Inside Jim Morrison’s strange obsession with a serial killer
Jim Morrison was a man of many obsessions. He took a poetic view of the world, wrestling with how the American disposition fits into the meter of some primordial pattern. Somewhere amid this mystic philosophy was the strange presence of a serial killer from a bygone era who Morrison seemed to think symbolised something pivotal in the way the West unfurled thereafter.
The Doors classic ‘Riders of the Storm’ began life as a simple jam of ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’, a country tune which was originally written by Stan Jones and depicts a coterie of curse cowboys forced to ride horseback through the sky for tortured eternities. While The Doors may have taken the song in an entirely different direction thereafter, this brooding sense of epic Western theology remains. And it wasn’t just the stark Midwest’s dusty haze that Morrison wanted to capture but also the characters that existed there.
Therein lies the tale of a hitchhiker. Morrison himself was no stranger to wandering the serpentine roads of the west with an outstretched thumb. In college, his girlfriend lived three hundred miles away and Morrison would thumb rides towards her on his lonesome. This was dangerous. Thus, Morrison crafted a darker traveller to give the song a grave gravitas. “There’s a killer on the road/ His brain is squirming like a toad,” Morrison croons out in reference to murderous hitchhiker Billy Cook who killed six people as he made his way between Missouri and California.
This dark, murderous streak is not only woven into the lyrical tapestry, but it splatters the rolling journey of the melody with a damned undertone in what is one of the great counterculture tracks. While the sauntering atmospheric epic ‘Riders on the Storm’ might encapsulate so much more than just the killing spree of Billy Cook, there is no doubt that within the great doomed American tale, Cook is a prominent figure.
His presence is shrouded in mystery, as though it has a life beyond the song. Indeed, he did in the mind of Morrison. In the summer of 1969, two years before ‘Riders on the Storm’, Morrison created the film HWY: An American Pastoral, whereby he portrayed a hitchhiker pondering the ways of modern American society, as life and landscaped unspooled around him.
The opening shot of the movie sees a stretch of asphalt unravel with the credits painted onto it before the camera eventually arcs towards the bruised sky of moody desert dusk where the desolate moon hangs like a milk bottle top on a washing line awaiting the hissing company of the night. This notion of the long unfurling roads of America stretching out like lonely ventricles is not just a vignette to open a film, but a singular fascination that Morrison seemed to hold throughout his short life. Amid the desert night was a dark presence. A sort of disease on the outskirts of society.
Billy Cook embodies that. As District Judge Stephen S. Chandler said in the trial: “Society stands indicted for permitting this child to grow up among cruel and inhuman conditions and must accept part of the blame. This crime might never have been committed had this boy been given a civilized upbringing and education.” He since entered pop culture indefinitely cropping up in movies, noir novels, songs and memoirs long before Morrison delved into the seemingly unflinching cold-blooded killer with an eye for fame.
He was, in short, a symbol of the folly of wayward society. He put this pastiche down in a poem. Morrison sought to capture the passenger lifestyle he was almost drifting through in a stupor—Jim Morrison’s ‘The Lord’. The poem depicts modern life as a cruise through town in a car gazing at the crooked world through a window. You can check out a verse from Morrison’s epic poem below, where he travels to society’s crumbling edges—the sort of dark places that twisted Billy Cook’s lurk and linger, forever impressing themselves on Morrison’s far out psyche:
“The city forms- often physically, but inevitably
psychically- a circle. A Game. A ring of death
with sex at its center. Drive towards outskirts
of city suburbs. At the edge of, discover zones of
sophisticated vice and boredom, child prosti-
tution. But in the grimy ring immediately surround-
ing the daylight business district, exists the only
real crowd life of our mound, the only street
life, night life. Diseased specimens in dollar
hotels, low boarding houses, bars, pawn shops,
burlesques and brothels, in dying arcades which
never die, in streets and streets of all-night
cinemas.”
