Strange days have found us,
Strange days have tracked us down.
They’re going to destroy‘
Our casual joys.’
The Doors. Strange Days.
I feel it’s significant that perhaps the two most notable rock tracks from the year of the Summer of Love carried a mood somewhat at odds with Flower Power. The Beatles A Day in the Life is the final moment of Sgt Pepper but it seems to almost celebrate bleakness and alienation with stupendous intensity.
photo Jane Bown
Atmospheric footage from recording session of A Day in the Life
The Doors provide another motif from the Crowley Huxley Berlin 1930 dream as they brought Brecht’s Alabama Song forward into 1967 with a version on their first album. The closing track, The End presented an unsettling oedipal psychodrama set to music that seemed to be an appropriate soundtrack for a primal ritual. This was understood by Francis Ford Coppola who would later make use of it in Apocalypse Now (see video of introduction below). Jim Morrison found ‘weird scenes’ and ‘danger on the edge of town’ as he travelled the ‘highway to the end of the night’, a rider on the storm of the snake, Dionysus inciting the maenads to sacrifice him. Fiercely literate and cultured Morrison saw something else that was stirring. If the great ceremony was about to begin and the gods and myths of the ages be reinvented then sex and death might meet at the ‘feast of friends’. The enduring success of the Doors music and Morrison’s status as mythic icon indicates he helped express feelings that others shared.
Introduction to Apocalypse Now featuring the Doors The End
When a two thousand year reality tunnel breaks up, things are not necessarily going to run smoothly. During the sixties the tensions between contrasting generations produced extremes of response amongst the young. There were Nuit’s Love-ins and psychedelia but that was not all. In the heady cocktail many different forms of magic and mysticism flourished. In California in ‘67, if you looked beneath the surface there were a number of groups who seemed to be taking their lead from Ra Hoor Khuit. Vietnam dramatised a lot of the issues. The repression brought down on the hippy drug culture created a lot of anger and then hatred. Not everyone was into Gandhi and putting flowers down soldier’s rifle barrels as protest.
