The Legacy of Jim Morrison and the Doors

Nearly twenty-five years ago, in the middle of a season in which rock & roll was seeking to define itself as the binding force of a new youth community, the Doors became the house band for an American apocalypse that wasn’t even yet upon us. Indeed, the Los Angeles-based quartet’s stunning and rousing debut LP, The Doors, flew in the face of rock’s emerging positivist ethos and in effect helped form the basis for a schism that still persists in popular music. While groups like the Beatles or the many bands emerging from the Bay Area were earnestly touting a fusion of music, drugs and idealism that they hoped would reform — and redeem — a troubled age, the Doors had fashioned an album that looked at prospects of hedonism and violence, of revolt and chaos, and embraced those prospects unflinchingly. Clearly, the Doors — in particular the group’s thin, darkly handsome lead singer, Jim Morrison — understood a truth about their age that many other pop artists did not: namely, that these were dangerous times, and dangerous not only because youth culture was under fire for breaking away from established conventions and aspirations. On some level, Morrison realized that the danger was also internal – that the “love generation” was hardly without its own dark impulses. In fact, Morrison seemed to understand that any generation so intent on giving itself permission to go as far as it could was also giving itself a license for destruction, and he seemed to gain both delight and affirmation from that understanding.

Consequently, in those moments in the Doors’ experimental, Oedipal miniopera “The End,” when Morrison sang about wanting to kill his father and fuck his mother, he managed to take a somewhat silly notion of outrage and make it sound convincing, even somehow justified. More than the songs of Bob Dylan or the Rolling Stones, Morrison’s lyrics signified a recognition that an older generation had betrayed its children, and that this betrayal called for a bitter pay-back. Little wonder, then, that the Doors’ music (“The End” in particular) became such a meaningful favorite among young Americans fighting in Vietnam, in a war in which children had been sent to kill or die for an older generation’s frightened ideals. Other groups were trying to prepare their audience for a world of hope and peace; the Doors, meanwhile, were making music for a ravenous and murderous time, and at the group’s best, the effect was thoroughly scary and thoroughly exhilarating.