tHE dOORS 'bEAT gENERATION'

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“If he (Jack Kerouac) hadn’t written On The Road, The Doors never would have existed.” Ray Manzarek

Some bands wear their Beat influences on their sleeves. Steely Dan is a reference from a William Burroughs book “Naked Lunch” and their song lyrics continued to be influenced by literature. At first glance The Doors don’t seem to be Beat influenced and while The Doors were heavily influenced by literature, they practically released a reading list when they became a national band, they were also obviously influenced by film (Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek were UCLA film students when they met), but theatre was an influence, as well as Blues music. If you delve past surface appearances you will find The Doors, especially Jim Morrison were influenced by The Beats (most of this essay focuses on Jim Morrison because he was The Doors chief lyricist and the most widely read in literature of The Doors).

The first thing The Beats gave Morrison is the most important and overlooked influence, they gave Jim Morrison a reading list. Kerouac’s “On The Road” provides a who’s who of cutting edge writers ranging from William Blake, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Arthur Rimbaud. The most influential in Morrison’s development as a writer with a desire to be a poet was French symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud. Morrison was influenced by Rimbaud’s “A Season in Hell” as well as “Illuminations.” Also important to Morrison was Rimbaud’s biography. Rimbaud is famous for his quote that poetry should be “a systematic disorganization of the senses.” Rimbaud’s poetic career was also a very quick and shambolic tear through the ranks of French poetry of the time. Rimbaud stopped writing at age seventeen and left for Africa to make his fortune as a gun-runner. It’s from this that Morrison developed the romantic idea of writing some memorable poetry and then “split for Africa.” Other writers suggested by The Beats were Nietzsche, Celine, Baudelaire, William Blake, Hart Crane, Weldon Kees whose ideas and Morrison’s paraphrasings of which you can later find in Morrison’s philosophy, Doors lyrics, and poetry.



If you’re looking for a more direct influence of Beat writing on Morrison, the style of Morriso’s poems, what at first seems to be disjointed imagery and as Morrison himself put it “Listen, real poetry doesn’t say anything; it just ticks off the possibilities….” and with all the imagery stacked upon itself paints a picture, sort of like pointillism with words. One of the influences of this style is Allen Ginsburg best exemplified in “Howl.”

“I’ve seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn, looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection in the starry dynamo in the

machinery of night,…”

Compared to one of Morrison’s poems, “Awake.”

“Awake

Shake dreams from your hair

My pretty child, my sweet one

Choose the day and choose the sign of your day

The day’s divinity

First thing you see.

A vast radiant beach in a cool jeweled moon

Couples naked race down by its quiet side

And we laugh like soft, mad children…”

The Beats also influenced Morrison’s songwriting, not in borrowed phrasings, or similarities in style but in tone. An excellent example is The Doors “Cars Hiss by My Window” seems very influenced by Kerouac.

The Doors “Car Hiss by my Window” from “L.A. Woman”
From “On The Road”

“I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was-I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.”

Both of these scenes aptly describe the same sort of existential aphasia or fugue state, and the disorientation of not quite knowing who you are or why you’re there.

Jim Morrison may have been a rock and roll star, but maybe we’ve been too quick to give him that label, maybe even poet doesn’t accurately describe Morrison’s avocation, perhaps a more accurate description is Beat rock and roll star, or maybe rock and roll star should be taken out of the equation and consider him a Beat writer, or more accurately description the last Beat writer.

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