Was Jim Morrison a Poet?

The band returned to the studio in 1967 to record their second album, Strange Days. It was another solid burst of creativity from the band. Strange Days featured another epic closing number to rival “The End,” “When The Music’s Over.” “What have they done to the Earth,” Morrison sang. “What have they done to our fair sister?”

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Morrison maintained close contact with his muse in the studio. According to McClure, “Jim was always making up songs in the studio. The musicians would be taking a break, and Jim would grab the mike and sing spontaneously, making up the words as he went along.”

“He always had a notebook on him and a pencil,” remembers Krieger. “Unfortunately, a lot of that stuff he would just throw away. I wish I had every notebook he ever had. There must be tons of good stuff in there, I’m sure. The stuff he cared about, he kept. But there’s a lot of great stuff that went away.”

For most of the band’s career, lyrics came to Jim in torrents. “It was almost like someone was telling him what to write down,” says Krieger. “But then there were also times when it was like pulling teeth for him. Sometimes he’d been looking in his poetry book and have to come up with an idea so he’d work from that. But for the first couple albums, he said that he had some great pot [chuckles]. I don’t know where he got it, but he would smoke that stuff just listen to this voice…and he would write down the words.” As divine as his inspirations seemed, Morrison wasn’t adverse to revision. “He’d be changing stuff right up to point where it was recorded.” Says Krieger. “Nothing was ever written in stone.”

Like their California peers Jefferson Airplane and The Grateful Dead, The Doors advocated the use of love and drugs. But, due to the complexity of Morrison’s character, they had much more to say on the subject. “We were never really protagonists of the flower movement,” Krieger told Ladd. “In fact, we were the complete opposite. Because what was happening with that trip was, all these hippies were [talking about] love and peace and everything’s great, but really that was only half of the side of the coin. And we were providing the other half of that coin. There always has to be a balance.” Fittingly, when they wrote the song they jokingly titled “Peace Frog,” the lyrics were primarily about “blood in the streets.”

In July of 1968, the band released their third album, Waiting for the Sun. It featured the all-time classic “Five to One,” later sampled by rapper Jay-Z for a classic of another era. (Krieger prefers Snoop Dog’s “Riders on the Storm” remake, but he’s lukewarm on both.) Waiting for the Sun’s lead track and hit single was the raucous “Hello, I Love You.” Contrary to Internet rumors, The Kinks never sued The Doors for royalties over the song’s noticeable similarity to “All Day and All of the Night.”

With 1969’s Soft Parade, The Doors sound continued to evolve, as did Jim’s lyrics. The eight-minute title track fused some of his most evocative word play with shape-shifting grooves. “I tell you this,” he barked, “no eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn.” The album found the band employing horns and strings, most notably on the Sinatra-esque “Touch Me,” written by Krieger.

“The chorus I kinda stole from a Joan Baez song,” he freely admits. Say what? “I’m gonna love you ’til the heavens…’til the heavens…something about the rain,” Krieger says, laughing. “I forget what the name of her song was. But I used to really be into Joan Baez in her folk music days, so I would borrow some stuff from her from time to time.” The lyrics may have been partially recycled, but the tune was Krieger’s own. “Jim would always sing his own version of my melodies, but on that particular one, he stuck pretty much to what I wanted.”

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