Uh-huh
Uh-huh
You reach a hand to hold me but I
Can't be your guide
Baby
Moonlight drive
Music by Robbie Krieger, Ray Manzarek
© 1967 Doors Music ASCAP
Until the mid 1960s rock and roll was a form of entertainment designed to appeal almost exclusively to teenagers. Tunes were catchy, lyrics were largely confined to simplistic rhyme schemes of the classic 'moon–June–spoon' variety, and songs were restricted to an ideal length of no more than two and a half to three minutes so as not to overtax what was felt to be the limited adolescent attention span.
Not until Bob Dylan released his groundbreaking 1965 LP Bringing It All Back Home, containing material which was in a true sense poetic and broke every existing rule governing both song length and subject matter, did the popular song really come into its own as an authentically adult art form.
Moonlight Drive, the first single taken from The Doors' second 1967 LP Strange Days, is a case in point. The idea that a song so uncompromisingly dark could receive high rotation airplay on radio and be performed by its creators on prime time television would have been unthinkable in the buttoned down 1950s and even in the first half of the pre-psychedelic 1960s. Its masterful blending of blues imagery and Symbolist poetry is every bit as groundbreaking, in its way, as a song like Dylan's Mr Tambourine Man or anything released by Jimi Hendrix or acid-inspired UK bands like Cream or Pink Floyd during their respective heydays. While the song does conform to the three minute rule –– clocking in at 3:06 –– it is anything but predictable with Robbie Krieger's eerily haunting slide guitar continually weaving in and around the melody and Ray Manzarek's punchy keyboard work driving the rhythm alongside John Densmore's excellent (and vastly underrated) drumming. Moonlight Drive is a song that manages to captivate and unsettle the listener from its first note to its last, crowned by Morrison's supremely confident vocal performance which is, by turns, seductive, bluesy, and bordering, by the end, on the semi-psychotic.
This is rock and roll born of the unlikely melding of oldschool down home blues exemplified by artists like Howlin' Wolf and John Lee Hooker and 'decadent' nineteenth century French poets like Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine with a healthy dose Antonin Artaud's The Theatre and Its Double thrown in to remind the listener that Morrison's primary goal as a performer was always to provoke his audience and shock them out of their complacency. He achieved this aim in Moonlight Drive, a song which confronts the listener in ways which few popular songs ever manage to do even today where shock for its own sake has more or less become a standard cultural requirement. You can love the song or hate it but the one thing you cannot feel about it is neutral.
Linguistically speaking, Moonlight Drive seems closer to a Rimbaud poem like Le Bateau Ivre [The Drunken Boat] than it does to any other late 1960s rock lyric that I can think of. Rimbaud's poem, published in 1871 when he was only seventeen years old, contains many lines which, to my mind, could be interpolated into Moonlight Drive almost verbatim without sacrificing one iota of its power as a musical composition.
The imagery is similar and there is the same uneasy feeling of barely contained madness lurking below the surface of the language. The same is also true of the track that precedes Moonlight Drive on the Strange Days LP. Horse Latitudes is not a song as such, but rather a spoken word piece, lasting just over sixty seconds, which Morrison allegedly wrote when he was fourteen for a high school English assignment, basing its imagery on a painting he'd seen of the horses of Spanish conquistadores plunging from the deck of a galleon into a storm-tossed sea:
I can think of almost no other songwriter in the English language who could get away with putting a track like this on what was ostensibly a commercial recording designed to appeal to what, despite its newfound sophistication, remained a predominantly suburban teenaged audience. Nor can I think of any other lyricist who could successfully juxtapose magnificently poetic lines like 'Surrender to the waiting worlds / That lap against our side' with straightforward blues steals like 'Come on, baby, gonna take a little ride' without making the result sound trite and utterly ridiculous. Few songwriters have ever come close to replicating the visionary quality of Morrison's best work or its astonishing ability to provoke, confront and disturb the listener five decades after it was originally unleashed on an unsuspecting world.
The Lords and The New Creatures, two volumes of poetry by JIM MORRISON, were originally published separately in 1969 and republished in one volume following his death in Paris on 3 July 1971 and his internment in that city's Père Lachaise cemetery (also the final resting place of Frédéric Chopin, Honoré de Balzac and Oscar Wilde, among others). These works have now been joined by Wilderness: The Lost Writings of Jim Morrison Volume I and The American Night: The Lost Writings of Jim Morrison Volume II.
Special thanks to everyone who take the time to upload music to YouTube. Your efforts are appreciated by music lovers everywhere.
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Last updated 14 October 2021 §
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