How the Doors Song ‘Riders on the Storm’ Defined Jim Morrison
- by Tom Taylor
When The Doors first formed in 1965, starting a song with a lightning crack and an apocalyptical atmosphere was out of the question. In the eternal summer of peace and love, the flowery sanguine sound that most of the mainstream music in the era propagated was in direct contrast to the iconoclasm that followed shortly after.
As Jim Morrison said long before the band arrived at the masterpiece of L.A. Woman: “I’m interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos, especially activity that appears to have no meaning. It seems to me to be the road toward freedom.”
When tumultuous times thrust the flower-power scene into turmoil, The Doors stood out amid the mixed-up rock ‘n’ roll milieu as a dose of darkness. Rather than pitch black realism, however, they were tapping into a much more mystical sense of cloud cover.
As Life journalist Fred Powledge wrote upon first seeing Morrison on stage in 1968: “Once you see him perform, you realise that he also seems dangerous, which, for a poet, may be a contradiction in terms.” Powledge, by all accounts, was not your typical Doors fan, his role in journalism at the time was covering the civil rights movement, however, Morrison seemingly captivated him as a sort of unfathomable rock ‘n’ roll Christ at the precipice of counterculture.
