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The Most Overtly Political Doors Songs
I don’t think so far politics has been a major theme in my songs. It is there in a few songs, but it is a very minor theme. Politics is people and their interaction with other people, so you cannot really separate it from anything.
—Jim Morrison
Jim Morrison once remarked, “Who wants to hear revolution 24 hours a day?” Although Morrison claimed that Doors songs weren’t political, several of the band’s songs powerfully reflected on the turmoil of the 1960s. Some of the group’s more notable political songs included “The Unknown Soldier,” “Five to One,” “When the Music’s Over,” “Peace Frog,” and “Tell All the People.” Morrison rarely would directly address the current political climate but instead write about universal themes (for instance, “The Unknown Soldier” could apply to any war, not just Vietnam). However, there were exceptions, such as onstage at a concert at the Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix when Morrison shouted to the crowd, “Four more years of mediocrity and horseshit. If [President Nixon] does wrong, we will get him.”
“When the Music’s Over”
An epic song that appeared at the end of the Doors’ second album, Strange Days, “When the Music’s Over” ran for nearly eleven minutes, making it the third-longest recorded Doors song behind “The End” (11:42) and the “Celebration of the Lizard” (17:01). The song features a powerful ecological rant using rape imagery: “What have they done to the earth?/ What have they done to our fair sister?/Ravaged and plundered.” Morrison took the line “scream of the butterfly” from the title of a porn movie he had seen on a marquee while driving through Times Square in New York City. The lyric “feast of friends” later became the title of a Doors documentary, while “alive she cried” was taken for the title of the Doors’ second live album and “dance on fire” was used for a Doors video.
“Five to One”
“Five to One” appeared on the Doors’ third album, Waiting for the Sun. According to Robby Krieger, “Five to One” was “one of the predecessors to Heavy Metal.” Although the song strongly suggested an urge for an overthrow of the existing order, Morrison left the title open to interpretation (but claimed that the lyrics were not political). Was “Five to One” the ratio of old to young, whites to blacks or non-pot smokers to pot smokers? In the liner notes to The Doors Box Set, Robby Krieger remarked, “Jim figured that by 1969, there would be five times as many people under the age of 21 as would be over, therefore, why not rebel? We could take over.”
“Five to One” was the song played during Morrison’s infamous rant at the Dinner Key Auditorium in Miami on March 1, 1969. After slurring the first two stanzas, he called the audience “a bunch of fuckin’ idiots” and then embarked on an extended (and often nonsensical) monologue inspired by ideas he garnered from the experimental Living Theater. Morrison later claimed he got the idea for the song while waiting in the audience before an early concert: “It was one of those big ballroom places and the kids were milling around and I just got an idea for a song.” One of the lines from “Five to One”—“No one here gets out alive”—was used by Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman as the title for their hugely successful 1980 biography of Jim Morrison.
“The Unknown Soldier”
“The Unknown Soldier” was the first single (with the B-side “We Could Be So Good Together”) released from Waiting for the Sun. The song peaked at No. 39 on the charts even though it was strongly censored by commercial radio. According to Densmore in The Doors by the Doors, Rothchild had the Doors do “130 takes” of the song: “It was ludicrous … the heart was lost.” Morrison may very well have been inspired to write the song after the Doors had visited the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery during the day of a concert at the Hilton Hotel International Ballroom on November 25, 1967.
During live performances, the Doors devised an elaborate onstage mock execution. Manzarek would raise his arm, while Krieger pointed his guitar toward Morrison like a rifle. When Manzarek dropped his arm, Densmore used his drums to emulate a gunshot and Morrison would collapse onto the stage. The band even created a three-minute film for “The Unknown Soldier” that was shot on Venice Beach and featured Morrison being summarily executed. The film was enthusiastically received when the Doors played it at the Fillmore East. In a negative review of a Doors concert for the Bridgeport Telegram (“Doors Shout and Shriek to 5,000 in JFK Stadium”), critic Charles S. Gardner called “The Unknown Soldier” a “desperately anti-war ballad climaxing with Morrison’s being thrown to the floor in a burst of exploding electronic feedback.”
“Tell All the People”
Morrison hated the Krieger-penned “Tell All the People” so much that he demanded that individual writing credits be listed for the first time on the Doors’ fourth (and most critically maligned) album, The Soft Parade. The third single released off the album, “Tell All the People” (with “Easy Ride” as the B-side) reached No. 57 on the charts. “Tell All the People” was often known as “Follow Me Down” because of the use of the phrase throughout the song. Morrison’s opinion was that it had “terrible, corny lyrics,” but it was a “nice song.” A reviewer for CREEM magazine called it “an innocuous enough hippie call-to-arms with none of the jumbled wit of John Lennon’s ‘Come Together.’”
Even though “The Unknown Soldier” was strongly censored from commercial radio, the Doors publicized the song by creating one of the first music videos in rock history, a three-minute film that featured Jim Morrison getting summarily executed on Venice Beach.
Courtesy of Kerry Humpherys/doors.com
“Peace Frog”
“Peace Frog” appeared on the Doors’ fifth album, Morrison Hotel. Frantically looking for some new material to fill the album, producer Paul Rothchild discovered one of Morrison’s poems called “Abortion Stories,” which served as the basis for the song. In the liner notes for The Doors Box Set, Densmore referred to “Peace Frog” as the “most ridiculous title ever,” while Krieger called the song “an early attempt at dance music.”
“Peace Frog” features the line, “Blood in the streets in the town of New Haven,” a reference to Morrison’s December 9, 1967, onstage arrest at the New Haven Arena. Morrison also makes reference to the infamous 1968 Democratic National Convention with the line “Blood in the streets of the town of Chicago.” In addition, “Peace Frog” contains the spoken-word verse that begins with: “Indians scattered on dawn’s highway bleeding.” A childhood flashback, the lines referred to a terrible accident involving Native Americans that Morrison witnessed as a child on a desert highway near Albuquerque, New Mexico. Since “Peace Frog” blended so seamlessly into the next track, “Blue Sunday,” radio stations often played the two songs consecutively. “Peace Frog” appeared on the soundtrack for the 1998 Adam Sandler comedy The Waterboy as well as the 2005 video game Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland.