DB's Song of the Day (day 343): "FIVE TO ONE" (1968) The Doors

Five to one, baby / One in five / No one here gets / Out alive

Yesterday was the birthday of James Douglas Morrison, lead singer of The Doors. I’ve already posted for his death day and, around Easter, on “The Soft Parade.” To honor Morrison on his birthday I feel I have to choose something from one of the first three LPs. I was tempted to go with something from Strange Days (1967), mainly because that’s the one I associate with lysergic dissociation in the cold winter of 1977/78. But maybe I’m not as close to those days at the moment, their strangeness having inspired other things I’ve written. The third album, Waiting for the Sun (1968), is in many ways the most obvious choice, if only because “Hello I Love You,” its lead-off, is such a ready radio song, and so impulsive. But rather than go for something so obvious, I’m drawn to the LP’s closing song, its brashest and most in keeping with Morrison’s image as some kind of incendiary figure.

They got the guns, but we got the numbers / Gonna win, yeah, we’re taking over!

It’s the kids against the elders, it’s the freaks against the straights, it’s the hip against the squares. It’s 1968 and Jim’s only 25. And how about that band? The Doors—Ray Manzarek, Robby Krieger, John Densmore—had a sound all their own. It could be spacey, headsy, it could be bluesy, could be hard rock, even jazzy, rarely was it folky, and that set The Doors apart from 90some % of bands around at the time. It’s an L.A. thing, I guess. Anyway, “Five to One” is a song with plenty of what you’d call “mojo.” It’s riding the vibe of doom, tempting the Revolution. Far out. Hearing this song you kinda understand better the scene that gave rise to Charlie Manson.

Acid heads always risked becoming psychotics. Morrison didn’t, but then that’s because he was more of a boozer than anything. Kept him “sane,” somewhat. Wild mood swings he did have and I guess that’s what keeps me connected to my old Doors records after all these years. I dig the moods of this music. It’s full of a kind of bravado that has to do with everything they’ve ever told you about the people who hit their twenties in the Sixties. They were riding a wave alright. But on this song Morrison looks into the abyss opening up below the wave. Ooooooo, wipe out!

Trade in your hours for a handfulla dimes / Goin’ta make it, baby, in our prime. And listen to how he positively entones “prime.” Yeah, prime cuts for this dude. Primo. This is for the “get out before you’re 30” crowd. And Morrison means it. The old get old and the young get stronger. He’s not waiting around for when the young get older.

And he’s rarely contemptuous, but that “You walk across the floor / With a flower in your hand / Trying to tell me no one / Understands” certainly has the mark of dismissing those gentle flower people from up there in Frisco. And the voice—so guttural, with a whine built in—keeps our teeth on edge. And the zombies of the apocalypse muttering “get together one more time” behind his increasingly frenzied lead, as Krieger on guitar starts tearing it up more than he’s wont to do, make us fear things are coming to a head. And then a scream leading into Jim trying to work out some logistics with his baby—“see I gotta go out in this car with these people”—and she's probably circling for a landing hours from now.

It could all go horribly wrong: Your ballroom days are over, baby / Night is drawing near / Shadows of the evening / Crawl across the years. Whatever that means, it sounds baleful. Like: the jig is up. We’re onto you, and once upon a time you dressed so fine, threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you? Who cares, those shadows are comin’ for you now, and they mean curtains.

Waiting for the Sun tends to lull you into thinking the demonic poet who wants to kill his dad and fuck his mom is mellowing into a pop-songster, and then “Five to One” comes along and makes us wonder when we’re going to see this guy heading for the beach with a bloody machete in one hand and the head of some Fat Cat dangling by its matted hair from the other. Or maybe he’ll just do it in his psychotic dreams as he sprawls in a bathtub letting it all go . . . .

Gonna make it, baby, if we tryyyyyy.

DB's Song of the Day (day 184): "RIDERS ON THE STORM" (1971) The Doors

On this date in 1971, Jim Morrison, lead vocalist for The Doors, died in Paris. At the time, today’s song, from L. A. Woman, The Doors’ final album with Morrison, was just making its way onto the charts, giving the song—which was eerie enough to begin with—the eerie effect of seeming “beyond the grave.”  But it was a song I had to have, and it seemed a shame it was all over for Morrison, though my discovery of all the band's albums wouldn't happen for another seven years. In retrospect, I’d say the first and the last Doors albums are the essential ones, though I also have a place for Strange Days (1967) and Waiting for the Sun (1968).

The view I first heard about The Doors, from an older friend more aware of their career as it developed than I was, was that the first three albums were the best, or true Doors, and from The Soft Parade (1969) on things were questionable. I buy that until we get to L.A. Woman which is a great comeback album and also shows that The Doors, seemingly, had weathered that weird year 1970 and were playing rock as vital as anyone was in what was a great year for rock. At least that’s the view I have now because the more I hear this album, the more impressed I am. I can almost forget about the earlier ‘poet’ Morrison, ramping up his dream-logic sagas as on the first three albums. I prefer Morrison the blues singer, the belter, the rocker. And the band seems very tight on these tracks, mostly recorded live in the studio. They’d lost producer Paul Rothschild and I think that helps. There is a leaner, meaner sound on this album than on the other Doors records—it begins on Morrison Hotel but there’s a lot of filler on that one (released in that weird year 1970), but really comes into its own here.

I don’t know what Morrison would have done had he continued. It seems The Doors had decided against future live performance after Morrison staged something of a “strike” at their last gig and wouldn’t perform. It seems he’d had enough with being “the Lizard King.” And why not, wasn’t it time to knock all that Sixties schtick on the head? Could he have been reborn in another persona? This album leads me to believe that yes he could. From 1972-75 there were some rock classics waiting to be born and I don’t doubt that somewhere in there would’ve been another great Doors creation. But it was not to be.

Before “Riders on the Storm” made the airwaves, all I knew of The Doors was “Light My Fire” from 1967 and “Hello I Love You” from 1968, and then “Love Her Madly,” which preceded “Riders” as a 45 from L.A. Woman, and which I didn’t care for much. Reportedly Rothschild called it “cocktail music,” and he may have a point, but it’s mainly that it’s rather tame. It sits on the album like what it’s supposed to be: the radio tune, a bit incongruous but not awful.

“Riders” was something else, with its opening thunderstorm and waves, with that tinkling droplet played on a Fender Rhodes by keyboardist Ray Manzarek, with the sepulchral intoning of the title and the lines—as starkly beautiful as any Morrison ever came up with—“Into this world we’re thrown / Like a dog without a bone / An actor out on loan / Riders on the storm.” Morrison was a Nietzsche and Rimbaud nut in his youth (hear, hear!) and he may even have been familiar with Heidegger’s notion of being “thrown” into the world (Geworfenheit). The idea underpins an existential sense of “the realities of life” (your vital statistics, status, social connections, family, location, occupation) as simply a “given,” a situation that is not intrinsic to your actual Being, much as the actual past is not deterministic of this present. In any case, Morrison and company gave Top 40 radio in 1971 (and pretty much ever after) a sense of how slippery the present is—it’s like being a rider on a storm. Some of us get to ride longer, some of us ride it better, but there’s going to be slippage, y’know, and spills.

The song includes a couple other verses but none as good as that chorus, and the “girl you gotta love your man” part isn’t too sexist, is it? Rimbaud said that one day “we” might understand women, and chose that as a possible means of improvement for the species—Morrison says women have to make men “understand.” It might still smack of that “earth mother” bit but I always took it in a “return to Eden” sense in which the woman isn’t the betrayer but the means to enlightenment.

Then there’s that bit about “a killer on the road / His brain is squirming like a toad.” I remember hearing that in the car as a kid—“If you give this man a ride / Sweet family will die”—and finding it rather unnerving. And there, on the album cover, was Morrison sporting his big Manson-like beard. Whew. You had to hand it to Morrison for not doing things touchy-feely. There was always a sense of danger, of something that might be smoldering under the surface and that might come to light in a burst of agonistic venting. I think that’s what made the live shows so volatile. But it also, it seems, became a tremendous pain in the ass for the other band members, and for Morrison himself.

Anyway, it’s worth my while to take this post to commemorate James Douglas Morrison because he did cast a shadow over my early verse-making, back when it seemed that poems might really be lyrics and vice versa. That view comes from not knowing very much about poetry, but much can be done in the ferment of imitation in ignorance. At least for awhile. Wallace Fowlie, who made the first translation of Rimbaud I read, actually wrote a book about Morrison and Rimbaud. That seems a bit thin to me, if we’re talking about verse-making, but it makes sense if we’re talking about the kind of ideas they had about what makes a poet a poet. The long, sustained deregulation of the senses, and all that. Morrison certainly had enough of that. I just don’t think much of the idea of “reading Morrison” without Manzarek’s keyboards and Robby Krieger’s guitar. They together made The Doors sound that, most of the time, envelops Morrison’s voice so well. But as a singer/frontman, Morrison knew all about how to sport with “the poetic”—or, as he conceived it, after Nietzsche, the Dionysian. Rare enough in rock, we must admit.

Into this house we’re born.

DB's Song of the Day (day 109):"THE SOFT PARADE" (1969) The Doors

Yesterday I took his name in vain, so I guess it’s time he showed up on here: Jim Morrison and The Doors. The Doors are one of those odd bands in the history of rock. There’s no one else quite like them and even they can’t successfully do what they do as often as they like. Morrison, like Hendrix, cashed out early, but, unlike Hendrix, there’s a sense that he’d shot his bolt. While it’s always been a shame that Hendrix didn’t get to age into the old bluesman he was perhaps born to be, it’s hard to say what Morrison, if he’d stuck around, would’ve evolved into. In some ways, The Doors’ debut LP, The Doors (1967) was all they needed to say.  It’s a swanky blues sound shot through with the more psychotic aspects of psychedelia, with Morrison’s deep voice adding sepulchral hues at will. It’s also sexy as hell in an eerie, idolatrous way.

The second album, Strange Days, builds on that and in some ways is even better, but still cut from the same cloth, and released the same year. Then Waiting for the Sun, the third album, moves away from that standard sound in little ways, with what might almost seem sunny California touches, and may be the most satisfying album. With the fourth album, from which comes today’s title track, the band is clearly trying to branch out, but branching out produces some pretty weak numbers. And yet “The Soft Parade” is a standout example of the kinds of nutty excess these guys could come up with and somehow pull off.

The extended album-closing track was the hallmark of The Doors ever since “The End” on the very first album, a long, dreamy stream-of-consciousness poem snaking along to a rambling jam that finds crescendos and explosions whenever Morrison comes close to primal anxieties. “When the Music’s Over” on Strange Days is in some ways more eloquent in exploring the ad hoc imagery of improv poetry—find a groove and ride it, till “the music’s over.” Both songs were showcases for Morrison to emote and to fling his wrenching scream into the Aether.

“The Soft Parade” is already in on all that. It’s got a sense of pastiche in its grooves as Morrison enjoys throwing out little non sequiturs, like “the monk bought lunch,” and rhymey doggerel, “Peppermint, miniskirts, chocolate candy / Champion sax and a girl named Sandy,” and babbled asides like “this is the best part of the trip, the best part, the trip, I really like.” It’s a little time capsule of psychedelic posturing that Morrison and company have fun with, throwing in their characteristic grooves and licks and letting Morrison open with a stentorian harangue—“YOU CANNOT PETITION THE LORD WITH PRAYER!”—and close with one of those free-floating phrase-clusters (here seeming to echo Strange Days’ unnerving “Horse Latittudes”): “When all else fails / We can whip the horses eyes / And make them sleep / And cry.”

The general feel of the song is trippy as hell as it moves through various moods—if you listen to it on altering substances, each new phase is bound to remake the space you find yourself in. The opening has the sensual melancholy for which we turn to The Doors in the first place—as, for instance, “Moonlight Drive” or “Crystal Ship”—“Can you give me sanctuary / I must find a place to hide / A place for me to hide.”

For me, the song belongs with the Easter season for no particular reason other than a loose association that got stuck in place, having to do with using it on a tape made one particular acid-intensified Easter and my sense that the kinds of all-night psychic voyages this song seems to recount suit the season. For about a decade from early Eighties to early Nineties, I used to sometimes read Finnegans Wake aloud into the wee hours of Easter morning in an attempt to return to that dreaming awake feel we used to have others kinds of help achieving.

This song too, in parts akin to the previous album, boasts a bit of that Californian ascendancy that, if you ever feel it on the East Coast, you feel it in April—“Successful hills are here to stay . . . .Gentle streets where people play”—that’s pretty much the mellow LA vibe. But the line that always gives me a lift is “Everything must be this way.” It can have something of a “what, me worry” tinge to it but it also comes stamped with the iron will of the Fates. This is how it is because that’s how it is. Amor fati, as Nietzsche was fond of saying.

The song gets loose and funky and starts the inevitable climb of a Doors’ song, but here the overlapping voices are whipping it on to a kind of chaotic party atmosphere—all those people out to have some fun, with lights getting brighter and a moaning radio and, a favorite, “a few animals left out in the yard.” The song works well with something like Hunter S. Thompson’s vision of Vegas as people distorting into unnameable creatures before his very eyes. And Morrison likes his heart of darkness tropics too: “what brought us this far to this mild equator”—knowing that the journey within is like the journey into the most distant land. “We need someone or something new / Someone else to get us through”—which comes as the kind of “we blew it” gesture that eats up Kesey at the end of Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test or which Morrison returns to with the great gesture of “I tell you this, no eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn” on “WASP” from what was the final (and I'll go out on a limb here, best) album, L.A. Woman (1971).

It’s all part of a failed experiment and Morrison and company are just riding that tiger a little longer.  You’re allowed to think of Rimbaud giving up at the end of A Season in Hell with that shrug that will echo for centuries. “Well, I will ask forgiveness for having lived on lies, and that’s that.”

All our lives we sweat and save
Building for a shallow grave
Must be something else we say
Somehow to defend this place

Is it defensible, that search for gold in the grooves of the moment, for the diamond insight, the state of grace Allen Ginsberg calls “kind king light of mind”? “The Soft Parade has now begun / Listen to the engines hum . . .”

I'm proud to be part of this number.

Krieger, Dinsmore, Manzarek, Morrison