The Doors: The Establishment of Psychedelic Rock
- David Lapadat
- Nov 18
- 11 min read
Table of contents
The Historical and Social Context: Desacralization and the Crisis of the 1960s
In a world where the process of desacralization was unfolding with unprecedented speed in Western history, the horrors of the First World War were merely a prelude to the terror that would establish itself (foreshadowed by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917 and the precarious social and political situation in interwar Germany) starting in 1939, with the onset of the Second World War.
Born during the World War, the rebellious generation of the USA in the 1960s spent its childhood under the threat of the Korean War and stepped into adolescence amid the turbulent times of conscription for the Vietnam War.
Beyond the horror provoked by yet another war, the American 1960s were marked by crimes, assassinations, racial tensions, generational ruptures, and paranoia. The idea of justice seemed alien to the “land of the free and the brave.”
Living in an eminently profane world, adherents to the fine Nietzschean tradition, the youth conceived their freedom as they saw fit.
They took refuge in drug consumption, in total liberation from consciousness and contemporary moral rules, perhaps without realizing that, by manifesting against religion, they themselves were establishing a new faith.
Moreover, the popularity enjoyed by the Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bardo Thödol) among the young generation of the 1960s indicates, in Eliade’s view, a “near-total desacralization of death in contemporary Western societies, as well as the desire to revalorize – religiously or philosophically – the act that fulfills and at the same time questions human existence.”[1]
Starting with pacifist movements like Flower Power or Hippie, the youth showed the world how tame and conservative the rock’n’roll of the 1950s actually was.
These types of movements, apparently iconoclastic and desacralized, were nevertheless capable of a reinterpretation and revalorization of the sacred.[2]
The need for spirituality, which, no matter how ignored, represents an essential trait of the human soul, pushed society toward forging a new god, a divinity that promised total liberation through journeys to distant worlds.
This god was called LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide). Indeed, we have the testimony in the form of a novel by William Burroughs, a central figure of the Beat Generation, who says in his book Naked Lunch: “All hallucinogenic drugs are considered sacred by those who use them – there are Peyote cults and Bannisteria cults, Hashish cults and Mushroom cults – ‘The Sacred Mushrooms of Mexico make you see God.’”[3]
The Idol of LSD and Its Spread Across America
This idol had followers in San Francisco, in Los Angeles, in Fresno, then along the entire West Coast and eventually throughout America.
It was promoted through the famous experiments of Aldous Huxley.
The fact that a scholar of Huxley’s caliber allowed himself to be seduced by the mirages of unknown worlds had an unexpected influence on the American public, which did not realize at the time (but would learn from its own experience) that the British writer’s adventures in this realm were driven by the spiritual need of a sensitive artist in possession of an uncommon intelligence that had reached the limits of reason.
LSD had its priests and priestesses and, of course, its own music.
The Birth of Psychedelic Rock as a Product of Drug Culture
Psychedelic rock was born in the early 1960s from people’s need to support the hallucinogenic drug experience.
Most bands competed to propose in songs unusual words, sounds – the electric organ imitating sinusoidal sounds, extra-musical elements –, instrumental variants that would facilitate the hallucinogenic effect.
Major bands such as The Beatles, Rolling Stones, The Beach Boys, Jefferson Airplane, or Grateful Dead got caught up in this game of pleasing the public, riding the commercial wave.
Psychedelic rock, viewed from this angle, is the product of drug culture and not the reverse.
The Emergence of The Doors in 1967: Redefining Psychedelic Rock
Things were to change in 1967, when the first album of the mysterious band The Doors was released in Los Angeles, California.
Growing in the shadow of the band Jefferson Airplane, The Doors managed to break away from the pattern of ordinary rock and redefine the concept of psychedelic rock.
The band was both the “creative vehicle”[4] of the poet and musician Jim Morrison, as music critic Greg Kot put it, and an organism in its own right, with the band members in perfect creative unity.
As Danny Sugerman observed, “each member formed a part of the diamond that represented the whole.”[5]
The Apollonian-Dionysian Duality and Creative Evolution
“The permanent evolution of art is linked to the duality of the Apollonian and the Dionysian”[6], thus the creative evolution of The Doors was facilitated by this duality represented by Jim Morrison (irrational, impulsive, chaotic, ecstatic, passionate), Dionysian par excellence, on one hand, and Ray Manzarek, rational, serene, calm, balanced, on the other.
Ray saw and understood the inexhaustible fire burning in Jim’s soul and knew how to give it form in musical terms. Jim Morrison was like Nietzsche’s tragic artist, because “the tragic artist is not a pessimist – precisely because he says ‘yes’ to everything doubtful and terrifying; he is Dionysian.”[7]
Paradoxically, however, it seems that the shamanic tradition is taken up and revalorized by the cult of Apollo. The gift of vision, the importance given to music and poetry are elements that bring the two traditions closer.[8]
Ray Manzarek (like Morrison) was an erudite spirit, but also an experienced musician. He possessed a critical and oriented mind.
He was not unfamiliar with mystical practices, being interested in transcendental meditation of Indian origin, practiced through asceticism, while Morrison believed that the path to mystery was “paved with drugs and shamanism.”[9]
The other members of The Doors were not strangers to esoteric techniques either, with Manzarek being classmates with John Densmore and Robbie Krieger in the yoga meditation class of Master Maharishi Mahesh.[10]
Musical Innovation: Absence of Bass and Unique Instrumentation
From a musical point of view, The Doors do not resemble contemporary bands.
The bass is absent from the band’s lineup. Although studio musicians were hired for some tracks to add the bass line, in general the bass line was played by Manzarek on the electric organ. This detail offered two essential advantages.
The first was obtaining an evanescent effect in the tracks, eliminating any telluric implication – the bass with its heavy gait would have held the instrumental like an anchor. The second important element is the way the bass score is performed.
On the organ (left hand), Manzarek obtains a more sweetened sound, being able to make subtle legatos between notes, which the bass could not execute, at least not in such a flowing manner. The legato effect contributed to suggesting the trance effect that permeates the tracks. Manzarek’s organ (the score played with the right hand) adds new dimensions to the music in space, revealing in the instrumental background a vast expanse of shifting sands.
The score unfolds discreetly, the piano suggesting the fragility of the ecstatic state, which stretches like a thin film over the sleeping consciousness.
Densmore’s handling of percussion oscillates from the most complex jazz rhythms, to syncopations specific to Latin music, to the tribal violence of shamanic drums.
Krieger’s guitar versatility envelops the orchestration with palettes of colors from Spanish music, Indian music, blues, country, or classical.
Finally, Morrison’s theatrical interpretation of his poems to music, interwoven with whispered stories or wild howls, outlines the unmistakable style of The Doors.
Early Recordings and Professional Production
In the band’s early recordings, all these qualities are blurred by studio technique and lack of vision in the prints.
This aspect matters less if we consider that the tracks were only demo variants, recordings that could be considered unprofessional (moreover, the track “Moonlight Drive” has a much more expressive and sincere character in the demo recording than in the one mastered two years later; the jazzy studio version has a pretentious air and loses sight of the mysterious character of the track in favor of technical presentation); the important thing is that even in these prints, the special character of The Doors’ creation is glimpsed, which was to become evident in the studio sessions at Elektra Records under the careful guidance of producer Paul Rothchild and sound engineer Bruce Botnik.
They knew how to highlight the essential parts of The Doors’ creation, eliminated instruments such as the harmonica, and sweetened the harsh sound of the bass.
They guided Morrison in the art of interpretation and brought out the mystical character of the encounter between poetry and music.
In the case of The Doors, one can speak without exaggeration of an interdependence between poetry-music-production.
Rothchild knew how to transpose into professional musical production the musical visions and ideas of the four members of The Doors.[11]
Transcendence Beyond Hallucinations: The Spiritual Role of Psychedelic Rock
The Doors understood that the role of psychedelic rock is not to punctuate a series of hallucinogenic states.
Drugs are no longer an end in themselves but become means that must lead to transcendence.
They intuited the capacity of art to fill the spiritual void that gaped in society and in people’s souls. They attributed symbolic value to terms such as subconscious, unconscious, hallucinogenic journey, denoting the unknown areas of the soul.
The Doors do not stop at liberating the subconscious. Irrational chaos is channeled on a path toward spiritual becoming. They considered that they release the monsters that lay unknown, allowing the mind (spirit) to die and be reborn.
The subconscious seen in the light of the sacred is the archaic symbol of the Center of the World, and music is the medium for propagating trance. In other words, through ecstasy we will reach the Center of the World, through the liberation of the subconscious we will be able to communicate with the unknown.
In this respect, The Doors’ creation is not the product of the 1960s culture, but the image of the unleashed inner world, of metaphysical revolt, in which the cult of drugs represents only a (decadent, admittedly) way of facilitating transcendence. Moreover, Morrison satirizes the Hippie movement in the song “Five To One”: “You walk across the floor with a flower in your hand / Trying to tell me no one understands / Trade in your hours for a handful of dimes”[12], suggesting through these lyrics that the propaganda preached by the youth of his generation describes a system just as arbitrary and sterile as the one proposed by the establishment they deny.
If we accept the mystical side that psychedelic rock should presuppose, without understanding this musical phenomenon as a series of incoherent states caused by artificially induced hallucinations, then lato sensu this musical genre begins and ends with The Doors.
The Role of Poetry, Dramatic Interpretation, and Blues Influences
Jim Morrison, alongside the other Doors, establishes the essential role of poetry and dramatic interpretation within rock music.
The band’s sonic creation is tributary to blues music, this genre being par excellence archaic with profound spiritual valences. Just as “every writer forges his precursors”[13], The Doors, like The Rolling Stones, revalorized blues music within the rock phenomenon.
One must not forget the band The Animals, often inexplicably overshadowed by other great bands, which reintegrated blues into rock music, while affirming the beginnings of psychedelic rock through tracks such as “House Of The Rising Sun” or “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”, which are still jewels of this genre today.
If most melodic lines were probably born along with the text, in the plane of instrumental arrangement, clear influences from various musical genres or even direct borrowings from other songs can be observed.
Although the music fits stylistically into the category of psychedelic rock, we identify numerous passages from jazz and country (Ray Charles, Vaughn Monroe, Howlin’ Wolf, Paul Butterfield), from Latin music (bossa nova), from Spanish folklore (Isaac Albéniz), or from Baroque (Tomaso Albinoni).
The rock accent is undoubtedly a consequence of the Zeitgeist, but, unlike The Rolling Stones or The Beatles, the main purpose of the music is not entertainment, but profound meditation.
Jim Morrison is not a rock star, but wants to be a mythic figure, inviting the overcoming of the human psychic condition through music and poetry, interpreted with dramatic punctuations or discontinuities.
The message is always mystical, and under this guise it comes closer to Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan than to the energetic rock bands of the 20th century.
Exploration of Dark Worlds and Initiatic Structures
While the artistic elite of the time sang of peace, love, and serenity induced by narcotics[14], The Doors probed the dark worlds, of eternal night, hunting the shadows of creatures lost in the world’s memory.
All Doors songs follow an initiatic structure.
The labyrinthine exposition does not rule out the hypothesis of a well-determined path, being more a metaphor for the chaos from which a purified, thus initiated, consciousness will be reborn.
Each journey presupposes a symbolic death and rebirth, arduous trials, fantastic events in “Not to Touch the Earth” or “The Soft Parade”, passages through fire in “When The Music Is Over”, shamanic invocations in “Shaman’s Blues”, “Horse Latitudes”, “Celebration Of The Lizard”, “My Wild Love” or “L.A. Woman”, mystical ascents in “The Crystal Ship”, return to Primordial Time in “Waiting For The Sun” or “The End”, the imminence of death in “Riders on the Storm” or “Hyacinth House”, and, of course, impossible passages in “Break On Through”.
Critical Perspective: Ritual, Exorcism, and Transcendence
The Doors’ creation is thus explained by film critic Gene Youngblood:
“If The Beatles and The Stones blow your mind, [the music of] The Doors is for the moment beyond, when your mind is already gone.[…] The Doors’ music is the music of outrage. It is not sham. It probes the secrets of truth. It is avant-garde in content, if not in technique: it speaks of the madness that dwells within us all, of depravity and dreams, but it speaks of them in relatively conventional musical terms. This is its strength and its beauty – a beauty that terrifies. The music of The Doors is more surreal than psychedelic, it is more anguish than acid. More than rock, it is ritual – the ritual of psychic-sexual exorcism. The Doors are the warlocks of pop culture. Morrison is an angel; an exterminating angel.”[15]
The charm of The Doors lies, without a doubt, in the encounter of music with poetry, in the mystical inclination toward the unknown, the transcendental call, and the theatrical drama, almost ritualistic, that describes the scene of such an impossible passage.
Through their creation, which could be stylistically framed in a mystical-origin psychedelic blues-rock genre, the four Doors manage to free the myth from historical, spatio-temporal constraints, so that it can be perceived in its full majesty.
The music is transcendental, it sends poetry on the deceptive sound waves beyond the Gates and invites us to rediscover it with other senses in a metaphysical world, to understand it beyond appearances.
“There are things known and things unknown, and in between are The Doors.”
[1] Mircea Eliade, History of Religious Ideas and Beliefs. Vol. 3: From Muhammad to the Age of Reforms, Iași, Polirom Publishing, 2011, pp. 244-245.
[2] Mircea Eliade, Nostalgia for Origins: History and Meaning in Religion, Bucharest, Humanitas Publishing, 2019, p. 8.
[3] William Seward Burroughs, Naked Lunch, Bucharest, Pandora Publishing, 2020, p. 41. [4] Greg Kot, The Doors, https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Doors#ref666745, accessed on 23.09.2020.
[5] Hopkins, Sugerman, p. vii.
[6] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, Bucharest, Cartex Publishing, 2018, p. 30.
[7] Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols or How to Philosophize with a Hammer, Bucharest, Humanitas Publishing, 2019, p. 35.
[8] Mircea Eliade, History of Religious Ideas and Beliefs. Vol. I: From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries, Iași, Polirom Publishing, 2011, p. 248.
[9] Hopkins, Sugerman, pp. 52-54.
[10] Hopkins, Sugerman, pp. 54-60.
[11] Pop Expresso, The legendary Rock music producer Paul A. Rothchild was born on this day in 1935, https://www.popexpresso.com/2022/04/18/the-legendary-rock-music-producer-paul-a-rothchild-was-born-on-this-day-in-1935/, accessed on 18.05.2022.
[12] “Ya walk across the floor with a flower in your hand / Trying to tell me no one understands / Trade in your hours for a handful of dimes”, Cf. Lyrics, Five to One, https://genius.com/The-doors-five-to-one-lyrics, accessed on 23.09.2020.
[13] Borges, p. 251.
[14] Hopkins, Sugerman, p. X.
[15] Hopkins, Sugerman, pp. 139-140. Cf. Gene Youngblood, Doors Can Provide Instant Enlightenment Through Sex, https://thedoors.com/news/doors-can-provide-instant-enlightenment-through-sex, accessed on 23.09.2020.
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