‘Five to One’: The drunken session that defined The Doors
As one of the foremost counterculture acts of the 1960s, The Doors’ ability to encapsulate the brooding tension of an entire generation without their political message ever feeling contrived. The group was not without its socially charged songs, and cuts such as ‘The Unknown Soldier’ and ‘Peace Frog’ symbolised their distrust of the establishment and the willingness of the government to send their generation to war. But, what set The Doors apart was their ability to talk about huge change within the confines of pop music.
One instance that perhaps typified the band and their ethos was ‘Five to One’, a song that so neatly encapsulates the band. It talks about racial tension, generational divides, attitudes to drugs and the Vietnam War, all the while delivered in a studio session that saw Jim Morrison so drunk that he had to be regularly counted in.
Waiting for the Sun, the 1968 album from The Doors, arrived at a pivotal time for America. Following the ‘Summer of Love‘, which saw a generation of Americans find their inner hippie and collectively agree that the older factions of society had lost their way, 1968 offered a dual edge of hopeful resistance and an alluring cliff edge. As the war in Vietnam raged on, a mass of public opinion rallied against the conflict while those in government and authority did everything they could to ensure the war machine kept churning forward. When placing these attitudes within a society that was also trying to align the Civil Rights Movement and a new attitude towards drugs, there is little to stop a counterculture from exploding.
The Doors were at the forefront of that movement. Releasing two albums, The Doors and Strange Days, in 1967, the band acted as the soundtrack for the cultural revolution. Jim Morrison, the group’s mercurial leader, was the poster boy for this change. A poet, a lothario, and a uniquely intoxicated individual, Morrison’s image as a Byronic detent for a new generation was difficult to shake. While in the world of New Romantic poets, he may have found a home in being able to scrawl his work on parchment and depart in a horse-drawn carriage to the nearest den of debauchery, for the modern world of the 1960s he was expected to be more present.
All of these threads were woven together during the recording of ‘Five to One’. The song, though described by Morrison as being wholly non-political, pointed to several different notions at once. “Five to one” was the approximated ratio of white people to Black, of the new younger generation to old, to non-smokers of marijuana to smokers and, perhaps most pertinently, Vietnamese soldiers to American soldiers in Vietnam.
“Five to one baby, one in five, no one here gets out alive” remains one of Morrison’s most poignant lyrics, written in reference, one suspects, to the disparaging numbers facing American soldiers arriving in Vietnam. Another lyric in the war arrives with, “Hey got the guns, but we got the numbers”. However, such is the ambiguity in the singer’s lyrics that this could also be a reference to the older generation versus those in the counterculture movement.
“The old get old, and the young get stronger,” he sings with another pointed reference to the swell of changing attitudes. Despite Morrison’s assertion, it is hard to see this song being anything but a rallying cry to a generation now firmly engaged in their secret revolution. It’s a sentiment rammed home during the track’s most infamous performance in Miami in 1969 when Morrison began to call the audience “slaves” and “idiots” while on stage, something which would see him arrested for attempting to incite a riot.
The recording of ‘Five to One’ was another example of these conflating moments, as Morrison, clearly inebriated during the studio session, garbles the lyrics with the elegance of an irrational bridge performer. When listening closely, it is even [possible to hear a studio engineer telling Morrison “one more time” on the recording. It is in this duality that we see The Doors neatly defined.
While Morrison and the band were the champions of the counterculture movement, and they happily pushed forward altruistic causes that dealt with war, societal change and civil rights, they were also hampered by the singer’s addiction struggles. It’s impossible to know whether this song would have garnered more resonance with a sober Morrison at the helm or if a clean frontman would have helped The Doors to continue their mission.
All we can know is that it is within the paradigm of ‘Five to One’ that we see the great and gruesome sides of Jim Morrison and The Doors.
