How a car accident involving an infant Jim Morrison inspired a classic song by The Doors
Artistic inspiration can often come from the most unlikely of places. In the case of counterculture icons The Doors, songwriter Jim Morrison seemed to move through life, soaking up inspiration like a long-haired sponge, which can be seen by the variety of sounds and musical influences he explored during his time with the band. Despite typifying the hippie age with his music and performance, some of Morrison’s inspiration rose from his early experiences in childhood.
Born in 1943 into a military family, Morrison had an expectedly atypical childhood. Given his father’s position as a high-ranking admiral in the US Navy, the Morrison family lived something of a nomadic lifestyle, which meant a young Jim Morrison was forced to continually adapt to new surroundings and circumstances. On top of that, the singer’s parents had a particularly bizarre method of discipline.
The parents vowed never to hit their children, as was commonplace at the time, but would instead employ a military-style “dressing down” ,whereby they would verbally assault their children to the point of tears in an effort to discourage bad behaviour. Unsurprisingly, therefore, Morrison ended up cutting ties with his family, for the most part, after graduating from UCLA in 1965 – around the same time that he came to form The Doors.
Even if he largely removed himself from the family, Morrison would still draw upon his early experiences throughout his songwriting career. One of the most prominent examples of this came with the song ‘Indian Summer’, one of the first songs the band ever recorded together. Despite being on their initial demo tapes, the song did not see widespread release until Morrison Hotel in 1970, perhaps as a result of its dark background.
‘Indian Summer’ used the morbid inspiration of a car crash that Morrison had experienced as a child. While on a family road trip to New Mexico at the age of four, the car Morrison was travelling in became involved in an accident. During said accident, a family of indigenous Americans were either injured or, as Morrison has claimed, killed. Undoubtedly a scarring event to witness for a four-year-old Morrison, he never seemed to forget the deaths of that family.
“The souls of the ghosts of those dead Indians…were just running around freaking out,” he once said, speaking upon the accident and the construction of ‘Indian Summer’. “And just leaped into my soul. And they’re still in there.” Admittedly, it must be mentioned that Morrison was on a consistent cocktail of mind-altering substances for most of his time with The Doors, which may go some way to explaining how the dormant spirit of dead First Nations caused him to write ‘Indian Summer’.
Nevertheless, the song remains one of the clearest examples of Morrison drawing upon his tumultuous childhood within the music of The Doors. After all, the band were among a new wave of counterculture groups capturing the political and social revolution of the late 1960s. They were rarely concerned with tender self-reflection of the exploration of childhood trauma; they were rooted in the immediate present.
Potentially as a result of the switch-up in Morrison’s songwriting that ‘Indian Summer’ suggested, the song took nearly five years to see an official release, and when it eventually did, it was hidden away as the penultimate track on Morrison Hotel. The Doors never played the song live, either, as it did not seem to have the same impact as many of their other compositions. Regardless, ‘Indian Summer’ is certainly worth a revisit.
