The Doors Music

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The Doors are often most remembered for the songs they should probably be least remembered for, and for the simple reason that those songs are the most accessible. Songs like “Hello, I Love You” and “Light My Fire” are far from being their most interesting work either musically or lyrically. They are basically darker interpretations of the popular genre of empty-headed 60s love songs.

Still, those are the Doors' “pop hits.” They got the most air-play back then on rock radio, and they still get the most airplay now on oldies radio. If you listen to either of them, they're pretty silly. The lyrics are far less poetic and nuanced than songs like “Crystal Ship” or “LA Woman.” In fact, they almost verge on being parodies of the genre- how moronic would you have to be to tell a girl you loved her without even knowing her name?

Still, they do have an underlying emotional energy of dark, menacing sexuality, a seductive Dionysian force that is unique to the Doors. And that's why they still work as effective pop songs, despite being much less than the fullest expression of what the Doors had to offer. Both songs can usually be found on any Doors compilation album, and I'm not really sure I'd purge them from the list. If these are the Doors' pop songs, they act to balance out the more avant garde and occasionally pretentious pieces in the Doors canon.

I just wish the folks who put together radio play-lists would open their minds a little, and realize there are a lot of Doors songs they could choose to play- not just these two.

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Was Jim Morrison a poet? He certainly wanted to be seen that way, but does his work really deserve the name of poetry? That's a complicated question, because it raises the issue of whether song lyrics are poetry in the first place.

There are poetic traditions, usually oral traditions, in which poetry is always combined with music and never separate from it. Gaelic poetry, for instance, was written this way until the twentieth century, and sometimes still is. That isn't really the same thing as rock lyrics, though, because in poetic song traditions the melody is seen as a carrier for the words, a memory aid more than anything else. The music in these traditions is never seen as being equally important with the words and is never allowed to overpower the words. It is usually seen as being very untraditional to have more than the simplest instrumentation as an ornament to the song. A “good singer” is someone who sings the words clearly so they can be easily heard, and who expresses the emotions in the song- not someone with a powerful or note-perfect voice, and not someone who can deliver a charismatic performance.

Rock music is almost the complete opposite of this. The music is usually seen as being more important than the words, to the extent that it may not be easy to even hear the words. The singer's charisma and personality are on display- and never more so than with the Doors. So, while rock lyrics can sometimes be poetic, rock music is not a poetic song tradition. The lyrics are almost an after-thought in rock.

If rock music is different from poetic song traditions, then any assessment of Jim Morrison as a poet must depend on his words alone, without the benefit of his performance or the music. In other words, what would you think about Jim Morrison's work if you just saw the words in a book? Opinions on that question have been very mixed.

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The Doors took their name from a book by Aldous Huxley called “The Doors of Perception,” by he took his title from an older and much stranger work, the “Marriage of Heaven and Hell” by William Blake. Here's the phrase in its original context:

“For the cherub with his flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at the tree of life, and when he does, the whole creation will be consumed and appear infinite and holy whereas it now appears finite & corrupt... This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment... But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged; this I shall do, by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid... If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite... For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”

As bizarre and incomprehensible as this might seem, it can actually be readily understood in the context of the underground traditions of mysticism and internal alchemy. What Blake is saying is that the teachings of organized religion have placed a barrier between humanity and the holiness of the world, preventing us from seeing the world as it truly is. This is essentially a Gnostic concept. According to Blake, when people learn to reject the traditional opposition of body and spirit, and begin to enjoy sensual pleasure rather than rejecting it as sinful, the barriers set up by religious tradition will fall away. The “infinite,” as Blake calls it, is always present, but the barriers to perceiving the infinite have to be burnt away as if with a corrosive acid before we can see the truth.

In other words, Blake saw sexuality and the rejection of conventional restrictions on its free expression as a key he could use to “break on through to the other side.” The Doors could not have chosen a more appropriate name!