Psychedelic Lunch

Welcome to our “Psychedelic Lunch” series, “The 27 Club Edition” where we find out how deep the rabbit hole really goes and explore psychedelic tunes from the 60’s and 70’s. Weekdays At Noon EST. Enjoy the trip!

“Where’s your will to be weird?”

Jim Morrison will go down in history as one of the greatest frontmen in the history of music. Serving as the lead singer of the Doors, Morrison’s incredible voice and poetic lyrics helped define the counterculture music scene of the 1960s, while his tragically abrupt end only enhanced the aura around his legacy. So just what was it about this man that enthralled so many fans? Read these facts to find out!

When the Doors were first formed, three of the members—John Densmore, Robby Krieger, and Ray Manzarek—bonded over their mutual interest in meditation. They even went to scheduled classes. Morrison was allegedly the only one who didn’t join in, presumably because he was busy staring wistfully at ocean.

Morrison famously spent most of his adult life in a relationship with Pamela Courson, who served as his muse and partner. Their relationship was eventually considered a common-law marriage by the State of California, even though common-law marriage wasn’t recognized in California. Courson is buried as Pamela Susan Morrison.

Like many rock stars, Morrison obtained a few nicknames during his musical career. The most popular one was “The Lizard King,” but there was also “Mr. Mojo Risin” (which came from the song “L.A. Woman” and is an anagram of Morrison’s real name) and “The King of Orgasmic Rock” (which we’re sure he must have made up about himself).

During his lifetime, Morrison maintained a close friendship with Beat poet Michael McClure. The two of them planned a number of uncompleted film projects, including a film where Morrison would have played Billy the Kid! After Morrison’s death, McClure wrote the afterword for No One Here Gets Out Alive, a biography of Morrison written by Danny Sugerman.

A Club You Don’t Want to Belong To

Morrison’s tragic death at the age of 27 means that he belongs in the 27 Club, a group of actors and musicians who tragically died when they were 27 years old. The list also includes Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse, and Anton Yelchin.

Morrison and the Doors did have the chance to perform at the legendary Woodstock in 1969. However, they turned down the chance to be there, though a few different reasons are given as to why. According to Ray Manzarek, passing on the concert was simply a stupid decision, while others claimed that Morrison disliked performing outdoors. Regardless, Doors drummer John Densmore went to Woodstock independently of the band, performing with Joe Cocker.

There are also rumors that The Doors weren’t able to perform because Jim Morrison was embroiled in legal troubles from getting arrested in Florida for indecent exposure charges where he allegedly exposed himself onstage.

“The End” in my opinion is one of The Doors most psychedelic songs.

I was just exploring the limits of reality. I was curious to see what would happen. That was all curiosity.— Jim Morrison.

The end was nigh and no one would be spared. Children would be driven mad and they’d kill their fathers and rape their mothers. A great snake would slither and devour the sinners. The church would fall, schools would burn, and homes would crumble into dust, swallowed by an incandescent, burning earth. Destruction would reign and love would disappear little by little.

This apocalyptic scenario is perfectly described in “The End,” one of the most psychedelic songs of The Doors. The End” is death, although the song also deals with Jim Morrison’s parents – it contains Oedipal themes of loving the mother and killing the father. Morrison was always vague as to the meaning, explaining: “It could be almost anything you want it to be.”

The Doors developed this song during live performances at the Whisky a Go Go, a Los Angeles club where they were the house band in 1966. They had to play two sets a night, so they were forced to extend their songs in order to fill the sets. This gave them a chance to experiment with their songs.

“The End” began as Jim Morrison’s farewell to Mary Werbelow, his girlfriend who followed him from Florida to Los Angeles. It developed into an 11-minute epic.

On August 21, 1966, Jim Morrison didn’t show up for The Doors gig at the Whisky a Go Go. After playing the first set without him, the band retrieved Morrison from his apartment, where he had been tripping on acid. They always played “The End” as the last song, but Morrison decided to play it early in the set, and the band went along. When they got to the part where he could do a spoken improvisation, he started talking about a killer, and said, “Father, I want to kill you. Mother, I want to f–k you!” The crowd went nuts, but the band was fired right after the show. The Doors had recently signed a record deal and they had established a large following, so getting fired from the Whisky was not a crushing blow.

Morrison sang this live as “F–k the mother,” rather than “Screw the mother.” At the time, the band couldn’t cross what their engineer Bruce Botnick called “the f–k barrier,” so they sanitized the lyric on the album. When Botnick remixed the album for a 1999 reissue, however, he put Morrison’s “f–k”s back in, which is how the song was intended.

This was famously used in the movie Apocalypse Nowover scenes from the Vietnam War. Director Francis Ford Coppola had it remixed to include the line “F–k the mother.” 

Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek recalled in a 1995 MOJO interview: “To sit back in an audience and hear ‘The End’ come on at the beginning of Apocalypse Now, it’s absolutely thrilling.”

Morrison was on an acid trip when they first tried to record this song. He kept singing “F–k the mother, kill the father” rather than the actual lyrics. In The Mojo Collection, it states: “Comprehensively wrecked, the singer wound up lying on the floor mumbling the words to his Oedipal nightmare. Then, suddenly animated, he rose and threw a TV at the control room window. Sent home by producer Paul Rothchild like a naughty schoolkid, he returned in the middle of the night, broke in, peeled off his clothes, yanked a fire extinguisher from the wall and drenched the studio. Alerted, Rothchild came back and persuaded the naked, foam-flecked Morrison to leave once more, advising the studio owner to charge the damage to Elektra; next day the band nailed the track in two takes. Morrison lived for only another five years.”

This is supposedly the last song Morrison heard. The night he died, he was playing old Doors albums, ending with this one. This was the last song on that album.

This was recorded with the lights off and only one candle burning next to Morrison.

The album version of the song is an edited combination of two takes, which took a total of about 30 minutes to record. Producer Paul Rothchild called it “one of the most beautiful moments I’ve ever had in a recording studio.”

Morrison would sometimes stop in the middle of this during concerts to get a reaction from the crowd.

The instrumentation is meant to be like an Indian raga. The guitar imitates a sitar, with seemingly unrhythmic pluckings of diatonic notes. The drum beat is designed to sound like a tabla, and the keyboard is supposed to provide the humming support of a tambura.

Ray Manzarek told Rainer Moddemann of The Doors Quarterly that he believed the “blue bus” in the song is, “Jim’s version of the Egyptian solar boat… it is the boat that the pharaohs and everyone, everyone else rides on through infinity, through eternity, and ‘the blue bus’ was for me a vehicle that would take you on a voyage into magical places.”

Moddemann asked about the more simple interpretation that the “blue bus” was referencing the blue buses of the Santa Monica line, but Manzarek resisted the idea. “I don’t think it has anything to do with that,” he said. “It’s more cosmic. It’s a cosmic journey, and blue being the color of the cosmos out there. And then the next line is, ‘driver where are you taking us.’ On a trip, man, on a voyage to some place you have never been before, and some of them are gonna be scary, some of them are gonna be a lot of fun, lot of fun, like ‘The Crystal Ship.’ A thousand girls, a thousand thrills.”