Year: 2014
Type: article
Abstract: CRENSHAW "Five to One" is an evocative phrase.For listeners aware of the Doors song by the same title, it can bring to mind images of sex, fear, death, freedom, revolution, or simply drugs and alcohol.It can be a good-time anthem or a sobering indictment of the sixties.For listeners in the sixties, this double meaning was likely intentional.The song's lyrics are loaded with double-or triple-meanings.In the 1968 recording from the LP Waiting for the Sun, lead singer Jim Morrison's vocals are at times audibly slurred; but the song starts off strong."Love my girl, she lookin' good," Morrison almost whispers into the microphone, establishing a sexual tone from the beginning before letting his listeners know that "no one here gets out alive."Joan Didion remarked on this sex/death duality in an essay in The White Album (1979).The Doors, she claimed, were "missionaries of apocalyptic sex."They "seemed unconvinced that love was brotherhood and the Kama Sutra" and "insisted that love was sex and sex was death and therein lay salvation." 2 Other double meanings in the song are equally illustrative.In the next stanza Morrison sings, "they got the guns, but we got the numbers."At face value, the lyric can be interpreted as an overt political message.The police may have "the guns," but the people "got the numbers."Organist Ray Manzarek, however, revealed another meaning of the song in a 1968 interview in Life magazine."In California, a number is another name for a joint, a marijuana cigarette," he pointed out, adding drily, "[I] just thought you might want to know that." 3 Sex, death, politics, drugs.Many of the Doors' songs are as cryptic and suggestive as "Five to One." "Five to One" is meaningful on another level, though.Discussions about music feature prominently in many historical accounts of the sixties counterculture.While they have acknowledged that the counterculture was complex and nuanced, historians continue to focus on San Francisco bands like the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Country Joe & The Fish to describe the popular culture that issued from and reinforced it from 1967 to 1969.In his acclaimed 1996 book And the Crooked Places Made Straight historian David Chalmers provides an excellent example of this dominant interpretation."Somewhere about the year 1967… the hippie culture turned into the counterculture," he explains."San Francisco gave birth to it," and "life was psychedelia."San Francisco bands became the "model," in his view, of a "tribal-love rock musical" that became popular in that year.The Los Angeles-based Doors released their first and most successful album in 1967, though, and by the end of the "summer of love" it was number one on the national charts.By the end of the year, the Doors had two albums-The Doors and Strange Days-on the Billboard Top 10.For every Grateful Dead album a listener bought, at least five others bought an album by the Doors.For the rare listener who called in to a radio station to request a song by Country Joe & The Fish, at least five called in to request "Light My Fire" or "Break on Through."These listeners were aware of the Doors' message, even if they often misinterpreted it.Many fans and 1 The author wishes to thank
Source: Music and Politics
Author: Christopher Crenshaw
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W1976189209