{"id":249,"date":"2011-02-07T13:21:45","date_gmt":"2011-02-07T18:21:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gadflyonline.com\/wpblog\/?p=249"},"modified":"2012-07-15T19:57:38","modified_gmt":"2012-07-15T23:57:38","slug":"wanton-world-without-lament-a-retrospective-on-the-doors-and-the-counter-counterculture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wanton-world-without-lament-a-retrospective-on-the-doors-and-the-counter-counterculture\/","title":{"rendered":"Wanton World Without Lament: A Retrospective on the Doors and the Counter Counterculture"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
The Doors: Waiting for the Sun <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In 1968, The Doors released their third album, Waiting for the Sun<\/em>. Many, especially those who were parents during the sixties or contemporary teens who have been spoon-fed their conception of the world by mass media, have an image of 1960s musicians and fans madly running around like hippies, for whom every action stereotypically entailed drugs, free love, peace, and long, colorful, often unisex clothing. These hippies, despite their varied political agendas, are often homogenized as politically charged with fun music and an overly peaceful\u2014albeit dulled by drugs \u2013message. However, closer examination of the lyrics of some artists, such as the Doors, indicates precisely opposite. Believing that the sixties solely revolved around the proclivity of drugs to induce forgetfulness and numbness to the world constitutes a failure to realize the multiplicity of meanings psychedelic music holds within its specific political and social context. While the band members steeped themselves in drugs in the selfsame efforts to expand their consciousness as their hippie peers, they reflected an alternate political consciousness to counterculture, rendering them a counter to counterculture. The Doors\u2019 lyrics in their album Waiting for the Sun<\/em> reflect an acute and exacting sensitivity to the multiplicity of political and social changes during the 1960s, but within a branch of counterculture entirely separate from stereotypical hippie psychedelic rock.<\/p>\n

The Doors were different from most bands in the sixties. Their music, other than the top hit singles \u201cHello, I Love You\u201d and \u201cLight My Fire,\u201d was not mood-lifting and it was far from peaceful.\u00a0 \u201cHow do we bring the drama, how do we bring the depth of emotion, how do we bring the pathos, the joy, the sorrow, the terror into rock and roll music?\u201d Ray Manzarek, the Doors\u2019 blues-trained organist, waxes poetic in his account of his life with the Doors. The Doors realized that the times were changing and the \u201cgood old days\u201d were over. In the slow, lamenting tune \u201cSummer\u2019s Almost Gone,\u201d the lyrics state that \u201cMorning found us calmly unaware\u2026when summer\u2019s gone, where will we be?\u201d an expression that at once reflects doubt, dismay, and nostalgia for the warm, golden days of times fast disappearing. Manzarek describes the song as \u201csad and melancholic. A song of the end of innocence. Perhaps of the end of love. Perhaps of the end itself.\u201d Following \u201cSummer\u2019s Almost Gone\u201d on the record is the seasonally appropriate, \u201cWintertime Love.\u201d The lyrics of this nearly carnivalesque waltz are were probably intended to illustrate displeasure and are easily interpreted as such, as Morrison himself was a literary scholar, and knew literary archetypes like the back of his hand. Winter typically exemplifies disillusionment, death, cold, and sadness in literature. Therefore, it is not surprising that the lyrics lament, \u201cWintertime winds blow cold this season\u2026Love has been lost, is that the reason \/ Trying desperately to be free.\u201d According to Morrison\u2019s lyrics, people were unhappy because they were caged and without love. \u201cYour ballroom days are over, baby\u201d Morrison half-growls, half-croons in the last track on the record, \u201cFive to One.\u201d The ballroom days were indeed over. All over the political and social scene everything was changing, and not necessarily for the better.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Jim Morrison of The Doors<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Vietnam War changed the way everyone thought about life, and while many artists toyed with the war and its problems in their music, few to none confronted the war so blatantly in their music. \u201cThe Unknown Soldier\u201d opens with a false calm and pleasantry, going on to tackle the war, the insensitivity of the majority of Americans to it, and the hypocrisy of our country itself. As Michael Hicks, author of Sixties Rock, <\/em>notes, The Doors \u201c[added] a delay effect to the organ, then [superimposed] the sound of steeple chimes, followed by crowd noises.\u201d The song also featured military chants, drumrolls, and gunfire. In fact, The Doors brought in rock writers such as Paul Williams (Crawdaddy<\/em>) and Richard Goldstein (Village Voice<\/em>) with blank rifles to discharge at Morrison, firing-squad style, to record the background sounds in \u201cThe Unknown Soldier.\u201d\u00a0 To illustrate America\u2019s hypocrisy, the lyrics juxtapose highly contrasting images: one of the news being read at the breakfast table, and a common household commodity at the time, a television; one of a soldier being shot in the head. Emphasizing that the bullet is not striking a head that belongs to a person, but rather the \u201chelmet\u2019s head\u201d illustrates the insensitivity of America, as the \u201chelmet\u2019s head\u201d is objectified and depersonalized. Americans have a \u201chollow shoulder\u201d \u2013 that is, no heart.<\/p>\n

The last track on the record, \u201cFive to One,\u201d was actually cut down from The Doors\u2019 17 minute theatrical piece \u201cThe Celebration of the Lizard,\u201d but abbreviating the piece did not reduce the song\u2019s antigovernment message. According to Manzarek, the line \u201cThey got the guns, but we got the numbers\u201d was something Jim Morrison actually said once in everyday conversation. \u201c\u2018They can ship us off to Vietnam to be slaughtered in an Asian jungle, but they can\u2019t kill us all. We\u2019ve got the numbers,\u2019\u201d he said. Clearly, The Doors did not feel supportive of the government, and felt equally dismal toward the fate of the troops. Providing the title of the song are the sham statistics \u201cFive to one, baby, one in five \/ No one here gets out alive now.\u201d The actual song recording is a wonder in and of itself, as an already drunk Morrison choked down some unidentified pills with bourbon before insisting that they record \u201cFive to One\u201d immediately. As Manzarek says, \u201cHis rhythm was a little off in the \u201cget together one more time\u201d section\u2026but it was such an impassioned performance that we put it on the record.\u201d This leads us to wonder, is it possible that Morrison\u2019s alcoholism amplified rather than dulled his artistic ability?<\/p>\n

Hand in hand with the war were politics, something The Doors were not unaware of. \u201cNot To Touch the Earth\u201d clearly recognizes JFK\u2019s assassination with the lines \u201cDead president\u2019s corpse in the driver\u2019s car \/ The engine runs on glue and tar\u201d and goes on to prove cognizance of the tensions with Russia and communism that still existed despite the lack of \u201creal\u201d war between Russia and the U.S. by \u201cnot goin\u2019 very far \/ To the East to meet the Czar.\u201d By choosing to explore the East, The Doors figuratively leave the West by choice, probably because they believe that America\u2019s seeming luxury is a fa\u00e7ade: \u201cThe mansion is warm at the top of the hill \/ Rich are the rooms and the comforts there \/ Red are the arms of luxuriant chairs \/ And you won\u2019t know a thing till you get inside.\u201d<\/p>\n

While music in the sixties regularly confronted the idea of peace and the need for peace, the Doors differ from their contemporaries in that their lyrics do not expound upon the need for world peace but rather the inability to achieve it. In \u201cWe Could Be So Good Together,\u201d The Doors critique the world peace movement by simply calling it a lie: \u201cTell you wicked lies \/ Tell you \u2018bout the world that we\u2019ll invent \/ Wanton world without lament.\u201d The lie is that peace is a real possibility. The Doors saw the world around them and heard the message of their peers, and concluded that the two models of society, one real and one hoped-for, were as incompatible as oil and water. Unlike what most musical artists professed but probably like what most Americans believed, the Doors had given up on peace, because, as Manzarek explains, at the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies a wave of paranoia had swept over the youth of America. Death and the rumor of death had descended upon us, entered our conscious mind, and filtered down into our subconscious, where they lodged like a bad cancer.\u201d<\/p>\n

The paranoia and distress of everyday life inevitably led to the search for escape. For many people in the sixties, drugs and alcohol provided precisely that. Drugs often became a social activity with a great deal of pressure involved. The song \u201cFive to One\u201d recognizes that pressure with the line \u201cYou see, I gotta go out in this car with these people \/ And get fucked up.\u201d However, many turned to drugs and alcohol, not purely to \u201cexpand their consciousness\u201d but also to simply get away. Naturally, people wanted to escape the violent, vicious world to which they were held victim. The song \u201cYes, the River Knows\u201d reflects a stolid determination to \u201cdrown in mysticated wine,\u201d to \u201cbreathe underwater till the end.\u201d\u00a0 In the Latin-influenced ballad \u201cSpanish Caravan,\u201d Morrison begs the caravan to \u201cTake me away.\u201d But perhaps the song most reflective of drug use, although indirectly, is \u201cMy Wild Love.\u201d The song describes a woman who asks the Devil to pay for her \u201criding\u201d or traveling \u2013 or escaping. When he refuses, she continues riding, presumably chased by the Devil. She is not being chased by the devils of the past so much as the devils of the present; she is concerned the present will catch up with her if she stops riding. That is, she is concerned that the reality of the world will hit her if she stops numbing herself with drugs, for all she wants is \u201cfor the people \/ to let her go free.\u201d<\/p>\n

One has to understand that the songs are symbolic and cannot be taken literally. Morrison was an accomplished reader and poet who, as Manzarek explains, \u201cwas borrowing and quoting and paying homage to his masters.\u201d The Doors\u2019 particular branch of counterculture was not of their own invention. Their ideologies \u2013 particularly Jim Morrison\u2019s \u2013 drew upon 1950s Beatnik counterculture, with darlings such as Jack Kerouac and Allan Ginsberg, famous writers and poets known for their disillusionment, criticism, and individuality. At the end of the lyrics to the theatrical piece \u201cCelebration of the Lizard,\u201d which was never completed to the satisfaction of the band members and was therefore not included on the LP (but was still considered important enough to be featured on the inside cover), Morrison writes, \u201cI am the Lizard King.\u201d While Morrison was eccentric at times, it can be assumed that Jim Morrison did not really believe he was king of the lizards.<\/p>\n

Many argue that Jim Morrison was so dependent on alcohol that he, and consequently his lyrics, was numb to the goings-on of the world, both politically and socially. As Manzarek himself acknowledges, \u201cthe drinking didn\u2019t exactly help the situation.\u201d However, Morrison had a vested interest in a great deal of his songs\u2019 subjects. One day, when asked why he was feeling low, he admitted that his father had been promoted to the rank of admiral, recognizing his father\u2019s vocation as a \u201cprofessional killer.\u201d\u00a0 Rock writer Mikal Gilmore expands this idea: \u201cMorrison\u2019s lyrics were a recognition that an older generation had betrayed its children and that this betrayal called for a bitter payback.\u201d The young people were angry that their parents\u2019 generation harbored no qualms about shipping them off to kill people they had never met, while their parents could not imagine why they so profoundly lacked patriotism. Furthermore, the older generation was threatened by blatantly confrontational lyrics such as \u201cThe old get older and the young get stronger\u2026\/ Gonna win, yeah, we\u2019re takin\u2019 over!\u201d in the still disillusioned but most hopeful sounding song on the album, \u201cFive to One.\u201d The older generation generally took issue with the message the lyrics embodied, which highlighted the generation gap.<\/p>\n

While this is less true in the modern day, many believed that the lyrics are offensive and argue that, as the works of drug addicts, the lyrics cannot be taken seriously. However, it is because the lyrics are offensive and written by drug addicts that they ought to be taken seriously, because a propensity to offend and do drugs is what defined the sixties. Some would claim that the sixties were about other things as well, such as peace and Civil Rights, but is it not true that the idea of quitting Vietnam, or of black people being equals to whites offended a lamentably large percent of the population? The ability of a range of issues to spark controversy is a key factor in the modern conception of the sixties. The lyrics are therefore emblematic of the sixties and its politics and society as perceived by a certain people, in this case The Doors and their followers, at the time. According to one letter written to the FBI that encouraged the curtailing of sales of material like Waiting For the Sun<\/em> and anything similar, the \u201cthe great majority of Americans will applaud any efforts to make record racks and newsstands refrain from peddling such filth.\u201d<\/p>\n

Waiting for the Sun<\/em> is considered by many to be a weak album compared with the Doors\u2019 more mature, and conversely, more raw albums because of its oftentimes cryptic lyrics, softer sound, and seemingly softer message. However, it carries deep political and social critiques, spanning over almost the entire scope of human experience in the sixties. It engages the Vietnam War, current events, politics, international relations, peace, drugs, alcohol, love, sex, religion and the loss of religion, and overall, the changing of the times. The Doors\u2019 decisively different analysis of their time through their lyrics is often underestimated, especially in Waiting for the Sun<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Doors gives a different take on the culture of the 1960’s. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":250,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[70,69,118,66,8,68,67],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=249"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3064,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249\/revisions\/3064"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/250"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}