcycle over the Grand Canyon, but the Department of the Interior nixed the harebrained scheme.

By 1976 Knievel was done jumping motorcycles, the baton passed to his son, and the remainder of his life was spent wistfully enjoying the memories of his daredevil days. That is, whenever he could find time for lazy nostalgia what with the charges of soliciting an undercover policewoman for immoral purposes, hepatitis, a liver transplant, serving six months for
assault on his former press agent with a baseball bat, bankruptcy, diabetes, and a divorce.

At 71 he died of pulmonary failure which, after all the high-flying crashes and broken bones, fractures and concussions, is quite remarkable: Evel Knievel died, more or less, of old age.

He is buried at Mountain View Cemetery in Butte, Montana.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
Take Exit 127 off of I-90 and follow Route 2 south for 1½ miles.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery and at the first crossroad turn left. After a few hundred feet, on the right, a spruce tree wrapped in red, white and blue stands guard over Evel’s headstone.

OCTOBER 22, 1920 – MAY 31, 1996

Timothy Leary’s name is synonymous with 1960s counterculture as the key polarizer who extended the generational distance from a gap to a chasm. Disillusioned young people saw Timothy as a harbinger of social change, while their parents viewed the Harvard University psychologist as an antiestablishment corrupter of youth.

Until his Harvard days when he met Richard Alpert, Timothy’s life was conventional, and he even attended West Point before entering the Army during World War II. In 1961, though, Timothy and Alpert (today known as Baba Ram Dass) began experimenting with lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD. Timothy went one step further and publicly extolled the virtues of taking LSD as a vehicle for personal growth, and the “turn on, tune in, drop out” insurrection began.

By the time Timothy was fired from Harvard four years later, his psychopharmacological revolution, the Psychedelic Movement, was in full swing. At some point came the unspoken realization that LSD itself was not the key to spiritual or intellectual nirvana after all, and the psychedelic experience was then redirected into the Humanistic Revolution: an empowering ethereal movement emphasizing interpersonal relationships, multilevel personality assessments, group therapy, and body/mind interaction that ultimately fed into the enduring New Age movement.

While all of these revolutions and movements were finding their balance, Timothy was performing a balancing act of his own with the authorities. In January 1970, he was finally
sentenced to up to twenty years on marijuana convictions. Nine months later, though, he escaped with help from the underground group, The Weathermen, and after joining Black Panther fugitives, eluded captivity for three years before being caught in Afghanistan.

In 1976 Timothy had a change of heart and was paroled after he cooperated with federal authorities; unbelievably, after having preached against the establishment all his adult life, he informed on the very Weathermen who had helped him bust out of jail.

He had survived the sixties, the drugs, and the busts, but after his release Timothy never again had quite the same impact on the world. In the following decades, as attitudes hardened toward recreational drugs, he maintained a legal income source from his many books, dabbled as a stand-up comedian and a software developer, consorted with Hollywood friends, and made sporadic talk-show appearances.

In 1995 he was diagnosed with inoperable prostate cancer and, ever preoccupied with being Timothy Leary, he managed to turn his protracted death into a media event. After announcing that his death was imminent, he spun this “most fascinating experience in life” into something about which he was “eager and enthusiastic.” For a while, Timothy even contemplated committing suicide in real time; in this period when the Internet was not even yet a mainstream gadget, his idea was to develop a Web page wherein fans and well-wishers—or adversaries, for that matter—could watch as he set sail on a final and most profound, far-out trip.

In due time though, in private and in the still moments as the cancer began to assume control of his body, Timothy’s enthusiasm for his death waned and his friends knew it was a trip he feared. Talking about taking one’s own life and actually doing it are two very different things and, in the end, there was no last act of defiance.

Instead, at 75, Timothy died in his sleep at home. He died with dignity, and he was not logged on or spaced out.

Space would have to wait just a little longer; Timothy still had one last “far-out trip” to experience. In April of 1997, about seven grams of the psychedelic cosmonaut’s ashes, along with those of Gene Roddenberry and 22 other space enthusiasts, were attached to the final booster stage of a rocket and blasted from the planet by a Texas-based company named Celestis, in the world’s first space funeral. On May 20, 2002, after 28,132 orbits around the earth, the capsules of ashes reentered the atmosphere over New Guinea and burned up in a fiery finale.

DECEMBER 8, 1943 – JULY 3, 1971

As lead singer and lyricist of the Doors, Jim Morrison’s theatrical shock tactics and poetic (though sometimes disturbing) hyperbole came to symbolize the temptations and excesses of rock and roll. Full of himself, loaded with charisma and antics, Jim overshadowed the other members of the Doors. To their credit, however, they always seemed content to stand back and let Jim take center stage while they played the swirling and eclectic psychedelic rock music that was, in effect, the soundtrack of Jim’s life.

Jim grew up the son of a strict and authoritarian Navy rear admiral, and this might have been a source of his outlandish rebellion. He would often falsely claim that both his parents were dead. Jim enrolled in UCLA’s film and theater program in 1964, but found drugs, particularly LSD, more interesting than his studies. In 1965 he drifted from school and, together with classmate Ray Manzarek, formed the Doors.

In the summer of 1967 when their first album was released, Jim was still a slightly tentative frontman, but as the group rose to prominence and flower-power rockers pulsed to the hypnotizing rhythm of its “Light My Fire” single, Jim quickly worked himself into his role in grand fashion. Their next album,
Strange Days
, solidified the group’s success, and Jim’s throaty baritone and onstage persona became anything but shy, delivering keenly suggestive lyrics in alternate turns as a sullen poet and a fevered lunatic. His onstage behavior became increasingly erratic and exceedingly bizarre. After barrages of profanity at a show in New Haven, Connecticut, Jim was arrested on obscenity charges; in Miami, mimicking sex put Jim behind bars for lewd and lascivious behavior. Jim’s indulgence in every hedonistic excess offstage and his off-the-wall behavior onstage put the band’s very stability and survival at risk.

After the riotous concerts of 1969, the band went back to their songwriting roots and released two albums over the next two years; it seemed that perhaps Jim’s spirit for good old rock and roll might be rejuvenated. When tours to promote the albums were announced, everyone hoped the over-the-top discord was in the past, but again, the shows were marked by controversy. Prompted by Jim’s reputation, local police were a constant and intimidating presence, and the magic of the Doors live performances was lost. Fed up with the pressures from every direction, Jim withdrew and,
in March 1971, went to Paris to unwind and write poetry with his companion, Pam Courson.

According to Pam, at 5:00 a.m. one morning, she found Jim lying in the bathtub of their apartment at 17 rue Beautreillis in Paris, dead as a doornail. Oddly, only Dr. Max Vassille, who signed Jim’s death certificate, and Pam actually saw Jim’s corpse. No autopsy was done, but on the death certificate Vassille stated that Jim had died of a heart problem aggravated by the use of alcohol followed by an abrupt change of temperature. In short, while half in the bag, Jim plopped into his bath and the sudden temperature change prompted a heart attack. Yeah, the whole thing smells fishy to me, too.

Due to the mysterious circumstances surrounding Jim’s demise and subsequent burial, theories ranging from accidental heroin overdose to murder have been trotted out as the “true” cause of his death. Some believe Jim never even died but merely staged it to escape the chains of stardom.

Jim, or at least his coffin, was interred at Paris’s Père-Lachaise Cemetery. Drawing a million visitors per year, Jim’s tomb is the fourth most popular tourist stop in Paris, which says reams about Jim, and Paris for that matter.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
The easiest way to reach Père-Lachaise is by taking the Metro, and the line required is Nation-Porte Dauphine. Get off at the Phillipe-Auguste stop, take the steps leading to the Boulevard de Charonne, and the celebrated graveyard is marked by signs from there.

In June 1970, Jim and Patricia Kennealy, a practicing witch, were married in a Celtic ceremony. Still, Jim’s one-page will was quite simple and clear: Everything was left to Pam. Less than three years after Jim’s death, Pam died of a heroin overdose in her Hollywood apartment. Like Jim, she was 27.

Pam was cremated and her ashes interred at Fairhaven Memorial Park in Santa Ana, California. Her nameplate is engraved “Pamela Susan Morrison” though, by all accounts, she and Jim never wed.

JULY 25, 1954 – NOVEMBER 1, 1999

In the years between Ernie Banks’ retirement and Michael Jordan’s emergence, Walter Payton took up the slack as
sports-hungry Chicago’s most beloved athletic hero. When the Chicago Bears picked him in the first round of the 1975 NFL draft, they had failed to compile a winning record for eight seasons, but with an aggressive running back destined for the Hall of Fame in their ranks, the Bears’ fortunes changed quickly. After Walter’s rookie year he posted the first of what would be ten consecutive 1,000-yard seasons, and by his third year in the league he won the first of two MVP awards.