Jim Morrison's New Mexico childhood home

Jim Morrison lived in this house on Candelaria Road as a young boy while his father, Steve Morrison, was stationed at Kirtland Air Force Base. The family moved frequently — the nature of Navy life — but New Mexico left a mark on Morrison that surfaced throughout his poetry and songwriting.

He was around five or six years old during the Albuquerque years. It was here, or on the roads nearby, that Morrison later claimed to have witnessed an incident that haunted him for the rest of his life: a truck overturned on the highway, and injured Native Americans lay scattered across the road. Morrison said the souls of the dead entered his body that day. Whether literal or mythologised, the story became central to his identity as a performer.

The house itself is a modest mid-century home in a quiet residential neighbourhood in Albuquerque's northeast heights. There is no plaque or marker. It looks like every other house on the street — unremarkable until you know who lived there.

The New Mexico landscape — vast, empty, sun-bleached — shaped Morrison's sense of the spiritual and the mythic. The desert imagery that runs through The Doors' music, from "The End" to "Riders on the Storm," has its roots in these early childhood years in the American Southwest.