| The 5th Dimension – Wedding Bell Blues Lyrics | 2 years ago |
| To me, there seems to be a perceptible edge of desperation and judging that it was written before Roe v Wade it could well mean that the women in the song is pregnant, hence "Wedding Bell Blues". | |
| The Mamas & the Papas – Twelve Thirty (Young Girls Are Coming to the Canyon) Lyrics | 8 years ago |
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@[Swifty57:11142] It's how I see it, too. Meditative in tone. |
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| The Mamas & the Papas – I Saw Her Again Lyrics | 8 years ago |
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Pretty much a very narcissistic and opportunistic view of a sexual relationship. My opinion, only. |
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| Donovan – Sunny Goodge Street Lyrics | 8 years ago |
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Sure. It's about being loaded. A good, evocative and accurate description of the innocent use in the 60s. It was a sort of first communion with the cosmos, it seemed like. Oh, well! |
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| Donovan – Sunny Goodge Street Lyrics | 8 years ago |
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@[tim:11141] caesar I took it to be "Involved in an eating scene..." It's an interesting image... A guy obviously stoned on cannabis ("violent hash eater") has maybe used a candy vending machine, wanting to indulge in some gustatory sensations--and you know how good everything tasted stoned, But the machine fails to deliver--it eats his coins--and he's shaking it, bitterly disappointed. This came out in '65 I'm thinking and I smoked dope for the first time that year. Before I smoked the lyric implied one thing; after, it seemed real clear to me. |
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| The Doors – The Spy Lyrics | 8 years ago |
| @[vulvalove:9712] Good point. Bears examination. | |
| The Doors – The Spy Lyrics | 8 years ago |
| @[modernman73:9711] Me, too. | |
| The Doors – The Spy Lyrics | 8 years ago |
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To me, this is much more about voyeurism and paranoia than something so mundane as checking up on one's girlfriend. It's thematically about the dark aspects of human nature. One might compare it thematically to The Police's "I'll Be Watching You". |
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| The Doors – The Spy Lyrics | 8 years ago |
| Seems like a general exploration of voyeurism from the POV of the voyeur, in the same way that Cobain's Polly is about kidnapping and rape from the POV of the rapist/abductor. | |
| The Doors – Ship Of Fools Lyrics | 8 years ago |
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@[bertil:8637] Further note that you are probably aware of... There was a film in 1965, taken from Porter's book. There is a fair chance that this film, which was pretty good--I saw it in the theatre at the time, was known to Morrison, and functioned as an artistic springboard. |
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| The Doors – The Crystal Ship Lyrics | 8 years ago |
| @[Karlin:8636] Sounds like a crock, to me. | |
| Belly (US) – Feed the Tree Lyrics | 9 years ago |
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The more I consider the song, the greater I respect the accomplishment. There is very vivid, but ambiguous, imagery. Think of a big red tree *throwing* up its leaves, spinning round and round. And this is immediately juxtaposed with the image of pouring one's heart on the ground. In essence, a person (the old man) put his life into the tree. There is shifting point of view. There are temporal shifts. There are incompatible gender identifications. The narrative hints a very large sub-text or larger narrative frame--we're seeing only a part, or several small parts jumbled up. I can recall deconstructing the plot line of Catch-22 in college. It's a non-linear narrative that requires a concrete temporal/setting diagram to make linear sense. Such an approach would be useful for this song, I think. |
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| Belly (US) – Feed the Tree Lyrics | 9 years ago |
| @[prismspect:3668] So you think this song is about dental hygienic techniques? | |
| Belly (US) – Feed the Tree Lyrics | 9 years ago |
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@[kenfo00:3667] One more reply, after re-reading your comment... I feel the darkness, too. It is an integral part of the attraction of the overall artistic package. The dark element can also be found in the contemporaneous songs of Cobain ("Polly", among others) and STP's "Plush". Seems like the dark, evocative and ambiguous narratives were much more common in that era. |
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| Belly (US) – Feed the Tree Lyrics | 9 years ago |
| @[Fredashay:3666] Certainly brings a whole new interpretation to "be there when I feed the tree," doesn't it? | |
| Belly (US) – Feed the Tree Lyrics | 9 years ago |
| @[kenfo00:3665] For what it's worth, I think that yours is an excellent and provocative analysis. | |
| Belly (US) – Feed the Tree Lyrics | 9 years ago |
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But there is a lot of ambiguity to this song that needs to be considered... First we're told about an old man by the narrator. Then we hear about the narrator refer to herself as female--seemingly with the principal feature being silver teeth. Female with silver teeth. Then ostensibly, the old man refers to the silver-toothed girl as "boy". Now the narrative shifts identity to the old man, whom the narrator "used to be", just as she "used to be" the little girl. The old man now seems to say that he'd only hurt the "silver baby" in his dreams. It is a tremendously evocative and ambiguous song that is very effective and establishing a sort of mingled nostalgia and unspecified, unspeakable threat of some kind. Really, this is art in the same sense that "Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome" or "Scorpio Rising" is art. |
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| The Doors – Take It As It Comes Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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I'm not real sure how it fits (haven't thought about it) but the shooting arows at the sun closely parallels Hercules shooting an arrow at Helio, the charioteer of the sun, in an attempt to strike back at the excessive heat in the Lybian desert, while Hercules was on his 10th labor. I feel quite cefrtain that Morrison would be familiar wtih this reference (anyone who knows about "The Journey to the End of the Night" is pretty far into literary influences), and how it relates to mythical heroes (demi-god, in this case) being forceful in life. |
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| The Doors – Crawling King Snake Lyrics | 11 years ago |
| Gosh, what a truly wretched song... | |
| The Doors – The Soft Parade Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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This is what I think, so it's naturally open to question. I'll qualify where I'm coming from, first. I started college in the mid-60s, in Marin county. I was a fairly middle-of-the-road kid going to college, and the weird thing about that time was that, due mainly to the confluence of the anti-war and civil rights movements, there was a sharp generational divide: us versus them. I will assure you now that, as unbelievable as it seems, the majority of my generation, at that time, non-radicals and firebrands, thought that we were going to change the world, much for the better. I mean, we *really* thought that. It was a highly unrealistic time and there was a sharp generational divide. This is a perfect environment for political protest songs and for feel-good utopian songs to thrive. And they did... Note here that the content of the Doors' material was marked *less* political than mast of their other contemporaries. There may be references to situations caused by the political situation (Unknown Soldier, Peace Frog), but they are merely vehicles for the narrative--which is very often apocalyptic on the grand scale. They are not like "Come on, people, smile on your brother, everybody get together, time to love one another, right now..." ("Get Together" - Youngbloods). Or "There's something's happening here..." ("For What It's Worth" - Buffalo Springfield). When I first heard the Doors in 1967 I could tell that there was something quite different about what they were doing. I do not now think that this was under their control. I think it was a byproduct of the backgrounds of the individual band members. First and foremost, they were well-educated--had been exposed to classical western philosophy and mythology in comparative lit classes, and other similar humanities-based classes. So all of them had available to their imaginations much of the works of Freud, the writings of the 19C French decadents, classical mythological archetypes, etc. And I mean that *all* of them had at least some exposure. Contrast this with the grunge or glam rock eras, where perhaps mention of the name "Aristophanes" would zoom right over the artists' heads. There's not a lot of allusion to tropes in much of the music that followed--nor was that all that much at that time (60s-70s), either: Mellow Yellow, my ass... This is why, when listening to the Doors' lyrics, it's really important to listen for possible verifiable references *first*, and if you find none, you may be safe(r) in thinking that the lyrics are pretty much transparent--they have no alternative meanings. They did do such songs; I think that Love Street is fairly transparent--although, again, the subject of the song could be an archetypal love goddess. Not so for "Runaround Sue" or "Maggie", huh? :^) It seems pretty clear that Morrison thought of himself as a sort of modern manifestation of Dionysus. He may have at first thought that this was an interesting idea, but that it was not to considered seriously--but later, after the attention, the WILD, consistent adulation, the drugs and drinking, he may well have resolved that in fact, it was his pre-destined role to *be* a priest king--exalted--The Lizard King. Really, his transformation, in his own mind, was probably similar to what happens to many successful athletes, who are subject to the same sort of unreality in their daily lives. Ever listened to LeBron James talk for a while? Now if you take that POV, on songs that he did the lyrics for--consider that a demi-god is thinking aloud. That would be a good start. Morality does not actually apply to demi-gods, and don't forget that he was likely very familiar with Nietzche. So when you see the line: "One is to love your neighbor 'till His wife gets home." the fact that this was sung by a male, and loving one's neighbor until his wife gets home was, at that time (believe me, it was not like it is now), a terrible taboo, similar to the sentiments expressed in "mother--yes, son--I want to fuck you"--you were playing with ethical/moral dynamite. You had a writer of lyrics who did not feel bound by normal moral sentiments. He was the Lizard King, and could "do anything". Now such a person is not into advising their followers for their own good. He's not telling you *anything* you can use--he's musing aloud, for you to take from it what you will--to him, it doesn't matter. When you read that "Jim wanted to show..." or "Jim was telling us that...", this is not the person he appears to have been, from what I can see. Now I'm not saying that Morrison was any such thing--clearly, becoming dead at 27 ought to purge anyone of that idea--but this is how he thought, and he's the author of much of their more elliptical material. Over and out... :^) |
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| The Doors – Spanish Caravan Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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I agree with those who say that there is no really deep meaning or allusion to any governing symbology, unlike something like "Not to Touch the Earth" or "The End", where it is possible to demonstrate reference to existing symbolic forms. That said, it is a great example of the visually, viscerally evocative effect of some of some of their lyrics. I used to spend a lot of time on the beach in California. Not so much the populated beaches in S Cal, but more like the isolated ones from Santa Barbara north. If you maybe smoked some--or drank some wine--and heard this song in your head, with the sound of the waves in the background, you could *see* a Manila galleon, on the new route back to Acapulco (that was the run: out from Acapulco with gold, back from Manila with trade goods), running with the NW wind that blows along the coast--maybe worried by the fog as you near Point Conception--the end of a long voyage becoming more real to you, thinking about home... I think that when they were at their best, they were very thoughtful lyricists--both Morrison and Krieger. Very fine stuff to be on commercial radio...but perhaps a case of pearls before swine. |
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| The Doors – Strange Days Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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The line, as it appears in the lyrics: "Bodies confused, memories misused." I had always heard this as: "Our dreams are fused, memories misused." I ma not at all confident that I am hearing it correctly, and it seems to me that either lyric works about the same--to indicate a muddled, mixed-up reality. In the case of "bodies confused" it seems to infer that natural physical instincts are thwarted; in "our dreams are fused" it could indicate that either (or both): a) the singer and the listener are thinking the same basic thoughts; and/or b) for each target individual of the song, reality and and fantasy have become one and the same. Scary stuff... |
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| The Doors – Twentieth Century Fox Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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I am reluctant to criticize, but "Sent to manless school" is really very weak for the types of lyrics the Doors did. I think that this works better: "Since her mind left school" works better, and this is supported by the line that follows immediately: "It never hestitates" "It" in reference to "mind". If we took the lyric "Sent to manless school" (yech!) "it" would refer to the school. And I guess then that the school never hesitates. Is that really what this song is about, the "manless school"? I think the intended meaning is that since she is thinking for herself (mind left school), she's decisive. Her mind (it) never hesitates. |
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| The Doors – L.A. Woman Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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OK, I'll admit that I like this song disproportionately because I lived in LA when I was young, in my 20s and 30s... That said, besides being tremendously evocative (in my experience, there is no place I've been like LA, if you are young and looking for romantic encounters). It was (and I hope it still is) a city for lovers, overlain by a certain decadence that only serves to spice up the whole mix. It seemed like any exciting thing could happen...I have little doubt that Morrison saw it this way, too, based on his writing. I can see the young woman, in 20th Century Fox, walking past the boutiques on a sunny day on Rodeo Drive... (For a really good idea of what it felt like to live there in the 70s/80s, Steely Dan's "Gaucho", and other of their albums of the period hit it pretty good, too. Aja really speaks to the West Hollywood/Beverly Hills/Westwood/Brentwood axis, for sure... ) I think that someone mentioned the paring of "city at night" and "city of light". The "City of Light" could well be a reference to Paris, known for a long time as "The City of Light". I realize that he moved there sometime in 70 or 71. I'm not sure how this aligns with the time the song was written and recorded. I think this could bear more analysis. |
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| The Doors – L.A. Woman Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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I think that the exact wording of the lyrics, as shown here, are open to question e.g., where they have: "Where the little girls in their Hollywood bungalows" I'd always heard it as: "Met a little girl in a Hollywood bungalow" I'd live in LA for a while, visited relatives who lived there since I was a little kid. This song is as hugely evocative for anyone who has ever lived in LA and *liked* it (lots don't), and was *stimulated by it*, as Randy Newman's ditty "I Love LA". This is not a cynical put-down, either. If you're young and in LA in the 80s, you felt just about the way Newman described... ...and if you'd been there the same year as the Manson murders, for example, you'd still be attracted, and realize that this crime was a quintessential Los Angeles crime. Random, involving glamour, and near-inexplicable motives. So when you hear a line line: "I see your hair is burnin' Hills are filled with fire" and many autumns, when the Santa Anas come and it hasn't rained for 90 days or more, and the vegetation along Mulholland and down the south slope is just like the kindling they so cheerfully sell outside of a Ralph's supermarket, and you drive north on 405 on a weekend evening, to the Santa Monica freeway cut-off, you see the the glow of the fires along the Sepulveda Pass, well, *this* song really takes you there, again. Similarly, the lines: "Cops in cars, the topless bars..." is a very vivid reminder of my 21st birthday, along Sunset and parts of Santa Monica Blvd, in 1968. Just another day in paradise, huh...? :^) |
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| The Doors – I Can't See Your Face In My Mind Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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Wow. I didn't even notice... "Insanity's horse adorns the sky..." ??? ??? Really, I think we need a better transcription of the lyrics here. I don't think this is right. It is questionable at the very least. |
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| The Doors – I Can't See Your Face In My Mind Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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The line, as they show it here: "Carnival dogs consume the lines." make no sense in any interpretation I can come up with, even nonsensical, and so I begin to wonder if the lyric is actually something else. I mean, what are we to make of it? There are dogs at a carnival and they eat the people standing in line for the farris wheel and the roller coaster? The Doors lyrics are seldom that, well, *sloppy*... This would be as self-referential as James Joyce. They rend to reference classical tropes and use images that often relate to that. The way it is, *no one* could possibly interpret the song, and they did not seem to try for this level of obscurity. They are not typically like John Lennon, who, if the apocryphal story is true, upon finishing "I am the Walrus", said: "There. Let the fuckers figure *this* one out..." |
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| The Doors – Cars Hiss By My Window Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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Pretty clearly follows the blues formula of the repeated premise, followed by a dramatic conclusion. Do you think that Morrison ever had to *pay* for sex? Jeez, I hope he was smarter than that. |
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| The Doors – Unhappy Girl Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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Now, the really sad thing here is that the lyrics contain an obvious usage mistake: "devise", a verb, (pronounced "dee-vize") meaning "to create" or "to invent" instead of "device", a noun, (pronounced "dee-VICE", as in "he have de vice of gamblin'") meaning something created to perform a specific purpose. "You are locked in a prison of your own device." And guess what: ain't no one here spotted this and they even proliferated the error by using the same incorrect term in their comments. And of course, the phrase "of one's own device" is in very common literary usage to make an ironic observation that one has been screwed by one's very own actions--a lot like the phrase "hoist with one's own petard". Ultimately, we are treated to the comic spectacle of folk working seriously to interpret a fairly literate lyric, and these same folk can't spot a simple spelling/usage error. I try to be as tolerant and democratic as the next man, but until you can spot this sort of error, you have not yet acquired the price of admission to participate in serious discussion. |
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| The Doors – Ship Of Fools Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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I agree that the song references Porter's book, and the film of the same title that came out in the mid-60s. So far as a "playful" ambiance, it's tough to see how this squares with lines like "The human race was dying out..." and "Smog's gonna get you pretty soon..." |
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| The Doors – Twentieth Century Fox Lyrics | 11 years ago |
| The way the lyrics scan, and the vocabulary and style, lead me to believe that this is a Krieger song. I could be mistaken... | |
| Buffy Sainte-Marie – Cod'ine Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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I always thought that the refrain, as shown here: "And it's real, and it's real, one more time." is actually: "And it's sweet, yes it's sweet, one more time." because, you see, opiates/opioids are like that. I've only heard the Quicksilver Messenger Service cover, from the movie Revolution, so I really don't know. |
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| The Doors – Moonlight Drive Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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So I've been going thru these coments on a lot of the songs today. I've ponderd long and hard on the fact that the very first time I heard a Doors song (summer of 67) I was immediately taken away, somewhere other than where I actually was. There was great power in the songs. Much of Morrison's stuff is just poetic musing--much is not, like Cobain, autobiographical. All four Doors were college boys, and at least Morrison and Manzarek graduated from UCLA (Krieger may have graduated from UCSB, for all I know). So what you had here was a bunch of fairly literate guys exposed to a lot of art and even European Romantic/Post Romantic/Decadent poetry and literature. Now as the years went by and I really started to look at Morrison's poetry and lyrics, I realized that, really, they can be pretty immature. Yet here we are, he's been dead 40 years and more, and we're still talking about him, and there's still a boatload of mystique. Some of this is just plain circumstance, like with James Dean, dying young, but still, there's more to it. What we had was a literate competent band led by a tremendously charismatic and confident character who came to think of himself as a hybrid of Dionysus, Blake, Byron, and some kind of new age shaman. And it looks to me like he kind of believed it. Bands I saw at that time were closer in stage persona to shoe-gazers--maybe "rockin' out" a bit more, but there was not a lot of "perfromance art", which is what it looks to me like the Doors' live performances were: early experiments with spontaneous performance art, like rituals, done to music and chanting. They predated a lot of the very theatrical stuff of the 70s, like Alice Cooper, but they were more spontaneous and here's the important part: unlike the acts that followed, I think that Morrison bought this: he felt that he was the Lizard King--whatever that was supposed to be. So he wrote about very vague, but powerful, emotions, like fear of an apocalyse, death, dissolution, losing one's self in the dissolute luxury of the senses. Again, I think that there are *some* autobiographical lyrics, but many of the others were like the prose peom genre, as done by Blake, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, etc. His songs sound like a Gustav Klimt or Aubrey Beadsley painting *looks*--kinda scary and yet fatally attractive. Once you understand that this is where a lot of Morrison's work is coming from, you'll stop thinking that he's writing a wistful song about a cute girl he'll never get over, and instead he's trying to do archetypes: Alexander, Dionysus, every great volatile, flawed hero. And he should get credit for trying, even if he's pretty immature in how he's doing it. But the guy died at 27: what could he actually know of life? He is really a decent raw intellect who had been exposed to a fairly good education in the wesern artistic tradition, who was absorbed by pagan spiritualism, and was trying to write poetry. There is a lot of fairly sad output (low quality, immature), but mixed with an undeniable power that grips you, at the level described by Karl Jung. That's his legacy, I think. The last truly commited adherent to Romantic decadence, and almost entirely untainted by cynicsim. |
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| The Doors – Waiting For The Sun Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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Th ething about Morrison is that he reveled in the image of the Romantic madman. Dionysus in the latter half of the 20th C. This si liely about nothing more focused than feeling young and alive and vital (and virile) but always there's that underlying current of one's mortality. Fairly happy, positive song, for a Doors' song, until you come to: Waiting for you to Come along. Waiting for you to Hear my song. Waiting for you to Come along. Waiting for you to Tell me what went wrong. This is the strangest life I've ever known. Right when this part starts, the music changes radically and has a definite undertone of threat, like the mask is slipping, and what's underneath is really pretty scary. Yeah. |
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| The Doors – Wintertime Love #1 Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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To start with, it's a waltz: rare animal in pop songs. Lots of their stuff seems to me to non-autobiographical. This is one of those songs. They tend to try for literate impressions in the Romantic or even Cavalier Poet mode,a nd there's often not a lot of hiodden meaning, just a sort of general emotional impression. Anyway, that's what I think. |
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| The Doors – Wishful Sinful Lyrics | 11 years ago |
| Always took it to a a very vague impression of Atlantis. | |
| The Doors – End Of The Night Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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That's "Louis-Ferdinand Celine", as the author of "Journey to the End of the Night". I actually read this about 35 years ago. Of course, I cannot remember a single thing about it. :^( |
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| The Doors – Summer's Almost Gone Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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Because of the obvious fascination with death, I have interpreted this song as being about the waning of youth, with summer almost being over as a way of recognizing that youth is finite, and it is ending. The line, especially, saying something like: "When summer's gone, where will we be?" seems to especially resonate with this sentiment. There may be those who think this is a simple "summertime love song" like something the Everley Brothers, or Del Shannon, might like to sing, but if you weight the thematic range of most of the lyrics from the entire Doors songbook, they are seldom direct, seldom cheerful, and seldom even wistful. They are DARK with foreboding and threat and intimations of mortality--but not dread. And I actually believe the line to be: "At night we swim the *lamp-lit* sea..." This evokes a concrete visual image like something out of Salambo, or the Arabian Nights. |
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| The Doors – The Crystal Ship Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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I, too, have interpreted the line as "1000 pills, one thousand thrills". There's a kind of sinuous elegance to this song; I think it's merely an outpouring of the excess of the spirit of 19th C Romanticism that infused a lot of the lyrical sensibilities of Morrison songs. I have long believed that if you thought of Morrison as Lord Byron as a rock star, you'd be pretty close to correct. |
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| The Doors – Back Door Man Lyrics | 11 years ago |
| It's pretty clearly about about an African American man who has a job opening the front door of a big hotel. | |
| The Doors – Yes, The River Knows Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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The interpretation "mystic, heated wine" makes sense in this regard... Considering that the Doors' lyrics often referenced obscure sources (e.g., "not to touch the earth" is the title of one of the chapters of Frazer's Golden Bough), being drowned in wine (of all things) is quite likely a reference to the death of Clarence in Richard III. He is drowned "in a butt of Malmsey". Now, Malmsey is a thick, sweet wine, like sherry, and it is heated in the production process to give it flavor and color. Doesn't this seem consistent with a group whose lyrics reference a major work on anthropology, and who apparently know at least one interpretation of why the horse latitudes are so named? So, "mysticated", my ass. This sounds like something Sarah Palin might come up with, not Jim Morrison or Robbie Krieger. |
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| The Doors – Yes, The River Knows Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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I agree, and would add that I've always thought it was a reference to Shakespeare's Richard III, when Clarence is drowned in a butt of malmsey. The group frequently had obscure allusions. And malmsey is heated during fermentation. I believe that such a reference would be in character with a group that would also refer to Frazer's The Golden Bough. |
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