Jim Morrison once revealed his two favourite bands
The entire canon of The Doors often feels like it exists outside of the normal confines of rock and roll. As most of the rock scene was becoming more concerned with the hippy movement and walking around with flowers in their hair, Jim Morrison was painting a dark picture of what was happening inside his head, usually with graphic depictions of the violence in every human heart. Then again, even the most spaced-out frontmen get their ideas from somewhere.
In the early days of The Doors, Morrison was usually more attuned to poetry than standard rock and roll. In his first meetings with future Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarak, Morrison didn’t even fancy himself as a singer, thinking he didn’t have the voice for it. When swapping influences back and forth, Manzarek would tell Classic Albums, “Jim was influenced by the Beat poets. Certainly people like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Michael McClure”.
After the group started gaining traction in the Sunset Strip scene, Morrison started to harness different personas depending on the song he sang, from embracing his role as ‘The Lizard King’ on ‘Not to Touch the Earth’ to becoming a crooner on songs like ‘The Crystal Ship’. When talking about some of his favourite bands from around the same time, Morrison had an equally spaced-out taste for some of the newer bands coming out of the woodwork.
When discussing his modern tastes, Morrison first talked about his love for blues music, thinking that that was what the band were destined to do in the early days. However, newer acts like Pink Floyd were also catching his ear at the time, explaining (via YouTube), “I heard them in Hyde Park when they were doing a free concert, and I liked them a lot”.
It’s not hard to see why the early days of Pink Floyd appealed to Morrison, either, having the same dark psychedelic vibe that The Doors would be the American inverse to on albums like Strange Days. Outside of standard rock and rs two oll, Morrison also expressed an interest in jazz, waxing poetic about Miles Davis’s performance at the Isle of Wight, saying, “I’m not a musician. I just knew that there was something there. And I figured if we can go in that direction and get complex like that, then it’s best for us to do what we do best, which is blues”.
Although The Doors have certainly made their fair share of blues songs across albums like LA Woman, there were always elements of both of Morrison’s favourite bands creeping into their sound. On some of their epic tracks like ‘The End’ and ‘When the Music’s Over’, Morrison tends to ramble off in free verse as the band improvises around him, which is taken directly out of the way that the musicians in Davis’s band fed off each other.
While Pink Floyd wouldn’t stay together with the Syd Barrett iteration for much longer, The Doors also harnessed some of their zany energy, putting some of the wacky sound effects into songs like ‘People Are Strange’ or ‘Hello I Love You’. For all of the standard hippy bands coming out at the time, it’s easy to see the common thread between Miles Davis, The Doors and Pink Floyd. Not all of them played the same type of music, but hidden within their songs was an innate fearlessness to try anything they could on record.
