No Eternal Reward: The Doors

Stuff You Should Know, hosted by Josh Clark and Charles W. “Chuck” Bryant, is probably my favorite podcast, but on occasion Chuck manages to irk me slightly by tossing out gratuitously dismissive comments about the 1960s rock group The Doors—pronouncements like (and I’m paraphrasing, here), “Most teens go through a Jim Morrison phase—me included—but as you grow up, you recognize his lyrics are just pretentious pseudo-poetry. Getting past that Morrison stage is a rite of passage, a sign of maturity.”

He’s said things like this more than once. And he’s not alone in this view. I’ve heard others express similar sentiments about Jim Morrison and The Doors.

These critics are dead wrong. I am well past my teen years and I still, to this day, have not outgrown the music of The Doors, and I remain a vocal defender of the poetic vision of Jim Morrison’s lyrics. (Witness this very blog post.) It’s not my contention that everything Morrison wrote was inspired—nobody hits it out of the park every time (even Shakespeare wrote a clunky line or two)—nor am I saying that I share Morrison's dark world view. But when Morrison’s lyrics are good—and they often are—they are very good: poetic, evocative yet coherent, and philosophically consistent. And over the course of The Doors’ relatively short recording career (roughly four-and-a-half years), he articulated a recognizable and undeviating world view. (He also lived his philosophy. For better or worse, he truly walked the talk, and died at the age of 27 perhaps because of it. It is not my intent to romanticize this fact, as some have. Dying at 27 is a tragedy.)

There's video of an interview with a seemingly very drunk and/or stoned Jim Morrison from about 1968 in which he claims that the one thing he'd like to do musically, which he hasn't yet done, is compose and perform a song that is a pure expression of joy. I find this both odd and hilarious because the phrase "a pure expression of joy” is far from the first thing that should come to mind when you think of The Doors' music^[1]. In fact, it probably shouldn't even make the top 500 things that come to mind. Morrison's was a consistently dark vision from which the very thought of joy is almost entirely alien.

Well…I should qualify my assessment: darkish is more accurate. Because even a casual glance at the lyrics of Morrison's songs reveals his celebration of the life force; but it's equally obvious that Jim believes the time we have to enjoy life is short, doomed to end soon, probably sooner than you think, possibly violently, because there are dark forces afoot in this world:

There's a killer on the road
His brain is squirming like a toad
Take a long holiday
Let your children play
If you give this man a ride
Sweet family will die ("Riders on the Storm")

The world Morrison posits here is one of implicit, life-threatening danger. You can disagree with this view, of course, but the point is that a world rife with existential threat is a given in Morrison’s view and one needs to recognize that to fully appreciate his art. The specter of death, often violent death, lies at the heart of such Doors songs as “The End”, “Light My Fire”, “When the Music’s Over”, “Horse Latitudes”, “Moonlight Drive” (a romantic moonlight drives leads to a moonlight swim which leads to drowning), “The Unknown Soldier”, “Five to One” (the lyric “No one here gets out alive” could stand as a pretty succinct summation of Morrison’s overall outlook), and too many other songs to list.

In this world, you can’t always tell that the threat is there; you can't necessarily see the madness, the squirming toad brain of the possibly innocuous-seeming hitchhiker, but that just makes him all-the-more dangerous; because if you give this man a ride…

And in Jim’s view, we are all, however unknowingly, on the verge of giving this man a ride.

But any life worth living is about taking chances, Jim insists. Perhaps the best distillation of this view is in the lyric from "The WASP (Texas Radio and the Big Beat)": "I'll tell you this," Jim intones: "No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn." This—the here and now—is what we have; nothing else. Make the most of it because the rest is empty promises. There is no "better place" awaiting us after we leave this plane of existence: "Cancel my subscription to the Resurrection," Morrison sings in "When the Music's Over"; for the "music is your only friend" and when it's over ... "turn out the lights".

But in the same song, Morrison offers a glimpse of what is possible for those willing to take risks: “Before I sink/ Into the big sleep/ I want to hear/ …the scream of the butterfly.” You will never encounter those rare and secret experiences, Jim intimates, if you are too timid to take chances, too eager to conform, too uptight to allow that maybe, just maybe, butterflies scream. You can’t hear what you’ve never listened for.

In a little-known Doors B-side, "Who Scared You", Jim basically uses his contention that the time we have here on this earth is all we have as a seduction technique: "Who scared you? Why were you born?/ …into time's arms with all of your charms?" You, we, are young and beautiful here and now—not in some promised-yet-deferred paradise, a realm whose price of admission is a life wasted in self-abnegation—so let's make the most of our now because we are caught in time's unforgiving arms in which our youth and beauty will fade ("The time you wait subtracts the joy", as Jim sings in "We Could Be So Good Together")... and if we waste that, there will be no compensation later. The final verse of the song strongly implies that this idiosyncratic seduction technique is a success, strangely enough.

The insistence on immediate gratification in the lyrics and poetry of Jim Morrison betrays a definite hedonistic tendency, but it is a hedonism born of the certainty that time will win; death will win; our time is fleeting, our youth temporary, and a moment wasted is a moment lost forever, and lost for no good reason, for zero recompense. There is a distinct Götterdämmerung element to Jim's vision: Don't waste your life looking toward some promised future paradise—this is your paradise, your Valhalla, and you should not let the fact that, yes, Valhalla is ultimately destined, doomed, to fall deter you from finding whatever enjoyment you can while there is time.

It helps, when approaching the music and lyrics of Jim Morrison, to have at least a rudimentary understanding of the Dionysian/Apollonian dichotomy with respect to approaches to art. Morrison’s approach is a quintessentially Dionysian one.

In Greek mythology, Apollo, the sun god, is the avatar of rational thinking, order, and light; he represents the appeal to logic, prudence, and purity. Jim Morrison’s poetry and lyrics are decidedly not a product of this approach, a fact to which Morrison alludes in his lyrics to “End of the Night”, a song on The Doors’ eponymous first album:

Realms of bliss
Realms of light
Some are born to sweet delight
…
Some are born to the endless night

Morrison identifies with, and his lyrics explore themes related to, the latter cohort—those “born to the endless night”, those who thrive in the penumbrae of a dark and dangerous world.

In marked contrast to Apollo, Dionysus is the god of wine and dance, of irrationality and chaos, of ritual madness; he represents the appeal to emotion and instinct. His frenzied followers, drunk on wine, would often tear animals to pieces with their bare hands. In Euripides’ play about this cult, The Bacchae, one mother even tears her own son to pieces while in the throes of drunken Dionysian ecstasy. Dionysus is a fertility god and was himself once torn to shreds and brought back to life (long story) and is thus associated with death and rebirth, with the cycles of nature, with the eternal return.

One of Morrison’s most famous quotes (from the short promotional biography released by The Doors’ records company, Elektra, in late 1966, to accompany the launch of their first album) is a direct invocation of this Dionysian approach:

I am interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos—especially activity that seems to have no meaning. It seems to me to be the road toward freedom.

"The Soft Parade" always struck me as The Doors' best musical approximation of a Bacchanalian revel, ending, as it does, in chaos, destruction, and an utter confusion of voices as events become increasingly "harder to describe" ... then, ultimately, impossible to describe. The song begins by insisting “You canNOT petition the Lord with prayer!” And then proceeds to show why. Perhaps, to Jim, this was an expression of the only true kind of pure joy, ending in ritualistic death and destruction.

Morrison and The Doors served as a distinctive foil to the prevailing attitude of 1960s popular music as epitomized by groups such as the Beatles. In the summer of 1967 (aka “The Summer of Love”), the Beatles proclaimed “All You Need Is Love”, while The Doors, on their first album, sang of “love becom[ing] a funeral pyre” (in “Light My Fire”, released as a single in time for the Summer of Love) and ended that album with the 11-minute opus “The End”, which starts out as a simple farewell to a friend but abruptly transforms into a vision of ritual slaughter, patricide, and incest, expressed in the distinct cadences of the Beat poets Morrison loved. (“Weird scenes inside the gold mine” indeed.) The opening line “This is the end, my only friend” means something entirely different, something more apocalyptic^[2], when it is repeated at the song’s end. The contrast could not be more stark. The sunlight, structure, and order of the Apollonian approach are of little interest to Jim Morrison. His outlook is darker, chthonic—even death-obsessed, some would say.

My wife, for instance, when I mooted The Doors’ “Crystal Ship” as a possible wedding song. (It really is a pretty song.) ”No death music,” quoth she, rejecting it out of hand. I ended up on the losing side of that argument, alas. I reluctantly concede, lo, these many decades later, that “Crystal Ship” might not have been the best choice for a wedding song, but, in my defense, my wife was lobbying for “I Melt With You”, which, really, need I say more? That could not be allowed to stand. We ended up with a compromise that we both could live with, a song that was not “death-obsessed” (which made my wife happy) but also was not hot garbage (which made me happy). (For those of you wondering what song hits that sweet spot of existing exactly midway between the minor-chord lugubriousness of “Crystal Ship” and the major-chord pop-schlockiness of “I Melt with You”, it is…[drumroll!]...Van Morrison’s “Moondance”. It falls smack dab in the middle—that’s just a scientific fact—and was acceptable to both my wife and me as prothalamion.)

But I am still having this argument with my wife in my head. Yes, “Crystal Ship” starts with “slip[ping] into unconsciousness”, which can certainly be read as an allusion to death, but the song’s very first word is “Before”:

Before you slip into unconsciousness
I’d like to have another kiss.

The song is not about death per se but about living one’s life to the fullest before experiencing the reality of death. “No one here gets out alive”, as Jim sings in “Five to One”, and a lot of his lyrics are pretty direct when it comes to addressing that truth (“Someday soon/ Someday soon…You're getting old/ You're getting old/ And I hate to remind you but you're going to die” (“Someday Soon”); pretty subtle, Jim). So much rides on what you decide to do before you slip into that unconscious state, before you sink into the big sleep.

Check Out These Related Resources

All of The Doors’ officially released studio albums (The Doors; Strange Days; Waiting for the Sun; The Soft Parade; Morrison Hotel; LA Woman) are available on hoopla; they are also available on CD at various MCLS branches

Stuff You Should Know Podcast and Book

No One Here Gets Out Alive by Jerry Hopkins. A bio of Morrison

Light My Fire: My Life with The Doors by Ray Manzarek. Keyboard player for The Doors

Riders on the Storm: My Life with Jim Morrison and The Doors by John Densmore. Drummer for the group

Set the Night on Fire: Living, Dying, and Playing Guitar with The Doors by Robby Krieger. Guitar player for The Doors

- by Tom, Hopewell Branch

^[1] Generally speaking, that is. Because not all of The Doors' music reflects Jim Morrison's dark aesthetic. Some of The Doors' better songs were written mostly or entirely by The Doors' guitarist, Robby Krieger—for instance, the music and most of the lyrics to The Doors' first big hit, "Light My Fire". Early on, The Doors were so much in sync with each other and so collaborative that the credits for the songs on the albums read "Music and lyrics by The Doors", regardless of who had written any particular song. Individual credits for songs began to appear with The Doors' fourth album, The Soft Parade, because Robby began writing lyrics like "Follow me across the sea/ Where milky babies seem to be/ Molded, flowing revelry/ With the one that set them free" ("Tell All The People"), which Jim Morrison nearly refused to sing (and certainly didn’t want anyone thinking he’d written) because he felt ridiculous mouthing sentiments so far from his personal beliefs; he objected not just to the hippie-dippie, groovy-guru vibe, but also the admonition to "follow me"—Morrison was adamant in his belief that people should lead themselves, not follow.

But at times, even on the album The Soft Parade, it can be pretty hard to distinguish who wrote what because a lot of the lyrics sound like what Jim would have written. "Touch Me", for instance, written by Robby, sounds to my ear like the kind of love song Morrison might have written; even more so when you discover that the song was inspired by a fight Robby had had with his girlfriend and the lyrics had originally been a taunt: "C'mon C'mon C'mon C'mon now HIT me."

^[2] Small wonder that Francis Ford Coppola chose “The End” as his theme song for Apocalypse Now.