Was Jim Morrison a Poet?

“Jim said that maybe we don’t have enough songs, you know…you all should try to write some too,” Krieger remembers. “So I went home and the first one I did was ‘Light My Fire.'” It wasn’t addressed to anyone in particular. “I tried not to think of specific people or things when I was writing. I figured Jim’s stuff was very universal and could be about anything, so I tried to emulate that.” Besides a few instrumentals he barely remembers, it was Krieger’s first real song and his debut as a lyricist. “You know that it would be untrue/You know that I would be a liar/If I was to say to you/Girl we couldn’t get much…higher.” A little awkward, maybe, but it would do. Coming from Jim’s mouth, though, those words became incendiary.

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By the summer of 1966, The Doors had built up their repertoire and were ready for the stage. They landed a gig as the house band at L.A.’s infamous Whisky-a-Go-Go. It was there that Morrison, high on acid, would sink into a trance while singing “The End,” intoning these famous words: “Father, I want to kill you. Mother, I want to…” You know the rest. (or think you do-Morrison never actually completed the sentence.)

These lines got them fired, but a record contract with Elektra Records would soon put them in the national spotlight. With tracks like “Break on Through,” “Light My Fire,” “The Crystal Ship” and “The End,” their debut album, The Doors, was a remarkable achievement.

The Doors were naturally inspired by the music they heard on the radio, but only to a point. “Sgt. Peppers, obviously-that was a big shocker,” says Krieger. “And Hendrix’s album. But you know what, we weren’t really listening to a lot of that stuff. We had a lot of old blues records, classical stuff. We were into all different kinds of things…old Brecht, Kurt Weill, German opera…we wanted to be our own thing. There was nothing really that came along that made us say, ‘Oh, we’ve gotta do something like that.’ As for Morrison, he wasn’t too enamored with any particular songwriters. I think he liked some of the Stones stuff and some of The Beatles stuff. He liked Van Morrison a lot, and The Animals. But there wasn’t a whole lot that he was crazy about. He was more into his own thing.”

The Doors formed a tight unit from the beginning, splitting all their publishing royalties equally. When the band was introduced on stage as “Jim Morrison and The Doors” early on, Jim made the MC introduce them again-as “The Doors.”

While “Light My Fire” was a hit at radio, it was their legendary stage show that was gaining them the most notoriety. In concert Morrison would routinely whip the crowd into a Dionysian frenzy. (He even invented stage-diving). While the singer ingested freely before a performance, the others held back. “With The Doors, each song has a lot of things that you have to do right, otherwise you’ll look stupid,” Krieger points out. “So it’s not easy. The couple of times I’ve played on acid, it kind of blew my high,” he says, laughing.

Still, the band liked to take trips too; the music led them there. With Manzarek pumping the bass on his organ with one hand while tickling the astral plane with the other, Krieger made his guitar weep and moan. Densmore would take wild, impressionistic drum fills, and everyone would hang on Morrison’s next move.
Densmore explained to Jim Ladd how, for Jim, his onstage rants and Lizard King persona were no “act.” “Morrison was one of the few performers I knew that really believed what he was saying,” he recalls. “He lived that life. He wasn’t just up there doing his trip and then going home to watch TV and have a beer and laugh at it all…all the way to the bank. He lived that life that he lived out on stage all the time.”

“At concerts he’d sing for four hours if they’d let him have the stage that long,” poet Michael McClure, a friend of Morrison’s, recalled in a 1971 interview. “He was the same way at your house or at a bar; he’d sing to entertain you or himself.”

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