The Doors were known for creating music that seemed to originate from another planet. You simply couldn’t find a performer like Jim Morrison in any other genre of music, no matter how much jazz or blues they threw in. He was the epitome of the promiscuous rock star on stage. Morrison never considered himself a rock star. But when he came up with the song “Moonlight Drive” for the first time. He realized he had something.
Upon closer examination, though, Morrison’s frontman duties almost seem unattainable by most rock band norms. He had little to no knowledge of music theory. He barely understood what it meant to be a rock singer. But when combining that with his love for poetry. Something celestial seemed to happen whenever he got in front of the microphone.
Morrison was drawn to poetry before anything else, so it makes sense that music wasn’t his true calling. He had to find a way to express himself, and that meant majoring in film, the favourite subject of poets everywhere.
Yes, Morrison worked in UCLA’s film department before quitting college. It was there that he met Ray Manzarek, who had recently fled his legal career. Morrison wrote poetry all day, but things didn’t really come together until he put “Moonlight Drive” to music.
Morrison didn’t have the confidence to sing them for a long time, according to Manzarek. He told Classic Albums, “[Jim] said, ‘I’m writing songs,’ and I said, ‘Let me hear some of your songs“‘. He said, “Eh, I don’t have that much of a voice,” and I told him to shut up because Bob Dylan is the biggest thing alive and he doesn’t have a voice. Then he closed his eyes and began to sing, “Let’s swim to the moon, let’s climb through the tides.”
Manzarek told Morrison that he knew he had found what he was looking for even in its unadulterated state. He said, “At that point, I said, ‘That’s it, we’re putting a rock and roll band together.‘” This one is something we’re pursuing to the end.” But even with the addition of guitarist Robby Krieger and drummer John Densmore, “Moonlight Drive” still needed some tweaks to be finished.
While Morrison’s voice carried the majority of the band’s greatest songs, Krieger’s slide guitar is what makes “Moonlight Drive” truly effective. The transition between those two notes isn’t particularly complex. However, when you hear it combined with Morrison taking a late-night drive along the coast. It sounds like Krieger is communicating. With the ghost of a sinister California.
However, that was The Doors’ true allure from the start. Despite all of the fantastic music they produced together, the goal was never to create a single as successful as “Light My Fire” on the charts. The goal was to convey the essence of The Summer of Love. “Moonlight Drive” served as a mission statement to expose the darker side of psychedelic music.
