Moonlight Drive

very sexual in my opinion. "wet forests" and "get real tight" coming in at the end as well as the whole reference to taking a little ride and parking in a beautiful spot near the ocean to get some.

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.

This is one of the first songs Jim wrote. Pure poetry.

jim wrote this song in his lsd days on the roof an abandoned beach house in venice beach where he also wrote the material for the first 2 albums. like a shaman the music just came to him supossedly.

I heard it was about killing a girl, which kinda makes sense. If you read the lyrics over, thinking that it's about kidnapping a girl, it makes sense. But.. i dunno really.

As others have said, one of my favorite songs by The Doors. Such a beautiful song. Why did all the great music legends have to die? Maybe they could have saved us from all this shit music today hadn't they passed away instead of only the real music lovers just having to reminisce about them.

Karlos got it right. The poem is about drowning suicide. In the 2nd to last line Jim says "baby gonna drown tonight". Re-read the poem and think about it why would you have to swim to the moon or climb throgh the tide unless you're under water lookin up. "surrender to the wainting worlds..."is another clue.

This is one of my favorite doors song. The lyrics are amazing: "penetrate the evening, that the city sleeps to hide" I love those two lines. Jim Morrison is a genius, but what about the rest of the band? Why does no one pay attention to them? Robby Krieger is a really good guitarist. Just listen to the guitar in this song. It's fucking great man.

it's a song about murdering your lover by drowning, driving to the sea, and suicide with her, or both committing suicide together. it becomes obvious as he say along the song they are going to the sea, and by the end he says he's gonna drown. In the live versions, sometimes he says "fishes for your friends" and "pearls for your eyes", and evocates a vision of a rotten body underwater. Damn great dark psycho song!

alright....the doors. hail the lizard king.