The Doors song that sounds best on LSD: “Jim was so messed up”
In the mid-1960s, a guy called Ken Kesey was doing experiments up and down the West Coast, mostly in the hippie epicentre of the San Francisco Bay Area. Advertised with psychedelic posters reading, “Can you pass the acid test?”, he claimed to be studying the effects of LSD, but really, the acid tests were a chance for a bunch of kids to get royally messed up and experience the world’s most intense trip with lights, music, videos, and all sorts. Kesey spent time and effort curating that, but really, he could’ve just sent them all along to The Doors’ concerts and studied them there instead.
If the acid tests were usually about having a good trip, The Doors’ concerts, in many moments, could’ve been a look into the other side. In many moments, they appeared more like shamanic gatherings than anything else. The band would spiral out into long jam tracks like the infamous work in progress, ‘Celebration Of The Lizard’, which Morrison said was a “kind of an invitation to the dark forces”. His poetry, too, seems to speak to that, as so much of the content found on the spoken word album, An American Prayer, alludes to the connection between spiritual awakening, music and essentially rioting.
He always seemed to write of enlightenment as a thing that required a kind of violence. “Break on through to the other side,” he declared, yelling it to his crowds as an instruction as the whole band would kick it up a notch, whipping the room into a frenzy, just like he wanted.
That seemed to be Morrison’s own experience with acid as drummer John Densmore said he often felt like he was watching the singer lose his mind during as his psychedelic days wore on. “The psychedelic Jim I knew just a year earlier, the one who was constantly coming up with colorful answers to universal questions, was being slowly tortured by something we didn’t understand,” he said, adding, “But you don’t question the universe before breakfast for years and not pay a price.”
The conflicting lightness and darkness of Morrison’s acid experience is perfectly reflected in Robby Krieger’s response when Vulture asked him which Doors song sounds best on acid. He said ‘Light My Fire’ would be one, capturing those brighter, colourful days. But his real answer seems to get at the darkness as he picked ‘The End’.
“The whole deal was that when we recorded that song, Jim was on a huge dose of acid, and he had an Oedipus complex. He was really dealing with that at the time. Shortly before we recorded it, he came up with that [line] about fucking the mother and killing the father,” he said, reflecting on how LSD was unlocking some truly fucked up doors in Morrison’s mind.
It’s not just that the song is perfect to soundtrack an acid trip, being long and lazy and never too intense as long as you don’t spiral too deep into the existentialism. But it comes down to the context. “That’s just a really acidy song. Especially to me, because I know Jim was so messed up that night on acid,” Krieger said, so to him, the voice on that track would forever be the voice of Morrison, floating away on his own acid test.
