Interpreting The Doors Lyrics

Inscrutable at best - at worst complete nonsense. Poetic perhaps or simply pretentious. As a poet, Jim Morrison wasn’t one of the greats. As a lyricist, as well as performer and all-round-rock-and-roll-sex-God, there are not many that come close. His lyrics hit some high spots but they also hit a few lows and interpreting The Doors songs, while at times can feel like an interesting and a valid intellectual pursuit, at other times seems futile.

I once read a series of interpretations of the song “The Weight” by The Band. It was very amusing. It was teenagers and young adults overlaying their life experiences on someone else’s to try to make sense of it. I won’t describe what one person thought “take a load off Fanny meant”.  And this was always my problem when as a young man, I tried to interpret Doors lyrics. I didn’t really understand Jim Morrison’s life experiences from which he was drawing inspiration. Nor did I appreciate fully the social turmoil that was underway in the United States in the sixties. The post-war economic boom; Vietnam; the civil rights movement.

Some of The Doors lyrics defy interpretation. “Remember when we were in Africa”? - We can do WHAT to the horses eyes?! - And it’s such a shame that the line “His brain is squirming like a toad” is so prominent in one of The Doors most well known tracks, “Riders On The Storm”. It’s hardly surprising that there are those that mock Morrison’s lyrics. But this is to select the weakest lyrics only and nobody should be judged by their weakest performance alone. There are passages of great poetry in The Doors lyrics, some quite accessible others require a fuller understanding of the context within which they were written.

Here’s a simple example. The phrase “An actor out alone” in “Riders On The Storm”. First off, the line is actually “An actor out on loan”. When a Hollywood actor is signed to a studio but has no work, another studio can take them on. This is known as being out on loan. This is a metaphor for being out in the wilderness (or something like that). But unless you know Hollywood studio lingo, you’re not going to get this. (Jim lived and worked in LA having studied film at UCLA. The phrase wouldn’t have been alien to him.)

So you need to understand context to understand the literal meaning of the lyrics. But you also must not interpret them literally. This might seem like a contradiction but it isn’t. Morrison uses word to evoke imagery. There are many interpretations to the words – the meaning depends on the image that is evoked and that is entirely subjective. If “Five To One” evokes images of youth revolution for you but for me it evokes images and ideas of the horrors of war – we’re both right. What I hear is what I hear. Morrison, like all poets, would never give interpretations of his own work. In answer to the question “what does it mean” he’d say “What ever you think it means. That’s what it means”