I come from a small town in the north-west of England where people are more spectacularly and disturbingly saturnalian than anywhere else I’ve ever been to or seen. Staggering amounts of alcohol, cocaine, ecstasy, gambling, sex – you name it, it was imbibed (predominantly, though not exclusively) by young men of my acquaintance to frightening degrees on a fairly regular basis during the 90s and 00s. Some of them still do it. And many of these friends of mine have long professed a love of the Doors. After listening to this album, I finally understand why.
Most of the music here is not particularly groundbreaking. It’s bluesy rock, similar to the contemporaneous output of the Stones or the Who. But two key elements distinguish the Doors, the first of which is Jim Morrison’s vocal delivery. He sounds utterly feral, and nowhere more so than on the opener, with its unearthly shriek to “break on through to the other side”. Is Jim, as an arch-romantic and a disciple of Nietzsche and Freud, calling on us to shatter the chains of reason, and into the realm of instinct and emotion? God knows, but I don’t get the same vibe from the Beatles, who always sounded relatively professional, playful, and in control, including on their more psychedelic songs. Even the Stones brought an ironic British detachment to their otherwise sinister music. But here we have a deep and immediately apparent Dionysian abandon which is far removed from the more Apollonian stylings of, say, Revolver. Jim’s terrifying primal scream hints at some serious issues which were, of course, to manifest themselves shortly after, rendering him as the reference point for artistic excess and youthful self-destruction for a generation (until he was expertly transitioned by Val Kilmer from the realm of rock tragedy to high comedy).
The lunatic asylum vocals are perfectly complimented and accentuated by the second defining feature of this album: the organ. I read an article written by Marilyn Manson about his love of the Doors: he suggested that they were the only band of the time who wouldn’t have been able to make it through a show if the keyboard player had sustained an injury. Indeed, the organ is central to all of the best moments on this album – it crawls up and down the songs like some demented, sensual, unhinged, erratic spider. This is most true on “Break on Through” and “Light My Fire”, the record’s two biggest hits.
I assume that “Light My Fire” is about James getting wrecked with and then shagging his girlfriend, but the song is more unsettling than romantic. The long, jazzy interlude and keyboard solo after the second verse could be considered a bit arduous, but I find this section hugely disconcerting. To me, it represents the inchoate stupor that follows the high of a drugs binge, and it summons to mind an image of Jim on stage, completely off his face, head sunk against the microphone, while the rest of the band continue to play impassively and interminably behind him. I can almost feel his inebriated misery and disorientation, and anticipate the coming hangover. And then, suddenly, after two minutes of this incoherence, Jim snorts another line, the bouncy chorus hits again, and the Lizard King is cheerfully back to calling for his fire to be lit. I don’t think any other song more perfectly captures the self-destructive excesses of the 1960s. Even when the lyrics are ostensibly sensible, as on “Take it as it Comes”, the demented organ gives the Dionysian lie to the Apollonian restraint of the words. Jim enjoins the listener to take it slow, but as the organ spirals, these sentiments appear as mindlessly recycled soundbites about clean living, uttered by a drunk with his head on the bar.
Come to think of it, a drunk with his head on the bar is a neatly representative image for this entire album. To some extent, of course, every great band and every record is rooted in a moment in time, in a particular setting. The Beatles latter albums invoke the breezy, but psychedelically tinged sunny uplands of swinging sixties London, while the Stones inhabit that same city’s dingy, smoky underground blues bars. You can’t hear the Beach Boys without thinking of lush Californian sands (and the myriad aberrant psychoses underlying that cookie-cutter culture). But the sound of the Doors is the sound of an off-his-face redneck, staggering out of a grimy bar onto a desert road at midnight.
To some degree, this album systematically narrates a night on the town. On “Soul Kitchen”, our protagonist is still sat slumped at the bar, smoking one cigarette after another, and demanding more liquor from an increasingly exasperated barman. By the time the fairground pump of “Alabama Song” kicks in, he’s been ejected onto the hick town’s hauntingly deserted streets, and left to forage desperately for “the next whiskey bar”. The music here expertly conveys the undignified clown-like staggering of a drunken debauch searching for another watering hole. “End of the Night” is very much about what it says on the tin – every bar is closed, leaving Lord Byron to stagger down the desert road while the icy and unforgiving stars look down impassively. It’s like “Red Right Hand” meets Queens of the Stone Age, a Cormac McArthy-esque vision of extreme hedonism in the American wilderness. Very, very troubling.
That said, a couple of the songs on this record deal with romantic relationships – but always with a particular Doorsian prurience. “Twentieth Century Fox” is a venomous takedown of the quintessential, borderline-anorexic, coquettish, cigarette-smoking 60s model, who is dismissed here as “fashionably lean”. “Back Door Man” is a dirty blues cover and initially I thought it was about anal sex, but apparently, it’s a term for someone who steals in through the back door to give someone else’s wife a seeing to. “I Looked At You” is, I guess, about the inevitability of copulation with Jim Morrison after sharing a single look with him; the ubiquitous, barely repressed, animal sensuality of everyday life and every exchange of eye contact. Actually, I don’t find any of these songs particularly memorable, but they all ooze with impropriety and licentiousness, a world away from the lovey-dovey stylings of the Beatles or the Beach Boys. Nobody wants to hold anybody else’s hand here.
Another intriguing aspect of this album are the moments of despair and morbid flatness, the crashes and comedowns after the drug-induced highs and sexual orgies. There are, arguably, two such moments. “The Crystal Ship” is positively funereal, the demented organ suddenly somber, Jim asking to be “delivered from reasons why” – a great line that encapsulates his willful rebellion against the forces of the Enlightenment which, he probably believed, strangled the vitality of life. “The End” reminds me of “Love is Blindness”, a long, drawn-out, slow-paced closer that bookmarks the Dionysian chaos and mania of much of the rest of the album. The closing Freudian couplets are a bit clumsy, in my opinion, but the more apocalyptic lines toward the start of the song are more disturbing, a grim foretelling of the Manson killings, the escalation of the Vietnam War, and the end of the 60s. These songs sound to me like a prefiguring of post-punk: both could be on the second half of Closer, for example.
Ultimately, the Doors’ debut album is about the profound ambivalence at the heart of Bacchanalian revelry and Dionysian excess. It is riven with the hell of addiction and the misery of the comedown, but it also points to how life-affirming being young, going out on the town, and getting wasted can be. I can imagine how inspirational this might have seemed in the late 60s – not for the ground-breaking music, necessarily, but for the mood and aura the Doors created. Much of the music I grew up with – Guns ‘n’ Roses, Marilyn Manson, Oasis – is rooted in this feeling, this turning away from the Apollonian, taking more, getting high, and self-destructing. I always thought rock’n’roll was inherently and inseparably about this, but having gone back to its roots, I’m now less sure. Maybe the Doors were the first to forge this link after all.
And yet, to me, this album is always dark, it’s never uplifting. I don’t hear a boozy celebration of life, like on, say, “Cigarettes and Alcohol”, but rather a frantic and ultimately doomed attempt to keep one step ahead of a monster that was always going to catch Jim in the end. And I’m not referring to Val Kilmer.
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Highlights: “Break on Through”, “Light My Fire”, “The Crystal Ship”