How Aldous Huxley inspired The Doors
If you’ve ever needed proof that poetry and rock and roll can work well together, you only have to look at The Doors. The band, led by Jim Morrison, rose to prominence in the late 1960s with their blues-inspired psychedelic songs. Beyond the brilliance of their music and lyrics, Morrison gained iconic status due to his indelible stage persona. Both mysterious and outrageous, the vocalist was frequently arrested on stage due to his antics, making The Doors’ shows unforgettable.
For punk poet pioneer Patti Smith, seeing Morrison meld poetry with rock music was game-changing. In her memoir Just Kids, she wrote, “I felt, watching Jim Morrison, that I could do that.” And she did – following in Morrison’s footsteps to become a key figure in the punk landscape and one of the most influential artists of all time. Evidently, Morrison’s short stint as a musician, tragically passing away when he was 27, was powerful enough to leave a lasting mark on popular culture.
Morrison’s love of literature can be thanked for his writing skills, which he expressed from an early age. According to his high school teacher, “Jim read as much and probably more than any student in class, but everything he read was so offbeat I had another teacher (who was going to the Library of Congress) check to see if the books Jim was reporting on actually existed. I suspected he was making them up, as they were English books on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century demonology. I’d never heard of them, but they existed, and I’m convinced from the paper he wrote that he read them, and the Library of Congress would’ve been the only source.”
He cited writers from the Beat Generation, like Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, and Symbolist poets, such as Arthur Rimbaud, as some of his biggest influences. He enjoyed the likes of Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, and Vladimir Nabokov, all of whom greatly influenced his beliefs.
The English writer Aldous Huxley also significantly influenced Morrison, so much so that the young musician named his band after his book The Doors of Perception. Published in 1954, the book explores Huxley’s experience with mescaline, with the writer arguing that psychedelics can aid creativity. The title was lifted from William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: infinite.”
This was certainly an appealing idea to Morrison, who spent much of his time after university taking LSD. In an interview with Newsweek published in 1967, keyboardist Ray Manzarek explained, “There are things you know about and things you don’t, the known and the unknown, and in between are the doors – that’s us. We’re saying that you’re not only spirit, you’re also this very sensuous being. That’s not evil, that’s a really beautiful thing. Hell appears so much more fascinating and bizarre than heaven. You have to ‘break on through to the other side’ to become the whole being.”
Huxley’s influence on Morrison was vital in shaping the singer’s beliefs and interests, subsequently aiding his contribution to psychedelic music.
