Break on Through: Finding The Doors
The Doors in 1968. Photo: Elektra Records.
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I was at university when I first heard the Doors. It was springtime, coming on summer. I was living on campus, my first year, and I was eighteen. I was in a housemate’s room, waiting for him to get back for some reason I don’t recall now. The building we lived in was a little run down, the rooms were shabby, but I remember that day – the sunshine streaming through the windows, the dust embers in the air glinting and dancing. Our campus was situated in the lap of a large valley, and in the distance, I could see the green of the hills. Maybe it was late morning or early afternoon; knowing my habits at that point in my life, I probably hadn’t been up all that long. I was sleepy and a little bored so I began to thumb through my housemate’s CD collection.
I took out a CD, ‘The Best of the Doors’. It’s the one with a black and white cover, the lead singer Jim Morrison, his arms extended sideways like some sort of rock and roll Jesus, the shaggy mane tumbling down from the sides to frame a face which is statuesque and perfect, eyes vacant and yet melancholy somehow too. But I only glanced at the cover, dismissing it. I pretty much figured it was music from the 60s. I knew music from the 60s; growing up my father had record and CD collections spread around the house, and when he’d get drunk he’d pelt them full blast keeping everyone awake.
I liked some of that stuff though. I liked the cheeriness of rock and roll rhythms and the sentimentality of some of those old crooning love songs. They seemed of another time. A self-contained world that had none of the sophistication or irony of modern music, music which tended to reflect darker and more fitful realities. These were the vague prejudices I felt, rather than thought upon.
But for some reason – perhaps it was that boredom again – I ended up putting on that first Doors CD. I went to a random song and pressed play. And listened while the sunlight streamed in and I could hear the vague chatter from people passing outside. And then it just … melted away. There are certain times in one’s life when you have an existential aesthetic experience, something which feels almost life-changing, and yet it is wholly accidental. Flicking TV channels late at night, coming to rest sleepily on a film, and eventually finding yourself drawn in, gripped and awakened, only to remember that film for the rest of your days. This was a little like that.
The song was ‘The Crystal Ship’. Whatever I had been expecting it wasn’t anything like what I heard. I had thought of 60s music as being old-fashioned, but this seemed much more modern. Only modern is not the right word. Timeless. The first few words of the song are acapella, this voice intoning in the dark – ‘Before … you … slip …’ and then it is joined by what I can only describe as fairground music. A faint shimmering symbol, a fluttering rhythm which gives way before the gentle but steady piping of a distant organ, and that voice continues, diaphanous and hypnotic – ‘Before you slip …. into unconsciousness … I would like another kiss, another flashing chance at bliss … another kiss’
As that carousel music flows onward in the background, that voice continues to intone. That voice. I’d never heard anything like it. It was so perfect as to be almost hollow, so fine as to be almost toneless. There was something inhuman about it, ethereal; more like a Platonic Form – a shimmering transcendental archetype – than something living and breathing; and yet, in the same moment, it carried such human loneliness, such longing – ‘the days are bright and filled with pain … enclose me in your gentle rain.’ It was haunting. It was hurting. I imagine that if a ghost had a voice – a spirit imbued with all the regrets of a life now gone – it might sound something like that. It might sound the way Jim Morrison sounded to me that day, in that room, all those years ago.
And perhaps that is the fundamental miracle of music. It is, more than anything, an activity of ghosts. Someone has lived a life, and at some point along the line, they poured that life into words and music. Eventually, that life must be lost to time. And yet, the medium preserves the sound – the record, the cassette, the CD, the MP3 – it allows what once was to play out again, to call out across time – as a plea, a lament – bridging one existence with another, the past with the future, the living with the dead.
I have never experienced that aspect of music – the sense of its ghostly eternity – with the intensity and power with which his voice stole over me that early afternoon. Neither before nor since. I replayed the ‘The Crystal Ship’ over and again, marveling at its ephemeral beauty, feeling a physical sense of loss when that voice died out. When my friend returned, I asked him if I could borrow the CD (we were not particularly close) and I recall the anxiety that shot through me at the thought of being parted from the sound if only for a few hours. He was, however, kind enough to lend me the collection, and later that evening I smuggled it into my room like contraband, like something otherworldly, something precious.
The late comic and rather wonderful human being Robin Williams once said ‘I used to think that the worst thing in life was to end up alone. It’s not. The worst thing in life is to end up with people who make you feel all alone.’ I like this quote because it hits on something deeper, something that is a fundamental part of modern existence. The sense that loneliness isn’t simply about separation but also about togetherness.
Many of us live in cities populated by millions, some of us live in tenement blocks or towers, hundreds of people are packed together in these great concrete fortifications, and yet we rarely ever speak to, or even know the names of, our closest neighbors. In modern life, the individual existence unfurls in the midst of the crowd and yet this sometimes serves to emphasize the crystalline quality of loneliness all the more sharply.
At university, I felt like that. My evenings were often busy and filled with people – having done various awful part-time jobs to pay the bills, I eventually resorted to selling weed, which was more fun, despite the nocturnal hours. But I felt a distance from the people around me.
The students I knew on campus were often public school boys or international students. The public-school boys fascinated me, they had an affected drollness, they would all address one another by their second names, as if they were practiced professionals conducting business scenarios in a board meeting or gentleman’s club – the ridiculousness of their affectations betrayed only by a twinkling, knowing smile.
They would banter ostentatiously, with wry grins, and their humor was droll in a wink-wink, nod-nod type of way. And they would drink like medieval aristocrats – and though their politics were as awful as you might expect – they could be very funny, taking each other down ruthlessly, and yet with the underlying affection that comes from the recognition of another member of your same tribe. What I remember most was how at home they were in the world, how comfortable they seemed in their own skins.
The international students were different again; beautiful boys and girls with olive skins and honeyed eyes, young men and women from Greece, Spain, Italy and France whose rooms smelt faintly of incense and coffee, of olive oil and pot, and who would spend nights under a candle-lit glow holding forth on politics and philosophy, passionate and amused. Even their conversation was impossibly continental and exotic; magical names floated across the air like incantations, names I had never heard before – ‘Foucault’, ‘Derrida’, ‘Deleuze’ ‘Levinas’ – mysterious and enigmatic figures whose esoteric thoughts and theories it seemed to me these students had at their fingertips.
They seemed so knowledgeable and in the ease with which they moved through life, so casually sophisticated and supremely adult. And this they shared with their public-school brethren – a sense of being entirely at home in the world.
I did not feel at home in the world. I don’t think I ever have. And in the summers, the public-school boys would take to the snowcapped mountains of Switzerland and France for skiing holidays and the international students would decamp for a summer spent island hopping around the Mediterranean, and I would return home to do factory work or spend the summer pushing trolleys in Tesco feeling vaguely that life was leaving me behind.
And in the nights, I’d drink whiskey and smoke and listen to the Doors. Their music seemed to speak to me of loneliness in that hauntingly modern way. When one listens to a song like ‘People Are Strange’ it is paradoxical. On the one hand, it has that carnivalesque sound; when the song reaches its chorus, the music is jaunty almost cheerful – ‘When you’re strange … faces come out of the rain’. It has the rhythmic tempo of a New Orleans marching band, it is rousing, upbeat, and you want to clap along with it. But this is offset by the otherworldliness of that distant voice and the lyrics themselves which provide a masterclass in the poetry of alienation: ‘When you’re strange, faces come out of the rain … When you’re strange, no one remembers your name …. When you’re strange, when you’re strange …’
This is the loneliness of modernity; a loneliness which is filtered through other people, only they are not other people at all, but apparitions – those ‘faces’ which ‘come out of the rain’ are as specters materializing from the nighttime mist. It is the loneliness of the streets where there is an insuperable divide between one’s inner life and thoughts, and the people you encounter in the darkness. ‘People Are Strange’ provides a ribald, Gothic-esque carnival, blending the excitement of the city at night and all those unimagined lives with the infinite distance that opens up between each and every one.
Such music – encompassing both the stark alienation of urban realities along with the gothic sound of an eerie and ghostly carnival – offers a tissue of contradictions; the upbeat works in tandem as a musical refrain with an underlying pulse of despair, the baroque plays out alongside the contemporary, isolation and anomie is refined in and through the noise of the crowd. As the author Melissa Ursula Dawn Goldsmith comments on ‘People Are Strange’, the song employs an ‘expressionist’ sense of ‘alienation and distanciation’ in order to express the positive aspect of social life as something ‘strange’.[1]
‘Alabama Song’ – perhaps one of the best peons to getting drunk ever penned – operates in a similar fashion; that ‘Show me the way to the next whiskey bar … Oh show me the way to the next whiskey bar!’ again works in terms of a marching rhythm, a call to action, the need to seek out Dionysian excess, to drive the pleasure principle to its apex but of course such ‘positivity’ eventually yields a chaos and a senselessness and a lack of meaning – ‘oh don’t ask why’. The antinomies of pleasure and pain, of joy and hopelessness that are the syncopated rhythms driving the soundtrack to the existence of every alcoholic, every drug abuser, are – in Morrisons’s hands – rendered as vivid and raw as the train tracks that streak down a heroine addict’s arm.
As is well documented, Jim Morrison was both an alcoholic and a drug addict, though toward the end of his brief existence, the former mostly outweighed the latter. That Jim Morrison should have indulged in booze and drugs is hardly surprising; indeed it would have been more shocking had a young man of his age and time been a teetotaller, especially given the relationship drugs and drink played in the context of a social rebellion that saw conservative mores challenged not simply by direct action and political protest but also by a cultural revolution.
In their comprehensive, insightful and well-written biography of Jim Morrison, authors Jeffery Hopkins and Danny Sugerman describe how the teenage Morrison was drawn into the burgeoning counterculture of the 1950s, how he was able to escape the stifling small-town conservatism of Alameda – where the family was based – by hopping on a bus and making for North Beach. North Beach was a neighborhood in San Francisco that had become a beacon for counterculture through the new breed of literature and records which were beginning to describe the adolescent experience as it tore itself away from the expectations of the ‘greatest generation’. Expectations which had been marked by a certain unremarked stoicism, a silent duty to the family and the state and perhaps also a quiet desperation; all aspects of a way of life whose insularity and conservatism had grown out of the trauma of war and the memory of economic depression.
But if that generation had played out the events of its life in a monochrome black and white, then the generation of the 1950s was the first to explode into technicolor. As the teenage Morrison strolled down North Beach Broadway, he’d encounter a hectic clutter of bright, neon-lit shops whose contents gave voice to the new spirit of youth and self-expression starting to emerge from the grey fug of small-town suburbia, for here, among other things, was the ‘world headquarters for the beatniks’.[2] Morrison would frequent the ‘City Lights Book Store’ with its alluring promise of ‘Banned Books’, and he would pore over the work of the beatnik poets – ‘Ferlinghetti was one of Jim’s favorites, along with Kenneth Rexroth and Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg made the greatest impact’.[3]
But the most potent influence on the teenage Morrison and his sense of self came in the form of the great bohemian, beatnik novel On the Road, the nomadic flavor of its wandering freedoms and most of all, its invocation of the character of the wild and free-spirited Dean Moriarty and its blurring of the lines between freedom and madness – ‘He was one of Kerouac’s “mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn burn burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars’.[4] Indeed the teenage Morrison was so enamored by the fictional character that ‘he began to copy Moriarty right down to his “hee-hee-hee-hee” laugh.’[5]
It was unsurprising, then, that the adolescent Jim Morrison would get drunk and dabble with pot, not just because these things provide goofy and fun experiences for many a teenager, but on a more profound level, they were part and parcel of the cultural milieu and the kind of archetype of youthful freedom and rebellion that Morrison was intuitively and aesthetically drawn toward. For the same reason, it is no coincidence that this developing cultural consciousness, the rituals of drinking and getting high, and the exploration of the counter-culture aesthetic through beatnik literature would also coincide with Morrison’s first forays into writing himself:
Jim was becoming a writer. He had begun to keep journals, spiral notebooks that he would fill with his daily observations and thoughts … and as he entered his senior year, more and more poetry. The romantic notion of poetry was taking hold: the “Rimbaud legend,” the predestined tragedy, were impressed on his consciousness, the homosexuality of Ginsberg and Whitman and Rimbaud himself; the alcoholism of Baudelaire, Dylan Thomas, Brendan Behan; the madness and addiction of so many more in whom the pain married with the visions. The pages became a mirror in which Jim saw his reflection.[6]
The connection between alcohol and creativity has a seasoned lineage. In ancient Greek times, the grape was not just a symbol of Hellenic identity in the same way as the olive vine, nor just a richly traded commodity and mere object of consumption, but moreover something which had a significant aesthetic and religious usage in its form as alcohol. The Greek word Pneuma (πνεῦμα) translates into ‘spirit’ – but it also has the meaning ‘breathed’; it was conceived that the ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ was something ‘breathed’ into the individual from a divine source, and that inebriation was a way of opening up the spirit to its origins, to bringing oneself into contact with the infinite once more.
And, as the late Christopher Hitchens pointed out, ‘the very word “spirit”’ also preserves an intuition of the ‘“inspired” that was detected by the Greeks when they hit upon fermentation’[7] and used its results in their creative endeavors, not least of which was the production of music and art. The counterculture movement of the 50s and 60s revived this notion and deepened it; the idea that alcohol and drugs could provide a gateway to a deeper essence, the conscious-altering-means which could provide a sublime encounter with the transcendental reality. Whilst at UCLA, Morrison became fascinated by the ancient Greek world, particularly in and through his readings of the eloquent and savage reactionary philosopher Fredrich Nietzsche.
In particular, Morrison would come to identify with the figure of ‘the long-suffering Dionysius’, for in the ancient Greek god, Morrison found something more primordial, an archetype that hinted at a buried and elemental reality through the experience of both suffering and excess. Dionysius, in Nietzsche’s philosophy of art, became a symbol for the darker, unrestrained and irrational impulses that lurk just below the depths of the psyche and come to power that aspect of aesthetic creation which is chaotic, instinctive and unconscious.
Morrison combined this sense of art, with a broader philosophical vision; the poet’s suffering, the poet’s creativity – heightened by the use of alcohol and drugs – could work toward an ‘ecstatic dissolution of personal consciousness’.[8] If this was achieved – if personal consciousness with all its distortions and peccadillos was somehow transcended – then true reality could be glimpsed in its eternal and elemental guise; or as the great religious poet William Blake put it, ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite.’[9]
This type of philosophy precipitated an artistic journey, the use of drink, drugs and aesthetic activity in combination to seek out the ‘infinite reality’, the ‘primordial nature of the universe’, or as Jim Morrison and his college friends would come to call it, ‘the universal mind’.[10] This intuitive, emotional and sometimes frenzied quest would bleed into other intellectual trends and cultural preoccupations; both psychology and shamanism became key moments defining the focus of Jim Morrison’s poetry and eventually the music of the Doors.
Jung was a key fit, for instance; his theory of primeval archetypes tessellated nicely with the idea of a ‘universal mind’ which was veiled by the paraphernalia of the empirical and everyday, while shamanism, provoking altered states of consciousness often through hallucinogens as a way of transitioning into the invisible realm of spirits and ghosts, conceived of reality in the same dualistic fashion; a physical world behind which lay a more fundamental spiritual essence which could be encountered given the correct intellectual strategies and spiritual activities.
A note of caution should be sounded. These intellectual trends easily shade into the worst forms of cod philosophy and trite spiritualism; who hasn’t had to endure that bore at a party describing an experience of taking mushrooms in the Amazon and touching a dolphin in order to become ‘one’ with nature, or Gary from Peckham off his nut on a ‘vision quest’ having snorted a good bump of crystal?
And the idea that there is any hard and fast connection between aesthetic creativity and the use of drugs and alcohol is a treacherous one to say the least. As a functioning alcoholic, I can say that a moderate amount of drinking certainly can grease the wheels and allow for a more unincumbered creative flow. At the same time, I’ve gone over the next day some of the stuff I’ve written while fully flushed (stuff I thought was brilliant in the moment) and it’s nearly always read wincingly self-indulgent and all-over-the-place in the sober light of day.
I suppose what I want to say is that although people rightfully laud the explosion of political and aesthetic creativity provided by the counterculture that emerged in the 50s and 60s, it did have its distortions and deficits. Many of the rambling stream-of-consciousness poems unleashed by those beatniks who thought they were harmonizing with infinite realities were simply onanistic, annoying, and completely meaningless.
And the hippy movement, which many of the beatniks would flow into, was problematic. The hippies of the early 1960s famously played an important and effective role in the anti-war movement in their capacity as flower-power-promoting pacifists, but in terms of the possibilities of challenging the status quo and the political forms of exploitation back home, it is important to remember that there was a streak of conspicuous individualism which ran through much of the movement, and made it resistant to radical social change. As Devon Van Houten Maldonado observes, the hippies were in the ‘majority white, middle-class group of young people’ whose wealthy backgrounds most often meant that they had ‘had less at stake than those fighting for civil rights’.[11]
The material luxury many of the hippies enjoyed set the basis for a cultural indulgence; on the one hand, they loathed the militarism and the straight-laced conservatism of their parent’s generation, and yet, the solution to many of the political problems of the age for them became the expansion of the mind through drugs and the adoption – in crude outline – of various tenets of mysticism and eastern religions such as Buddhism or Hinduism.
But the search for nirvana or brahman was also the movement of the isolated and private consciousness as it turned in on itself; the great social and political problems of the age faded before one’s own spiritual journey of individual discovery. This kind of esoteric spiritualism – so attractive to many a hippy – allowed the individual in question to feel as though they were posing a radical affront to the status quo, that their higher consciousness had transcended the material and base imperatives of a capitalist economy such as consumerism and the never-ending drive toward accumulation and profit, and yet, in the same moment, such an isolated and aloof spiritual purview left intact the social structures and forms of capitalist organization and oppression which set the stage for the ‘consumerist’ society in the first place.
For the struggle for ‘nirvana’ would never necessitate the joining of the trade union, or the radical organization, or the revolutionary party; it would never require the one who sought it to siphon their efforts into the practical transformation of society at the socio-economic level in and through collective action – through strikes and committees. For this reason, the ‘rebels’ could ‘rebel’ against their parents’ generation – against their concern with material goods, their unquestioning fidelity to the government and country, the conservatism of a conventional bourgeois existence more broadly – while at the same time their own basis in a substantial degree of material privilege which sustained such a ‘rebellion’ was left wholly undisturbed.
As a consequence, hippies could often ‘turn on, tune in, drop out’ in a way that would never have been feasible for civil rights activists and besieged radicals such as the Black Panthers, for the struggle of the latter was most often an ‘existential’ one – i.e. they could not afford to ‘drop out’ as their politics flowed from the fight for their very existence. And in this way, the hippy movement was always inclined toward an aspect of trite and superficial spirituality, a cultural luxuriant that overlaid a more fundamental accommodation of the status quo. As a long-deceased journalist once opined, scratch the surface of a hippy, and you will nearly always glimpse a conservative on the inside.
How much of the music of the Doors was infused with this hippy-esque sense of saccharine spirituality, camouflaging a more conventional and conservative mindset? While Jim Morrison shared much of the hallucinatory ‘LSD’ culture which hoped to cleanse ‘the doors of perception’ and allow the user to gaze into the infinite beyond (the name of the band was lifted from Blake’s phrase siphoned through Huxley), there were also important points at which Morrison eschewed the hippy ethic and reacted against it.
The song ‘Five To One’, for instance, seems to draw attention to the futility of the hippy lifestyle: ‘Night is drawing near/Shadows of the evening crawl across the years. You walk across the floor with a flower in your hand. Trying to tell me no one understands’. The ‘flower in your hand’ hints at that flower-power generation which is increasingly unmoored from the political realities as time creeps on – ‘shadows of the evening’. The conclusion? Morrison seems to suggest that radicalism will eventually and inevitably be traded for renumeration – ‘Trade in your hours for a handful of dimes.’[12]; the youthful hippy protestor will eventually morph into a figure of comfortable middle-class entitlement.
In an interview from 1970, Jim Morrison was more explicit in his antipathy to the hippy movement – ‘The hippie lifestyle is really a middle-class phenomenon … and it could not exist in any other society except ours, where there’s this incredible surfeit of goods, products, and leisure time.’[13] In another interview given that same ‘[u]n year, he was even more vehement, describing how the young hippies at Woodstock had ‘seemed like a bunch of young parasites, being kind of spoon-fed this three or four days of … well, you know what I mean.’[14]
Hopkins and Sugerman also emphasize Morrison’s spiritual and intellectual distance from the hippy movement, ‘[un]like the prototypical “hippy”, Jim thought astrology was a pseudoscience, rejected the concept of the totally integrated personality, and expressed a distaste for vegetarianism because of the religious fervor often attached to the diet. It was, he said, dogma, and he had no use for that.’[15] And, as Christopher Crenshaw argues, the Doors were ‘not part of the “love generation.” … were not influenced by folk-rock, and Jim Morrison’s lyrics did not often encourage listeners to “feel good.” Listeners were more likely to call them “evil” than look to them for peace and love.’[16]
For Crenshaw, the Doors embodied another aspect of the sixties counter-culture revolution, a ‘side of the resistance experience, a side fascinated with self-expression, darkness and release, sex and death.’[17] The music journalist Max Bell, writing for Classic Rock magazine expresses a similar sentiment, writing that ‘Morrison’s neo Gothic croon and Manzarek’s ghostly, cathedral-like organ spoke of murkier climes than those offered by the Beatles’ brand of polychromatic pop.’[18] For Bell, the music of the Doors was the darker palliative to much of the happy-go-lucky music of the 60s, ‘the symphonic high art’ of the Beatles for instance; for Bell, the Doors ‘gave the lie to such positivism, drawing on the growing feeling of ‘us against them’ that pervaded a generation of young Americans in fear of the draft to Vietnam’.[19]
But perhaps the music has a deeper historical resonance still. As Hopkins and Sugerman write, one of the things which inoculated Morrison against some of the worst aspects of hippy-esque counterculture was the fact of his own background as a ‘college graduate instead of a dropout, a voracious reader with a highly catholic taste …[w]hether he liked it or not, he was the obvious product of a Southern upper-middle class family: charming, goal-orientated, and in many ways politically conservative.’[20]
Again there are deep and underlying contradictions here. From an early age, Morrison seems to have intuited the hypocrisy, the façade of respectability that cloaks the lives of the well-to-do – his mother Clara, an aspirant social climber, vividly exampled it. And she was keen to impress standards of respectability and decorum on her often wild and wayward eldest child, and when he failed to meet her expectations, she was not shy about letting him know. Jim’s father was a navy man, away living on distant bases for most of his childhood, so Jim saw him infrequently. The times he did, however, were turned into significant occasions as when Jim was invited to visit a ship carrier his father had recently been promoted to run.
By this point, Jim Morrison was a young man, a college student who had a keen sense of his own developing identity, but this was something his mother could neither comprehend or respect, demanding instead that he cut his hair before the important visit: ‘There are three thousand men on that ship and your father has their respect, and he has that respect because he is a fine disciplinarian. How would it look if his son, his very own son, showed up looking like a beatnik?’[21]
Jim attended the event with his hair shorn as requested, but the bitterness over these kinds of incidents never really left him. A few years later, he would sever all links with his parents, brutally sudden, and he seems to have never looked back. From his earliest days when he used to torment his little brother, there was an aspect of cruelty, of coldness, about Jim Morrison – something that was on display in later life particularly in terms of the parade of women he scorned, mistreated and sometimes even brutalized. His parents, despite their faults, clearly loved him, and put a lot of effort into trying to raise him, albeit according to their parochial and conservative values. The manner in which he suddenly and abruptly discards them does seem unnecessarily cold and cruel, however on another level, it also makes a certain sense.
For the spiritual and political distance that opened up between them was immense. Clara, for Jim, represented something more than the stifling, shaming probations enforced by a parent on her child. She became more generally an emblem of the lower-middle-class world; the faux sense of respectability that thinly disguised the calculating aspiration and the snobbish superiority which lay underneath.
And if his mother was the prim package in which the values of the lower-middle class were decorated, then his father represented a more direct archetype – the distant disciplinarian with a military gait, someone in whom words and self-expression were always subordinate to the unthinking and unquestioning devotion to duty, a figure in which the state and the status quo could locate a steadfast guardian, someone of the lower orders who had thoroughly imbibed the tonic of patriotism and hierarchy, whose whole being was sheened red, white and blue, and would devote his existence to the shoring up of American military power and the project of globalism and mass murder which that entailed.
I believe that, for Jim Morrison, his parents became more than just figures whose authority he resented as part and parcel of adolescent rebellion; they were emblems, personifications almost, of aspects of the decadence and decay of the American society in the late twentieth century, the point at which historical development was reaching its twilight.
It is well-chronicled that Morrison claimed his earliest memory to be from when he was four years old, and he was traveling with his parents on the highway from Santa Fe. The scene is recreated in the film The Doors, directed by Oliver Stone, the dusty highway, the expanse of desert and mountain, the arid heat but with the greys and purples of storm clouds brewing in the background. The family passes an overturned truck and the young boy glimpses the injured and dying Pueblo Indians who have been thrown from the vehicle and onto the asphalt by the force of the accident. The child, witnessing the horror, exclaims ‘I want to help, I want to help … They’re dying! They’re dying!’ to which his father responds in a comforting murmur, ‘It was a dream, Jimmy, it didn’t really happen, it was a dream.’[22]
In later years, his parents’ account of the incident differed from Morrison’s own. With no small dose of imagination and some hyperbole, Jim Morrison probably exaggerated the details of the accident, the number of victims, even going as far as to say that he had, as a four-year-old child, felt the soul of one of the dead Indians pass into his body. But whatever embellishments Morrison gave to the incident in retrospect, it is clear what happened was something that left an indelible mark on who he was, who he became – he would later describe it as ‘the most important moment of my life’.[23]
And this is significant on several levels. In the most immediate sense, it was a traumatic, unsettling and harrowing experience for any small child. But it also became, I think, a philosophical allegory of a broader political and social vision. The victims of the accident were native Americans – the ingenious people whose displacement, ethnic cleansing and murder on a vast scale constituted perhaps the nation’s ‘original sin’ (it preceded the transatlantic slave trade in this respect). It is not altogether insignificant that Morrison’s father was a military man, someone who rose high in the ranks of the same power which oversaw much of the ethnic cleansing that had been interwoven with the nation-building project of the past. And that whisper – ‘it was a dream … it didn’t really happen’ – isn’t that the refrain of every white conservative in the political establishment seeking to diminish or disappear historical memory?
The idea of the US as a long smooth highway, a journey of sleek, technological progress and civilization, an untrammeled and unproblematic voyage into the future that works to disguise the wreckage of persecution, slavery and mass-murder which one glimpses momentarily through a window as those details rapidly recede into the rearview of the past; this acts as a potent metaphor for history, for society, for the family unit. I think the veneer of respectability that overlaid the often spiteful, ruthless and acquisitive values of the lower-middle class suburban existence became blurred in Jim Morrison’s aesthetic consciousness with broader social and historical horizons, the modern nation – its values of liberty, fraternity and equality – papering over the deeper primeval darkness at work beneath the surface of respectability and decorum.
I think too this is why he came to despise his parents so absolutely; not only did they sense in him the antithesis of their own respectability and accommodation to the status quo, but he located in them – unconsciously, indirectly perhaps – the ciphers of a broader system, a system which despite its claims to progress had yielded repression and apartheid and naked children running through streets in lands far away, skins burnt off by napalm. His parents, of course, couldn’t be held responsible in some purely personal capacity for the scope and entirety of these broader historical trends, but they could be held responsible for turning away, they could be held responsible for denial, for psychological repression, for the same social amnesia exhibited by an entire generation of older conservatives who papered up the cracks of darker realities by retreating into religious tradition and the parochial values of the ‘decent Christian family’.
In one of his most controversial works, Sigmund Freud extended his theory of the ‘Oedipus complex’ to the historical plane; in Totem and Taboo he argued that the latent desire of the son to kill the father provided the motive force for the transition from the rural world of tribes and gens to the earliest emissions of cities and modern civilisations. The young men whose hungers and freedoms had been suppressed by rigid hierarchy of the ‘totemic’ clan would eventually coalesce as a repressed group which, in turn, would enact a terrible revenge on the ancient patriarchy: ‘the brothers who had been driven out came together, killed and devoured their father and so made an end of the patriarchal horde. United, they had the courage to do and succeeded in doing what would have been impossible for them individually.’[24]
To be blunt, Freud’s analysis doesn’t have a leg to stand on in terms of providing a persuasive or even vaguely accurate description of the way in which the first civilizations came into being, historically speaking. But what is interesting about it is the way it explicitly equates the destruction of a family unit by the unleashing of Oedipal tendencies on an individual scale with the destruction of a whole social order. In perhaps the most disturbing verse of all, in possibly the Doors’ most evocative and starkly poetic song, Jim Morrison gives full credence to Freudian sensibilities and the Oedipal Complex in a sinister meditation on the ancient and the repressed, on sex and death:
The killer awoke before dawn
He put his boots on
He took a face from the ancient gallery
And he walked on down the hall
He went into the room where his sister lived, and then he
Paid a visit to his brother, and then he
He walked on down the hall, and
And he came to a door
And he looked inside
“Father?” “Yes, son?” “I want to kill you”
“Mother? I want to… “
This verse is about the half-way point in the song which, in its finalized form, is almost eleven minutes long. Naturally, this section caused deep controversy – in the live performances, Morrison sometimes erased the ambiguity of that final truncated sentence by concluding with visceral intent – ‘Mother? I want to … fuck you!’. But over time, the outrage has melted, and, for some, what remains is simply the sense of a band being shocking for the sake of shock, the Freudian aspect smuggled in as a way to be fashionably intellectual and visibly subversive. And yet … I would have to demur. For the song itself reveals much deeper layers and complexities.
The ‘killer’ who awakes before dawn is strangely anonymous – an archetype rather than a person, someone who conforms to the primitive, primeval image selected from the ‘the ancient gallery’ that the Jungian collective consciousness encompasses. At the same time, the killer has a contemporary bent, he puts ‘his boots on’ – one can imagine he is a serial killer – that dark and sadistic symptom of modern anomie and a staple of American culture in the 60s and the 70s from the Manson murders to the Zodiac. The damage this killer inflicts on his family is explicitly Freudian, but Morrison is not addressing his own family in the verse but rather the more universal example they had set – for they had become an emblem of the respectability of an American dream which overlaid an American nightmare, a crisis of civilization drawn out through global war and authoritarian repression, a crisis which was reaching its apex in the 1960s.
And so, when Jim Morrison ‘kills’ his father and ‘fucks’ his mother, what he is really alluding to is not just the destruction of a family, but the destruction of a civilization – a civilization which has inculcated the very death drive that seeks to obliterate it. ‘The End’ is, at its core, a song about the end of an epoch, a collapse, and its form is modernist and fragmented for precisely this reason. Like Elliot’s The Wasteland we seem to be hearing fragments of different voices at different times. In the beginning, for instance, the song opens up with the most beautiful, aching melancholy … ‘This is the end. Beautiful friend. This is the end, my only friend, the end. Of our elaborate plans, the end. Of everything that stands, the end. No safety or surprise, the end. I’ll never look into your eyes again’. Its apocalyptic but also intimate – someone addressing a lover before they unclasp hands for the final time. Soft, gentle, and so painfully beautiful.
Another voice, however, speaks in a colder way, a soulless way, almost as though someone is speaking through him. It invokes the aspect of the shaman, of the ancient peoples who lived on the land and who propitiated their animal gods long before they were displaced by Europeans brandishing crosses – ‘Ride the snake, ride the snake to the lake, the ancient lake … He’s old and his skin is cold’. This sense of ancientness is pronounced in another section, this time in the form of a madness which has fallen upon a modern culture – ‘Lost in a Roman wilderness of pain. And all the children are insane’. And joining these, is the voice of the preacher of the prairies with his promise of rapture and millennialism – ‘Can you picture what will be? So limitless and free’.
And then there is our serial killer, of course, who takes a face from the ‘ancient gallery’, and here one can’t help but wonder whether such a disguise – such a mask – might also represent the uniform so many young men were forced to don when they were sent off to kill in Vietnam at the behest of their parents’ generation. And finally, all these competing voices die down in favour of just the one, again that haunting refrain, ‘this is the end ….’
This achingly beautiful poem/song gives voice to various images of repressed and maddened presences that exist below the surface of ‘Americana’ in some kind of primordial and chaotic state of flux that ultimately suggest the collapse of civilisation itself. When I listen to ‘The End’ I think it is much more than just a rambling stream of consciousness by a beat poet and hippy-transcendentalist. Rather it has its roots in the dark terminus of all empires, that seed of degeneration which was present from the beginning, that speck of decay and death which great powers carry with them unbeknownst, the dark shadow at the edges that was so potently diagnosed by the playwrights of the past such as Aeschylus who used his play ‘The Persians’ as a prophetic allegory, the ominous portent which would herald the destruction of Athens at the hands of Sparta, or the poet Shelley as he poignantly referenced the tragedy of the great Ozymandias, that colossal wreck gradually sinking into the sands of time.
In the American context, we might call to mind the work of the artist Thomas Cole and his ‘The Course of Empire’, a set of five paintings which portrays the rise and fall of civilization. It depicts the origins of humanity in the forms of the early hunter-gatherers who eventually grow into an innocent and pastoral way of life where human beings live in a gentle harmony with nature.
The third painting shows how civilisation itself has succeeded these earlier moments, it renders a resplendent harbour overlooked by ivory palaces and pantheons. The civilisation – though it certainly has Roman and Greek trappings – is glorious but also generic, it is a placeholder for a concept of empire more generally, as the copper tinted water is festooned with glorious golden ships of war on the verge of departing for battle. Inevitably, the final paintings in the quintuple describe the apocalyptic downfall of the civilisation and the return to nature once more, shattered ruins overwhelmed by creeping vines and sprouting trees as nature reclaims the landscape.
In a song such as ‘Yes, the River Knows’, the Doors bring across that early stage of pastoral innocence, of people communing with nature; the river itself is personified in an animist tradition – ‘the river told me, very softly’. The river represents the very heart of being, and yet at the same time it is also ephemeral, like the flow of time itself: ‘Free fall flow, river flow’. The song describes that early arcadia, the spontaneous and immediate unity with nature which was the province of our most ancient ancestors – ‘breathe underwater to the end’ – and yet time is always at work, ‘On and on it goes’. It is a gentle poetic meditation, with just the slightest hint of foreshadowing, and in this way it has a similar aesthetic effect to those early paintings of Cole, the sense that innocence in its very essence is something that must inevitably be lost, that history will always find a way of turning the page.
And that sense of loss is also so much a part of ‘The End’, on a personal level in terms of the lover or ‘beautiful friend’ who is being addressed, but also at the level of a whole historical epoch. It is, perhaps, no coincidence that Francis Ford Coppola used the song to such eerie and crepuscular effect in the opening to Apocalypse Now. We begin with the sinister whirring of helicopter blads which then elides into that famous intro – ‘This is the end, my only friend the end. Of our elaborate plans, the end. Of everything that stands, the end’.
While this is going on, we see the thickets and trees of a great jungle, the shadow of a helicopter motors by, and then everything is engulfed by great plumes of flame. From that fire materialises the image of a soldier’s shell-shocked face as he gazes up into the ceiling while in the background the inferno continues to rage, punctuated only by the sleek skeletal shadows of burnt-out trees. It is one of the most powerful introductions to any film I think, not only because of the aesthetic and technical merits of the camera work, but because the music and the images have a real historical resonance, the logic of empire driven to its demented and insensible peak, that heart of darkness which is the engine of great war and cataclysmic collapse.
Morrison and Coppola were of a similar age, cut from the cloth of the same generation, they even attended the same film school. They were brilliant, quizzical, troubled bright lights of a generation whose lives played out against a backdrop of empire and abuse of power that yielded an epoch-changing war; they were not the type of prophets, Nostradamus-like, who used their art to predict the end of the world, rather – for their generation at that time – it seemed more like something they were actually living through. Ultimately ‘The End’ carries an intense sadness, the sadness of youth – of children not yet grown – thrust into the terminal freefall of an end of days, and the terrible knowledge which comes with it, a bitter, beautiful lament to innocence lost.
+++
… It is perhaps five or six years after that day, when I discovered the Doors for the first time in that light-riven campus dorm. It is perhaps only five or so years, but it already feels like a lifetime away. Now I am living in Latin America, in Ecuador, and I share a flat with a best friend. We both teach English at the local university. It is Friday night, and I am meeting her partner for the first time. It’s often awkward meeting the partner of a dear friend, for a kind of enforced proximity occurs, where you both, as strangers, have to frantically try and gel for the sake of her, so I am a little anxious.
But I shouldn’t be. Ruben is soft-spoken, gentle, with a brilliant but random and chaotic bent of mind that disappears down rabbit holes and roams across the stars. And, like me, he enjoys a drink or two. But the most wonderful thing of all is – as evening merges into night – I discover he is the biggest Doors fan I have ever met. From that moment on we are friends in our own right. And together we will savor their music on many more occasions, many more late nights spent drinking and indulging our obsession.
To paraphrase Tolstoy, one of the fundamental miracles of music is the way it expresses the soul of the musician and infects the soul of the listener. But the relationship isn’t a purely passive one. For just as the musician breathes color into the lives of future generations, the listener can use music to breathe life into the past too. I am middle-aged. I haven’t seen my friend Ruben for many years, and those people I knew at university are as shadows seen from a great distance now. But when I play the Doors, it brings me back so swiftly, so sweetly, to those moments in the past, to the memory of friends and laughter played out once more under faraway skies, and the ghost of a younger, long-lost self.
Notes.
[1] Goldsmith, Melissa Ursula Dawn (November 22, 2019). Listen to Classic Rock! Exploring a Musical Genre. ABC-CLIO. pp. 93–94.
[2] Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman, No One Here Gets Out Alive (Plexus Publishing, London: 2011) p.11
[3] Ibid., p.12
[4] Ibid., p.12
[5] Ibid., p.12
[6] Ibid., p.18
[7] Christopher Hitchens, ‘Living Proof’, Vanity Fair March 15th 2003: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2003/03/hitchens-200303
[8] Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman, No One Here Gets Out Alive (Plexus Publishing, London: 2011) p.45
[9] William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790)
[10] Jim Morrison cited in Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman, No One Here Gets Out Alive (Plexus Publishing, London: 2011) p.45
[11] Devon Van Houten Maldonado, ‘Did the hippies have nothing to say?’ BBC Culture 29th May 2018: https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180529-did-the-hippies-have-nothing-to-say
[12] ‘Five To One’ The Doors 1968
[13] Jim Morrison cited in Christopher Crenshaw, ‘Five to One: Rethinking the Doors and the Sixties Counterculture’, Music & Politics 8, Number 1 (Winter 2014), ISSN 1938-7687. Article DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/mp.9460447.0008.101
[14] Ibid.
[15] Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman, No One Here Gets Out Alive (Plexus Publishing, London: 2011) p.155
[16] Christopher Crenshaw, ‘Five to One: Rethinking the Doors and the Sixties Counterculture’, Music & Politics 8, Number 1 (Winter 2014), ISSN 1938-7687. Article DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/mp.9460447.0008.101
[17] Ibid.
[18] Max Bell, ‘The Doors: the story of Strange Days and the madness of Jim Morrison’, Classic Rock 12 November 2016: https://www.loudersound.com/features/the-doors-the-story-of-strange-days-and-the-madness-of-jim-morrison
[19] Ibid.
[20] Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman, No One Here Gets Out Alive (Plexus Publishing, London: 2011) p.155
[21] Clara Morrison cited in Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman, No One Here Gets Out Alive (Plexus Publishing, London: 2011) p.40
[22] Cited in Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman, No One Here Gets Out Alive (Plexus Publishing, London: 2011) p.6
[23] Jim Morrison cited in Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman, No One Here Gets Out Alive (Plexus Publishing, London: 2011) p.6
[24] Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo (Norton and Company, New York: 1950) p.176
