50 Years Of The Doors

“Before I sink / Into the big sleep / I want to hear / The scream of the butterfly”: some of my favourite lyrics, which I first read scrawled onto Jim’s Morrison’s gravestone in a photograph. Incidentally, I would find myself in that exact spot in Paris’s Père Lachaise Cemetery not long after. As the closing track of The Doors’ seminal 1967 album Strange Days, the true magic of ‘When the Music’s Over’ is that as an eleven minute song, it doesn’t feel like eleven minutes. Opening with Ray Manzarek’s iconic organ intro, the song is a haze of pure narcotic psychedelia underpinned with a certain intensity of thought which, for me, perfectly encapsulates the mood of an era. Morrison’s passionate wails of “Cancel my subscription to the Resurrection / Send my credentials to the House of Detention”, which often left him flopping on the floor of the stage at Whisky a Go Go on Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, simply enthral the listener as intricate, experimental guitar solos melt into kaleidoscopic keyboards in a mind-bendingly trippy mantra. Although far from ever being a radio staple, Morrison’s brainchild explores the theme of music being the fire of life; when it stops, so does life’s spirit. As I stood at the final resting place of the Lizard King, I couldn’t help but conjure up those classic lines: “Music is your only friend / Until the end…”

Feature compiled by Alex Graham