The song Jim Morrison wrote about horses being thrown off ships
In the 18th century, sailors making their sea voyages would become stuck in areas with no wind and calm waters, floating idly for days on end in the expansive waters. Time would pass, and temperatures would soar. In an effort to conserve food and water, ships loaded with horses bound for the West Indies and America would throw horses overboard. This bizarre ritual led to these ocean regions being dubbed “horse latitudes”, as immortalised by Jim Morrison in a song he wrote as a teenager.
‘Horse Latitudes’ would later become a hit for The Doors, appearing on the 1967 album Strange Days. Morrison first became aware of the concept when sat in a high-school classroom, having noticed a paperback cover that showed horses being thrown off a boat. He was so struck by the imagery of the horses flailing to their deaths that he started writing the lyrics to the would-be Doors song.
“‘Horse Latitudes’ I wrote when I was in high school,” Morrison told Rolling Stone in 1969. “I kept a lot of notebooks through high school and college, and then when I left school for some dumb reason, maybe it was wise, I threw them all away.” But the visceral poetry on ‘Horse Latitudes’ endured, with its violent, fantastical imagery: “And the first animal is jettisoned / Legs furiously pumping their stiff green gallop / And heads bob up, poise, delicate, pause, consent / In mute nostril agony.”
Morrison’s spoken word poetry is backed by a series of unsettling sounds provided by other Doors members. You can hear them intermittently wailing into the mic, clanging coconuts and Coca-Cola bottles into bins, and also the white noise of a tape recorder – which was being hand wound to change the speed, creating a noise somewhat similar to the wind.
‘Horse Latitudes’ was said to be one of the first poems Morrison ever committed to paper, but around the fifth or sixth grade, poetry had completely enthralled him. At that time, he wrote another, called ‘The Pony Express’, which he described as “one of those ballad type” poems.
“I never could get it together, though,” the late singer said.
Morrison added: “I always wanted to write, but I always figured it’d be no good unless somehow the hand just took the pen and started moving without me really having anything to do with it. Like, automatic writing. But it just never happened. I wrote a few poems, of course.”
It was his formative years in high school that laid the groundwork for much of his later style, the equal parts empathic and psychedelic musings he perfected with The Doors. “The birth of rock and roll coincided with my adolescence, my coming into awareness,” Morrison once reflected. “It was a real turn-on, although, at the time, I could never allow myself to rationally fantasize about ever doing it myself. I guess all that time I was unconsciously accumulating inclination and listening – so when it finally happened, my subconscious had prepared the whole thing.”
