The Doors song inspired by Jack Kerouac
Throughout the 1960s, every song The Doors put to tape would be about more than just a good rock and roll tune. From day one, Jim Morrison wasn’t looking to be the typical rock singer, and half of the reason the band became what they were was through Morrison’s warped view of reality dictating how the songs would be played. Although the music was the essential piece of the puzzle, poetry factored into the equation just as much.
Before Morrison had become fascinated with rock and roll, he initially wanted to be a part of the beat poetry scene going on around the same time in America. When talking about the influences that Morrison had in the beginning, keyboardist Ray Manzarak told Classic Albums, “Jim was influenced by the beat poets, certainly [people like] Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure”.
Quickly turning his poems into pieces of music, Morrison’s first attempt to sing came when he showed Manzarak one of his poems. As he slowly bobbed his head to the music he heard subliminally, Morrison had inadvertently come up with the melody of what would be ‘Moonlight Drive’, only needing the rest of the band to fill out the sound.
By the time the band got around to the late 1970s, they had started to lose touch with the initial spark that made them want to play music in the first place. Outside of three albums of the same material, The Soft Parade marked the moment when they started to move outside of the conventional norms, bringing in horns and strings to satiate Manzarak’s love of jazz musicians.
Throughout the following few projects, though, the band would quickly become a bluesy version of themselves, with LA Woman standing as the holy grail at the end of their career. Embodying the seedy and attractive sides of ‘The City of Angels’, the title track includes musical sections synonymous with the band, from the relentless rhythm to the band’s gift to improvise over Morrison’s ramblings.
When talking about the song’s origins, Manzarak would say that Morrison was going back to the poets that he loved when coming up with the final tune, calling the tune “a song about driving madly down the LA freeway – either heading into LA or going out on the 405 up to San Francisco. You’re a beatnik on the road, like Kerouac and Neal Cassady, barreling down the freeway as fast as you can go”.
Featuring Morrison playing around with whatever words fall out of his mouth, the song is a road trip odyssey through the seedy side of Los Angeles, with Morrison singing to either a female companion or the city itself. This song would only be a preview of the poetic excursions throughout the remainder of the record, with ‘The WASP’ taken from a spoken-word piece that Morrison would perform throughout the band’s career before it was set to a bluesy shuffle beat. The Doors may have been one of the most singular forces in LA music, but Morrison’s love of the written word is seeping through every line in this track.
