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More Than Words: Morrison Unleashes Killer Instinct
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Jim Morrison with long-time love, Pamela Courson
Have you ever loved a song to the point of ridiculousness but no matter how hard you try, you just can’t understand the lyrics? What was the artist thinking when writing your favorite tune? More Than Words, a weekly column, will help to delve a little deeper…
Riders on the Storm -
“Truly live life for you know not when death will come”
“This song is about being a small part of a largely chaotic universe”
“Actually it's about a serial killer. I don't know all of the details but that's what it's about. I'm unsure if it's about a real life serial killer or just one in Morrison's mind. Either way, I love this song.”
“I think its about poverty for some reason, or maybe the world is dying and the men and women have to stick together as the world is sinking to oblivious sadness.”
The quotes above were taken from various Doors fans describing in their own words what the song Riders in the Storm means to them.
Featured on The Doors’ 1971 album LA Woman, Riders on the Storm was written by Jim Morrison and reached number 14 on the music charts. According to band member Robby Krieger, it was inspired by the Stan Jones song, (Ghost) Riders in the Sky: A Cowboy Legend. However popular myth tells us that in fact, Riders on the Storm was possibly written about three different incidents.
- The killing spree of Billy Cook who posed as a hitchhiker and murdered an entire family – highlighted by the lyrics “There's a killer on the road, His brain is squirmin' like a toad, Take a long holiday, Let your children play, If ya give this man a ride, Sweet memory will die, Killer on the road”
- A tragic accident involving a reckless driver and several deaths of Navajo tribesman when the car hit them head on
- The poem, Chevaliers de l'Ouragan (literally, "Riders of the Hurricane"), by French Communist poet Louis Aragon
In the Oliver Stone movie, “The Doors”, Morrison is seen driving with his parents past a Native American family. The song is playing in the background.
However despite these references, The Doors were never struck on creating the standard three-minute radio tune. Instead the band created art – and in random acts of improvisation and imagination, often took their songs far beyond studio-recorded versions during live shows. This left their songs open to much speculation and interpretation.
Doors expert Dan Keating, suggests that “Morrison's standard joke of the word Dog spelling God backwards slides in (to the song) as does the notion that we are all but acting out a part in this life, souls on loan to this world. But this world can be harsh, evident in the sedate presentation of the deadly reality of killer hitchhikers on freeways. The imagery is blunt, and the gentle undercurrent of the song's music and lyrics now harbors the threatening edge of death.”
The lyrics, “Into this house we're born, Into this world we're thrown, Like a dog without a bone, An actor out alone, Riders on the storm,” help to illustrate Keating’s point that “Jim's message was act now, search later. Life is a journey, but any journey will be painful. Life is pain, love is pain, and fear prevents people from experiencing life, from accepting what The Doors ultimately come to realize, that we are all just Riders On The Storm”.
In the book “Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend”, by Stephen Davis, it is suggested that in 1962, while Jim was attending Florida State University in Tallahassee, he was seeing a girl named Mary Werbelow who lived 280 miles away. Jim would often hitchhike to see her.
"Those solitary journeys on hot and dusty Florida two-lane blacktop roads, with his thumb out and his imagination on fire with lust and poetry and Nietzsche and God knows what else - taking chances on redneck truckers, fugitive homos, and predatory cruisers - left an indelible psychic scar on Jimmy, whose notebooks began to obsessively feature scrawls and drawings of a lone hitchhiker, an existential traveler, faceless and dangerous, a drifting stranger with violent fantasies, a mystery tramp: the killer on the road."
Believed not to have a relation to the overall theme of the song, the lyrics, "Girl you gotta love your man" can be seen as a desperate plea to his long time girlfriend Pamela Courson who he was seeing at the time the song was written.
Morrison recorded his main vocals and then whispered the lyrics over them to create the haunting effect. The song was the last he ever recorded before his death in Paris in July 1971 at the age of 27.
** More Than Words is a weekly column. Stay tuned for the next edition!
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