The Doors

Never in rock history has a band been more nakedly bipolar, the black thunderhead of dread hanging in the distance even during their most utopian moments. After sparking a psychedelic fuse on “Light My Fire,” and promising that we “couldn’t get much higher,” the Doors’ dream exploded into a grim apocalypse during “The End,” as Morrison and company wandered dazed through a bleak “Roman wilderness of pain.” Like a car accident by the side of the road, you can’t tear your eyes (or ears) away. Image c. MichaelOchsArchives.com

When their stars aligned just right, the Doors found themselves midway on the high wire between their two manic poles. With its cotton-candy-sky woodwinds and strings, [i]The Soft Parade[/i]’s “Wishful, Sinful” captures the band in a moment of rare tranquility. They even seem [i]playful[/i] as Morrison ambles down “Love Street,” extolling the virtues of his lover, with her “lazy diamond-studded flunkies.” Seize this moment to catch your breath in the hurricane’s eye, because it never lasted long.

The deeper we burrow into the Doors’ dark soul, the wider the swings from pole to pole. In “End of the Night,” Robby Krieger’s whammy bar drops the trapdoor from beneath our feet, Ray Manzarek’s organ shudders in with a minor-key tremor, and we’re plummeting down Alice’s rabbit hole. In “Horse Latitudes,” manic preacher Jim Morrison delivers a fever dream prophecy dense as a Biblical revelation. And finally, the Lizard King slithers into our psyche in “The Spy” and reveals himself to be the one who knows our deepest secret fear.

Truth was the Doors’ torch, and they clutched it firmly, even as the ground beneath them began to rock and crumble. For all the stories of excess and misadventures, the Doors were, at heart, seekers, probing and pushing for some essential truth in an absurd world. Psychically scarred from living in the Bomb’s shadow, infected with Nietzsche’s nihilism [i]and[/i] Rimbaud’s doomed romanticism, it’s small wonder they exhibited multiple personalities. Musically and lyrically, they crossed oceans and continents in a frenzied search for a lost, unifying chord — in the drones of India’s [i]ragas[/i], the fluttering glissandos of Spanish flamenco, the woeful baying of a chicken-shack blues harp — that might bring harmony to their restless souls. Jim Morrison said it best himself, defining both the band’s mission and their dilemma: “There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors.”