A Poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses.—Arthur Rimbaud in a letter to Paul Demeny, May 15, 1871 He was not a showman, he was a shaman.—Ray Manzarek describing Jim Morrison When Kurt Cobain took his own life in 1994, he snuffed artistic possibilities as well, two of which might have been covers to rival the irresistible energy of The Beatles' remake of "Twist and Shout" or the interpretive genius with which Jimi Hendrix transformed Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower." Just imagine the thrashing energy Nirvana could have brought to "Paint It Black" by The Rolling Stones! I can hear Cobain's anguished anger as he laments: I see the girls walk by dressed in their summer clothes, I have to turn my head until my darkness goes. The other lost possibility is "Break On Through (To The Other Side)," which hurls the listener into one of Rock's greatest debuts, a perfect album called The Doors. Uncanny how it seems as though I've heard Cobain roaring for all he's worth, his voice hoarse and nearly breaking as he pleads: Made the scene! Week to week! Day to day! Hour to hour! The gate is straight, Deep and wide! Break on through to the other side! Break on through to the other side! Break on through, Break on through, Break on through, Break on through, Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah. The Doors released their eponymous LP on January 4, 1967 (while Kurt Cobain remained in utero another six weeks.) What an incredible way to kick off the New Year! In Rock music's annus mirabilis, The Doors fired the opening salvo of mind-blowing amazement. Still brushing his mustache, Sgt. Pepper wouldn't report until May 26. And while 1967 would be known for the Summer of Love and flower-fangled festivity, a group from sunny Venice, California burst onto the scene with a menacing iceberg of an album—something undeniably compelling yet brooding and dark and sometimes disturbing. At the heart of the enterprise was poet and visionary Jim Morrison, a swaggering blend of Rimbaud and Bluesman, Surrealist and Sinatra. Lean, handsome, just oozing sexuality, and what a set of pipes! Listen to Jim bring it as The Doors cover "Back Door Man." Along with Mick Jagger and Robert Plant, Morrison was one of Rock's three greatest frontmen. His vocals are underrated; he had a marvelous voice which he could modulate from a gentle croon fit for a baby's lullaby to a booming all-diaphragm delivery that would awaken a slumbering deity. But it was what went on in that lush jungle of a brain of his that made The Doors so different from everything else happening in Pop culture. From an early age, Jim had formidable intellectual interests. He attended Florida State University and graduated with a degree from UCLA's film school, but he was largely an autodidact. Jim's sister, Anne Morrison Chewning, said: "[I]n high school he would learn a new word and then he'd write a whole story around it, so his vocabulary was incredible. When he graduated from high school, he asked my parents for the complete works of Nietzsche—most kids want a car!" One day on Venice Beach in 1965, Morrison met up again by chance with his UCLA film school friend Ray Manzarek. Manzarek had been playing keyboards with his two brothers in a band called Rick and the Ravens. Jim sang some songs he'd written and Ray liked what he heard. The two soon founded a new group: The Doors. The Doors. Even the group's name has an intellectual pedigree, one that alludes to a more than recreational approach to hallucinogens. It's short for The Doors of Perception, title of Aldous Huxley's 1954 account of his experiences taking mescaline. Huxley, in turn, derived the phrase from a line in William Blake's book The Marriage of Heaven and Hell in which the Romantic poet wrote: "If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is: Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern." The Doors had one foot planted in Eros, the other buried in Thanatos. And if you think that's highfalutin academic speak, Jim thought—and created—in those very terms. His passion for Nietzsche, specifically The Birth of Tragedy, along with his related delving into Greek myth, particularly the cult of Dionysus, informs his art at every turn. Unfettered ecstasy walks hand-in-hand with sorrow and suffering. Pain and insanity occur throughout the album like a karmic counterbalance to joy: "We chased our pleasures here / dug our treasures there / but can you still recall / the time we cried?"—Break on Through (To The Other Side) "The days are bright and filled with pain / enclose me in your gentle rain / the time you ran was too insane."—The Crystal Ship "Some are born to sweet delight / some are born to the endless night."—End of the Night In "I Looked at You," a mutual glance and smile of attraction seems to imply irreversible doom: "I looked at you / you looked at me / I smiled at you / you smiled at me ... now we're on our way! / and we can't come back! / 'cause it's too late, too late, too late." A cover suggested by Manzarek, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weil's 1927 "Alabama Song," steeped in Weimar decadence, dovetails with the agenda. The Doors employ a parodic, circus-like oompah matched to anachronistic instrumentation (along with his usual Rhodes and Vox Continental keyboards, Ray plays a Marxophone, lending the rendition a vibe reminiscent of the Anton Karas score for TheThird Man.) It's a fun drinking song . . . with grim consequences: "For if we don't find the next whisky bar / I tell you we must die / I tell you we must die." Even that hypnotic anthem of love, "Light My Fire," delivers an unexpected jolt of the ominous. Guitarist Robby Krieger came up with the song (it was the first song he ever wrote and it spent three weeks at number 1!) In interviews, Krieger explained how he decided to channel one of the four classical Greek elements and chose fire. No doubt, Krieger envisioned passion's metaphorical flames, but Jim penned the second verse and for him "the beast with two backs" represents an opportunity for mutual immolation: The time to hesitate is through, No time to wallow in the mire, Try now we can only lose And our love become a funeral pyre. Along the way, Jim, Ray, Robby, and drummer John Densmore have been dropping morbid intimations, but nothing can prepare you for "The End," a second canonical masterpiece on the same album, a black diamond in the The Legacy's crown. "Light My Fire" and "The End," Eros and Thanatos. In a way, the album's closing song unites the two in Morrison's chilling spoken-word riff on Oedipus Rex. And just as "Light My Fire" leads you in a hypnotic dance of love, "The End" induces a lucid trance in which you look into the eyes of death; Nietzsche said that when you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back into you. Pain and madness return: Lost in a Roman wilderness of pain and all the children are insane, all the children, are insane waiting for the summer rain. Another UCLA film school grad two years ahead of Morrison, Francis Ford Coppola, understood the wild majesty of this song, casting it unforgettably as essential soundtrack in Apocalypse Now. The Doors collected several elite firsts. They were the first group to advertise their record with a billboard on the Sunset Strip and the first American group to rack up eight consecutive gold albums. More profoundly, they were the first to make darkness their métier; to make the disconcerting, the disorienting, the strange their accustomed milieu; to make Thanatos their lifeblood; and, critically, to use this material to generate record sales. The Doors and the LPs that followed laid the foundations for future sub-genres, music premised on angst and soul-searching: Bob Mould ("Sacrifice/Let There Be Peace") Soundgarden ("Fell on Black Days" and "Black Hole Sun") Nine Inch Nails ("Hurt"), Audioslave ("Show Me How to Live") and a whole lot of Nirvana. With a perfect album you can drop the needle on either side and just let it play. With The Doors you can do just that; it remains an astonishing debut these 55 years later. The Doors Side 1: Break On Through (To The Other Side) Soul Kitchen The Crystal Ship Twentieth Century Fox Alabama Song (Whisky Bar) [by Bertolt Brecht & Kurt Weil] Light My Fire Side 2: Back Door Man [by Willie Dixon & Chester Burnett] I Looked at You End of the Night Take It as It Comes The End