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This is exactly right. Double Elvis. And Doug. There's nowhere I wouldn't go to help someone customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual. Even if it means sitting front row at a comedy show. Hey, everyone, check out this guy and his bird. What is this, your first date? Oh, no. We help people customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual together. We're married. Me to a human, him to a bird. Yeah, the bird looks out of your league. Anyways, get a quote@libertymutual.com or with your local agent. Liberty. Liberty. Liberty. Liberty. Hey, discos. Need a little more Disgrace Land in your life? Just a touch to get you through. Yeah, me too. This is the podcast that comes after the podcast. Welcome to Disgraceland. The after party. Welcome to the Disgraceland bonus episode. A little thing we like to call the after party. This is the show after the show. The party. After the party. The bridge to get you from one full episode of Disgraceland to the other. The backyard to dig into the dirt. Our mission, to uncover the truth, to confront the myth, to reclaim the story. On this bonus episode was a mysterious count responsible for the deaths of Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin. Who's Kerdoo? And the Mary Tyler Moore Show. What? New song recommendations and more old song Italian disco. Don't blame me. Plus your voicemails, texts, emails, comments, DMs, and as always, a whole lotta Rosie. This is the podcast for the musically obsessed, the outsiders, the independent thinkers who know that the best history is the history that gets buried. Disgraceland is where I tell the stories they didn't want told. The kind you'll end up telling someone else. Alright, Discos, let's get into it. All right, Discos, listen, my hair is on fire. This morning as I'm putting together this afterparty bonus episode for you. I woke up thinking about Taylor Hawkins and the fact that we still don't have an official cause of death for the iconic drummer, as discussed in our recent episode on the Foo Fighters. And so I made myself an espresso. I popped on my noise canceling headphones, crawled back into bed with my laptop though, and I googled famous rock stars with unknown causes of death. And surprise, there are literally none. Zilch, nada, zero. But I don't want to beat a dead horse. I want to beat an entirely different horse. Actually, horse as in H, as in heroin. So somehow that Google search that led me into this Jim Morrison wormhole, now I know. Well, trodden territory over here for us at Disgrace in a new Horse on a beaten path, so to speak. But really what I found is fascinating. I think I knew. I think I knew this. I think I knew that there was never an autopsy for Jim Morrison. And I pretty sure I knew that it was closed casket and that the burial happened super quick after Jim died, and that his family had little to do with the final arrangements. And none of these facts are all that revelatory or shocking on their own. And they're all used as fodder for the conspiracy theorists who claim that Jim Morrison faked his own death, that the heroin overdose never happened, and that Jim, you know, pretended to off himself so that he could. Or pretended to die, I should say that, so that he could live in peace outside of the glare of fame and retire and live the quiet life of a poet in the French countryside or whatever and no longer have to live the loud, drunk, drug addicted rock star life that he was living. But here's the thing. I didn't really realize until now, or maybe I did and I just forgot, or I just let this fact exist in plain sight and I ignored it. Or maybe I just bought the line that had been fed to me, to all of us anyways, until now, that Jim Morrison died from a heroin overdose. Because here's the thing, Jim Morrison didn't use heroin, or at least many of his friends recounted over the years about how Jim hated the drug and that he actively spoke out against using heroin in the company of his friends. And that he hated the fact that his girlfriend, Pamela Corson, AKA Pamela Morrison, she wasn't really his wife, common law wife, somehow sometimes went by Pamela Corson, sometimes by Pamela Morrison. I'll probably, probably refer to her as both in the course of this episode. Anyhow, he hated that his girlfriend Pam actively used heroin and that this was a subject, her heroin use was a subject. Common. A common subject of disagreement between the two, between the couple. This is pretty interesting. So Jim Morrison supposedly dies of a heroin overdose, but he didn't use heroin. Obviously this doesn't prove anything. Doesn't prove that Jim Morrison, I guess, didn't die from heroin, that he didn't take heroin, that he didn't die in a Paris bathtub. Jim Morrison could of course just tried heroin and died. Of course his official cause of death, heart failure. The sort of understood to be cause of death for Jim Morrison, heroin overdose. But for a guy who didn't use heroin. Anyhow, following this line of thinking, following this little bit of research I was doing this morning, if you were to do this, it would Inevitably bring you to a fascinating character from the late 1960s and early 70s. Jet set. A friend not of Jim Morrison's but of his girlfriend Pam's, and also a friend of Graham Parsons and a friend of Janis Joplin and of Keith Richards and Marianne Faithfull and Ms. Mercy from the GTOs and a whole lot of other famous rock stars who regularly used heroin. This guy was their buddy, their pal, their friend. And some of these folks died from heroin. That friend was a French aristocrat, an actual Count, a handsome jet setting playboy in his early 20s named. Damn it, Matt. I lost your text messages. Okay, this guy's name, I texted Matt this morning at like 7:30 in the morning. Because Matt, Matt's French or at least understands French better than I do. To get a correct pronunciation, I'm going to butcher it here. And then Matt, you can, you can correct me. I'm only going to say his name once or twice here. Count Jean de Bretel. Bretel. Okay, The Count. All right, listen, I've read about the Count before. I nearly forgot about the Count though. Okay? The Count came up in research for our Jim Morrison season of the 27 club that we, that we produced a couple years back. And I made a mental note to do more research on the Count eventually, which I never did until now, by accident. Now, the Count, the Count here is shadowy. The Count is glamorous. The Count is like Jim and Janice and Jim's girlfriend Pam, dead. The Count was also Jim's girlfriend's boyfriend. And the Count was the supplier of high grade heroin to the stars in the 60s and the 70s. And the Count may have not only inadvertently killed Jim Morrison, but also Janis Joplin as well. So check this out. The Count was a good looking rich aristocrat in his early 20s. His family had a literal fortune. His father's businesses were located in Africa. So the young Count had diplomatic connections in Morocco. Morocco in the 1960s was a hotbed of drug trafficking. Specifically the trafficking of hashish and heroin. Two drugs that many, many rock stars were hyper fixated on in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Now, not only was the Count tied into diplomats and drug traffickers Morocco, he was also, as part of the jet set, tied into many individuals from the Paris, again, he was French, and London, again, he was account high societies. Now, in 1967, the Count enrolled at UCLA, all right, in California, in Los Angeles, okay? But UCLA did not have access to good drugs at the time. So the Count fixed that. He started moving pounds of hashish through the Moroccan consulate into Los Angeles to his campus apartment. Now, the hash, and apparently the Count's good looks and money attracted young women. One of them was a girl named Pamela Corson. A woman named Pamela Corson, and the two began seeing each other. And even though Pam was seeing the new singer for the Doors, one of the hottest bands at the time, his name being, of course, Jim Morrison. Now, Jim hated the Count, and Jim, he hated the Count's heroin. But Pam, she dug the Count, and, you know, to be honest, she liked his heroine, too. Jim got drunk and and yelled. Pam got high and took off with the Count Americash into Europe to hang out with Brian Jones and Jimi Hendrix. Pam and the Count would eventually end up back in Los Angeles, and Pam would end up back with Jim. But the Count kept slinging his heroin the whole time. And in the fall of 1970, the count had a particularly strong batch of heroin. He hooked up his friend Janis Joplin. He also hooked up a musician named Mercy Fontenot. I'm probably pronouncing that incorrectly. She goes by Ms. Mercy. She was from the GTOs. Yes. Frank Zappa's GTOs. Okay? Ms. Merc Percy felt herself slipping into a drug coma when she used the Count's heroin. And somehow she pulled herself out of it and survived this bad batch. Now, this survival of the Count's bad batch of heroin happened on the exact same day that Janis Joplin did not survive the Count's bad batch. Okay? On that day, October 4, 1970, the Count hooked up Janis Joplin with heroin just like he did Ms. Mercy from the GTOS. Ms. Mercy survived. Janis Joplin died on October 4, 1970. Ms. Mercy lived, and she gave the rest of her batch of heroin to her friend Graham Parsons. Somehow, Graham survived, too, until he didn't and overdosed and died later in 1973. But back to that weekend in 1970, the weekend that Janis Joplin died. Over that weekend, nine other people who weren't rock stars also died in the Los Angeles area from heroin overdoses. Jimi Hendrix had already died that year. Now Janis Joplin was gone, and Jim Morrison was aware of all of it, okay? He was nursing his beer at Barney's Beanery in Hollywood, and he told his friends that they were drinking with number three. Jim Morrison didn't know it, but his joke was dead on. Jim had one more album to deliver to the record label. That album was LA Woman. Once that album was done, Jim split to Paris to meet Pam, who was already there, hanging out with you guessed it, the Count. Pam was in bad shape. She and the Count were consumed with heroin. They were sunk deep into the Paris underground with a whole assortment of low life, high class junkies and deadbeats. Paris was drowning in that French Connection, intensely pure heroin. The same heroine William Friedkin would put at the center of his incredible film, the French Connection. This was the heroine that the Count was dealing. And now the Count was counting Rolling Stones as his customers, namely Grant Parsons buddy Keith Richards. Those two were also in France at the time, at Nelcott. While Keith was hiding out from British tax collectors and making the Stones heroin induced masterpiece, Exile on Main Street. Through his connections with the Rolling Stones, the Count started seeing Marianne Faithful. And the two wound up in Paris in July 1971, where the count went to work slinging that French Connection heroin again in France at the time, in 1971. You've got the Count, Marianne Faithfull, Pamela Courson, Jim Morrison, Keith Richards, Graham Parsons and the French Connection. Now, on the night of July 3, Marianne Faithful says that she was with the Count in bed. And they got a call in the middle of the night from Pamela Courson, again, Jim Morrison's girlfriend, who at that moment was freaked out. Pamela absolutely needed to see the Count. Okay? Now, Marianne Faithful, she was stoked at this. She was psyched because she wanted to meet the singer of the Doors. But the Count said that that wasn't going to happen and he split to go rescue Pam. And he left Marianne behind because Jim Morrison was dead from heroin. The Count's heroin, according to Marianne Faithful, anyways, from heroin. That was most definitely, yes, the Counts. But here's the thing. Jim Morrison didn't use heroin, right? Right. But he did use cocaine. And the French Connection heroin was also called cotton candy because of its light color. A lot of heroin, depending on how it's cut, how it's processed, is brown. The French Connection stuff was like a pinkish white. Jim Morrison, according to those in the know, mistook his girlfriend's heroin for cocaine and snorted too much of the incredibly pure drug and died. Jim Morrison's girlfriend, who was also the girlfriend of the most infamous heroin dealer in the music industry, who himself, the Count died less than a year later of an overdose. Maybe some suspect the Count did himself in over his guilt. Others suspect murder, we don't know. I'm looking to find out sooner or later though. I'm telling you right now. Anyways, back to our story. Pamela Morrison, she overdosed and died a couple years later, a couple years after the Count. And nearly everyone connected to this dude. Everyone. Nearly everyone connected to the fucking Count, guy. Pamela Morrison, Janis Joplin, some say Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Graham Parsons. Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead. Marianne Faithful. She survived. And she flat out accused her ex, the Count, of killing Jim Morrison. The details around Jim Morrison's cause of death are hazy, just like they are for Taylor Hawkins's death. Completely different context, of course, but still, you can see some sort of rock and roll historical parallel here. We don't know. We don't know how Taylor died, and we. I don't think we know how Jim died, really. Officially, he died of heart failure. Unofficially of a heroin overdose. But again, there was no autopsy. Did I say that earlier? I probably should have. There was no autopsy, and there was no history of Jim using heroin. There was, in fact, a history of Jim hating heroin. The story, this story, not just the story of Jim Morrison's death, but the story of the Count. It is fascinating, and it is coming in a full episode of the Disgraceland podcast soon, probably in a Doors episode. I did one satirical episode on Jim Morrison. I'm going to do a Doors episode, and this is going to be my angle, and this is going to be most of the story, to be perfectly honest, because this is just the surface. And most of what I just told you, I researched this morning. By researched, I mean I read one People magazine article. Incredibly, this is all. Everything I just gave you is from a People magazine article. Pretty much. Not. Not everything, but. But a good portion of it. There's. But there's a ton more out there, and there's a lot more research I'm going to do, and I'm gonna put together an incredible story for you guys in a full episode of Disgrace. Sam, That'll be coming in a couple months. I guess it'll be a Doors episode. All right. But before that, we're gonna dive a little bit deeper into the Count and more specifically, into the shady details behind Jim Morrison's death and the claims that he wasn't a heroin user. In today's exclusive episode of the after party, go to Disgracelandpod.com to sign up to become a Disgraceland All Access member and unlock exclusive and ad free content just like this on a weekly basis. All right, this week in the feed, as we've been discussing our new episode on the Foo Fighters. Now coming up right after this bonus episode here, right after this in the rewind slot on Sunday, our episode on Bjork and the deranged psychopath who wanted her dead, who attempted to murder the Icelandic princess, who set off an international scramble by the FBI in New Scotland Yard to save Bjork's life. You don't want to miss this episode. And then next week, on Tuesday, Tuesday, May 5th, we're releasing a new episode on Ian Watkins from Lost Profits. And when you're listening to that episode, be thinking about what story from music history has upset you the most, because this might be it. This might be the most upsetting story from any rock star we've covered. This Ian Watkins story is so damn upsetting, not only because of the horrendous crimes that this Lost Profit singer committed, but also because some of these crimes could have been. Could have been prevented. So how upset were you when you learned about the Ian Watkins crimes? But you know, it can be anything. What's the most angered you've ever been, most angry you've ever been from news that you heard from Music History? 617-906-6638 voicemail and text, let me know DisgraceLandPod on the socials DisgraceLandPodgmail.com all right, guys, I want to talk to y'. All. I want to hear your thoughts on Taylor Hawkins in the Foo Fighters and everything else that we got going on in Disgraceland. Unlikely cover songs, more music, memoirs, whatever. New songs, old songs. We're digging into all of it and more with your voicemails, text, emails, DMs, and more coming up right after this. And Doug, there's nowhere I wouldn't go to help someone customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual, even if it means sitting front row at a comedy show. Hey, everyone, check out this guy and his bird. What is this, your first date? Oh, no. We help people customize and save on car inside insurance with Liberty Mutual. Together. We're married. Me to a human, him to a bird. Yeah, the bird looks out of your league. Anyways, get a quote@libertymutual.com or with your local agent. Liberty, Liberty, Liberty. Liberty May is mental health awareness month. And your 20s, they can feel like a lot on the psychology of your 20s podcast, we unpack the anxiety, the overthinking, the heartbreak, the identity crisis, all of it that comes with being in your 20s. Because if you've ever thought, is anybody else feeling this way? They definitely are.