The lyric Ray Manzarek said was “what Jim Morrison was all about”
The dark rumbles of the 1960s counterculture’s dramatic souring would be presciently channelled on The Doors’ violently lysergic debut.
Dropped early 1967 as the lauded Summer of Love was about to bloom from the West Coast and across the Western underground, The Doors dwelled in a darker, more dramatic terrain of nightmarish trip.
Conjuring heady slices of psychoactive garage, keyboardist Ray Manzarek’s foggy organ would stand as the quartet’s essential sonic weaponry alongside their frontman’s volatile performance art. Later to prove an essential influence on a young Iggy Pop, Jim Morrison threw himself into the role of enigmatic, psychedelic conjurer with ease, weaving a more intense and arresting counter to the hippy idyll’s flower power revolution.
They never topped their explosive first album. While solid records would follow, boasting canonical cuts from the Los Angeles acid-bluesmen, The Doors best captured their mystical energy. At times radiating celestial romance on ‘The Crystal Ship’, beckoning cosmic otherworlds on ‘Break On Through (to the Other Side)’, or commanding stirring paeans to sexual energy on ‘Light My Fire’s amorous flame, every facet of The Doors’ enveloping psych is all hit with Morrison’s pitch-perfect lyrical bullseyes.
It’s the 11-odd minute album finale that arguably stands as The Doors’ finest moment. Immortalised in the opening napalm destruction of 1979’s Apocalypse Now’s phantasmic Vietnam War trip, ‘The End’s percolating descent into inner anguish and murderous monologues stand as the band’s most primal moment, a swallowing dusk of wandering intrigue and hellish vignettes, all scored by an entrancing raga slither spiking to a crescendo of unabated rock at its most spiritually frenzied.
It’s a defining number that could take strange, unexpected forms on stage. Speaking to journalist Gary James in 1991, not long after Oliver Stone’s band biopic was released, Manzarek revealed some of the live video material of ‘The End’ that lay in the Doors’ vaults yet to be seen by fans.
“There is one, a show up in Toronto, a performance of ‘The End’ that we’ll use someday,” Manzarek revealed. “But, they took out the whole Oedipal section, the whole mother / father section, ‘the killer awoke before dawn’ has been edited out of that show. The censors edited the whole sequence out of that show, man”.
He added, “It was just too heavy. He took a face from the ancient gallery. It’s not ‘father I want to kill you, mother I want to…’, it’s the killer awoke before dawn, he put his boots on, and he took a face from the ancient gallery’, like a Greek mask. That’s what Jim Morrison is all about”.
Lyrical storm clouds of familial violence and sexual rage may have been inspired by his student days performing in the university production of Oedipus Rex. But Morrison was drawing on deeper scars within his psyche. So affected by his military father’s alienation at his son’s artistic inclinations, The Doors singer maintained a ruse that his family was dead and he was orphaned, adding to the mythos he keenly draped himself in.
It’s unclear to what degree his grievances were embellished, but seething fury with unleashed with such biblical and wrathful fever, no doubt unveiling an insight into his inner workings that were all things at once, immature, frightening, tragic, all the knotty wirings that charged his on-stage, feral abandon that fascinated one half of the crowd and terrified the other.
