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Let's swim to the moon, uh huh
Let's climb through the tide
Penetrate the evenin' that the
City sleeps to hide
Let's swim out tonight, love
It's our turn to try
Parked beside the ocean
On our moonlight drive
Let's swim to the moon, uh huh
Let's climb through the tide
Surrender to the waiting worlds
That lap against our side
Nothin' left open
And no time to decide
We've stepped into a river
On our moonlight drive
Let's swim to the moon
Let's climb through the tide
You reach your hand to hold me
But I can't be your guide
Easy, I love you
As I watch you glide
Falling through wet forests
On our moonlight drive, baby
Moonlight drive
Come on, baby, gonna take a little ride
Down, down by the ocean side
Gonna get real close
Get real tight
Baby gonna drown tonight
Goin' down, down, down
Let's climb through the tide
Penetrate the evenin' that the
City sleeps to hide
Let's swim out tonight, love
It's our turn to try
Parked beside the ocean
On our moonlight drive
Let's swim to the moon, uh huh
Let's climb through the tide
Surrender to the waiting worlds
That lap against our side
Nothin' left open
And no time to decide
We've stepped into a river
On our moonlight drive
Let's swim to the moon
Let's climb through the tide
You reach your hand to hold me
But I can't be your guide
Easy, I love you
As I watch you glide
Falling through wet forests
On our moonlight drive, baby
Moonlight drive
Come on, baby, gonna take a little ride
Down, down by the ocean side
Gonna get real close
Get real tight
Baby gonna drown tonight
Goin' down, down, down
Lyrics submitted by kevin
Track duration: 03:03
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Much of Morrison's stuff is just poetic musing--much is not, like Cobain, autobiographical. All four Doors were college boys, and at least Morrison and Manzarek graduated from UCLA (Krieger may have graduated from UCSB, for all I know). So what you had here was a bunch of fairly literate guys exposed to a lot of art and even European Romantic/Post Romantic/Decadent poetry and literature.
Now as the years went by and I really started to look at Morrison's poetry and lyrics, I realized that, really, they can be pretty immature.
Yet here we are, he's been dead 40 years and more, and we're still talking about him, and there's still a boatload of mystique. Some of this is just plain circumstance, like with James Dean, dying young, but still, there's more to it.
What we had was a literate competent band led by a tremendously charismatic and confident character who came to think of himself as a hybrid of Dionysus, Blake, Byron, and some kind of new age shaman. And it looks to me like he kind of believed it.
Bands I saw at that time were closer in stage persona to shoe-gazers--maybe "rockin' out" a bit more, but there was not a lot of "perfromance art", which is what it looks to me like the Doors' live performances were: early experiments with spontaneous performance art, like rituals, done to music and chanting. They predated a lot of the very theatrical stuff of the 70s, like Alice Cooper, but they were more spontaneous and here's the important part: unlike the acts that followed, I think that Morrison bought this: he felt that he was the Lizard King--whatever that was supposed to be.
So he wrote about very vague, but powerful, emotions, like fear of an apocalyse, death, dissolution, losing one's self in the dissolute luxury of the senses.
Again, I think that there are *some* autobiographical lyrics, but many of the others were like the prose peom genre, as done by Blake, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, etc. His songs sound like a Gustav Klimt or Aubrey Beadsley painting *looks*--kinda scary and yet fatally attractive. Once you understand that this is where a lot of Morrison's work is coming from, you'll stop thinking that he's writing a wistful song about a cute girl he'll never get over, and instead he's trying to do archetypes: Alexander, Dionysus, every great volatile, flawed hero. And he should get credit for trying, even if he's pretty immature in how he's doing it. But the guy died at 27: what could he actually know of life?
He is really a decent raw intellect who had been exposed to a fairly good education in the wesern artistic tradition, who was absorbed by pagan spiritualism, and was trying to write poetry. There is a lot of fairly sad output (low quality, immature), but mixed with an undeniable power that grips you, at the level described by Karl Jung.
That's his legacy, I think. The last truly commited adherent to Romantic decadence, and almost entirely untainted by cynicsim.
"baby gonna drown tonight"
hey stoners, sometimes a door is just a door, eh
The lyrics are amazing: "penetrate the evening, that the city sleeps to hide" I love those two lines.
Jim Morrison is a genius, but what about the rest of the band? Why does no one pay attention to them? Robby Krieger is a really good guitarist. Just listen to the guitar in this song. It's fucking great man.
Let's climb through the tide
Penetrate the evenin' that the
City sleeps to hide"
i think he's saying that he wants to live in the world that people hide from and neglect. just like the city sleeps through the night, they sleep through the mind set and thought process that morrison wants to embrace and experience.