The first Doors song Jim Morrison ever wrote: “We’re going all the way with this”
The Doors always made songs that sounded like they were coming from another planet. Regardless of the amount of blues and jazz that they threw into the mix, you weren’t going to get someone like Jim Morrison in any other genre of music, playing the role of the debaucherous rock star to a tee whenever he got onstage. While Morrison didn’t initially think of himself as the rock star type, he knew that he had something when he thought up ‘Moonlight Drive’ for the first time.
When you think about it, though, Morrison’s role as the frontman practically feels impossible by most rock band standards. He didn’t know the first thing about music theory and only marginally knew what it took to be a rock singer, but when combining that with his love for poetry, something celestial seemed to happen whenever he got in front of the microphone.
So, with a calling in poetry before anything else, you can imagine that Morrison wasn’t drawn to music as his true calling. He needed to express himself however he could, which meant majoring in every poet’s favourite subject… film.
Yes, before ditching college, Morrison worked in the film department at UCLA, where he met Ray Manzarek, who had just run away from trying to be a lawyer. While Morrison spent his days writing poetry, it wasn’t until he set ‘Moonlight Drive’ to music that things started to take shape.
According to Manzarek, it took a long time before Morrison had the courage to sing them, telling Classic Albums, “[Jim] said, ‘I’m writing songs’, and I said, ‘Let me hear some of your songs’. And he was very shy, saying, ‘Eh, I don’t have that much of a voice,’ and I said, ‘Forget it, man, Bob Dylan doesn’t have a voice, and he’s like the biggest thing going’, and he closes his eyes and starts to sing ‘Let’s swim to the moon, let’s climb through the tides.’”
Even in that raw form, Manzarek knew that he had found what he was looking for, telling Morrison, “At that point, I said, ‘That’s it, we’re putting a rock and roll band together. We’re going all the way with this one.’” As the duo got drummer John Densmore and guitarist Robby Krieger in tow, though, ‘Moonlight Drive’ would need a few more alterations before it was complete.
While half of the band’s greatest songs usually lived and died on the strengths of Morrison’s voice, ‘Moonlight Drive’ really works thanks to Krieger’s slide guitar. It’s not the most complicated thing in the world going between those two notes, but hearing that paired with Morrison going on a seaside drive late at night sounds like Krieger is channelling the ghost on the dark side of California.
But that was really the allure of The Doors from the beginning. For all of the great music that they made together, it was never about making something that could be a chart hit like ‘Light My Fire’. It was about capturing the feeling of The Summer of Love, and ‘Moonlight Drive’ was the mission statement that let everyone know the dark side of what psychedelia had to offer.
