Jim Morrison’s Enduring Message: Rock Music, the Liberal Subject, and Society
This past July marked the 50th anniversary of Jim Morrison’s death, and with it came a number of retrospectives on The Doors and his legacy as one of rock music’s most enigmatic helmsmen. It also included the release of The Collected Works of Jim Morrison, a behemoth of an anthology that contains poetry, journals, and other of his writings. Stand out among these is The Lords / Notes on Vision, which like much of Morrison’s other work, contains themes of sex, death, power, and self-entrapment in the modern age.
Most people would agree that rock music is no longer as popular as it used to be. Many would even go so far as to say it’s “dead,” although to be accurate, this sentiment has been around almost since rock’s inception. Morrison himself professed this view. Yet no one’s “cancelled his subscription to the resurrection”. The rock music’s not quite over. Still, it can’t be denied that the lights have been dimming down for a while.
There’s a set of usual culprits called out as being behind rock’s decline: the sullying of artistic freedom by rock’s mass commercialization in the late 20th century, the creeping invasion of digital technology into the realm of “true” musicianship, the passing of several influential (and too often self-obliterating) musicians, and the ascent of rap, hip hop, and electronica as the new dominant forms of popular music.
Less well known is a certain philosophical explanation for rock’s vitality – and by association, its fall. In his nineties treatise on the aesthetics of rock, the American music philosopher Theodore Gracyk argued that the ideological lifeblood of rock music is liberalism, an Enlightenment era philosophy that views authenticity and the common good as deriving first and foremost from whatever autonomous individuals seek and choose as most worthy for themselves. From this perspective, rock is rebellious because it insists upon a personal authenticity that is based upon intensity of feeling and its conveyance through music. Even if our workaday lives require that we maintain a socially constructed and culturally approved outer self, rock is about the inner “true” self, whose emotional expression warrants special consideration and protection. It is this dialectical tension based in liberalism, says Gracyk, that has fueled rock’s artistic power and its ongoing cultural relevance.
By extension, the question is: if rock music has been and continues to be on the wane, is it because a common commitment to liberal ideology is simply becoming less and less compelling to younger western audiences?
Seemingly, this rings true to me as a so-called “Geriatric Millennial” or “Xennial“ – part of the older cohort of my generation who’s a mash-up of Gen X cynicism and goal-oriented millennial hustle-and-grind. The intersectional and culturally constitutive perspective that many of us have learned and apply to our comprehension of ourselves, society, and our place in it just doesn’t jive with the notion of a liberal self who exists prior to all social experience. In the manner of the seminal French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, when he speaks about the “raw” and the “cooked,” , you could say that these days we prefer to think of ourselves as pot roast.
If they haven’t already learned it from experience, many younger Americans also don’t presume that they will necessarily thrive under the conditions of maximum freedom that a more classical liberalism favors. Yes, we are a generation that was raised on a steady parental diet of “follow your dreams,” “embrace your uniqueness,” and other aphorisms of self-expression, so that core aspect of our socialization does remain at play. But Janis Joplin’s rejoinder that “freedom is just another word for nothin’ left to lose” sounds a lot like today’s millennials when they sigh to their friends that all they really want is a mortgage and a 401K.
In her recent essay on UK rave culture, Mary Harrington, suggests that millennials’ lassitude towards liberal ideology might even be veering into tacit rejection. Invoking the organizational culture of the nightclub as a metaphor, she writes that it is a “pitch perfect representation… for the way an individualistic society seems to combine the pursuit of freedom with a drift toward authoritarian governance.”
I’ve come to believe that nightclubs have replaced their subversiveness with a sort of cuddly fascism. I’m not talking jackboots-and-flags fash, of course; but instead about how the absolute hedonism and self-expression of a nightclub needs a single point of authoritarian control — the DJ. Usually enthroned in an elevated position that resembles a dais or altar, everyone surrenders to this monarch of the decks, while order is kept at the margins by his unaccountable enforcers: the bouncers […] But if the hedonistic autocracy of a nightclub is the perfect metaphor for an emerging millennial authoritarianism, so too is the crowd: a mass of people united in the shared thrill of the music, yet also atomised, every dance unique.
Clearly Harrington isn’t down on self-expression or personal freedom. Rather, she’s raising the point that liberty isn’t synecdochical — that individual freedom isn’t really freedom at all if a greater collective iteration of it doesn’t exist. The part cannot be spoken of as the whole, and society is more than the sum of its individual parts. Our reason for being cannot only be the pursuit of an individual authenticity that our socialization has inculcated within us, but it must also include a communal dimension.
Theodore Gracyk points to Jim Morrison as having been a rock artist with a particularly individualistic and liberal self-understanding. Morrison, he writes, “regularly invoked the true self that must be found and let loose,” and it stood in absolute dichotomy from his socially constructed outer self. For example, he cites Morrison’s statement that, “’If I had an axe I’d kill everyone… except my friends.’ A friend, however, ‘is someone who lets you have total freedom to be yourself.’”
But was Jim Morrison, one of the most totemic figures of rock rebellion and artistic authenticity, truly a disciple of the dualistic thinking upon which Gracyk’s thesis of rock vitality and liberal individuality hinges?
As an admirer of the philosophical works of Friedrich Nietzsche, and in particular Nietzsche’s interpretation of tragedy and Dionysian culture, Morrison’s quest for freedom unassailably strived for a merging of duality through musical experience — a process he regarded as both sacred and necessarily communal. As Morrison explained,
It’s a search, an opening of one door after another… In our music it appears to me that we’re seeking, striving, trying to break through to some cleaner, freer realm. It’s like a purification ritual in the alchemical sense. First you have to have the period of disorder, chaos, returning to a primeval disaster region. Out of that you purify the elements and find a new seed of life, which transforms all life and all matter and the personality until finally, hopefully, you emerge and marry all those dualisms and opposites. Then you’re not talking about good and evil anymore but something unified and pure.
The individual members of the Doors first crossed paths in Venice Beach in the mid-sixties, with Ray Manzarek, Robby Krieger, and John Densmore meeting up in a class for the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s Transcendental Meditation. Through Manzarek, who had met Morrison at UCLA’s film school, the other members became acquainted with Jim’s Nietzschean philosophical leanings, fascination with surrealism, and his devouring of literature by William Blake, Arthur Rimbaud, Jack Kerouac, and any writers who were “mad to create, mad to be real.” As Densmore later recalls, “I picked up one of Nietzsche’s books… and read a couple of paragraphs. I couldn’t figure out why anyone would want to read a whole book of such double-talk.” Manzarek, on the other hand, shared with Morrison “an intellectualism and a naïve Nietzschean philosophy” and played the Apollonian aesthete to Morrison’s Dionysian revelry.
While for the rest of the Doors, the road to Enlightenment was initially guided by the flag posts of the sixties counter-culture — meditation, vegetarianism, the occasional acid trip, the transcendence of individual consciousness — Morrison perceived that the path to freedom was through drinking, an intentional disorganization of the senses via multiple substances, and an ecstatic dissolution of personal consciousness in the “primal nature of the universe.”
In short, Morrison’s sense of freedom was driven by an interest in the attainment of the unknown through the quietening of individual will, and he believed music to be the vehicle that could most easily usher him into this Dionysian state, into a world not made according to the measure of human beings. As the philosopher Stefan Sorgner explains,
It was Nietzsche who already described the possibility that human beings are not in opposition to this world but are regarded as participants in this one world within his early work “Birth of Tragedy”…. [and he] makes clear that it is music in particular which represents best the Dionysian perspective …The Dionysian artist, primarily the composer of musical tragedies, has access to and becomes one with the original unity …. which is the dynamical, the not-being-one-with-itself, the self-contradictory, the leading driving force, and the self-overcoming force…. Together with one’s sense perceptions, our own self- understanding as a subject vanishes which is the reason for Nietzsche to describe the Dionysian state as a “breaking together of the individual and his becoming one with one’s original being.” The Dionysian artist uses this state to bring about Dionysian works of art and in particular he produces an image of the original unity as music… There are many analogies between this process and the process of the creation of the world, …[but for Nietzsche] what used to be done by the one or God, is now being done by philosophers and artists.
The conventional structure of the rock concert, with its spatial separations between the audience and musicians, as well as stage and seating, was likely viewed by Morrison as an impediment to his musical imperative to marry together the many categorical contradictions that he knew to frame our everyday lives. Through his voracious reading, Morrison would have been well aware that prior to the institutionalization of Greek tragedy, Dionysian celebrations were simply composed of groups of humans who sang and danced together.
Musically speaking however, the Doors’ goal was always alchemy. Morrison’s poetry was fused with his shamanistic courting of the muse, and the music that could deliver him to a Dionysian state also carried the audience along with it. The intended result was a mutually experienced “oneness” among all, which the band referred to as the “communal mind.” Through improvisation, the Doors’ procession towards the communal mind achieved a “decentering” of musical agency. Power became dispersed away from Morrison as a visibly prominent frontman and from the band’s privileged positioning on stage above the audience, towards a more egalitarian distribution among the players, listeners, and instruments. The Doors’ musical aesthetic became one of “intra-activity.” Ray Manzarek described it this way:
When the Siberian shaman gets ready to go into his trance, all the villagers get together and … play whatever instruments they have to send him off… Those sessions can last for hours and hours. It was the same way [when we] played in concert. The sets didn’t last that long, but I think our drug experiences let us get into it that much quicker […] Sometimes he wouldn’t feel like getting into the state, but the band would keep on pounding and pounding, and little by little it would take him over. God, I could send an electric shock though him with the organ. John could do it with his drumbeats […] And the audience felt it too!
Danny Sugerman, one of Morrison’s biographers, confirms the intentionality of the band’s intra-active aesthetic. “Morrison,” he writes, knew that “music is magic, performance is worship, … rhythm can set you free, [and he was] too aware of the historical relevance of rhythm and music in ritual for those transforming Doors concerts to have been accidental.”
Not only was Morrison appreciative of the historically sacred power of music, but his writings suggest that he regarded the freedom available to the individual and the collective through musical ritual to be a necessary palliative for a rational, atomistic, subject living in an age of modernity. “[Los Angeles] is looking for a ritual to join its fragments. The Doors are looking for such a ritual, too,” he explained.
Personally, perhaps Morrison had also long possessed a heightened awareness of just how alienating the prevailing dualistic thinking around morality could be to younger Americans. His family, girlfriends, and teachers thought Jim to be “queer” in relation to fifties conformity, a flaky eccentric with intellectual tastes and lifestyle habits that they struggled to comprehend. Early roommates recall how he took on the stance of an anthropologist, keeping notes and studying the reactions they had to his pranks and personality quirks (eating their food without asking, taking their cars on joyrides, walking on ledges). He was fascinated by the psychology of crowds and proposed to his college classmates that they provoke a riot on campus. “We can cure [their neuroses]. We can make love to it […] Don’t you even want to try?”
They did not.
Morrison didn’t want to be alone on his freedom quest though. He wanted –needed– others to be part of the journey. For as much as he was interested in “activity that seems to have no meaning,” it was through his long-standing experience of being perceived by others as an oddball, as well as his affinity for authors and artists with the courage to see their visions through in the face of societal disapproval, that he had arrived at certain existential questions about the modern condition that he wanted to relay to others. He seemed to think the Doors’ music an ideal starting point for sparking philosophical reflection within their listeners. “A Doors concert is a public meeting called by us for a special dramatic discussion,” he explained to one journalist, and at a later date adding, “ For me, it was never really an act, those so-called performances. It was a life-and death thing; an attempt to communicate, to involve many people in a private world of thought.”
Was he successful?
With a quiet prescience, he seems to have predicted that he largely would not be.
Come on baby, take a chance with us
Come on baby, take a chance with us
[…]
This is the end, beautiful friend
This is the end, my only friend
It hurts to set you free,
But you’ll never follow me
As Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman write in No One Here Gets Out Alive, Jim’s frustration with others’ languor inevitably began to manifest itself.
[By 1968] Jim’s boredom with rock stardom began to grow. Originally he and Ray [Manzarek] conceived of the Doors as an intelligent, volatile fusion of theatre, poetry, and well-executed, exploratory music. It was obvious to Jim that this concept was becoming lost on his audience, the largest part of which was drawn by the sensationalism, the sex-idol hype…. Now he began to show contempt for and turn against his fans. For months he’d been spitting at them (or at their image of him) and getting so drunk that the performances often suffered… Jim got blatantly contemptuous as a means of denying himself the mindless misguided approval he was being offered.
In The Lords / Notes on Vision, a “thesis on film aesthetics” that Morrison penned primarily during his time at UCLA’s film school, he consistently takes aim at voyeursism and its institutionalization –not only within the dualistic structure of cinema, but within modern society.
Multi-medias are invariably sad comedies. They
work as a kind of colorful group therapy, a
woeful mating of actors and viewers, a mutual
semi-masturbation. The performers seem to need
their audience and the spectators — the spectators
would find these same mild titillations in a freak
show or fun fair and fancier, more complete
amusements in a Mexican cathouse.
[…]
More or less, we’re all afflicted with the psychology
of the voyeur. Not in a strictly clinical or
criminal sense, but in our whole physical and emotional
stance before the world. Whenever we seek to break
this spell of passivity, our actions are cruel and
awkward and generally obscene, like an invalid who
has forgotten how to walk.
[…]
We all live in the City
The City forms — often physically, but inevitably
psychically — a circle. A Game. A ring of death
with sex at its center….
[…]
There are no longer ‘dancers,’ the possessed.
The cleavage of men into actor and spectators
is the central fact of our time. We are obsessed
with heroes who live for us and whom we punish.
If all the radios and televisions were deprived
of their sources of power, all books and paintings
burned tomorrow, all shows and cinemas closed,
all the arts of vicarious existence…
We are content with the ‘givens’ in sensation’s
quest. We have been metamorphosised from a mad
body dancing on the hillside, to a pair of eyes
staring in the dark.
Despite Morrison’s appeal to “the city” to create a musical ritual to join its “fragments” — its atomistic inhabitants, its profane onlookers — he also realized on some level that his non-dualistic imperative to diffuse the boundary between performer and audience, to rouse the “voyeurs” out of their passivity, was an uphill battle. “A game is a closed field, a ring of death with, uh, sex at the center. Performing is the only game I’ve got, so, I guess, it’s my life.”
The spectator is a dying animal.
[…]
Dull lions prone on a watery beach.
The universe kneels at the swamp
To curiously eye its own raw
postures of decay in the mirror of human consciousness
In 1998, the music journalist Simon Reynolds published Generation Ecstasy, a cultural exploration of techno and rave culture. Rave culture, Reynolds says, values DJ-oriented functionalism, drug-fueled hedonism, a punk spirit, and an “instinctively avant-garde surrender to the will of technology.” It runs on a dialectic of exile and utopia. A self-declared former “rockist,” he argues that in the rave experience, he truly found “the Dionysian paroxysm programmed and looped for eternity,” with its meaning “pertain[ing] to the macro level of the entire culture [and being] much larger than the sum of its parts.” No longer able to fixate on singular albums or guitar gods, Reynolds
… understood ecstasy as a sonic science. And it became clear that the audience was the star […] I was instantly entrained in a new kind of dancing — tics and spasms, twitches and jerks, the agitation of bodies broken down into separate components, then reintegrated at the level of the dance floor as a whole […] Unity and self-expression fused in a force field of pulsating, undulating euphoria.
He describes sampledelia as abandoning all aspects of “feel,” which lends to this music a quality of disembodiment — a sound profile “to which no ready real world referents attach themselves.” It’s a harbinger of posthumanism, of an emerging non-anthropocentric ontology.
This “head emptying” music became “endlessly thought-provoking” to Reynolds, its “ostensibly escapist nature… [making him] think harder about questions of class, race, gender, technology.” Made for “pleasure outside of meaning,” it ultimately becomes a musical catalyst for sparking philosophical reflection, returning music, as Jacques Attali claims, to its ancient sacred function.
Reynolds adds,
Of course, rock is also rich in nonverbal elements, a hefty proportion of its pleasure and power residing in the sound, the groove. Nonetheless, critics continue to discuss rock as a series of stories or statements. Because it isn’t figurative, dance music intensified the non-referential […] It seems to be all materiality and no meaning […] [But] rave music doesn’t so much abolish “soul” as disperse it across the entire field of sound.
Recall above Mary Harrington’s suggestion that the structural organization of rave culture is a reflection of society’s contemporaneous authoritarianism and simulacratized freedom. Also note her emphasis on “feeling.”
…clubbing felt subversive: a form of self-expression where social norms could be dissolved in a bath of pure hedonism, shorn of stuffy rules and social norms. Hearing the bass get louder as you approached the entrance, and the way the air became a warm, rich fug of dry ice, hormones and ear-bursting noise. The spark of sexual tension, the illicit substances, the sheer extravagance all felt thrilling.
Contra Harrington, Reynolds does not view the DJ’s positioning relative to the audience as one of privilege. Albeit DJs being a focal point, this culture, he writes, emphasizes “participation and the democratization of noise.” Ravers aurically blur the musical boundary by blowing horns and whistles to the rhythm of sampledelia. Whereas Harrington sees in the individualistic hedonism of rave culture a diversion for millennials who have been failed by neoliberalism, Reynolds views it (much more sympathetically), as Gen X’s escape from the commodification and corporate bloat of the rock industry.
Does music that does not carry the sound signature of “flesh and blood humans” function better at ushering us into a state of alchemical liberation?
Have raves degenerated from peak Dionysian culture into some sort of carnival ride that offers a momentary (albeit counterfeit) feeling of emancipation?
Is the survival of rock music posited on emotionally “authenticity” and a dualistic sense of the inner “real” and outer “constructed” self ?
For Jim Morrison, were he still alive today, I suspect that while he would regard these genre-based music questions as having merit, he would ultimately see them as being subsidiary to the existential undertaking which seems to have preoccupied him the most (and which he ardently wished would preoccupy others much, much more): What constitutes the individual? And how we can artistically engage in this philosophical reflection together?
Paul Rothchild recalls the following incident from the recording of “The End,” on the Doors’ first studio album:
At one point Jim said to me during the recording session, and he was tearful, and he shouted in the studio, “Does anybody understand me?” And I said, “Yes, I do,” and right then and there we got into a long discussion, and Jim just kept saying over and over, “Kill the father, fuck the mother,” and essentially it boils down to this: kill all those things in yourself which are instilled in you and not of yourself. They are alien concepts which are not yours, they must die […] Fuck the mother is very basic, and it means get back to essence, what is reality, what is… nature – it can’t lie to you. So what Jim says at the end of the Oedipus section [of “The End”] which is essentially the same thing that the classic says, is kill the alien concepts, get back to reality, the end of alien concepts and the beginning of personal concepts.”
To better understand what he was trying to communicate about the individual in relation to society, we once again must consult Nietzsche, by whom Morrison was greatly influenced.
Nietzsche conceptualized the individual as being a collection of historical, pre-historical, and “animal” drives that exist in rivalry and alliance with each other. Much of our psyche is formed by our early life experiences. Our socialization by our parents/ family is a thoroughly cultural process, and so there are many elements of past tradition that become a part of who we are. He writes, “Direct self-observation is not nearly sufficient for us to know ourselves: we need history, for the past flows on within us in a hundred waves.” When we lack any sense of history, it amplifies the sense of dislocation we feel living in a modern and absurd world. Morrison features this “thrownness” in “Riders on the Storm.”
The multiplicity within our psyches, Nietzsche argues, also contains pre-historical drives and “animal” impulses, but far from viewing these as negative forces that we should repress, he urges us to both reacquaint ourselves with them (as most modern individuals have lost touch with / destroyed these “divine” instincts) and learn to harness them towards a greater project – the harmonization of these contrary forces under the aegis of an organizing idea, or a dominant master drive that is not discovered through an act of will, but unveils itself throughout the passage of one’s life. In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche says,
The organizing idea that is destined to rule keeps growing deep down — it begins to command, slowly it leads us back from side roads and wrong roads; it prepares single qualities and fitnesses that will one day prove to be indispensable as a means toward a whole — one by one, it trains all subservient capacities before giving any hint of the dominant task, goal, aim or meaning.
Like Morrison (“It hurts to set you free, But you’ll never follow me”), Nietzsche concluded that few of his contemporaries would join him in plumbing the depths of the psyche (“I undertook something that not everyone may undertake… I bored into the foundations”) and striving to fashion themselves, their drives, into a harmonious whole:
He enters into a labyrinth, he multiplies a thousandfold the dangers which life in itself already brings with it; not the least of which is that no one can see how and where he loses his way, becomes isolated, and is torn piecemeal by some minotaur of conscience.
Morrison, I believe, is alluding to this same passage (from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil ) in a latter section of his own work, The Lords / Notes on Vision:
The Lords. Events take place beyond our knowledge
or control. Our lives are lived for us. We can
only try to enslave others. But gradually, special
perceptions are being developed. The idea of the
‘Lords’ is beginning to form in some minds. We
should enlist them into bands of perceivers to
tour the labyrinth during their mysterious nocturnal
appearances. The Lords have secret entrances,
and they know disguises. But they give themselves
away in minor ways. Too much glint of light in
the eye. A wrong gesture. Too long and curious a
glance.
The Lords appease us with images. They give us
books, concerts, galleries, shows, cinemas. Especially
the cinemas. Through art they confuse
us and blind us to our enslavement. Art adorns
our prison walls, keeps us silent and diverted
and indifferent.
Precisely who (or what) are these mysterious “Lords” that are only able to be perceived by the few — the small number of individuals who adventurously enter into the labyrinth and “bore into the foundations” of their psyche?
In a 1970 interview, Morrison explains,
A lot of passages in [“The Lords”], for example, about shamanism turned out to be very prophetic several years later because I had no idea when I was writing that I’d be doing just that.
What “The Lords” is a lot about is the feeling of powerlessness and helplessness that people have in the face of reality. They have no real control over events or their own lives. Something is controlling them. The closest they ever get is the television set.
In creating this idea of “The Lords” it also came to reverse itself. Now, to me, “The Lords” means something entirely different. I couldn’t really explain. It’s like the opposite. Somehow the Lords are a romantic race of people who have found a way to control their environment and their own lives. They’re somehow different from other people.
“The Lords” therefore carry a dual meaning. First, they are the “alien” (i.e. historical, cultural) forces that have been “instilled in you and are not of yourself.” In addition to other structurally dualistic forms of entertainment, Morrison highlights the cinema as being particularly insidious due to its institutionalized voyeurism. Rather than providing us with knowledge that can help us to energize our lives (via Nietzsche’s organizing idea), these artistic activities only increase our restless and endless search for novelties. Second, the Lords represent those individuals who have sculpted the contradictory impulses and drives within themselves into harmonious totalities, and as a consequence, have “found a way to control their environment and their own lives.” They have returned to reality and “the beginning of personal concepts.”
Of “The End,” Morrison explained that it is “sufficiently complex and universal in its imagery that it [can] be almost anything you want it to be,” but he identified the song as being about three primary things: sex (the action that creates new life; fertility), death, and travel (traversing into the great unknown; rebirth). Within the context of rites of passage, for example the transition from childhood to adulthood, there is a state of liminality — a psychological and cultural threshold that is characterized by ambiguity and disorientation — that exists between “death” (the departure of one social status) and “rebirth” (entry into another status). Morrison’s instruction to “ride the snake” is not just (or even primarily) a sexual reference. According to Carl Jung, the ouroboros, an image of a snake eating its own tail, is not only symbolic of the endless cycle of life, death, and rebirth. It is also an archetype of alchemy, symbolizing “the One who proceeds from the clash of opposites.” To “ride the snake” is to indefinitely travel through this non-dualistic maze.
Across cultures and time, music has been a key component of such community rituals, guiding people along their transformational journeys. Thus when Jim Morrison said, “The city is looking for a ritual to join its fragments,” he was communicating his belief that through the musical experience of a Doors concert, the marriage of duality could occur simultaneously and interconnectedly on two levels — that of the individual psyche as well as the collective.
The process of liberating the self is activated by musical process of collective liberation, of breaking down the atomistic barriers that dominate our cultural perceptions of identity. One cannot truly occur without the other. Musical experience facilitates bringing “the city” (the drives within our psyche + the individuals within society) together to find authenticity and freedom.
In the manner of Nietzsche, perhaps Morrison’s organizing idea, his heroic goal, was to help others find theirs.
“ There is a false saying,” Nietzsche wrote. “How can someone who can’t save himself save others?” Supposing I have the key to your chains, why should your lock and my lock be the same?”
Accordingly, there necessarily must exist different musical paths to freedom — rock, electronica, jazz – because we are each unique aggregations of chaos and have been differently influenced by cultural forces. But by placing more emphasis on musical creation and experience than on stylistic differences, our appreciation of the post-individualistic dimension of any acquisition of personal freedom through music gains room to flourish. Rock may continue to “rock on.”
Door of passage to the other side,
The soul frees itself in stride
Turn mirrors to the wall
in the house of the new dead.
Like the ouroboros, the philosophical and musical legacy of the Doors cycles on indefinitely.
- Note: Unless otherwise referenced, all quotes have been taken from No One Here Gets Out Alive by Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman, and all verse derives from The Lords / Notes on Vision by Jim Morrison.
